Something Wild (19 page)

Charity lifted Mike’s hand from her leg and dropped it off to the side. Being the brute that he was, he put it right back, and continued his thumb swirling.

“It’s a shame you won’t be joining us,” Fay said, leaning her folded arms on the tabletop and glaring at Charity as if she’d done something wrong. “I’m sure you’d enjoy the hazelnut torte as much as Pastor Mike. And then,” Fay said, at last directing her attention on Mike, “don’t forget you’ve promised to have Sunday dinner with us.”

“I don’t know if I can make it.”

“Nonsense. A promise is a promise, and Raylene’s spent the last week preparing a lovely menu. Peanut-crusted roast pork, baby peas, my mother’s secret-ingredient scalloped potatoes.”

“I don’t know, Fay.”

“I know how busy you get sometimes.” Her eyes narrowed as she studied the portion of Mike’s arm that was visible above the table. “You know we always eat at three on Sunday. If you’re there, you’re there. Seth Colton will be coming, too, and naturally he’ll be bringing those five hooligans of his. Never known a man who needed a wife more, with the exception of you, Pastor.”

Mike’s jaw tightened as Fay bustled up from the table, but he didn’t say a word, made no comment at all as Fay stuck out her hand to Charity. “It was lovely to see you again.”

Charity stood, moving away from Mike’s stilled fingers, and shook Fay’s hand. “Thanks for the cinnamon rolls. They’re delicious.”

“Family recipe. I’ve already passed it down to Raylene, and she makes them once or twice a week.” Fay looked at Mike and smiled. “You’ve tasted the ones she makes, haven’t you Michael?”

Mike’s chair scraped the floor as he got up. “I’ve tasted them, Fay, and they’re every bit as good as yours.”

“I’ll be sure to tell Raylene that. You never know, she just might bring them by for you occasionally, rather than me making the trip.”

At last Mike chuckled, breaking some of the tension Charity felt. “You do that, Fay.”

A few minutes later, bundled in her coat, hat, and gloves, Fay was in her car, waving goodbye to Mike as he stood in the open doorway. When the car pulled away, he closed the door and turned, fixing his eyes on Charity. “I’m sorry about that.”

“She’s ... nice.”

“She’s a busybody, but she means well.”

“She thinks something’s going on between us. Why didn’t you tell her the truth?”

Mike frowned as he lifted the coffeepot and poured himself another cup. “I didn’t see any need to make excuses. Nothing happened, Charity.”

“That doesn’t mean the minister and the showgirl won’t end up being the talk of the territory.”

“You won’t be here to listen to it, so what does it matter?”

“I don’t like being thought of in a bad light. I don’t want people to think about me and say, ‘Oh, she’s the one that led our good pastor astray.’”

“I did the leading, Charity. If I hear any rumors, I’ll squelch them.”

Setting his mug on the counter, Mike crossed the room, slipped his arms around Charity’s waist and pulled her against him. He felt so good, so right, yet everything between them was wrong.

“I’ve got to get ready for church. Are you going with me?”

Charity shook her head. It was so tempting to stay in his arms, to forget about going home, but there was nothing here for her except a man who lusted after her body but was still in love with his wife. If the paintings in the living room and Mike’s constant thoughts about Jessie hadn’t been enough to convince her of that, Fay’s words had.

She slipped out of his arms and went to the laundry room for her clothes. Getting out of here, away from Mike’s heated eyes, from his restrained desire, might not be what she wanted, but she had no other choice.

Mike leaned against the door jamb just inches away from her and watched while she pulled her jeans, sweater, and underwear from the dryer.

“Mind turning around while I get dressed,” she asked, making a circle with her index finger. She half expected him to say he’d already seen her naked and seeing her again without a stitch on wouldn’t bother him in the least, but he did as she asked and turned his back.

“I don’t remember ever sleeping so good,” he told her as she pulled off the mostly unbuttoned flannel shirt and dropped it in the laundry basket.

“You were exhausted.” She slipped her sweater over her head, tugged her still dirty but dry jeans over the borrowed boxers, and worked the zipper up. “Anyone would have slept good.”

