Bravo Unwrapped

Five

Buck took B.J. to the Nugget Steakhouse—on Main Street, wouldn’t you know? The Nugget had a main dining room and another room next door, which contained one of the town’s two bars.

A stocky waitress in jeans and a polo shirt greeted Buck by name. He gave her that grin that bowled all the women over. “Nadine. How you been?”

“Can’t complain.” Nadine led them to a booth. “What can I get you to drink?” She handed them each a menu.

Buck ordered a whisky and soda. B.J. asked for water. The waitress hurried off through the door to the bar.

B.J. opened her menu. “What’s good?”

“How would I know? I haven’t eaten here in over a decade.”

The menu was big enough that, held upright, it blocked him from her view. Which was fine. After all, every time she looked at him, she only wanted to look some more.

He said, “You probably can’t go wrong with the filet.”

She grunted in answer, staring blankly at the menu, wondering why she’d bothered to ask for his recommendation. It wasn’t as if she would be eating or anything.

Morning sickness. Who ever thought of calling it that? Probably some idiot with a disgustingly positive attitude. For B.J., the problem went on all day and all night. If it kept up, she’d be the skinniest pregnant lady in Manhattan. She might die of starvation, and her poor unborn baby with her.

And she just knew he was waiting over there across the table for the moment when she had to stop hiding behind the menu and look at him again.

Might as well get it over with. She shut the menu, set it aside and went ahead and met his eyes.

Wouldn’t you know? Compelling as ever.

She glanced away. For something to do as she tried not to look at him, she studied the decor.

The place was aggressively rustic, a virtual sea of knotty pine. Knotty pine crawled up the walls and spread across the ceiling. Their booth and the tables grouped in the center of the room were all made of knotty pine. The ladder-back chairs? Yet more knotty pine. Even the wagon-wheel chandeliers overhead were knotty pine, stained dark enough that it was hard to make out the knots. But B.J. wasn’t fooled.

She knew knotty pine when she saw it—and she didn’t care for it in the least. B.J. had history with knotty pine, history that involved a dead animal, a rifle and a hunting lodge in Idaho.

In October, the year she turned twelve, L.T. had taken her to Idaho to hunt elk. B.J. had always loathed hunting. She didn’t want to watch her dinner die, she truly didn’t.

But she’d learned to shoot and how to handle herself in the woods just to prove to L.T. that she could. That trip, she’d actually shot an elk. A gorgeous big bull with a massive rack. It was one of those things that just happened. She had the rifle and she knew how to use it and she knew what L.T. expected of her.

In the sub-freezing pre-dawn, she’d crouched behind a big, gray rock and waited there for hours, being quiet and tough and self-reliant, the way L.T. expected her to be. She had it all figured out in her twelve-year-old mind. No elk was even going to come near her, so she wouldn’t have to actually shoot anything.

Wrong.

The animal appeared out of nowhere. All at once it was just standing there in the early-morning gloom, looking off toward the snow-capped mountains to the east and the bright rim of light where the sluggish sun was slowly rising. Soundlessly, she shouldered her rifle, got the creature in her sights—and pulled the trigger. A perfect, clean shot. The bull dropped dead where it stood, forelegs crumpling, big brown eyes going glassy, making no sound but a loud thump as it hit the ground.

B.J. emerged from behind her rock and stood over it, still not believing that she’d actually killed the poor thing.

The knotty pine had come into play that night. Their hunting lodge was paneled, like the Nugget Steakhouse, all in pine. L.T. and the other men stayed up late, drinking and laughing and loudly discussing how “little B.J.” had got her elk. Little B.J., who had gone to bed early, lay awake in the open sleeping loft upstairs, counting the knots in the paneling, thinking that she really hadn’t meant to shoot that bull, and wishing the men would just shut up about it.

“You’re too quiet,” Buck said.

She blinked and focused on him. “Sorry. Just thinking.”

“About?”

Nadine reappeared, saving B.J. the trouble of coming up with an answer. The waitress set their drinks in front of them, along with a bread basket, bread plates and their flatware rolled in white cloth napkins. “You two ready to order?”

“I am,” said B.J. She rattled off what she wanted and Buck did the same. Nadine scribbled it all down and hustled off again.

