And then, damned if she hadn’t just walked away. Just pulled back, her eyes still huge and moist and heartbreakingly hurt, shaken her head and walked out the door.
And Noah had been too much of a coward to follow her.
He was too much of a coward now. If he weren’t, he would be out at Cletus Wilson’s ranch working alongside her, instead of pulling the pickup into a parking slot in front of the feed store in Westridge.
He should have argued with her that morning when she’d told him she didn’t want him risking his neck again this soon after his fall by branding Cletus’s cattle or herding his own with the hands who were going to get ready for branding at the Lazy V the next day. He should have pulled rank, even though he had felt like hell.
Not from the fall—he’d taken worse in staged fights on movie sets—from the fact that he’d walked back into that silent, echoing house and lain awake the entire night. He’d watched the moon set and the valley slip into blackness, the stars finally getting their chance to shine through. He’d watched the sky ease from ebony to pearl to mauve to coral. He’d heard the birds wake and the animals rustle to life. He’d heard the alarm bells ring throughout the compound and Sally’s car crunch across the dirt drive as she’d arrived to cook breakfast.
He’d lain in that bed the entire night sweating for a woman who slept no more than fifteen feet away.
And he hadn’t done a damn thing about it.
Cameron Ross would have slipped to her door and whispered sweet nothings, making everything all right, earning him entry, winning him her smile and the sweet comfort of her body.
Cameron Ross would have had a script and a director and seventy crew members standing around waiting for break. He would have had Makeup spraying his hair into place and Wardrobe readjusting his silk boxers.
But he wasn’t Cameron Ross. He was Noah Campbell, and Noah Campbell couldn’t do those things.
Which was why he’d invented Cameron Ross in the first place.
“Mornin’. Aren’t you the new owner of the Lazy V?”
Noah almost walked right by the man speaking to him. Smallish, balding, successful looking in a portly, well-fed way. Smiling like a salesman with his hand out.
“Morning,” Noah responded, taking it out of courtesy.
“Name’s Bob Grumman. First Montana Bank. Your loan’s with us. Just wanted to welcome you to Westridge.”
Noah let his smile grow. “Why, thank you. Noah Campbell. It’s my pleasure to be here.”
Bob Grumman was already nodding, as if he’d figured as much. “Woulda been out to the ranch right after branding, anyway, but since I’m here…Anything you need, sir. Anything at all. Can’t tell you what it means to us for you to have kept that loan in town, when you could have taken it back east and all.”
“Well,” Noah said, “the Lazy V’s part of Montana’s economy, not Pennsylvania’s.”
That got him a hooting, happy laugh. “When’s Hank takin’ over for you?”
“Hank?”
“Foreman. Now that old lady Winters is outta there, we all figured…”
“Nope.” Fingering his hat in a Western salute, Noah stepped up on the sidewalk. “Real nice meeting you, Bob. It’s a pleasure working with your bank.”
He met the same question in the feed store, the small appliance store and then in the little general store that looked so much like the one his aunt and uncle had owned in Dawsonville, Texas.
“Why not?” the proprietor asked as he rang up the food Sally had asked Noah to pick up while he was in town carrying out the duties of one of the men who’d been pulled to herd cattle. “Hank’s a real good man.”
“Dulcy seems like a real good woman,” Noah said evenly.
His real answer came in the lift in the man’s eyebrows. “You don’t say.”
It didn’t take an interpreter to figure that one out. Only one reason to choose a woman over a man in these parts, the man implied. Noah objected even without the words.
“You stop that right now, Pete Dunn,” a scrawny, sharpeyed woman in a housedress said in protest, finger out toward the man behind the counter as she stalked up from the aisle where cereal was stuffed on shelves alongside canned vegetables and light bulbs. “I swear, you’ll be flower fertilizer before you ever admit that women have the vote.”
“It’s not that, Vera, and you know it,” he countered.
“Well then, there isn’t anything else,” she said with sharp finality. “You hear me?”
Noah turned on the woman and was rewarded by a smile. For the briefest of seconds he hesitated, wondering just who the smile was for. Wondering if he’d been caught after all.
