Noah felt as if he’d just been thrown in a blender on puree.
“What?” Dulcy whispered, her body rigid, her eyes huge.
He opened his mouth to further the lie. To protect her.
“Don’t get all businesslike on my account,” he heard someone say behind him. “It’s just me.”
Sally.
Somehow he’d heard her, some sixth sense from his other life that kept on alert for camera-carrying paparazzi even as his body spiraled out of control. It had been a very close thing, though.
“Sure nice to see you, Sally,” Noah lazily greeted Dulcy’s cousin as he surreptitiously pulled Dulcy’s vest back into place. As he sucked in some settling air and tried hard to keep his hands from shaking as badly as the rest of him.
“Better me than Mary Murphy,” Sally retorted as she reached them. “She’s in there pumping Josh for all the dirt on the ranch. I think your dancing exhibition inspired her.”
Dulcy groaned. “Oh, great. And I just got her to stop calling me a strumpet from the last time.”
“The last time?” Sally echoed.
“Strumpet?” Noah laughed. “Them’s mighty strong words.”
“I was mighty single when I had that baby,” Dulcy reminded him, her hand on his arm, her fingers tight in a silent thanks. “Aunt Mary is nothing if not scrupulously honest.”
“And law abiding,” Sally added.
“And shrewish,” Noah chimed in.
Sally made it a point to turn back to consider the action behind them. “The perfect relative. Glad she’s not mine.”
“She’s Bart’s,” Dulcy reminded her.
“Remind me to stop by for a scorecard before I leave,” Noah said.
“Bart’s over by the Tilton’s house, Dulcy,” Sally said. “You’ll walk back in with him. Noah and I’ll just wait here for a minute.”
“We’re big kids,” Dulcy began to protest.
“Why don’t I go back with Bart?” Noah asked. “It might look better.”
“You kidding?” Sally retorted, seriously outraged. “And deprive me of the only good rumor ever started about me in this godforsaken place?”
Noah scowled, more grateful than he knew how to say for the time she’d given them both. “Bart isn’t appreciably bigger than I am, is he?”
Sally’s grin was pure mischief. “He could beat you like a rented mule, if he wanted. Fortunately, he won’t. Bart respects nothing as much as a well-cooked meal. And I cook the best meals in three states. Now, go on, Dulcy, before the other half of the dance knows what you two have been up to.”
It took Dulcy a second to relent. “This isn’t necessary, ya know.”
Sally grinned. “I know. It is…judicious, though. At least for now.”
Without another word, Dulcy turned back for the dance, and Noah watched her go. The lights caught faint ruby highlights in her hair and evaporated the solid outline of her skirt so he could watch the shadows of her legs as she walked. He could remember the feel of her against his hands. The terrible sense that this, finally, was what he needed. What he wanted. What he could never have.
“You can’t get a better manager than Dulcy,” Sally said evenly.
Noah looked over to see Sally watching the same thing he was. “I know.”
She nodded, arms akimbo, set in a position of judgment. “Puts the Ponderosa to shame.”
Ponderosa as in “Bonanza,” Noah imagined. “I know that.”
“No matter what you think’s going on.”
“What do I think is going on?”
She looked at him, and he saw very sharp blue eyes. “You tell me.”
“Your job is safe, Sally,” he said, “if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s nice. Did I tell you I only work at that ranch because Dulcy’s there?”
“What do you think I’m going to do?” he countered. “Sell the thing to Jack Palance and throw Dulcy out?”
“I think you’re going to be here for about four more weeks and then disappear again.”
Noah couldn’t think of a thing to say to that.
Sally faced him, and he saw what kind of effort it took.
“I’m being totally out of line,” she informed him. “But I don’t care much. I’ve been with Dulcy every step of the way since the day she told her father she was pregnant. I know what she’s accomplished. I know what she’s overcome. I know that I told her I thought you could be good for her. I want to make sure I was right.”
Noah let out a laugh that sounded suspiciously like a sigh. “You this involved with all your cousins?”
Sally looked back toward the dance, where the men had begun to cluster outside to share drinks and fishing stories. “Did Dulcy tell you what happened the day she graduated from college?”
Noah didn’t answer. He knew he didn’t have to.