“So,” said Buck.

“What?”

“What was on your mind, just then?”

“When?”

He gave her a look—kind of weary and put-upon.

Oh, what the hell? “I was just thinking that I hate knotty pine. Knotty pine is depressing. Every damn knot is like a big, sad, reproachful brown eye—an eye that watches your every move.”

“Never thought of it that way.”

“This is probably not a good place to be on medication.”

“I kind of like it myself.” He tipped his head to the side and looked toward the center of the room. Admiring the knots in the tables and chairs? Apparently. The light from the hurricane lamp on their table shone on his dark hair. So silky, his hair.

And thick. Very thick…

“My dad brought us here once,” he said, turning to her again, smiling slowly when he caught her eye, causing certain responses, certain small, shivery feelings she instantly denied.

She cleared her throat. “How old were you?”

“Pretty little. Maybe five. It’s one of my few memories of him. He was gone so much. He would show up out of nowhere, now and then, for a week or two, and then disappear again. That was the last time he came to town, when he brought us to dinner here. It was before Bowie was born—nine months before, if you know what I mean.”

She did. Blake had gotten Chastity pregnant, gone away, and never come back. “What a guy.”

Buck said, “That was pretty much his M.O. He’d show up, get my mother pregnant and leave. He’d come back in a year or so, get her pregnant again. Leave again. None of us ever got to know him or anything. He was the stranger who happened to be our father.”

Her editor’s brain kicked in. The stranger who happened to be our father. That might make the cutline under a photo of the notorious Blake. They’d need to dig up an old picture….

And she should be getting this down. Any revelations about Blake Bravo could definitely be usable.

She grabbed her bag, dug out the mini-recorder, turned it on and set it on the table, down toward the hurricane lamp—out of the way, but close enough to pick up everything they said. “So Bowie never even met his father?”

Buck eyed the recorder. “Always on the job, right?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

He looked at her. A long look. “I keep hoping for more.”

“Well, don’t—about Bowie and Blake…”

He said nothing, just looked at her some more.

And if she’d didn’t watch it, she’d be looking right back, going ga-ga over his eyelashes and the sexy curve of his mouth. “Talk,” she commanded.

He made a low sound—something between a grunt and a chuckle. And at last, he got down to it. “Bowie, as the youngest, never met our father. And Brand, Brett and I never knew him. Not really. He hardly ever came around, and we were mostly too little to have a clue who he was.” Buck glanced down into his drink and then back up at her. “He had the weirdest, scariest light-colored eyes. Wolf eyes…but I told you that, didn’t I? About his eyes. Back when you and I were together?”

She nodded. Back then, he never talked about his family much. Just that his dad had left them when Buck was very young—and about Blake’s pale, strange eyes. “Tell me more about the time your dad brought you here, to the Nugget. You were five, you said?”

“Yeah. I was the only one of the kids who got to go. Brett and Brand were…two and three, I guess. Ma left them with my grandmother. It was December. I remember there were tinsel garlands looped on the light fixtures.” They both glanced up at the wagon-wheel chandelier over their heads. “And a tree, over there by the door to the street—a fresh tree, strung with those old-style big lights and shiny glass ornaments. I remember passing it as we came in, breathing in the piney smell of it, getting off on the way the lights glowed in the branches. It meant Christmas was coming and that gave my five-year-old heart a thrill.”

“You had good Christmases, growing up?”

He nodded. “Ma made a big deal of it. She baked like a champion, played Christmas carols all day and half the night from the morning after Thanksgiving on. She decorated a huge silver-tip fir in the front room. She seriously decked the halls—and every flat surface in sight. The hotel—in those days she called it a hotel—was a damn Christmas wonderland and that is no lie. My brothers and I loved it.”

“It sounds fabulous.”

“It was.” Those dark eyes of his were shining.

Nadine trotted up, bearing a pair of totally retro salads: iceberg lettuce and wedges of tomato drizzled all over with ranch dressing. “Here we go.” She plunked them on the table and bustled away again.

B.J. looked down at her plate—and her stomach actually growled. Amazing. For the first time in a week, out of nowhere, she was starving.