He hadn’t. She held out her hand. “I’m Vera Dunn,” she said. “This Neanderthal’s wife. And I’m real glad to see you aren’t held back by some of the stupider notions that are so popular around here.”
Noah shook her hand. “Noah Campbell. A real pleasure.” This time he meant it.
She looked hard at him, but just for a second, as if trying to remember if she’d seen him in town. Noah held his breath. But before he could blow his own cover, the bell over the door tinded and everybody’s attention swerved.
Every one of Noah’s alarm bells went off.
“Afternoon,” Pete said, greeting the new pair of customers with the careful courtesy that had been Noah’s first introduction.
“Hi, there,” the woman answered with a five-hundred-watt smile. Salon-tousled blond hair, designer, stone-washed denim jumper and white T-shirt, silver-, and gold-studded lizard skin boots, surgery-enhanced everything. Accompanied by a sixfoot, Nautilus-primed, airbrushed and Armani-draped vision in yellow sunglasses, thousand-dollar silk and sockless loafers.
Melanie Miller and Barry Feldman. Hottest husband-andwife production and direction team on the continent. The hottest team Cameron Ross wouldn’t work with, anyway. Noah would have compared them to sharks, but even sharks only fed when they were hungry.
Before they could figure out he wasn’t just a local, Noah yanked out his shopping list and headed back for the cereal aisle.
“We’re staying up at Jack Logan’s place,” Melanie was saying in her sharp, listen-to-me voice. “And thought we’d just pick up a couple of nice chards for dinner. We thought Chilean, but only because Jack hasn’t even tried Chilean yet. Can you imagine?”
“No, ma’am, I sure can’t,” Pete answered in a drawl that halved his speaking speed.
Piling shredded wheat and lima beans into his arms, Noah grinned.
“We don’t carry…chards,” Vera continued. “We have some beer on the far aisle and cooking sherry by the window.”
There was dead silence. Noah almost peeked over the top of the cookies to see the expressions on old Mel’s and Barry’s faces. Alongside them the bell tinkled again and a tiny, wizened lady struggled in the door without the two of them noticing. Vera swept right by them to give her a hand in.
“You’re kidding,” Melanie finally ventured to say. If Noah hadn’t seen Barry screaming obscenities on a movie set, he would have sworn he never spoke.
“You might try Bozeman,” Vera offered, busy patting the little lady on the arm as she went by. “I hear they got a gourmet place.”
“Billings,” Noah couldn’t help but add, knowing that only the top of his hat could be seen. “The Mystic Duck. They have great chards. And cabs.”
“Really?” Melanie countered, obviously not hearing the sarcasm. “Is it far?”
“Couple of hours.”
Another silence, this punctuated by the bell and more new footsteps.
“I don’t suppose you have any tiramisu, either.”
“Not unless it’s got a Campbell’s label on it,” Pete assured her.
Noah kept his head down as he followed the sound of their boot steps and the opening door.
“I’m not living here in these conditions,” Melanie was insisting.
The bell rang over the door, and Barry’s distinctive growl could be heard for the first time. “Live here? Who says we’re going to live here? At least not yet. You know what he said.”
Noah came out of hiding to see the two of them conferring alongside their shining white Range Rover.
“There isn’t anyplace called the Mystic Duck in Billings,” Vera informed him without looking his way.
Noah laughed. “I know. But I figured all the fresh air’d do em good.”
“What the hell is a chard?” Pete complained. “Damn if all those folk don’t always come in here askin’ for it.”
“Wine,” Vera told him. “Some kind of wine. So’s cabs.”
“Uh-huh. Why the hell don’t they call it wine?”
“’Cause when you can afford lizard skin boots,” Noah informed them both, “you figure you can afford something mottier than wine.”
Vera sneaked him a look. “You don’t drink chards?”
“Not unless I need to get drunk fast and there isn’t any whiskey around.”
“And who the hell’s Jack Logan?” Pete demanded. “She said that like I should know. He didn’t grow up here and I forgot, did he?”
At that, Vera sighed. “He’s that movie star. The one who kicks people. He bought the Tyler place and closed all the roads up the mountain. Where you been?”
