He reached for a red rag to wipe his hands, straightening to his full height. He stood well over six feet tall, sturdily built and breath-stealingly impressive.
The moment hung in the air, tremulous as a spiderweb spun under eaves in a rainstorm, but bright, sharp, clear, and unmistakably special.
As Natalie coasted past, their gazes locked.
In that fraction of a blink, she memorized everything about him. Eyes the color of coal, chiseled jaw, Olympic shoulders, hard everywhere, all of him bottled into an explosive package.
Boom!
His eyes pierced into her like an arrow’s point, took her, owned her.
Dear God! What was this?
A lazy, wolfish, one-sided grin spread slowly across his face.
Just one look and all the mysteries of the universe were answered. Every nerve ending in her body tingled to life as if she’d been asleep for a hundred years and was awakening for the very first time.
It’s him!
He was a stranger to Cupid. She did not know him, had never met him, and yet, in that hushed sweet second, her body knew something that her mind did not. She felt him deep in her center.
At last.
He’d found her at last.
It struck her like a fever, hot and rushed, an emotion so sudden and sweet that her brain fumbled and stupidly came up with the word “love.”
Did she dare think it? How foolish to think such a thing of a stranger. No. Not love. Love at first sight was absurd, right?
And yet . . . and yet . . .
Panic spread through her as more images fell in on her. His big, black cowboy boots parked underneath her bed, her sunny yellow Keds lined up beside them. Warm quilts on a cold winter night. Silver lightning that lingered—burning and brilliant. His hard mouth crushed against her soft one, tasting rich and decadent as pure dark chocolate.
What did it all mean?
She had no explanation for what she was feeling. It was too blissful. Too good. It scared the living crap out of her.
Thankfully, gratefully, she’d already sped past him. She was too terrified to glance back.
A mirage, she told herself. A dream. Not real. He could not be real.
The blood had drained from her face, leaving her cheeks quite cold. Ghostly. The road flattened, her pace slowed. She tried to get her legs moving again, but they were cement, too heavy to move.
Craziness.
This was sheer craziness. She’d lived in Cupid too long and even though she didn’t believe in the love legends, apparently the stories had been like the creeping damp, silently, insidiously closing in on her to culminate in this . . . this . . . What the hell was
this
?
She swallowed, listening to the quickening of her pulse, felt the blood rush fierily back to her cheeks, and suddenly, she could not see. Oh, everything was still there—the trees, the buildings, and the vehicles—but the image imprinted on her retina was not of the scenery before her. Instead, his face blotted out everything else, like a full solar eclipse turning high noon to midnight.
Music filled her vision—violins and saxophones, pianos and drums, Vivaldi and Mozart, Pachelbel and frickin’ Bonnie Tyler. Colors surrounded him—a rainbow of pleasure—crimson, azure, olive, lavender, saffron.
Could she be having a stroke?
Yes. A stroke. That might explain the wild euphoria, the ceaseless pounding of her heart, the inability to breathe. Why couldn’t she breathe?
“When it hits, you’ll know.” Aunt Carol Ann’s words rang in her head. “There will be absolutely no doubt.”
Dear Cupid, the most awesomely awful thing has happened.
D
azzled, Dade Vega blinked and she was gone.
He shook his head, wondering if he’d imagined the phantom beauty in yellow on the pale blue Schwinn, looking like springtime in Paris. Why did it feel as if the bottom had just dropped out of his world?
A hard tightening gripped him in all the right places. He scrubbed a sheepish palm over his face. Purposefully, he stepped to the curb and glanced down the street.
Nothing. Nobody.
She was gone, if she’d ever really been there at all.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’d had a hallucination, but it would be the first time since the head injury he’d suffered in Afghanistan four years ago.
Ah shit. Man, he couldn’t backslide, not after all the progress he’d made. If he was backsliding, it’s had everything to do with Red’s disappearance.
Funny how easy it was for the past to reach up and punch you in the face when you least expected it.
Honestly, he was half hoping that she
was
a hallucination because that would rightly explain the berserk push-pull between his head and his heart. He felt a rushing need to go after her, spill his guts, tell her who he was and how he felt. One look in her enigmatic sky blue eyes and he felt as if love beckoned him with open arms, while his soul had dug in its heels and jerked back, too guilty of damage and sin to believe anything so good could be true.
