“That’s a gunshot wound,” Sally pronounced, rag poised over Noah’s arm. “You out robbin’ banks again?”
Noah did his best to grin. “How you think I bought this place?”
“Oh, that,” she scoffed, tipping a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over the rag and slapping the whole mess against the gash in his arm and stoking the fire all over again. “I thought you did that by legal robbery.”
Noah did his best to keep quiet and smile. “Thanks.”
“He gonna live?” Dulcy demanded as she walked back in the house from where she’d been putting her horse away.
Noah couldn’t believe it. How could she seem so matter-offact, as if nothing had happened? Had he imagined it? Had he been hit so hard on the head that his entire body had shortcircuited right into putting his nose into her hair?
He felt as if he’d been struck by lightning.
He felt…he felt…
God, it was a good thing he was the actor and not the screenwriter. The truth was, he didn’t know how the hell he felt. Surprised and antsy and upended. Distracted as a teenager getting his first look at a naked girl.
In all his life he’d never used anything but the gray matter between his ears to guide his actions.
There had been another guide entirely, out on that trail tonight.
There was another guide now, even though he knew perfectly well there was some other cerebral business that had not yet been attended to. A quick, muttered conversation he’d almost missed entirely.
“He’s gonna live,” Sally assured his manager. “Is Hannah ever coming back in from the barn?”
Dulcy tossed her hat on the rack and walked over to the coffeepot. “Nope. She finished her dinner and took her stuffed bear and her violin to soothe Doofus to sleep. She also has her sleeping bag out there in case he should wake during the night and cry out in pain.”
Noah almost forgot what Sally was doing to his arm. “I didn’t think he was that bad.”
“His scratch is smaller than yours. But Hannah worries about her friends.”
“This is not a scratch,” Noah protested, lifting his arm for her to see.
It was a scratch, but it was throbbing and almost as sore as his head, and he thought he deserved at least as much concern as a horse.
Dulcy stopped right alongside him and bent for a close inspection. Noah was sure she meant to be funny. The minute her hair got in proximity to his nose, he knew she’d blown it.
She’d been out in the dirt all day, wearing a ten-year-old hat in eighty-degree weather while wrestling a couple hundred calves. How the hell could her hair smell like oranges? Noah wanted to drop his head into it again and never come out.
“You must be a greenhorn,” she teased, straightening as if she couldn’t read his thoughts. “Cowboys are never this lucky.”
Noah scowled. “Thanks.”
“How’s your head?”
“His head?” Sally demanded, back on alert.
“He hit his head when Doofus decided to come home without him,” Dulcy said. “Didn’t he show you that, too?”
“So I could do what?” Sally countered. “Kiss it and make it better?”
Noah caught Dulcy’s faint blush. He saw her eyes flicker his way and then shy away again. He knew just what she was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing. About what he’d like her to kiss and make better.
God, he had to get a handle on himself. He’d come here for some rest, and right now it looked like he wasn’t going to sleep for the next six weeks.
Not only that, but if he gave action to any of the thoughts that were plaguing him, he’d be without a foreman, fast. And he didn’t want that.
He didn’t want that at all.
“Coffee?” Dulcy asked abruptly, stalking back to the pot.
“Thanks.”
“So, how is your head?” Sally demanded, wrapping gauze around his arm.
“Sore.” Confused, confounded.
“You dizzy? Faint? Seeing double?”
“Not since I sat down on the trail.”
Sally spent a second peering at him, as if she could see his brains through the hair on his head.
“I’m all right,” he insisted, even though he really didn’t feel like it. But that wasn’t something he could discuss with either of these women. Not now, at any rate.
Sally didn’t seem to believe him. Instead she laid a hand on the back of his head and made him wince.
“That’s a hell of a bump.”
“It wasn’t so bad until you slammed into it,” he protested, pulling her hand away.
“Even so,” she insisted. “You should be careful. Somebody should keep an eye on you.”
“I told you, Sally,” he insisted. “I’m fine. I used to do this all the time when I…”
“When you what? Worked a rodeo?”
No, he thought with some chagrin. When he’d worked as a stuntman on his way up. He’d almost told them both the truth, which just went to show how this place was beginning to affect him. How these people were affecting him.
“When I worked on my uncle’s ranch. I used to help him work the new horses, which meant I spent a lot of time flying through the air. And hitting my head. It doesn’t feel any worse.”
