The Street Where She Lives (19 page)

But they weren't, not really.

And what would happen tonight? Alone in the dark? When their hormones kicked into gear again? Yes, they had Emily as a chaperon, so nothing much could happen, but Ben was nothing if not inventive. Would he want to sleep with her again? Instincts said yes, no matter that they'd already said goodbye. She knew resisting him would be her biggest challenge, especially when just thinking about it made her body feel soft and needy. And hopeful.

Rachel watched the scenery change and found herself putting aside her anxiety. Instead, she itched for a pad and pencils to capture the vast open space, the rock formations…everything. Spring had been extremely wet this year, and the primroses, sunflowers and other showy varieties bloomed madly across the desert floor. So different and yet so beautiful. The Joshua trees, for which the area had gotten its name, sprouted out of the dessert floor, some up to twenty-five-feet tall. From a distance, they looked like spiny, reaching ghosts.

“It's like being on another planet,” she said in wonder as they pulled into a campground.

The place appeared deserted except for one other party, who'd gone much farther down the road and around a rock outcropping, leaving them with the illusion of being completely alone.

“It's early in the season yet.” Ben pulled out the equipment they'd rented—a tent, stove, lantern. He wore jeans sinfully faded and threadbare, with holes in both knees, and one threatening the back of his left thigh. He had a red flannel shirt opened over his T-shirt that looked as soft and ancient as his jeans, and boots that had been around awhile. He was outdoors personified. “Spring can still get pretty brutal weatherwise out here.” He tipped his head back to study the sky.

She tore her gaze off his body at that and looked upward. Was that a thundercloud? “And so we came here because…why?”

Emily grinned and danced around. She wore jeans, too, and though they were relatively new, she'd cut holes in the knees to look like her father's. Rachel's heart tugged just looking at her.

“This is going to be so much fun! Can we roast the marshmallows now, or should we go for a hike, Dad? Or how about taking some pictures? Can we?”

Because of that, Rachel. You're here, already freezing your tush off, to make her happy. To see her smile.

“How about we set up the tent?” Ben pulled lightly on Emily's ponytail, smiling into her happy face, making Rachel swallow hard at the bittersweet feelings just looking at the two of them together provoked.

The late-afternoon sun reflected off the desert floor. She would have said the desert was brown, brown and more brown, but here in the flesh, she was stunned by how wrong she'd have been. The Joshua trees reaching out for the sky were a vivid green, with dark-brown
trunks. The jagged rock formations were a myriad of colors, red and purple and yellow…she couldn't stop looking around her, feeling the urgent need to get it all down on paper.

They put together camp. Rather
Ben
put together camp, with assistance from his eager daughter, while Rachel, feeling stiff and achy due to the surprising chill in the late-afternoon air, was forced to sit in a chair and watch.

The wind kicked up, blowing the flannel away from Ben's body, tossing his hair around his face and shoulders as he put together the tent without directions.

Rachel needed directions just to run her coffeemaker.

Ben laughed at something Emily said, laughed again as the poles Emily was working on fell to the ground, dumping the tent as well. Frustration bubbled over that she couldn't get up and help, be involved, but watching had its own merits. Her daughter—their daughter, she reminded herself—was in heaven.

Had her father have ever laughed with her like that? Smiled at her with such love shining from his eyes? Swallowing hard, she had to admit, Ben had turned out to be an amazing father, and Emily deserved every second she could get with him.

The tent did eventually go up. The tag on it claimed to sleep four people but Rachel eyed the tiny thing and wondered exactly what size those four people were supposed to be, as it hardly looked big enough for
one
sleeping bag. The three of them would be packed in there like sardines…

At least they'd have Emily with them, because being so close to Ben in nothing more than a sleeping bag sounded…damn tempting. In spite of her chill she
started to warm up a little, from the inside out, just thinking about it.

“Mom, we're going to go on a hike up that peak over there.” Emily was still bouncing around as she pointed to a rock formation a ways off, one that looked high and formidable. “Want to try to come?”