He knew better.
Life had kicked Dade in the teeth far too many times for him to trust it. He’d learned that happiness, by and large, was a mirage and it was best not romanticized.
But the woman’s image lingered, leaving an indelible imprint, and he found himself thinking about a soft mattress on a hot sweaty night, sheets tangled up in their entwined limbs. He could almost hear her calling out his name in ecstasy, and dammit if he didn’t start to get hard.
False, this vision, he knew it, but he could still see her delicate lightness, her smile, modest and a little shy, but as welcoming as warm socks on a cold winter’s day. A tumble of soft brown hair floating out behind her like a cloud as she rode past.
For that instant when she’d looked at him and he’d looked at her, one lonely soul connecting with another, Dade had thought,
It’s her.
It was a stupid thing to think, he was well aware of that, but he’d thought it nonetheless.
Forget it. Move on.
Moving on was the only way he’d survived, another lesson courtesy of the Navy SEALs. It was harder to hit a moving target. Red had proven the point. His friend had stopped in Cupid, stayed, gotten comfortable, and now he’d gone missing after texting Dade a Mayday message three days earlier.
Tanked.
The secret code only they understood. It meant
I’m in trouble deep, trust no one.
That’s why he was here in this dead-end, desert mountain town. To find out what had happened to his foster brother who’d also served with him in the SEALs. They’d joined the navy together the day after they graduated from high school, and Red was the only person in the whole world that Dade gave a shit about. Because of that, he’d taken a leave of absence from the security detail he’d been on in New Orleans.
There were no commercial flights into Cupid and since the nearest big airport was in El Paso, two hundred miles away, he decided to simply make the drive. Waiting around in airports made him feel helpless. At least when he was on the road, he was making progress. Unfortunately, he’d been out on an oil derrick in the Gulf of Mexico when the text had come through, and it had taken him this long to arrive.
He was terrified that Red had gone off his meds and was in the grips of full-blown, post-traumatic stress flashbacks. After the Mayday message, Red had not answered any of Dade’s calls or texts. Tough as he was on the outside, his buddy was as emotionally fragile as an eight-year-old.
Dade had to be careful. He couldn’t afford to assume it was simply PTSD. What if Red had stumbled across something or found himself in some other kind of trouble? He was here to retrace his buddy’s steps. The best way to do that was to ease himself into the community and see what he could find out.
First his junkie parents, and then the foster care system, had taught him that trusting people was a damn dumb thing to do, so his plan was to keep his connection to Red a secret until he got the lay of the land and figured out where his buddy had gone.
Which was another reason he was particularly disturbed by his overwhelming reaction to the woman on the bicycle. It simply wasn’t smart.
There she was again, clogging up his mind—that pretty oval face, big blue eyes, and full pink lips. He imagined she smelled like honeysuckle. When he and Red were kids, they used to pluck the white blooms from the honeysuckle vines that grew up the wooden privacy fence of their foster home, break them open, and suck out the drop of sweet nectar.
Kissing her would be like that.
Honeysuckle woman, that’s how he thought of her now.
For Chrissakes, Vega, knock it off. If she’s even real, she’s way out of your reach for so many more reasons than you can count.
He might as well wish for the Hope Diamond. He was as equally likely to possess it. Dade pulled a palm down his face, winced at the prickle. He hadn’t shaved since the previous day and he haired up fast thanks to his father’s Hispanic blood, Satan rest the bastard’s soul.
“Screw it,” he muttered, and wrestled into the T-shirt he’d stripped off while working on his motorcycle.
The trip through the desert and up the Davis Mountains had messed with the Harley’s timing and he’d had to disassemble the gas tank to get to the timing belt. The job had taken over an hour and he’d been putting the chopper back together when she’d ridden past.
He’d stopped underneath the security lamps in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot because it had still been dark when he’d started the job. Dade packed up his tools, stuffed them in the compartment underneath the seat, and wondered what honeysuckle woman’s name was.
Forget her already.
