“We are going to have to deal with this attraction sooner or later,”

Robert said roughly, holding her hand tightly.

“Maybe it would be better if we didn’t see each other.”

He looked at her mouth, closed his eyes. “We’ll just…take it easy.”

“All right.” She pulled on her hand. He pulled back.

“Why do you think it happens like this?” he said, stepping closer. “Out of nowhere?”

It wasn’t out of nowhere on her part. “I always saw you, Robert. You just never saw me before.”

He moved even closer, until his hips and hers were nearly touching. “Yes, I did.”

She rolled her eyes. “Right.”

“You used to have this green dress,” he said. “Your hair spilled all over it. And you wore red lipstick in those days. Bright red, like something sinful.”

His eyes were intent, “You’ve always been beautiful, Marissa. You just didn’t know it till now.”

Dear Reader,

Once again, Silhouette Intimate Moments has rounded up six top-notch romances for your reading pleasure, starting with the finale of Ruth Langan’s fabulous new trilogy. The Wildes of Wyoming— Ace takes the last of the Wilde men and matches him with a pool-playing spitfire who turns out to be just the right woman to fill his bed—and his heart.

Linda Turner, a perennial reader favorite, continues THOSE MARRYING MCBRIDES! with The Best Man, the story of sister Merry McBride’s discovery that love is not always found where you expect it. Award-winning Ruth Wind’s Beautiful Stranger features a heroine who was once an ugly duckling but is now the swan who wins the heart of a rugged “prince.” Readers have been enjoying Sally Tyler Hayes’ suspenseful tales of the men and women of DIVISION ONE, and Her Secret Guardian will not disappoint in its complex plot and emotional power. Christine Michels takes readers Undercover with the Enemy, and Vickie Taylor presents The Lawman’s Last Stand, to round out this month’s wonderful reading choices.

And don’t miss a single Intimate Moments novel for the next three months, when the line takes center stage as part of the Silhouette 20th Anniversary celebration. Sharon Sala leads off A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY, a new in-line continuity, in July; August brings the long-awaited reappearance of Linda Howard—and hero Chance Mackenzie—in A Game of Chance; and in September we reprise 36 HOURS, our successful freestanding continuity, in the Intimate Moments line. And that’s only a small taste of what lies ahead, so be here this month and every month, when Silhouette Intimate Moments proves that love and excitement go best when they’re hand in hand.

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

Beautiful Stranger
Ruth Wind

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For my sisters, Cathy Stroo and Merry Jordan,

who’ve each chosen to serve the teens of the world,

offering hands to hold, ears to listen, shoulders to cry on

and hearts so full of love no judgment can enter in.

I am so proud of you both.

RUTH WIND

is the award-winning author of both contemporary and historical romance novels. She lives in the mountains of the Southwest with her husband, two growing sons and many animals in a hundred-year-old house the town blacksmith built. The only hobby she has since she started writing is tending the ancient garden of irises, lilies and lavender beyond her office window, and she says she can think of no more satisfying way to spend a life than growing children, books and flowers.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

Prologue

The girl showed up on his doorstep, wearing nothing but an oversize windbreaker to protect her from the February cold. Her shoulders were painfully thin under the jacket. Her stomach bowed out in an unmistakable shape she tried to hide, a shape all wrong on a fifteen-year-old.

The long hair hadn’t been washed in a few days, and Robert could tell she was wearing the same makeup she’d set out with. Whatever belongings she’d carried with her were in a very small backpack.

When the knock came, it startled him into breaking a fragile bit of red glass he’d been fitting into a small frame, edging it with heat to ease it. Tsking, he flipped his safety glasses to the top of his head and went to the door. The girl was standing there on his step, her chin lifted at that cocky teenage angle that was all bravado, yet hid a scared little girl heart. She popped a big wad of gum. Long earrings glittered against her tangled hair, and her eyeliner was smeared, as if she’d slept in it.

“Hey, uncle,” she said, like she’d just come in from school. As if she wasn’t five hundred miles from home. Like he expected her.

Robert met that I-dare-you gaze for one long moment, seeing, with painful memory, himself at fourteen, fifteen, wanting somebody to—

Without a word, he opened the screen door. He didn’t yell or ask what the hell she was doing. He simply pushed the door aside, opened his arms and she fell against him, her twig arms fierce against his ribs, her relief an almost palpable presence. She didn’t have to tell him she was in trouble, that she’d run away, that she had nowhere else to go.

When her tough-girl facade cracked, it cracked wide open, and his fifteen-year-old niece, five months pregnant if she was a minute, burst into tears and sobbed like a baby. He just held on.

There wasn’t much room for her in his little house, and heaven knew he was the last man on earth who ought to be an example for anybody, but Robert held her while she cried, then sent her to take a shower while he made her a big bowl of soup. He made her eat, then put her to bed in his own room before he called his sister, Alicia, who responded pretty much as he’d expected—her new husband was more important to her than her daughter. Robert forgave her before he even hung up. They’d had the same mother after all.

He leaned in the doorway and watched Crystal sleep, a knot of pain in his chest. No matter how bad he’d be at the father thing, he was better than nobody. He’d managed to oversee a motley crew of soldiers through a war—how bad could one teenage girl be?

He set to work on cleaning up the back room, boxing up his tools and supplies so she would have a room of her own. Tomorrow they’d figure out the rest.

Chapter 1

As her classroom of twenty-seven ninth graders filed out of seventh hour—her last class of the day, thank heavens—Marissa Pierce grabbed her purse out of the desk drawer and bolted for the faculty rest room. In ten minutes, she had an appointment with the parent of a difficult student, and if she didn’t visit Mother Nature right now, she wouldn’t have a chance for another hour. Intolerable.

She bustled through the throngs of high schoolers in their baggy pants, and took pleasure in the simple fact of being able to bustle—an act that had been purely beyond her for a long time. It was still a little shock to zip up a pair of size-twelve slacks, but the best part of losing eighty-five pounds was this: being able to move lightly and without trouble through a crowd.

Just like a normal person.

The rest room was blessedly empty. Marissa tended to nature, readjusted her belt and peered at it in the mirror. All day long she’d felt odd about this belt. She knew she’d fiddled with it, touching it with her hand every so often to make sure the belly beneath it wasn’t sticking out a mile. But the mirror insisted the belly looked exactly the same as it had this morning—a little rounder than some, maybe, but ordinarily so. And there were no gobs of back fat pushing out her blouse in the rear.

It had taken eighteen months to lose the weight, and she still had a good fifteen or twenty pounds to go. They had been long, long months at times, sometimes very discouraging, and even now it seemed that a kind of ghost of her former self clung to her.

But there were moments like this one, when she saw herself in a mirror, with a shirt tucked into a pair of trousers, that she realized anew it had all been worth it. After fifteen years of being the fattest kid, then the fattest woman in any room, of ducking mirrors and dreading shopping malls, she took extraordinary pleasure in the simple act of not wincing when she bent to put a little fresh lipstick on her mouth.

Feeling much better, she went back to her room in the clearing halls and found Crystal already seated in her usual place, third seat in the fifth row, by the windows. And as she often did, the girl stared out that window as if some rescue was imminent—or at least, she wished it was. Kids this age were often a mass of tangled hungers and skewed logic, and pregnancy only made all of that about twenty times worse.

One of the reasons Marissa had chosen to teach this age group was because her own adolescence had been very difficult. To her surprise, she was very good at it. Her heart and soul were engaged by the delicate, topsy-turvy, exuberant and exasperating world of teens. Every so often, a particular child captured her—last year it had been a boy with such brilliance for math that she’d been challenged every single day to stay ahead of him.

