Angel's Rest (13 page)

“What about your dad?”

“I never really had a dad. My biological father was married, but not to my mom. He was part of our lives off and on until I was eight. That’s when he traded my mom in on a younger mistress.”

“That must have been hard.”

“Yeah. When they broke up, she had nothing. No financial support, no emotional support. Nothing. He turned his back on us. I haven’t seen him or spoken to him since.”

“What a jerk.”

“Yep.” Her mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Uncle David threatened to go after him with a baseball bat, but Aunt Janice talked him out of it. She was thrilled to have my mom living near her and away from my father. My aunt and uncle were great to me. They didn’t have children of their own, and they showered me with love and attention. I had a great life here. It’s been a joy to come home again.”

“Good for you.” Gabe glanced toward the door. “We
probably should look for that flashlight. We may be here awhile.”

He was right. Nic could hardly see anything, and it wasn’t even full dark outside yet. She dropped down onto her hands and knees and began to feel her way around. “It can’t be too far away.”

The cold from the basement floor seeped into her bones and caused her to consider how uncomfortable the coming night might be. Cold. Dark. No food.

No bathroom.

Immediately she felt the urge to pee. “This isn’t good, Gabe.”

A circle of light appeared. He’d found the flashlight. “It’s not that bad. We have shelter. We won’t freeze to death. I have a nine o’clock appointment here tomorrow morning, so somebody will be around to let us out then at the latest. In the meantime, we might as well see what we can scavenge from these boxes and trunks around us. I’ll bet we can find plenty to keep us comfortable enough for one night.”

“There’s no bathroom down here, Callahan.”

“Bet you a hundred bucks there’s a chamber pot, though. Let’s see what we can find, shall we?”

Over the next twenty minutes, they set up camp in the basement. He brought her a stack of quilts and three bearskins that she stretched out on the floor. He found a candelabrum complete with stubby candles and a case containing three clean, dry matches. He tossed her souvenir pillows from Paris and Rome, and whistled with appreciation when he stumbled across a wine rack. “Excellent. My knife has a corkscrew.”

“Lucky us. Don’t forget we need a chamber pot.”

Two minutes later, he presented her a pot with a flourish.

Nic tucked it away in a corner of the basement. By the
time the grandfather clock upstairs chimed six o’clock, they’d created an amazingly comfortable nest.

He’d switched off the flashlight to save the batteries, and the discovery of a box of unused candles made conserving those unnecessary. With candlelight casting a warm, golden glow that staved off the deepening shadows of night, she produced two stems of crystal, which he filled with Bordeaux, and they each settled down with one of Elizabeth Blaine’s journals to pass the time.

The atmosphere was comfortable, the air between them easy, and Nic lost track of time as she sank into the history of Eternity Springs and its citizens.

Elizabeth Blaine had immigrated from Ireland to Chicago in the mid-1880s and taken a position as nanny to a banker’s family. When the family moved to Denver with the hope of improving the banker’s wife’s respiratory ailment, Elizabeth moved with them. She lost her position four years later when the wife died and the banker remarried.

Elizabeth then followed the silver boom to Eternity Springs. She cleaned houses and hotel rooms and … Nic pored over the words written on the pages and her heart broke.

“Why the tears?” Gabe asked, jerking her back to the present.

Nic blinked and wiped her eyes, then offered him a tremulous smile. “Okay, I’m an idiot. I can’t believe I cried over something that happened more than a hundred years ago.”

“Tell me.”

“She had a dog. Elizabeth did. His name was King. She brought him with her from Ireland, and he was all she had left of her family. She told a story of how once when the child she cared for was still an infant, his mother had him with her as she worked in her flower garden and a vicious neighborhood dog sneaked up on
the baby and the mother didn’t notice. King was inside the house and went berserk. He crashed through a window screen to get outside and chased the other dog away. Anyway, she writes in her journal about how King got old and sick and she had to ask a friend to put him down. That’s what made me cry.”

“You are such a soft touch.”

She shrugged and attempted to change the subject. “Any interesting stories in the volume you’ve been reading? Any clues about the bride or the silver bars?”

“No. Afraid not. This diary covers the months when Elizabeth was falling in love with Harry Cavanaugh.”

