Red Hot Obsessions (190 page)

Among Rae’s family—four men who bristled with weapons—Wulf felt a modicum of that relief, that they could defend themselves and Reagan if shooting started. Rae stood behind the men who aimed at the cans on the ridge, watching.

The Varminter rifle had an amateur’s scope on it, and Wulf settled the crosshairs near the top of the can, since they were so close. The red metal shone in the desert sunlight, glaring through his scope. A sustained breeze ruffled his hair, so he adjusted one-half of a mil dot upwind.

Wulf pulled his body rigid on the dirt, contracting his muscles into opposition, and slowed his breathing. Sharp rocks ground his belly and knees. He squeezed the trigger just to the break point.

His body pulsed with life and whooshed with air, jostling the rifle. The scarlet can bobbed under the crosshairs.

Wulf held his breath and waited for the pause between his slow heartbeats, then squeezed the trigger past the break point and released the round. The rifle’s recoil shoved his shoulder.

The soda can plinked off the other ridge, spinning in the air.

He tagged it again while it flew.

The blued steel of the rifle warmed Wulf’s cheek, and he breathed.

~~~~~

A Worldly Man

After lunch, while the men were retrieving the rifles from the gun safe, Rae’s mother had cornered her in the hot kitchen, expecting answers. The black smell of the cheese that had leaked onto the skillet and burned lingered in the air.

“Dominic seems like a nice young man,” Momma had said.

“Yeah. He’s nice,” Rae said. The house around her echoed with good memories: all seven sets of handprints pressed into the sidewalk outside, the stack of saddles in the barn, and the guns in the safe for home defense, fun, and hunting.

“But you can’t marry him,” her mother said.

“I didn’t say anything about marrying him.”

“A bird and a fish can fall in love, but where would they build their nest?”

“Momma, I’m not a bird, and he’s not a fish.”

“A man like that, a worldly man, would never be happy here in Pirtleville.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway. He’s moving back to Europe in two weeks.”

“Well, all’s well, then. I’ve always said that it’s just as easy to fall in love with a virtuous man as with a worldly man.”

Rae didn’t think of Wulf as being worldly, with its connotations of jadedness, selfishness, and greed, especially when he had been nothing but nice to them all through lunch no matter how her father had provoked him. Still, Wulf did look like a tall, pale oak tree planted among the Pirtleville scrub brush.

That was a stupid image, though. An oak tree would die in the desert.

While she and Wulf were walking out into the sharp scrub brush with her father and brothers and Wulf said that he was all right with the gun, she exhaled, relieved.

If Wulf missed the targets while shooting, that was fine. If he had been wussy about the gun, even considering he had nearly been killed by one, her family would have taken it out of Rae’s hide later. She didn’t want Wulf to be the brunt of those jokes. A worm of discomfort wiggled in her brain that her family would impose such a rule, but they did, and she couldn’t change it or them.

Now, Rae watched Wulf take aim from the prone position, his body wrapped around the rifle, lying on the hard desert clay.

His can popped up from the dusty ridge, sparked in the sun, and then pinged to the side, struck dead on
twice.

The next three cans flipped off the dusty ridge and then all were hit
again
before they sailed into the thorny scrub brush:
plink-plink, plink-plink, plink-plink.

Wulf’s shots hit far too many cans in a row to be dumb luck.

Good Lord, he was a
really
good shot.

Seriously, was there
nothing
this guy couldn’t do?

Wulf held the rifle easily, and even now, he carried it with familiarity in his hands as he climbed to his feet.

Okay, she was going to try horseshoes, calf roping, tap dancing, French braiding, the harmonica, and origami, and if he excelled at all those things, she was done with him because he must have sold his soul to the Devil or something.

After some boisterous congratulations by her brothers, Wulf walked beside Rae on their way back to the house. The sun was beginning to fall, though it was still hot and yellow in the brilliant sky.

It was getting late, and they had to change clothes before the Celebration of Life at the church.

With his expert shooting and easy conversation at lunch, Wulf had ingratiated himself with her family. He slid right in, very well, too well. His shiny mirrored shell might be at work again.

She said, “I thought Europeans didn’t like guns.”

“The world’s largest marksmen’s competition is held in Hannover, Germany every year, a five hundred-year-old tradition. The parade of five thousand marksmen is over seven miles long. There’s a fair around it.”

“Have you been there?”

“Every year of my life until I was fifteen. After that, I competed a few times and performed respectably.”

Disbelief warred with the obvious evidence of the double-shot cans. She stopped walking. “You’ve competed in international marksmanship competitions.”