“Working here, woman.”
“He bid on your place, too,” she told Noah.
That got a nod out of Pete. “Good thing he didn’t get it. Be a waste of a fine herd. Fine land. I swear, if one o’ those Hollywood types showed up here actually wanting to do some ranching, I’d sell this store and walk the streets of Los Angeles with a sign that said I’m Sorry.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” Noah agreed, thinking that Pete and his wife would never know what made him smile.
Pete was still crabbing about chards and tiramisus and things when Noah piled his entire cache on the counter to check out. By then a few other shoppers had entered, been introduced and sized up their new neighbor. Not one showed signs of recognition.
“Dulcy know where she’s goin’?” One of the newcomers asked.
“She’s not going anywhere,” Vera answered for Noah as she settled the last of the groceries into his bags. “So just let everybody know.”
The man nodded, eyes a little wide. Alongside him, the little old lady who had finally introduced herself as Miss Retta Williams, nodded with approval. “She was a good student,” she said.
“She’s a good girl,” Vera insisted, as if it were an oft-quoted argument, then turned on Noah. “Well, you tell Dulcy if she needs anything, just let me know.”
“I will.”
“A spitfire of a girl. Especially after what she’s been through.”
“What she’s been through,” another voice interrupted disdainfully from a back aisle.
Noah caught Vera’s scowl just before he turned to see who had just joined the party.
Another woman, this one plump and fair. She must have come in when he wasn’t looking. Once pretty, Noah thought, but long since soured enough that all her lines seemed to curve down. Her mouth, her eyes, the lines at the corner of her nose. Thick dishwater hair swept into a roll and pricy slacks, a silk blouse and pearl earrings. Pushing fifty, at least physically. She glared at Vera as if facing off with a heretic.
“Now, Mary,” Vera cautioned, hands up. “This isn’t the time.”
“And just when is the time, I ask you? You think this man doesn’t deserve to know just who he has running that fancy ranch of his? I’ve been listening to you all skirting around things, and I’ve had it.”
Noah held very still, just like old Pete over by the cash register. Except that Pete had a kind of anticipatory look in his eye, like he was getting the pay-channel fights for free.
“Dulcy’s made her mistakes…” Vera started to say.
“Mistakes,” the other woman hissed. “I’m tired o’ hearing about ‘mistakes.’ Broke her father’s heart, that’s what she did, and him the best minister this town’s seen. Broke his heart and sent him into exile.” Without even drawing breath, she swung a finger around at Noah, as if he were a third-grader caught tossing spitballs. “You want her to run your ranch so bad? Just remember. Don’t take your eyes off her.”
“Mary!” Vera protested, aghast.
“Don’t ‘Mary’ me!” she challenged. “It’s my pearl necklace she stole.”
“You don’t—”
“I do. I did then and I do now. She’ll fool you,” she warned, pointing at Noah again. “Make you think she’s sweet and dedicated and all. She’ll steal from you, right under your nose.”
“I know all about her,” Noah lied, unable to listen to the spite pouring out of this woman’s mouth.
“You do, do you?” she retorted, her eyes bright with selfrighteous indignation. “Did you know that she’s missing some of your cattle?”
“Come on, Mary,” Pete finally spoke up. “We don’t know for sure…”
But Mary only had eyes for Noah. She waved a finger at him again. “You don’t know. Have her show you on that fancy computer she has. You’ll see. A leopard doesn’t change its spots. Don’t take your eyes off her.”
And then, without doing any of the shopping she must have come in for, she simply walked out the door.
For a minute there was a taut silence. Noah could almost hear his heart thunder. He just couldn’t tell whether it was from outrage or fear. Missing cattle? What the hell was she talking about? And why did the whole damn valley know about it when he didn’t?
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Campbell,” Vera said. “You didn’t need that on your first day in town.”
Noah came very close to shaking his head to clear it. “She’s sure been saving that all up to tell me.”
“She’s not a bad woman,” Miss Retta said, excusing her. “She just never did really get over it, is all.”
