The Mountain Between Us (6 page)

Where
was
he headed? Away? When her ex-husband had shown up in town this summer, Jameso had responded by disappearing for two weeks. Running away—he said because his feelings for Maggie scared him. Looking at him, you'd never think a man like Jameso would be a coward, but there you had it. “I have no idea where he was going. I don't keep up with his schedule.”

“You don't?” Rick moved to stand directly behind her computer monitor, the green plaid of his flannel shirt filling her field of vision. “I thought all women kept tabs on their lovers. To make sure they were following the straight and narrow and not getting into trouble.”

“Since when do you know anything about women?” As far as she knew, Rick had no romantic interests in town. He made a show of ogling pretty tourists, and Maggie was pretty sure he wasn't gay, but he was also apparently celibate, or incredibly discreet, not an easy feat to accomplish in such a small town.

“I know enough about women to keep from getting entangled with them,” he said. “Lessons learned the hard way, I might add.”

“Oh.” This was interesting. Rick rarely talked about himself. “And how is that?”

“Don't try to change the subject,” he said. “We were talking about you.”

“We were? I thought we were talking about Jameso.”

“Same difference. You and he are a couple. Don't bother trying to deny it.”

“I wasn't going to.” After all, she lived next door to Jameso. They went out together often and regularly spent the night at each other's houses—things they never tried to hide. They'd had what Maggie saw as a comfortable—and comforting—relationship. Good conversation, great sex, no pressure.

But a baby had a way of exerting a whole new force on a relationship. Enough to tear them apart? She supposed that was up to Jameso.

“So when are you two getting married?”

Her heart lunged like a racehorse at the starting gate. “Married?” The word came out in a squeak. She took a deep breath, struggling to control her emotions. “What makes you think we're getting married?”

“Oh, come on, Maggie. You're not the type to fool around with a guy just for fun. And if you'd wanted to merely live with the guy, you would have moved in with him already and saved on the rent.”

Part of her suspected Rick was deliberately needling her, but she rose to the bait. “How do you know what type I am?” she snapped. “You hardly know me.”

“I know you married your first husband at nineteen and you'd probably still be married to him if he hadn't left you for that heiress or whatever she is. You're the kind of woman who finds a man and sticks with him like glue.”

“That doesn't sound like love—it sounds like desperation.” And desperation was a word that in many ways described her marriage to Carter. She'd been desperate not to lose him and in the process had almost lost herself. A mistake she intended to never make again. “I'll have you know I'm perfectly content being single. I don't need a man to make me happy.” Even as she said the words her stomach fluttered, as if the baby inside of her—surely not big enough yet for its presence to be felt—was protesting this declaration of independence. Maybe Maggie didn't need a man, but did her child need a father?

Of course, Jameso wasn't rushing to her side to declare his undying devotion to his unborn son or daughter. She hadn't seen him at all since he'd dropped her off at her house yesterday afternoon with his plea for “time to think.”

She fixed her boss with a firm stare. “Rick, butt out,” she said. “You're my boss, not my personal counselor.”

He held up his hands in a defensive gesture that didn't fool her for a minute. “Hey, I'm only trying to help. We look after each other around here. It's the only way to survive.”

“Meddling in my business is not looking out for me. When I need your help, I'll ask for it.” And he'd turn blue if he held his breath, waiting for that day.

“You know where to find me. And speak of the devil . . .”

She followed his gaze out the front window in time to see Jameso ride past—a man in black leathers, with a black helmet, on a black and silver motorcycle. Dark and sexy. Something out of a romance novel fantasy. She felt betrayed by the warmth that pooled between her thighs at the thought—and the relief that surged through her, knowing he hadn't left town for good, at least not yet.

She shut down her computer. “I'll see you tomorrow, Rick.”

“Say hello to Jameso for me.”

She didn't dignify this with an answer.

 

Jameso's motorcycle was parked in front of his house. The narrow miner's cottage was the twin to hers, with a steeply pitched roof and tiny square front porch trimmed in Victorian gingerbread. His house was painted mossy green with white trim, hers pale lavender. A light glowed in his back window—the kitchen. She resisted the urge to walk across the yard and knock on his door. She wouldn't go to him. He would have to come to her.