“Several times. I formally learned to shoot in the military.” He turned to look at her. Amusement sparkled in his blue eyes. He carried the rifle easily with it leaned against his shoulder. “I wasn’t planning to show off quite so much.”

“You were in the military?
You?”

“Swiss men are conscripted for national service for one year when they are twenty. Like most, I went into the army, though I stayed an extra year beyond my conscription. After that, men are enrolled in the home guard, like your national guard, and every household is issued a rifle and ammunition.”

Rae’s eyebrows lifted. “No wonder you weren’t fazed by all the gun talk. Kind of makes our gun laws look puny, since your government teaches everyone to shoot and then hands out guns.”

Wulf shrugged. “Being a neutral country means we defend ourselves.”

“What’d you do in the military?”

Wulf pulled in his lower lip.

Dang,
but she wanted to play poker with him sometime. She could probably make enough off him in one night to open her clinic.

He said, “Don’t read too much into this.”

“Okay.” A sharp branch snagged on her tee shirt, and she stopped on the trail to free herself. The thorns had pierced the cotton, and she tried to unsnag the bush without ripping the thin knit. The desert exacted harsh penalties for not paying attention. The snakes were probably out of hibernation, too.

Wulf stopped beside her. Her brothers and father had walked far ahead of them.

He leaned down to where she could hear him whisper. “I trained as a sniper.”

Her mouth fell open, but she snapped it closed. Yeah, sure. Nothing to read between
those
lines.

Yikes.

She went back to tugging at the thorn and her shirt.

Wulf didn’t look away from her, and he lowered one pale eyebrow over his blue eyes at whatever must be written all over her face. “And?”

“Nothing.” She dislodged the barb.

“Nothing the psychology student would want to say?” His monotone was a bit dry.

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” As Sigmund Freud never said.

His curt nod might have masked anything.

“Did you ever shoot anyone?” she asked, far before she could stop herself. She had no freaking filter between her brain and her big mouth sometimes. Something must be wrong with her, asking the guy who got shot as a child if he had ever sniped anyone. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ask that.”

This time, Wulf didn’t pull in his lower lip. “I had a man in my crosshairs once, but our team leader took the shot.”

“Jesus.”

“The assassin was aiming at the Pope, not Jesus.”

“You were hanging out with the Pope?”

“The Swiss Army provides security for the Vatican, though that particular division only recruits Catholics. There was a threat, and our unit in Rome didn’t want to involve the Italian police, so they called for reinforcements. We all went, even those of us who had a different flavor of holy water sprinkled on us as infants.”

Good Lord, infant baptism. That meant that he had never made a mature profession of faith, which her church insisted on. According to her First Baptist church, he wasn’t really a Christian.

According to her church, most people weren’t real Christians. Heaven was going to be sparsely populated without the Jews, the Muslims, the Mormons, the Catholics, the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Pentecostals, and the Southern Baptists. The Southern Baptists were close, but with all that singing and shouting out in church and such, they were surely going to Hell, too.

She was astonished at herself that she had ever believed that stuff.

Rae looked down at her father and brothers, who were all the way to the house and waving them in.

She waved back, letting them know she saw them.

Wulf caught her hand, pulled her toward him, and stepped backward behind a bush. Once they were hidden from the house, he wrapped his arms around her. His breath tickled her ear as he whispered, “Stay with me tonight, in the hotel.”

“I
cannot
. My dad will freak.” The sun shone hot on her head and shoulders.

“We have only two weeks.”

That wasn’t her fault. “My dad will gather a posse for a shotgun wedding.”

“They’ll never find us.”

“There are only two hotels in town.”

“You should stay with me.”

He obviously did not understand how small towns worked. “It’s different, here. I absolutely cannot stay with you in a hotel room. It wouldn’t be good-natured chiding. It would be bad, really bad, for me, afterward.”

He sighed. “I’ll retrieve your luggage from the car before I leave.”

Oh, yes, her backpack was still in the front-trunk of his Porsche.

He pivoted and took her hand while they were walking down to the house.

Now that she thought about it, a lot about Wulf was reminiscent of the military: his stride, his posture, that man-among-men demeanor, and even his golden blond hair was cut very close to regulation military style.

She dropped his hand when they came over a hill and got within eyeshot of the house. Someone was probably watching them from the windows.