“Oh yeah?” Nic sat up straight. She shut her diary and set it aside. “Cool! Tell me about it.”

He passed her the book saying, “I’ll let you read it yourself. Makes me feel like a voyeur to read it.”

“Why? Tell me it’s not X-rated.”

“No. It’s … mushy.”

“Romantic.” Nic opened the book and flipped through the pages. One passage caught her eye, and she read it aloud. “ ‘Harry knocked on my door this afternoon, handed me a bouquet of two dozen roses, and asked me to accompany him on a picnic up at Heartache Falls. He’d engaged the services of a violinist who followed behind our buggy, serenading us with love songs. His manservant prepared our picnic spot prior to our arrival. Fine Irish linens graced a table set for two with fine china. He served us roast duckling and chilled champagne from a silver bucket. My dear Harry quoted poetry to me over our meal, then asked me to dance with him in the meadow. It was the loveliest afternoon of my life.’ Ahh …,” Nic sighed. “That’s so sweet.”

“So says the romance novel reader.”

“You have something against romance, Callahan?”

“Not at all. I have something against schmaltz.”

“Schmaltz! That wasn’t schmaltz.”

“Darlin’, that picnic was the epitome of schmaltz.”

“All right then, Casanova. What should Harry have done to romance his lady?”

Gabe stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. He linked his hands behind his head and considered the question. “The bouquet was way overdone. A single rose would be okay, or even better, whatever flower she considered her favorite. Hiring a violinist to ride behind the courting buggy ruined the whole thing.”

“Now, why would you say that? It’s terribly romantic.”

“You like threesomes, do you?”

“What? No!”

Gabe chuckled and continued, “A mountain meadow picnic was good, but a linen-draped table? Fine china? Roast duckling? No. Way too formal. Too stuffy. All you need for a romantic mountain meadow picnic is a quilt to spread on the grass and a picnic basket with finger foods. The champagne was a good idea, but it’d have been better if he’d put it to chill in the creek.”

“That’s a good idea,” Nic agreed. “What about the poetry and the dancing?”

“Depends on the woman, of course. If she’s into that, then yeah. Nothing’s wrong with poetry or dancing.”

“What do you do for music if you’ve left the violinist back in town?”

“If a guy can carry a tune at all, he can sing softly, or hum. You can dance to birdsong or music in your mind, as far as that goes.”

She let that sit a minute, then said, “That’s not bad, Callahan. Not bad at all.”

He grinned, then reached for the wine and topped off their glasses. She sipped the rich, smooth Bordeaux and studied him. Tonight Gabe seemed approachable, not nearly as uptight as he ordinarily did. Maybe with some
judicious questions she could learn a little more about him.

Since the best way to learn information was often to share information, she said, “My ex had a romantic streak in him. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. He’d bring me flowers and small gifts out of the blue—just because he was thinking about me, he’d say. Looking back, I suspect that rather than romantic gestures, they were gestures of a guilty conscience.”

“You’re better off without him.”

“Yes, I know that.” She blew out a breath, then asked in a bright tone, “What’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done?”

At first she thought he’d blow her off, the way he’d done all the other times she asked him anything personal. Instead, with a smile playing faintly on his lips, he said, “I took my wife to the mall.”

She waited, and when he failed to elaborate, prodded, “C’mon, Callahan. You have to explain that.”

“Hey, I would have thought the hot-air balloon ride on the surprise trip to Napa would have ranked number one, but Jen always said that that trip to the mall was the most romantic act ever. See, I hate to shop. And I absolutely despise malls. My wife, on the other hand, loved shopping and enjoyed malls. On that particular occasion, she was three days past her due date with our son, and her doctor told her she could go another week. She was just pitiful. So I offered to take her to the mall. We ate burgers at the food court, browsed the bookstore, bought a couple of baby toys. Then I dragged her into Victoria’s Secret and picked out something for her to wear before the baby came and something for afterward.”

“Your wife was right. That does top a hot-air balloon ride.” When he smiled and remained relaxed, she decided to take the risk. “What happened to her, Gabe?”

