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“Explanations can wait,” Garth said. He didn’t like the whiteness in the woman’s face now that she was sitting. And he could feel the effort her body spent in drawing each breath. He’d taken off her coat when he’d first laid her on the sofa. Nothing separated him from her skin but the white silk blouse she was wearing. The material was cool and sleek, but he could feel her warmth beneath the material. Yes, explanations could wait. He’d just as soon hold this butterfly of a woman a minute or two longer before he found out what was making her so worried.
Chapter Two
Six weeks later, on a side street in Seattle
Garth Elkton figured he was the sorriest excuse for a man alive. He’d let his butterfly woman fly right out of his life and he’d been too tongue-tied to stop her. The fact that she was avoiding him at the time—and had avoided him most of the two days that she spent in Dry Creek—should not have stopped him.
You’d have thought it was his fault she hadn’t known those two boys had come to Dry Creek to save Glory Beckett instead of shoot her and that Glory Beckett had ended up helping the Feds cut off the distribution network for the stolen beef that was being rustled out of Montana. He had not known those things himself. He couldn’t have told Sylvia.
But that didn’t ease her coldness to him. As near as he could figure, Sylvia had been annoyed with him just for breathing the same air as everyone else. A sane man would give up on a woman so set against him. At first he’d thought it’d been the confusion about Francis. But he’d told her Francis was his sister. It hadn’t seemed to make a difference.
He told himself a dozen times he should forget her.
Still, he tapped his shirt pocket. Sylvia had lost a butterfly-shaped, gold earring when she rode in his pickup the morning he’d found her. He hadn’t noticed it until after she left Dry Creek. He’d meant to mail it to her in Seattle, but he’d found he was reluctant to part with it. He kept hoping she’d write and ask about it. But she didn’t.
He glanced down at the faded Polaroid picture that he’d taped to the dash of his pickup—he’d given Santa five bucks to take that picture of Sylvia on Christmas Eve and it was the best five bucks he’d ever spent. She’d been talking to the kids serving the spaghetti dinner that night in Dry Creek and her face was alive with laughter. Her smile had haunted him ever since she climbed into Glory Beckett’s Jeep and headed back to Seattle.
At the time, he’d thought his yearning for her would fade. He didn’t know her. He knew that. The shadows of emotions that had chased themselves across her face when he talked to her could be misread. But he had an itch inside his gut to know Sylvia Bannister, and he figured the only way to get rid of it was to do something about it.
He didn’t have a plan past returning the earring. A man needed hope to have a plan and he didn’t have any of that. Sylvia Bannister had made it clear she was a church woman and he figured a church woman would never take up with the likes of him. But plan or no plan, hope or no hope, it seemed the best way to start was to go to Seattle.
And here he was. Lost as a stray sheep on some wet Seattle street. Or maybe he was even in Tacoma. He’d dropped Matthew Curtis off so the man could do his own courting of Glory Beckett. Garth had thought he’d find Sylvia’s youth center with no problem. He’d flown missions in the army with a flashlight held to a map the size of a baseball card.
But the streets here were confusing. Too many hills and detours. Too many gang markings covering street signs. Too many empty, shelled buildings with the street numbers erased off their sides. He knew he wasn’t in the safe part of town and he didn’t like the thought of Sylvia’s center being here.
And then he saw a familiar face. One of the kids. John. The kid was half walking, half running down the street beside an abandoned building. Gray metal sheets were nailed over the windows of the building and rust outlined the doorway. Garth guessed the building used to be a factory of some kind.
Then he noticed that John’s face was as gray as the weathered sheet metal. The kid was afraid, looking over his shoulder and trotting along like some lopsided chicken.
Garth pulled over and parked his pickup. He was going to call out to John when he saw what was happening. Kids—thugs, Garth thought—were coming toward John from all directions. Instead of running faster, John slowed down like it was hopeless.
Garth reached over and opened the passenger door of his pickup truck. John could make it to the pickup if he gave one good burst of speed. Garth honked the horn and John looked up but didn’t move. Garth had seen this before. Someone so scared they couldn’t move even to save themselves.