He strapped on his helmet, slung his leg over the machine, reached down to turn on the check valve. Instantly, fuel poured from the tank, soaking the leg of his pants in gasoline.
Dammit!
In his stunned enchantment with the woman on the bicycle, he’d neglected to reattach the hose.
Love at first sight is a very scary proposition when a stranger instantly becomes an intimate.
—MILLIE GREENWOOD
A
fter Natalie dropped the letters off at the community center, she made her way down the Main Street sidewalk, past Tilly’s Dry Cleaners and Tailoring Shop, Cupid’s Bow Tea Room, and Cox Realty—all of which were closed at six-thirty in the morning—before she stopped outside Ticket to Ride travel agency.
Conrad York, the prim, debonair ex-Vermonter who’d moved to the arid climate of southwest Texas on his doctor’s advice, owned the travel agency. Every Sunday evening, he changed out the posters in the window, and every Monday morning, Natalie stopped by to see what destination awaited the plucky traveler.
This week, he featured Paris.
Hand to her chest, Natalie stared at the montage of the City of Lights—the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, Versailles, brightly colored umbrellas over wrought-iron tables at outdoor cafes. She could smell the French bread, hear Edith Piaf crooning “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” taste chocolate napoleons, see the
Mona Lisa
, feel the cobblestones against her feet. In Paris it would be so easy to have a wild, passionate affair that wasn’t meant to last; the perfect place to re-create herself.
She heaved a little sigh, reached out, and pressed her fingertips against the glass, touching the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Someday. One day. But in her heart, she knew that day would never come.
Loneliness shuddered through her like a cold draft swooping down off Swayback Mountain on a frosty December day. She hunched her shoulders and stared at her reflection in the glass.
A stranger would see a tall, slender woman in a bright yellow dress, wearing an ugly polypropylene ankle-foot orthosis (unaffectionately known as an AFO to those who were forced to depend on them) on her right leg, and unstylish sneakers. They might never catch a glimpse of the haunted expression that lurked beneath the surface of her cornflower eyes. She worked hard to forget the past, but at the most unexpected times it could rise up and clasp her in a sorrowful embrace.
Natalie had been born with the weight of tradition on her shoulders, the oldest daughter, of the oldest daughter, of the oldest daughter of Millie Greenwood, the woman who started it all.
The entire history of Cupid was wrapped up in her family. It was a smaller-scale, but no less heavy, version of being a Disney, a Rockefeller, or a Barrymore. Not a responsibility one could shrug off like a coat. People depended on her. She couldn’t afford to be selfish.
For the most part, she accepted her role without complaint, but once in a while it would have been nice to forget who she was, pack her things, and run away.
Fly, fly away.
Flying.
And then there it was. The dark memory clutching at her throat.
It was her ninth birthday and a clear summer day just like this one. Daddy, laughing and carrying two-year-old Zoey on his shoulders, walked across the tarmac of Cupid’s tiny private airfield toward the twin-engine Cessna that he’d been flying since he was seventeen.
Zoey giggled and tugged his hair. Natalie had skipped alongside their mother, who swung a wicker picnic basket between them and whistled “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
Natalie’s hair had been plaited into braids and clipped in place with pink Hello Kitty barrettes. She wore blue jeans with the cuffs turned up, a red shirt with the appliqué of a watermelon on the front, the black buttons shaped like seeds, and a pair of red polka dot Jelly shoes. How she loved those shoes.
It was the last time she remembered being truly, blissfully happy.
Daddy, can I do the flight check with you and Mommy?
Not this time, strap your sister into the backseat. Make sure the buckle is tight.
How come I always hafta take care of her?
Because you’re a good big sister, we depend on you. Now do as you’re told.
Scowling, she’d taken Zoey’s hand and led her toward the airplane steps. Her sister had dawdled, stopped to pick up a Cheeto—the puffy kind—abandoned on the ground.
“Yuck, that’s nasty, put it down.” She knocked the cheese puff from her sister’s hand and Zoey started wailing. Natalie had to drag her kicking and crying into the plane. Their relationship had been pretty well like that ever since, Zoey getting into trouble, Natalie bailing her out, and Zoey getting pissy about it.
