The Secret of Everything (29 page)

Tessa thought about the way he’d listened to her, and she gave him the same in return. She couldn’t reach that spot on his shoulders, so she rubbed her hand over his belly, the only place on him that had any softness.

“Everyone always feels so sorry for me, this widower with three little girls, wife’s a suicide, how could she do that.” He shook his head. “I fucked up,” he said plainly. “And there isn’t a
damned thing I can ever do to make that better. But I also think that we can’t always save people. Sometimes, fate is lying there like a snake, and it’ll take you no matter what you do to try to stop it.”

“Maybe,” Tessa said.

Vince shifted and put his hands on her face. “I’m going to kiss you now,” he said, and Tessa nodded. And then they didn’t do a lot more talking, and it felt like fate, though Tessa really tried to tell herself that was foolish and girlish and she was old enough to know better.

In her dream, Tessa was small and standing on the edge of the cliff. A woman held hard to her hand, and Tessa was screaming,
“Mommy, no, Mommy!”
and trying to pull away. On the other side was another child, also screaming, but Mommy was strong, and she dragged them with her, diving over the side, where she let go. Tessa felt the long, empty drop, tasted smoke in the air, and then came the foamy plunge into the icy water, down, down, down, bubbles coming up all around her. Her foot touched bottom, and she pushed off as hard as she could, bobbing up into the night, the darkness, the flickering orange light in the distance. She clung, coughing, to a tangle of roots, screaming,
“Help! Help! Help!
Help!”

And then there were hands hauling her up out of the water, dripping and shivering violently, crying. Crying. The person pulling her out of the water held her against his chest. Sam.
“I’ve got you, baby. You’re okay now. Breathe.”

She fought against him, screaming, and then she kicked herself awake, falling into her own bed, pressed up against a broad, naked male back.

For a long moment she was disoriented, unable to place herself
in time or location or her life. What bed was this? What room? Which dog sleeping on her feet?

Slowly, the shape of the French doors revealed themselves. Los Ladrones, then. Vince. She moved, pressing her smaller body around his, an arm snaking down around his waist. She was shivering in reaction, and his skin, so hot and smooth, warmed her. Tucking her forehead into the hollow of his spine, she found it possible to stop shivering.

Vince turned and gathered her into the solid circle of his body. “You all right?” he rumbled.

“Bad dream,” she said, and tried to go back to sleep. But every time she closed her eyes, she saw the dramatic plunge into the water, and all the cold terror came with it.

After a while, Vince said, “Are you asleep?”

She said, “No, are you?”

“Do you want to go get something to eat?”

Tessa laughed. “It’s the middle of the night!”

“So? I’m a big guy. I haven’t had anything to eat since lunch at 100 Breakfasts, and it’s been pretty busy since then.” As if to underscore the plea, his stomach growled. Loudly. “See?”

“Okay. I could eat,” she said.

He smoothed a hand upward, cupping her breast. “You have no idea what a relief this has been. Just being with somebody, letting everything go.”

“Ditto,” she said. Light from the doors edged his mussed hair, the curve of his shoulder. “Kind of a surprise for me, too.”

“A surprise?” He lifted up on one elbow. “How so?”

“I don’t know.” She felt shy, revealed now in the pale light. “It’s really easy to be around you. Like I already know you.”

“Maybe it’s not just dogs who come back to life. Maybe we knew each other in Mesopotamia.”

“Could we make it somewhere a little more interesting? Medieval Venice or something?”

“I can go with Venice. Were you a courtesan?” He traced a circle around her breast.

“Oh, no. I was the haughtiest noblewoman in the whole of the town. And you”—she narrowed her eyes, letting the story unfold—“were a bishop in the church, sworn to uphold vows of chastity until death.”

The tips of his fingers skimmed her throat, and he bent close enough to brush his lips over her lower lip. “Was I successful?”

“What do you think?”