Over what? Noah could have asked, if he hadn’t jumped in with that stupid lie.
“I’m sure,” he said instead. “Must be hard on Dulcy.”
Both of the women nodded, their expressions identical.
“That’s why I think she deserves the break,” Vera said. “She’s never really had one from this town.”
“But she stays here.”
She shrugged. “It’s home, isn’t it?”
That simple. Noah ached suddenly to be able to say the same thing. To know one place so well he would defy everything to return to its comfort. To take the friendship of this place and these people for granted. To know he wouldn’t have to second-guess the people around him, the people who worked for him, the woman he loved.
The woman he loved.
It wasn’t something he could think about right now. Not when he could still feel the startling heat from Dulcy’s kiss. Not when he’d stayed up all night fighting the absolutely insane notion that she was the person he’d wanted to fall in love with instead of Isabelle all along.
Because now, everything had changed again.
Noah was all set to ask Sally when he got back to the ranch. He didn’t. He was set to ask Dulcy when she got back from her day, sweaty and dusty and exhausted. He was ready when he saw his herd penned up on the broad meadows alongside the buildings, ready to be branded.
How many were there, he wondered? How many were there supposed to be?
What exactly had Dulcy done in her past that had divided the town into camps?
But he didn’t ask. He ate his dinner and paced his house and tried again to sleep under the same roof, and the next day, bright and early, he assumed his place among the men who gathered in the pearly, predawn mist to send his own cattle through the chutes. He worked with his hands and his arms and legs, that day, and let his mind take a break. He savored the sight of hundreds of glossy, white-faced Herefords, of the hugeeyed calves and placid mothers, of the well-trained horses and dogs, of cursing, laughing hands and bright sun. He lived the dream he’d dreamed for thirty years and forgot the questions.
And just as before, he watched Dulcy. Sharp, sensible, smiling Dulcy, who seemed to somehow grow more beautiful beneath the harsh sun, her braid halfway down her back and her nose freckled from the sun, her sleeves rolled up and her eyes seeing everything. He watched her and realized that not one of these men who worked alongside her realized what a treasure she was.
And he wondered why.
By the time they had the ranch to themselves again, the sun had set. The cattle were grazing back in the holding pens and the horses were bedded down. The trucks and trailers had departed, and the only sounds that could be heard were the cattle and the coyotes.
Unable to remain in the house with the sky such an incredible color, Noah took his coffee out on the porch and just sat. Just listened to the clatter of dishes from the kitchen, the murmur of voices as Sally and Hannah finished up, the creak of footsteps over old wooden floors. He watched the sun pull the gold and red from the sky and leave behind a deepening lapis, through which stars gathered in ever increasing clusters. He was tired and sore and sated with the feeling of hard, worthwhile work. He was trying his damnedest to ignore the sound of computer keys in the office Dulcy kept in what had once been the guest bedroom just above him.
Behind him, the screen door creaked and slammed.
“Oh…”
Hannah. She obviously hadn’t expected him.
“Wanna sit?” he asked. “I’m trying to pick out constellations.”
She didn’t need to be asked twice. Taking a place next to him on the front steps, she tilted her head back. “You like watching the stars?”
“Yup. Don’t get to see ‘em as much where I live.”
“You don’t have stars in Philadelphia?”
“Too many lights.”
“Oh. That’s sad. Mom and I look at ‘em all the time.” She lifted a hand and pointed toward Orion’s belt. “There’s Phil.”
“Phil?”
She giggled. “Phil the Amazing Sheep.” She swung her arm further, closer to the Little Dipper. “And that’s Bob the Bodacious Bunny, and Hannah’s Harp.”
“It is, huh?”
“Sure. They’re my constellations. Mom gave ‘em to me.”
Noah found that instead of watching the sky, he was watching the child. And that the child had eyes that glowed bright with intelligence, like her mother’s. “She did, huh?”
“Sure. We used to look up at ‘em every night when I was very little. Mom told me all about what constellations were, and I asked her what their names were. So she told me.”
“About Bob.”
“Uh-huh. When I got older I found out that she didn’t really know the constellations. She just made ‘em up. I know all about Orion and Cassiopeia and all. But I like Bob and Hannah and Phil better.”
