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“I keep thinking about getting him a dog, but with his father away and a new baby…” Tess sighed. “Anyway…enjoy your stay!”
Winnie watched the SUV rumble down the dirt road, then went back inside. Annabelle promptly hopped up on the bed, turned three times in place and flopped down, grinning, eager-eyed. We live here now?
“Only for a week,” Winnie said over the pinch of anxiety in her stomach, Elektra’s warning ringing in her ears. “Maybe.”
She tugged open the back door and walked out into the small clearing carved out of the forest, where the sweet, clean breeze caught her loose hair the way a mother might sift a child’s through her fingers. A shrill bird call made her glance up in time to catch a flutter of blue wings. A jay, maybe, rustling in the branches, searching for pine nuts. She shut her eyes, savoring, telling herself even if her reason for being here didn’t pan out, that after the past year—years—there were worse things than spending a week in heaven.
Winnie’s smile faded, however, when she opened her eyes and noticed the fresh bicycle tracks in the soft dirt, leading to a path that disappeared into the trees. She turned, frowning, her gaze following the tracks, which stopped just short of the house, next to a woodpile probably loaded with eight-legged things. Or, far worse, no-legged things. With scales and forked tongues.
In the woods behind, something cracked. Winnie wheeled, her back prickling, her great fear of slithery wildlife momentarily forgotten as Annabelle joyfully vanished into the undergrowth in hot pursuit…only to flinch at the barrage of pine nuts from overhead, courtesy of a huge, and very pissed-off, squirrel. The dog glanced up, confused, then hauled ass back to the house to cower behind Winnie’s legs.
The sky embraced her laughter.
His breath coming in short, angry pants, the child tightly gripped the handlebars of his birthday bike—a real mountain bike, just like he’d wanted—as he watched the lady and her dog through the trees. He let go long enough to swipe a hand across his nose, a hot burst exploding inside his chest. You get away from my house! he wanted to yell, except his throat was all frozen up—
“Robbie! Rob-bie!”
Robson jerked his head toward Florita’s call, her voice pretty faint this far from the house. If he didn’t get back soon, she’d get worried, and then she’d tell his dad, and he’d get worried, and that would suck. So after one last glance at the lady laughing at her dumb dog, he turned around, pumping the pedals as fast as he could to get back.
To get away.
The chickens scattered, clucking their heads off, when he streaked through the yard, dumping his bike and running around to the back. “An’ where were you?” Florita asked when he came into the sunny kitchen, the pretty blue-and-yellow tiles making Robson feel better and sad at the same time, because Mom had picked them out.
“Just out ridin’,” Robson said, panting, going to the big silvery fridge for a bottle of juice. He could feel Florita’s dark eyes on his back, like she could see right through him. He really liked Flo, but she saw too much, sometimes. And nice as she was, she wasn’t Mom. Mom had been all soft and real-looking, her long, black-and-silver hair slippery-smooth when Robson touched it. Flo’s hair was dark, too, but it was all stiff and pokey. She wore way too much makeup, too, and clothes like all the teenage girls did at the mall, like she was scared of getting old, or something.
Mom had always said getting old didn’t scare her at all, it was just part of life. Robson swallowed past the lump in his throat, only then he realized Flo had been saying something.
“Huh?”
Flo rolled her eyes. “One of these days, you’re gonna clean out your ears an’ hear what I say the firs’ time, an’ I’m gonna fall right over from the shock.” Since Flo said stuff like that all the time, he knew she wasn’t really mad. “I said, your father’s goin’ down to Garcia’s, you wanna go with him?”
“No, that’s okay,” Robbie said, and Flo gave him one of her looks, the one that said she understood. That ever since Mom died, Dad spent more and more time up in his studio, painting, and not so much time with Robson. Not like he used to, anyway. Flo said Dad was just trying to “work though” his feelings about Mom dying and stuff. Which made Robson mad, a little, because you know what? He missed Mom, too. A lot. And it hurt that he didn’t feel like he could talk to Dad about it. But whenever he tried, Dad would get all mopey-dopey, and that only made everything worse. So finally Robson stopped trying. Because what was the point?