He could tell she still didn’t believe him. Nothing much he could do about it. Slapping one last bit of tape on the bandage on his arm, she collected her supplies and headed back for the bathroom.
“So that’s why you’re so good on a horse,” Dulcy suggested, setting down his coffee.
He nodded and lied through his teeth. “That’s it. I counted every day I could during school until I could get to vacation and the ranch.”
“Did you grow up in Texas?” she asked.
He nodded, another lie. All lies, just like everywhere else in his life. Except for how he felt about this place. About that poor, dirt and scrub ranch he’d worked all those summers. “My whole life,” he said. “Philadelphia’s just where I landed.”
“Witness,” Sally inexplicably piped up as she walked back in the room.
Dulcy glared. “He already told you he’s okay, Sal. And besides. I don’t see you bathing wounds by lantern light.”
Sally headed straight for the cabinets and began pulling out dishes. “Not me,” was all she said.
Noah could have sworn Dulcy blushed again. Come to think of it, so did he.
Then Dulcy punctuated the conversation as only she could. “I also think Harrison Ford wouldn’t have fallen off his horse in the first place.”
“He fell off his car,” Sally insisted. “And he owns a ranch.”
Noah checked Dulcy for an explanation for Sally’s logic, but she just shrugged. “Well, that makes all the difference in the world. I’m gonna wash up for dinner. I assume we’re still having dinner?”
Sally set the dishes down on the table and turned back to her heap of pots and pans. “Dry chicken, overcooked string beans, and potato pellets. Coming right up.”
Still feeling a little queasy from all the extracurricular activity, Noah just sat at the table. “You two sure seem to know a lot about movies,” he ventured carefully, testing waters he knew he shouldn’t.
Setting down a couple of aspirin to go with his coffee, Sally laughed. “We one,” she amended. “I’m the videophile. Dulcy puts up with it because she can’t cook.”
“You can’t cook?” he called out to where he could hear water splashing in the bathroom. “You’re kidding!”
“The last time I checked,” Dulcy retorted easily, “the job description for a ranch manager does not include having a secret recipe for apple pie.”
“Wouldn’t hurt.”
Sally waved him off as she proceeded to set the table around him. “Don’t get her started. She’ll tell us all—in much too much detail—the things she can do that I can’t. Most of which involve sliding entire arms into pregnant cows.”
“City Slickers,” Noah couldn’t help but offer with a grin.
Sally brightened immediately. “See? You can catch the hang of it pretty quickly. You don’t go to movies?”
He saw the quick flash of uncertainty in her expression when she said that, as if she knew she’d said something that didn’t make sense. As if she couldn’t quite figure out what it was yet.
He wondered how long it would take her. How long it would take any of them.
Noah wondered, sitting in the warm peace of that kitchen with the sounds of crickets and coyotes drifting in the window and Vince Gill on the radio, how much longer he’d be able to hide out and pretend he could be the person he really was.
He’d invented himself for Hollywood. He’d done too good a job of it all round.
“No,” he said, looking down to consider the coffee in his cup and telling the best truth he could. “I don’t really get much time to go to the movies.”
Which was true. If he saw them, he saw them in somebody’s private screening room.
“You should go with us,” Sally suggested. “Or we could rent a movie or two. You should see something with Cameron Ross. Did I tell you that you look like him?”
Noah hadn’t won the Oscar because people liked the color of his hair. He sipped easily at his coffee and flashed Sally a grin, even as his heart did a two-step that would have left old Vince Gill gasping. “You already have the job,” he said dryly. “You don’t need to push it.”
“No, really,” she insisted, not looking at him anymore as she served up what looked nothing like overcooked or dried out anything. “You weren’t really born in England, were you? If you were, you could be brothers.”
“Sorry to disappoint you. Is he still on the island?”
Sally simply scooped up a couple of tabloids on the way over to the table. “See for yourself. I still want to know where Isabelle Renoult is.”
Noah had been about to pick up the top of the pile when Sally’s words brought him up short.
Isabelle.
There she was, her picture superimposed over the shot of the island compound, with Cameron Ross chipping golf balls alongside a palm tree. Noah had forgotten how beautiful she was. Sleek, sensual, lithe as a cat.
Different.
It seemed almost as if he didn’t recognize her anymore. As if what he’d seen in her wasn’t there, maybe had never been there. Maybe he’d imposed on her the very same impossible ideal she’d imposed on him. Suddenly, though, she looked shallow. Cold. Intelligent rather than intense.