“Back to dinner out with psycho-Dad,” she prompted as she unrolled her napkin, spread it on her lap, grabbed for her fork and dug in.

It tasted so good. She had to make a conscious effort not to groan in delight at the crisp texture of the lettuce, the creamy, perfect consistency of the dressing. She gobbled down several crunchy, delicious bites before it came to her that Buck wasn’t talking.

She looked up from devouring her salad to find him watching her—again.

“Hungry?” he asked, annoyingly amused.

She took time to swallow, lick a spot of dressing off her upper lip and wipe her mouth with her napkin, before replying. “Yeah. So?”

“Last night at the Castle, you didn’t eat much of anything.”

She wisely refrained from comment on that one and instructed instead, “Your father. With lots of detail, please. If I have to write this thing, you have to give me something to work with.”

“You can be very bossy, you know that?”

“And you can be a manipulative SOB—or did I mention that already?” She dropped her napkin in her lap and forked up another huge bite of salad.

“Yeah. You mentioned it.” He stared at her mouth as he lounged back in his seat, keeping one strong arm resting on the table—to the right of his empty drink and his untouched salad. “You’re still steamed because I dragged you into this.”

She paused before stuffing that big bite into the mouth he kept staring at. “How did you guess? The story, please.”

He picked up his drink, rattled the ice cubes as Nadine rushed by—and finally continued. “We took a booth that night. The one right behind you, I think it was. I remember that Ma and my dad sat together. I sat across from them. I tried to be very, very good. And whenever my father would look at me with those scary eyes of his, I’d get this tightness in my stomach, this feeling that I wouldn’t mind so much when he went away again. Little did I know that when he left that time, he was never coming back.”

B.J., having polished off her salad, longed to pick up her plate and lick the last of the dressing from it. Somehow, she restrained herself.

And besides, there was still the bread basket. She grabbed it and peeled back the warming towel to reveal four nice, big dinner rolls. Snatching one up, she slathered on the butter and then tore off a hunk and stuck it in her mouth.

God. Bread. Delicious—and Buck was watching her again, grinning that grin of his. She made a move-it-along circular gesture with her free hand.

He took his cue. “Recently—since a few years ago, when it all came out in the papers and I found out who he really was—I’ve been learning about dear old Dad. Blake kept a home base in Norman, Oklahoma, with a woman named Tammy Rae Sandovich. He had one child with Tammy Rae. A boy, Marsh.”

She swallowed. “Your half-brother…”

“One among many. I met Marsh last year. Great guy. Blake used to beat him—and his mother, too. A lot. So in hindsight, with the information I have now, I can’t say I regret that dear old Dad didn’t show up much, or that he stopped coming around when I was so young.”

B.J. felt a faint twinge of something that might have been sympathy—for Buck, for all the left-behind children of the evil Blake. With that twinge came the urge to reach across the table, to cover Buck’s hand with her own, to reassure him, the way a friend would. It was an urge she took care to suppress.

Nadine set Buck’s second drink in front of him. “Everything okay?”

B.J. swallowed again. “Great,” she said, and popped the last of the roll into her mouth.

Nadine beamed at B.J.—and scolded Buck. “Eat your salad. Steaks are on the way.”

“I’m getting to it, Nadine.”

The waitress clucked her tongue and left them—and Buck reached over and turned off the recorder. Before B.J. could swallow that last chunk of bread and object, he leaned closer and spoke low. “I talked to Ma—about what’s up with Bowie and Glory.”

Okay, she was curious. She washed the bread down with water. “So, and?”

“Glory’s pregnant.”

“Pregnant.” She set down her glass. She probably should have guessed—and was this too close to home, or what?

“Bowie wants to marry her.”

“So he said—more than once. And she said no. Repeatedly. At the top of her lungs, as I recall.”

Buck finally picked up his fork. “It doesn’t matter what she said. He’ll marry her, one way or the other.”

“Not if she keeps saying no.”

“You just don’t get it.”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“Bowie’s a Bravo.”

“And that explains…what?”

“Everything.”

“Oh. Well. To you, maybe.”

He wore an excessively patient expression. “My brothers and I were raised minus a father. That’s not going to happen to our kids.”