Garth half swore. He’d have to do this the hard way. He opened his door and reached behind the seat for an old bullwhip he’d bought at an auction last week. The Gebharts were selling out and he’d paid as much for the whip as their pride would allow. At the time he wasn’t sure it’d stay together long enough for him to nail it to his barn wall.
Now he hoped the whip would hold together a bit longer than that.
Sylvia stopped her fingers from twisting together nervously. She was sitting behind her desk in the small office at the center. The other staff—Melissa Hanson and Pat Dawson—were conspicuously absent. Cowards. They were no more prepared to chat with Mrs. Buckwalter than she was.
At first she’d felt like Alice in Wonderland when Mrs. Buckwalter had called, asking to see the center. Sylvia knew of the Buckwalters. True, she never traveled in those financial—or social—circles, but she knew they existed. Just like she knew the queen of England existed. She’d just never expected to have the queen—or Mrs. Buckwalter—for tea.
The Buckwalter Foundation was not the kind of donor that usually supported the center—in fact, they were more likely to donate millions to a Seattle museum than ten dollars to a small, church-funded youth center that needed a camp.
Of course, she’d be happy to show Mrs. Buckwalter around. She’d smiled into the phone in frozen shock. Today? Yes, four o’clock would be fine.
Sylvia wasn’t off the phone for two seconds before she realized something was very wrong. She had assumed somehow in those magical minutes that someone from the staff had approached the Buckwalters about their ideas for a youth camp. The funding they had counted on had fallen through at the last minute and her first wild hope was that somehow word had gotten to the Buckwalters and they were coming to their rescue.
She realized how naive that sounded the moment she thought about it. A lion in the jungle didn’t worry about whether or not an ant had funding. She didn’t even know anyone who knew the Buckwalters well enough to get past the army of secretaries that fielded their calls. They were notorious for being difficult to contact.
Her fears were confirmed when she questioned the staff. No one had called Mrs. Buckwalter. No one even knew how to reach Mrs. Buckwalter.
That’s when Sylvia panicked. The phone call had not been a miracle—it had been a mistake. Mrs. Buckwalter must have thought she was calling someplace else. She must have looked in the phone book under Tacoma-Seattle Youth Center and dialed the wrong place.
Sylvia took a deep breath. So it wasn’t perfect. It was still a slim hope and that was better than anything else she had. After all, Jesus was an old hand at drawing a rabbit out of a hat. He had fed five—or was it ten—thousand with a few biscuits and a couple of fish fillets. If he could do that, he could help her with Mrs. Buckwalter.
Sylvia braced herself. Yes, she’d do her best pitch. She had the grant proposal. She needed to make some changes and it would be ready. Then all that remained was—
Oh, no, the office! Or more like the nonoffice. Sylvia used the room that had once been a janitor’s storage room. The room met her needs but it still smelled of floor wax. She’d always kept lots of green plants around, but surely a woman like Mrs. Buckwalter would expect more to sit on than a gray folding chair.
And her clothes! Sylvia looked down at herself. Usually she wore a suit when meeting with prospective donors. But today she had on a bulky navy sweater and acid-washed jeans. There wasn’t time to drive back to her apartment and change.
Sylvia took a deep breath and reminded herself what Jesus could do with a biscuit. That reminded her—yes, tea. She needed a pot of tea and some English biscuits.
By four o’clock the tea was cooling in the cups and Sylvia’s glow was fading by the second. Mrs. Buckwalter certainly wasn’t interested in the proposal Sylvia had managed to get ready.
“—we’d pair each teen with a mentor.” Sylvia pressed forward with her proposal because she didn’t know what else to do. Mrs. Buckwalter still held her purse in her lap. The purse was genuine leather and the lap was ample. Sylvia had seen Mrs. Buckwalter at a distance in several local charity events and thought she looked imposing. Up close she looked downright intimidating. English tweed suit, hand-tailored for her. Starched blouse. Iron hair, severely pulled back. Intelligent green eyes that seemed impatient.