Something about Crystal Avila had snagged Marissa hard. She found herself worrying about the girl at odd moments, just before she fell asleep, or in the shower. It wasn’t just that she was pregnant. Sadly, Crystal was far from the first pregnant teen to sit in this classroom.

No, it was deeper than that. There was such a depth of yearning, such sorrow in those dark eyes that it was sometimes hard to look at her. She’d lost something big in her old life, something more than her innocence. It plucked at Marissa in some odd way she couldn’t shake.

Dropping her purse back into the desk drawer, Marissa said casually, “Hey, kiddo. You can come sit up here if you like.”

She just shook her head, the long strands of straight black hair sticking on the coat she wore every minute, probably to hide her belly. She was a pretty little thing, small and delicate, her face adamantly Native American with broad cheekbones and narrow chin.

Marissa started the process of tidying her desk. “How was your day?”

Crystal made a grunting, you-are-so-stupid noise, and rolled her eyes. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

“It sucked, as usual.” She bent her head, ran her thumbnail along the pencil holder carved into the desk. “I hate this place.”

It was a good opening. Marissa carefully focused on gathering scattered writing utensils and putting them in a square container another student had made for her in woodshop. “Did you like your old school better?”

“No.” A singularly surly word. “I hated it, too, but my mom didn’t make me go.”

“And you’re mad at your uncle because he makes you?”

She shrugged, probably not quite willing to be that disloyal with an outsider.

“Well, you know—” Marissa kept her body moving, unfocused and therefore unthreatening “—if you weren’t as smart as you are, I might think there were better ways for you to spend your time.” She erased calculations from the blackboard and turned around. “But anyone with a brain like yours really needs an education.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, snorting, “I’m so smart. Can’t you see how smart I am?” She gestured with anger to her belly.

“Getting pregnant is a mistake, but it has nothing to do with brains.” When the girl only lowered her head, Marissa went on. “Lots of really smart women get pregnant by accident—even women who are trying to be careful, so you aren’t alone.”

Crystal began wiggling her foot, but she still didn’t have the blinders up. A surprise, but Marissa wasn’t about to waste a chance. “You really are smart, Crystal. I’d really like to help you see that, if you’ll give me a chance.”

The great dark eyes flickered up, flared briefly with hope, then lowered quickly again.

Oh, babe! Marissa thought, that familiar ache in her chest.

“None of my other teachers ever told me I was smart. What if you’re wrong?”

Marissa laughed softly. “I’m never wrong,” she said. “And I’m really smart myself. I know what I’m talking about.”

A knock sounded at the door, and Marissa straightened, turning to welcome the girl’s uncle into the room. But halfway to her feet, her heart slammed hard into her ribs and then settled into a painful thudding.

Red Dog.

That was what they called him, anyway, an army nickname. Marissa knew him through her association with the Forrest family—he was Jake Forrest’s best friend.

And one of the most intensely sexy men Marissa had ever seen. It was less a particular feature or even combination of features that made it so—it was the essence of him, a dangerous combination of brooding darkness and an appreciation of women that was like some devilish cologne seeping from his pores.

Marissa quickly turned and snatched a paper off her desk, seeking his real name. “Mr. Martinez?” With a degree of smoothness she would have thought beyond her at just that moment, she crossed the room and extended her hand, smiling warmly. “Come in. I’m so glad you could make it.”

“Please call me Robert.” Not a single flicker of recognition crossed his face as he clasped her hand with a firm, honest kind of grip. “Thanks for asking me here. Sorry I’m such a mess—I had to come right from work.”

“Not a problem.” And it wasn’t. His chambray shirt and jeans were dusty with a long day’s work in construction, but his long, graceful hands were clean. His hair, thick and inky, was pulled back into a long braid, highlighting the hard, high cheekbones and wide mouth. His eyes were serious, very dark, but she knew from watching him at various gatherings that they crinkled up when he laughed.

She struggled back into a professional demeanor. As they moved toward the middle of the room, Marissa liked the way his attention honed in on Crystal.

“Hi, honey,” he said, and raised a hand in a gesture of inclusion. “Why don’t you come on over here with us?”

The girl reluctantly slid out of her seat and shuffled over, dwarfed by her coat and baggy pants and all that hair sliding forward to hide her face. Her uncle slid an arm around her shoulders and embraced her quickly before he let her go.

They settled into chairs Marissa kept close to her desk for unruly kids. “Mr. Martinez—”

“Robert,” he corrected.

“Right. Robert, I was just telling Crystal that I think she’s very bright, and I’m worried about her.”

Robert glanced at Crystal, then back to Marissa, and she saw his concern in the darkness of those uptilted eyes. “She is smart,” he said. “But she doesn’t seem to like school very much.”

“Exactly. Maybe if we talk, we can get to the bottom of that. Make it better.”

“All right,” Robert said.

Marissa shifted slightly. “Crystal, can I ask you some questions?”

“I guess.”

“Have you made some friends here yet?”

A shrug, a dull glance outside the window. “Yeah.”

It was a lie and Marissa knew it, but she wouldn’t push. With a flash of inspiration, she dropped her usual spiel about the missing homework assignments and asked instead, “Tell me, is there anything you’re crazy about? I mean totally nuts. Like cats or horses or a book you’ve read?”

A small alteration in body language. Crystal’s gaze slid toward her uncle. “No,” she said.

Robert grinned. “You can tell her.”

Long lashes swept down. “No.”

Marissa glanced at Robert. He met her eyes, then reached out and put a hand on Crystal’s shoulder. “She’s not gonna use it against you, babe.”

Crystal shifted away. “Everyone makes fun of me. Like I have a sickness or something.”

“I won’t laugh. I promise,” Marissa said, crossing her heart and lifting a hand.

With a dark glare at her uncle, one that dared him to say a word, Crystal said distinctly, “No.”

“It’s all right,” Marissa said. “You don’t trust me, and you don’t really have any reason to.” She shrugged. “If you ever feel like telling me, I’ll be glad to listen—and maybe I can figure out ways to connect school, which you seem to hate, to whatever it is that you love.”

Crystal raised her eyes, and Marissa glimpsed something like surprise.

“Of course, that means we have to talk about the other things now.” Marissa folded her hands. It was always hard to know how a parent would respond to the kind of news she was about to deliver. Some reacted defensively. Some turned their embarrassment into anger at the child.

“The reason I wanted to talk to both of you together,” she said, “is because Crystal is doing very well on tests, but she’s not turning in homework. In math, since she’s obviously getting the concepts, I’d be willing to overlook the lack of homework, but I’m hearing about the same problem from other teachers, and they aren’t going to be as willing to overlook that work.”

Robert frowned, an expression of bewilderment more than anger. “She does her homework. I check it every night.” He turned to her. “Aren’t you turning it in?”

“I forget.”

Marissa carefully did not smile. Crystal wasn’t forgetting. Or if she was, it was a passive-aggressive kind of forgetting, a way to get what she thought she wanted. She’d discuss some ideas with Robert once Crystal left the room, but for now she let it go. “Crystal, I’d really like to help you get some good patterns going, so school is more fun for you. It would be criminal for you to waste that great mind.” She paused. “Do you have any suggestions?”

A sudden wash of tears filled the dark eyes, and she looked away sullenly. One hostile shoulder lifted and fell.

“How about if you come here for an hour after school, and I can help you with your work—not just math, but whatever you’re having trouble with?”

“I’m not having any trouble.”

