The Rose of Blacksword (55 page)

And then he heard it—what he should have heard as soon as she’d opened her mouth. She wanted to know if he was Tom
Geiger
. Not Tom Vargas. Tom Geiger. Which meant she hadn’t recognized him. The woman was looking for the man he was now, not the guy he used to be.

While that was still sinking in, she added, “I’m Alex Marshall.”

Shit
.

“You’re supposed to be a man.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I never said I was a man. Sometimes Alex is a woman’s name.”

When Tom didn’t reply, she shrugged as if to say
What can you do? Life throws curve balls at us all
. “It’s short for Alexandra. You can call me Lexie if you like that better. A lot of my friends do.”

“Well, I’m not your friend.”

“Not yet, but you’re getting off to a smashing start.” She planted her hands on her hips, staring at him. If she’d been able to breathe fire, he’d be toast by now, but considering her size and general adorableness, it was like being stared down by Tinker Bell.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said finally.

“Because I have breasts?”

Not precisely because she had breasts, no, though at the moment they weren’t a point in her favor. Those breasts were going to make it a lot trickier for him to find the right person to ride with her—he’d have to make sure whoever it was wouldn’t take advantage of her. Which, in turn, meant he was likely to be stuck with her company for a lot longer than he wanted to be.

That
was the problem. Because attractive as she was, the woman screamed Type A. One look at her bike told him everything he needed to know. It was expensive, immaculate, and tricked out with high-end components. The narrow handlebars were choked with accessories, including an air horn to scare off dogs, a flashing LED safety light, a bike computer, and a handlebar bag topped with a plastic map sleeve. Inside the sleeve, she had a TransAm trail map—annotated, if his eyes didn’t deceive him, with tiny tape flags.

His general aversion to humankind aside, Tom liked women as much as the next guy. But hyperorganized, controlling women like this one reminded him of his ex-wife, and that was a reminder he could live without.

And if she needed another strike against her, there was the eight-inch reflective orange triangle hanging from the back of her saddle, on which she’d written, in large black letters, “Lexie—TransAm—OR to VA.” It may as well have read:
Hi! I enjoy talking to strangers about riding my bike! Please drop whatever you’re doing to engage me in inane conversation
.

Not his cup of tea.

Tom knew better than to say any of that aloud. He stuck with “This is a bad idea.”

“Which part?” she asked, with a perplexed shake of her head. She had wavy reddish brown hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Very pretty.

Very definitely not a man.

“Riding together,” he clarified.

“But wasn’t it your idea? You answered my ad.” She looked irritated with him, a little confused. Vulnerable. He wanted to help her out, except he was the problem.

This was exactly why he avoided getting tangled up with people. You reached out a helping hand, and the next thing you knew you were up to your neck in quicksand, trying and failing to figure out a way to get everybody back out again.

“My sister,” he said.

“What about your sister?”

“She answered it.”

“You’re kind of losing me here.”

“Yeah.” He crossed his arms and stared at her. Maybe if he was rude enough, she’d give up and go home. There was a risk she would cry first, and that would be unpleasant, but he could weather it if he had to.

She crossed her own arms, mimicking his posture, and stared right back. “Yeah.”

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Read on for an excerpt from Annette Reynolds’s
Remember the Time

PROLOGUE

The front porch of the Victorian house provides the only relief from the afternoon sun. The threat of a thunderstorm will only make the heat worse, and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia hunkers down to wait out the summer of 1977. Likewise, the three teenagers who sit sprawled on the porch in various states of heat prostration
.

“Can it get any hotter?” Kate asks, her voice taking on just the slightest hint of a whine
.

“Don’t say that.” Paul watches a fly take a desultory stroll across his forearm
.

“Bet it’s hotter than this in Arizona,” Mike comments
.

“But it’s a dry heat,” Paul and Kate say in unison. Paul looks down at Kate and they grin at each other
.

No one on that porch doubts Paul Armstrong will be in Phoenix next summer. He is the golden boy of Staunton High School’s baseball team. Making it to the majors isn’t a pipe dream for Paul. His self-confidence will make it happen
.

