Different Dreams (6 page)

Malou was astonished by the change. Or had Cameron merely reverted to his true nature?

Behind her, in a voice so soft that only she could hear it, Bambi whimpered in her sleep.

W
atching Ernie and Cameron glare
at one another made Malou acutely uncomfortable. If they were macaques, she thought, fur would have flown or the dominant male would have chased off his underling by now. Such tension could never be supported in the wild.

“If you need me, I'll be in the lab.” Ernie broke first, stomping away and slamming the door behind him. Cameron had prevailed.
Dominance does not mean right,
Malou reminded herself. She was certain that Cameron Landell had not gotten to where he was in his world by making a habit of backing down. Or of being overburdened with scruples.

In the silence that followed, Bambi's whimpers seemed to grow louder. Huddled tightly against the clean towel, her parchment-thin eyelids twitched as she followed the course of a nightmare.

“There must be a storm on Storm Mountain,” Cameron
commented. Malou was surprised that he'd remembered her references to the monkeys' ancestral home. She warned herself that she would do well to keep in mind the fact that Cameron Landell didn't miss much and that he forgot even less. As the bad dream receded, the baby monkey's whimperings subsided and she relaxed.

“Your friend certainly had a burr up his . . . under his saddle,” Cameron continued.

“He
was
pretty upset,” Malou replied noncommittally. “I think it's understandable.” She recognized in her own voice the arid, detached quality it took on when she was attempting to be scientific, objective. Cameron noticed it too.

“
Highly
understandable,” he repeated. “Listen, I don't know what the options are here for keeping the troop intact, and you sure didn't present any viable ones at our first meeting. Want to give it another shot?”

It took Malou all of five seconds to drop her suspicions and her pose of scientific detachment. “You mean it? You really want to hear my ideas for keeping the troop together?”

Her breathless eagerness caused the hint of a smile to flicker across Cameron's lips. “Something like that, yes. You are still interested, I presume.”

Malou had to take a moment to collect herself. But only a moment, for all the wild schemes she'd conjured up in the long sleepless hours of the past five nights
bubbled close to the surface. “Grants,” she blurted out. “Given the unique family records we have on the troop, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to get all kinds of grants for genetic studies. Then there's the whole incredible topic of the troop's adaptation. From piney, snowy mountains to cactus prairie. That's at least a dozen studies right there. And all the social interaction, the dominance structure. We're only just beginning to understand that. Then there's—”

“Whoa. Hold on there,” Cameron broke into her pell-mell inventory of possibilities. “With grants, you're talking foundations, bureaucracies. It would be months, years, before agencies like that could come up with funding. We're going to need a few speedier solutions than that. Something on the order of three weeks, when my note falls due at the end of May.”

“Oh,” Malou said, her enthusiasm draining away.

“Look, don't go all glum and wimpy on me. If we're going to work together on this, there's one thing you need to know—Landell Acres takes precedence over everything.” He fixed her with a gaze of deadly intensity. “It's
the
project I've been working toward my whole life. Before this, I've only been developing land. For the first time, I'll be building on it as well. The stakes are high. In this particular case, they're a bit too high. Do you understand?”

Malou nodded weakly.

“Good, because no man, and
certainly
no monkey, is going to stand in the way of my completing Landell Acres.”

“We might be able to get some kind of an emergency award if we let the foundations know what the situation is.”

“Go to it. Get on the phone and start calling around.”

Malou was already pulling her cell phone from her pocket when she remembered one significant detail. “I can't get a signal down here.”

“What about the ranch house? There's supposed to be a land line. You can make your calls from up there.”

Malou looked around her. The baby—she'd have to stay for the baby. No, Ernie could certainly mix up formula as well as she could. Observation notes? Clearly the survival of the troop was more important than a few hours of missed notes. No, she really had no excuse for not going with Cameron Landell. No excuse other than fear of being alone with him. She scratched out a quick note to Ernie giving him Bambi's feeding schedule and explaining where she'd gone. “Let's hit the road,” she said, taping the note to a spot where Ernie was sure not to miss it—the front of the refrigerator.

