Renegade Man (8 page)

When she halted
her Chevy in front of his tent, his hand went to the door handle, but she
forestalled him. “Jonah, I’m sorry. I had no right to put a damper on your
dream. We’re both entitled to our dreams.” She leaned across and kissed him
lightly on the cheek. “Friends?”

He half turned
toward her and caught her shoulders. “That’s no kiss, Ritz.”

“It’s Rita-lou.”

“For me, it’s
Ritz. Always has been.” He lowered his head toward hers.

Her eyes grew
wide. “Don’t, Jonah.”

Her voice was a
husky, pleading murmur against his lips. But he closed his mouth over hers and
kissed her anyway. His lips ground against hers in a swift, no-holds barred
kiss. She made no protest this time. Her lips were unexpectedly gentle beneath
his and the dimension of the kiss changed.

Softly, slowly,
his lips responded to hers. The kiss was achingly sweet. Her mouth felt so
warm, so right. Her kisses had been a sacred thing to him, and now he felt
himself wanting her all over again. He had loved her with a love that he had
never known before or since, but after he had left Silver City he had convinced
himself that it never would have lasted.

So how come the
kiss hadn’t changed?

His tongue, as
if it had a will of its own, gently traced the outline of her mouth before
nudging her lips apart to receive a deep, sweet-tongued exchange. He heard her
breathing alter, keeping pace with the ragged tempo of his own. Tenderness
seeped into the tentative mating of their tongues, but Jonah knew this was all
wrong.

With a
self-control that cost him dearly, he put her from him. “Now that was a kiss.”

When he released
her, she simply looked at him with a bemused expression.

“Night, Ritz,”
he said, stepping out and tipping his Stetson before he closed the car door.

Chapter 5

R
ita -lou had no
idea what her father had looked like. Her mother had never said anything about
him—only that Luis had been a migrant worker. But in Rita-lou’s memory her mom
had gone from a Mae West voluptuousness to pleasantly plump, not that the
additional poundage had stopped an air jockey from running off with her.
Rita-lou used to imagine the lo- thario pilot wearing a leather vest and
goggles, with a silk scarf wrapped around his neck.

Her later images
of her mother weren’t quite so Hollywood: an aging, frowsy blonde wriggling her
excess flab into a girdle. Watching this daily ritual with awe, Rita-lou had
always made a silent vow that she would never go through that sausage-stuffing
agony.

Well, she had
never owned a girdle, but now she did a more severe penance: she exercised and
she dieted. She loathed exercise. Sometimes she thought, What the hell? There
were worse things than a soft roll around the middle. How absolutely wonderful
it would be to say consequences be damned and devour a calorie-laden hot fudge
sundae billowing with whipped cream.

Unfortunately,
while she could thumb her nose at public opinion, she couldn’t disregard a
nagging conscience. So she exercised and dieted while her brain’s pleasure
center screamed for a caramel-and-nut candy bar or a slice of double-fudge cake
layered with thick, rich chocolate icing.

She groaned with
an addict’s raging desire, swept up a towel and toiletries from her tent and
stalked out before she could change her mind about snacking. The one good thing
about excavating a site was that the arduous work kept her in shape—and there
was no chance to nibble when her hands were buried in dirt from sunup to
sundown.

A glance at her
dirt-encrusted nails told her that it was indeed time for a hot bath. Usually
she sponged off with cold water from the Renegade, but every two or three days
she was lured to make the two-mile walk to the hot springs. Magnum trotted
along beside her, stopping every once in a while to sniff a plant or chase a
squirrel.

At one point
along the way she could glimpse Jonah’s campsite through the foliage. His
red-and-white half-ton pickup was parked alongside the silver camper. Her gaze
darted to the picnic bench he used for his sampling work, but he wasn’t there,
and she didn’t hear his dredger running. She thought about the way he continued
to call her Ritz. She used to find it amusing, but now she suspected that this
saltwater sovereign did it purely to annoy her.