Four days, and Noah was disconcerted to find that all that slick sophistication had attracted the myth he’d created, not the person he’d rediscovered here in the mountains.
Not two months ago, he’d told a respected journalist that he couldn’t imagine his life without Isabelle. Now, in the space of three days, he couldn’t imagine it with her.
“What do you think he does all day?” Sally asked, leaning over his shoulder.
Noah startled all over again. “Who?”
She pointed to the suntanned, muscular image of a screen star, his teeth gleaming, his hair tousled to perfection. Noah scowled. He was going to have to have a word with Ethan. He was beginning to play Cameron just a little too well.
But then, if he fired his cousin, who was going to provide his diversion when he wanted to escape?
“Looks like he plays golf,” he said.
“Can’t be any fun just doing that,” Dulcy offered, plopping down in the other chair.
“Sean Connery seems to like it,” Sally retorted.
“Sean Connery’s over sixty. Golf is boring. Which means, I guess, that Cameron Ross is boring, too.”
Dulcy had just picked up the plate of chicken to serve herself. Sally snatched it out of her hand with a scowl. “You wouldn’t say that if you’d met him,” she challenged, making it a point to hand the platter to Noah instead.
Noah almost missed the plate entirely. “You’ve met Cameron Ross?”
Thank God, she blushed and shook her head. “No. But my friend Patsy from the junior college did. She was right in the front row outside at the Oscars this year. Almost got to shake his hand.”
“Makes your heart just want to stop beating, doesn’t it?” Dulcy drawled.
Sally glared a little more. “Cameron Ross is suave, sophisticated, brilliant and solves crime in a tux. You got a problem with that?”
“Cameron Ross solves crime in a tux?” Noah couldn’t help but echo. “Must cut into his acting schedule.”
“And play hell with his cleaning bill,” Dulcy added.
“Man on the Run and Second Agenda,” Sally said in a kind of wistful voice Noah knew only too well. “He makes James Bond look like a slacker in a Sears suit, and Dulcy’s not impressed. But then, Dulcy writes fan letters to Hootie and the Blowfish…whatever the heck that is.”
Noah wasn’t ever going to get his food. “You write them?”
It was Dulcy’s turn to squirm. “For Hannah. She’s nuts about their music.”
“And you don’t listen at all.”
She shrugged. “Just a little.”
Noah couldn’t help it. He let out a laugh they should have heard in the bunkhouse. “Hootie and the Blowfish,” he marveled with a shake of his head.
“Okay,” she retorted, “so it’s not opera. It’s—”
“One of my favorite groups,” he informed her.
That brought the kitchen to a dead halt. Sally was still standing by the table with the potatoes now clutched to her chest as if needing protection. Dulcy sat with her fork halfway to the chicken, staring at Noah as if he’d told her he worshipped Satan.
“To be specific,” he amended, taking the potatoes from an unprotesting Sally, “my favorite group is the Crash Test Dummies. But I’m real fond of Hootie. Not to mention Green Day and Shakespeare’s Sister and the Cranberries, and…well, I enjoy the new alternative music almost as much as Hannah. In fact, the one extravagance I did indulge in is a stereo system that should be showing up soon with my CD collection.”
He could see that he still hadn’t quite convinced them.
“But I thought you’d, well, you know…”
“Live and breathe the classics? Hardly.”
“But when I called, your business manager was always saying you were at the opera. Or the symphony. Or the ballet. I just figured…”
Ah, Ethan. Always ready with an alibi if anybody should try and get in touch with Noah. Ethan, who in Philadelphia ran Noah’s commercial investments. Who worked as the blind for the various persons Noah was. If Hollywood wanted Cameron Ross during an “island vacation,” Ethan, the faithful business manager, either rerouted the call or took the message. The same for the other side, where Noah Campbell was really the silent partner in The Campbell Group that Ethan had started on Noah’s money and run on Ethan’s acumen.
Ethan looked enough like Noah to stand in for him at a distance, like now on the island, and sounded enough like him to filter off annoying problems. Ethan was the single person in the world who knew all of Noah’s secrets. Who had sat out on that fire escape with him, weaving plans from dreams, and now celebrated their realization.
“Yes,” Noah finally said. “I was at all those things. Fundraisers. Tough to raise money for hospital wings at black-tie Hootie concerts, ya know?”
Dulcy actually groaned. “Oh, God, I’ll never hear the end of it now.”