“Well, maybe it would just be a case of you turning the homework in to me, then, so I can see that it gets to the right places.” She looked at the uncle, resisting that little zing of awareness he gave her. “Would that be okay with you?”

“What d’you say, Crystal? Maybe try it for a week or two, see how it goes, eh? It’s only an hour. What the heck?”

Heartfelt shrug, both shoulders. “I guess.”

Marissa smiled. “Good. I’ll see you tomorrow, here, then. And since you’ve been tortured long enough, how about giving me a few minutes with your uncle? You can get a soda or something, maybe?”

“Somebody here won’t let me drink pop.”

Robert chuckled, and reached into the pocket of his jeans. “I saw the Sno-Kone man out there. Get some ice cream. It’s good for you.”

“How come it’s good and pop is bad?”

“Because ice cream is made from milk, silly girl.” He winked at her. “Get me a couple of ice-cream sandwiches, will ya? I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

Crystal took the money and gravely shook her head. “Someday, Uncle, you’re going to be as fat as a house. Or my uncle Gary.”

He laughed. “Probably.” He patted her shoulder and inclined his head. “Go on.”

Crystal shuffled out, and Robert turned back to Marissa, his face wiped free of amusement. “She’s not doing real well here, is she?”

“No.” Marissa, acting on a hunch, stood up and closed the door, then returned to her seat. “She’s been here…what? Four or five weeks? And I’ve never seen her even talk to another student. Other kids try, you know, to include her, and she’s not having it.”

He sighed, and then, as if he couldn’t think while sitting, stood up and paced to the window. “I’m not too good at this father thing,” he said, turning. His arms were crossed. “I’ve never had a kid—but I gotta try. Her mom is useless, and there’s nobody else. I’ve been trying to make her stick to regular hours and eat normal food—just, you know, normal.” He gestured, shook his head. “Why am I telling you this?”

“Maybe because it’s hard to go it alone,” Marissa said. “It sounds like you’re doing all the right things, and it’s obviously a rough time for her.” She frowned. “Is she doing any kind of parenting class, Lamaze, anything with other kids who are also pregnant?”

“She starts the end of the week. You think that’ll help, maybe? Maybe she feels kind of isolated.”

“Yeah.” Marissa thought, fleetingly, of herself at fourteen—feeling like a hippopotamus in her flowing dress while all the other girls wore their skinny jeans.

“Trust me when I say this is a rough age for all the kids, but if there’s anything to set you the tiniest bit apart, it’s that much harder. She’s pregnant, she’s new and she’s Native American, which sort of makes her exotic around here.” She smiled. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not exactly a wildly integrated community.”

Humor flickered over his eyes—eyes that crinkled upward at the corners just as she remembered. In detail. With a little ripple of despair, she decided he was just sinfully delectable.

“I noticed,” he said. “I don’t want to live in a city. Red Creek might have some flaws, but at least I don’t have to worry about her getting on the wrong side of some gang.”

“Do you mind if I make a suggestion?”

“No—please. I’m open to anything.”

“I’ll have her come in every afternoon and see if I can get her on track with school, maybe let her know there’s someone else in her corner. We can start a check-off system to help her get her homework in. And it’s probably going to help a lot to get her into her pregnancy class.” She straightened. “But it also occurs to me that there’s someone in town who would be more than delighted to help you mother this lost child.”

He looked puzzled. “Mother?”

She chuckled. “Yeah. Louise Forrest—er, Chacon, I guess it is now. Jake’s mother.”

“You know Jake and his mother?”

He didn’t recognize her at all. With a grin she said, “We have met, Robert. I’m good friends with Lance.”

His body went soft with surprise, and she saw the knowledge and recognition dawn on his face. “Oh my God! I know who you are now. Marissa.” His gaze moved with frank astonishment over her body. “My God! You’ve lost…you’re so much—” He stopped, clamped his mouth shut, took a breath.

Marissa laughed.

“Sorry,” he said. “That was really rude.”

“Not at all. It’s very common lately.”

“You’ve lost a lot of weight.”

“Almost a hundred pounds.” She gestured like the Duchess of York. “And trust me, I love it when people are amazed.”

His eyes made the journey over her figure once more, this time frankly appreciative. “You look terrific.”

“Thanks. Now, about Louise…”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Yeah, Louise is a great idea.”

“Day to day, it’s just getting through. Sometimes just minute to minute.” She smiled. “I teach them all day, remember. But when you run into something troubling, Louise might have good advice.”

He nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and held out his hand. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the interest you’ve taken.”

Marissa stood and clasped the long brown hand in her own, allowing herself at last to experience the slightly heady sensation of standing close to him, holding his hand and smiling up at him. “My pleasure,” she said, and made to draw away.

But he held on, tightening his fingers slightly. “You were always beautiful, you know.”

Marissa, stricken to the core, was afraid he’d see too much if she let him hang on a second longer, and she pulled away, hiding her emotions under a well-mannered smile. “Thank you. And thank you for coming.”

At the door he paused. “Do you want to know what she loves?”

“I’ll wait until she’s ready to tell me.”

He nodded. “All right. Thanks again.”

He closed the door behind him and Marissa sank against the desk, swallowing the weird rush of emotion his simple, clear words had given her. You were always beautiful. Not exactly the words she would ever have expected to come from the lips of a jaded, brooding man who only crooked his finger and had women from thirteen to seventy flocking to his side.

Then she realized with a wry little smile that it was exactly what she should have expected. The great power of a ladies’ man lay in his understanding of a woman’s most private, most revered hungers.

Reaching for her purse, she chuckled. He’d certainly zeroed in on Marissa’s.

There was a card from her sister in the mailbox when she got home, and Marissa laughed when she opened it. The front showed a beachy guy in worn white cutoffs, smiling hunkily, and the inside said, “Just wanted to send you something fun to break up your day.”

Marissa had mailed out the exact card, for no particular reason, to her twin sister, Victoria, only three days before. They were identical twins, the only children of their obscenely wealthy and overly protective parents. What nature began in the womb, the isolation their parents had imposed had completed; the pair had an almost uncanny bond, as if they were one mind in two bodies.

When she walked in, still smiling, the phone rang.

“I just got it,” she said into the phone, knowing by a twin’s intuition exactly who was on the other end. “I should have known.”

Victoria laughed. “I don’t even know why we bother. Next time, just buy the card and keep it and so will I, and we’ll both save the postage.”

“Ah, what fun would that be?”

Victoria changed gears. “Enough of that. Who is he?”

It startled Marissa. “Who?”

“Some man. Don’t lie. I felt it, right in the solar plexus.”

Marissa chuckled. “Well, he’s really no one. A cute parent, that’s all. Sweet talker.”

“Mmm. He must be hot, that’s all I have to say. I’m going to come see for myself. Can I come visit? Maybe stay for a week. Or a month?”

“Really?” Marissa cried. She had not seen her sister in more than two years, largely due to Victoria’s hectic and worldly schedule. “That would be so fantastic!” She smiled to herself. “I have quite a surprise for you.”

“And I have one for you.” She laughed softly. “I can’t imagine that we’ll duplicate each other this time.”

Marissa thought of her sister’s ultraskinny frame. “Nope. Not this time.”

“All right, then. I’ll see you in a week or two.”

They hung up.

Chapter 2

One of the best parts of Marissa’s job was that her planning period fell just before lunch, so on those days that she was not required to be in the cafeteria or walking the grounds, she had a good long break in the middle of the day. She often went to a small café nearby to have a salad freshly made from a long list of menu items. Today she chose butter and radicchio and romaine lettuces, sunflower seeds, broccoli, tomatoes and shredded carrots and a bare sprinkling of pumpernickel croutons. They didn’t even have to ask anymore if she wanted the dressing on the side.

