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Saul had never been nervous before. Maybe when he was really young and had gotten a fright from one of the horses, or a bull. Fright he understood. Nerves, he’d had no experience of before now.
But when he arrived in the kitchen, having had his quick shower and changed, the ambience immediately lessened his concern.
The light wasn’t harsh and interrogating. Molly had lit a pile of fat candles and placed them around the kitchen, on shelves and workbenches. It all looked cozy. Sweet.
“Hi,” Molly said cheerfully, turning from the counter, and throwing him a quick smile. “Dinner won’t be long.”
He was grateful to her for behaving as though nothing had happened earlier. For not questioning what she’d overheard and for not berating him for whatever bad she thought he’d done. Yet he still felt a longing to explain. “Molly, about what you heard earlier.”
“None of my business.”
“It’s not what you think. This woman says she’s pregnant, which she probably isn’t, and she says its mine, which I know for a damned fact it isn’t.”
“It’s really none of my business.”
“We didn’t sleep together.”
She put her hands over her ears. “Not listening.” She started humming.
“She wasn’t even my date, let alone my girlfriend. She’s a pain in my backside.” And possibly his back pocket.
“La-la-la-la-la...”
“So I’m thinking of going back and slitting her throat.”
That got her attention.
He smiled. “Thank you for not questioning me. Thank you for not demanding details and answers. I appreciate it. Tonight, you can be boss. What can I do to help?”
She threw him a wooden spoon which he caught against his chest. “You can stir the chili.”
The meal was heating on the stove, the places set at the counter they dined at. She had dinner under control. Not that he’d have minded doing the cooking—or reheating in this case—since he was used to doing it. He’d done it as a kid. Middle children always took that helpful course.
But he wasn’t a real middle kid, was he? He’d lived his life thinking he was, then his mother had killed every memory he’d cherished. Every picture of a family bond he’d held dear had disintegrated when she’d told him, a day after his supposed father had died and his sister, Karlie, had stopped talking to him for some then unknown reason, that his whole life was a lie.
“Smells good,” he said as he walked up to the stove and the Texas chili, but all he could smell was Molly as he stood next to her.
Her perfume. Her natural, desert-in-bloom aroma. She didn’t even have to try. She just was lovely to look at and lovely to inhale. Smart-ass spark though she was, it was the kind of spark he liked most. She stood up for herself through thick or thin, even when it hurt her and even when she was unsure about what she was doing. Had he done that?
He stepped away from all that goodness of Molly’s, and away from another soul-searching question he wasn’t sure he could answer yet. Could he have handled the family fallout differently?
“Want me to slice the bread?” he asked.
“Butter’s in that dish over there.” She indicated a china bowl piled high with swirls of butter.
She’d taken the time to skim pats off the block and create fancy little curls in a bowl. He moved to the breadboard and the crusty loaf that sat on it, appreciating the effort she’d put into tonight’s dinner. She must really want that roof. And he really wanted to get something clear.
“Molly,” he said in a tone that made her look at him. “I don’t mess around with more than one woman at a time, so I don’t want you to think that because I kissed you the other day that I’m some two-timing cheat. Because I’m not.”
He saw something flicker across her eyes but didn’t know if it was regret that he’d brought the subject up again, or relief at what he’d said.
“Okay,” she said at last. “I mean okay about—you know, when we—”
Kissed. “Thanks,” he said, and nodded.
He didn’t want her thinking bad of him, and he didn’t want to hurt her, since he got the impression she was easily hurt, regardless of all her gutsy determination. And, yeah, he still thought he would probably make a play for her. At least go for another kiss. Maybe a longer, deeper kiss.
Saul took the loaf and sliced through it. “I took another look around the hacienda this afternoon,” he said, changing the subject. “It’s an impressive house.”
“Isn’t it?” she said behind him.
She picked up the dinner plates and gathered knives and forks. He put slices of thickly cut bread onto a plate that sat next to the china bowl of butter swirls, picked both up, and turned to the candlelit kitchen and the island counter where Molly was folding paper napkins and arranging their cutlery.