“I’ve gone without sleep before, more times than I can count. Sleep still didn’t come easily, and when it did I’d end up waking off and on, or I’d toss and turn. Having you in my arms made sleeping easy.”

“Maybe I should bottle little bits and pieces of myself. I could probably make a fortune on the sleeping-pill market.”

“I’d buy every bottle.”

She’d give them to him free of charge if she felt it was the right thing to do. But he wasn’t thinking straight right now. He wanted Jessie, not her.

Shoving her underwear in the pockets of her jeans, she grabbed her boots and tried to walk past him, but he latched on to her waist and tugged her against his chest. “Stay,” he whispered against her ear.

“Why?” She dropped her boots at her side and pressed her hands against his chest to keep some distance between them. “Because you sleep better when I’m around?”

“Because I like having you around.”

“Do you say the same thing to everyone you offer a job to?” She pushed away from him and crossed to the kitchen window, where she stared out at the clear blue sky and a vast land coated with snow.

“This has nothing to do with a job, Charity.”

She faced him again, leaning against the counter for support. “I know. It has to do with you and me and some strange kind of lust we feel for each other. But that’s it. Lust. Desire. Nothing more.”

“How can there possibly be any more if you don’t give us a chance?”

“What if I did give us a chance and it didn’t work out?”

“Then you could go back to Vegas knowing we tried.”

“It’s a crapshoot, Mike, and the odds are against us. I’m not going to gamble with what I’ve worked so hard to build for myself.”

“What have you built? A superficial string of jobs that go nowhere? What are you going to do when you’re older, when you can’t dance any longer, when your body isn’t young and firm?”

She glared at him, hating his words. As hard as she tried to hold it back, a tear slipped from her eyes. “I hoped you’d understand. I hoped you’d be better than all the other people who’ve told me my choice was crazy. But you’re no better than the rest.”

Slumping down in a kitchen chair, she yanked on a sock and tried to shove her foot in her boot, but Mike stilled her hands, grasping them tightly in his.

“That wasn’t fair.” He crouched down in front of her and reached a hand toward her face to wipe away her tear, but she pulled back. “I’m sorry,” he added.

“Don’t be. You haven’t said anything that I haven’t thought about before.”

“You know it’s a dead-end job.”

“That’s the way it appears to you, but to me it’s a dream. It’s the only thing I’ve done in my life that hasn’t been forced on me, and I’m not going to give up until I make my dream come true.”

The knock at the door startled both of them. Mike thrust his hand through his hair. “We need to talk, Charity.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she said, shoving her other foot into her boot as Mike stood, ignoring the next series of knocks on the front door. “You’ve got to get ready for church, and I have to pack and catch a plane for home.”

“I’ll come to Vegas.”

“Why? So you can see firsthand what I do on stage? So you can preach at me about what’s wrong about my job?”

“You really think that’s what I want to do?”

The knock was louder this time. Charity pushed out of the chair, grabbed her coat, hanger and all, from the laundry room and pushed past Mike. “That could be Jack. He said he’d come get me this morning.”

Mike trailed after her as she rushed to the front door and pulled it open.

Max stood in the doorway, looking in an all-fired hurry. Behind him Charity could see Jack sitting in the truck with the engine running.

“Something wrong?” Charity asked her brother, worried that something dreadful had happened at the ranch house, or maybe Lauren was about to have her baby early.

“The airline called a little while ago. They’ve had to move up your flight.”

“To when?” Mike asked, grasping her shoulders, pressing his chest against her back.

“A few hours from now. We’ve got to go or you’ll miss it.”

“Now?” Charity felt rushed, confused. “But I’ve got to pack.”

“Your bags are in the truck.”

“I haven’t said goodbye or thanks to anyone, j—”

“Jack says there’s another storm blowing in and if you don’t go, there’s no telling when you can get out of here.”

“She’ll be out in a second,” Mike said.

“No. I’ll go now.”

Mike held her back and Max looked from one to the other. “I’ll wait in the truck. Come out when you’re ready.”

Mike all but closed the door in Max’s face. He twisted Charity around and cupped her cheeks in his hands. There were dark shadows under his eyes. He was still tired, but there was something else in his gaze, something she couldn’t read.

“I’m in love with you, Charity. God help me, I didn’t want it to happen, not when we’ve known each other such a short time. But it did happen, and it scares the hell out of me.”