The interior of the Escalade was all rosewood, with pewter leather seats that felt like a kid glove against the bare backs of Malou's legs. She drank in its deep, rich smell as the barely perceptible hum of the finely tuned engine sent smooth vibrations purring through her. After
so many months of no-frills living at the research station punctuated by dusty, jarring jeep trips into Laredo for supplies, she sank gratefully into this moment of luxury. The main road leading to the ranch house was lined with wildflowers—bluebonnets, Indian paintbrushes, wild daisies. It was a riot of unending color.

Cameron scrutinized the passing landscape. Slowing down, he arched his torso slightly forward so that he could jam a hand into his jeans pocket. Malou was not unaware of the play of strongly developed muscles beneath Cameron's shirt and trousers as he wriggled a hand into his pocket and brought forth a crudely drawn map. “I got directions over the phone from Stallings's foreman, Jorge, and since his English is about as bad as my Spanish, I'm not terribly confident of this map I drew. You've never been to the ranch house, I take it.”

“No. Mr. Stallings was very jealous of his privacy. He never invited any of the researchers to his home.”

“This must be it,” Cameron said, matching the scrawled lines on the crumpled paper to a road ahead. They turned off on an asphalt road that curved beneath a rusted wrought-iron arch. At the crown of the arch was a tipped-over S representing Stallings's Lazy S brand. “This ranch house had better really be something,” Cameron grumbled as they moved out of sight of the highway. “It would have to be to make Stallings's property worth even a third of what he claimed.”

The road dipped down through a low water crossing. A thin trickle of water ran across it. “Bet that's hell when it rains,” Cameron noted disapprovingly.

Malou barely glanced at it or noticed when the paving ended. She was spellbound by the beauty of the property. An infinity of tender spring green stretched out all around her, wrapping the land in the promise of new life that sprang forth like a miracle each year to defy the harsh surroundings. With the trained eye of an ethologist, she caught glimpses of animal life that most people would have missed. Of startled deer peering through the foliage. Of armadillos trundling through the underbrush. Of javelinas bolting away from the sound of the oncoming car.

“It's remarkably unspoiled,” she exalted.

“Yes, and even more remarkably undeveloped,” Cameron groused. “I haven't seen any of the improvements, the fences, the pastureland, the buildings that Stallings told me were here.”

They emerged from the jungle of green and rounded a curve. At its end sat a lovely stone house.

“It's like something out of a Grimm's fairy tale,” Malou breathed in wonder at the small structure almost buried in the dense vegetation.

“It's pretty grim all right. But the only way it's connected to a fairy tale is how Stallings portrayed it to me.” Malou noticed that as he shook his head in disgust, most of it seemed to be directed against himself.

Outside the car, Malou caught the tumbling, crystal song of a canyon wren and the poignant scent of the wisteria-like purple blossoms of the mountain laurel. A creek sparkled in the distance, cutting a silver trail around the giant trunks of century-old live oaks. She touched the stone of the house and wondered what long-dead craftsman had chiseled it with such delicate precision. For her, the air was as redolent with enchantment as it was with the sweet scent of the mountain laurels.

Even Cameron could not remain totally immune to its spell. With each fragrant breath he inhaled, a bit more of the tension that coiled around him eased its grip. “Pretty,” he pronounced the deliberately tepid verdict. “Not profitable, but pretty. God, if you could only put pretty in the bank, all our problems would be solved.”

“But you can't,” Malou sighed.

“Not unless you happen to have a highly unusual banker. In which case I'd like to meet him. Soon.”

That little bit of levity was all that was needed to bring the scene's magic to life. As they approached the front door, Cameron halted her. “Uh-uh-uh,” he warned, pointing to the base of the massive door, which was supported by a sturdy oak plank. “That is a threshold if I've ever seen one. Custom demands that I carry you across it.”