The path she
followed paralleled both the old Butterfield Trail and an elk migration route.
She hadn’t come across any elk on her traipsings, but she was wary of other
wildlife. Mountain lions and javelina abounded in the area, as did Buck Dillard
and his kind.

To reach the springs,
she had to skirt a creosote- treated pine fence—part of Split P property—that
enclosed an old gold-recovery mill that had run on mule power. Even in this day
and age, a rancher had the power of a feudal lord over his range, so she was
delighted that each time she passed the Split P’s
arrasta
, Magnum
slipped through the fence to relieve himself on the oak post.

The hippie
commune’s clapboard shack, its roof now fallen in, marked the location of the
hot springs. Surrounded by yellow genestra and blue lupin, the hot springs were
practically hidden until you topped a rocky ledge. Then the rising steam
betrayed the two stone-lined pools three feet below, the larger one spilling
over into the smaller one. That one overflowed in a trickling stream that emptied
into the Renegade a mile away.

Rapidly she
stripped off her clothes and, with a sigh of pure bliss, eased into the larger
pool. Magnum might like water, but the hot springs held no interest for him.
Within five minutes he was off, sprinting after a bounding jackrabbit.

Eyes closed, she
lay back and smiled. She didn’t know how long she stayed in the shallow pool
with her head propped against its fern-covered rim, but when her bones felt
like spaghetti she knew it was time to bathe, so she reached for her biodegradable
shampoo.

The distant
sound of whistling interrupted the chatter of the forest birds, and she went
absolutely still. She recognized the ditty—“Blow the Man Down”—and that meant
the whistler had to be Jonah! She shot to her feet and grabbed the towel off
the ledge. Normally she had no trouble climbing out of the pool, but trying to
hold the towel around her made the attempt difficult, especially when her body
was still wet and slippery.

With one leg
over the ledge, she looked up and saw Jonah, his sweat-stained Stetson tilted
down over his eyes. He was bare-chested, and a towel was slung over his
shoulders. Slowly his lips curled into a brash smile. She couldn’t make up her
mind whether to slap it off his lips or kiss it off, and the thought startled
her. She settled for trying to climb from the pool with dignity.

“Heave-ho, my
hearties,” he said with a pirate’s leer. “Heave-ho!”

“Will you shut
up, John Paul Jones, and get me out of here?”

“It’s Jonah
Jones to you, my lady, or else you’ll get no help from this jack-tar.”

She grunted, out
of patience. “Jonah Jones, then. Now give me your hand.”

After he hauled
her to her feet, she took an inordinate interest in knotting the towel around
her. She supposed that with any other man she would have been anxious about
being caught nearly nude in a forest. But she knew Jonah would never hurt her,
though the way he watched her now—with that out-law’s squint of his—flustered
her. The memory of his kiss flustered her even more. She had thought she could
live without romance, but Jonah had somehow managed to resurrect her sex drive.

When she was
finished securing the knot, she glanced up through her lashes and caught the
look of alarm in Jonah’s green-gold eyes. “Don’t go giving me that tender-eyed
look, Ritz,” he growled. “What happened last night was a leftover from years
ago. That’s all.”

“You’re
mistaking curiosity for tenderness,” she snapped, stooping to sweep up her
things. He had always had a knack for divining her most private thoughts,
including the more disreputable ones. “I was comparing the man with the boy—and
the man came up short!”

“Look, knockit
off, okay?” He tossed his towel on the ledge and dropped down to tug off a
boot. “A harpy can turn a man off quicker than a cold shower.”

She had begun to
walk away, but that last remark did it. She spun around. “All right. Let’s have
it out, Jonah Jones. You’ve never forgiven me for choosing Chap over you.
That’s it, isn’t it?”

He jerked off
one white sock. “You mean dumping me, don’t you?”

“You’re the one who’s
ticked off. You tell me.”

