Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material (21 page)

The words struck Rio with the force of an explosion, shaking him. Somehow Hope knew the name that no one else had ever spoken aloud but his grandfather, and then only once, when he gave Rio his name during a ceremony conducted in a place few men had ever seen.

“You see too much,” Rio said savagely.

He felt naked before the clarity of Hope’s vision. He surged to his feet and strode away from her, farther up the narrowing canyon, shutting her out. Then he realized the unfairness of what he had done and struggled to control the emotions that were reducing him to reflex and impulse. His grandfather had always told him to
listen,
to hold himself utterly still and
listen
with every bit of himself. In time, understanding would come.

So Rio stood motionless,
listening
as he never had before.

He heard only Hope’s love for him in every word, every gesture, every look. There was nothing else, no desire to cage the wind, to break him like a wild horse, to change him into a man who would be more comfortable to love.

Like the wind itself, she asked nothing of him.

And like the land itself, she gave everything in return.

Tension flowed out of Rio, leaving him both at peace and alive in a way he had never known before. He turned and walked back toward Hope. With each step he sensed the warm fall of sunlight, the subtle murmuring of the wind, the power of his own body, and the gritty whisper of the land beneath his feet.

It was a hard land, an honest land, a miraculous land with a million million yesterdays and more tomorrows than a man could count, a land where rains came and sank into stone until strange rivers seeped through the fossil remains of ancient seas.

The years peeled away until he was thirteen again, light-headed from ceremonial fasting and shivering with cold. It hadn’t mattered. Nothing had been real to him then but the presence of buried water like gentle electric shocks against the soles of his bare feet.

It was the same here, now.

Water within the stone, water’s ghostly presence tingling up through him with each step until he stood transfixed, not able to take another step. Incredible currents sang through him, making him want to throw back his head to the sky and shout, but he had no voice. He had only the certainty of ancient water running black and sweet and deep beneath his feet.

Hope had seen Rio turn and walk back toward her, had seen him slow, then stop. The absolute stillness of his body screamed that something was wrong.

“Rio!” she called, scrambling to her feet.

He didn’t answer.

She ran across the canyon bottom toward him until she could see the expression on his face. She stopped as though she had run up against a cliff.

“Rio?” she asked softly.

His eyes opened. They were almost as black as the water buried deep beneath the earth.

She walked toward him, touched him, and trembled. It was as though the ground had shifted beneath her feet.

He saw her knees buckle and his arms swept out, pulling her close, supporting her. He kissed her while the land whispered its secrets to him, to her, water singing to both of them from deep within the earth.

Then he gave to her what he had given to no other person.

“My true name is Brother-to-the-wind.”

Twenty-one

M
ASON SLAMMED THE
truck door and held out his arms to Hope. “Honey, you should have called me sooner! I’d have come back right after Thanksgiving instead of sitting around on my dead end stuffing my face with leftovers.”

Laughing, Hope ran down the front steps and hugged him, burying her face in his red flannel shirt. He smelled of wool and cold and the awful pipe he never smoked around her. She loved all of it, for it meant that he was here again, ready to laugh and tease and share the Valley of the Sun with her.

“I wanted you to have a real vacation,” she said. “You haven’t had one in years.”

“But the well—”

“You came back in time to help me set up the rig,” Rio interrupted. “I didn’t really need you until now.”

Mason looked over Hope’s shoulder at the tall, dark man filling the doorway to the house. As Mason and Hope climbed up the steps, he gave Rio a sideways look.

“Heard in town you had some trouble with Turner,” Mason muttered.

Hope stiffened, remembering the ugly look on Turner’s face when he stalked her through her kitchen.

Gently Rio’s hand stroked over her hair, reassuring her with his touch. Without thinking, she turned her head so that her lips brushed against his palm.

Mason saw the gesture, understood everything that hadn’t been said, and frowned.

Deliberately Rio put his arm around Hope and drew her against his side. “Turner won’t be back. He knows that Hope is my woman.”

Mason’s faded green eyes focused on Hope. “Honey?”

“Yes, I’m Rio’s woman.” She searched Mason’s eyes, remembering what he had said about Rio.
Temporary man.
“Don’t be angry.”

“Angry? Shoot!” Grinning, Mason held out his hand to Rio. “Welcome home, son. It’s about time you found a good woman and settled down. And God never made no better woman than Hope.”

She started to protest, to explain that Rio hadn’t meant that kind of belonging, home and children and forever.

Rio tilted her face up to his and kissed her lightly on the lips, stilling the protest he saw forming.

“I know,” he said softly.

The words could have been an answer to Mason’s praise of Hope or to her silent protest.

“This calls for a drink,” Mason said happily.

He strode into the house and went directly to the old-fashioned walnut bar cabinet that stood at one end of the living room.