In the house, she changed and surveyed her figure in the mirror on the back of the bedroom door. Her stomach looked no rounder, her breasts no fuller. If not for the persistent morning sickness and the three positive tests stashed in her dresser drawer, she might have thought the pregnancy was a figment of her imagination.

A knock on the door startled her. The weight and cadence of the fist striking the wood set her blood to humming with anticipation, even as she hastily tugged on a sweatshirt and yoga pants.

“Hello, Jameso.”

He stood in the open doorway, still dressed in his leathers, his shaggy hair windblown, his eyes shadowed in the yellow glow of the porch light. He had looked very much like this the first night she'd encountered him on the front porch of her father's cabin. She'd been both afraid of him and drawn to him then, just as she was now.

“Maggie, I've been thinking.” He strode past her into the living room, motorcycle boots striking hard against the worn wood floor.

Well, that's what he'd said he was going to do, wasn't it? She faced him, arms crossed, waiting. He wore the grim expression of a man about to make a grave sacrifice. Maybe she should tell him there wasn't anything romantic about a martyr.

He ran one hand through his hair, nostrils flaring as he sucked in a deep breath. Tension radiated like heat from the taut set of his shoulders and the compressed line of his mouth. If she hadn't been so annoyed with him right now, she'd have been concerned he was going to stroke out from his obvious anxiety. As it was, she felt he deserved every bit of agitation, considering the distress his attitude had caused her.

But she was completely unprepared for his next move. The floor shook as he dropped to one knee in front of her and gazed up at her with a determined expression. “Maggie, will you marry me?” he asked.

C
HAPTER FOUR

M
aggie stared at the man who knelt on the floor in front of her. He looked about as happy as a felon on his way to the hangman's noose. “You don't really want to marry me,” she said. The truth of the words made her feel cold.

He blinked. “You're going to have my baby. Of course I want to marry you.”

“Get up off the floor this instant.” Honestly, he looked ridiculous down there. Who had decided a proposal should be delivered from the knees? Such a declaration should be made while looking each other squarely in the eyes.

He rose in a fluid motion. “I was just trying to do this right.” Doing it right would be declaring his undying love and passion for her, not proposing because he'd knocked her up and felt an obligation. “Getting married just because I'm pregnant would be the worst idea in the world,” she said.

“We wouldn't be getting married just because you're pregnant. I love you, Maggie.” His tone softened, almost pleading. “You know that.”

Did she know it? He'd certainly said it before—usually immediately before, during, or after sex. And he probably did have true feelings for her. But the distance between “I love you” and “I'm prepared to make a commitment to spend the rest of my life with you” was the distance between the earth and the moon.

She kept her arms folded across her chest, a barrier between them. “If I wasn't pregnant, would you still have proposed to me?”

He had the grace to look at the floor between their feet. “Maybe not this soon, but . . .”

“And I wouldn't have said yes if you had. We've barely known each other five months. My divorce has only been final seven months. I'm not ready for marriage again—and neither are you.”

He nodded. “So you're turning me down?” He'd obviously come here expecting things to go one way and thought if he kept bullishly pressing forward he'd eventually get the result he wanted.

“I'm turning you down,” she said. “I don't want a man who only wants to marry me out of a sense of obligation.”

His eyes met hers, sadness and confusion in their brown depths. “I want to take care of you and our baby,” he said.

The earnestness of his words breeched the barrier around her heart, and she felt a lump forming in her throat.
Oh, God, please don't let me start bawling,
she thought. Tears had a way of derailing any serious discussion. Not to mention if she got too emotional he was liable to flee in panic—and she wouldn't blame him if he did. She took a deep breath, marshaling control.

“I'm glad to hear it,” she said gently. “And you can do that. You don't have to be a husband to be a father, any more than I have to be a wife to be a mother.”

He swallowed, his Adam's apple jumping in his throat. “I don't know anything about being a good father. My own dad did a pretty lousy job.”

He'd never said a word about his father before. All she knew about his family could be summed up in a few sentences: His mother lived in Florida, he hadn't seen any of them in years, and he rarely talked to them. She had the impression he had a sister somewhere, though he never talked about his father. She resisted the urge to ask for more details; now wasn't the time.

“I don't know anything about being a mother either, but I guess we'll learn. People do it all the time.” She tried to sound more confident than she felt. There was only a person's life at stake here; she could think of a hundred different ways they could screw this up.

He wore his stubborn look again. “It doesn't seem right, letting my kid be a bastard.”