“You can’t stop trying,” Flo said softly, like she’d read his mind, which kinda freaked Robbie out. He also knew she’d only nag him if he didn’t go, so he finished his juice, went and peed, then dragged himself out to Dad’s studio, pushing himself from one side of the passage to the other as he went, even though Flo would get on his case about the handprints.
Once there, he had to blink until his eyes got used to the bright light—with all the windows along the top, it was almost like being outside. Especially since the room was so tall. Robbie liked how it smelled in here, like oil paint and wood and that stuff Dad used to make the canvases white before he painted on them. Rock music playing from a CD player on the floor practically bounced off the walls and ceiling, it was so loud, tickling Robbie’s feet and moving right on up through his body. When he was littler, he used to like yelling out his name in here, just to hear it echo.
Paint all over his jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt, Dad was cleaning up one of his big paintbrushes, frowning a little at the painting he was working on. At least, Robbie thought he was frowning—it was hard to tell with Dad’s dark, curly hair hanging in his face. Robbie fingered his own much lighter-colored hair, which was almost as long. Flo was constantly fussing at both of them to get it cut, but Dad said this was their mountain-man look. He didn’t shave every day, either. Flo had a lot to say about that, too.
Robbie looked at the painting. Some of Dad’s canvases were so humongous he had to build this thing called a scaffolding to reach the top. But this one was small enough to sit on one of Dad’s special-made easels. The colors were real bright, oranges and purples and pinks and greens, kinda like the view from his window when the sun was going down. But instead of being pretty, the colors looked like they were fighting each other.
“D’you like it?” Dad asked. His father sounded different from everybody else around here because he was from Ireland. It was neat, watching his friends’ eyes get all big the first time they’d hear Dad say something.
He twisted to see Dad watching him with that sad look in his eyes Robbie hated, so he turned his head back around, fast, like when you touch something hot and drop it right away, before it can burn you.
“Who’s it for?”
“Just for me,” Dad said.
And Robbie said, “Oh.” Then he added, “Flo said you’re goin’ down to Garcia’s?”
“Yeah, they got in a shipment for me today.” Dad often had art supplies and stuff sent to the old store down on the highway, rather than to the house, partly because it was sometimes hard for the delivery trucks to get up here, partly so people wouldn’t be able to find him. Dad didn’t like people poking around in his business, he said. “Want to come along?”
“Sure,” he said, like it was no big deal. Except when he looked at Dad, he was smiling, sort of. At least enough to make creases in his fuzzy cheeks. But his eyes still looked like they were saying he was sorry. Like Mom’s dying had somehow been Dad’s fault. Robbie wanted to tell Dad to stop being dumb. Instead, he asked, “Can I get a Nutty Buddy?”
“You’re on,” Dad said back, reaching down to swing Robbie up into his arms, like he used to do, and Robbie hugged his neck as tight as he could, not even caring that Dad’s face was all prickly, like a porcupine.
The sign in the window was hand-lettered and to the point:
Dogs and Kids Allowed Only With an Adult
Gotta love a town that’s got its priorities straight, Winnie thought as she freed Annabelle from the truck in front of the long, stuccoed building with a columned front porch, all by its lonesome out on the highway. And according to the larger—but still hand-lettered—sign stuck in the dirt bordering the road, Tierra Rosa’s only gas station. She’d keep that in mind.
On one side of the porch sat a series of wooden rocking chairs, flanked by wooden crates of corn, melons and apples; on two of the chairs sat a pair of toothless, leathery-faced old men, rocking off-sync and scrutinizing Winnie from underneath battered cowboy hats as she and Annabelle walked up the steps. She nodded; they nodded back.