The tone of the temporary plastic ceiling, the table setting, the meal, the fat candles she’d lit, all looked cute, and a little romantic.
Appreciation wasn’t an attribute he’d had much chance of feeling in the past six years. But Molly had done her best to make this evening a good one for her contractor, and Saul couldn’t say he was sorry about it because it was a warm, reciprocal appreciation that was swirling inside him. Like butter pats melting beneath the rays of a hot sun. Given the day he’d had and all the ridiculous discoveries he’d made about Sally and the hit his back pocket might take, it would be pleasant to sit with Molly tonight and forget about it all.
They’d eaten in silence, more or less. Molly was fine with it. She’d concentrated on her meal, making sure she ate it even though she’d lost her appetite after overhearing Saul on the phone to the woman she’d thought must be a girlfriend he’d walked out on, but whom he’d said wasn’t a girlfriend. He hadn’t said if he’d walked out on her or not, so Molly didn’t know and shouldn’t care. Except that the woman was pregnant! Although he said it wasn’t his.
“So what brought you home to Hopeless?” he asked as he stood. He gathered their plates and headed to the sink.
Better not tell him it was because she’d dumped her fiancé due to him cheating on her. It might remind him of the girlfriend he didn’t have. “I was all adventured out,” she told him, standing and collecting the butter bowl and bread plates. “I felt the time was right to start the business I’d always wanted.” Funny how she’d never thought of opening that business in the valley before. Yet now she was doing so, and even though she’d been forced into opening it here, she was grateful. “Some things are meant to be.”
He turned from the sink and the running water. “Well, it’ll be the right environment.”
“I hope so.”
“There are distinct styles in the place,” he said, jutting his chin at the blue canvas, but Molly knew he meant the whole hacienda.
“The harmony of house and nature,” she told him when he went back to his washing up. “It’s an all-styles type of house.”
“Why has no one lived in it?”
Maybe he ought to know about the great-grandfathers—after that chill he’d had in the salon. There might be more chills coming his way.
“Around 1850,” she began, “the Mackillop men were part of the exploration of the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail. Their women followed, and they settled in the Panhandle—we don’t know why, but think their sons might have joined the buffalo hunters who came from western Kansas. After 1875, the area was kind of lost, or empty.”
“But they came through?” Saul asked.
Molly shrugged. “Perhaps they had protection—of some sort.” She moved on quickly. “They started a cattle ranch, but I don’t think they were very good at it. That’s when they claimed, or were given, Calamity Valley—or so we think. Nobody kept any records.”
“Did they turn to farming?”
“Tried. But it was pretty harsh in the 1880s. Anyway, they made a stack of money when the railway came through Amarillo. Life picked up for them then. They became businessmen—although undoubtedly a bit nefarious here and there. Things plodded on but by 1912 when our great-grandmothers were born, the valley was no longer thriving. Until they met the great-grandfathers, who were really keen to prosper.”
“Young men, battling the economy.”
“Young when they arrived and just as young when they left.” Molly picked up a bowl of cut melon she’d prepared for dessert.
“What do you mean?”
“Remember I said about the superstition going on. And that funny chill you felt in the salon? It’s all to do with the GGs.”
He turned at the sink and paused in his task of washing up. “The what?”
How to put it?
She gave a reluctant half-smile. “I told you we’re a bit of an oddball family. We’ve got great-grandfathers. We call them the GGs. They arrived in the valley in 1938, met the great-grandmothers, and left in 1939.”
“Why?”
“Two reasons. A few years earlier, the Palo Duro Canyon became a state park, but the great-grandmothers kept refusing to sell Calamity Valley, which infuriated the great-grandfathers who wanted the money.”
“And the second reason?”
“The great-grandmothers were pregnant.”
“They left all three wives?”
“I’m afraid it was worse. They left all three unmarried women. Hence, we’re all Miss Mackillops because the grandmothers don’t have husbands, either, and neither did their daughters.”