She found herself laughing cynically, when she really wanted to cry. “Is that heartfelt declaration supposed to make me want to stay with you?”

“I’ve only told one other woman that I love her—”

“And you still love her! Look at this place.” Charity cast her eyes around the painting-filled room. “Jessie’s everywhere you turn. Your house is full of her paintings. You keep a picture of her in your Bible. She’s in your thoughts, in your dreams.”

“You’re wrong. You don’t understand.”

“You’re right, I don’t understand. But I don’t have the time for explanations.”

She pressed her hands against his chest and pushed away, flinging open the door and stepping out into the bitterly cold morning. “I’ve got a suggestion, though, Mike. Don’t tell any other woman you love her until you’re sure it wasn’t a mistake, some big fluke of nature playing a trick on you. Make sure you’re happy about it instead of being scared shitless. And please, until you can say it without thinking of Jessie at the same time, keep it to yourself.”

With that said, she ran for the truck, for a plane that wouldn’t wait, for another job in Vegas that might never lead anywhere, and she didn’t look back.

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Charity lounged beside the pool,
soaking up Las Vegas’s springtime sun, a can of Diet Coke dangling in the fingers of one hand. She wedged a cordless phone between her shoulder and her ear. Her free hand, meanwhile, toyed with the braid slung over her shoulder as she and Sam Remington caught up on life away from the ranch and at it, just as they’d done every week for the past two months.

“So what’s Logan doing now?” Sam asked, always concerned about her friend’s friends, whether she knew them or not.

Charity tilted her head and looked at the
ex-detective
sitting next to her, working on a tan that didn’t need much working on.

“Right now he’s circling job opportunities in the want ads.”

“For himself?”

“Oh, no. He hasn’t quite figured out what he’s going to do with himself since he quit his job, but he’s determined to find something for me. Something, I might add, that he feels is a little more my style, like being secretary to a podiatrist or answering phones at a mental health clinic.”

Logan shot her a grin, then double-circled what looked to be another low-paying, tedious, eight-to-five job. Sam, however, was silent at the other end of the phone. Finally she said, “What happened to the job singing backup for Elvis at the Heartbreak Hotel and Wedding Parlor?”

“It was the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel and Honeymoon Haven and”—Charity let out her frustration on a long-winded sigh—“I was fired.”

There was another decidedly long pause at the other end of the phone, a phenomenon that seemed to occur an awful lot lately, especially when Charity recounted a new story about being canned to any one of her family members or long-distance friends. “What did you do this time?” Sam asked.

“Why does everyone always assume it’s my fault when I get fired?”

“We don’t
always
assume that—only occasionally.” Sam laughed lightly. “So what’s the story this time?”

Charity sipped at her Diet Coke. “Are you sure you want to hear it?”

“I’ll listen to anything if it’ll make me laugh. After spending a week in Florida with Jack’s mom, I need a pick-me-up.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Miserable. Once a homeless person, always a low-life, that’s the way Lady Celeste sees me. But that’s not what I want to talk about right now. Tell me why you got fired. Did Elvis have anything to do with it?”

“Oh, yeah, that five-foot-two reprobate had everything to do with it, beginning with the poofy Ann-Margret wig he made me wear. Jeez, Sam, it was almost as big as he was. And then he insisted I wear fuchsia hot pants, a skin-tight angora sweater with one of those pointy bras they wore way back when, and, get this—white go-go boots.”

Sam chuckled. “Please don’t tell me you complained about the costume?”

“Of course not. I’ve worn less and I’ve worn worse.”

“So what happened?”

“I slapped a drunk bridegroom when he asked me to accompany him and his new wife to the Blue Hawaii honeymoon suite. Seems he had a special
lei
he wanted to give both of us—at the same time—and I’m not talking about a necklace of tropical flowers.”

Logan lowered his sunglasses and glared at her, but she brushed his frown aside with a wave of her hand and listened to Sam’s giggles.

“The bridegroom took great exception to my refusal,” Charity said, squirting sunblock on her stomach and rubbing it in. “Elvis didn’t like the fact that I refused, either, so he canned me.”