Inside, the plank-floored building was the modern equivalent of the old-fashioned general store. A quick perusal revealed everything from diapers to fishing tackle, Hungry-Man dinners to motor oil, Levis to Rice Krispies. In addition to food, gas and pretty much everything else, a sign at the front counter also proclaimed the place’s official U.S. Post Office status, P.O. Boxes Available.
Aside from the old dudes outside, Winnie and Annabelle were the only customers; by the cash register, a very cute, overly cleavaged, brunette teenager in a low-cut top and open hoodie leaned on the counter, her chin digging into her palm as she flipped through what looked like a textbook, frantically taking notes in a spiral notebook beside it. Something told Winnie that whatever the gal’s assignment was, she wasn’t finding the tall, buff, teenage boy with a shaved head trying to get cozier all that much of a distraction.
“Quit it, Jesse!” she said, making a great show of moving out of range. “I’ve got this major test tomorrow—!”
“Aw, c’mon, Rach…just one little kiss? Please?”
Then she giggled, which the boy took as leave to swoop in for that kiss.
Winnie smartly wheeled her hundred-year-old grocery buggy toward the back, thinking, Ain’t love grand? over a wave of déjà vu so strong she was half inclined to stomp back to the register and smack some sense into one or both of the kids. Because nobody knew more than her where swooping and such led to.
Then she sighed and went about her business, reminding herself that not every teenage girl who indulges in a little kissy-face gets knocked up. That some were smart enough not to let things go that far. Or at least to make sure there were no consequences if they did.
“You need any help finding stuff?” the girl called out, almost like she cared. Winnie poked her head up over a shelf brimming with Old El Paso products.
“Um…dog food?”
“Back wall, to your right. Ice cream’s on special this week, too. Two half gallons for six bucks.”
“Thanks,” Winnie said, hauling a twenty-pound bag of Purina into her cart, then nudging it toward the frozen-food case, since the gal had taken such pains to steer her in that direction. Lost in a quandary between mint chocolate chip and Snickers, she barely heard the bell jingle over the door. So it took a second for the deep, Irish-accented male voice asking about a package to register.
“Oh, yeah, Mr. Black,” the girl said. “It’s right here, let me get it for you…”
After a white-hot jolt of adrenaline, Winnie ducked slightly behind a display of fishing rods to peer toward the front, too late realizing that Annabelle had sauntered back up to see if anybody needed herding, kisses, whatever. A moment later a young kid with shaggy, pale-blond hair popped into view, yanking open the case to grab one of the loose Nutty Buddies inside. At Winnie’s sucked-in breath, the kid’s head whipped around, eyes wide, and something inside her exploded.
Five minutes on the Internet, and there’d been the magazine article, complete with a photo of the reclusive Western landscape painter and his wife, a textile artist/social activist, her broad smile much more relaxed and friendly than her significantly younger husband’s. And scattered throughout the article, shots of the marvel of wood and glass—one whole side devoted to the high-cei-linged studio built especially to accommodate the “Irish Cowboy’s” massive canvases—that Aidan and June Black had built in the mountains bordering the picturesque northern New Mexican village of Tierra Rosa.
Then Winnie’s heart had stopped at the single profile image of the Blacks’ only child, a son. Adopted, although the article hadn’t mentioned that. Seven at the time of the shoot two years earlier, his hair had been almost angel-white in the sunlight.
The same color Winnie’s had been at that age—
“Yarp!”
Annabelle had reappeared to bow in front of the boy, tail wagging. Boy play with me? Please? Frowning, his thin shoulders weighted in some way she couldn’t exactly define, the kid looked from the dog to her, then back at the dog, quivering in anticipation.
“It’s okay,” Winnie said, not sure how she was breathing. “She wouldn’t hurt a bug if she stepped on it.”
