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“Who told you that?”
“You did, graduation night. You said you were going to New York to art school, then to Paris, because that was where all artists went.”
Becca made a show of concentrating on the eggs she was beating. She poured them into the hot skillet and tilted the pan to let the eggs spread evenly. “I said a lot of things that night. People do that when they’re drunk. They blather.”
“Sure they do,” he allowed. “And sometimes being drunk makes them relax enough to really speak the truth.”
“I wouldn’t know. That was the first and last time I ever enjoyed that particular experience— Do you like mushrooms?”
He nodded, and she sprinkled them in, along with a bit of chopped ham. She took the bowl of cheese from him and dribbled cheese in, too.
“So, what happened?”
“You know what happened. I didn’t get accepted into the art school. I believe I told you that.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
She looked at him then, and her face went still. “You do remember, don’t you. I was hoping you didn’t.”
“It’s not the kind of night a guy is likely to forget.” He couldn’t help the grin that started to creep up.
She mumbled something and turned back to her omelette, folding it over with a spatula.
“I figured you wouldn’t remember,” he said. “You were pretty wasted.”
“You don’t know women that well, Colt. Our most humiliating moments are the ones we remember most clearly. Wasted or not.”
She slid the omelette onto a plate and returned to work on the next, not looking at him.
“It wasn’t humiliating,” he said. “At least, it shouldn’t have been.”
“Come on, Colt. I acted like a fool.” She faced him, one hand gripping the spatula, the other on her hip. “I practically begged you to take me away with you. And I—I…” She sighed and turned back to the pan. “You know what I did.”
Oh, yeah. He knew.
He stepped up and took the plate she held out to him. He wanted to touch her again, but got the feeling he’d get a fork speared in his hand if he tried. Instead he rooted around until he found the silverware drawer, and carried two forks and knives to the small table in the dining room.
Becca followed with a tray containing her own plate, a smaller one with a stack of toast, two glasses and a pitcher of orange juice. Her face was flushed, but he didn’t think it came from standing over a hot omelette pan. He decided the gentlemanly thing would be to change the subject.
“The house looks nice. You’ve done a lot with it.”
“Thanks.”
“Did you do all the work yourself?”
“What I could. I had this window enlarged, and I hired Pete Huckaby to do it. He moved to Aloma after you left, I think. He just finished a few months ago. And there was some plumbing that needed to be redone, which I couldn’t do, of course.”
She tore off a bit of toast, but he noticed she didn’t eat it. She looked around the room.
“It was mostly cosmetic work. Paint and paper, and changing the furnishings. But it makes a lot of difference.”
He forked a bite of omelette and studied her as he chewed, thinking of the “cosmetic work” she’d done to herself. “Yeah, it makes a difference in the appearance. But underneath, it’s still the same house.”
She faced him head-on, and he knew from the steely glint that came into her green eyes that she caught on immediately. He knew, and was impressed when he saw her chin lift.
“Yes, it is. But then, the house was basically a good house, solid and strong. All it needed was cosmetic work and a little attention to make it a home again. So why not take it and make it into the home I always knew it could be?” She lifted one brow and almost defiantly stuffed a forkful of omelette in her mouth.
And for some inexplicable reason, that made him want to jump across the table and kiss her.
Instead, he just grinned and shrugged. “No reason I can think of.” He looked around at the design she’d painted on the dining room wall; deep green vines and morning glory climbing over a trellis. She was right—it did feel more like a home than it ever had when old lady Danvers lived here with all her dark, stuffy furniture.
“So you decided to just paint the house instead of painting the world.”
“I paint,” she said defensively. “I haven’t bowled the art world over with my talent the way I’d planned, but I do paint. And you saw the ads I draw for Dunleavy’s. That actually pays a little.”
“I suppose that’s enough, then.”