Logan held up the newspaper and pointed to another job he’d circled, but she swatted the paper away.

“So here I am,” she went on, “without a job again, using Logan’s phone because his saving’s account isn’t as empty as mine, using his pool because the one at my apartment complex was closed due to some kind of fungus growing on the bottom, and, well, I’m just killing time until my audition next week.”

“What audition?” Sam asked.

“The second part of the audition I had to rush home for in February. I swear Duane has it out for me, making me think that first audition was all-important, stringing me along for weeks after giving me the impression I might get the job, then telling me he wants me to audition again.”

“Is it worth it, Charity?”

Sometimes she wondered. And then something good would happen, a smidgen of hope would come her way, making her think she might have a chance to reach the top in this town. There was always hope. “Yes,” she said softly, “it’s worth it.”

She could almost see Sam smiling when she said, “If it makes you happy, that’s all that matters.”

Through the phone, over a thousand-plus miles, Charity could hear the twins, one cooing, one crying. “Can you hold on a second, Charity?” Sam asked.

“Sure.”

She pictured Sam lifting a baby to her shoulder and a part of her longed to reach out and hold one of the twins again, or Lauren and Max’s brand-new baby boy. But there weren’t too many chances to get away and enjoy that kind of happiness. If she wasn’t working, she was fighting for a job.
That
was the life of a not-too-successful showgirl.

Through the cooing and crying she heard the screen door in the kitchen slam, she heard a familiar voice—Mike’s voice—in the background asking for Jack, and heard Sam say he wouldn’t be back till late.

Whatever else Mike might have said was unintelligible. But the mere sound of his deep, rich voice made her long for him. She wanted to share more conversations. Wanted to once again feel the warmth of his skin against hers. Even with a thousand miles separating them, a thousand miles and goals that didn’t coincide, he still made her ache.

Again she heard the door slam and she knew Mike had gone, just as he was gone from her life. “Sorry, Charity,” Sam said. “I got a bit distracted.”

“Was that Mike?” Charity knew already, but she felt the need to ask.

“Yeah. He said to tell you hi.”

Sam was a terrible liar. “No, he didn’t.”

“All right, he didn’t. He just sort of shrugged when I told him I was talking to you. Said he was busy and since Jack wasn’t around, he’d get going. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“I don’t expect him to ask about me.” She hoped he would but admitting that was impossible. “He’s a busy man, running the ranch, preaching on Sundays, probably going out with Fay Atkinson’s niece Raylene.”

“Why would he go out with her? She’s a teenager, for heaven’s sake.”

“She’s what?” Charity was totally aghast. She never would have guessed that, considering the way Fay Atkinson had been trying to push the preacher and her niece together.

“She’s eighteen. Nineteen at most. And she’s interested in Beau, not Mike.”

“But Fay said—”

“Fay’s a busybody. Darling lady who’d give you the shirt off her back, but a busybody just the same.”

Relief washed over her. It made no sense caring what Mike was up to, but it was hard not to be interested.

“Is he still chasing after Satan?” Charity asked, knowing she should turn the subject to something else, but she was a glutton for punishment and had to know what was going on in Mike’s life.

“He caught him a couple of weeks ago.”

Her good mood suddenly deflated. “That should make him happy.”

“There’s only one thing that would make him happy right now, and that’s you coming back.”

“That’s not going to happen. We’ve got nothing in common, and—”

“He’s in love with you.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“Max heard him tell you so that morning he and Jack took you to the airport.”

“And Max blabbed to you about it?”

“He told Lauren who told me. That juicy bit of news was a nice accompaniment to all the rumors circulating about the one and only local minister sleeping with a showgirl.”

“That was an unfounded rumor, nothing more, and I’m surprised you’re mentioning it months after the fact.”

“I’m only mentioning it because Mike’s lonely, and even though you’d never admit it, I think you’re lonely, too.”

Charity got up from the lounge chair and walked to the far side of the pool, away from Logan, who’d been harping at her about Mike, too.

“I don’t have time to be lonely,” she told her friend. “I’ve got Logan and my work—”

“Logan’s a friend, not a lover. There’s a big difference, Charity. Mike loves you. He wants you.”

