Stay (Dunham series #2) (41 page)

“Because you don’t do official.”

“Not unless I declare it official myself, no. This,”
she mumbled, waving a hand at him. “This is strange. We do things
on your terms and I . . . I go along with it. I don’t know
why.”

“
My
terms?” he asked, incredulous. “If I
asked you to come up to Chouteau City, just once, would you?”

“Absolutely not,” she snapped, then rolled her eyes
when he began to chuckle. Huffed again.

Eric reached out, took her hand, pulled her into
him. She relaxed against him when he wrapped his arms around her.
He kissed the top of her head.

“C’mon. We have rides to ride.”

Two roller coasters and a plume ride later, they
strolled toward the train depot, Vanessa curled up against Eric’s
body, his right arm around her. She had his left hand enfolded in
both of hers, pressed into the valley between her breasts.

They kissed softly with nearly every slow step they
took.

“Tell me about your father,” she said whispered
against his mouth.

Shocked to his core, he stiffened and tried to
withdraw from her, but she tightened her grip, kept him close.
“Eric,” she murmured, “I thought you were all about the
relationship? Please tell me.”

Dammit, she was right. Annie had always known not to
ask. Not even Knox had dared pursue it after Eric had snarled at
him for asking.

“He left when I was one,” he muttered. “Everybody in
Chouteau County knows that.”

“There’s more,” she returned, just as quietly.
“You’re too angry that I asked.”

Yes, he was, he realized with some surprise. Yet . .
. he knew that, too, would be up for grabs once he started
campaigning in earnest. He might as well start practicing on a
sympathetic audience.

He shrugged. “My mother, she was young. Pretty, I
guess. She says she had her head in the clouds, married him. What
she didn’t know was that he was married to two other women in two
other states—with other kids, to boot.”

Vanessa tensed, but Eric only shrugged.

“He says he had the intention of supporting us all,
but I doubt he could’ve over the long haul. But he was caught,
prosecuted for bigamy and fraud, racketeering. That’s why he left.
He was on the run.”

“Says? He’s alive? You’ve spoken with him?”

“He’s in prison.” Eric laughed bitterly. “In Utah,
of all places. He was running a few other scams. Ponzi schemes,
multi-level marketing. Stuff like that. It’s easy to scam people in
Utah.”

“Have you always known where he was?”

“I started looking for him when I went to BYU, and
turned out he was right up the road.”

“And you went to visit him?”

“I did. A couple of times. He’s just a broken old
man. He cried when he met me, he was so happy, and I couldn’t hate
him. I just . . . pitied him. I write to him sometimes because he
seems to appreciate it so much, desperate for any attention from
his kids. Proud of me, what I’ve done. Brags on me to his
cellmates. I don’t know any of my other siblings, where or who they
are or how to find them. Not that I’ve tried,” he admitted.

“You look— In high school, you didn’t look Italian.
Now you do. I think— It’s however long your hair is.”

“Let’s just say my mom wasn’t happy when I got my
hair cut right before I left for college.”

“Because you look like your dad?”

“
Exactly
like him, she said. Except
taller.”

“I bet she’s proud of you now, though.”

“Oh, yeah. She’d like it if I participated in the
tribe more, but they’re in Oklahoma and I have a life that I
established before I really got interested in what the tribe
does.”

They continued their walk and suddenly Eric realized
they were in their own little bubble in the middle of an amusement
park packed with adults and screeching children. The currents of
people flowed around them harmlessly, like water around a rock in
the middle of the stream.

“Your mother changed her name. Why didn’t you change
yours?”

“Oh, I did. The minute I turned twenty-one. BYU’s
crawling with linguists, so I found one to help me choose an Osage
name. I officially ditched Niccolò and took Tsexobe as my middle
name. It’s the Osage word for spider.”

“Oh, that’s pretty.”

“My mother was disappointed I didn’t change my whole
name, but by that time, I’d met my father, and considering I didn’t
end up in prison the way I figured I was going to, I got some idea
I could turn the name around.”