She glared at him, then sighed. “Yes, Colt, it’s enough. I didn’t go out and set the world on fire like you did, but it’s fine. I have a good life. And my painting may be more of a hobby than a profession, but it’s still mine.” She closed her eyes for a second, then shook her head and looked at him again. “Nothing works out the way you think it’s going to when you’re eighteen, Colt. At least, it hasn’t for me. But that’s okay. You know, when I think about it, not one thing has changed since that night in your pickup, and yet everything has changed. I’m a different person now, even though I’m still the smart girl who helps everybody with their algebra homework. I just get paid for it now. My life hasn’t changed that much on the surface. I’m still in Aloma, still in the same house, still a—”
She broke off with a sharp intake of breath. She clamped her mouth shut and looked at him with wide eyes, her cheeks flushing. He thought for a second she was choking, but she’d just gone very, very still.
And in that moment the thought followed itself through in his head. He dropped his fork to his plate and gaped at her.
“Becca, don’t tell me you’re still a virgin?”
Chapter 3
He shouldn’t have laughed, he decided later. He was justified in being surprised, even shocked. She’d just admitted to being a thirty-year-old virgin, for Pete’s sake. Surprise was to be expected.
But really, he should not have laughed.
The clock on the wall behind him had ticked loudly in the silence that had echoed his question. She’d sat, her face flushed, and stared back at him. As soon as it dawned on him what she’d just said, or had tried not to say, he felt a grin start to build like he hadn’t felt in a very, very long time.
Becca Danvers, with her sweet kisses and carefully banked desires, was still untouched.
The thought had filled him with so much pleasure, in fact, that he laughed. Out loud.
He wasn’t laughing now.
Now he was trying unsuccessfully to stop the scene of the previous night from replaying itself in his head. Now he was working like a demon, hauling off old furniture and ripping rotten carpet from the floor of Doff’s house, in the hopes that hard work would erase the memory of Becca, her face a mask of complete humiliation, from his mind.
It wasn’t working.
Colt stood and rubbed at his aching back, surveying the damage he’d done to the house today, and thinking about the damage he’d done to Becca last night.
Many times over the years he’d imagined what it would have been like if he hadn’t turned Becca down when she offered him her virginity. Imagined it in vivid, Technicolor detail. But he’d assumed, of course, that someone else had eventually taken what he’d declined.
“Stop looking at me like I’m some kind of freak,” she’d said as she stabbed her fork in her omelette.
He couldn’t help himself, though. The only coherent words he’d been able to form, after he regained his voice, were, “How the hell did that happen?”
“It’s actually a matter of something not happening, Colt.”
She’d sniffed and swallowed, and he felt like a jerk. But still, the thought kept running through his head that no one had touched her. No other man had touched her. And the urge to laugh again welled dangerously close to the surface.
It was a wonder she hadn’t tossed him out on his butt. But then, that was Becca. Even when she was humiliated—or thought she was—she maintained that cool pride. It might have hurt to think he was laughing at her, but she’d manage to get over it quickly enough.
Even so, the memory felt sour in his stomach today. “Are the guys around here nuts?” he asked the empty room. He got a rumble in response, and noticed for the first time that the light outside had grown dim. He crossed the room and looked out the window; storm clouds were building in the west.
“Damn it.” He rubbed the small of his back and contemplated his options. He’d decided to tear out the old carpet—it was filthy and had probably been butt-ugly even when it was new—and refinish the wood floors underneath rather than replace it. The gleam of polished wood would help sell the house, but it was hell on his back.
It was a habit now to curse Doff when the pain in his back got bad. The pain was going to force him to call it quits for the day. His career was hanging by a thread as it was; he wasn’t going to jeopardize his recovery—and his chance to beat Doff—for the old man’s mess.
The thing was, he was loath to stay in the house one second more than necessary. He ate his meals, and even slept, on the back porch. With the rain coming, he wouldn’t be able to hang out there. And he sure as hell wasn’t staying in Doff’s house.
He didn’t realize he’d focused on the hole in the living room wall until he’d stared at it for several minutes. He’d put that hole there a dozen years ago. The last time he’d been in this house. The last time he’d seen Doff.