Noah found himself nodding. “Yeah. Me, too.” He found himself imagining Dulcy sitting alone in the night with a tiny girl in her lap weaving tales of magic animals in the sky and giggling, heads close together, their magic hair a dark fire in the dusk. He found himself unspeakably jealous of the two of them.
“Are you gonna make us move, Mr. Campbell?”
That brought Noah up with a start. “Why would I do that?”
“Because that’s what the kids say.”
Noah took a sip of his cooled coffee to cover his surprise. “Well, don’t listen to everything kids say, Hannah.”
She turned to him with a flashing smile, just like her mother’s. “Well,” she said. “I’m going to say good-night to Doofus.”
“Say good-night for me.”
And she was off the steps with a clatter, leaving Noah behind with more questions, fewer answers and a truckload of frustration.
“She giving you her ‘poor orphans in a storm’ routine?” he heard from behind him.
His heart jumped. He hadn’t heard her coming down the stairs. Turning around, he saw her silhouetted by the living room lights, all shadow and no substance, just like him. “Not really,” he admitted, trying to sound nonchalant. “She was teaching me about constellations.”
The door creaked open again, a lazy, friendly sound Noah realized he’d missed in his years in L.A., and she joined him on the steps.
“It’s always a challenge keeping up with her,” Dulcy admitted, her own coffee cup dangling between her knees.
She had on jeans and a T-shirt, and tendrils of her hair curled over the milky skin of her neck. Noah didn’t want to take his gaze from her. He did to save his sanity. “You do a good job of it.”
“I have lots of help.”
He didn’t know what else to add. For a long time, they just sat there, side by side on the porch watching the night. Hannah raced back up the steps, plopping a kiss on her mother’s cheek as she clomped on through into the house, and Sally headed out the same way, waving goodbye as she climbed into her little compact and turned for home. The night deepened and cooled, and still they didn’t move.
“I think silence is highly underrated,” Dulcy finally said.
Noah looked over in surprise. He was thinking the same thing.
“Good company makes all the difference,” was all he could manage to say, aching as he was to own what they shared at that moment.
“You haven’t asked,” she said suddenly, still not looking at him.
“About what?”
“About what I’m sure you heard in town yesterday. I heard that Aunt Mary spilled her guts to you.”
Noah couldn’t hide his surprise. “She’s your aunt?”
That actually got a smile from her. “Sure. Uncle Mike’s wife. You think anybody else in this valley could afford pearls? Uncle Mike makes it, and Aunt Mary spends it. When she’s not lecturing all of the rest of us on how to budget ourselves better, anyway.”
“Where do they fit in on the family tree?”
“She’s my dad’s little sister…well, younger sister. Thanks for standing up for me.”
“I had lots of help. Vera and Miss Retta.”
Another smile, this one laced with nostalgia. “Oh, Miss Retta couldn’t say anything bad about anybody if her life depended on it. But I understand you lied like a rug.”
He wasn’t sure what to do. What to say. “In a manner of speaking.”
“It’s no secret, Noah.” She chuckled, a wry, knowing sound. “At least, not around here. I probably should have told you first, though.”
“Want to tell me now?”
“I’d better. Otherwise, God knows what other lies you’ll get caught in.”
She was quiet for a moment longer, studying the far hills and listening, Noah thought, to old voices. “My dad is a good man,” she began, oddly enough. “A minister with a true faith. Unfortunately, he had to have the bad luck to have more than one daughter, and the second one simply didn’t turn out like he wanted.”
Noah wondered what the hell he could have wanted that Dulcy wasn’t. “What happened?” he asked instead.
“What happened?” She shrugged, a minute movement that spoke eloquently of her priorities. “Hannah happened. I’m afraid I’ve had an unfortunate tendency to buck the norm.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
She grimaced. “Thank you. The sad fact is that I was a notorious rebel in my teens. Nothing new or interesting. Ultrastraight parents, high standards and all. I’m ashamed to say that I lived up to every stereotype ever written about the minister’s daughter.”