“Her mom and dad are big education people. The other kids have degrees, which the Rev and Missus paid for. Nice jobs, careers, you know. Anyway, when the ceremony was over, Dulcy didn’t even take off her cap and gown. She piled Hannah in the car and headed on over to Billings to let them know that it might have taken her six years, but she’d done it. She’d worked two part-time jobs and not slept for weeks on end and single-handedly raised a beautiful little girl, but she’d gotten her bachelor’s. She’d done what they’d wanted.”
“They didn’t come to the graduation?”
“God, no. She never expected that. She did think they’d at least see her at the house, though.” Sally sighed. “She got to the house and found it empty. The neighbors told her that her parents had left for a trip two days earlier. Deliberately. They were afraid she’d come see them, and they figured being gone was the best way to avoid an unpleasant situation.”
“Unpleasant?”
Sally’s smile was dark. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were all altruistic people? Even after getting pregnant, Dulcy might have been allowed back in the fold if she’d seen the light and let Hannah be adopted out, so the whole thing could be swept under the rug. That was her father’s price for letting her come home and have her education paid for.”
Noah’s gaze strayed toward the dance, where he could see a lithe figure with flaming hair strolling arm in arm with a bear of a man. He thought about not being able to go home and what that cost.
“She had you,” he said to Sally.
“Me?” Sally laughed. “I knew all along that her parents weren’t going to be there. I didn’t have the guts to tell her. I still don’t.” Sally turned on him, pinned him in his place. “This last couple of years Dulcy has been the happiest I’ve ever seen her. She has Hannah, she has work she loves, she has a place she’s beginning to call home. I just don’t think it would be fair for her to start believing in something that isn’t going to be there when she rings the doorbell, ya know?”
He knew.
“I don’t care who you are,” Sally challenged. “I can’t let you hurt her.”
Noah dragged a hand through his hair. “You can’t think I can promise not to hurt her, can you?”
“You can give me a promise of good faith.”
“Sally, I’m as surprised by this as Dulcy is. Believe me.”
“I believe you. It doesn’t mean I trust you.”
Noah couldn’t help it. Even still feeling as if he’d been caught in chopper blades, he had to grin at her. “It’s too bad you’re busy here,” he admitted. “I could use you in my other life.”
“You couldn’t afford me.”
He wanted to walk around, to kick the dirt a little, consider the moon. He ended up standing stock-still, facing this formidable woman over an issue he didn’t understand himself. “All I can promise is this. I don’t make commitments lightly. I’ve made one to the ranch, and that’s that. Nobody’s pushing me off, turning me away or buying me out. I’ve wanted this too long. As for Dulcy, I’ve never felt this way about anyone in my life—”
“Even the woman you were mourning at the Last Chance the first night?”
He smiled. “Even her. I know some of what Dulcy has been facing, and the last thing I want to do is put her through more. Trust me, if I could figure a way past all that, I’d do it. But Sally…” He lifted his hands, ineffective gestures of how overwhelmed he was. “I couldn’t stop now if you held a gun to my head.”
She didn’t appear to be moved. “Is that your heart speaking, or your fly?”
He laughed, shaking his head. “Every inch of me. So, if you want to have Bart beat me stupid, go right ahead. It isn’t going to change anything.”
Sally glared at him a moment longer, divining his intentions in the dark, he guessed. Then as suddenly as she’d pounced on him, she retreated. Grinned. Grabbed his arm and turned him for the dance.
“Gone with the Wind,” she said happily.
“Huh?”
Sally patted his arm and laughed. “Never mind.”
“So it was deliberate sabotage,” Dulcy concluded the next afternoon as she leaned over Noah’s shoulder to squint at the computer screen in her office.
“That’s what we figured,” Noah assured her. “Ethan had uploaded all the information on the ranch the week we closed. When he went to update the information, it was inexplicably changed. We spent all of one night working on numbers and got nowhere.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Ethan was the one who finally cracked it. Nothing more than computer games from one modem to another.”
Dulcy straightened and rubbed her eyes. “I’ve been killing myself over this stuff. It looked so damning.”
“I know. I guess that was the idea. Especially since the cattle were missing.”