Carrying her overflowing plate to a table near the window, she relished the salad slowly, along with a whole-grain roll and a thin spread of butter and the unsweetened raspberry tea they served, made with fresh lemons and raspberries. Outrageously good.

Gazing peacefully at the bright blue Colorado day, she felt sinfully satisfied. In her old life, she had rarely taken the time to enjoy food—eating had been a guilt-laden activity, something evil one was required to indulge, and she often hurried through it, almost inhaling a meal before others had made it halfway through.

It was a miracle to her now to really taste the butter on the bread, savor the small wheat berries in the soft dough. She dipped her fork in dressing and speared a pale green leaf of butter lettuce—it was one of her favorites at home because of the way the leaves felt in her hand, soft as suede—and took time to experience the combination of flavors. Before she had finished half the salad, she was satisfied—no, closer to stuffed.

Replete, and feeling virtuous from all the nutrients she’d managed to pack into a single lunch, she paid and headed back to campus, two blocks north. The walk was a particularly pleasant one, following a path through a park that ran through the middle of town like a long finger. The day was not yet hot, and a breeze lifted her hair.

A breeze that smelled of cigarettes. She glanced over, ready to smile; the few teachers who still smoked often slipped away to the park during lunch, and it was her habit to shake her finger at them cheerfully. But no one was sitting on the favored bench beneath a copse of aspens—instead, blue smoke wafted around the edge of a cinderblock building that housed rest rooms. Marissa spied a combat boot with a spot of pink paint at the toe peeking around the base of the wall.

With a sigh, she crossed the grass, shaking her head, and came around the building.

Crystal Avila hunched there, guiltily, and started so violently when she saw Marissa that she dropped the cigarette on the ground.

Marissa quickly stepped on it, grinding it beneath the toe of her shoe. “Bad idea, kiddo. And not just for you.”

The girl ducked her head, pulled her coat more tightly around her belly. A fall of hair, taking up a thick reddish hue in the dappled sunlight, slid over her shoulders.

“Do you smoke a lot?” Marissa asked.

“No.” She swallowed, dared to raise her eyes for a split second, dropped them again. “This is the first time since—” She burst into tears. “I don’t know what I was doing!”

“Oh, honey.” Marissa reached for her with one hand, ready to offer a shoulder for a hug if the girl needed it, but Crystal jerked away, hiding her face with her hands.

“Don’t suspend me, okay? I swear, I’ll do whatever you want, but I don’t want my uncle to—”

“To what?”

“To give me that look, all sad and disappointed.”

“Ah.” She folded her arms, leaning as casually as she could against the wall. “Well, first of all, I can’t suspend you for smoking because you’re not on school grounds.”

“Really?” Bright, hopeful eyes in a face streaked with tears.

“I could have you sent to study hall for leaving campus—”

“Oh.” Deflated balloon. Shoulders drooping, head dropping.

“—but I don’t see what purpose it would serve. You have enough study hall for fourteen people already.” She sighed. “I want to help you, Crystal. I wish you’d let me.”

Abruptly the girl put her back against the wall and slid down to sit on the ground, her elbows braced on her upraised knees, her hands over her face. “You can’t do nothing.”

“Anything. And you’d be surprised.”

“You don’t know,” she said miserably. “You don’t know what those girls say about me. I hate them.”

Marissa knelt, trying to be as ladylike as possible in a straight skirt. That was one thing her old tent dresses had afforded that she’d never truly appreciated—freedom of movement. “You want to walk back to school with me? We can talk in my room. I don’t have a class for an hour.”

She shook her head. “I want to go home. Can you call my uncle?”

“Sure.” She reached into her purse and took out a tiny cell phone. “What’s the number?”

Crystal looked up. “It’s a beeper.” She gave the number and Marissa punched it in, then held the phone loosely as she examined the girl. “Someone hurt you today?”

She blinked. Nodded, her mouth tight. “I know how it looks, you know, but I’m not a slut. I never was.” She raised her head. “I swear it on a stack of Bibles.”

“I believe you.” She hesitated. “Is it different people or someone in particular? If there’s someone in particular, I can make sure it stops.”

“Get real.” She rolled her eyes. “Like I would rat someone out like that.”

The phone trilled lightly in her hand. “Hello?”

“This is Robert Martinez,” he said. That voice—it rolled over her in a wave of color, a rich sienna, like the skin on his arms. “You beeped me?”

“Yes. This is Marissa Pierce, Crystal’s math teacher. She’d like to come home. Is that all right?”

“Is there something wrong? Is the baby okay?”

“They’re both fine. She’s just had kind of a bad day.”

“A bad day? What does that mean?”

Crystal said, “Ask him if I can walk over to where he’s working and I’ll tell him what’s going on.”

Marissa repeated the information.

“That’s fine. Look, I know she’s right there, but is there something going on I need to know?”

“Yes,” Marissa said.

“Can you bring her over? Or meet me somewhere?”

“Sure, I’ll bring her.” Crystal rolled her eyes. Marissa grinned. “Where are you?”

He gave her directions. It was only three blocks west, in the heart of the historical district. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”

Marissa stood, brushing her skirt down. “Come on, kiddo.”

Crystal stood, wiping hard at her face with her sleeve. “Why are you always so nice? Don’t you know people take advantage of you?”

“I’ll take my chances.”

When Robert’s beeper had gone off, he’d been high on a ladder in the foyer of a Victorian ruin. His crew was working on the restoration of a mansion that had been built with mining money just before the turn of the century. Neglected for more than twenty-five years, rumored to be haunted, Rosewood would provide the centerpiece for a historical renewal project that the town of Red Creek hoped would attract summer tourists to replace the income lost when skiers looked elsewhere for entertainment.

Robert had been tearing out the plaster and lathe of a particularly rotten stretch of ceiling, his hair and face covered with dust and old spiderwebs, when the pager had beeped loudly.

He’d checked the number with a sinking feeling. He only wore the beeper so that Crystal could get in touch with him anywhere, anytime, and it could only be her paging him. He’d scrambled down, brushing off his face and arms as he went, then had called out to Tyler Forrest, in charge of the meticulous restoration of the wood, and Robert’s direct superior. “Need to borrow your cell phone, man.”

The number was one he didn’t recognize, and when he’d called it and got Marissa Pierce, he’d felt a frisson of…anticipation over the sound of her voice. And then sadness that Crystal was still having so much trouble.

He handed the cell phone back. “I gotta take a break. Crystal is going to come here, and I’ll need to take her home and get her settled. Shouldn’t take long.”

“Is everything okay with the baby?”

“Baby’s fine.”

Tyler nodded. “Take as long as you need. Kids come first.”

“Thanks.”

“Wait a second, man.” Tyler reached into a leather satchel. “My wife found these. Why don’t you take a look while you’re waiting?”

He took the folder. “What is it?”

Tyler gestured to the boarded area above the landing of the stairs. “Photographs of the original window. Black and white, but at least it’s a start.”

Robert shook his head with a wry smile. “You’re a damned pit bull, you know it?”

“So they say.” Tyler grinned. “Just take a look.”

He carried the folder out to the shabby porch, patting his shirt pocket for cigarettes in an automatic gesture. It was empty, as it had been for three years. The habit of reaching for them would probably be with him when he was ninety. He took out a wooden match instead, stuck it between his teeth and flipped open the folder.