“He’s a man who wants me to conform, a man who wants me to do what he thinks I should do.” And he’s still in love with his long-dead wife, she thought sadly. “He’s not interested in my career, Sam. He thinks it’s a loser of a job. Hell, what he wants is to put me inside a corral and tame me, because he’s tame and he thinks everyone and everything should be that way. But I don’t want that. I never have.”

“What do you want?”

“To make my own mistakes. To have my family and friends love me no matter what I do.”

Maybe she was selfish, maybe she wanted too much, but that was it in a nutshell. It seemed such a small thing to be loved—faults and all.

Mike tossed fresh hay into the corral at the back of his barn and ignored the crunch of footsteps behind him in the gravel. He wasn’t in the mood for company. He hadn’t been in weeks, but that hadn’t kept intruders away.

“Mornin‘.”

He should have expected Jack to stop by to see how things had gone on the ranch during his absence. What he had to report, however, wasn’t good.

“It was a hell of a winter,” Jack said, hooking a boot heel over a rail.

“Yeah.” Mike couldn’t agree more. The last two weeks of February had been bitterly cold and March hadn’t been much different. It had been one of the harshest winters on record, and the Remington ranch had lost more cows than Mike wanted to think about. They’d had large hay reserves, but there’d been too many days in a row where the snow blew so hard a man couldn’t see his hand in front of his face let alone go out on the range to dump hay for the critters.

Of course, not everyone had stuck around the ranch to deal with the horrific weather.

“How was Florida?” Mike asked, keeping his eyes trained on the stallion darting back and forth in the corral.

“I’d take forty below any day. If it hadn’t been for two colicky babies and a wife begging and pleading for us to be with Lauren when her baby was born, I would have stayed put right here.” Jack climbed a couple of rungs on the paddock and folded his arms over the top rail, obviously wanting a better look at the mustang inside. “God, I hate Florida, especially the snobs in Palm Beach.”

Mike leaned his pitchfork against the corral and joined his friend, glad to have something to talk about other than the ranch. “Did your mom show up?”

“Yeah. She wasn’t about to miss the christening, so I got to spend a couple days hearing Lady Celeste tell Lauren how to take care of the baby, the house, and her business, as if she’d had a whole lot of experience. And then she started in on Sam, and you know as well as I do what my mom thinks of my wife.”

Mike laughed. It was one of the few times something had struck him as funny in a couple of months.

“I heard Reece was there, too.”

Jack chuckled. “You’d think they hadn’t gotten a divorce twenty-some-odd years ago the way Mom turned her henpecking on Dad. Told him she was tired of hearing rumors about the latest blonde bimbo he was squiring around Santa Fe, told him he’d gained too much weight around the middle. Then dad started in on her, complaining about her stuffy friends.”

It was good hearing someone else bellyache for a change. Mike had done his own share of complaining lately, and he figured everyone in the county was tired of listening to his troubles—the ones he cared to share. Once the whispers about his scandalous affair with the Vegas showgirl had subsided, people pretty much hushed up around him. Even Crosby kept his distance. No one asked him about Charity and even if they had, he wouldn’t have had any comment to make except that she’d gone home and that he hadn’t heard from her since.

Didn’t matter, he supposed. He had his hands full running Jack’s ranch, his own fledgling operation, and preaching to a congregation where a few folks occasionally looked at him like he was a fallen man. It was their loss. He had nothing to hide. Had done nothing wrong. In his mind, holding Charity against him during the night, kissing her, coming close to making love to her, had been the best things he’d done in six years.

But she was gone now, and he’d sunk back into loneliness, which had long ago become a fact of life.

“So,” Jack said, staring at the angry mustang trying his hardest to find a way out of the corral, “how’d you catch Satan?”

“Catch?” Mike shook his head. “The horse was starving and brought his herd down to the ranch to get something to eat. He hardly put up a fight when
I
tossed the lasso round his neck. Sure took the fun out of it.”

“He doesn’t look all that happy with his current lot in life, food or no food.”

“Woody and I added a couple more rails to increase the height of the corral. There’s no way the stallion’s going to get out unless someone opens the gate, but he’s far from resigned to his fate. He eats, he runs from one end of the corral to the other, and he’s ready to fight anyone who gets too close to him.”