Authors: Jodi Thomas
Halfway to her place she seemed to need to break the silence. “I can help with Carter’s search.”
“He’s got me,” Wilkes added as if she’d forgotten about him.
She didn’t even look his direction. “If he found the drawings, surely someone else has, too.”
“Some folks don’t see what’s right in front of them.”
She seemed to get the point. “I see you, Wilkes. You’re a hard man to miss.”
He smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. He guessed what she was doing. Counting the minutes until they’d be at her place. Waiting until she could say goodbye.
After a long stretch of silence between them, he voiced his thoughts. “Angie, are you still afraid of me?”
Her laughter seemed forced. “No, Wilkes. I know it looks like I’m afraid of everything, but not you.”
He smiled hoping her words were true as he headed down the incline to the lake and her cabin. They passed the sheriff’s place. Wilkes slowed. “Margaret’s car is still parked out front.”
“That’s surprising after how they avoided each other all evening.”
He agreed and turned toward Angie’s cabin. “I don’t want to ever be like that,” he said. “I’d rather not marry at all.”
“I agree. When my mother died, my dad never got over it. I asked him once about his sadness and he said it didn’t matter. He’d take the grief for the pleasure of having been with her.”
Wilkes pulled up in front of her cabin. “You think couples get to be in heaven together?”
“Maybe a few. If they loved enough.”
Wilkes walked around the car and laughed as he opened the door. “Dan and Margaret better hope for heaven ’cause if they end up in hell the devil might skip the fire and brimstone part and simply put them together.”
He offered his hand and she laced her fingers in his.
A good sign, he thought. She was proving she wasn’t afraid of him.
As they reached the porch, he pointed to the sky. “See that quarter moon? That’s called a rustler’s moon. Enough light for rustlers to slip onto a ranch and steal cattle, but not so much that anyone on guard would see them clearly.”
She leaned back and stared up at the sky. “And what would you do, Wilkes, if you could move unseen beneath the rustler’s moon?”
“I might steal your heart, pretty lady,” he answered, halfway kidding.
She laughed. “Not likely.”
“Then I’d settle for a kiss.” The words were out before they’d passed through his mind. “I don’t know why, exactly, but there is something about you, Angie, that I find downright kissable.”
To his surprise, she met his stare. In the shadows he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Maybe something like they didn’t fit together or she had enough problems without getting involved. He didn’t want any complications, because it wouldn’t take long for her to figure out that his heart had shriveled up and died a long time ago.
“I’m not interested in playing games, Wilkes.”
“I’m not asking for forever, Angie, or even tomorrow. I just thought it might be a nice way to end the evening.”
She frowned. “So the kiss is just the after-dinner mint?”
“Something like that.” It was amazing how quickly she could make him feel like an idiot. “Never mind.”
Her hand reached out and brushed his shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.
“All right. If it doesn’t mean anything. No forever or even tomorrow. One friendly kiss.”
She wrapped her arms around him. The fact that holding this woman always felt like an attack registered in his mind about the time the softness of her pressed against him.
He realized he’d been waiting for this moment all day, maybe all his life. To kiss a woman for no reason other than it might feel good. No strings. No promises. Just the pure pleasure of holding Angie.
Her lips were one inch away, but Wilkes couldn’t move in to claim the kiss. The sudden realization that he did want more made him hesitate.
He laughed as he carefully lifted her off the ground. They were almost the same height now. For once they weren’t so mismatched.
“One kiss,” he whispered to himself.
One kiss.
He set her feet on the first step and pulled her tighter against him, wanting to see her face in the moonlight until the moment their lips met.
She smiled and tilted her head in invitation.
When his mouth lowered over hers, he kissed her slow, taking in the waves of her feelings moving from surprise to a hesitation at his boldness to passion. He didn’t know much about her past, but he had no trouble believing that she was naive to this kind of kiss.
And surprisingly, he felt the same.
* * *
W
ILKES
PULLED
AWAY
, kissing across her cheek to her ear before he whispered, “That was unbelievable, Angie. Maybe the best kiss I’ve ever had.”