The window was enormous, and it was not simply painted glass, as had been fashionable at the turn of the century, but the real thing—stained glass in lead. It was also enormous, stretching from the base of the landing to nearly a story and a half above. Robert whistled. It was good work—no, better than that.

It was also well beyond anything he had attempted. He’d done small restorations for private homes, usually a small round in a door, a pair of matching windows alongside a fireplace, things like that. He’d done one large window for an Indian church, but not even it came close to this in size. Tyler would have to find someone else.

With a shake of his head, he closed the folder and paced to the end of the porch and back again, peering every so often down the sidewalk in the direction from which they’d come.

Chill, man, said a voice in his head, and he exhaled heavily, got rid of the match and forced himself to sit on the wooden railing that surrounded the porch. A breeze, smelling of pine resin and sunlight on a carpet of old leaves, swept down from the mountains, as light and clean as anything he could imagine. It was one of the things he liked best about this place, that weightless, scented breeze. It rattled the aspen leaves together overhead, startling a squirrel who skittered down the trunk and nearly across Robert’s feet before it realized its mistake and scuttled off in the other direction.

The tension in his chest eased. Whatever the problem was, he and Crystal could figure it out. As long as they had each other, a roof over their heads, food to eat, there would be an answer.

But when she appeared on the sidewalk, he wondered. Her head was bent in misery, her arms folded across her chest. She was too skinny. So miserable. She would not say a word about the boy who’d made her pregnant, wouldn’t say anything about her life back in Albuquerque at all, come to that.

Next to her, Marissa provided such a contrast of healthy womanhood that Robert nearly resented her. Sunlight caught in the fall of her elegantly cut dark hair, hair that swung in a thread by thread flow that came only from a very expensive set of scissors. Today she wore a royal blue blouse, silk by the low luster, together with a simple straight skirt. Lush breasts and round hips, a complexion clear as a bowl of milk, teeth as straight and white as a picket fence.

He didn’t move immediately, caught by a swift, sharp surge of lust, rare and surprising. He narrowed his eyes, wondering what kindled it, noticed the fine heavy sway of flesh beneath her blouse, the unconscious swish of hips—she had a very female kind of walk, one you didn’t see much anymore. Like one of those old-time movie stars, Marilyn Monroe or Rita Hayworth. Yeah, she had a very Rita Hayworth look, a siren in silk.

It was only then that he realized how he must look himself, covered in hundred-year-old plaster dust. The recognition, couched as it was in the obvious wish to look better for her, annoyed him, and although he brushed a little at his shirt and face as he walked down to meet them, he dared her to look down on him for being a working man.

Anyway, it was Crystal who mattered, not her teacher.

As the two of them approached, Robert saw that Crystal’s face was streaky and red-eyed. In the oversize jacket she insisted upon wearing, she looked like a refugee, especially in comparison to the elegance that came off Marissa in clouds, along with that rich-girl smell. For a moment, he hated the teacher and everything she represented—the entire power structure, the do-gooder mentality. Gritting his teeth, he resisted brushing dust from himself and said, “What’s going on?”

They exchanged a glance. “I think I’ll leave that up to Crystal,” Marissa said with a soft smile at the girl. Even her voice was rich. Perfect vowels, perfect tone. He bet she never shouted, even when she was flat-out furious.

“Crystal?” he prompted.

She looked toward the tops of the trees, to the roof, at the ground, anywhere but at his face. In some way it wounded him. Why wouldn’t she talk to him? “You tell him,” she told Marissa.

“I’d rather you did, Crystal,” Robert said. “Have I ever yelled at you? Have I done anything to make you think I’m judging you?”

“No.” The word came out hoarsely. “It’s not that.”

“What, then? I don’t get it. I want to help you.”

Marissa touched his arm, just above the elbow, and when he looked up, she gestured toward a cluster of white buckets tucked under the shade cast by an old pine. “Why don’t we go sit over there?”

He spared a glance at her skirt. “Mighty expensive clothes to go slumming in.”

“They’ll wash,” she said, steel in her tone.

He knew better, but shrugged. “Whatever.”

They walked across the neglected yard in silence and settled on the sealed buckets that contained plaster repair mix. Marissa, straight as a Victorian lady, waited for Crystal to look up. “I really think this is in your court, kiddo.”

“She caught me smoking,” Crystal said, and dropped her face into her hands, hiding behind her yards of hair.

“Smoking?” He sat up, shocked in spite of himself. “Crystal!”

“See?” Crystal flung away her hair, threw out her hands. “That’s what I mean. That shock thing you do. I hate it.”

He felt like he’d been kicked, and before he spoke, he took a minute to breathe deeply, in and out, and tell himself that whatever Crystal did was just a symptom of her anger. He found himself touching a tattoo on the inside of his wrist, a memento of his own days of anger. “Crystal,” he said quietly.

She looked at him finally, and there was so much misery in her expression that he reached out and took her hand. “Are you all right?”

Her fingers tightened around his convulsively. “Yeah.”

“Do you smoke a lot?”

“No. I did sometimes, back in Albuquerque, but not since I came here.”

“Why today?”

A shrug.

Marissa asked, “Do you want to get out of this school that badly?”

“No,” she said, aggrieved. And to Robert’s complete amazement, she started to cry again. “I don’t know why I did it. It could be bad for the baby! But there was this girl and I just asked her for one, like to prove something, I guess. And—” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “It was stupid. I know it was. But, Miss Pierce, I’ll do anything you want. Please?”

Robert let himself look at Marissa then, clenching his jaw to keep hope from showing on his face. The blouse made her eyes even bluer in her pale face, but it seemed like he could see goodness there. Not Rich Girl benevolence, but something real and honest.

And something more, too. In anyone else, he’d have named it street savvy, but he didn’t know how this woman, with her three-hundred-dollar shoes and that million-dollar cosmetic smell, would have picked up street smarts.

But the bright blue eyes narrowed, her lips tightened and she leaned forward. “Listen here, Crystal. You got me the minute you walked in that door, and I know I’m a soft touch where certain kids are concerned. Fifteen was the worst year of my life, and I bet you’re having an even more miserable time than I did, so I’m on your side in a way you aren’t going to find very often. But—” she leaned closer, elbows on one knee “—I’m also smarter than I look, and if you play me, you’ll lose me. Got it?”

Crystal, without a single atom of surprise about her—which was more than Robert could say—nodded. “I promise, Miss Pierce.”

“Good.” She looked at Robert. “Are you free to take her home?”

He hesitated, only a second. “Sure,” he said.

Marissa inclined her head, and he found himself snared in a strange way by the measuring expression in her eyes. “There was no right answer to that question. Why don’t you let me call Louise if you have to go to work? I know she won’t mind.”

“Who’s Louise?”

He shot Crystal a silencing glance, and considered it. Louise Forrest Chacon was famous—almost infamous—for her need to take care of not only her own children, but the children of the whole damned world. He had been the beneficiary of that loving attention more than once, the most memorable time being when he’d had to tell her that her son was in the hospital after falling down a cliff.

Something eased, all the tension and conflict he’d been feeling since they’d walked up, and he gave Marissa Pierce a smile. Rich Girl or not, she had something real that he liked a lot.

“Truth is,” he said, “I got connections to my boss. He won’t fire me. But maybe me and Crystal can take the afternoon and go for a visit.” He stood and held out his hand, only realizing, when it was fully extended and she couldn’t refuse without being rude, that it was covered with dust, making his dark skin look as if it had been plunged in flour.