Mrs. Buckwalter looked at the diamond watch on her wrist.
Sylvia gave up. Mrs. Buckwalter must have realized the mistake early on and was just waiting for enough minutes to pass so she could politely leave. She obviously wasn’t used to this part of town. There must be thirty carats of diamonds on that watchband alone. “You shouldn’t wear your good watch down here.”
Mrs. Buckwalter looked up blankly. “I didn’t.”
“Well, it would be the watch of a lifetime for any of the kids down here,” Sylvia said dryly. “We try not to wave temptation in front of them.”
Mrs. Buckwalter nodded and slowly unhooked her watch. Then she laid the watch out beside the teapot. “It’s yours.”
“But I didn’t mean for you to—”
“I know.” Mrs. Buckwalter waved aside her protest. “I’m an old woman and I don’t have time to be subtle. Don’t know what made me think I might be able to pull this off slowly. Let me put it to you straight. I’ll fund this camp of yours but I have one condition—I pick the campsite, no questions asked. If you have a problem with that—”
“No, no—” Sylvia was speechless. She started to rise out of her chair. Could it really be that simple?
“We’ll need at least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Sylvia clarified. She wasn’t sure Mrs. Buckwalter had been paying attention.
Mrs. Buckwalter nodded complacently. “We’ll probably want to make it two hundred thousand dollars, plus whatever the watch brings. I never liked it anyway. I want to be sure they have the best of everything. Not that it’s necessary for learning good manners, but it helps.”
Sylvia half choked as she sank lower into the folding chair. “Manners?” She was right. Mrs. Buckwalter hadn’t been listening. She had them confused with some other youth center. Maybe one of those upscale places that prepares girls to be debutantes.
“We work with young people who have been in gangs,” Sylvia offered quietly as she got up and walked over to a locked cabinet and turned a key. She pulled the drawer open to reveal a jumble of knives, cans of spray paint and bullets. Each item had a tag. “These are only from the past month. Kids give them to us for a month at a time. We hope that at the end of the month they’re ready to give up the stuff forever. Usually they do. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, they know fear every day of their lives. They see other kids killed. They’ve all robbed someone. They need more than manners.”
Mrs. Buckwalter looked at the drawer and raised an eyebrow. “Well, if you’re set on it, you’re welcome to add the prayer and Bible stuff I hear you’re famous for—I don’t believe it will harm anyone. But you’re to include a proper amount of old-fashioned manners, too. I don’t care how violent these children have been—we are a civilized nation and manners will do them good.”
“You don’t mean table manners? Salad forks—that kind of thing?” Now that Sylvia concluded Mrs. Buckwalter knew where she was and what she was saying, she tried to sort the thing out. Was “manners” a code name for some new therapy she hadn’t read about yet? Some kind of new EST thing—or maybe Zen something. Mrs. Buckwalter didn’t look the type to go in for psychological fads, but she must be.
“And everyday etiquette, too,” Mrs. Buckwalter added complacently. “Respect for elders. Ladies first, boys opening the door for girls—that kind of thing. Maybe even wrap it up with a formal dance.” Mrs. Buckwalter’s face softened. “I’ve always thought there’s nothing like a formal dance to bring out the manners in everyone.”
Sylvia felt as if her head was buzzing. Most of the kids she worked with had probably never seen a dance more formal than the funky chicken. And if a boy opened the door for a girl, she wouldn’t go through it, suspecting he was using her as a body shield to stop bullets from someone on the other side of it.
“But—” Sylvia started to explain when she noticed that Mrs. Buckwalter was no longer listening to her. Instead, the older woman had her head tilted to the outer room. Things were getting a little noisy, even for the center.
“Excuse me,” Sylvia said. She’d worry about manners later. “I’d better check and see what’s happening.”
The thud of a basketball sounded as it hit the wire hoop in the main, gymlike room of the center, but no one even looked as the ball circled the hoop before slowly dropping through the basket. The two teenage boys, who had been shooting baskets, had their backs to the hoop. They stood frozen, half-crouched, undecided about whether to run or to hit the floor as the front door slammed open.