She finally got her sister buckled in, and a few minutes later, their parents climbed inside the plane. Mommy settled the picnic basket between Natalie and Zoey. Natalie could smell the bologna and mayonnaise sandwiches with thick slabs of cheddar cheese and dill pickles on them. Her mouth watered.
Daddy took off and climbed into the marshmallow clouds crowning the Davis Mountains; the sound of the propeller engine was a lulling drone. Zoey had fallen asleep in her seat. Mommy and Daddy were teasing each other, and Daddy leaned over several times to give Mommy a quick kiss on the cheek.
Mommy would giggle and kiss him back and say, “Jimmy McCleary, keep your lips to yourself.”
Natalie smiled and thought about the chocolate cupcakes with pink icing that Mommy had packed in the picnic basket, and everything was perfect.
The marshmallow clouds suddenly turned black and out of nowhere a gust of wind blew in as the hot air from the desert valley floor mixed with the cool air flowing down the mountains.
The little airplane bobbled.
From his reflection in the rearview mirror, Natalie saw Daddy’s face go pale and serious. He gripped the yoke with both hands.
“James?” Mommy asked, her voice coming out thin as string cheese.
“We gotta go back.”
Disappointment weighed heavy in Natalie’s stomach. “No,” she wailed. “We’re supposed to have a picnic for my birthday!”
“Hush!” Her mother shot her a fierce look over her shoulder, but there was terror in her eyes.
Natalie’s stomach rose up into her throat and she got a creepy, wriggly feeling, the way she did last year when her cousin Melody told her to close her eyes and hold out her hands and she’d give her a big surprise. Natalie had done it, but when she opened her eyes, she’d seen a ribbon snake curled in her palm, flicking its tongue at her. She’d screamed and thrown down the snake. She wanted to scream now, but she was too scared. The plane was bumping and diving and buzzing. Daddy was cussing under his breath, and Mommy was hanging on to her seat with both hands.
“Mommy?”
“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. The plane was going down, down, down, spinning and twirling the way Natalie did when she twisted the chains up on the park swing tight and then let them go.
“James, what is it?” her mother whispered.
“Wind shears,” Daddy’s voice was tight as he battled the yoke.
Anxiously, Natalie tugged on her braid; the Hello Kitty barrette sprang open in her hand.
Impossibly, Zoey was still asleep.
Daddy fought as hard as he could, but the angry wind pushed down on them, and through the window, she could see the mountain become the ground.
They hit so hard Natalie’s teeth jammed together and she bit her tongue. She tasted blood, heard Zoey cry out, but she could not see because everything went black.
Sometime later, she became aware of a deep, biting pain in her right leg and cold rain hitting her face.
Zoey’s sobs were soft.
Natalie’s eyes popped open and she was startled to find they were upside down in a tree. The top of the plane was gone, the misshapen metal razor-sharp. She was held in place by the seat belt, her hair dangling past her head. The picnic basket had spilled open and bologna sandwiches were strewn across the ground below. She counted them. One, two, three, four.
A chocolate cupcake lay smashed against her lap. The rain washed the icing into a gooey pink smear. She tried to move but the pain in her leg shot up hot and mean through her hip, and she got sick to her stomach.
She glanced around for her father, but she did not see him. Where was Daddy?
Her mother’s seat was gone out of the plane, but then she spied Mommy nestled against a tree branch, moaning quietly. That’s when Natalie realized that the tree branch was poking right through her mother’s chest.
“Mommy?” she whimpered.
“Natalie,” her mother whispered. “Are you okay?”
“My leg hurts.”
“Can you see Zoey?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How is she?”
Why couldn’t Mommy see her? She was right there, staring at Zoey. Couldn’t she see? “She looks all right to me.”
“Natalie?”
“Yes, Mommy?”
“You’re going to have to be a very brave girl.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know you are, baby, but listen to me. Promise me that no matter what happens, you’ll look after Zoey.”
“I promise.”
“Good girl.” Her mother’s voice was so weak she could barely hear her now.
“Mommy?”
She didn’t answer.
“Mommy!” Natalie screamed.
Mommy’s eyes were closed and she did not speak again.
The rain came down harder.
