Lover in the Rough (2 page)

“Too bad, baby. I want to know what the old goat thought was good enough to be worth five percent of $7.6 million. And don’t worry,” he added, grabbing her. “If I like it, I can afford it now that he’s dead.”

Reba straightened her arms and shoved suddenly, using every ounce of her strength. Todd wasn’t expecting her to resist. He staggered backwards two steps and sprawled on his rear in the gravel. He scrambled to his feet, swearing.

“That’s it, Farrall. I was going to be nice about it, but it’s time somebody taught you that a whore’s place in this world is on her back!”

Reba spun around to run up the canyon, only to collide with something warm and hard. A man. His presence shocked her into utter stillness. She had heard no one approach, seen no one—but there he was, as unyielding as the canyon wall. He lifted her, turning to put her behind him, then faced the furious Todd.

The stranger said nothing. He merely stood, waiting, as calm and unbending as the black mountains.

Reba stared at the man’s back, too surprised even to speak, caught by the impressions of the instant—the hard warmth of his hands, his easy strength as he had lifted her, the brilliance of silver-green eyes. He was not as tall or as heavy as Todd, but the stranger had moved with a muscular grace that spoke of power and a rare coordination. There was also an indefinable assurance about him that was like nothing she had ever seen.

Todd took two steps toward Reba before he stopped. Though angry, he was no fool. He looked at the stranger. “This isn’t any of your business,” snapped Todd.

The man said nothing, did nothing, simply stood and waited with a patience that was frightening.

Todd took one more step forward, saw the smooth change in the stranger’s stance and backed up quickly. With a crude oath, Todd turned and stumbled back down the dry streambed, pausing only to call over his shoulder, “The whore isn’t worth it!”

The man watched until Todd was out of sight, then turned toward Reba. She stared at him, caught by the color of his eyes, a pale, shimmering green that was startling against the sun-browned darkness of his face. Crisp black hair curled out from beneath the rim of a dark western hat. A thick sable moustache contrasted with the fine sculpting of his lips. The short-sleeved khaki desert shirt he had tucked into his faded jeans did little to conceal the male strength of his body. From a loop on his wide leather belt hung a geologist’s hammer, blunt on one face and shaped like a pick on the other. Though he could have used it as a weapon against Todd, the stranger hadn’t even put his hand on the tool.

“Thanks,” Reba said. “You saved me a run through the rocks.”

His smile was a slash of white against the tanned darkness of his face. She revised her estimate of his age downwards. She doubted if he was over thirty-five. Hard years, though. His face made that clear, as did the physical assurance that had routed a man younger and larger than he.

“The next time you need to be alone,” he said, “you might try the valley. It’s so quiet there you can hear grains of sand hiss down the slipface of a dune.” His deep voice had a gentle western drawl overlaid with harsher accents she couldn’t identify. “And,” he added dryly, “it’s not as easy to be trapped out in the open.”

“How did you know I wanted to be alone?” Reba asked, pushing a wisp of hair behind her ear. The cinnamon diamond flashed and burned with each movement of her hand.

“The same way I knew that you weren’t just playing hard to get with loverboy. Body language doesn’t lie.”

“Like you standing there, just waiting for Todd to move, so confident you didn’t even touch the hammer on your belt.”

His light green eyes narrowed as he reassessed her in a single, comprehensive look that noted the eggshell silk of her blouse, her russet shorts, her Italian leather sandals, the vibrant cinnamon diamond ring on her right hand, and most of all the curving woman’s body conditioned by a lifetime passion for gymnastics.

“He doesn’t know you very well, does he?” said the man softly.

“No.”

“And he’s not likely to,” added the man, a statement rather than a question.

“Not if I can help it,” she agreed, feeling more at ease with the stranger than she had with any man but Jeremy.

The man’s smile flashed suddenly beneath his midnight moustache, transforming the harsh planes of his face into less intimidating lines. “There’s another way out of the canyon, if you’re game.”

“How did you know that Todd’s the type to ambush me on the way out?”

“Same way I knew I wouldn’t have to use the hammer on him. Instinct.”