Molly ignored the look of surprise on Saul’s face. “The place was a dustbowl back then. The depression just about wiped us all out. But the great-grandmothers—brave, courageous and daring—began to regenerate the three towns, growing them and producing an income. The GGs heard about it and got mad.”
“Would serve them right, wouldn’t it?”
“You’d have thought so, but not our GGs—selfish, uncaring, and nasty.”
“What did they do?”
“Cursed us.”
She waited while he pondered this. It took him a while. Surprise, humor, then a deeper consideration showed in the rapid changing of his features. Although consideration sat on his face longer than surprise and humor. “You’re looking skeptical,” she said.
“Do you blame me?”
Molly shrugged a shoulder. “We’re doomed. All Mackillop women. But don’t worry about it. I won’t let the GGs haunt you while you’re here. Want to eat dessert outside?” she asked, hoping she’d gotten him off the subject now she’d given him a taste of it.
“Sure.” He dried his hands on a towel.
Molly picked up a plate of sliced melon and moved outside. With any luck, she wouldn’t have to tell him more about the crazy Mackillop history and the curse she really didn’t want to believe in.
She looked around. Where should they sit? When it was only her, she sat on the small hand-carved wooden bench but that would be a tight squeeze for two.
“Want a beer, Molly?” he called from inside.
“Please.” This was not going to be the cozy evening under the stars that part of her might like it to be, but she didn’t want to ruin this unexpected camaraderie. And this is what she needed to do—keep him sweet. Roof. Needed.
She pulled out two folded metal and canvas deckchairs from behind the wooden bench and opened them as she shook away the notion that this casual and friendly atmosphere wasn’t to do with her need to keep him sweet so that he built her roof, but more because it warmed her soul. As though he might turn out to be a friend after all. Except he’d leave in couple of weeks’ time.
The candlelight from the kitchen created a tender glow on the outside area and Molly relaxed a little as she read the sign she’d hung on a wall, the evening shadows lighting up each of the rules she’d written so far.
Porch Rules
Kick back.
Take a nap.
Enjoy the view.
A sign she could contemplate each evening as she sipped her after-dinner beer, all on her own. A sign she’d add to as the necessary rules of relaxation came to her—dependent on what happened next in her life.
Kiss Saul.
She closed her eyes and turned her head from the porch rules.
He came out of the kitchen, an opened bottle of beer in each hand. Molly stood, brought out of her thoughts by his arrival.
“Here’s your beer, Miss Doomed Mackillop.” He said it with such soft amusement that it made her smile.
Saul stilled. Then the air between them stilled. Then Molly’s heartbeat thumped.
He’d shaved tonight. Smooth-jawed yet still dirty-sexy. She ran her gaze over his features. His not-quite square face. His high forehead. His blue eyes and dark blond eyebrows. His nose, which was just the right length to enhance his cheekbones, and the firm mouth that hovered in preparation for a slow smile—or a kiss.
“Are we going to go through this again?” he asked gently.
She took her focus from his mouth to his eyes. So dusty-blue in the evening light.
“I don’t think we should.” He didn’t have to explain what he meant. If he hadn’t spoken she’d have angled her chin and he’d have lowered his head, and they’d have kissed.
He tilted his head slightly, still holding her gaze. “I’m not usually the type to say no to someone I’m attracted to, but I’m not staying, remember. If I were to take things some place with you now, I don’t think I’d be able to handle the arguments that’d undoubtedly come into my head, about going to that good place with you and then leaving. I blame my grandpa. He filled me with manners.”
Goddamn his good-mannered grandpa.
Molly cleared her throat. “Look,” she said tilting her head in a confirmatory manner. “Me, too—I mean about the manners thing. Momma would hate it if I went”—some place beautiful—“some place good with you and then simply snapped my fingers and sent you on your way when I was done with you.”
