“You’re not used to this, are you?” he asked after a time.
“To what? Being kidnapped? No, I’m not.”
“The adrenaline. You’re not used to it. You don’t know that it makes you irritable as hell after the first rush. Then, a while later, it lets go of you and you feel like you’ve been run over by a truck.”
She let out an explosive breath. “I’m not at that point yet.”
“You’ll get there.”
The moonlit night turned cold, as the big truck descended from the last mesa into a broad canyon. The shape of the land seemed familiar to Christy. After a few minutes she realized that they were approaching Remington from a different direction. The lights of the little town danced in the far distance like a band of fireflies.
Cain drove toward the lights for a few miles. Then without warning he turned off and headed up a graded gravel road. Ahead the spruce forest fanned down from the dark peaks like a ragged slice of midnight. Soon the truck was in the forest, growling happily and taking the road like a smooth black beast.
When Christy was certain her voice wouldn’t show fear, she asked, “Why aren’t you taking me back to the hotel?”
“That’s the first place Hutton’s county mounties will look for you.”
“County mounties—oh. The deputies. I don’t think they saw me.”
“How sure are you?”
She thought about it. There was no guarantee Hammond hadn’t caught a glimpse of her as she went across the balcony. And if he had, he’d know who she was.
Red hair could be a real pain in the ass.
“Not that sure,” she admitted. “Where are we going?”
“My place. No one will look for you there. Tomorrow I’ll ask around. If it’s safe, I’ll take you back to the hotel.”
“Won’t the deputies be suspicious if I’m seen with you tomorrow morning when you drop me off?”
Teeth flashed in the darkness of Cain’s beard. “They’ll assume the obvious.”
“Love at first sight?” she said ironically.
“Something like that, Red.”
“I’ll take your word for it. I’ve never been there, done that.”
And she sure didn’t plan on starting now.
For a time she just sat and tried to understand how much her world had been rearranged by her sister.
Again.
But thinking was impossible. She was caught between the night and Cain’s reflection in the window. With each breath she took she felt adrenaline retreating from her blood, stranding her in a kind of numbing fatigue.
Five minutes later he turned off the main road onto a side road that led up into a stand of tall, elegant spruce. The headlights glinted on glass windows and picked out the shape of a small cabin with a pitched metal roof. A wood corral stood in front of a small hip-roofed barn.
“How about Johnny?” Cain asked as he turned off the engine. “Will you take my word for him too?”
“What do you mean?”
Without answering, Cain got out, walked around to her door, and opened it. He stood in the doorway, keeping her in the truck.
“I wasn’t Johnny’s lookout,” Cain said. “I don’t even know what he was after inside the house—assuming he was after anything.”
“He was.”
“How long have you known Johnny?”
“Know him? I never even saw him until tonight.”
“Then how did you know it was Johnny up in the house?” Cain asked reasonably.
Christy tightened, remembering the instant she’d first spotted the big Indian crouched over a door.
“Bigger than Sheriff Danner,” she said rapidly, “no movement in the right side of his face, handsome despite that, a handful of metal rods that had to be lock picks.”
“That’s Johnny.” Then Cain asked casually. “Since you’d never met him, how did you know his name?”
“One of the guards called him Johnny.”
Cain whistled through his teeth. “Guards, huh? Did they grab him?”
“Yes.”
Something in her tone made Cain look at her, really look at her. In the moonlight, his eyes had a feral gleam.
“What happened?” he asked.
“My turn,” she said tightly.
“What?”
“If you weren’t with Johnny,” she said, “why were you following him?”
“To see where he was going,” Cain said dryly.
“Whose side are you on?”
“My own. What happened when the county mounties found Johnny?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I think he’s the back-shooting son of a bitch who tried to murder me four months ago.”
Chapter 14
Christy opened her mouth but nothing came out. She tried again with the same result.
Cain’s hands slid underneath her arms.
“The first step is a big one,” he said. “Ready?”
“No. I just discovered how Alice felt on her way down the rabbit hole.”
This time his smile was genuine, and warm. “It’s not that long a step, honey. Hang on.”
He lifted, swung, and lowered. The ground came up beneath her feet, but her knees gave way. She hung on to his forearms, bracing herself.
Despite the coolness of the night, his shirtsleeves were rolled back to his elbows. The flesh beneath her palms was warm, hard, and roughened by hair. He smelled like wood smoke and evergreens.
She was so close to him that she could see the pulse beating in his throat.
He was alert but calm.
She was neither.
Running water laughed somewhere nearby. A light breeze teased the trees. Branches brushed over glass; sounds that took her straight back to her childhood and a pain she still couldn’t heal.
Exhaustion washed over her in a soundless black wave, pulling her down, drowning her. Distantly she realized that she was holding on to Cain like salvation and at the same time trying to push him away.
“Red? You okay?”
“Sorry,” she said faintly. “I think I was just run over by that truck you mentioned.”