He stopped. Took a deep breath. Remembered. “I sat
there in those mandatory religion classes at BYU, and listened to
my professors talk about heritage and genealogy. I started poking
around. There’s an artist. Giovanni Battista Cipriani. He’s my
however-many-greats-grandfather. I don’t care for the art much, but
if people know the name Cipriani, it’s because of him, not my
father, and his name is worth something. He might have been an
asshole. I don’t know. At least he contributed something to the
world.”

“But you identify with your mother’s people.”

“And my mother’s religion, yes,” he said slowly. “My
ancestors. The warriors. The Osage were a very sophisticated
people.”

“The tattoo?”

He cast her a grin then. “The
spider
,” he
said, “is patient. She watches and waits and lets things come to
her.”

Vanessa’s mouth melted into a delighted smile.
“That’s
you
!”

“For the most part, except . . . ” He took a deep
breath. “Why don’t you want to talk to me on the phone during the
week, return my emails?”

Her smile vanished and she looked away. “I’m busy,”
she muttered.

He tucked a finger under her chin and directed her
to look up at him. “Try again.”

“I—” She pressed a hand to her mouth, tears suddenly
glimmering in her eyes.

When she didn’t continue, he said, “You’re scared.”
She gulped. “You don’t like the word ‘girlfriend.’ You think if you
get attached, you’ll lose control of your life. You get involved
with men who don’t ask anything of you emotionally and aren’t
prepared to give you anything, either. You said so yourself.”

“That’s fine for you to talk,” she snapped, jerking
away from him. “Annie? Friends with benefits? Only not so honest as
me, all done up with an engagement ring and wedding plans.”

“Okay, you got me there,” he snapped back, irritated
that she’d pegged it so fast, irritated that they’d gone from
simpatico to scrimmage in a heartbeat. “But at least we had a
relationship.”

“Oh? Does
she
know about your father?”

Eric’s head exploded. “Don’t throw that back at
me.”

“Ding ding ding, and the answer is no, she doesn’t.”
Vanessa pointed at him. Glared. “Don’t you lecture me on my
emotional unavailability when you don’t have a decent track record,
either. We are
poor trailer trash
, both of us. I don’t know
about you, but I don’t want some random attachment to drag me back
into that kind of drama. I hate drama.

“I still can’t look at Vachel without feeling like I
just dropped back into the trailer park. Every time I see him, I
hurt because there’s nothing I can do to help him. He has to climb
out himself and you know what? He never will. He’s an insomniac. He
wears kilts and buckskins and wishes he’d been born in 1790 in
Scotland, and spends most of his time in the woods hunting. He has
no friends his age because he doesn’t want them and his only real
friend is a man who was old when the Civil War started. He rarely
speaks.
He sleeps in trees
. He’s only thirteen, but he’s a
complete mess. God only knows how he’s going to turn out.

“And when Knox died—” She choked, putting one
shaking hand over her mouth and staring at Eric, tears streaming
down her face. “Justice called me that night to tell me. I couldn’t
move. I just sat in the middle of my office and cried but then— He
wasn’t
dead. But I still couldn’t do my job very well, and I
was in the middle of my busiest season, my masquerades. The man
who’d rescued me, educated me, fed me—my
dad
—was hovering
between life and death for two weeks, in and out of the operating
room,
after
he died once already. I couldn’t imagine my life
without him in it and if he had— No matter how mad I get at him, I
think about that night and it . . . doesn’t matter. Because I’d
rather have him
alive
and not helping than
dead
and
not helping.”

Eric felt every word, sharp and hot, slicing through
armor he didn’t know he had.

“This weekend stuff and, and emails and, and phone
calls— Text messages? What the
hell
is that all about? Do
real people in real relationships communicate that way? I don’t
want that. It’s not real. It’s just fantasy and I don’t have time
to waste on fantasy. Two hundred and fifty miles, Eric. Me with
Whittaker House and you with the White House. I
refuse
to
play that long-distance game and call it a relationship.