Sylvia scanned the big room in a glance. The air was humid; it’d been raining off and on all day. Sometimes the weather made everyone short-tempered. But it wasn’t the weather today. She saw the two boys in the middle of the floor and three or four girls sitting on the edge of the floor where they’d been gossiping.
All of the kids were staring at the front door. And she couldn’t blame them. A large figure was shouldering its way inside. If they were anywhere else, Sylvia would say it was a bear. Or Bigfoot. But then she saw that the figure had two parts. John was slung over the shoulder of a man as big as a mountain. She could already hear the squeal of rubber as a car screeched to a stop outside.
The man turned to face the room and Sylvia drew in her breath. That gray Stetson. It couldn’t be anyone but— No, she wasn’t mistaken. She’d know that arrogant masculinity anywhere. The question was—“What are you doing here?”
Sylvia meant to have the question come out strong, but it must have been little more than a whisper. In any event, Garth didn’t seem to hear her. Instead he bowed down in a graceful arc to let John roll off his back and, at the same time, uncoiled a massive bullwhip from his shoulder.
Sylvia cleared her throat and tried again. “What are—”
This time she had his attention. She knew it with the first word out of her mouth. His eyes swung to her and he took a step toward her. He dipped his hat and his eyes were in the shadows again. If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn he was feeling shy. “I—ah—”
He never finished his sentence. The first bullet shattered the glass in the window beside the door. Garth didn’t wait to see what the second bullet would hit.
“Everybody down,” he bellowed as he dropped the whip and took another step toward her.
Sylvia looked around to be sure everyone was obeying. She was going to slide down when she knew the kids were all right. But that wasn’t soon enough for Garth.
He sprinted to her side and in one fluid movement wrapped his body around her before rolling with her to the floor. Sylvia braced herself to hit the floor, but Garth twisted his body so that he took the impact. He landed on his back with Sylvia resting on his chest. Then he quickly somersaulted so that Sylvia was enclosed inside his arms.
Sylvia froze. She forgot all about the bullets that might be flying overhead. She hadn’t been this close to a man since that day her ex-husband had threatened her—she pushed the very suggestion from her mind. She couldn’t afford to think of that now. She had to concentrate on breathing. If she could only keep breathing.
Garth felt Sylvia stiffen. Good Lord, she’s been shot!
Garth turned to his side. He ran his hands quickly down Sylvia’s back. What was she doing wearing a sweater? Blood would soak into a sweater. Her breathing seemed fainter and fainter. And he didn’t like the fluttering heartbeat. She felt like a frightened bird. He wondered if shock was setting in. He needed to find the bullet hole.
He slipped his hand under her sweater. If she was limb shot, they could deal with that later. But if the bullet had hit her internal organs he needed to act fast. His hand slid over the smoothness of her back. Her muscles tensed and her breathing stopped. He’d run his hand up and down her back twice before he convinced himself there was no blood.
“Where does it hurt?” he demanded.
A warm ember settled in his stomach. Her skin was softer than sunshine on a spring day. The faint scent of peaches was reaching his nostrils, too, and he noticed her hair. Luxurious strands of midnight-black hair were nestled near his neck. For a moment, he forgot why she lay curled inside his arms. It was enough that she was there.
“Ummmph.” A muffled noise came from near Garth’s heart and he realized Sylvia was trying to talk.
“Oh, excuse me—I didn’t—” Garth pulled away from Sylvia. Her skin was white. He felt a sudden surge of anger at the thugs outside that had frightened Sylvia. “I shouldn’t have led them here. They frightened you.”
“No, you did,” Sylvia answered automatically. One of the things she’d been taught in her battered-wife course ten years ago was to be honest. “You frightened me.”
Sylvia took a deep breath and looked up at Garth Elkton, at least as nearly up as she could. He still had her half-encased in his arms and she saw more of his chin than his eyes. She took another breath. Calmness was the key. “You need to let me go now.”