Vince rolled her over onto her back, his hands on either side of her shoulders, and nestled in between her legs. She felt him nudging her, playfully, heatedly. He bent, slowly, slowly, slowly, and touched his mouth to hers, swirled his tongue over hers, and she met him in kind, running her hands over his chest, then his arms and buttocks, poised for a plunge. “I think you drove me mad,” he growled, “and I took you when your husband was in the other room.”

Tessa laughed throatily “Show me.”

He dove in, and then they were tangled again, making love with a fierceness Tessa couldn’t remember feeling for a long time. A long time. His hands moved on her chest and caressed her heart. His breath moved on her lips and animated some dead fragment of her soul. His voice, ragged and rumbling and rich, set thrumming some answering sound in her own throat. Everything shivered when he touched her. Everything blazed.

Dangerous
, she thought as they moved.

He braced himself over her and put his hands beside her face. “Look at me, Tessa.”

Her breath was shallow as she opened her eyes.

“Promise you’ll tell me before you leave town.”

“I promise,” she whispered. “I promise.” Then they were both sliding away into their own shared world, constructed when they met, demolished when they parted. Unique in all of time.

Vince drove them out to a truck stop off the interstate, nearly thirty miles away, where no one would see them or even care. Felix came with them, riding in the back. He curled up happily on a blanket but didn’t want to be left behind.

The humans settled under the green fluorescent glare in a booth next to a window, where they could see his truck. An individual jukebox and heavy white mugs ready for coffee furnished the table. A skinny, heavily eyelinered waitress in a pale-pink uniform and white shoes shuffled over to slap menus down. “Coffee?” she asked, pot poised over cups.

“I’ll have tea, please,” Tessa said. “Very hot water, if you can.” The woman nodded. She poured coffee for Vince, gathered a handful of mini-creamers out of her pocket, and set them down gently. Tessa shot Vince a cheerful wink. Her cheeks were rosy.

He excused himself to wash his hands, and when he came back out, she was studying the menu with great intensity. She had the look of a woman who’d been having sex for hours—the slightly swollen mouth, little nick of passion on her throat, eyes sleepy. Her hair always looked slightly untidy, and in truth it was no different now, but it added to the general postcoital look. He wondered if the other men noticed and glanced around, glaring at them, as savagely protective as a bear.

Chill, he told himself, rejoining her, but then she looked up
with those light-green anime eyes and he realized he was in trouble. He’d been doing fine the past year or so, getting laid now and then, taking care of the girls. He was tired. He was lonely. But he’d been doing okay.

Tessa suddenly made that world seem like a sepia photograph—a still life absent color or passion. He bent his head to study the menu. “What are you having?” he growled.

“I don’t know, Mr. Bear,” she said, and lowered her own voice to a growl. “What do you recommend?”

He glanced up to catch the shine in her eyes. “Not oatmeal.”

She smiled. “I’m way too hungry for oatmeal.” She slapped the laminated menu closed. “I’m having the works—eggs, bacon, hash browns, biscuits, and gravy.”

He grinned. “Hungry, doll?”

She raised an eyebrow. “All we ever do is eat and have sex, you notice?”

“We had a picnic.”

“Only by accident,” she said. “And that’s eating.”

“True.” The girl returned, and Vince ordered blueberry pancakes, eggs, sausage, and milk. Tessa ordered her massive meal, too, then turned her attention to the jukebox.

“Hmm. Do you think they’d get mad if we played things?”

He glanced around. There were three men hunched at intervals over the counter, likely all truckers stopping in for a cup of coffee so they could keep going another couple hundred miles. “Probably.”

“Too bad. They have all kinds of good stuff.”

“What would you play?”

“Aerosmith, and Guns N’ Roses, maybe a little Led Zeppelin.”

“Really?”

She grinned. “No. I thought you’d like them, though.”

“Good call.” He leaned in to see the selections. “Yeah. ‘Dream On.’ ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’ ‘Black Dog.’ All good.”

“So predictable,” she said with a
tsk
.

“What would you choose, Ms. Supercilious?”