“If you want a real relationship with me, you’re
going to have to give up everything you have—your goals, your
dreams, everything—and move here and convince me that you, that a
relationship with you, is worth the kind of hurt that love brings
with it. If you can’t do that, you can just go home right now and
stay out of my life
because it killed me when you left the
first time, and again when you left the second time. And it’s going
to kill me now. You make me have drama! Do you understand that?
I don’t want drama
. Don’t bother taking me home. I’ll find
my own way and I’ll box up your stuff and ship it back to you.”

She turned and walked off, holding her tintype in
one hand and dashing tears away from her face with the other. Her
streaked ponytail bounced in time to the angry stride of her long
golden legs. He watched her go, unable to stop her, the words she’d
sighed into her pillow last night as she fell asleep under his
hands echoing in his head.

I love you, Eric. Stay with me.

* * * * *

37: Lawyer Barnes

October 2010

“Got an overnight order, Boss. You’re gonna have to
tell me what to do because it looks like a prank to me.”

Vanessa nodded at her assistant, then skillfully
flipped the mess of wild onions, apples, black walnuts, and
cranberries sautéed in lemon-infused

lard. She drizzled a sweet white from Stone Hill
Winery over her concoction, then lit it up.

“You want to try this, Curtis?” she called over her
shoulder where he sat at the staff table watching Fox News.

“Shore, honey.”

The kitchen ran on skeleton staff on weekdays in the
fall, and right now, things were especially slow. There were no
families at Whittaker House and few enough other guests that only
six tables sat in the dining room. The permanent residents usually
ate in the kitchen with the staff and the missionaries. Right now,
Vanessa had lots of time to experiment and tape a year’s worth of
Vittles
, the production crew ensconced in the cottages and
their meals provided. Why had she never thought of it?

With both a night and day concierge (the one Eric
had surprised her with), she didn’t have to personally greet many
of the guests or see to their needs herself.

With Knox coming every weekend to help her again
(
Uh, yeah, Eric kind of kicked my ass. I’m really sorry,
Vanessa. I wish you’d said something.
), she had caught up with
those items on her to-do list that only she could do and—

“Have you ever thought about writing a cookbook?”
Knox asked her one Saturday afternoon.

Vanessa paused. “Yes,” she said slowly. “But I’ve
never had time.”

“Eh, well, Justice is second chair on that case Eric
has, so I never see her, and my last class on Friday is at eleven.
If you want, Mercy and I can come down early on Fridays. That
should give you time to work on it. Would you like that?”

She blinked. “Really?”

“If that’s something you want to do, yeah. Be happy
to help.”

“Oh, yes, Knox. Thank you!”

Vanessa doused the flame and slid the mess onto a
pewter plate, garnished it with a couple of grapes and took it over
to her guinea pig. His wizened black face topped by that shock of
white curly hair bent over the plate and he sniffed appreciatively.
“Apples’n’onions,” he said reverently. “You shore can cook,
Vanessa, honey.”

That meant nothing. Over the years, she’d learned
that if Curtis praised a dish effusively but didn’t finish it, he
didn’t like it but wouldn’t hurt her feelings. What she awaited
right now was an abrupt nod and a clean plate.

“Boss? The order? Dude wants it pronto.”

She started and headed over to the packing bench to
look at the ticket:
Nash Piper, Hilton-Bozeman, Montana: Three
days, favorites, breakfast, lunch, dinner.

Well, so he’d made it, and just into October, too.
Fourteen hundred miles on foot, not counting however many miles
he’d managed to hitch a ride, in five months.

The Whittaker House kitchen knew
Mister John
Thompson
’s tastes as well as she did, so she instructed her
assistant to cook the food and pack the Styrofoam-lined box
accordingly. He looked at her funny, but did so. Once that was done
and she bent to sign off on the packing slip, she paused and
wrote,

Not going so well here. Hope yours is better. V

She didn’t know why she’d written that, but she had
no one to talk to, and for the first time in her life she
wanted—needed—a girlfriend who didn’t also inhabit Knox’s world in
some way. Nash was the only person who might understand, but he was
gone and she blinked away the tears.

It was done and she need not think about that
anymore. At least now, thirteen-year-old Vanessa had closure, even
if twenty-eight-year-old Vanessa had a hole in the middle of her
chest.