Marriage by Mistake (41 page)

Sweat beaded his forehead as he dangled
hundreds of feet above the ground, searching the cold granite face
of rock. Four minutes now. If Matt didn't find the hurt climbers
soon they'd all be blown into pieces the size of confetti.

He was about to give up hope when he caught a
glimpse of color, deep in a crevasse. Matt swung toward that color,
counting down the seconds in his head, expertly adjusting his fit
teenage muscles. Only three minutes now. His arms reached out to
take hold of
  
what? Helpless
woman, terrified child, wounded youth? He couldn't see
  

The sound of his bedroom door opening swept
Matt abruptly from the edge of the cliff.

"Matt, aren't you coming to dinner? I called
you five minutes ago."

Quickly composing his face, Matt turned from
the bedroom window. "Five minutes, already?" A rush of adrenaline
still pulsed through him as he swiveled his wheelchair to face his
sister. The expression on her face was quizzical.

Gee, it would be nice if people around here
knocked before opening other people's bedroom doors. Matt sighed,
wheeling toward her. He was sixteen years old, after all. Didn't he
deserve a little privacy?

"Are you all right?" Kerrin put a hand to his
forehead. "You look all flushed."

"I'm fine." Drawing his head out from under
her palm, Matt flushed even more, hardly wanting her to guess what
he'd been doing right before she'd horned in on him. If his older
sister got an inkling of Matt's secret fantasies she'd be all over
him to go back to physical therapy. Kerrin was a decade older than
he was, but full of naïve delusions. She'd get a gooey look in her
eyes and spout a lot of nonsense about how Matt could recover the
use of his legs. She'd probably tell him he could become an Olympic
star. Kerrin was completely crazy.

"I made spaghetti and meatballs," his sister
now informed Matt, leading the way down the hall.

Matt stifled a groan. "You made dinner?"

Kerrin turned around with a hurt expression.
"Is there something wrong with that?"

Matt was too smart to answer. "What happened
to Mom? She go into town?"

"Mom and Dad drove to Bishop. They've got one
of their outer space meetings."

Brother and sister exchanged a look. Matt
grinned. "One has to admit, we've got the most interesting parents
in town."

"Out of this world," Kerrin agreed. "Oh dear,
I think that's my garlic bread I smell burning."

Still grinning, Matt watched her race down
the hall, her tawny curls flying. All right, so she was completely
hopeless in the kitchen, but she managed it with a certain
screwball charm. There was no reason on earth Kerrin should be
adding 'town spinster' to the list of other town titles she'd begun
to collect, he thought, as he wheeled down the redwood panelled
hall.

In the airy kitchen, the garlic bread smoked
on the counter while Kerrin busily threw some spaghetti into a
bowl. The resigned way the noodles fell told Matt that Kerrin had
managed to overcook them. She'd probably had her nose stuck in a
book and forgotten to turn off the heat. The woman had two master's
degrees and ran the Mono county school system with the strategy and
skill of a four-star general, but she couldn't quite manage
pasta.

She couldn't handle living on her own,
either, and though she claimed she preferred the company of her
family, Matt suspected something else was going on. It was probably
just as well. She would have starved.

Matt rolled to a position by the kitchen
table. "Dad says you're going to L.A. tomorrow."

Kerrin started. Guiltily, Matt thought. "He
told you that?" Her eyes avoided Matt's as she brought the food to
the table.

"Uh huh." Matt watched as Kerrin attempted to
dish him some sticky, and hence uncooperative, noodles. "But he
wouldn't tell me why you were driving two hundred miles to a place
I know you loathe. So I figured    " Matt paused,
watching her face closely. She'd been touchy as a kitten for a week
now. He had one guess why. "So I figured it must be a man."

Kerrin choked and nearly dropped her load of
noodles onto the Formica surface of the kitchen table. Matt could
hardly believe his eyes as color rose to her cheeks.

"My God," he exclaimed, astonished. "It
is
a man!"

"No!" Kerrin gave a determined shake to the
serving ladle, and managed to divest it of clinging noodles. "It is
not. That is    " Her color deepened. "All right. I
suppose he is male in gender, but it's not what you think."