She flashed him a coquettish glance. “Beach Boys. ABBA. Motown. All happy, all the time, much to my father’s despair.”

“Not what I would have expected.” He stirred three sugars into his coffee. “Don’t tell me—you have a secret passion for
The Sound of Music
.”

“Not secret. I
love
it. And
The Music Man
, and every Disney song every recorded, and all the bubble-gum-pink pop you can think of.”

Vince shook his head in disbelief. “And I was worried about being cool in front of you, world traveler and Renaissance festival woman.”

“You should see my iPod lists. My dad literally groaned aloud when he saw it. Not”—she rolled her eyes—“that I can get him to own an iPod.”

“My mom probably knows your dad, you know.”

“I suppose they probably would know each other. Or did.” She shook her head. “Weird to think of them all in that world, right? All young and full of passion and vision.” She inclined her head. “And look what came of it, too—the farm, which is cool.”

Vince let her ramble, sleepy and overamped from too little sleep and lots of sex. Her oddly deep, musical voice washed over him in welcome waves. He watched her red mouth moving, and the float of a hand drawing a point in the air, and her thin, long eyelashes, and the tiny elliptical fold at the corner of her eye that gave her that Asian anime look. He looked at the hollow of her throat and the curve of a breast, and everything about her was exactly perfect.

It occurred to him that he had fallen, hard.

And he suddenly had a suspicion that he knew who she was. He’d have to check out some pictures at his mother’s house. If he was right, her story was a lot more complicated than she thought.

For now he wouldn’t say a word. He would just drift on waves of Tessa, lazily and at peace for the first time in longer than he could remember.

   I
t was the first very sharp morning of the year, and Vita started making biscuits and sausage for the morning special. Nothing like a solid plate of biscuits and gravy to get a person moving. She was vain about her biscuits, which she’d learned to make from a Southern girl who’d lived at the Boulder house, decades before. They always turned out light and fluffy and tender, no matter how she grew the recipe.

It wasn’t yet dawn when Annie came in. Vita had taken the cell-phone picture over to the police station, but they said it was too murky to see well. She scowled and told them to keep an eye on the area anyway. She really didn’t want to disturb Annie’s peace.

“Hey, kid,” Vita said now. “Hungry? I’m about to put the biscuits in the oven.”

Annie huddled by the door, her hands behind her. “I actually came in early to get your advice about something.”

“Okay.” She wiped her hands on a towel. “What’s up?”

“Can you come outside for a minute?”

Vita followed the girl out. Woman. It was hard to think of the skinny little thing as a full-grown woman, even if she was
in her mid-thirties. The back door opened into a fenced area, then into an alleyway where the dumpster was.

Annie knelt and picked up a white cat that was nearly as skinny as Annie herself. “This is Athena. She showed up at my door and I’ve been feeding her. I know I shouldn’t have, but …” Annie bent and kissed the cat’s face, and Athena purred, tucking her head against Annie’s jaw. “She’s just so sweet.”

And you’ve been so lonely
, Vita thought. She rubbed a hand over the cat’s skinny back. “She’s a beauty. Does she have seven toes?”

“Yes! How did you know?”

“There’s a whole community of seven-toed cats around here. A lot of them are Siamese mixes, but a lot of others are all black or all white. They’ve lived here since the Spanish came.”

“Wow. You hear that, sweetie?”

Vita waited for Annie to get to her request. It was sure to be a request. Women in her circumstances had few resources and fewer places to turn. “I want to keep her, but I have to find a new place to live. And I might need some help with that. I mean, I don’t have a lot of money, and I don’t want to get in trouble with my parole officer or anything like that.” She raised her pale eyes to Vita’s face. “My ex-husband killed my last cat. And I just want to keep Athena, and this way she gets a good place to live, too.”

The women and girls who came through Vita’s kitchen all stole her heart in one way or another, even when they couldn’t make it work on the outside and ended up back in jail, but something about Annie made her ache all through her middle. Vita smiled. “That is the most I’ve ever heard you say.”