This surprised a laugh from her. “Hello! This is the twenty-first century. Things like that don't matter anymore.”

“They matter to me.”

Who would have guessed such traditional emotion ran through the heart of an avowed rebel? “Jameso, it will be all right, really.”

“What about your dad?”

Her father? What did Jake have to do with this? “What about him?”

“I know he ran out on your mom right after you were born. I want to prove to you I won't be like that.”

This was why she loved the man—he had a talent for getting to the heart of the matter. “Then the way to prove it is to stick around. A marriage license didn't stop my dad from leaving.”

“I do love you, Maggie.” He held out his arms and she went to him, the tension draining out of her as his arms encircled her.

“I know. And I love you. But that's not enough.” She'd loved Carter, too. At least in the beginning. But the love hadn't lasted. She wasn't sure it ever could. And she was certain that marrying someone because you thought it was what you should do, instead of what you wanted to do, was a surefire way to kill whatever passion they shared.

“So what are we going to do now?” he asked.

“We go on the way we have been, and we'll decide how to work things out when the baby gets here. We've got seven or eight months to figure it out.”

He held her tighter. “That doesn't sound like long enough to me.”

Or to her, but it was seven or eight months for her and Jameso to get to know each other better and to figure out if they had a future that went beyond a shared child. A thought occurred to her and she nudged his shoulder. “Did you buy me a ring?”

“A ring?”

“An engagement ring. Did you buy me an engagement ring?” After all, he'd said he wanted to do things right.

“Uh, yeah. I went to a jeweler's in Montrose this afternoon.”

That answered Rick's question about what Jameso had been up to. “Let me see.”

He stepped back. “Uh-uh. You turned me down, remember?”

“Oh, come on, let me see!” She might never wear Jameso's ring, but she could at least see what he'd picked out for her.

“Nope.” He shoved both hands in his pockets. Was that where he'd stashed the ring? “If I hurry, they'll probably give me my money back.”

“You can still show it to me.”

“No, I don't think so.”

The smug look on his face infuriated her, which was, of course, the whole idea. A bit of payback, perhaps, for her turning down his proposal? Though she still didn't believe he'd actually
wanted
to marry her, she could believe his pride had been hurt, just a little. “So you really aren't going to let me see the ring?”

“Maybe one day, when you change your mind about marrying me.” He bent and kissed her cheek, then walked out, leaving her to fume and to wonder. He'd sounded awfully certain, as if she really would change her mind. Or as if he really wanted her to.

 

“Excuse me, I'm looking for Miss Wynock?” Olivia's voice sounded too loud in the hushed confines of Eureka Library. Everything smelled of old paper and furniture polish, and had the air of a place long shut off from the world, like a mausoleum or a seldom visited museum. Olivia herself hadn't been in a library since high school, though Lucas spent hours in them, in every city in which they'd lived.

The woman behind the front desk stared at her, round-eyed behind thick glasses. “Cassie's in the back,” she said in a normal tone of voice. She pointed a finger toward the back of the room. “Over in periodicals.”

Olivia tiptoed between low display shelves filled with fossils and old mining tools, past a bank of personal computers and shelves filled with videos and books, to an open section of armchairs and rotating magazine racks. A thin, gray-haired woman dressed in a gray skirt and a white blouse looked up at her approach. “Miss Wynock?” Olivia asked.

“Yes?”

“I'm Olivia Theriot. Lucas's mother.”

“If he's done something wrong, I certainly had nothing to do with it,” Cassie snapped. “The boy's too smart for his own good.”

The woman's instant recognition of Lucas's name surprised Olivia, even though Lucas had said they were friends. She had a hard time picturing her sweet, curious son and this dried prune of a woman together. “Lucas hasn't done anything wrong. He . . . I need to do some research on the history of Eureka. He gave me a list of books to read. And he said I should talk to you.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” Cassie drew herself up taller, looking pleased. She adjusted her glasses on her nose. “Let me see the list.”

Olivia handed over the sheet of paper covered in Lucas's boyish scrawl. Cassie scanned the list, then raised her gaze to Olivia once more. “Why are you so interested in Eureka's history?”

“Janelle and Danielle at the Last Dollar have hired me to paint a mural on the back wall of the café. They want something with scenes from Eureka's history.”