He reached for a cigarette, cursed again when he remembered he’d quit two months ago, and walked slowly into the kitchen. Out of spite—whether to himself or to Doff he didn’t know—he turned back to the living room and stared again at the hole in the wall.
Doff had been three-quarters of his way into a bender the day Colt walked home from a two-day stint in the county jail—another pleasant memory for his mental scrapbook, courtesy of Doff Bonner. The old man had been happy to gloat over Colt’s time behind the bars, had thought it was a good way to teach him a lesson. He’d been too drunk and giddy to coherently say exactly what lesson Colt was supposed to learn from going to jail over something that was Doff’s fault.
But Colt felt that he had, indeed, learned his lesson. If he was old enough to go to jail, he was old enough to stand up to Doff.
Maybe he shouldn’t have egged Doff on, Colt had thought since then. Maybe he should just have told the old fart to shut up, and kept walking. But something in him wanted revenge. So he stood up to him. Told the old man how being in jail was a damn sight more fun than being in the rat hole they lived in. How his friends had come up to the jail and played cards with him. How the sheriff’s wife—Toby’s mother, back then—had taken pity on him and baked more food than he could possibly eat.
That hadn’t been enough to coax more than a little frustration out of Doff, though. Colt found that once the hateful flow of words started, he couldn’t stop them. Or maybe he could have, but it made him feel powerful to be the one hurling the abuse for a change.
So he kept it up. Told the old man all the things he’d wanted to say for eighteen years. Told Doff what a sorry bum he’d always been, how Colt hated him and was ashamed of him. Still it wasn’t enough to make Doff unleash that fury that was usually so close to the surface.
So Colt pulled out the one weapon he knew he had.
“You’re a joke, and always have been. World Champion bull rider, my foot. You cheated. Everyone knows you bought the vote. Even today you’re the biggest joke on the circuit.”
That had done it. As soon as Colt saw Doff’s fist coming at him, he knew that was what he’d been pushing for. And he swung back.
He should have known what would happen. He outweighed the old man by a good forty pounds, and all of it muscle. And he had eighteen years of being on the receiving end of the punch. He had plenty stored up to unleash.
Doff crashed into the wall, so hard he knocked a hole in it. He’d slumped to the floor, his hands up in defense instead of attack, and looked up at Colt, fear in his eyes.
That was the last time Colt had seen his father. The shame had grabbed him by the throat in that moment and had not let go. He hated Doff Bonner for making him what he was, hated him for teaching him to use his fists as weapons. Hated him for giving him the knowledge of what it was like to be on both sides of that equation.
And hated himself for following in dear old Dad’s footsteps.
He’d run. Run from the house, into town and straight to the Haskell’s house, which was the closest thing to a home he’d ever known. He’d tried to run from the shame, but it was always there, in the memory of a pitiful old man’s fearful eyes and trembling hands.
Of course the bum hadn’t patched up the hole. Doff probably didn’t even notice it, in his constant drunken state. But that was okay with Colt. He didn’t need the past to be patched up and glossed over. He would leave that hole there until it was the finishing touch on the house. Because the ache was like a sore tooth, and he needed to know it was there. He needed to remember.
He paced, edgy. The room had darkened with his mood, and he stood in front of the window, watching clouds build on the horizon.
It irritated him that his injured back slowed him down, and resentment made him want to work harder. But he knew that, for today at least, he was done.
He walked out to the back porch, a fresh wind stirring the grass. The ball of rage that sat constantly in his gut—sometimes a dull glow, sometimes a hot flame—flared as lightning slashed a vertical rip in the sky a few miles away. Once again, Doff had the last laugh. Colt had been close—so close—to beating Doff’s record, to proving he was the better man, the better athlete, when he’d been tossed from Rascal’s back. He could swear that in his dying moment Doff had possessed Rascal’s body and dug that horn into his back, just to get in the last word. Thunder rolled overhead, and the temperature of the wind dropped noticeably. It chilled the sweat on Colt’s neck and tossed his hair. Lightning cracked. He could see the rain line just a few miles away now.