"C'mon Ker." Matt was grinning from ear to
ear. "You can tell your own brother. Where did you meet?"

"We haven't met    yet. And it's
not a date." The thought seemed to make her flustered as all get
out. "It's...town business."

A lie
. All right, so Kerrin had been
fool enough to let Ollie, the town's auto mechanic, talk her into
becoming mayor instead of him this year, but there was no possible
'town business' that could involve Los Angeles, two hundred miles
to the southwest.

"Give," Matt said.

"It's an interview," Kerrin elaborated. "I'm
interviewing someone."

Another lie
. "Really? For what?"

Her green-gold eyes glanced at him and away.
"Summer school teacher."

Matt stopped eating. He was so discomfited he
didn't even notice the faint, whispery tone of Kerrin's answer,
indicative of a third lie. "Summer school?" he squeaked. "I thought
the state wasn't giving us any money for summer school." In fact,
he'd been counting on it.

"They aren't." Kerrin seemed to catch
herself, and added, "That is, a special committee came up with the
cash. We're very lucky."

"Right. Lucky." Matt slammed his fork onto
the table. "Forget it, Ker. I'm not going to summer school."

The argument was familiar and Kerrin seized
on it. Anything to change the subject from her trip to L.A. "Sure
you are. By taking Health this summer you'll have a free period to
take Driver's Ed in the fall."

"Driver's Ed? Are you crazy?"

"One way or another you're going to be
driving."

His lips thinned and his golden eyes bore
into her. Considering the fact that she'd just been lying her head
off, Kerrin thought she handled the searching look well. Besides,
Matt wasn't trying to find out about the alleged summer school
teacher any more. No, now he was busy doing what he'd been doing
the past three years of his life. He was trying to get out of
having to spend time with the other, able-bodied kids his own
age.

"You just don't get it, do you?" he said, his
voice soft.

Kerrin gave him a guileless look as she
forced some spaghetti into her mouth. "Get what?"

His straight mouth quirked into a smile. "Mom
and Dad won't make me."

This was most certainly true, so Kerrin
didn't bother to refute it. "I suppose you have something better to
do?"

"As a matter of fact, yes." Matt grew a smug
smile. "Private research."

"Oh, brother. Not about that pyromaniac, Mr.
Holiday?"

Matt raised his brows. "Mr. Holiday is not a
pyromaniac. Pyros merely set things on fire. Blowing them up
requires a great deal more sophistication."

"I see."

"And he takes photographs of his successes."
Matt picked up his fork and gamely shoved it into the noodles. "At
the instant of explosion. I showed you the one of the dam on the
Columbia River. He sent it to the AP wire service. Ballsy,
huh?"

"If you say so." Kerrin got up from the
table, hoping Matt didn't remark how little she'd eaten. She could
never eat when she was nervous, and nervous was a pale word for how
she felt about her trip to L.A. tomorrow. Summer school teacher?
Hardly. The man she was going to meet in L.A. was about as far as
you could get from anyone Kerrin would hire to teach young
minds.

At the sink Kerrin stopped and wondered, for
the hundredth time, if she were doing the right thing even meeting
the guy. For the hundredth time she closed her eyes and assured
herself this was her only possible course.

Tomorrow she would meet that man and...she'd
talk him out of taking the job in Freedom. He'd never even set foot
in her town.

"Hey, Ker, you okay?"

She flinched. God, Matt was quick with that
wheelchair. He'd slipped up right behind her.

"Fine," she pronounced automatically. "I'm
just fine."

But Matt looked up at her, still concerned.
"Because if you're nervous about meeting this, er, summer school
teacher, I could give you a few pointers."

Not back to the summer school teacher
.
Buying time, Kerrin shook her hands free of water, then turned to
give her brother a raised-eyebrow regard. "Could you, now?"

"Sure." Matt's concerned expression eased
into a grin. "Hey, I'm a guy, aren't I?"

"I told you, this is a job interview." She
barely stumbled over the lie this time. "It's not about
guys
." Matt had to be the only male in the world who thought
Kerrin had a chance for romance in her life. Unfortunately, he
thought so with single-minded determination.