A full minute dragged by, then two. He sucked air past his teeth, then exhaled a heavy breath. He closed his eyes and dropped his head back to rest on the steamer trunk behind him. “It was a car accident. She died at the scene. Our son, Matt …” He stopped, cleared his throat. “The doctors warned me from the first that he probably wouldn’t make it, but he fought hard. So hard.”

Reacting instinctively, Nic reached out and clasped his hand, halfway expecting him to jerk away from her touch. Instead he clasped her hand in return. “I lost him last July. He was almost six years old.”

“I’m so sorry, Gabe.”

Now he did pull away. “I’d rather not talk about it anymore.”

“Okay. No problem. I’m through being nosy. I promise. Let me just ask you one more thing.” As he shot her a narrow-eyed frown, she said, “If you had the chance to come back as a dog, what breed would you want to be?”

He laughed, just as she’d hoped. Nic sipped her wine and hid her satisfied smile.

Gabe lay in the darkness and recalled another time when he’d attempted to sleep on a cold, hard floor on a bitter winter night. Then he’d had no quilts, no wine, no lovely woman sleeping an arm’s length away. It had been another world, another life. Literally.

John G. Callahan had been a State Department associate when he took a bullet on a public street in Sarajevo. Eastern European nutjobs who had a sub-rosa war going on with the CIA and other Western intelligence operations then spirited him away. A palsied doctor removed the bullet in an unhygienic hovel, and then when a ransom demand fell through, his captors sold him off to sadistic Croatian mafiosos who dumped him into an
ancient mountain fortress that made the Count of Monte Cristo’s Château d’If look like a downtown Marriott.

On a basement floor in Eternity Springs, Colorado, Gabe’s lips twisted in a wry grin. That bare, bitter cold made tonight’s chill seem like a barefoot walk on a sandy beach in summertime.

What a strange evening this had been. Not only had he thought about his other lives—in Texas with his mom and family, then in Virginia with Jennifer and Matt—he’d talked about them. He’d been able to do it without choking up or breaking down. He rarely said Jen’s name. He almost never spoke of Matt. Tonight it had actually felt good to say their names.

What had happened to his lunchtime determination to remain on guard against the appeal of Eternity Springs?

It didn’t last past his hard-on. Apparently, having that particular part of his body demonstrate signs of life once again had put the whole notion of facing dragons back on the table.

Not that he was anywhere near ready to actually use the damned thing. Just because he was alive didn’t mean he got to live again.

Guilt remained a burden able to drag him down into the black abyss. Grief, on the other hand, didn’t weigh him down quite as much as it had just a few weeks ago. It still had the power to strike swiftly and savagely, but those instances occurred less often now and with weaker intensity than in the past. He figured this must be the natural grief-recovery process. Although the superstitious part of him wondered if Eternity Springs and its warmhearted citizens weren’t getting to him.

“Brrr,” Nic complained, her voice drifting across the darkness. “It’s so cold. Do you have a spare bearskin over there?”

An image of naked limbs on a bear skin rug flashed
through his mind. He cleared his throat. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I dozed for a bit. My boots were killing me, so I took them off. Now my feet are cold, and that makes me uncomfortable and cranky.”

Gabe hesitated a moment before saying, “Well, we can’t have cranky. Scoot them over here. I’ll rub your feet for you.”

“God bless you, Gabe Callahan.”

She whipped her legs out from beneath her covers and set them in his lap. She wore thin trouser socks, and when he took her right foot between his hands, he sucked in a breath. “You have ice cubes for feet.”

“I told you so.”

He tugged off her sock and began rubbing her bare, freezing foot. While he tried to keep his touch clinical and his thoughts impersonal, he couldn’t help noticing her foot’s slender width, the graceful arch of her instep, the softness of her skin.

It was the most personal touch he’d shared with a woman in months, and damn his soul, he enjoyed it.

While he massaged her right foot, her left foot crept up and rested on his thigh, inches from his torso. Inches from his erection.

He should put her ice cubes right on his crotch, but he settled for the next best thing. He tugged his shirttail from his jeans and yanked her sock off her left foot. “Look, don’t take this personally. Consider it payback for doctoring my scratches that day.”

He took both her feet and tucked them against his belly, sucking in an audible breath. It truly was like putting ice on his stomach. “Whoa. Have you no circulation in your feet whatsoever?”