“They stole the idea from my Founders' Pageant at Hard Rock Days. Those two were certainly never interested in local history before. “

“I don't know what inspired them.” She was not going to get in the middle of a feud between the librarian and the café owners. “Can you help me with these books?”

Cassie looked her up and down. Olivia fought the urge to fidget, like a girl called into the principal's office. If this project hadn't been so important, and if she could think of any other way to get the information she needed, she'd have turned on her heels and left Cassie Wynock to stew in her own superior attitude.

“Come with me.” Cassie motioned for Olivia to follow and set off at a brisk walk back toward the front desk. She breezed past the woman behind the counter and into an office with glass on two sides, which allowed the occupant to look out over the library. “Sit down.” Cassie indicated the chair across from the desk.

Olivia sat. Cassie took the chair behind the desk and pulled out a thick brown photo album—the kind where all the photographs are held in place by black adhesive triangles at the corners. She turned the album around to face Olivia and opened to a page with a picture of a stern-faced man with slick-backed hair and a curling moustache. “This is my great-grandfather, Festus Wynock. He founded the town of Eureka. Everything it is today is because of him.”

Olivia peered at the photograph. Old Festus looked like he'd eaten a sour pickle. She pointed to a photo on the opposite page of an equally stern and imposing woman. “Who's this?”

“That's my great-grandmother Emmaline. The dowry she brought from her family paid for all the property my grandfather bought. At one time he owned most of the land in the area.”

That much land would be worth a lot of money these days. Olivia had been around people who had money—Cassie didn't look like them. “Why doesn't your family own all that land now?”

“Because he sold it.” She snapped the album shut. “I can show you these books about gold miners and Indians, but all you really need to know is that my great-grandfather put Eureka on the map. If anyone should go on your mural, it's him.”

“I'd still like to look at the books Lucas recommended,” she said. “I have a few ideas of my own for the mural.”

Cassie scowled at her, her eyes beady, like a wary rodent. Olivia couldn't have guessed the woman's age; her face was almost unlined, but she had the attitude of an elderly schoolteacher, prim and unbending. “I hope you're not one of those modern artists who is going to paint a lot of deformed people in weird colors and make us look bad.”

Olivia choked off a laugh. Deformed people? Really? “Danielle and Janelle have final say on what the mural looks like,” she said.

“Oh, well . . . those two.” Cassie waved her hand dismissively. “There's no telling what they'd think was appropriate.”

Olivia started to say that being lesbian didn't exclude a woman from having good taste but decided Cassie wouldn't get it. “I don't have any intention of painting deformed people in weird colors,” she said. Though if she painted Cassie Wynock, she'd be tempted to render her as a shriveled old witch with snakes for hair. The image amused her.

“What are you smiling about?”

“Nothing. Do you have a picture of Jake Murphy? I'm thinking about putting him in the mural.”

The librarian's transformation was remarkable to behold. Her face paled, then turned a deep red, almost purple. She rose from her chair, and when she finally spoke, her voice shook with rage. “Jacob Murphy was a terrible person who doesn't deserve to be immortalized in any way, shape, or fashion. If you intend to put him on your mural, you'll get no help from me.”

Whoever this Jacob Murphy was, he'd obviously done something to piss off the librarian. Olivia was beginning to like him more all the time. She stood also. “Maybe I'll come back some other day for those books,” she said, and backed out of the room.

In the meantime, she had another idea for a person to include on her mural—not Cassie Wynock's sainted great-grandfather, but her great-grandmother, the woman who had put up with the old reprobate. If he was half as pompous as his great-granddaughter, his wife deserved a medal.

 

“I call this meeting of the Eureka Town Council to order.” Lucille banged her official mayor's gavel on the front counter of the Last Dollar, aiming for the wooden striker that had come with the hammer, but missing and hitting the side of the cash register instead, setting up an alarming jangling. She winced, but soldiered on. “All council members are present and accounted for.”

She nodded to the large front table where council members Doug Rayburn, Katya Paxton, Junior Dominick, and Paul Percival sat with cups of tea or coffee amidst the miniature pumpkins and gourds the girls had provided as a centerpiece. Katya had a steno pad open in front of her, a mechanical pencil at the ready to take the minutes of the meeting. The only sounds in the room were the shuffling of feet and the creaking of wooden chairs as various townspeople settled in for the evening's discussion.