He smiled so tenderly, the charm of it so bright Molly couldn’t help returning it with a smile of her own. One that was full of embarrassment which meant she was probably blushing.
“When you were done with me?” he asked through his bold, questioning smile.
“I can be brutal when I have to be,” she said, trying to control herself. “I’m the sort of woman who makes a stand.”
He gave a low, throaty laugh. “I’m currently the sort of man who’s trying to figure out what you’d be doing with me in that good place before I was sent on my way.”
“Stop it. I’m not the sort of woman who stands for being teased, either.”
“This is kind of weird,” he said, amusement slipping from his features and his voice. He inched forward, and the fraction of space between them disappeared. “You’re teasing me, Molly, not the other way round. If I wanted to kiss you I’d do it anyway. You know that.”
Molly didn’t reply but her mouth watered and she had trouble with her inner thighs which were now trembling.
“I think you also know I won’t do it unless I think you want me to.”
Her heart bounced and the quiet atmosphere of the night fell over her like a shawl.
“Molly. That woman I was talking to on the phone.”
Molly blinked. She ought to stop him from saying more, but she really wanted to know. “What’s her name?”
“Sally-Opal. She’s giving me a bit of trouble and I’m trying to work my way around it.”
“By dumping her?”
“No!” He grimaced. “Well, maybe it looks that way. Maybe I am, a bit—but I was never with her, like in a relationship. I don’t think she’s very stable. She’s lonely, or something.”
“What happened?” Molly asked.
“I pulled her out of a rolled vehicle one night on duty. She’s been overly grateful ever since.”
“Chasing you.”
He nodded.
“Did you come here to hide from her?”
He reddened a little. “I suppose so.”
That hurt a bit. “I bet you can’t wait to get it sorted with her, then move on.”
He shook his head. “I’m glad I found my way here.”
“So am I,” she said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be getting my roof. Anyway, best of luck with this woman. Hope you get it sorted and if I can help in any way, just yell.”
“I’ll let you into a secret,” he said. “I’ve been shunned before, and I didn’t like it. I dealt with it but I put out feelers these days, and I make certain I’m not going to be played—mostly I make certain. I had my heart broken once and once was enough.”
Molly licked her now dry lips and tried to keep her eyes on his.
Then he smiled and the sudden brooding mood left him. “Just so you know what you’re getting into, should you decide to tease me into that good place.”
He’d had his heart broken. So had she, but somehow she knew for sure that Saul’s heartbreak had been tougher and deeper than hers. That he’d had to fight hard to overcome it. “No breaking of hearts from me,” she promised. “Although,” she added, a smile creeping onto her face regardless of her attempt to stop it. “I’m happy to know you think I’m so gorgeous I might break your heart.”
His smile deepened, matching hers. “That’s not the kind of heartbreak I meant. As gorgeous as you are,” he finished. “Now. Why Colorado?” He took his seat on the deckchair next to hers.
“Don’t know,” she answered, sitting, and accepting the change in conversation as though it was the most natural thing in the world. They didn’t need preparatory words between them in order to inch from one conversation to the next. It was that friendship thing. No matter whether they wanted it or not, they had it. “It was a pull or something. I’d planned on Arizona where my cousin Pepper lives now, and right up until the week I booked my ticket I was heading to Tucson. Then I changed my mind.” She hadn’t thought about it for a long time. “I wonder what would have happened to me if I had gone to Arizona?” she said, almost to herself.
She wouldn’t have met Jason. She wouldn’t have bought an engagement ring and lost twenty thousand dollars. She might have made it big as a photographer long before now—and she might not have come home to the valley.
“I thought about Arizona once, too,” he said. “Then I changed my mind.”
“Really? Why did you leave Colorado in the first place?”
“I didn’t have any plans to leave,” he said. “But suddenly I had to.”
Ah, the heartbreak issue.
“I don’t know why I chose Texas. Just a pull.” He pinned her with his eyes, which were so blue, even in the softened evening light. “A bit like you. Following fate, I suppose.”