“Hey, it was all
in the past. Let’s just forget it.”

It was as if
shutters clamped down over his eyes, giving his face that closed look he had
worn as a kid, and she knew it would be useless to try to break through. She
was locked out. That was how it had been all her life in Silver City: locked
out and looking in.

“So long, sailor
boy,” she threw over her shoulder, and sauntered off. Her graceful exit was
spoiled when she stepped on a pinecone and yelped.

She whirled
around and caught him grinning. Quickly he wiped the grin from his face. “Jonah
Jones, forget trying to look innocent. You never could do it.”

He smiled
without pleasure. “Is that why I always ended up the town whipping boy, whether
I was guilty or not?”

“You said it, I
didn’t.”

She started off
again, picking her way carefully through the brambles.

“Ritz.”

It sounded as if
he was laughing. She stopped, then turned slowly to face him. “What?”

“Put your tennis
shoes on.  And don’t forget your shampoo and stuff.”

She didn’t want
to afford him any pleasure by obeying his instructions, but obviously she
wasn’t going to make it another five yards barefoot on pine needles and acorns.
She dropped her shoes and, still holding everything else, slid her feet halfway
in. This exit wasn’t graceful, either, but at least she managed to get out of
Jonah’s sight. Once she was deep in the woods she quickly donned her clothes,
which was fortunate, because by the time she arrived back at camp Soren
Gunnerson was sitting under the cottonwood, his back propped against the trunk,
his hands locked around his knees. Apparently he had been waiting for her.

When she started
across the flats toward him, he got to his feet and dusted off his hands. Since
it was Saturday, he was dressed casually in a blue plaid shirt and white cords.
The sunlight glinted off red-gold hair peppered with gray. “Wasn’t sure I had
the right place until I saw the grid laid out,” he said when she was near
enough. “Here, let me take some of those things.”

She smiled and passed
him the shampoo, soap and her traveling kit. “How did you know it was a grid?”

“I took
Archaeology 123 at the Southern School of Mines. Did you know you look super
without makeup? All fresh and sunny.”

She smiled
wryly. All those years of learning to put on her makeup in five minutes
flat—wasted.

“Since you can’t
be reached by telephone,” he said, grinning, “I stopped by to see if you’d like
to eat lunch in a restaurant for a change.”

He’d come a long
way just to ask, and she thought, Why not? It was Saturday, and she was tired
of eating one-course meals. Besides, she needed to put both some physical and
mental distance between herself and Jonah. “I’d love it, Soren. Let me change.”

She had just one
dress with her—a pale pink nylon- knit sundress. A single pair of
sandals—flimsy white- heeled ones—completed her formal wardrobe.

As children, she
and Soren hadn’t known each other that well. He had been older, and after he’d
moved away from Chihuahua Hill their paths just hadn’t crossed. “Why’d you come
back to Silver City?” she asked, watching him from her side of his Lincoln.

He glanced away
from the road and smiled at her. “1 guess because it’s home. I don’t like big
cities. Too impersonal.” He turned his attention back to the road. “Are you and
Jonah a duo?”

“What makes you
ask that?”

“Well, you were
once, and—”

“That was grade
school sweetheart stuff, Soren.”

“And now that
you two are...” He paused, and she could tell he was searching for the right
words. “Living in the vicinity of one another?”

She had to smile
at the flush that spread across his cheeks. Then he chuckled. “It was pretty
boorish of me to say that, huh?”

“No, you were
reacting with purely masculine inquisitiveness,” she said, chuckling. “But as
to your question about Jonah and me—we just happen to be tenants of the same
sandbar.”

“Well, if you
ever get tired of roughing it, Rolistof’s plant manager returned to London for
the summer. His cabin’s about five miles out of Santa Rita, and vacant.”

“Too far from
the flats, I’m afraid. With the summer almost a third gone, I need to be
on-site as early and as late as possible. But thanks for the suggestion.”