Slowly, the boy got down on one knee to pat Annabelle’s head, and the dog became a blur—Boy likes me! Boy really, really likes me!—trying to lick everywhere at once. But he’d barely started giggling before he scrambled back upright, as though realizing he wasn’t supposed to be cavorting with strange dogs. Or a stranger’s dog, at least. Now the eyes focused on Winnie’s were accusatory, suspicious. Pained. And nearly the same weird blue-gray as hers, except for the flecks of gold near the iris.
“You the lady stayin’ in the Old House?”
The Old House. Like it was a name, not a description.
“Just for a little while.” He has my nose, too. For trouble, I bet. “You…saw me?”
“Yeah. Earlier.” The pointed chin came up. “Through the trees. I was on my bike.”
Bicycle tracks. Check.
“Oh. Do you, um, like to play around there?”
“Sometimes,” he said with a shrug. Not that I care.
Winnie’s mouth curved, at his beauty, his bravado. At how silly his long hair looked, nearly to his shoulders, as shiny and wavy as a girl’s. But every inch a boy, all the same, in his skater-dude outfit, the holes in his jeans’ knees. Still, she imagined the only thing keeping him from getting the crap beat out of him at school was his height, which made him look more like ten, maybe even eleven, than just-turned-nine.
Her face burning, Winnie turned back to the freezer case, grabbing—of all things—a carton of strawberry cheesecake ice cream, swallowing back the reassurance that wanted so bad to pop out of her mouth, that he could still come down and play, anytime—
“Robbie? Where’d you go—?”
They both looked up as Aidan Black—far shaggier and craggier than she remembered—materialized at the end of the aisle, nearly sending Winnie’s heart catapulting from her sternum. A second’s glance told her this was definitely not the mellow, grinning young man, his musical accent as smooth as one of Elektra’s chocolate shakes, she’d met barely two weeks before delivering the baby who’d become his son. The warm, laughing green eyes now dull and shuttered, this, she thought, was the very devil himself.
A devil who, despite how much she’d changed, too, instantly recognized her.
And wasn’t the least bit happy about it.
Her hair wasn’t punked up and jet-black as it had been then, but there was no mistaking those dusty-blue eyes, the set to her jaw, the way her long arms and legs seemed barely joined to her long-waisted torso, like a marionette.
A curse exploded underneath Aidan’s skull, just as Robbie said, “She’s the lady livin’ in the Old House,” and Aidan thought, Flo is a dead woman.
“We need to go,” he muttered, grabbing his son—his son—by the hand and practically hauling the lad up front to pay for his ice cream, hoping to hell “the lady” got the message that if she so much as opened her mouth—
He threw a couple of ones at Johnny Griego’s daughter at the register and kept going, swinging Robbie up into the truck’s cab and storming around to his side.
“Dad?” Robbie said, cautiously, once they were back on the highway. “What’s wrong?”
Where would you like me to start? Aidan thought. “Nothing, laddie,” he muttered, bracing himself as they passed a pasture where a half dozen or so horses aimlessly grazed…but not a peep from the other side of the truck. Then they crested a hill, on the other side of which lay a field chock-full of pumpkins. He glanced over, trying to decide if Robbie’s gaze was as fixed on those pumpkins as it appeared.
“We could stop, if you like,” he said carefully. When Robbie stayed quiet, Aidan added, “Shop early for the best selection?”
A second or two passed before Robbie shook his head. Aidan didn’t have to look at the lad to see the tears in his eyes.
His own stinging, as well, they kept driving, a heaping great sadness clawing at Aidan’s insides.
Aidan waited until he heard the distant boops and beeps of Robbie’s video game before confronting his housekeeper. “And it didn’t occur t’ya to tell me who Tess had let the Old House to?”
As it was, Aidan had only begrudgingly ceded to Flo’s entreaties, via her niece, to rent out the house to some woman from Texas determined to stay in Tierra Rosa and only Tierra Rosa. A normal man might have been at least curious about that. But Aidan was not a normal man, rarely concerning himself with the goings-on of the town he’d called home for more than a decade. So why would he have been even remotely interested in some woman keen on finding lodgings right here in town, and no where else?