It wasn’t much of a surprise that his mind drifted south, to Becca’s house. He’d heard her car drive by a few hours ago, when she came home from school. He could go there.
He should go there. He’d left things in a bungle last night. But hell, what did she expect, dropping a bomb like that on him? He stuffed his hands in his pockets and scowled. He’d handled the news badly.
But a virgin? He’d known Becca’s life was sheltered, but for crying out loud. How in the world did someone as pretty and sweet as Becca get to be thirty years old and remain a virgin?
Not that he was going to ask her, not after last night. But in his gut he knew he’d made the right choice twelve years ago. It had been hard as hell, but he’d done the right thing by telling her no. She would have ended up hating him.
And that was one thing he didn’t think he could take.
He rubbed his jaw and looked over at her house. She’d turned on the kitchen light, and the welcoming glow caused a shifting somewhere in him, a lump in his throat that he swallowed against.
Funny, he’d forgotten that he’d always gone to Becca, when they were kids. When things got rough with Doff, rougher than normal, and it was either clear out or get killed, he’d always found some way to get to Becca. She’d developed a signal for him to send her, an old tractor tire someone had left out in the fields behind their houses, and he rolled it over by the big cottonwood that bordered her yard. She explained it all like some kind of secret spy adventure, but they both knew it was a desperation call. When things got to be too much, and he needed her, that was his way of calling her.
And she always came. He waited out by the old quarry, pitching stones and dreaming about another life, and she always came. She made up stories to tell him. Nonsense, fanciful tales where kids ruled the world and had all kinds of fantastic adventures conquering demons and trolls. And for a few hours, he forgot what waited for him, and she forgot what waited for her.
So it wasn’t a surprise to find his feet headed across the field that separated their houses. It was an old habit, one that he hadn’t thought about in many, many years, but one that came back to him with ease. Things were getting to be too much, and maybe now he didn’t need her, but he sure as hell wanted to see her again.
Becca laid the stack of papers she had to grade on the table beside her favorite wicker chair on the screened-in porch. Pewter clouds built high in the sky; the storm was only minutes away. She didn’t want to miss it.
Lightning cracked again, thunder rumbled immediately after, and the sky broke. The rain came thick and heavy right away, and immediately the world shrunk down to a few dozen square yards. Her little house was the universe, and she alone lived there. She smiled.
She heard the teakettle shriek on the stove at the same instant she saw the dark gray form moving across the field. She knew it was Colt by the walk, even before she could make out the features.
She opened the porch’s screen door. “Hurry,” she called above the downpour. “You’ll get soaked.”
As he jogged up the steps, she saw that it was too late. His entire body was already streaming with wet.
She stepped back and let him in. “People get killed by lightning, you know. Don’t move. I’ll get a towel.”
She flipped off the burner under the screaming teakettle on her way through the kitchen. In the bathroom she grabbed two towels and a quilt. On the way back outside, she stopped, watching Colt pace up and down her porch. She set the quilt and towels on the kitchen table and took two tea bags from the cabinet. Chamomile and hibiscus. She and Colt could both use the calming.
She tossed the tea bags in a teapot and added boiled water, then tucked the quilt and towels under her arm, kicked the door open with her toe, and carried the hot tea outside.
“Hold these,” she ordered, in the same tone she’d learned to use on errant students.
He took the cups from her, sniffing rainwater off the end of his nose.
She dropped the towels on the chair and took the cups from him. “Okay, strip down and wrap up in this quilt. I’ll throw your clothes in the dryer.”
“No, that’s okay—”
“Colt, you have chill bumps the size of marbles on your arms, and you’re trying so hard not to shiver, you’re about to crack in two. Now strip, and I’ll throw your clothes in the dryer.”
At his hesitation, she raised an eyebrow. “You don’t honestly think this is my way of making a pass at you, do you? I tried that already, remember? Now strip. I’ll wait inside. Lay your clothes on the table inside the door, and knock when you’re decently covered. Okay?”