Kate groans as she raises her head from Paul’s lap
.

“Where’re you going, Ms. Moran?” Paul asks, his fingers closing around her wrist
.

“Get more tea.”

“Ya gotta kiss me first.”

“It’s too hot,” she moans, but they all know she doesn’t mean it
.

Both boys watch Kate’s walk to the front door. Her cutoffs are short and her legs are long. Mike silently sings the praises of summer. The screen door slaps closed behind her and, for a few seconds, the relentless drone of the cicadas is silenced
.

Mike feels a rivulet of sweat trickle down the nape of his neck. He looks over at his best friend. “How’d you get so lucky?” he asks
.

Paul slouches lower in the porch swing, setting off a gentle rocking motion. “It’s that Armstrong charm.”

Mike snorts and shifts in the wicker armchair
.

“Hey, we both had an equal shot at her.” Paul’s voice holds the hint of a shrug. “She picked me.”

Mike remembers it differently, but says, “Yeah. I guess she’s not as smart as she looks.”

“I heard that, Michael Fitzgerald,” Kate states, pushing open the screen door
.

“Heard what?” Mike asks innocently
.

Kate perches on the porch railing and rolls the cool glass across her forehead
.

“You know I love you both. Just different.”

“Please don’t give me that ‘I love you like a brother’ routine. It wounds me,” Mike says in what he hopes passes for mock pain
.

The glass at her lips, Kate rolls her eyes at him then closes them and tilts her head back to take a long drink
.

Her thick auburn hair is pulled back in a high ponytail, but a few heat-damp strands cling to her neck. Mike wants to lift them, blow on her hot skin. He wants to put his mouth there and taste her. The thought brings on the beginning of an erection and he guiltily glances at Paul
.

When Mike sees those amused hazel eyes looking back at him he knows he’s been caught
.

CHAPTER ONE

The initial assault on his body knocked the wind out of him. Gasping for air, he was swept along in the tumult of the newly born river in the Arizona desert. Rocks pummeled him. One particularly jagged stone hit his leg with such force that it slashed his jeans and cut open his thigh. He could feel the warm blood swirling around him, contrasting sharply with the cold water. A small manzanita tree swept past him, caught his left arm, and pulled it back. He could hear the snap as a bone broke. The pain made him scream, and then there was nothing but numbness.

The thoughts that flashed through his mind were quicksilver and, in some ways, senseless.
There goes the season
. Followed by,
Kate’s gonna be so pissed when she sees me
. And then,
I’m gonna have to buy Stu a new Jeep
.

A lethargy had come over him and the idea of sleep floated around his mind like a pleasant daydream. But there was something he needed to do. What was it? God, he couldn’t think anymore.

Paul could hear something over the thunderous crashing of the water around him. It must’ve been Mitch.
Mitch is gonna be late. I’ll have to explain it all to his wife
 … Opening his eyes, Paul caught sight of the Jeep and remembered the most important thing. The thing he’d forgotten.

It took all the concentration he had left for him to reach out his right hand and grasp the side mirror. His legs—his whole body—were whipped backward by the oncoming water, and he screamed again when something hit his lacerated leg with the force of a twenty-pound hammer.

There it was! He could see his wallet wedged between the dashboard and the windscreen. If he could just reach his wallet, open it up, look at that photograph—he’d be able to find the strength to get through this. The decision he’d made earlier was too important to be sidetracked by a few cuts and bruises, or a broken arm.

He was only thirty-four years old. He was healthy and strong. Dying was not on his agenda. Not for a very long time. All his intensity—all the life he had left—went into pulling himself up to the open window.

But he never heard Mitchell’s terrified shout. He never saw the boulder that crashed through the flimsy canvas roof of the Jeep, shattering the windshield, and his skull. He never got to hold the photograph hidden in the recesses of his wallet.