She sighed and sat back, exhausted. It was what happened when a person didn’t get any sleep and then spent the day wrestling large animals and evenings wrestling small computers. It especially happened when that person couldn’t keep her mind on the job at hand.
“I’m sorry, Noah.”
“For what?” he countered, looking over the tops of his wirerim glasses at her. “Not believing I’d be smart enough to figure out that you were the last person on earth who’d want to cheat me?”
She considered him for a moment. With those glasses he looked like an overeducated hobo. His beard was getting really scruffy and his face wind chapped and sunburned. His eyes looked so pale against his face. His hair was getting shaggy and sun-streaked. Dulcy had never seen a more magnetic man in her life.
“I hadn’t even met you when you were poured into this house the first day,” she reminded him. “How the heck was I supposed to know what you were going to think?”
He shrugged and went back to the numbers. “Point taken. Now you know, though. You should know enough to trust me.”
“Just like you trust me.”
“Exactly.”
“Which was why you let me in on the fact that you knew about the books not balancing right away.”
That got his full attention. “Ah,” he said with a nod. “Yes. There is that.”
“We don’t have time to play games here, Noah,” she reminded him.
“You wanted me to yell at you right away.”
“Would you have waited for Hank to tell you?”
For a very long moment, Noah just watched her. Just tapped his fingers against the edge of the desk as if counting cadence with his thoughts.
“No,” he finally said, climbing to his feet. “I guess I wouldn’t.”
Dulcy nodded. “I don’t deserve any less.”
For a minute he just stood there before her, eyes hooded, hands jammed into pockets, attention on her like a laser. Then he simply shook his head. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. It isn’t that you don’t deserve it. It’s that…well, things have become more complicated.”
Dulcy tried so hard to throw off a nod, as if it were all as easy as a snappy comeback. “Complicated is a good word.”
He grinned, relief evidently warring with frustration. “I wish I could say I was making sense. But everything’s changed, and I don’t know what to do about it. And truth be told, except for Ethan, I haven’t had many people I’ve been able to trust lately.”
Dulcy wondered if he heard the edge to his voice when he said that. “Just you and Ethan against the world, huh?”
He shrugged. “Always been that way.”
She nodded, her gaze slipping down to the tips of her boots, suddenly too close to Noah for comfort. Too near the truth to back away. “I get the feeling you don’t like to rely on people much. You don’t have friends, people you can really open up to, tell the truth to and chance all that horrible exposure that so terrifies us all.”
“Something you’re conversant with, I guess.”
“Used to be,” she admitted, facing him again. Forcing herself to confront the need she recognized in another person’s eyes. “But that’s what home’s for. I do have friends and family here I can count on.”
Somehow that seemed to steal some of the light from Noah’s eyes. He nodded as if hearing a myth. “Yeah, well. I never—” He struggled, stopped. Lifted his head as if the weight of what he needed to tell her grew too great. “Except for Ethan, I didn’t really have roots. No place like this I could rely on.”
“Even your uncle’s ranch?”
Another small smile, a very careful lifting of the shoulders. “I guess that’s as close as it got.”
Such a simple admission. Carried on rigid shoulders and impossibly correct posture. Dulcy thought prisoners of war must look just like this when offering up secrets they had carried like hot stones.
This man who had everything, who mesmerized with his voice and his eyes, who had the fortune to buy a prosperous ranch for cash, who commanded respect and admiration. This man was alone.
This man was lonely.
God, Dulcy wanted to hold him. To just whisper that she was there now. That it would be all right if he could just trust her.
But trust was still a long way off. Understanding, commitment, sense. Right now all she had was a raw ache in the pit of her stomach from wanting more from him even when she knew how really stupid an idea that was.
“Then I guess,” she said, her own voice tight as her posture, “that you’ll just have to make this your home.”
He looked up, a wealth of memory in his eyes, echoes of emotions and passions that seemed too great for the daylight and this prim little room with its rosebud wallpaper. Dulcy stood still before him, not knowing what else to do, not knowing how to answer a challenge as great as his.
Wanting to.
“What now?” Noah asked, and Dulcy knew he wasn’t asking about work. He wasn’t asking about business or cattle or the life in the house around them.
Downstairs the phone rang. Dulcy ignored it. Sally’d let her know if it was something important.