Sally seemed to be enjoying Dulcy’s distress. “Well, the old ranch just isn’t going to be the same anymore, is it?”
“If she were dead, Aunt Cordelia would be rolling in her grave,” Dulcy assured them.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Sally countered. “I think she’s rolling right now…oh, damn. Witness!”
Noah noticed that Dulcy was once again as confused as he was, so he just waited.
Sally swung her arm in the direction of the phone. “The Tiltons called. The barn raising’s scheduled for the end of the week. Can you make it?”
Back on familiar turf, Dulcy took a second to actually dispatch some food. “Yeah. We should be finished by then. Wanna come, boss? There’s a dance afterward.”
Noah’s first instinct was to say no. He was getting comfortable around the men, but then, men weren’t usually the sex that recognized him first in the grocery store.
Still, he’d fooled Sally, and he figured that there wasn’t a bigger Cameron Ross fan in the state. He might as well dip his toes into the social pool and see if he liked the water.
See if the water liked him.
Besides, he was intrigued by the idea of being out on a barn floor with Dulcy in his arms.
“Sounds great. Do I bring my own tool belt?”
“Just your sparkling personality.”
Moving among laughing, talking strangers to the sound of slide guitars, colored lights strung around the barn, his hands around her waist, her hair thick and loose around her shoulders.
“What about you?” he asked. “Are you going to be there?”
Dulcy grinned. “I’m a whiz with a band saw.”
Red and gold and honey, shimmering in the strung lights, her soft gray eyes languid with the music and the movement.
“What about the dance?”
This time she looked a little more disconcerted. “Sure. I guess.”
“In a dress?”
That endearing pink crept up her throat. “I own a dress.”
From over by the sink, Sally hooted. “Which you haven’t worn since Hannah was baptized.”
“I’d like to see you in a dress,” Noah said before he thought about it.
For a second the air in the room seemed to freeze. Dulcy’s eyes grew infinitesimally bigger, and her breathing stilled. Then, as quickly as she’d stopped, she moved again. Flashed him a sassy grin and went back to her food.
“Better’n seein’ you in a dress,” she said, and Noah laughed.
The night was almost perfectly still. Straight up in the sky the moon melted the stars, and above the meadows, the pines whispered like conspirators. When she opened the door to the horse barn, Dulcy heard the horses shift and settle. She inhaled their earthy scent and let her eyes get accustomed to the shadows.
She still felt as if she were hooked up to electricity. It had been over two hours since she’d sat at the table with Noah, and she still couldn’t settle down.
A barn dance. She’d been to dozens. Usually spent her time at the punch bowl with the other foremen, watching contentedly as Hannah and her girlfriends taught the boys to dance. She exchanged gossip with the people who did talk to her and ignored the slights of those who wouldn’t. Dulcy attended out of a sense of loyalty to her community and neighbors. She hadn’t really anticipated one since she’d been in high school.
She wasn’t really sure anticipation was what she felt now. Maybe dread was a better word. Or ambivalence. It was the strangest thing. When Noah had asked her about a dress, Dulcy could have sworn she’d felt his hands at her waist. Felt her cheek against his shoulder, the air moving against her legs as the two of them glided together across a floor, their heels clacking on wood, their words as whispered as the pines.
She could have sworn he’d felt it, too.
This had to stop. She didn’t have the time for this. She didn’t have the patience. She certainly didn’t have the fortitude. If anyone in this valley caught on to the fact that she was attracted to the new owner of the Lazy V, the rest of her already tattered reputation would be no more than shreds.
Not that she hadn’t survived it before. She had. But before Hannah had been too little to understand. Hannah had not been in school with the children of spiteful people who would bring that spite intact to class.
And Dulcy simply would not do that to the little girl she found curled up and asleep in the end stall.
“Hey, Doofus,” she crooned when the horse lifted his head in greeting. “She taking care of you?”
Doofus butted her on the shoulder and then dipped his head so she could scratch his ears. Dulcy watched her little girl sleep, one arm around her bear, the other around the battered violin case with its music school and Pearl Jam stickers.
It made Dulcy want to cry. It made her pray that she would never again make the kind of mistake that had brought her little girl into her life, because if she were that stupid again, she’d ruin Hannah’s life.
“She’s beautiful.”
Dulcy jumped back as if she’d been hit.
How could she have not heard him? How could she have not felt him following her down the hill?