“And experience in a few rough places?” said Reba lightly, somewhat shocked by the casual way he had spoken about using a hammer on Todd. If she’d had any doubt that the stranger was as hard as he looked, that doubt was gone.

The man measured her for an unsmiling moment, then nodded abruptly. “A few. Still want to come with me?”

“Yes,” she said quickly, surprising herself. She was usually wrapped in layers of professional reserve, armed and armored against life’s emotional ambushes. Jeremy’s death had changed that, fracturing her careful facade like a gem struck by a careless stonecutter. The stranger’s quiet strength drew her as surely as the naked beauty of the land.

The man watched her for another instant, black eyebrows raised in silent query. He turned away without saying anything, walked three steps and disappeared around a bend in the marble wall. She followed, then watched with admiration as he went up the polished marble wall as though it were a staircase, moving from handhold to foothold with an easy rhythm that told of years spent in rough country. It answered one small mystery—where he had come from so suddenly. His speed and silence were impressive.

Reba removed her sandals, knowing that their slick leather soles would not help her climb the marble. She slipped the sandal straps over her left wrist and waited until the stranger reached a wide ledge where the marble gave way to steeply slanted layers of volcanic rock. She took a few deep breaths as though she were preparing to execute a gymnastics routine, measured the footholds available and began her ascent. She let the spacing of the hollows determine her rhythm. Only the last part was difficult; she was seven inches shorter than the stranger’s six feet and there were no hollows for the last four feet of the wall.

“Hold up your arms,” he said.

She did. He bent and wrapped his hands around her arms. There was a brief sense of hard, callused hands followed by a surge of strength. He lifted her up the last few feet so quickly that she had no time to object. He steadied her, took the sandals and knelt to put them on her bare feet.

Reba made a startled sound as his fingers closed around her calf and the arch of her foot. Caught off balance, she braced herself with a hand on his back, feeling the shifting resilience of his muscles beneath her palm. A warm hand held her foot, brushing away sharp bits of rock before he strapped on her sandal. He moved so quickly, so surely, that by the time she realized she should object to his touch, the moment for objection had passed. In a rather dazed silence, she watched him buckle the second sandal.

“That’s the worst of the climb,” he said, standing up in a single smooth motion. He assessed her confusion, smiled slightly and nodded. “Loverboy was wrong about that, too.”

“What?”

“You aren’t a whore. Whores are used to being touched by strangers.” He turned and began walking along the ledge.

Reba stared after him for a few seconds before she followed, wondering how much of Todd’s tirade the stranger had overheard. She flushed and then went pale, remembering Todd’s accusations. Emptiness settled in her. More than ever she missed Jeremy’s presence, his faith in her as a person worthy of friendship and love. No one had treated her like that before she met Jeremy—not her mother, not her husband. No one.

Tears burned behind her eyelids, blurring the rough trail. Impatiently she rubbed her eyes. Not yet. Tonight, after the last photograph of Jeremy’s collection was taken and the last person left for Los Angeles, tonight she would cry.

She realized that the stranger had turned and was waiting for her. She knew that those silver-green eyes hadn’t missed her brief tears. With a defiant lift to her chin she walked toward him, pulling her professional composure around her like an opaque shell, concealing her emotions inside.

He hesitated for a moment, as though he would speak or hold out his hand to her, but did neither. Instead, he turned and walked soundlessly through the crumbling volcanic rocks. She followed, moving carefully, sensing his attention on her during the roughest parts of the trail and his approval when she negotiated the tricky spots with a poise that came from hours spent on a balance beam. She said nothing, though, nor did she meet his eyes again. She couldn’t bear to think of anyone overhearing Todd’s crude accusations.

As Reba walked, the silence and primal beauty of the canyon seeped into her, easing her feelings of anger and humiliation and emptiness. Curiosity grew in her as she watched the stranger’s unconscious grace of movement, his silvery eyes constantly appraising the cliffs and rocks, his alertness to every shift of sound. He was like a wild animal, intensely aware, moving powerfully and silently over the harsh land.

He stopped to wait for her by a stratum of black rock thrusting out of the land.