“Now,” she said carefully, her voice unforgivably tight as she deliberately misunderstood him, “we try and figure out who’s stealing your cattle so you don’t lose everything you have on a ranch you’ve wanted all your life.”
“Mom!” Hannah yelled up the stairs. “Uncle Mike’s on the phone! Says it’s important!”
Dulcy apologized with her eyes. With the helpless lifting of her hands that excused her escape to business. And before Noah could see through the obvious retreat, she fled.
“Sorry, honey,” her Uncle Mike said, his voice loud and efficient. “Couple of my hands just got back from town. Told me when they went over Wilson Creek Road they spotted some fencing down. You’ve got loose cattle.”
“Thanks, Uncle Mike.”
Dulcy was already in the process of grabbing hat, gloves and keys when Noah caught up with her.
“Dulcy?”
“The business discussions are going to have to wait, Noah. We have some cattle loose and some fences down. Wanna come along?”
He answered by grabbing his own gear.
Dulcy took a second to give Hannah a hug and kiss. “Want to ride up with us?”
Hannah scowled. “Can I stay here and listen to the music?”
Dulcy scowled right back, an old game. God had obviously given her somebody else’s child, someone with culture and artistic brilliance. Someone who adored cattle, but only from upwind.
“Oh, I suppose if you must. But that means lots of practicing while I’m gone so you can support me in my old age.”
“Mo-o-om.” A flash of a grin, like a shaft of sunlight through troubled clouds. It was worth everything Dulcy had survived. Would survive.
“Try the Cranberries CD,” Noah suggested as he followed. He only waited until the screen door slammed behind them to turn his attention back to Dulcy. “We’re going to have to talk. You know that.”
“Later,” she said as easily as she knew how. “Right now we have to get those cattle before an eighteen-wheeler makes steak tartare out of ‘em.”
Since they found Hank right away, that was the last of that.
Technically the delaying tactic worked. Gathering a couple of trucks, a couple of dogs and a couple of horses, Dulcy set out with Hank, Noah and Paco to get the cattle back into pasture and the fences mended. It took the rest of the afternoon, and much of the early evening hours. By the time they got back, they were all dirty, tired and crabby. And they were supposed to begin moving the cattle up to summer pasture the next day, which would take at least two days. Dulcy grabbed a sandwich for dinner and a shower afterward, taking an inordinate time washing her hair and ignoring the music skittering from the living room where Hannah and Noah were inventing a Hootie duet for violin and piano. She made a final check on the animals and said good-night to Hank, then spent another hour in reading Lord of the Rings to Hannah, who’d heard it all before but didn’t in the least mind playing the part of Gollim again.
When Dulcy came downstairs again, the house was quiet. Her tennis shoes shushed against the hardwood floor, and her damp hair caught the currents from the open front door. She knew she had no business heading for the porch. Noah would be there. She went anyway.
“How would you like to do me a favor?” Noah asked without looking around.
“How’d you know I was here?” she asked through the screen door.
“I always know where you are,” he said, still leaning against the porch railing, his T-shirt gleaming softly in the night, his jeans old and battered and sagging a little across the butt. “Will you do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Redecorate the house.”
That got Dulcy to push open the door and walk out on the porch. “Redecorate it? Just like that?”
When he looked over, she faltered to a halt. “Just like that.”
“What do you want?”
Noah shrugged. “I stink at that kind of thing. I just know I don’t want green and gold brocade and pressboard entertainment systems.” Like the one presently in the living room that had belonged to her frugal, tasteless aunt. “Leave the dining room be, though. I like that old table.”
“You want antiques then?”
“Functional ones, I guess. Something I’d be comfortable on.”
“Okay.”
His one eyebrow lifted. “Just like that?”
Dulcy shrugged, knowing perfectly well she couldn’t betray any of the emotions warring in her. “Your house.”
“No,” he objected, a finger up. “My home.”
Dulcy didn’t know how to answer. She didn’t know what to do with the sudden intensity in his eyes, or the ambivalence his words engendered in her.
“Okay,” she said with a stiff nod. “Sure.”
“Great. Then it’s settled.”
Noah turned back to his consideration of the night, and Dulcy turned to go back in the house.
“There’s something you need to know,” he said.