~~~~~

A Celebration of Life

Rae and her family arrived at the church at fifteen minutes before four o’clock. The spring sun hovered over the mountains, burning, still an hour or more away from the cool relief of sunset. They all stood outside in the dirt parking lot, withering under in the sunshine and waiting for others to arrive to provide the needed peer pressure to force them into that stifling wooden box of a church.

Rae watched the dusty road for Wulf’s car, even though she wished he had not come to Pirtleville. It meant too much to people here when a girl brought a guy home.

Rae had changed back into the long skirt and white blouse, even though the outfit made her feel like she was sliding backward into a gaping hole. The long skirt swished around her ankles, hobbling her. Her hair was still long enough to twist into a red-striped bun on the back of her head but so short that it stretched the skin on her face to do so. Tendrils curlicued around her face no matter how many hairpins she stuffed into it.

Her mother had silently loaned Rae a white mesh bonnet to cover her hair because all of Rae’s had been crushed in the backs of her drawers. The stiff bonnet reached around almost to her cheeks and pinned Rae’s ears to her head, smushing the crease behind her ears. Her own bonnets had been the more modern kind, sweeping in back of her ears, but her mom was more conservative.

Her momma walked the walk, and Rae respected that. When Momma did speak, it was something important and she meant it, but she otherwise went about her work quietly. She held no truck with idle gossip or idle hands.

In the dusty parking lot, her father grinned and handed his car keys to Rae. Her mother never brought a purse to church, saying that she didn’t want any distractions from the sermon, so her father had given Rae his keys to hold since she was fifteen rather than let them jingle in his pocket. He must have missed that while she’d been at college these last couple of years.

Rae stood between her mother and her oldest brother, waiting. For a moment, she relaxed. Belonging filled her. She felt still and quiet and at peace in this gritty parking lot, surrounded by her family. Her brothers didn’t fidget. They knew better.

Rae stood straight and wished she could play a game or check her email on her phone, but phones were always turned off when they went to church. Maybe it was just her lack of cellular reception, but she felt cut off from the outside world, which wasn’t altogether bad. She felt fine where she was.

More cars pulled into the dirt parking lot, rooster-tailing dust.

Rae’s maternal aunt, Alana, flushed her brood from her minivan. She had bought it cheap when an insurance company had totaled it because it was pockmarked with hail damage.

Alana’s youngest son, Daniel, flopped to the ground. He stared at the sky, wincing, like crows were dive-bombing him. His hands flapped in the air like he was trying to ward them off.

Alana, ever patient, stood Daniel up and tried to pierce the autistic cloud around him with her voice, telling him they needed to go into the church.

Rae had babysat for Daniel when she was in high school for an hour a day for four years to give Alana time to get other things done, unpaid because they were family. Daniel probably didn’t remember Rae because, even though she had been down on the floor with him the whole time, peering into his face and searching his wild eyes, she wasn’t sure he had ever noticed her. He had needed better care than Rae knew how to give him.

Rae waved to Alana, but Alana was too busy battling Daniel to notice her.

Hester’s old Chevy sedan pulled in next to Rae, and Hester and her mother, TracyJo, emerged. Aunt TracyJo’s expression when she looked at the old wooden church turned lovelorn. Her weak gray eyes misted over.

Rae watched the road for a lone black Porsche or a couple of black SUVs.

A gleaming black pick-up truck painted with flames cruised in. Its rear tires spun, throwing gravel. It skidded into a spot near the front, and Jim Bob Mulligan slid out of the driver’s seat. The lift kit jacked the truck up so high that Mulligan dropped the last couple of feet to the gravel.

Mulligan must have a pull-out step to climb back into his truck, or else he must swing up using handles like a ginger chimpanzee.

Rae turned back to her family and watched the county road that led past the Dairy Queen and the Sonic and then out to the vindictive desert, which would swallow up any blithe car or person that taunted it.

