“You get some color in your cheeks, some worry out of your eyes, and we clear the air between us. After that, if you say that’s it, that’ll be it.” He opened the cattle gate for her to pass through, then closed it behind them.
“You can tell me everything you know about what happened to James Tyler. I can’t think about much else. I don’t know how you could expect me to.”
“Okay, we’ll get that out of the way.”
He laid it out for her, every detail he remembered, as they rode toward the rim of the canyon. He spoke of murder and death as the trail leveled out to wind through pines and quaking aspen where flickers swooped and darted among the trees.
“Is Gull all right?”
“He’s going to see Tyler, the way he found him, every time he closes his eyes for a while. He’ll lose sleep over it, have nightmares when he does sleep. Then it’ll pass.”
“Is that the way it was for you?”
“I saw Melinda Barrett for a long time. The first time I saw a body when I was in uniform, it was just as horrible. And then…” He shrugged.
“It becomes routine?”
“No. It becomes the job, but it’s never routine.”
“I still see her sometimes. Even before all this started up. I’d think it had gone away, then I’d wake up, cold and sweating, with her in my head.” Calmer, she turned to look at him, so their eyes met. “We shared a hard thing at an early age. We shared a lot of things. You’re wrong when you say I don’t trust you. And you’re wrong to think manhandling me is the way to get whatever it is you want.”
“You’re what I want, Lil. You’re all I’ve ever wanted.”
Color did indeed rush into her face as she whipped her head toward him. “Go to hell.”
She kicked her horse into a trot.
PART THREE. SPIRIT
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
– PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
21
He thought: Shit. And let her take her distance. Maybe she’d blow off the steam of temper, maybe she wouldn’t, but temper was better than exhaustion. She needed to ride, he thought, needed to just breathe awhile. The air filled with the scents of sage and juniper, while overhead an eagle circled on the hunt. He heard what he thought was the drumming of a grouse from a thicket of buckbrush that looked like it wanted to open its tight buds and bloom.
Mad or not, he knew she’d take it all in and be better for it.
She might not look up and watch the eagle, but she knew it was there.
When she finally slowed, he caught up with her. No, he decided, she hadn’t blown off the steam. She rode on it every bit as much as she rode on Rocky.
“How can you say that to me?” she demanded. “All you’ve ever wanted? You left me. You broke my heart.”
“We’re remembering it differently, because I don’t remember anybody leaving anybody. And you sure didn’t act brokenhearted when we decided the long-distance deal wasn’t working.”
“When you decided. I came halfway to New York to see you, to be with you. I’d wanted to go all the way, to spend real time with you on your turf. In your place. But you wouldn’t have that.” Those dark eyes stabbed at him, lethal as knives. “I guess you figured it would be harder to dump me if I was sitting in your New York apartment.”
“Jesus Christ, Lil, I didn’t dump you.” They wounded him, those eyes, spilled blood she couldn’t see. “It wasn’t like that.”
“What the hell was it like, from your perspective? You told me you couldn’t keep doing it, that you needed to concentrate on your own life, your own career.”
“I said we couldn’t, we needed.”
“Oh, bullshit!” Rocky shied a bit, disturbed by the tone, the temper. She controlled him with no sign of effort or concern. “You had no right to speak for me or my feelings. Not then, not now.”
“You sure as hell didn’t say so at the time.” His horse danced, as uneasy as Rocky. Coop steadied him, and would have turned so he and Lil were face-to-face. But she trotted off. Again. Setting his teeth, Coop nudged his mount to follow. “You agreed with me,” he added, annoyed with the defensiveness in his tone once he’d caught up.
“What the hell was I supposed to do? Fling myself into your arms and beg you to stay with me, to love me?”
“Actually-”
“I drove all the way to that damn motel in Illinois, so excited. It felt like years since we’d seen each other, and I was worried you wouldn’t like my hair, or my outfit. Stupid things. And I was aching to see you. Literally aching. Even my damn toes hurt.”
“Lil-”
“And I knew the minute I saw you that something was wrong. You got there before I did-remember? I saw you crossing the parking lot, coming from that little diner.”
Her voice changed. The anger leaked out of it as misery pushed in. Where the anger wounded him, the misery simply destroyed.
He said nothing, let her finish. Though he could’ve told her yes, he remembered. He remembered crossing that pothole of a parking lot, remembered the first instant he became aware of her. He remembered the thrill, the need, the despair.
All of it.
“You didn’t see me, at first. And I knew. I tried to tell myself it was just nerves, seeing you again. It was just… you looked different. Tougher, harder.”
“I was different. We both were by then.”
“My feelings hadn’t changed, not like yours.”
“Wait a minute.” He reached out to snag her bridle. “Wait a minute.”
“We made love, almost the minute we closed the door of that motel room. And I knew you were going to end it. Do you think I couldn’t tell you’d pulled away, pulled back?”
“I pulled back? How many times had you? Why had it been so long since we’d seen each other? There was always a project, a field trip, a-”
“You’re blaming me?”
“There’s no blame,” he began, but she swung off her horse, stalked away.
Struggling for patience, he dismounted to tether both the horses. “You need to listen.”
“I loved you. I loved you. You were the one, the only one. I’d have done anything for you, for us.”
“That’s part of the problem.”
“Loving you was a problem?”
“That you’d have done anything. Lil, just-hold still, damn it.” He gripped her shoulders when she would have walked away from him again. “You knew what you wanted to do with your life. You knew what you wanted, and you were doing it. Top of your class, honors and opportunities. You came alive, Lil. You were exactly where you needed to be, doing exactly what you needed to do. I couldn’t be a part of that, and I sure as hell couldn’t get in the way of it.”
“Now you’re claiming you dumped me and ripped my heart out for my own good? Is that how you choose to look at it?”
“That’s how it was, how it is.”
“I never got over you, you bastard.” Anger and insult in every part of her-face, body, voice-she shoved at him. “You ruined me. You took something from me, and I could never get it back, never give it to anyone else. I hurt a good man, a very good man, because I couldn’t love him, because I couldn’t give him what he deserved to have and you’d thrown away. I tried. Jean-Paul was perfect for me, and I should’ve been able to make it work. But I couldn’t, because he wasn’t you. And he knew, he always knew. Now you want to stand there and tell me you left for my sake?”
“We were children, Lil. We were just kids.”
“I didn’t love you any less, or hurt any less, because I was nineteen.”
“You were going somewhere. You were making a mark. I needed to make mine. So yeah, I did it for you, and for me. I had nothing to give you.”