Dulcy stopped, suddenly, inexplicably afraid. “No I don’t.”
“Your cousin Sally chewed me out last night.”
Dulcy wanted to laugh. Somehow, she couldn’t. “Great. That’s just what I need.”
Noah didn’t seem to hear her. Dulcy turned to see him considering the stars, and she wanted to reach out to him. She wanted to touch him, to make sure he was real. She stood perfectly still instead.
Noah didn’t turn around. “For a woman who lives on movies,” he said, “she seems awfully unconvinced that a person can fall in love in a week.”
Dulcy couldn’t breathe. She could hardly stand up. She couldn’t look away, even though she knew he’d catch her lying. “Well, then,” she managed to say. “She and I have something in common.”
Noah should have been more disconcerted. He should have at least been as breathless as Dulcy was. “No surprise, I guess,” he said evenly, finally turning to her. “Until I came here, I would have agreed with you.”
Don’t, Dulcy wanted to beg. Don’t push so hard. Don’t bring up things we have no business talking about. Wishing for. Expecting.
Don’t think I can offer everything without getting anything in return.
Her heart was hammering as if she’d run a long way. Her chest felt on fire. She was most terrified of hearing what she wanted to hear the most, of finding what she saw in his eyes.
Dulcy didn’t realize she was going to run until she did it, spinning for the steps and heading straight across the lawn. Going nowhere except away from Noah and the moment they’d been heading toward since he’d first opened his eyes.
She heard the thud of his feet on the steps, felt him closing in like a storm front.
“We have to at least talk,” he demanded, catching hold of her out under the huge old oak.
Dulcy shuddered to a halt. “No we don’t,” she all but begged. “We can act like professionals and run this ranch until you go back to the real world.”
“I’m happy here, Dulcy,” Noah said simply, his posture as intent as his words. “Can’t you let me be happy with you?”
She turned on him then, not sure what she wanted. Not sure what she dreaded or believed. “And that’s all there is to it? Us being happy here on the ranch for six weeks at a time?”
Dulcy saw him hesitate, straighten. “No. I guess not.”
“Contrary to what my past might suggest,” she said. “I’m not a person given to flings. I can’t just dive in and hope for the best. Hell, Noah, I don’t even know you.”
“You know me.”
She shook her head. “I know you here. I could probably almost imagine I could have you here. But then you go back, and you disappear.”
Dulcy could see the struggle in him. Could almost hear the protests, the protections. She understood them better than anybody, even if she didn’t know why. She just knew that until Noah allowed her past, there would be no more for them.
Somehow she couldn’t think of the fact that in the daylight she would remember quickly enough that there would be no more for them, anyway.
“I’m only real here,” he said, his voice carrying that odd, haunting need she only heard in the darkness. “I think I could be real with you.”
“You think.”
His smile was so tentative. “You think this isn’t scaring me, too? No matter what you imagine, I’m not like this, either.”
Dulcy couldn’t help but laugh, a brittle sound. “In that case, Noah, I think we’re both in real trouble.”
“I know it.” He watched her a moment, his eyes dark and hidden, his hands as certain as morning. A man with secrets, with passions Dulcy had only tasted. A man she yearned for without knowing.
He held her there before him as if that contact could ground his words. “I don’t know what to do about this,” he admitted. “I want to be so careful, because I don’t want to hurt you, but I can’t seem to stop. I can’t keep my hands off you. I can’t sleep in the same house with you, and I can’t seem to manage the simple walk down to the foreman’s house.”
As if that should make Dulcy’s heart slow down or her throat open again to air. “As simple as that? I hate to tell you, Noah. Life doesn’t come in packages that are that neat. I know. I’m the one with a daughter no man would claim and a town full of people who haven’t decided to forgive me yet. If I commit to something, I do it completely. I expect it in return. And I expect it to include Hannah as unconditionally as it does me. You want all that? Because if you’re serious, that’s the only way I come.”
Above them the tree whispered. Off in the distance insects throbbed and a dog barked. There, before her in the darkness, Noah seemed to almost shift as he fought something in him to answer.
“You don’t understand, do you?” he asked, his voice suddenly so quiet. “What you have with Hannah is one of the reasons I’m falling in love with you.”
