The Secret of Everything (25 page)

And it had worked. Cycling, then mountain biking, had taken him into the international arena. He’d raced all over the world, landed juicy endorsements—and because he didn’t need much or even want to settle anywhere, he packed the money away, year after year, into various investments that had,
in the end, been the single smartest thing he’d done in his life. His mother, who had studied accounting at Cornell before she ran away to the West, had taken care of his investments, and it had been a boon to both of them. By the time he had his seventh and final accident at the age of thirty-three on a mountain in France, he had amassed a staggering sum.

By then he’d married Carrie and settled in Denver near her family. His mother, noticing the slow explosion of wealth creeping north from Santa Fe, counseled him to buy land. He took her advice, little thinking he would ever come back. It had been only an investment.

After Carrie’s death, he craved stability and familiarity, and he returned to a town he found much changed and to land worth millions more than he’d paid for it.

Most of it was around Los Ladrones—he’d started with a ranch that had fallen on hard times, which was where they lived now, and had begun to buy parcels around it as they came up for sale. He now had more than ten thousand acres of land, with more than six thousand acres on the river itself. Highly prized.

“No,” he said. “The land is the legacy.”

She filed the papers in a folder. “They have plenty, that’s for sure.”

On his way out of the office, he thought of Tessa, of kissing her in the stacks. Thought of the young buck who’d made all that money out of exuberance, the guy who never took things too seriously.

That man would have pursued a woman, taken his chances in the hopes of a payoff, whatever it might have been. As long as he didn’t bring his girls into the equation, there was nothing wrong with pursuing Tessa. If he was rebuffed—well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

He turned back. “Can the girls hang out here for a little while? I have some business to take care of.”

“A little while, but I need to get to the grocery store on my way home, and I’d rather miss the five o’clock rush.”

“No problem.”

He jogged across the plaza to the hotel and asked the clerk to ring Tessa’s room. “No answer, sir,” the Mexican national said politely. “Would you care to leave a message?”

“I’ll wait.”

“If you’d like, we are serving hors d’oeuvres and complimentary wine in the lobby, right through those doors.”

Vince glanced through the French doors and saw a shiny crowd nibbling on strawberries. He slapped a palm on the counter. “Thanks. I’ll wait outside.”

But then he felt like a lovesick fool, parked in front of the hotel, waiting for a woman to return. He tried her cell phone, but the signal was dropped before it went through. The mountains sometimes made cell reception unreliable.

He leaned on a heavy, ancient post and looked over the bustling plaza. It looked as if there might be a wedding this evening. Chairs were being set up beneath the tree, and someone had tied green ribbons to the low-hanging branches. A string quartet tuned their instruments, keyed into one another.

“Hello,” said a low, silky voice at his elbow. “I don’t know why I thought we could politely avoid each other in a town this size.”

“Why would we want to?” Vince turned.

Tessa stood there with the dog, her hair pulled back again into the omnipresent scrunchie. The same enticing tendrils curled around her long neck, lifted on a breeze. “Good question.”

He said, “This time, I was actually looking for you.”

“I sorta figured.” She pointed at the panting dog. “He needs to be in the shade.” She gestured down the way, and Vince nodded and followed her to a quiet, heavily shaded alley, where she pulled a bottle of water out of the backpack on her shoulder, awkwardly because of the cast.

“Let me help,” Vince said, taking the pack.

“Thanks.” She unscrewed the lid and poured water into a bowl for her dog. He slurped a hefty serving, then lay down next to the wall, panting in the heat.

“He looks great. Already fattening up,” Vince joked.

“He is a great dog, and he eats like a sixteen-year-old boy! But then, we’ve been walking a lot today, checking out all the trails around here.”

“How’s your foot doing?”

She lifted one shoulder. “Pretty good. How’s my Pedro?”

Vince grinned. “Fine. Just fine.” He pointed at the dog’s feet. “Were you at the river?”

She was drinking from the bottle now and nodded, screwing the tin lid back on. “Yeah. I’m trying to desensitize myself. I almost drowned there when I was four.”

“In the Ladrones River?”

“Yeah. I don’t remember it. Or at least I didn’t remember it until I fell in a river on a hiking trek in May. Then I remembered just enough to drive me crazy. Do you remember a forest fire?”

“Yeah, quite a few.”

“Like, mid-seventies sometime?”

Vince frowned, thinking back. Late elementary school. “I remember a few small things, you know. Nothing much.”

“There wasn’t anything in the newspaper files. I guess I have to keep looking.”

“Are you hanging around here for a while longer?”

“You sound irritated.”

“No. But I’d like to know where we stand, maybe.”

She slapped his belly. “You have to lighten up. Coming on a little strong.”

To his amazement, Vince actually flushed. “You know what? You’re right.” He gave a dry, humorless laugh. “You have no way of knowing, but this is not me.”

She caught his shoulder. “Doing it again.”

Vince turned, and she stood over him on the step. His face was a little lower than hers, and she put her hands on his face.

“Now smile,” she said.

He gave her the fakest smile he had, ear to ear, bottom teeth and all.