An instant later the world tilted and then righted itself again. She looked up into his face in disbelief as he started forward, carrying her like a child.
“I can walk,” she said.
“I can do it better. You’re shaking.”
“I’m not.”
He smiled. “Okay, what do you call it?”
“Um. Okay. I’m cold, that’s all. But you’re not. How did you get used to adrenaline?”
“Jail.”
“What?”
“For killing a man, just like Danner said.”
“My God.”
“Too tired to panic?” he asked coolly. “Good. Hang on while I open the cabin door.”
Numbly she waited while he opened the door and maneuvered through. Inside, he set her down but didn’t let go.
“I’m not going to faint,” she said irritably.
“Yeah? Your skin is white.”
“I’m a redhead. And I’m a lot tougher than I look.”
He smiled slightly. “What’s your name, tough lady?”
“McKenna. Christy McKenna.”
“Aaron Cain,” he said.
“I know.”
“The gallery,” he agreed.
Holding on to her with one hand, he reached over with the other to a wall switch. Light flared, revealing a large open living space that looked like a combination of museum and workshop.
The first thing she saw was a worktable littered with pottery and sherds. A large pot with geometric designs rested, half repaired, on a potter’s wheel in the center of the table. Several dozen sherds of the same color and design lay next to the wheel, waiting like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to be put into place.
At the other end of the worktable, a mud-crusted pottery bowl the size of a large frying pan waited patiently to be cleaned. The bowl was intact except for a crescent-shaped chip miss
ing from the rim on one side. There was an intricate, sophisticated design of black diamonds and chevrons just beneath the layer of red clay.
She didn’t doubt that the pattern had been hidden for centuries.
“You have that Alice-down-the-hole look again,” Cain said.
“If you offer me a cup of tea, I’ll hit you.”
“Brandy?”
“Please.”
She spoke without looking away from the artifacts that were stacked in every part of the room. Pots and bowls and mugs, some black on gray, some red on white, and some a clean white with brown or black designs. All of them were ancient. Most had a timeless beauty.
Many were clearly art.
Lured by a culture and an artistic style that were both new and intensely pleasing to her, she went from room to room in the cabin. Excitement energized her, making her forget how exhausted she’d been just a few minutes ago.
The cabin was much bigger than it had looked from the outside. It was jammed with art and artifacts of all sorts. In addition to the marvelous Anasazi pottery, there were examples of contemporary Native American art side by side with antiques that had once belonged to white settlers and frontiersmen. She saw stone axes, hand-forged steel trade tomahawks, and a powerful wooden bow where eagle feathers dangled in a silent statement of the former owner’s rank.
A cast-iron Dutch oven that had been blackened by the fires of a hundred years stood on a shelf next to a lustrous old grandfather clock. Nearby was a cherrywood fiddle so old the varnish had begun to crack. The varnish had already cracked on several of the paintings on the wall. The paintings were landscapes of the West as it hadn’t been for more than two centuries.
Throughout the rooms, like crystalline punctuation marks, there were mineral specimens whose like Christy had not seen short of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Spikes of quartz older than the oldest civilization on earth flashed and glittered from every corner. Some of the crystal spikes were smoky. Some were opaque. Many were as clear as spring water. All were museum quality.
She stopped in front of a bookcase that was crowned by a golden sunburst shooting through the heart of a cluster of crystals that were so clear they were nearly invisible.
Beneath the incredible specimen, the old wood gleamed with a once-living grain. The glass doors of the bookcase reflected back Christy’s image and Cain’s. He was standing in the doorway with a brandy snifter in his hand, watching her.
“Is it—” she began.
“Yes,” he said before she could ask. “The sunburst is pure gold.”
She started to turn around, but the books themselves caught her eye. From their good condition she’d assumed they were modern.
Suddenly she wasn’t sure.
She lifted the glass shelf and selected a volume whose title was as familiar as her childhood. The book had been required reading in the Wyoming school system. The volume in Cain’s bookcase was much older than her school text had been. Gently she opened the book. The title page said it all. She was holding a first edition of Banditti of the Plains, published privately in Wyoming in 1893.
“It’s an account of the Johnson County war,” he said, coming up behind her. “The cattlemen lost the war but they tried to limit the damage by buying up every available copy of the book.”
She nodded absently, enthralled to be holding a piece of history.
“Michael Cimino tried to turn it into a modern epic,” Cain added. “The result was Heaven’s Gate.”
“Almost as big a fiasco as the original,” she said dryly.
“Real people died in the Johnson County war. Only reputations died in Hollywood.”
Something in his voice reminded her that he knew very well how men died. Carefully she closed the old book and eased it back into place behind the safety of glass.
“If that book is what it says it is—a first edition—it must be worth a great deal,” she said, changing the subject.
“It is.”
Christy thought back to the avid collectors she’d met on the ride to Xanadu a few hours earlier. A few hours and a lifetime ago.
“Are you a collector?” she asked.
His smile wasn’t warm. “Do I look like a rich man?”