But Marissa didn’t even hesitate. She smiled—a true, deep smile that went all the way to her beautiful eyes—and she put her small, neatly manicured hand into his.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

Robert knew, even in the few seconds that he allowed himself to want her, that it was impossible. She wasn’t just well-to-do, not like an officer’s wife or a doctor’s daughter—but bloody rich. He recognized the difference from his days in the army, when he’d occasionally been called to provide security for a diplomatic function. It didn’t matter what country the rich guests came from—an Arabian prince or a Brazilian rancher’s wife or a Japanese royal—the details of that kind of money were always the same.

Clean. Impossibly well-groomed. Hair that looked as if it had been cut one strand at a time. Skin that had been perfectly fed and tended since birth. Toenails as well manicured as fingernails, clothes that moved invisibly, perfectly, of fabrics so fine they’d last seventy years.

But most of all, it was the smell. A smell that filled his head now, a scent of cosmetics, a particular combination of notes from products he couldn’t even begin to imagine. Lipsticks and lotions and creams and shampoos that came in frosted glass containers to sit on marble sink-tops.

Never failed to get him, right in the libido, and it didn’t fail now. Halfway hating himself for the weakness, he gave himself three seconds to inhale it deeply, allowed two seconds more for the desire that came with it to roll down his spine.

Yeah, he was weak. And it was a particularly dismaying weakness, that he was almost invariably attracted to such women, though he’d never actually pursued one. Logically, a poor Indian who’d spent his life fighting for every damned thing he had, ought to hate women like that.

But “ought to” didn’t mean “did”. Above all things, know thyself. What Robert knew was that smell could rip his heart out if he let it, because in some ways it represented everything he’d ever dreamed of as a boy—comfort and privilege and cleanliness. For that eight-year-old he’d been, for the fifteen-year-old shivering in a doorway, he savored the sense of her hand, her smell, her clean, orderly life, then let her go.

“Come on, Crystal.”

She stood up and stopped in front of Marissa. “Thank you, Miss Pierce,” she said with sincerity. She took a breath and said, “You know that thing you asked about?”

“Thing?” Marissa frowned a little, then remembered. “Oh, yes. Your passion?”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you if you want.”

“Please.”

“Movies,” she said, and that was all. She turned and started walking toward Robert’s truck.

Robert lifted his head and grinned at Marissa before he could stop himself, and he saw a flash of something cross her face, a flicker of awareness, unmistakable. Instead of squelching it with a brisk word or a sharp glance, he found himself inclining his head, testing the sensation of that new, fresh lust of his own, and found that it felt pretty good, that he liked the almost forgotten and pleasurable sense of awareness in his thighs. Interesting.

“Movies?” she said.

Robert only nodded, giving her a faint smile. “Yep. The rest you’ll have to get yourself.” He followed Crystal to the truck, knowing that Marissa watched him. He felt her eyes on the back of his arms, his legs. He thought of her sexy, rolling walk, and let a single vision of his hands, sliding up heavy breasts covered in heavy silk, tease his libido, then brushed it away. He climbed into the truck. “You had lunch yet?”

Crystal shook her head.

“Want burgers and fries?”

“Really? Junk food?”

He grinned. “A little now and then won’t hurt anything.”

When she got home from work, Marissa changed into sweats and T-shirt and her now-battered walking shoes. She needed her work-out today more than usual. Pulling her hair into a ponytail, she stretched the backs of her thighs and calves as she’d been taught, then set out just as the sun slid to touch the top of Mount Evans, a craggy peak among many that lined the horizons of Red Creek, Colorado. The sun, she thought as she strode down Main Street, looked like a ball balanced on the tip of a seal’s nose.

She loved the stillness of late afternoon and evening in Red Creek. April touched the air with the fragrance of new greenery and pine sap, but in the shadows, she could still feel the bite of the long winter, surprising and exhilarating.

As she moved, her heels hitting the old concrete of sidewalks poured in 1920, she felt the strain of the long day ease down her spine, flow through her legs and into the ground. Her shoulders shook loose, and she found her breath take a new, calm, deep rhythm.

Who knew simple walking could be such a life-changing experience? Eighteen months ago, a little blue over a failed romance, Marissa had finally tired of herself. Impetuously she’d set out on a walk around the town square to enjoy the sunset. Breathe the air. See something besides her own sorry face in the mirror.

That day she’d walked only five minutes, but it had been a five minutes that changed her life. The next day she’d done it again, just as an experiment, to see if it made her feel as good as it had the first time. It had.

It had gone like that for weeks—Marissa stepping out into the world at dusk to walk as far as she could, then come home, just to see what it was like. After a month, she could walk twenty minutes. After two, she was up to forty.

And after three months, people started to tell her that she needed to get some new clothes. Clothes that weren’t falling off her. For the first time, she realized that she’d been losing weight by simply moving her body. When she stepped on the scales at the local grocery store—she didn’t keep one in her house and still didn’t—she discovered she’d somehow lost thirty pounds.

Thirty pounds.

As Marissa came around a corner, Ramona Forrest was waiting in front of the clinic where she worked. Short and busty, Ramona had taken up walking to rid herself of the extra layer of cushion she’d gained while pregnant, and she had begun to enjoy their evening walks so much that she’d enlisted Louise, whom they usually picked up on the next long turn.

Louise was waiting in the designated spot, but she didn’t have on her sweats. “Hi, girls,” she said. “I have a houseful and can’t go, but, Ramona, your darling girl is up there, along with your husband, and I’ve got Curtis and Cody, too, so I’m fixing a big meal. Why don’t you both circle back and eat with us when you’re done?”

“Sounds good,” Marissa said, and tucked a loose strand of hair back into her ponytail. “As long as you aren’t doing the Southern thing and frying all of it.”

“You know better. I’ve got plenty of skinned chicken breasts for my girls, and a salad with every green known to mankind. I even bought some of that raspberry vinaigrette.” She said it “vinegar-ette” and Marissa smiled.

Ramona glanced at her watch, then the sky. “Half hour?”

“All right.”

As they continued their walk, Ramona said, “She’s up to something.”

“Absolutely. She’s so guilelessly obvious.”

“With Louise, it’s usually matchmaking.”

“True. Wonder who it is.” Marissa paused in horror. “Oh, I hope it isn’t me!”

“Keep walking.” Ramona tugged her arm. “Why you?”

Marissa groaned. “I sent Robert Martinez over to her today.”

“Red Dog?”

“The very one.” She squeezed her eyes tight. “Oh, good grief. I’ll die of embarrassment if that’s what’s on her mind.”

“I’m lost. Start over. Why would you even send him to—?” She interrupted herself. “Oh. Crystal.”

“Right. I thought Louise might be a help to both of them.”

“And she will, but she also got the bright idea to match the pair of you up.” Ramona chuckled. In a Frankenstein voice, she said, “Be very careful,” and shook her head. “She’s a mule when she puts her mind to something.”

“I know.” She rolled her eyes and took Ramona’s arm. “But I have to tell you that he’s one devastatingly sexy thing, isn’t he?” She grinned. “I even get kind of flustered when I have to talk to him. Me. Flustered.”

“He’s definitely gorgeous,” Ramona said cautiously. They paused in their talking to take a hill that was particularly challenging. At the top she continued. “He’s also a dog—hence the name.”

Marissa felt a little pinch at the warning. “I know,” she said aloud. “Not my type.”

“Liar. The badder they are, the better you like them.”

Marissa grinned. “I know. Isn’t that funny? And my sister, who has made an art form of being the bad girl, loves the good guys. How weird is that?”