“Better.” She tucked her hands in her back pockets and inclined her head. “Now, here’s the question, Vince: Do you want to play—and I do mean
play
—while I’m here, or let it go? I’ll be here another week or so, and then, if I get approval, I’ll be in town to set up the tour, and we can either be … um … friends, or not.”

He put his hands on her waist, taut and lean. “Friends. Now kiss me.”

Tessa laughed and bent in, pressing her mouth to his.

And just like that, the lightness blew away. The taste of her, the smell, the way she clutched his shoulders and pressed into him, all of it. He was as horny as a fifteen-year-old at his first dance, his dick as hard as glass. Pulling back a little, he took a breath.

“Jesus,” she whispered. “The chemistry is intense, isn’t it?”

He leaned closer, met her eyes and pressed their bodies together. “I want to fuck you until you can’t stand up.”

“That would take some doing,” she returned, and he dug his fingers into her back, laughing.

His phone rang, the sharp trill that signaled work. “Sorry,” he growled, and pulled it off his belt, keeping one hand around her body so she wouldn’t run away. “Grasso here.”

“We’ve got three lost teens in Rifle Canyon.”

“Missing since when?”

“Yesterday,” Jason said. “They were supposed to report back by five p.m. and still haven’t.”

“Damn it. Five last night? Why didn’t they call yesterday?”

“Who the hell knows.”

“I’ll be there in twenty,” he said, and hung up. “Sorry, gotta go.”

“You’re just doing this to raise the anticipation, aren’t you?” she said, slanting him a hot look. “You want me to sit up in my room fantasizing about what you’re going to do to me when you get back.”

His entire body reacted to that visual. He kissed her, deep. “Hold that thought. I’ll call you.” Straightening, bringing them both back to the real world, he added, “There’s no way of knowing when I’ll be finished, or even if it will be today, or what kind of shape I’ll be in when I’m done.”

“I get it.” She lifted a shoulder. “You know where to find me.”

   V
ita liked to run in the last light of the day, before twilight came creeping in with its ghosts. Along with cooking, running had been her salvation, and perhaps the two together were a good combination, because she’d never put on weight, which was more and more a surprise the older she got. She wasn’t vain about it—considered it a lucky accident of preferences and genes.

Tonight, the oppressive heat that could sometimes fill the valley in September had finally been blown down the river by a vigorous wind, and Vita decided not to run the long trail down by the river—there was always the slight worry over West Nile, which had hit the town pretty hard a couple of years back. Vita never got it, thank heaven. Mindful of the threat, she ran the perimeter of the town on a dry dirt trail. She’d already run her one marathon of the year, the Chicago, so she wasn’t in training. Just running for pleasure and stress relief and to keep her bones strong. The air smelled of dust and crushed leaves and sage, a scent that would be in her clothes when she got home.

The trail looped behind the plaza and around through open pine woods, down along a flat, open stretch lined with prickly pear and walking-stick cactus, over the trail to the lake, and
back down. As she ran, she rearranged recipes and let the day flow through her feet into the ground, where she left annoyances like the dishwasher who had been a no-show for the third time and a delivery of bad bananas. She thought of skinny Annie and her bad hair, humming under her breath as she flipped a pair of eggs, and of Vince Grasso glowering at Tessa the other day in the restaurant—something going on there, that was for sure; Vince didn’t bother with women much.

A lot to bother with in Tessa, Vita thought. Whenever Vita was with her, she had the sense of glimpsing an iceberg—just the edge, not enough to make sense of. A sense that there was more to her than she said, than she wanted to reveal. It made Vita careful in return, guarded, and she never was these days. Tessa was hiding something, but Vita didn’t think there was anything malicious about it.

Why, then? What did she really want in Los Ladrones?

God knew there was plenty for all of them to get twitchy about. Secrets aplenty, especially at Green Gate, that terrible summer. They all kept expecting the past to dry up like dust—they were in their sixties!—but it never did.

She completed her six-mile trek and slowed to a walk, cooling down as she came back into town. A fox dashed across her path, and Vita caught her breath. Seeing something like that startled and delighted her every single time, which was one big reason to never return to the cities of her youth. Wonder was worth pursuing.

If not for the fox, she might not have seen the man skulking along the apartment block above the western block of shops. He was lean and dark, beautiful in that sensual way that could be so dangerous, and his hair was tied back in a leather string. He was clearly stalking something. Someone. Looking at the windows, along the ground. Vita pulled out her phone and
shot a picture. She would show the police, because, even though they sometimes laughed at her worries, they also understood, and they loved her for her protectiveness of the young women who came through the diner.

She watched until he skulked away, then looked to see if she could make out what—or who—he was watching. There, framed clearly by a kitchen window with little clippings of plants in jars, was Annie.

Vita’s blood ran cold. The woman had never said, but the evidence of an abuser was all over her face and body. Tonight, Vita would take the cell phone pic to the police. Maybe she wouldn’t show Annie yet. She was just beginning to feel a sense of safety. It would be a shame to knock that out from under her.

Tessa had dinner, then collected all of the notes she had made on the town, the farm, and the restaurants and began to arrange them into an itinerary for her boss. Working with the door open to the breeze, she typed it all in and then wrote a letter giving him an idea of the overview.