The search for Paul Armstrong and Mitchell Browder began at one
P.M.
, immediately after the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department received the call from Kate Armstrong. Kate made the call immediately after Browder’s wife phoned from the airport, complaining that her husband had failed to pick her up, and “I’m standing here with a cranky four-year-old and every damn toy she’s got and five suitcases.”

The search ended at 2:48
P.M.
because Paul Armstrong and Mitchell Browder were just where they said they’d be.

The four-wheel-drive vehicle carrying a deputy and a member of the rescue squad sped along the dirt road. When they saw the unfamiliar sight of a river running through the desert, the deputy reverently whispered, “Flash flood,” and immediately put in a call for an emergency vehicle. The two men breathed a sigh of relief when they spotted a man sitting on a large boulder. Their relief would be short-lived.

He fit the description of Mitchell Browder, and the deputy was about to cancel the call for emergency services when the stillness of the figure struck him. The two men got out of the car, not bothering to close the doors, and walked toward the lone man. He didn’t move. He didn’t acknowledge their presence. When the deputy called out his name, he didn’t hear. He simply sat, staring at a point somewhere in the distance. When the man from the rescue squad drew closer he could see the mud caked on the man’s clothing. When he stepped in front of him and repeated his name, Mitchell Browder slowly moved his head upward, revealing a face streaked with dirt and tears.

“Mr. Browder, where is Paul Armstrong?”

“He’s gone,” Mitchell answered in a hollow voice.

“Gone where, Mr. Browder?” the deputy asked in a patient voice. “Which way did he go? My partner will go find him and I’ll stay with you.”

Mitchell shifted his eyes away from whatever he had been staring at and turned them on the man who stood before him. They seemed to burn with pain and fear, and the deputy took a step backward.

And then Mitchell Browder said the words that stunned first the men standing in front of him, and then the entire nation.

“He’s not far away. I watched Paul Armstrong die right over there.”

Mitchell lifted a hand that felt heavy with the weight of his words, pointing to the nearly unrecognizable Jeep that sat buried in the muddy rubble of the flash flood, and then silent tears coursed down his face once again.

“He didn’t stand a chance,” stated the sheriff, thinking she was out of earshot.

“It was over very quickly,” said a friend, who was also a doctor on call at the hospital, afterward.

“He didn’t feel any pain,” the coroner had pronounced, taking her hand.

Over and over again, the same meaningless phrases blew across her consciousness until she simply stopped hearing them. How the hell did they know? Although she had been spared the sight of his once beautiful now unrecognizable face, she had been forced to look at his battered body. A body that had been untouched by a surgeon’s knife, despite thirteen years in baseball. It seemed to her that he had hurt very much.

Paul had tried to convince her to go with them that morning. But Kate was sick to death of everything to do with Arizona. She’d been married to Paul Armstrong, and consequently baseball, for thirteen years. It wasn’t fun anymore. The constant moving, the road trips, the hundreds of hours spent alone, the limelight that Paul lived in as the Giants’ phenomenal second baseman—all these things had worn her down. She’d almost not come to spring training this year. Almost. But at the last moment she’d changed her mind, knowing that separation from Paul would be even more devastating to their marriage. This was his last chance to make it better. Kate had done all she could. She didn’t think she could live without him, but knew something had to give. And that “something” wasn’t going to be her any longer.

And as she sat, dry-eyed, on the couch in the living room of her parents’ Tempe home that night, surrounded by people who whispered and murmured and hovered, that was the one thought that assaulted her mind.

How am I supposed to go on without you?

It wasn’t until the next day that she cried.

Mitchell Browder stood in front of her while she sat on that same couch. His eyes were bloodshot and he looked at her forlornly—helplessly. He held a small plastic bag that he continually passed from one hand to the other. When he finally began speaking, his words came out in torrents of pain.

“I’m sorry, Kate. I’m so sorry! I don’t know what else …” He stopped and swallowed hard. “God, he was my best friend on the team. They just let me out of the hospital, and I wanted to come by and tell you how sorry … I don’t know what else to say. It doesn’t seem like enough. If there’s anything I can do to help you … anything.”