Ramona smiled, but her large brown eyes were serious. “I know he’s gorgeous and wounded and mysterious, Marissa, but those wounds are deep. I don’t think that man has ever had anyone in his corner. I’m not sure he’s capable of making a connection with a woman.”

Marissa felt suddenly humiliated that anyone should think she would go after a man like that, or had any hope of him coming after her. Aware that her cheeks were red, she waved a hand and made a joke. “I wasn’t exactly thinking of marriage.” She sighed. “I’m not the kind of woman he’d go for anyway.”

“Uh, sweetie, have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?”

She grinned. “Oh, yes. I admire myself in the mirror at least seven times a day, for very long periods.”

Ramona laughed. “So, why not you, then?”

“Do we have to do this? I’m embarrassed enough, okay?”

“Mmm,” Ramona said, anchoring herself more firmly to Marissa’s arm. “I think we do. Maybe old Red Dog’s just what the doctor ordered to build up that flabby self-esteem.”

Marissa laughed at a vision of lifting him overhead. “Push-ups for the ego?”

“Sit-ups for the psyche!”

“Sex for the soul.” It didn’t have the same ring and she knew it, but she didn’t take it back.

“Yeah, that’s what he’s about, all right. Sex.” Ramona sobered. “Is that something you could do? Take what he offers and walk away when it was done?”

“I could try.” She laughed throatily. “I mean, gosh, what’s the worst that could happen? Not like I haven’t had a broken heart once or twice in my life.”

“Haven’t we all.” They walked along the sidewalk, silent for a long moment. “On second thought, Marissa, stay away from him. He’s just…” She lifted a shoulder.

“He’s just what?”

“Wrong for you, that’s all.”

Marissa’s antenna rippled. She narrowed her eyes and said, “Would you mind being a little more specific?”

Ramona didn’t answer for a moment. She was a diplomat at heart, a doctor whose patients worshipped the ground she walked on. “Look, don’t take this wrong—”

“Oh, I know where that always leads.”

Ramona stopped. “You probably do. And I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Marissa, but you’re clueless on this level. You think it doesn’t matter that you’re worth however many zillions it is now, but it does. You don’t know anything about life the way he and Crystal had to live it. You don’t even know about ordinary people’s lives.”

Stung, Marissa crossed her arms and looked at the last gilding on the edge of the world, a brilliant gold zigzag edging the tops of the mountains. “And how much do you know about it, Ramona? More than I do?”

A puzzled expression crossed her face. “Well, no, probably not, but—”

“But,” Marissa added gently, “you might be less inclined to judge?”

Ramona winced. “Ouch.” She raised her big, compassionate eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m the one being judgmental.”

“It’s all right. I’m used to it.” She relented a little, rolling her eyes. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

“Labels,” Ramona said with a sigh. “What a pain. We all get stuck with them. Red Dog is the sexiest, baddest, saddest. I was the brainy busty one.”

“Richest, fattest, smartest.”

Ramona laughed. “Ha! We could have duked it out for smartest.”

Marissa laughed. “Thank heavens. I couldn’t stand being the richest, the fattest and the smartest.”

Chapter 3

Crystal didn’t like white people all that much. Back in Albuquerque, there never had been that many in her life, really, only the ones on TV and at school, but here, it seemed like nearly everybody was white. It made her feel lost, kind of, like she was in a foreign country and didn’t know the language.

She had to admit the old lady was pretty nice, and she was married to a Mexican who still talked as if he hadn’t been gone too long, and that made it easier to believe the lady was really that nice. She gave Crystal some Kool-Aid, and her house smelled like houses in Albuquerque, of onions and chili, which was for the Mexican husband, of course, but it still made it easier.

After a while, the house filled up so much that Crystal got kind of panicky, afraid all of them would want to make polite conversation with her. But Mrs. Chacon seemed to know the exact minute Crystal wanted to burst into tears, and took her into a room at the back of the house where there was a bed and a VCR. She had a ton of movies, too. “Your uncle said you like movies. Feel free to watch whatever you want, all right? And maybe you can have a nap. I’ll save you some supper—don’t worry about that.”

It almost made Crystal cry. That was what she hated about being pregnant. She cried over everything, as if she had an underground well in her belly and it over-flowed every day.

She looked through all the movies, and there were some pretty good ones, she had to admit. All the Nightmare movies, which she liked because they made her real life—no matter how bad it was on a given day—look pretty good since nobody was stalking her; and some goofy old movies such as Gone with the Wind, which Crystal had watched and didn’t get at all. She thought Scarlett was a total bitch and deserved to lose a good guy like Rhett. There were also a couple of her absolute, tip-top favorites, such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which she’d seen at least a hundred times, and Last of the Mohicans, which made her cry and cry and cry, every single time. She didn’t know if she wanted to do that right now. To get the full effect, it was best if she was all alone and could make all kinds of noise without anybody hearing what an idiot she was about movies.

There was no Titanic, which might actually have been too creepy for words. But there was one of the Romeo and Juliet with guns, the new one, with Claire Danes. Crystal put her hand on it, daring herself to look at it. But in the end, she just couldn’t. Not without Mario.

For one minute, that hot feeling came into her throat—not tears, but something that burned a lot more—and she wanted to touch him, talk to him, so bad that she almost couldn’t breathe. But that didn’t do her or the baby or even Mario any good.

The only safe movie after that was Ferris Bueller, and she stuck it in the VCR and kicked back on the bed. In minutes she was sound asleep.

It wasn’t as bad as Marissa expected, back at Louise’s house. The rooms were bursting with Louise’s three sons, their spouses and the grandchildren, who now totaled five with the birth of Anna and Tyler’s second baby. Anna beamed tonight, looking like the ultimate Madonna as she nursed her black-haired boy, and she only smiled deliriously when people teased her about her three children, wondering if she planned on more. Tyler came to her defense. “We love babies. We’re going to have twenty.”

Anna laughed at that. “Or maybe five.”

Robert was there, of course, quiet as he always was, laconically cracking dry jokes at odd moments, always eating whatever Louise piled on his plate. Often, Marissa noticed, Robert, and Louise’s husband, Alonzo, could be found together, comfortably sitting side by side, exchanging a word now and then. And of course, he and Jake went way back, to Desert Storm. They talked in a kind of grunting guy shorthand, laughing at asides no one else ever got.

But Marissa didn’t have to deal much with him directly, and Louise showed no overt signs of matchmaking, so Marissa relaxed and accepted the gathering for what it appeared to be: another of Louise’s rollicking, impromptu suppers.

Marissa had never experienced such joyful family dynamics, and she loved being here. Filling her plate with the promised skinned, grilled chicken breast and a steaming pile of steamed summer squash, she settled in a corner near Ramona and tickled her baby’s toes between bites.

But over and over, her gaze flitted toward Robert. Studying him covertly, she thought his face was kind of harsh, as if that difficult past Ramona hinted at had been etched into the shape of it. His mouth was stern and his eyes watchful, and he had a penetrating way of looking at people, unsmiling and direct in a way most people simply could not tolerate. He did not smile often, unless he was trying to charm someone.

Not someone. A woman. In spite of that dangerous aspect, or more likely because of it, he drew women in a way that amazed her. The first summer he’d lived in Red Creek, he’d worked in a little tourist trap near the grocery store, making tiny feather jewelry from carved rocks. Women did whatever they could to coax a smile from the wry mouth. Old women, young women, girls. All of them.

And he accepted it as his due, with a mocking little glint in his eye that might have made Marissa dislike him, if she hadn’t also been able to sense the sadness behind it, the same vast longing that made Crystal stare so hard out the windows at school, as if looking for a knight on a white horse.