“Ah.” And given her own circumstances, B.J. wasn’t sure she liked the sound of this. “Okay. Just to recap here. Bowie’s a Bravo. So he has to marry Glory—because she’s going to have his baby?”

“Yeah.”

“As in, one and one equals two?”

“That’s right.”

“Buck. Hello. Twenty-first century, U.S. of A.”

He waved his fork for silence. “Look. A Bravo may make mistakes in life. Big ones. But you can bet your favorite pair of sexy shoes that when there’s an innocent kid involved, a Bravo will always find a way to do the right thing.”

A stream of perfectly valid arguments scrolled through B.J.’s brain: that sometimes marriage just isn’t the right solution, that a child can have a productive, happy life without her parents being married. That some people—herself among them—just aren’t meant for marriage, that a bad marriage is never a good thing, for the child, or her parents….

She kept those arguments to herself. This was much too dangerous a subject to get into right now.

Chewing on another roll, she watched him as he ate his salad, thinking, I am now going to turn on the tape recorder and get on with the interview.

But then again…

Okay. She had to ask. “You, too, Buck? You’d marry some woman you didn’t care about, didn’t…love, just because she was having your baby?”

He speared a tomato wedge. “Bowie does love Glory. He said so.”

“Well, yeah. To convince her to do things his way.”

“Uh-uh. I don’t think so. I think he really does love her.”

“And you determined this, how?”

He considered a moment. “Call it an informed opinion. He’s my baby brother. I grew up with him. It’s my informed opinion that he meant what he said. He loves Glory.”

There was a moment. They looked at each other and B.J. felt…sparks. Heat. That burning energy, way too sexual, zipping back and forth between them.

Why this guy? she thought, as she’d thought a thousand times before. Why, always, in the end: Buck?

Nadine appeared with their steaks. She served them and took their salad plates away.

Buck started in on his T-bone. B.J. sipped her water and told herself not to go there—after which, she promptly went there. “And anyway, I wasn’t asking about Bowie. I was asking about you. If you got a woman pregnant, would you think you had to marry her, whether you really wanted to or not?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just curious,” she baldly lied.

Those eyes of his seemed to bore holes right through her. And then he lifted one hard shoulder, sketching a shrug. “Honestly, I can’t say for certain. It hasn’t happened.” Then he frowned. “Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me something?”

“No. No, I’m not.” Well, it was the truth. Barely. She wasn’t trying to tell him. Not now. Not yet…

“I’ll say this much.”

She gulped. “Yeah?”

“Any kid of mine is going to know his dad and know him well.” His steak knife glinted as he sliced his T-bone.

B.J. realized she’d been holding her breath and let it out. Slowly. “Buck?”

He set the knife aside. “Yeah?”

“Why are we doing this?”

He arched a dark brow. “Because it’s dinnertime? Because we have to eat—by the way, your filet’s getting cold.”

Stop, a voice inside her head commanded. Drop it. Now. But her mouth kept right on talking. “No. I don’t mean dinner. I mean this whole thing. You and me, here in your hometown. Why did you find it necessary to drag me across the country with you? We both know there’s no reason you can’t write this damn piece yourself.”

“No denying it now,” he said wryly. “You are talking to me.”

“Against my better judgment,” she shot back, then cut the sarcasm enough to ask, “And will you please answer my question?”

He looked at her in a measuring sort of way. The seconds ticked by. At last, he said, “Eat your steak so we can get out of here.”

“And then?”

“You’ll get your answer.”

Buck said nothing after they left the restaurant. In the chilly Sierra darkness, they strolled down the street, around the corner and across the bridge. The stars overhead, no city lights to mute them, shone thick and bright against the black-as-velvet night sky.

At the Sierra Star, the curtains at the front window were still open. Inside, as they mounted the steps, B.J. could see Chastity, sitting alone by the fire, reading a paperback book, an orange tabby cat curled in her lap.

Buck opened the door and ushered B.J. in—still without saying a word. Evidently, he’d decided against explaining why he’d forced her to head for the hills with him.

Fine. She was having second thoughts, anyway, wondering what had possessed her to ask him why in the first place. Whatever his reasoning, she didn’t need to hear it.