“Precambrian,” he said, pulling out his hammer and striking the stone. It gave off a hard, almost crystalline sound. The hammer left no mark. “One of the oldest rocks on earth. There was no life then, nothing but water and rock, lightning and wind. After a few billion years, single-celled life caught on. Algae. Not much as we measure life, but damned powerful just the same. The algae gave off oxygen as a byproduct, same way we breathe out carbon dioxide. They divided and multiplied and finally polluted the atmosphere with oxygen so badly that they killed themselves off.”

“Polluted?” Reba asked, startled.

His lips curved. “By their standards, yes. But they left behind a fantastically rich environment for life as we know it. Oxygen-breathing life.”

“ ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,’ ”
she said, her voice soft.

He smiled crookedly as he translated in his deep voice. “ ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ Exactly. Four billion years and nothing much has changed, not really.” He tapped the rock again, listening to the flat ring of metal on stone. “Sometimes I wonder what will follow us.”

“The way we followed the algae?” she asked slowly, staring at the incredibly ancient black rock. Billions of years . . . life growing, dying, changing, and time curving, beginning everything anew, lives and deaths balanced as harmoniously as the crystal lattice of a flawless diamond. Nothing lost, not really, not utterly. Life and death were part of the same continuum, different facets cut on the face of time.

Without realizing it, Reba let out a long sigh. The icy knot that had settled in her stomach the night Jeremy died began to loosen. To stand here, to see time solidified in ebony stone and hear it described by a deep, gentle voice made her feel less terribly alone.

“The thought of extinction doesn’t bother you?” he asked, his voice soft, his eyes as transparent as the sky, watching her.

“There’s only change, not extinction,” she said slowly. “Birds were once dinosaurs.”

His laugh was as surprising as the fire inside a black opal. “I should have expected to meet another geologist here.”

She shook her head, making sunlight twist and gleam in her thick honey hair. “Just a reader of natural history,” she said, remembering the years of her marriage when her professor-husband laughed at her for wasting time reading about ‘cold science’ when he was handing the living worlds of romance languages to her. Cramming them down her throat, to be precise. By the time she was divorced she read and understood Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, and was wholly fluent in French.

But she hadn’t enjoyed any language until she met Jeremy. He had refused to learn the language of his English father, a man who had seduced and abandoned his mother. When Reba first saw Jeremy, he was at a service station trying to explain what had gone wrong with his car. As the mechanic spoke no French, Jeremy’s explanation was of the hand-waving variety. She had volunteered a translation—and for the first time in her life she had understood the thrill of speaking more than one language. When Jeremy had answered her in his pure Parisian accent, she had a visceral sense of the beauty of the French language as a form of communication rather than a series of academic exercises.

“And a linguist,” said the stranger.

“What?” she said, startled by the parallel between her thoughts and the man’s words.

“A reader of natural history and a linguist,
n’est-ce pas
?” He smiled at her surprise. “My accent isn’t as refined as yours, but most of the Frenchmen I’ve dealt with weren’t from the Sorbonne.”

Reba lifted her hand to capture a stray wisp of hair as she studied him, suddenly wondering where he had been and what he had done. She saw his glance shift from her eyes to her ring and then back again.

“He gave the diamond to you, didn’t he?”

“He?” she said, startled that the stranger had accurately identified a gem whose gold-orange-brown color was so unusual that few people even knew diamonds came in that shade. “Who?”

“The man whose sheets loverboy is dying to sleep in.”

Reba’s hand dropped. She stepped backwards, angry and oddly hurt. “It wasn’t like that with Jeremy.”

He measured the change in her with cold, quick intelligence. Then he nodded. “But he did give that ring to you.”

“What makes you so sure?” she asked, her voice tight, her eyes searching his.

“Cinnamon diamonds are usually too dark or too pale, lacking distinction. Yours is very rare, very beautiful, the exact color and brilliance of your eyes. Only a man who was . . .
close
 . . . to you would give you such a gem. He must have looked a long time for it.”

Reba’s throat tightened, remembering Jeremy’s words as he had given her the ring. “Seven years,” she whispered. “He looked for seven years.”