“Uh…” Now that she'd stopped thinking about Ben in a sleeping bag, and was looking at that mountain they wanted to scramble up, her warmth dissipated. Every single one of her injuries, healed or otherwise, had made itself known in the chill. “I don't think so.”

Emily's smile faded. “You okay?”

Other than feeling ancient? Other than the fact that just a few months ago she could have outenergized her own daughter? “I'm fine, hon. Just a little sore today.”

“I thought you were all better.”

Her own fault, as pride had made her hide any lingering problems from the accident. “Mostly.”

Ben started a fire, then came out of nowhere with her artist pad and pencils, which he set in her lap. “To help you pass the time.”

She stared down at her things and was shocked to find them blurring with her own tears.

“Just do it for fun,” he said softly, mistaking her emotion for distress. “Don't think of it as work, just think of it as—”

She put her hands over his and squeezed, swallowing the lump in her throat. “It's perfect, thank you.”

He smiled into her eyes, then leaned forward to give her a kiss that brought back some of the warmth. “Look for us, we'll wave to you from the top.”

“Ben—” She grabbed his hand when he would have pulled away.

He touched her face. “You're safe here, Rachel.”

“I know.” She felt safe. She always felt safe around him, she realized. “Be careful with our daughter, she's a bouncing bubble of energy waiting for disaster.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the girl in question, who was already on the edge of their campsite, shifting impatiently back and forth with a camera around her neck. No laptop in sight. Ben turned back to her, his eyes lit with such heat it took her breath. “That's the first time you've ever said ‘our' daughter.” His voice was low and a little thick. “It's always been your daughter or my daughter, never…ours.” He stroked a finger over the hand that held her pencils. “I've never really thanked you for her—”

“Ben—”

“So thank you,” he said, and kissed her again, just once, just softly, and by the time she opened her eyes Ben and Emily were nearly out of sight already. But for the longest time she could still feel him. Taste him.

To keep her mind off that, she opened her pad. Surprising how she could jump right in to sketching out here in the wilderness, when she was still a little cold, not so comfortable in the chair, and worried about her precocious daughter stepping off a mountain and falling to her death, but jump she did. Maybe it was the absence of telephone calls, doorbells, clocks to watch…but whatever the reason, without the day-to-day distractions, she worked as she hadn't in months.

Thirty minutes later, she stared down in surprise. She'd drawn Gracie at the helm of a rowboat with her pencil high in the air pointing the way, towing her daughter and Patches, forging on against all odds. Out of nowhere, she'd pulled out a full
Gracie
column. No agony, no anxiety, nothing but the pure joy of the work.

She leaned back and looked at the startlingly blue sky.
A few white clouds. No sound except a light wind whistling through the canyon and a few scattered birds. And a distant cry of…
Mom?
Someone was yelling
Mom!

Emily!

Forgetting her aches and pains she leaped out of her chair, dropping her pad and pencils onto the ground as she scanned the horizon, heart in her throat. She knew it, Emily had gotten herself hurt or—

There. On top of the nearest rock outcropping, just where Ben had promised they'd stop and wave to her, stood her daughter and the man who'd changed her life forever with just one smile so long ago. Even from that distance she could sense he was giving her another of those smiles now, and she waved wildly, grinning in spite of herself, relief and something else crowding the heart that had stopped in fear only a second before.

They both waved back, Ben putting an arm on the exuberant Emily before she danced herself right off the cliff.

“Love you, Mom!” came Emily's voice, and then they were gone from view.

“Love you, too,” Rachel whispered to no one, not even sure which of them she was talking to.

 

N
IGHT FELL
with shocking swiftness. No simple dusk for this place. One moment the sun slowly sank in golds and yellows and reds behind the rocks, and then the next, utter and still blackness.

Rachel crossed her arms in front of her, watching as Ben resurrected the fire she'd managed to kill. On his knees, he poked at the embers with a stick and the flames leaped to life for him. He glanced at her and she rolled her eyes.

At that, he laughed. The sound made her stomach tingle.