She looked shy as she moved away and climbed up the steps of the cabin. “Where’d you learn to kiss like that?”
He was so busy trying to get his head around what had just happened, he didn’t think to answer. The touch of her lips hadn’t set off fireworks. No chills or light-headedness. Just a slow hunger he feared might take a lifetime to satisfy.
“I don’t think I’ve ever kissed anyone like that. Never. Usually a kiss is just something moving on to the real action, but this...this was...” He had no ending to the sentence.
She didn’t say a word. She moved a few feet away and sat very still on the porch railing with her hands in her lap.
He couldn’t stop staring at her. Maybe she couldn’t figure the kiss out, either. Hell, for all he knew she was praying the night would end.
Without a word, she stood and went in the cabin.
He waited on her porch hoping she was packing a bag and loading her cat in a carrier. If she was ending the evening, surely she would have closed the door.
Wilkes stared into the night wondering if it was too soon to ask to kiss her again. Or, maybe he wouldn’t ask, he’d simply kiss her. After all, they were two adults, not kids on a first date.
He looked up at the rustler’s moon. “I’ve gone brain-dead. I’m sounding like a teenager. Maybe I should go home and ask Vern to shoot me before I lose the three brain cells I have left.”
The light went out in the cabin and Wilkes ended his one-sided conversation.
“We’re ready,” Angie said as she stepped out of the cabin and handed him Doc Holliday.
The cat hissed, and Wilkes growled back. They were off to a great start.
On the drive back Wilkes talked about Yancy’s house that called to him. They even drove past it, but in the black of night there wasn’t much to see.
“I’m not afraid of ghosts,” she announced.
He pulled away from the house and headed back to his place. “What are you afraid of, then?”
She laughed. “Pretty much everything else.”
Thinking about it for a mile, he finally said, “Promise you’ll never be afraid of me, Angie. I never want to see the fear I saw in your eyes that first day we met.” He’d startled her. She’d jumped, falling into the display. He’d only meant to stop her tumble, but it had frightened her.
“I’ll try not to be.” She grinned in her shy way. “I am getting used to you, Wilkes.”
A few minutes later when he showed her to the bedroom farthest from his, Wilkes was polite and funny. He even swore Doc Holliday would love all the dust bunnies under the bed.
As he left her to unpack, he said, “Coffee will be on in the kitchen by seven. Uncle Vern will be sitting at the table waiting for a cup, so don’t let him startle you.”
“Thanks for everything,” she whispered.
“You’re welcome.” He glanced over his shoulder and found her staring.
“And for the best kiss I’ve ever had.” The words were so low he felt as if he read her lips more than heard.
He took a step back toward her as she slowly closed her door.
“Anytime,” he said, knowing she could no longer hear him.
Part of him wanted to pound on her door and grab her in another kiss, but he couldn’t rush this. It was too special for him and maybe for her.
He was coming alive again and he wanted to enjoy every minute for as long as it lasted. A day, or forever.
Wilkes walked to his end of the hall and whispered what he’d been thinking since he’d held her for a few minutes beneath the rustler’s moon. “One kiss is never going to be enough, Angie. Not by a long shot.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Carter
B
Y
THE
TIME
Yancy dropped Carter Mayes off at the campsite a quarter mile from the museum, Carter was almost too tired to walk up the three steps into his mobile home.
Mid-October’s wind whispered of winter moving closer, and the old man knew his time in West Texas was almost up for the year.
“You all right?” Yancy yelled from the open window of his car. “Maybe Wilkes’s chicken enchiladas didn’t agree with you.”
“I’m fine. My old bones just ache when the temperature drops. Come sunrise, I’ll be ready to go again.” He unlocked his door, and Watson met him. “My dog will keep me company for the rest of the night.”
Carter watched Yancy drive off, and the night became inky black. He turned on one reading light over his bed and told Watson all about the dinner party. The shaggy old shepherd didn’t seem all that interested.
He stripped down to his underwear, crawled into his blankets and called one of his daughters. He knew it didn’t matter which one because whomever he called would notify the other two. His girls were close, and their main hobby, since their mother died, was worrying about him.