“I don’t believe in fate.” If she did, she’d be cowering under her blankets, hiding from the GGs.
“Hell, neither do I. I don’t know why I came here. Maybe I shouldn’t have left.”
Something in his now downcast demeanor suggested he knew exactly why and wasn’t about to open up about it. Maybe not even to himself.
They were silent for a while, sitting peaceably beneath the cool night sky and the bright stars. Molly contemplated the porch rules and why life had sent either of them the way it had.
“You’ve got problems in the towns,” he said at last, breaking the moment.
Molly inhaled. She’d wanted to keep him off this track for as long as possible, but he was turning out to be more intuitive than she’d reckoned on. “Developers are hoping to buy the land and turn the valley into a fashionable hideaway, renting out their glorified exclusive holiday homes to tourists with a lot of money and a love of golf.”
“I hope you’re not going to let them.”
“We’re doing our best. Momma has a few ideas, and Davie went to Austin, where their base is, trying to work out why...”
“Why what?”
Molly scrunched her nose. He’d gone because he was trying to find out why they’d spread the rumour of Molly’s greed and what they intended to do next. “Oh, you know—rumors. They’re spreading rumors about the towns. About the Mackillops. Anything to make the valley residents sit up and think the time is right to sell their land.”
“The valley is unincorporated. I understand that’s the reason why it’s privately owned, but how come?”
She glanced at him. “Like I said earlier, it was either granted to us or we simply claimed it.”
He smiled. “And your great-grandmothers—daring and courageous souls—worked the land and built a community.”
Molly reclined further in her deckchair with a satisfied sigh and took a quick slug of her beer. “That’s us. Daring Mackillops.” Until it all went to pot because of the curse.
“I presume by getting your photography business off the ground you’re hoping to renew the tourist industry for all the towns.”
“It’s not going to be easy.”
“One business?” he asked. “Are you sure that’ll do it?”
She had plans for more businesses in the towns, if people wanted to take up the suggestions, but she didn’t want to tell him. She hadn’t got this first plan underway yet. “I’m going to have to try a whole lot harder than I currently am,” she acknowldeged.
He indicated the land around the hacienda with a lift of his hand. “Maybe you just need to chill, Molly. Let things happen as they happen.”
“Not sure if I’ve got time for that.” Not without her twenty thousand. Not without the roof fully restored and the hacienda ready to go with Through the Lens. “We do get some business trade. Momma’s a well-known hairdresser, and her sponge cake is famous.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“The people in the valley are keen to stay—I’m sure they are.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
Molly accepted this with an intake of breath and a long drawn out sigh. “There’s a laziness about the valley people now. They just shuffle along. Some have employment in Amarillo or Lubbock. Some do volunteer work for the canyon. We do get the odd tourist who has lost their way while hiking, biking—”
“You get a lot of hikers around here?” he interrupted.
“Heaps of strays wander the valley. They either find themselves driving down the unsealed road from the west, or they get lost in the canyon backcountry and walk into the valley. Once they’re here, we look after them. There’s lots to do! Davie’s native art—that’s stunning. And the bar in Surrender does quite well, when there isn’t a fight going on. And Reckless...” Molly halted. Reckless didn’t have anything going for it at the moment, except for Mad Aurora and what she offered. “And the grandmothers,” she continued. “They’ve always brought people to the valley. People come for miles to visit the grandmothers.”
“Daring fortune-telling Mackillops?” he asked.
Molly straightened in her chair and met his amusement with forthright Mackillop backbone. “Not fortune-tellers. Don’t ever say that.”
“I’m sorry. What do you call Alice then?”
“She’s a soothsayer. She can see things we can’t. There’s nothing crazy about it.”
“I didn’t say there was.”
“Alice and her sisters, they’ve got a gift. That’s all.”
“I understand.”
“So don’t go saying we’re crazy.”
“I didn’t say that, Molly.”
His gentler tone eased her out of her inbuilt rebellion at being called crazy. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to sound uptight...”