Malou was trapped securely in his arms before she had a chance to protest, “I'm pretty sure that custom only applies to newlyweds.”

“Who wants to risk it?” he asked, pressing close to her as he leaned in to turn the knob. With a grand step, he crossed the threshold. “You know,” he said, pausing on the other side, a distracted look on his face, “I can't remember another time in my entire life when I've swept a woman off her feet, and now I've done it twice in one day. What do you suppose it means?”

“That you're in training for Olympic weight lifting?” Malou hazarded.

“Cute. Criminally cute.”

And, there in a stone house smack in the middle of spring, with the fragrance of mountain laurel blending with birdsong, held for the second time in
her
life within a man's strong arms, Malou
felt
cute. She didn't feel like a dedicated researcher and the winner of several prestigious awards in her field. She felt cute. Criminally cute. “We've made it across the threshold, Cameron.”

Without making the slightest move to put her down, he said, “Call me Cam. It'll take so much less effort—and breath.”

“All right . . . Cam. But we've still crossed the threshold.”

He glanced down. “So we have.” He let her slide to the floor. “You wouldn't happen to have a small monkey handy that we could perch on your shoulder? That seemed to have made wonderful things happen earlier.”

“I didn't think you'd noticed.” Malou turned away to
hide the goofy grin spreading across her face and to tamp down the intoxicating rush of feelings bubbling through her as if a geyser of champagne had been unloosed. She forced herself to focus on the interior of the house. The living room they'd stepped into was dominated by a fireplace of fieldstone. The oak floors shone with the rich gleam of decades of polishing. Charming watercolors, botanical drawings of the local plants, hung from the thick walls. The furniture was sturdy and wood. A candlestick phone was mounted on a wall by the door leading into the kitchen, where a pump handle curled up over the sink.

“It's a place out of time,” Cam said in a low voice, just beginning to take everything in. “Other than the phone, there's not a thing in here from even the twentieth century.”

Malou looked around from the old cast-iron pot hanging in front of the fireplace to the wooden butter churn sitting beside the sink in the sunny kitchen. “You're right,” she whispered, an eerie feeling seizing hold of her.

“No TV. No air-conditioning. No electric lights,” he said, taking an inventory of all the artifacts of the twentieth century that were missing from the cozy dwelling.

“It's hard to believe that Mr. Stallings conducted all his business dealings from here.”

“He
did
have a telephone,” Cam said, picking up the old-fashioned receiver and holding it out to Malou so that she too could hear the dial tone.

“And a gramophone,” Malou declared, opening up a mahogany box to reveal an old crank-type record player. A stack of thick 78 RPM records stood beside it. “ ‘By the Light of the Moon,' ‘Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree,' ‘Chattanooga Choochoo.' ” Malou read out the titles.

“What a strange old codger,” Cam said, studying the books on a shelf. All were bound in dark leather, black and maroon, their titles lettered in gold on their spines. A complete collection of Dickens, some Robert Louis Stevenson, several slim volumes of poetry, and several more thick books on botany. Cam moved into the kitchen. “At least we won't starve,” he called out. “Ample supply of canned goods. Hope you like peas, Spam, and peaches.”

“My favorites,” Malou answered. “Right up there with Chateaubriand and Godiva chocolates.”

“And we certainly won't go thirsty,” Cam announced, stepping back into the living room, a bottle in either hand. “At least the old boy had taste in what he drank. Glenlivet scotch and good Kentucky bourbon.”

For a fleeting moment, with Cam framed in the doorway, beaming with pride in his discovery and absorbed with boyish curiosity, Malou wished it really could have been her threshold he'd carried her across. That this were their own little house, far from the rest of the world and all the problems pressing in on both of them. The memory of the most pressing of those problems broke the spell. “I'd better start trying to get in touch with some
foundation heads.” She dragged a stool up next to the kitchen door.

“Right. Work,” Cam reminded himself as he put the bottles down and headed back outside. He returned with a leather attaché case and settled down on the sofa to begin reading through a stack of legal-sized documents.