Natalie sobbed. She wanted out of this seat. Wanted down from this tree. Wanted her leg to stop hurting. Wanted her mother and her father to take care of everything. Wanted the sweet, happy day back the way it was before the storm took them down.
Daddy was gone and Mommy wasn’t talking anymore. It was up to her to fix things. She would climb down from the tree, help Zoey out of her seat, and go get Gram. Gram would know what to do.
The rescue workers found them at dusk. Natalie was on her butt with Zoey in her lap, dragging them over the rough, rocky terrain of Mount Livermore, tears streaming down her face as she fought against the blinding pain. She was going to take care of her baby sister no matter what. She’d promised Mommy.
Later, after she’d gone through surgery to have pins put in her leg that had been broken in twenty-two places, the doctor told her relatives that he had no idea how she’d managed to get as far as she did.
“It must have been excruciating, but the body,” he’d said, sounding amazed, “can do miraculous things under extreme stress.”
Her parents had died on that mountain, leaving Natalie and Zoey orphaned, but not unwanted. Their loving grandparents and a bevy of aunts and uncles had raised them, but Natalie never forgot her solemn vow to her dying mother. She would always look after Zoey.
Natalie’s leg twinged at the memory and she ran a hand down her thigh. That day had marked her forever, set her life in cement. She was ingrained in Cupid, Texas. There was no getting out, no escape, even if she wanted to, but she knew who she was and she accepted it, although once in a while a travel poster had the power to make her yearn for the impossible.
Putting the past firmly in the past, she got on her bike and rode home.
The McCleary mansion was in the older part of town on Stone Street, where the yards were massive, the fences white picket, and the live oaks stately. A decade earlier, when Cupid had rezoned Stone Street from residential to commercial, many of the grand homes that fronted Lake Cupid had been turned into businesses. Junie Mae had morphed Farnsworth House into a hair salon and spa. The old Van Zandt place became a chiropractor’s office. The Harris manor was now a tourist information center, and Natalie had converted her house into a bed-and-breakfast.
Transforming the McCleary ancestral home had been an act of necessity. While Natalie came from a long line of well-to-do McClearys, her father, she’d discovered when she’d been old enough to understand, had been something of a spendthrift, and he’d died owing more than a million dollars. There’d been life insurance policies on her parents, of course, but by the time Natalie was twenty, most of the monies had been exhausted and the only asset she had left was the house.
Tourists frequented Cupid, drawn by the romantic legend, the vineyards, the caverns, the mineral springs, the game fishing in Lake Cupid, and MacDonald Observatory, which offered some of the darkest night skies in the United States.
Natalie figured, why not give the tourists a place to stay? Armed with an interest-free loan from her grandmother Rose and advice from practically everyone in town, Natalie had hired a cook, a housekeeper, and a gardener and set about becoming a businesswoman.
For seven years, her business had thrived and she’d thrown herself into being the best hostess she could be; her B&B even garnered a starred review from
Texas Monthly
.
Then the corporations had sniffed out Cupid and everything changed. Hilton bought up land on the other side of the lake and erected a posh four-star resort hotel. Halfway between Cupid and the mineral springs, a developer built lavish vacation condos. The twin projects had siphoned off seventy percent of Natalie’s revenue.
Unskilled at anything else, she’d had little option but to take in long-term boarders. While she kept her three best rooms for tourists, sometimes she felt like she was running more of a halfway house or an assisted living facility than anything else.
She came in through the back entrance of the mansion that was a bastard combination of Greek Revival and Southern Plantation. The house needed a new paint job, but it would cost over two thousand dollars and she just didn’t have the spare cash right now.
Soon, she promised herself as the screen door snapped closed behind her.
Oh good, Zoey was in the breakfast nook adjacent to the kitchen, eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch while she leaned over Lars Bakke’s shoulder as he worked the Sunday crossword puzzle from the
Alpine Gazette
. The B&B guests took their meals in the formal dining room where breakfast was served buffet style, but the long-term boarders ate where the family did.
“Eleven-letter word for bogus,” Lars said, tapping his pencil against his chin.
“Counterfeit,” Zoey supplied.
“Smart girl.” Lars painstakingly filled in the crossword grid, gripping his pencil so low on the shaft that his fingers encircled the lead.