"Right." Matt rolled half a wheel back and
looked down her slight figure. "But just pretending for a minute
that it is about, ya know, guys, there's a few things you could do.
To encourage the fellow."

A brief, harsh laugh escaped Kerrin and she
quickly closed her mouth. The only thing she wanted to 'encourage
the fellow' to do was leave them all alone.

Matt shook his head. "For starters, Ker, you
could dress a little more...open. Like you're not afraid to show
your skin?"

"Ahem. Could I?"

"Hey." Matt reached out to tap her jeans-clad
knee. "It's nice skin."

"Thanks."
Nice skin
. Well at least she
had something going for her.

"Of course that skin could use some rounding
out," Matt went on, rubbing the chin he'd had to start shaving the
year before. "How about some ice cream?"

"Right now?"

"Sure. You didn't eat much dinner, anyway,
did you?"

So he'd noticed. Kerrin bit the inside of her
cheek and felt another stab of guilt, just as she had at the sink.
Was it normal, she wondered, for the victim of blackmail to feel
guilty? For she'd been blackmailed by those people in Los Angeles,
pure and simple. "Okay, Matt, ice cream. But let's take it outside.
It's hot in here."

Pleased, Matt wheeled with practiced grace
between the freezer and dish cabinets. Kerrin watched him and
wondered how much longer the town was going to be safe for a kid in
a wheelchair. No matter how agile and strong Matt kept himself,
he'd still be vulnerable to a man with two legs. For that matter,
everyone in town would be vulnerable, once that fellow from L.A.
got here.

And Kerrin was the only person in town who'd
know who he was, and the danger he presented.

"Come on." Wheeling, Matt led the way
outside.

On the porch, the air smelled of sage and
pine and a little hot dust. From somewhere up the hill, where the
sun still poked above the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, a bird
called. But Kerrin looked down, to the bottom of the valley.

"Here." Matt thrust a bowl at Kerrin from his
lap. "Eat."

Startled, Kerrin accepted the bowl. Sinking
to a seat on the wooden steps below Matt and thinking about her
meeting the next day, she continued gazing toward the valley, and
the Owens River.

Lazy, the Owens meandered between desert-dry
banks until it hit the chunky concrete physical plant that
straddled it, corralling the river into servitude. From there an
aqueduct carried the water of the Owens Valley to a thirsty Los
Angeles, two hundred miles away. The plant and the aqueduct beyond
it were owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
They'd built it and they ran it.

It certainly was vulnerable
. Kerrin
had to admit it. If anything happened to that plant no water would
go through to Los Angeles.

Matt licked his spoon and his gaze, too, fell
to the bottom of the valley. "Say, wouldn't this view be different
if they'd never built the aqueduct?"

Kerrin froze, her hands cupping the cold
ceramic bowl.

"There'd be fields down there instead of
sagebrush," he went on, oblivious to her stark silence. "By now
Freedom would have become a big city, 'stead of a rinky dink
town."

"But there is an aqueduct." Kerrin's voice
was hoarse. She nodded toward the structure. "After ninety years
we've come to depend on that thing." Yes, at her meeting with them
last week the mighty Department of Water and Power had made that
clear to her. The economic life of Freedom depended on the fact
that two hundred miles away Angelenos drank their water. If the DWP
pulled out of the town, the jobs and money that came with their
presence would likewise disappear.

Matt shrugged. "It's not a natural
relationship. Them dependent on us. Us on them."

Kerrin could only agree, silently. But that
dependency was already a fact of life in Freedom. If the DWP wanted
to send an "expert" in security systems to check out the safety of
their facility, there was little the town mayor could do to stop
them. No, not even when that "expert" was an expert at
evading
security systems!

All Kerrin had been able to wrangle was a
meeting with the man. All she could hope was that this meeting
would convince him not to take the job, not to come to her
town.

"Aw, Kerrin, you haven't taken a single
bite."

Kerrin looked down at her untouched Rocky
Road, then up at Matt. He looked so frustrated that she forced a
spoonful of the sweet stuff into her mouth. Her eyes searched his
to give her credit.

"How are you
ever
going to get a guy?"
Matt lamented.

"I don't know." Kerrin swallowed her bite of
ice cream. "It'll take a miracle, probably."