“None of that city bubbly, neither. Rye,” Mason announced.

Hope and Rio smiled as the old man pulled a bottle out of the bar, opened it, and inhaled with appreciation. He pulled out three cut-crystal whiskey glasses, examined them critically for dust, and poured a splash of amber liquid into each. He handed out two glasses and held the third high.

“To the both of you,” Mason said, his voice husky.

Hope touched her glass against Mason’s, making crystal ring triumphantly. She turned to Rio—and the searching intensity of his look made her knees buckle as they had in Wind Canyon when she had sensed the certainty of water coursing through him. Through her. Her hand trembled, sending tiny shivers through the potent whiskey.

Rio’s glass rang sweetly against hers, then against Mason’s.

She wanted to reassure Rio that he didn’t have to worry about her, that what had happened between them was her choice, her joy, her dream. But Mason was there, smiling like a man who had just stumbled onto the golden end of a rainbow. So she simply looked at Rio, telling him silently what she couldn’t say in front of Mason.

Brother-to-the-wind, I love you. All of you. The easy and the difficult and everything in between.

Watching Rio over the brilliant crystal rim of her glass, she sipped the potent whiskey.

He watched her in turn, open to every shift of emotion across her face. The taste of rye swept across his tongue, exploded in his mouth, but it wasn’t nearly as potent as the love he saw in Hope’s eyes. He touched his glass to hers again. Then he bent and kissed her slowly,
listening
to her as though she was an unknown country whose secrets he was only beginning to explore.

“Guess I better dust off my go-to-town suit,” Mason said smugly. “How much time I got?”

Hope smiled up at him from within the curve of Rio’s arm. “For what?” she asked.

“To git geared up for your wedding.” His tone of voice said that he thought she had better sense than to ask such a silly question.

“There’s no rush.” Hope’s voice was calm and very final, an unmistakable verbal no trespassing sign.

Mason had considered himself Hope’s honorary father for too long to pay any attention to the warning. His heavy gray eyebrows levered up almost to his hairline.

“What are you talking about, gal? I want my grandkids born proper!”

Hope felt Rio’s tension in the sudden hardness of his arm around her shoulders.

“Mason,” he said in a soft, inflexible voice, “leave it alone.”

For a moment there was an electric tension in the room. The old man’s mouth opened, then closed hard and tight. The narrowing of Rio’s dark eyes and the flat line of his mouth were as much a warning as his voice had been. Only a foolish man would ignore the signals of Rio’s anger, and Mason’s mama hadn’t raised any fools.

The old man looked at Hope with swift concern. Being Rio’s woman was not the same as being Rio’s future wife. The shadows in her beautiful eyes told him that she knew it, and had accepted it.

Anger surged through Mason, shaking him.
She’s giving herself to a man that don’t appreciate her.

On the heels of rage came a tumble of confused thoughts. Mason shook his head as though to settle his mind.

It don’t make sense. Rio ain’t no drunken buck that can’t keep his pants zipped. Rio wouldn’t touch a woman like Hope unless he cared about her in a permanent sort of way.

He just don’t know it yet, that’s all. He’ll smarten up quick enough.

Mason sighed and hoped it would be soon.

Real soon.

“You be right careful of Hope,” he said quietly, looking Rio straight in the eye. “That woman’s worth more than you and me put together.”

In silence Mason tossed back the rest of his rye, put the bottle away, and went out to the truck to bring in the supplies he had picked up in town.

“Don’t be angry,” she said quickly, softly, to Rio. “He’s all the family I have.”

Rio bit back on the emotions that had exploded when Mason turned on Hope:
I want my grandkids born proper.

He wondered if Mason would feel better knowing that Hope had gone into the affair with her eyes wide open. There wouldn’t be any children. No matter how much she thought she loved him, she didn’t want her children born not white.

“I’m not angry,” Rio said.

And he wasn’t. He understood. He had understood before he turned eleven.

Together Rio and Hope helped Mason carry in the sacks and boxes of food he had picked up in town. Without hampering Hope in any way, Rio made it clear that she wasn’t to lift, drag, shove, or otherwise disturb the heavy burlap bags of potatoes and rice, flour and beans, sugar and dried apples, and all the boxes of canned goods.

Though she eyed the closed cartons, sacks of the drilling lubricant everyone called “mud,” and bags of hardware that Rio had ordered for the drilling rig, she didn’t touch anything. He was ignoring them as though they didn’t exist. Mentally she shrugged and reached for a big sack of flour.

Rio beat her to it. He hefted the sack over one shoulder, gathered up a fifty-pound sack of potatoes with his other arm, and headed for the kitchen. She grabbed a bag of milk, butter, and cheese that was teetering on the edge of falling over and started after him. When she got back to the truck, she reached for a burlap bag of rice.