Because she was still so rattled after that conversation she’d had at dinner, she wouldn’t have felt a UFO land on her roof and shut down the electricity for the state.
She felt him now. Briefly Dulcy closed her eyes against the sudden surge of delight that threatened to swamp her.
“Come to apologize to your horse?” she asked.
He walked right up next to her and did his own scratching. Doofus didn’t seem to mind the extra attention at all. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“Horses are not notoriously good at discriminating things like that.”
His smile was so beautiful. Rough and easy and right.
And then he blew it. “Wanna tell me what was going on up there this afternoon?”
Dulcy looked over to find him still intent on the horse. “You tell me,” she said carefully. “I was just the cleanup squad.”
Then Noah looked over at her, and Dulcy knew she had a whole other problem on her hands. “What was Hank going to go look for?”
“Hank?”
“You told him to wait till tomorrow.”
“Ah.” Dulcy did her best to think fast. She looked back down at Hannah, as if afraid of waking her. Knowing perfectly well that if Doofus stepped square on her daughter’s chest it wouldn’t even alter her breathing.
Just what should she tell him? How much would he accept?
How long would she have before he found out his staff was conspiring behind his back?
No wonder she felt so at sea. Not one terrifying secret on her hands, but, it seemed, hundreds.
“He was going to see if he could find out who fired at you.”
“Why? I told you. I thought it was a hunter.”
Dulcy faced him then. “Uh, it isn’t season right now.”
“So, what? Poachers?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe…uh, neighbors.”
That did seem to stop him. Noah took his own look down at Hannah, then at Dulcy, and suddenly his eyes were darker. Sharper, as if his brain had been on vacation until that moment. “That’s a comforting thought.”
“You weren’t the only person who bid on this property, ya know.”
“I know.”
“The last thing several people wanted was for an outsider to take it over.”
“No surprise.”
“Well, some of the less rational might just feel that a…well, a warning might be called for.”
“You’re kidding.”
She shrugged again. “I was going to say something after Hank got back tomorrow. Like maybe you should only go out riding with one of us with you.”
His eyes widened. “You’re serious.”
“I don’t want to lose you,” she blurted out. “I mean…”
Dulcy could feel the flush climb her throat. She could feel the sweat pop up on her palms. The last thing she’d meant to do was tell him the truth. The last thing she needed on this earth was for him to suspect.
“I mean,” she said before he had a chance to interrupt. “That nobody else in this valley would have let me stay on here. And if I don’t work here, I can’t afford those trumpet lessons for Hannah.”
Dulcy couldn’t even look at him anymore. Couldn’t raise her gaze above the level of about the third button on his dark blue shirt. Even that was bad enough, because it allowed her to see the fact that he seemed to be having as much trouble breathing as she.
“Well, we wouldn’t want that to happen,” he murmured, his voice suddenly tight.
“No,” Dulcy said. “We wouldn’t.”
“I mean, who else would I be able to share my Hootie and the Blowfish CDs with?”
“Exactly.”
“And there wouldn’t be anybody to pull Hannah’s chair out at dinner.”
It was getting even more difficult to breathe. “True.”
“And if I left,” he said, reaching out a hand to lift her face to him, “I’d never get the chance to see you in a dress.”
That did it. Dulcy stopped breathing altogether. She stopped thinking. All she could comprehend was the fact that his eyes seemed alight, pale as the moon-washed sky, sweet as the water that tumbled over mountain fields.
She heard his breath catch, a harsh sound that shuddered through her. She felt the tremble of his fingers where they rested beneath her chin.
Dulcy wished she could say that Noah kissed her. That he took advantage of her. She wished she could lay the blame for what happened at his feet.
She couldn’t.
Somehow, the two of them met in the middle. Noah dipped his face to hers so that his hair spilled over his forehead and his eyes closed and his whiskers tickled her cheek. Dulcy raised up on her toes until her breasts brushed against his chest and her hands somehow found his shoulders.
Until her mouth met his.
She’d been kissed before. She’d been thoroughly loved, once upon a time when it had all still seemed magical and true. She’d never dipped her fingers into lightning. She’d never lost her way simply at the touch of a man’s lips.
But she did. Oh, she did. Standing there amid the horses, not five feet from where her daughter slept. She forgot them all, forgot her past and her future and her problems. For a brief, explosive moment, she found herself trapped in a whirlwind and unable to break free. For a heartbeat, it didn’t matter, and she was happy.