“Your clothes don’t. Clothes can be changed. What can’t be changed is the eye that selected all these things.” She gestured around the cabin. “You have an extraordinary eye. Are you a dealer?”
“Only when I can’t afford to hang on to something any longer, or when I find something better.”
Silently she wondered if he selected women on the same principle—keep them until something better came along. If he did, he was definitely Jo-Jo’s hidden lover. When it came to physical perfection, Jo-Jo was museum quality.
“Well-made things last longer than any of the people who own them,” Cain said. “A good cooking pot, clay or cast iron, is like the land that way. It connects you with something that endures a hell of a lot more years than one human life.”
She nodded, surprised by his matter-of-fact acceptance of mortality, his own included. “Most people don’t like to think about that.”
“Most people don’t like to think, period.” He nudged her fingers with the snifter he was holding. “Drink this while I start a fire.”
She took the fragile crystal glass and lifted it to her mouth. As she breathed in, tasting it, she made a surprised sound.
“Armagnac,” she murmured.
“What did you expect, wood alcohol with a twist of chewing tobacco for flavor?”
She ducked her head, hoping that he couldn’t see the flush on her cheeks. In truth, she hadn’t been expecting much in the way of finesse from a Moki poacher’s liquor cabinet.
“Sit down.” He gestured to the furniture behind him. “I’ll have the fire going in a minute.”
She looked at the sofa. It was small, almost a love seat. If two tried to sit on it at once, they would feel every breath the other took. She’d been forced to be that close to him more than once tonight. The thought of any more intimacy unnerved her.
She passed up the couch and sat in the big easy chair near the fireplace. As soon as she settled into its depths, she realized that it must be Cain’s favorite chair. It smelled faintly of him, evergreen and wood smoke, soap, and the elusive, indefinable scent that was the man himself.
I wonder if he scents me this clearly?
Her pulse jumped. She wasn’t used to thinking about men and women in such primitive terms—scent, strength, danger, death, life itself.
Rather grimly she took a drink of the Armagnac. The clean, complex, heady liquid spread through her like sunrise.
“You didn’t get this at the state liquor store in Remington,” she said.
“No,” he agreed.
“As a matter of fact, I think they were pouring it at Hutton’s party tonight.”
He looked over his shoulder at her through narrowed eyes. “Yes. And yes, this probably came from Hutton’s private stock.”
“Are you friends with him?”
“No.” Cain turned back to tend the fire.
“Then it’s the fabulous Jo who is your—ah, friend,” Christy said.
“With Hutton’s slut for a friend, a man wouldn’t need any enemies.”
The casual contempt in Cain’s voice shocked Christy.
“Sounds like a man scorned to me,” she said.
“Not as scorned as she was.”
“What does that mean?”
“What do you care, Red?”
“I’m a reporter,” she said quickly. “I ask all kinds of questions.”
“A reporter. Jesus.”
“You make it sound worse than being a burglar.”
“Honey, I’d rather have a burglar any day. At least you know up front what their game is.”
Chapter 15
Christy watched as Cain stood and went to a liquor cabinet that had been an icebox in the previous century. He pulled out a bottle shaped like a banjo and poured two fin
gers of Armagnac into a second snifter. Then he leaned against the fireplace and cradled the snifter against his palm, putting the stem between his long, surprisingly elegant third and fourth fingers. He held the snifter unself-consciously, the way a man would if he was alone and knew that Armagnac needed human warmth to be fully released.
And he watched her with eyes the same golden color as the fire he had just kindled in the hearth. But unlike the flames, his eyes were cool, a wolf’s eyes studying something new, trying to decide whether it was dangerous, edible, or simply meaningless to a solitary predator’s life.
“Is that what you were doing in Hutton’s house tonight?” he asked finally. “Research?”
“After a fashion.” She smiled slightly.
“What does that mean?”
“Just a pun. I write for Horizon magazine.”
He waited.
“That’s a magazine about international style,” she explained.
“I’ve seen it.”
“Oh.” She started to take another sip.
“So you’re doing another one of those fawning Hutton pieces,” Cain said.
“I don’t fawn in print or in person. I dissect style in the same way a critic dissects art.”
Cain saluted her ironically with his snifter.
“So,” he said after a moment, “you’re doing another one of those pieces that tell women why they should buy Hutton’s crap even though it looks like dried flower arrangements from the five-and-dime.”
She nearly choked on the potent liquor she was swallowing. Gasping, laughing, coughing, she wiped her eyes. When she could see again, he was still watching her.
This time there was a smile in his eyes.
“I’m no fan of floral arrangement fashions, dried or otherwise,” she said huskily. “I leave that to Myra.”
“Who’s she? Another model?”
“My boss. Until she fires me.”
“Is that likely?”
Christy shrugged. As she did, she realized that Cain had diverted her questions about him and turned them into questions about her. It was a neat trick, an interrogator’s or reporter’s trick, one that few people could play successfully on her.