“I’ll get it,” he said, lifting the slithery weight of the rice bag to his shoulder. Then, when she reached for more potatoes, he added, “Mason’s going to drop one of those grocery bags.”

She looked up, saw that he was indeed close to losing a bag full of fresh vegetables, and snatched it from him.

The next time she reached for something heavy, Rio picked it up before she could, even though he already had one bulging sack riding on his shoulder.

“Rio,” she said in a reasonable tone, “I’ve been playing tug-of-war with fifty- and hundred-pound bags of food since I was twelve.”

“Bet you lost, too.”

She smiled reluctantly. “Well, my style leaves something to be desired, but the job gets done just the same.”

Rio shifted the heavy bags so that their weight was comfortably balanced on his shoulders. “Stand on tiptoe so I can kiss you.”

As soon as Hope’s lips brushed his, he said, “We have a deal, woman. You dream for me and I’ll haul mountains into the pantry for you.”

Mason cleared his throat loudly from the doorway. “You know, them that don’t work don’t eat.”

Laughing, Rio stole another kiss from Hope.

Mason tried not to smile. Then he gave in and grinned as broadly as a kid. He had never seen Rio so open, so . . . free. And Hope, well, Hope looked like she had swallowed the sun.

Mason decided that he would stop worrying about wedding dates and Rio’s wandering past and Hope’s generous, vulnerable heart. A man would have to be stump-dumb and mule-stubborn to walk away from a woman like Hope. Rio was neither.

While Hope sorted out vegetables at the kitchen counter, she listened to the good-natured ribbing Mason was giving Rio over some incident from his past. Relief swept through her, and a rushing gratitude. She had been afraid that Mason wouldn’t accept the fact that she was Rio’s woman, period. No rings, no ceremony, no until-death-do-us-part. Mason hadn’t liked it, but he wasn’t holding a grudge. He loved both Rio and Hope.

If she was lucky, she could give Mason one of his heart’s desires. She could have a baby for him to fuss and worry over, a child who would call him grandpa and pester him with endless questions about the past.

If she was lucky.

She hadn’t been lucky this month. After almost two weeks with Rio, her period had come with the regularity of the moon’s own cycle. But December would be coming soon. It would be different then. It had to be. She wouldn’t get many more chances.

When the well came in, Rio would leave.

She knew it as deeply as she knew that she wanted his child. Yet within her acceptance part of her cried:
Why does he have to leave? What can he find out there that he can’t find on the Valley of the Sun?

The questions had no answer, and no end to the asking. They were still quivering in her mind when Rio shut the bedroom door behind him that night and took her in his arms.

“I’m sorry, little dreamer,” he said, stroking his hands down the line of her back.

For a moment she stiffened, wondering if he had read her mind and knew that she was crying in silence over the future when he would leave.

“Mason won’t lean on you again,” Rio said. “He understands how it is between us.”

How can he?
she asked silently.
I don’t understand myself.
But all she said aloud was, “I’m glad. Maybe he can explain it to me.”

“What?”

“You.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“Why you’ll leave.”

Before Rio could speak, Hope kissed him long and hard, filling herself with his taste.

“Never mind,” she whispered against his lips. “It doesn’t matter. Understanding why won’t change anything, not really. I’ll still love you and you’ll still leave me.”

“Hope, I—”

“Brother-to-the-wind,” she said over his words. “Love me while you’re here.” Her hands moved over his arms, his shoulders, his chest, and she shook with sudden hunger for him. “Love me now.”

His hands tangled in her dark hair, tilting her head back so that she had to meet his eyes. What he saw shook him to his soul: grief and acceptance, passion and love.

Most of all, love. She loved him as no one ever had, more than he had believed anyone could love.

“Hope,” he said hoarsely, “I don’t want to hurt you. Please, don’t let me hurt you.”

Her hands moved over his body, savoring the heat and power and arousal of him. She bit his lower lip with an exquisite sensuality she had learned from him.

“I’m hurting now,” she said huskily. “I want you so much I’m shaking. Can’t you feel it? I—”

The rest of her words were lost as his mouth came down on hers with a power that would have been painful if she hadn’t wanted him so badly. She shivered as his salt-sweet taste filled her mouth. Her hands kneaded down his back to his waist and then his hips, loving the lithe, flexed strength of him. Wanting to feel the smooth heat of his skin beneath her palms, she slid her fingers inside the waistband of his jeans.

It wasn’t enough.

He said something hot and dark as her fingers moved over his silver belt buckle, tugging on it. It didn’t open. She made a broken sound of frustration and pulled harder. The buckle stayed closed.

“Damned stubborn thing,” she muttered. “Reminds me of a certain water witch I know.”

He laughed low in his throat and stepped back, peeling away his clothes until he stood naked before her.

“Is this what you want?” he asked. “Is this—”