A big, brown SUV lumbered into the parking lot, and Mayor Harding emerged with his wife and their three teenage daughters. People said that he was the only beanpole in that garden of voluptuous butternut squashes. The ladies all wore traditional clothes like Rae’s family: long skirts, long sleeves, and bonnets on their hair. Mayor Harding grinned and waved at everyone like he was in a parade passing by the grandstands, and Rae couldn’t look at him for fear that she would burst out laughing at his hypocrisy or punch him for slumming around on his pretty wife. May would be devastated if she ever found out, and May had always put aside one of her brownies for Rae after church, every week, because she knew that Rae’s mother only cooked hearty food. Maybe it was better that Harding utilized The Devilhouse rather than having an affair where he might fall in love and leave his girls.

Yep, everybody who Rae really didn’t want to see had arrived.

Down the road, two black SUVs flanked a Porsche. All three vehicles turned into the church parking lot and picked their way to a slow stop at the end of the row.

Rae trotted to meet them.

Wulf peeled himself out of the low car, and his staff guys climbed out of their SUVs without looking like they were surveying the perimeter too much. All of them now wore black suits and sunglasses, and it looked like the government men in black had descended. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see sleek black helicopters in the sky above their church’s runty steeple, which would have affirmed all her family’s conspiracy theories.

Indeed, her father had lifted an eyebrow when the SUV entourage pulled up. His hand hovered near the back of his pants, and Rae wasn’t sure what would happen if he pulled his handgun around these guys.

Actually, she was pretty sure what would happen and she wanted to warn him, but surely her dad wouldn’t unholster his piece for no reason. He wasn’t the shoot-first type at all. Indeed, there had been several situations that he had talked everyone down when shots might have been fired in anger.

The parking lot went silent around Rae just as she reached Wulf. The whole congregation was staring at her back. She just knew it.

Wulf smiled and inclined his body toward her but didn’t reach for her in any way, thank goodness. Inappropriate behavior at such a somber occasion and under everyone’s scrutiny would have caused an uproar, and any behavior might be seen as inappropriate.

“Um, hi,” Rae said. Wulf’s blond hair was so light and short that he fairly glowed in the unforgiving sunlight. “I’m glad you came.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” Wulf said. He glanced behind her at all those staring eyes. Rae could practically feel all that staring tapping her on the back of her head and shoulders.

When there was no hullabaloo, people began to file into the tiny church. Rae waited with Wulf until her family turned to walk, then motioned with her head for him and his entourage to follow.

Wulf’s staff fell in around them.

When they reached the single door to the church, a subtle negotiation ensued for who took point, who took the rear guard, and whether Rae should walk in before Wulf or after. Wulf cocked his head toward the door and she stepped forward, but Friedhelm squeezed her elbow and tugged to pull her back. Wulf lifted one pale eyebrow at Friedhelm, the subtlest of sharp looks, and Friedhelm released her arm so she could walk into her own family’s church.

Jeez. That was just entering a small, backwater church. Rae could only imagine what these guys must be like in real public situations.

The congregation crowded in the hot aisle, jostling to their accustomed pews. The window air conditioners jammed in the first two windows fought a losing battle with the sun above and the hot bodies within. Perfume and industrial-strength antiperspirant combined into a simmering chemical smog.

Rae turned to follow her family into their pew, but this time Wulf touched her elbow and tried to maneuver her across the aisle and into an unoccupied section near the cramped windows. Wulf’s low voice reached her ears. “Sit with me.”

“No.” She stared at the knot-holed floor and whispered, “I have to sit with my family.” She didn’t look up because she didn’t want people to know they were having this conversation. “It was dicey to walk in with you. It
means something
if I sit with you instead of them.”

“I understand being the object of scrutiny, when one’s every act is interpreted. Sit with me.”

“You don’t mean what they will think,” and they would all think it, and every one of seventy or so people in the church would ask her about it later.

His voice lowered further, and Rae could just hear him say, “Mulligan must think it so.”

“Oh.” She would have to bear the brunt of the congregation’s questions when Wulf never came back, but that was later. At least right now, surely Jim Bob wouldn’t try anything, not at a Celebration of Life for his own aunt. She scooted into the pew and found herself wedged between Dieter and Wulf.