They'd met their neighboring campers—Joe, Matt, Liz and Shel, a group of four twenty-somethings claiming to be camping their way across the States before settling down to “real” life. The two couples had seemed a little wary of them until Ben had introduced himself, and within five minutes had made everyone feel quite at home.

Later, when Emily expressed worry at their new friends' lack of a home, lack of things and family, Ben told her that he suspected they were happy with the life they'd chosen, and could always change it if they wanted. Not everyone had to have a home or things. Or even family.

Rachel had watched him explain this to Emily and had to swallow hard. He was like that, happy without a home, things. Family.

She might have brooded over that, but Emily pulled out a deck of cards and challenged them to a gin rummy tournament. They played next to the fire, surrounded by wide-open vast space and a blanket of stars, with only their own laughter for company.

It was perfect. Rachel looked at Ben. Oh, yes, so perfect. She knew she should be sad, regretful, even resentful, that this would be it, their only foray into the whole family dynamic, the three of them, but suddenly she felt something else as well. Grateful.

Ben looked up, caught her looking at him. His hair had been long when he came, but it was longer now, and fell across his forehead. He shoved his fingers through it, shoving it out of his way. He looked tall, lean…beautiful. When he looked at her, she had to close her eyes.

He was leaving. Tuesday. Couldn't wait to leave.

“Let's hit the sack,” he said abruptly, putting the cards aside, as if his thoughts had turned as troubled as hers.

“Dad—”

“Storm's blowing in.” He pointed to the dark cloud mass coming in from the north, slowly blotting out the stars. “Let's get warm and cozy inside before it hits.”

Five minutes later Rachel was kneeling in the center of the miniscule tent, staring at the three overlapping sleeping bags.

“I want the door,” Emily said, having a good time whipping the beam from her flashlight over everything.

“I got the door, sweetness,” Ben said.

Rachel waited for the inevitable argument, as Emily never accepted anything less than her own way, but at Ben's no-nonsense tone, she simply grabbed her sleeping bag. “Well, then I get the far wall beneath the window.”

“Fine,” Ben said.

Fine? That wasn't fine. Emily by the wall would put her in the middle, where Ben's hard, warm strength would be against her all night long. She couldn't handle it, she—

“Get in, Mom.” Emily pointed to the bag that overlapped Ben's by a good third. “Tonight,
I
tuck
you
in.”

Kneeling on his bag, Ben pulled off his flannel shirt, leaving just the T-shirt, and slid into his sleeping bag. He looked at Rachel, his brow raised in a silent, amused dare.

Rachel lay down, pulled the bag up to her chin. She shifted her body around, expecting rocks beneath her. “Hey, this is…soft.”

“Dad put a mat down for you.” Emily grinned.
“Didn't want you complaining.” She kissed Rachel's cheek, then turned over, facing away from her and Ben with obvious delight. “I could sleep in the car, you know.”

“No,” Ben said in that dad tone, and once again Rachel was shocked when her daughter turned off the flashlight and stayed silent. Her breathing evened out, faked or otherwise.

In the dark Rachel could feel Ben looking at her, could feel the warmth of his body. Hard to miss it when they were practically pinned side to side.

“You doing okay?” he whispered.

Depended on his definition of
okay.
“I'm…good.”

“Warm enough?”

Hard not to be with his body acting as her personal furnace. “I'm good,” she repeated, and listened to his soft, sexy laugh.

“Then why are you holding your breath?”

Yes. Yes, she was. She let it out slowly. Outside, the storm moved in, the wind howled, the tent walls flapped noisily. Inside was like their own personal cocoon. A sinewy arm snaked out, gripped her waist and tugged her against a hard chest. “You're awfully quiet,” he murmured, his mouth to her ear. “You sure you're okay?”

“I'm…” His fingers were playing lightly over her ribs, stealing her thoughts.

“Good?” he tested softly. “You're good?”

Lord, she was trying to be. “Go to sleep, Ben.”

Another soft laugh escaped him, and he snuggled his face close to hers. “I will if you will, babe.”