Give a directive, Sylvia reminded herself. Be calm. Expect them to obey. Keep your mind focused. Count to ten. One. Sylvia stared at Garth’s neck. Two. She saw his Adam’s apple move up and down as he swallowed. She saw faint strands of hair curled around his shirt collar. Three. Remember to breathe.
The skin around his collar was a little lighter than the tan on his face. He obviously got his tan the hard way instead of in a tanning booth. Another breath. Then she smelled him. He smelled of wet wool from his jacket, and forest pine. She breathed in again for the sheer pleasure of it. He smelled like Christmas and reminded her of Dry Creek. She’d thought about him often since she’d left that little town in Montana. More accurately, she hadn’t thought about him as much as she’d dreamed about him. Little secret segments of sleep that left her restless when she woke in the morning.
His arms loosened around her. “I was only—” Garth protested as he moved away from her. He untwined his leg from around hers.
“I know,” Sylvia said quickly. She didn’t need to be so prickly. He couldn’t know about her problems with men. Or those unwanted dreams. “You meant well.”
Garth wasn’t sure what he had meant. But he sure hadn’t meant to frighten her.
“I was only—” Garth had rehearsed this line in his head and he had to spit it out. “I mean since I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d return your earring.”
“Earring?”
“In Dry Creek. You lost an earring,” Garth patted his shirt pocket until he found the little bit of metal. He fumbled inside his pocket and brought out the earring.
“Would you look at that!” The voice came from the far side of the room and bounced off all of the walls. Even the kids instinctively turned toward Mrs. Buckwalter. “He not only saved your life, he returned your jewelry. What a gentleman—and a hero!”
“Well, no, I,” Garth protested as he handed the earring to Sylvia, “I wouldn’t say that….”
Mrs. Buckwalter walked toward Garth and Sylvia like a general chasing away a retreating foe. Her tweed suit bristled with command. “You certainly are, young man, and I’ll hear no more about it.” Mrs. Buckwalter stood in the center of the room and looked down at Garth’s Stetson. A small smile softened her mouth as she picked up the hat. “Quite the gentleman. A fine example of chivalry if I’ve ever seen one, Mr…?”
“Elkton. Garth Elkton,” he supplied. Something about the way that woman was smiling made him uneasy.
“I rather thought so,” Mrs. Buckwalter said smugly as she walked over to Garth and offered him the hat.
Sylvia decided Mrs. Buckwalter was going senile. The older woman couldn’t know who Garth Elkton was. She had him confused with someone else. “He’s not from around here,” Sylvia offered gently.
“I know that, dear,” Mrs. Buckwalter said smoothly.
Sylvia wondered if another member of the Buckwalter family would be showing up soon to escort their mother home. The older woman was sweet but obviously not all she used to be mentally. That must explain her bizarre fixation on manners.
“I ranch in Montana, just outside of Miles City,” Garth said to Mrs. Buckwalter. He brushed off the Stetson and sat it squarely on his head.
“A large place, is it?” the older woman asked conversationally as she smoothed back her hair.
“A good piece,” Garth agreed as he looked around him. Two of the windows—the only two windows in the room—were shattered. “Don’t anyone go near all that glass until I get it cleaned up.”
“I’ll get it cleaned up,” John said as he rose from his crouch on the floor.
Garth nodded his thanks.
“I’d like to buy some of it,” Mrs. Buckwalter said as though it were a settled agreement.
“Huh?” Garth was looking at the glass. There were little pieces everywhere. “You want to buy what?”
“The land. Your land,” Mrs. Buckwalter repeated. “I’d like to buy some.”
“I’m not planning to sell any of it,” Garth said politely as he noted a broom in the corner. What would a city woman like her do around Miles City?
“I can pay well.”
Garth thought a moment. He wasn’t interested, but some of his neighbors might be. Still, he had to be fair. Sometimes there were items in the news that were misleading. “There’s no oil around there—least none that’s not buried too deep for drilling.”