“Knew just what to do with a stereotype. He fulfilled every rebellious fantasy up to and almost including that old favorite, ‘Take me away from all this.’ The only thing he took away was himself. I was sixteen.”
“What did your parents do?”
“What any good parents did. They sent me away. Actually, it was the best thing for everybody. They sent me to Sally’s parents in Butte, who saw to it I finished high school.”
“And they sent you to college?”
“Nope. Nobody had the money to send me through college.”
“Then the agricultural degree is fake?”
That was the first thing that seemed to affront her. “It is not. I had a partial scholarship and worked the rest.”
“And Hannah?”
“Went with me. Considering how she’s turning out, I’m thinking about doing a paper on the effects of higher education on the minds of infants. She has a frightening store of information.”
“Like Phil the Amazing Sheep.”
This time when Dulcy smiled, it was the smile of a Madonna, and Noah found his objectivity slipping even more. “We used to sit in the window in this crummy little apartment I shared with a couple of other students and count the stars. Hannah was going to be an astronaut then.” Her smile grew, softened even more. “And a ballerina. She was three.”
Noah didn’t know how to answer. What to offer in exchange. It occurred to him that for all his notoriety and success, he didn’t have a tenth of this woman’s strength. Her simple, straightforward courage. Noah hid behind layers of half truths about who he’d been and what he’d become. And he had less to really hide than she did. But she simply waded in and through and out the other side, as if that were the only thing imaginable to do.
“You didn’t ask about the necklace,” Dulcy admonished, surprising him all over again.
“I figured you’d tell me.” At least he did now.
She sighed, and this time Noah felt real weight. “Suffice it to say that the money Aunt Mary thought I’d gotten from stealing her necklace was actually an under-the-table loan from my mom. My dad might be able to stand on principles about Hannah, but Mom had spent her whole life waiting to be a grandma.”
“And you don’t know who stole it?”
“I didn’t say that. I just said that I didn’t.”
Nothing else to say.
What about the cattle? Noah wanted to ask. What else aren’t you telling me that I’m seeing in the eyes of the people you know?
But he couldn’t ask. He couldn’t breach this tenuous connection with an accusation that might, somehow be true.
He couldn’t even admit the fact that his trust had been affected by a bitter woman’s accusations.
And an honest man’s reaction.
So they sat together there in the night, sharing the silence and listening to their own thoughts. And all Noah could manage finally was the realization that in the still of the summer night, he could smell the soap on Dulcy’s skin. A clean, soft scent that reminded him of breezes and high meadows.
She was like a wildflower, he thought. She looked so fragile, but she had a surprising strength. A tenacity to take root in hostile environs. Easily bruised, but so far never killed. A rare treasure that would never have survived the streets of L.A.
Noah had bought the ranch to realize a dream. Sitting next to this small woman with her unruly auburn hair and halfchewed fingernails, he was just beginning to realize what the dream was. And what it might, in the end, cost him.
He should have been asleep. He was tired enough. Battered and sore and worked like a stevedore. But two nights later he found himself wandering the rooms of the first floor after midnight trying to settle the storm inside. That was why he was awake when the phone rang.
“Noah?”
Noah plopped down on a kitchen chair. “Ethan? What the hell are you calling me at this hour for?”
There was a pause. A wry voice that sounded, he knew, an awful lot like his own. “I always call you at this hour. What’s the matter, ranching making you a changed man?”
“No. But you’re going to wake Hannah.”
“Hannah? Who’s Hannah? That’s awfully fast after Isabelle, isn’t it?”
“Hannah is a six-year-old who happens to belong to the manager you contracted and never told me about.”
“No kidding. Well, that’s something else, then…”
Noah suddenly forgot sleep and all the work that waited for him in the morning. “Something else?”
“Uh, yeah. I’ve been going over all the records from the ranch.”
“You’re on a tropical island with a houseful of servants, Ethan. It’s supposed to be vacation.”
“I’m on an island by myself, Noah. That’s no vacation. So I brought my laptop and the modem, and pulled the ranch’s info.”
“Yeah?”
“Did you know that the books aren’t balancing?”