Dulcy jerked out of his grasp. “Don’t say that.”
“Why? It’s true. Don’t you realize how special you are?”
“I’m no different from a million other women who found themselves in my situation.”
“You really don’t see it.” He reached out a tentative hand to test the curve of cheek with his fingers. “My God, Dulcy, Hannah’s a marvel. She’s bright and unique and blessed with the most honest mouth in Montana. And you’re the single person responsible for it.”
Dulcy tried so hard not to look at him, not to feel the approval in his eyes. She pulled away, just a little. Just beyond the reach of his hand, so he couldn’t hurt her. “I did what I had to.”
“No, you didn’t. You did what nobody wanted you to. You gave everything to that little girl so she’d feel safe and secure and capable of doing anything. You kept her, you fought for her. You protected her when it would have been so much easier to give in. To drink away the stress or leave her with friends, or forget she was there when you had gentlemen in.”
Dulcy’s heart caught. Her gaze rose to meet his. She was stunned to stillness. Not by his words. By the sore weight of his voice. By the old grief in his eyes.
It was there. The hollow center to his easy presence, the darkness that hovered at the edge of those commanding eyes.
He stopped so suddenly that the night crept back in. Dulcy heard a radio somewhere, an animal rustle in the distance. She heard the brush of the breeze against her face. She saw the sharp surprise take hold in Noah’s eyes. Quick discomfort that grew to shame and then dread.
Dread, as if she could shatter him with a word.
Dulcy couldn’t speak past her own surprise, knowing somehow that Noah had never meant to admit what he had. Knowing just as surely that there was more.
He took a breath, never looking away.
“You would have tried your best, I think,” he said, his voice so soft and sore and lost. Hesitant with the task of telling. “Even with a husband. But if you were young and frightened and poor, you might have just given in to the anger. Run away and kept running, blaming the one person you could in the whole mess, because he couldn’t fight back. You might have finally even left him, because you just didn’t know what else to do.”
Dulcy was shaking. Humbled. Hurting for the lonely child she suddenly saw in this proud man. She wanted to hold him, to gentle this place in him. She wanted so much to give him back his laughter. She didn’t know how, and that hurt the worst.
“You made Hannah proud of who she is,” he said simply, and broke her heart for good.
Dulcy didn’t know how to answer. Not the gift, not the pain, not the revelation. Words had never been her strong suit, especially when emotions overwhelmed. If it had been Hannah whose eyes she saw open and hurting and needy like this, she would have cradled her in her arms, sung silly songs, murmured in those peculiar mother-tones that eased both parent and child away from the pain.
Dulcy could do none of those things for this man who had never known them. So she raised herself up on her toes, and she kissed him. She lifted her hands to his face, holding it to her, holding him to her.
For just a moment he stood there, frozen, unresponding. Brittle and unyielding as hard glass. Trembling.
Trembling.
And then, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, he wrapped his arms around her and returned the kiss. And Dulcy knew that no matter what else happened, it was too late to go back.
She loved him. She would always love him. Deep in those places a woman keeps secret, where love wars with reality, where commitments are made without the brain’s agreement, she knew. She would make love to this man who so enchanted her, so tormented her, so confused her. She would give him what she’d given no man, her woman’s heart. And she would regret it to the day she died, because she still didn’t believe he could really love her back.
Dulcy wasn’t sure how she heard it, not with her pulse thundering in her ears and Noah’s hands on her. Protective instincts died hard, though.
The bunkhouse door. The sound of boots on a wooden front porch and Josh’s petulant voice complaining about something to one of the other men.
The very thing Dulcy had feared from the moment Noah had opened his eyes. Discovery. Misunderstanding. A lightning-fast jump to conclusions that would end not only her authority but her peace of mind.
Dulcy yanked back, pulling away so fast she almost fell over. She looked up to find Noah’s eyes dark and his breathing fast.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, hand to her own chest as if she could stem her sense of loss.
He nodded, lifted a hand. Almost touched her cheek. “It’s okay. I understand.”
She almost couldn’t pull away from his gaze. Couldn’t run the way she should. She did, though, making sure Josh hadn’t seen them. She ran up to her room and shut herself in and spent another night awake and shivering with a need she hadn’t even known she had.