“I’m sorry I’m late, sweetie,” he began. “I had dinner with some friends.”
He closed his eyes and listened for a few minutes. Like her mother, his daughter April had the habit of listing, in order, everything she’d done all day. Finally she ended with a question. “What friends did you have dinner with, Dad?”
“Oh, I know lots of folks here, you know. I’ve met the new curator of the museum, nice girl, and an old fellow I went to school with seventy years ago. You’re not going to believe this, sweetie, but he’s got more maps of this area than I do.”
He wiggled deeper into the covers. “I’m having a great time as always. I swear the canyons get more beautiful every year. Tell your sisters not to fret. I’ve been coming out here so many years half the people in town know me by name. I like to move the RV around now and then so as not to wear out my welcome in one spot.”
He listened to his daughter talk about his grandchildren. All together he had seven granddaughters under ten years old. He called them the seven dwarfs and couldn’t have named all seven if his life depended on it, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love every one.
Almost dozing off, Carter broke into his daughter’s account of her youngest. “I’d better call it a night. I’m tired tonight, but I’m close to finding the cave. I can feel it. Another week, maybe two. After that it’ll be too cold here, and I’ll come home for the winter.”
Carter pulled the covers close around him feeling the season’s change all the way to his bones. “Good night, sweetie. Tell your sisters that I’ll call one of them tomorrow night.” He laughed. “You know, I almost said to tell your sisters and mom that I’ll be home soon. Sometimes, when I’m really tired, I forget that she’s gone. In my mind, most days I think that maybe she’s home waiting for me when fall is over.”
He smiled as his dear daughter said good-night, then Carter laid the phone down and turned off the light as he added, “I love you all, too.”
When he passed into dreams, the stick figures with huge round heads and hollow eyes walked beside him. He never spoke to them, but they no longer frightened him.
The sound of a car pulling up behind his little mobile home was the last sound that registered in his thoughts before he slept.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Angela
W
ALKING
OUT
ONTO
Wilkes’s ranch house porch at dawn, Angie felt as if she were floating on her own private cloud. Somehow Wilkes and she had discovered something totally new. She had no doubt they’d both been rattled to the core by that one kiss last night.
They’d stepped on an uncharted planet at the same time. This new feeling wouldn’t be all that unusual for her, she’d had a very sheltered life, but Wilkes was one of those men who’d been around. He’d probably had a dozen girlfriends and flirted with hundreds. Surely he’d kissed someone before as he’d kissed her last night.
Yet when he’d looked down at her after the kiss, he looked as if he wasn’t sure what had happened. She might have dreamed about that kind of kiss, but she knew Wilkes never expected to be so shaken by it.
He left a note by the coffeepot saying he wouldn’t be able to take her into work. He was sorry, but the sheriff would drop by about eight thirty to pick her up.
She sighed. Maybe she’d read too much into last night. So much for any feelings growing out of one stolen kiss under a rustler’s moon. It was time she stepped back into the real world. Fairy-tale endings don’t happen to practical girls like her. Wilkes was simply offering to help out.
Shy women like her didn’t have romantic encounters or passionate love affairs. She was like her mother, or at least she always thought she was. She’d find someone one day who shared the same interests, wanted the same things. They’d marry and have a good partnership. No drama. No complications. No passion.
Men like Wilkes were the stuff of fantasies and dreams. She had a feeling she’d relive that one kiss a million times in her mind. Wilkes, on the other hand, would move on to one of those model-thin girls with perfect hair and cute shoes. Either he was avoiding her because he feared lightning might strike again and he’d be tempted to do something foolish, or the kiss had meant nothing and, as he said, there was no tomorrow.
She was still trying to figure it out when the sheriff arrived at Devil’s Fork to pick her up. He was easy to talk to, but she couldn’t imagine discussing a kiss with him. So all the way to the museum he told her about his daughter, Lauren, and how she’d come up with this half-baked plan to bring her crazy roommate home to the lake to recover.