He laughed. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t thinking that. But I was thinking about the coincidences—you arriving in Colorado Springs the same day I left. The pull of moving on we were talking about, and where we went. I mean, why did you stay in Colorado if you didn’t intend to go there in the first place?”
How come his mind was so in tune with whatever was going on in hers? She’d just been thinking about Jason and her stay in Colorado, and why she’d felt the pull to go there instead of Arizona. “I’d been there four years and was almost getting somewhere with my photography work.” She shrugged her shoulders to her ears. “Then I was mugged.”
He straightened in his chair, a hand on the metal arm.
“Not hurt,” she said quickly. “But my purse and daypack were taken—along with my cash and credit cards.”
“When?” His voice had hardened.
She frowned, trying to remember the date. “The lease on my rental had run out. So I’d booked into a motel until I could find the time to hunt for another place.” How much information did he want and how much was she prepared to give? Not Jason, she didn’t want him knowing she had a cheating ex-fiancé. “It was summer. Two years ago.”
“When in summer two years ago?”
She chewed on her bottom lip. “I’d had a desperate six months with hardly any work, so it would have been—end of July. The twenty-second.”
Saul spluttered and coughed so hard that Molly got up and slapped him on the back.
“Jesus,” he said as he regained himself.
He looked up at her, his eyes narrowing and his consideration of her perplexed and shocked. “I found them,” he said in a tone that suggested he could hardly believe what he was saying.
While his features remained incredulous, Molly’s slackened in surprise. “No way. It couldn’t possibly have been the same bag. How come you’re saying it was?”
“Because I saw you. I saw your photograph in your wallet. I just stared at you. I couldn’t take my eyes off you—and that was unreal, because at that point I wasn’t in the mood for—”
“For what?”
He stared at her. “Jesus, this is weird. Why didn’t I see it when I met you?”
“I was blonde back then. I’d changed my hair color.” So she could change her whole crazy Molly persona. But she’d hated it and had the color washed out after she hooked up with Jason. “What were you doing back in Colorado if you left six years ago?”
“I’d gone back to talk to—it doesn’t matter why. I’d gone back for a visit.”
“So what did you do with my daypack?”
“I took it to the cops. I hung around. I said I wanted to meet you.”
Molly took a step back. “They called me the day you handed it in—I think the same hour you handed it in. But I said I couldn’t go and get it because...” She stopped as the ramifications of why she hadn’t been able to go struck her like a blow to the chest.
“Because of what?” he asked.
Unreal. Confusion still surrounded the story but... “Because I’d just met someone.” She’d met Jason that day. “I couldn’t pay the motel bill because my purse had been stolen, and I was so taken with this person’s kindness about it and the solution he offered, that I put off going to get my daypack until the next day.”
“By which time I’d gone.”
“Hot-beef,” she said, but her voice lacked any luster.
If it hadn’t been for Jason, she’d have met Saul two years ago.
He stood. “Three hours, Molly. I waited for you for three hours.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said insistently, hoping to match the intensity in his voice and on his face. “Why did you want to see me?”
“Because of your photo.”
“I don’t understand. Did you recognize me or something?”
He stilled. “No. Not in the way you mean.”
“So in what way?”
“I can’t explain it.” He turned, his mouth drawn. “It was to do with what had happened to me. Something about your photo pulled me out of my bad humor. I can’t explain it.”
“What had happened to you?”
“This is getting too complicated.” He picked up the beer bottles, the bowl of melon neither of them had touched, and glanced at her. “You go on to bed. I’ll clear up here and lock the hacienda.”
That was not what she wanted. She didn’t want him doing gallant things like washing up and tidying, but she still couldn’t speak. She was light-headed and felt sick. She’d probably paled, too, so it was a good job he’d moved away from her. Good job it was dark and the starry night had turned suddenly cold.
“I’m going to take a walk,” she said. “I’ll lock up the lodge when I get back.” She headed toward the courtyard, without looking at him, and made her way down the driveway and into the night.