In the far aisle, Friedhelm dipped like he had tripped, and his hand touched his forehead. Hans grabbed his arm and whispered near his head. They slid into the pew on the far side.

Whispering hissed around them like a bucket of rattlesnakes.

Rae sat straight, crossed her wrists and her ankles, and didn’t let her spine touch the wooden back of the pew. She stared straight ahead at the cross that towered over the pulpit up front. Hot stage lights threw cruciform shadows on the walls.

Wulf’s thigh pressed against her hip, and she remembered his hands on her skin just a few days ago. This hard pew reminded her of the wooden battle throne in the rope room.

Her face heated beyond the stifling warmth that pressed her skin.

Rae tried to focus on something else, anything else, because surely these Godly people could see such depraved thoughts running through her tight-bunned head, like how he had muscled those ropes wrapping her body.

Wulf’s leg jostled a little, and all her flesh rippled as he moved.

She tried to remember all the Bible verses that she had memorized as a girl, but none of them distracted her from Wulf’s hard body pressing her leg and, now that he shifted, her arm. Verses from
The
Song of Solomon
came to her mind, which she had read even though her Sunday School class had skipped over that Old Testament book.

Mayor Harding walked by and caught her eye for just a moment. He looked between Rae and Wulf, but he didn’t so much as raise his ragged eyebrows as his gaze passed over them and he grinned at the people in the next pew.

“It is four o’clock,” Wulf muttered to her. “Why aren’t they starting the service?”

Rae said, “Aunt Enid’s older son Amos isn’t here yet. He’ll be along any minute.” Rae saw a friendly face and waved two fingers at her cute but crazed cousin Craigh, the one with whom she had a facetious pact to marry when they were forty so they could spawn three-headed babies before their biological clocks ran out.

Craigh waved back and winked at her, then pointed to the pretty girl beside him, his date. Craigh was sitting with the girl in church, in front of his parents and everybody. Must be serious between them. Rae gave him a surreptitious thumbs-up.

Rae glanced at Wulf, who was glaring at his phone.

Wulf said, “If they do not start at four, the schedule will not hold.”

“Yep. Sometimes that happens.”

“I suppose we must accommodate.” He jerked his chin up and sat ramrod straight, resigned to the lack of punctuality.

When Wulf pulled himself upright, his black suit shifted on him, and the scent of his clean male flesh, soap, and faint spice of his cologne escaped his white shirt. He must have showered when he changed clothes.

Every time Rae inhaled, she could smell him as clearly as if her nose were pressed against his neck. She could almost taste him. She inhaled deeply and tried like mad to think of anything other than how Wulf tasted and smelled and the feel of his mouth on hers.

Two weeks from then, when Wulf moved to wherever he was going, Rae was going to have a hard time of it.

Rae glanced around the church and noticed that Wulf’s staff guys were also surreptitiously checking watches and phones and fidgeting.

“Do you guys need to be somewhere?”

“No. It is now four-oh-five.”

“Yep, it is.”

Behind her, Daniel grunted and made some kind of commotion, stimming by flapping his hands. Aunt Alana frantically hushed him, lest someone say something.

Rae knew that her Aunt Alana had done her best with the therapies that the pediatrician had told her to do, Sonrise- and Floortime-based ones, but that other therapies out there might have helped Daniel more. Real therapists might have helped him more than his untrained mother and a pathetically stupid high-school babysitter. Trained therapists utilizing modern therapies might have drawn words out of him, taught him language, and broken through the transparent haze that he flailed against every minute. Guilt caught in Rae’s throat.

Sunlight glared through the church through the open doors at the back, and more people came in. Rae stole a glance back there and saw that Otis, Aunt Enid’s oldest son, had indeed entered with Minister Stoppard. Otis was in his seventies and kept scratching at his shirt collar and patting down the few strands of hair that crossed the top of his head. He led his doddering wife up the aisle and to the front pew.

Minister Stoppard, who was in his late thirties, climbed to his place at the lectern and bowed his head, waiting for the Holy Ghost to move him to speak. His dark hair swayed like fringe around his face. The congregation quieted.

Rae watched the minister. The frown lines around his mouth and between his eyes had dug deeper into his sharkbait skin than the last time she had seen him, just a few months ago at Christmas.