Because I’m an eejit, he thought, as Florita slammed shut the oven door on their taco casserole, then turned, fully armed for the counterattack.
“An’ how were we supposed to know she was Robson’s birth mother? Even if Tessie had told me her name, it would have meant bupkis to me, since nobody ever told me what it was. Right? So you can stop with the guilt trip, boss.”
Aidan dropped heavily onto a kitchen chair, grinding the heel of one turpentine-scented hand into the space between his brows. True, since Flo hadn’t come to work for them until after Winnie Porter had removed herself from the equation, there’d been no reason to tell her who Robbie’s birth mother was.
But an anxious-eyed Flo had already sat across from him, their squabble forgotten. “You scared this woman’s gonna pull a fas’ one on you?”
“Not scared. Angry. That she showed up out of the blue. That she’d…” His hand fisted in front of him. “She’d no right to do this.”
“But if it was an open adoption—?”
“One she herself opted out of more than eight years ago.”
Flo seemed to consider this for a moment, then said, “You think she knows about Miss June? That she’s showin’ up now because Robbie’s mama’s dead?”
“I’ve no idea,” Aidan said on an expelled breath, then surged to his feet, grabbing his wool jacket from the hook. “Y’mind holding dinner for a bit?”
“Where you goin’?”
But Aidan was already out the door, the blood chugging through his veins faster than it had in more than a year.
Chapter Two
It’d been years since Aidan had even been down to the eighty-year-old, single-room adobe where he and June had lived when they first moved to Tierra Rosa. They’d bought the property for its own sake, holing up in the Old House until Aidan’s career had taken off well enough to build the New House, a half mile farther up the mountain. A half mile farther away from civilization. Not that either Aidan or June had been hideously famous, not then, not ever. Certainly not like the A-list actresses and shock jocks and such who called New Mexico home—they simply valued their privacy. Aidan, especially. In fact, he’d balked about that damn magazine spread, but June…
The back of his throat clogged as, despite top-of-the-line shocks, the truck shimmied and jolted down the dirt road, partially obscured by clumps of live oak and lemon-flowered chamisa, until shuddering to a stop in front of the house.
Snoozing in a coppery patch of sun on the low porch, the Border collie instantly jumped to attention, yapping; a second later, the screen door banged open and Winnie Porter appeared, hands shoved in her jeans’ pockets, the ebbing sunlight glancing off features a lot harder-edged than he remembered. But then, when he’d last seen her she’d been a very pregnant eighteen-year-old, her defiance worn down—according to June—by water weight and too many sleepless nights.
As he’d been then, Aidan was struck by her height, her almost mannish stance in cowboy boots that were all about utility rather than style, how there was nothing soft about her, anywhere. Even her hair was stick-straight, a million strands of wheat blowing helter-skelter around heavy-lidded eyes and pronounced cheekbones.
“Figured you’d be here soon enough.”
Her gaze was dead-on, unflinching. Certainly not a look designed to provoke concern about a woman being out here all alone, never mind that the only place safer would be a padded cell.
Aidan climbed down from his truck, coming just close enough for purposes of communication. Close enough to catch the determined set to her mouth. The instant that mouth opened, though, he cut her off with, “How the bloody hell did you find us?”
She shoved a stray chunk of her hair behind her ear. Unlike before, when black gunk had rimmed her eyes and she’d sported more studs than a country singer’s costume, she wore no jewelry, no makeup that Aidan could tell.
“Online,” she said, and his brain snapped back to attention. “That magazine article from a couple years back? At least, that you were living in Tierra Rosa—”
“You gave up the right to be part of Robson’s life more than eight years ago, when you begged—begged—us not to send you any more information about him.”
He saw the flash of regret. “I know. But if you’d give me a chance—”