Dangerous, Marissa thought. She’d been doing pretty well these days at avoiding the lost men in the world, focusing instead on saving herself. And the odd kid.

Her sister, Victoria, would have charmed him instantly, Marissa thought suddenly. But not her. Not even now. She didn’t have that femme fatale gene. She was exactly who she appeared to be: open, direct, honest.

Fatty, fatty, two by four, sang a nasally child’s voice in her head. Couldn’t get through the bathroom door.

Robert looked up, caught her staring and raised his chin in her direction, a simple greeting. She looked away, wincing inwardly over the fact that she had, this very afternoon, been thinking he might be slightly interested. Just for a fleeting second his mouth had turned up in a distinctly flirtatious little smile.

Standing, she pointed to Ramona’s plate. “Finished with that? I’ll take it in with me.”

“Thanks.”

Marissa retreated, dropping the paper plates in the trash, then heading for the sanctuary of the wide balcony attached to the back of the house, a wooden deck that overlooked a deep, long valley. At night, only the black zigzag of the mountains against the night sky could be seen. And it was a little cold, but Marissa breathed it in anyway—the stars, so bright and sharp and thick so far from the city, the utter silence of the land. She let go of a breath, relaxing.

Resting her hands lightly on the wooden rail, she looked down at them and smiled ruefully as she admired the new ring she’d had to buy when none of the old ones would stay on her fingers anymore. That had been a rich, rich moment, and she wore the antique circlet of garnets every day to remind herself how far she’d come.

Odd how those old tapes kept playing in her head anyway. She wondered, lifting her chin to drink in the crisp air, how long it would take them to go away.

The glass door slid open behind her, and Marissa turned to see Robert stepping outside. His braid fell over one shoulder. “Hi,” he said, tucking his hands in his pockets. “You mind if I come out with you?”

“Not at all,” Marissa said politely, though of course he was the one she had been escaping.

“I didn’t have a chance to thank you for what you did for Crystal.”

“Oh, don’t mention it, please. Is she better tonight?”

“I think so.” He joined her at the rail. “Bringing her here was a good idea.”

“I’m glad.” Marissa curled her fingers around the railing, willing herself not to look at him. But it didn’t particularly matter—she was still very aware of him, a scent of something fertile, verdant. He was tall and lean, bigger than she had previously noticed. His cocked elbow almost touched her arm. He shifted, hands still tucked lightly into the pockets of his jeans, and said nothing.

But even in the silence, in their stillness, she could feel an electric hum between them, strong enough that she thought she’d see a faint blue light in the air between their bodies if she looked.

The silence stretched. He shifted again, and she half expected—half wanted?—him to go back inside. He didn’t, though. Just kept standing there, radiating that electromagnetic field.

Finally she said, “This is such a peaceful town.”

“Yeah,” he said, and as if he’d only needed an opening he couldn’t come up with himself, added, “I kept thinking I’d leave, you know. Tomorrow. Next week. Next month. Kept somehow waking up here again every day.”

Marissa laughed. “I know the feeling. We used to come here to go skiing when I was a child, and I only came here to spite my father. Somehow I haven’t managed to go anywhere else.”

“How long have you been here?” He eased a little, leaning his elbows on the rail.

She had to think about it. “Seven years? No, eight. I turned down Dartmouth and ran to the Rockies.” She dared to look at him. No crackling blue electricity visible, but there was a nice glissando of light on the crown of his head and his nose. “How about you?”

“Three years. Didn’t intend to stay more than a few weeks, really. But that was when Jake…uh…”

“I remember,” she said to spare him. When Jake had fallen down a cliff and nearly killed himself. “Where are you from originally?”

He raised his head, met her eyes. “Albuquerque.” He said it almost like a dare.

“Is there supposed to be some meaning there? If so, I didn’t catch it.”

“Are you disappointed?”

Startled in a chuckle, Marissa asked, “No, why would I be?”

A slight lift of one shoulder. “White girls always want to hear some romantic tale of the reservation.”

“Ah.” She inclined her head. “Little chip on your shoulder there. Might want to knock it off.”

His teeth showed, just for a second, in the darkness. “I swear it’s true.”

“Well, my disappointment is much more basic. I think you should have a name like…oh, Johnny Blue Raven or something.”

“Ravens are black.” The smile broadened, and Marissa thought the air was definitely beginning to glow a pale blue, just right there around his head. “Where are you from?”

“A castle in Switzerland.”

He laughed. “Touché.”

Marissa liked the sound of that laughter, a little rough and hoarse, as if he didn’t indulge very often. It made her wonder what it would be like to hear him laugh really hard—or if he ever did. “It’s actually true. I was born in a castle in Switzerland.” She smiled. “It was an accident—my mother was supposed to be home, but she had to see these friends.”

“I see. So did you grow up in the castle, too, princess?”

“Not that one, sadly. A much gloomier castle in up-state New York, complete with ghoulish servants and guard dogs.”

“No kidding?”

She rolled her eyes. “It was a mausoleum. My father was sure someone would snatch my sister and I if he let us out of his sight for three seconds, so we didn’t even go to school—he sent tutors in to us.”

He peered at her for a long minute. “No wonder you wanted to break out.”

“Exactly.” She brushed her hair out of her face. “Now you. Where’d you break out of?”

“Hell,” he said without a single beat of hesitation.

Something told her to keep it light. “Pretty hot. I can see why you’d like the mountains.”

She’d surprised him again. His head came up, and there was an expression of measuring in his eyes. “Yeah.” He looked away again, clicking his heel on the deck, and Marissa focused on the long length of his back beneath a simple cotton shirt, a blue plaid. The fabric stretched tight across his shoulders. “Ever been to Albuquerque?” he asked.

“Once or twice. Probably not to the hell parts, though.”

He laughed and stood up, turning to face her. “Now how’m I gonna be the poor beleaguered wounded guy if you keep making these jokes?”

Marissa raised her eyebrows. “I guess you’ll just have to come up with another act.”

“You’re not at all who I thought you were.”

“Neither are you,” she said honestly, and somehow that was a lot more unnerving than that blue energy humming between them. “I didn’t know you could laugh.”

“It’s been a while.”

In the cool darkness, Robert did something he rarely allowed himself to do: he relaxed. Strange that he felt that freedom with this woman who was so far removed from his circle that she might as well have been a Martian, but there it was. Tonight she wore sweats and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and she smelled a little of soap and deodorant and sweat. It all made her feel more approachable, more real.

They talked, in that aimless way of people who want to keep each other company but aren’t sure of the ground yet, of Red Creek and the historical project. Nothing important. But he found himself looking—almost helplessly—over her body now and then, discovering that he liked the ordinariness of it, too full across the bottom, still pretty solid in the thighs. A homey kind of body that made him want to sidle up to her, press himself close, feel all that giving terrain against the hard angles of his own shape.

Weird. He knew it was weird for him even as he thought it, but there it was. As she laughed, he surprised himself by wanting to laugh, too. When she lifted her chin to point out a shooting star, he looked instead at the underside of her jaw and wanted to press his mouth there.

Cool it. Obviously it had been just a bit too long since he’d indulged himself in some good old recreational sex. He hadn’t felt right about it with Crystal in the house. Not surprising he was getting a little hungry. Pushing himself away from the railing, he thought about going inside before he got any more bright ideas.

But Marissa said, “That hell you spoke of?”

Spoke of. It made him smile. “Yeah?”

“Is that where Crystal’s from, too?”

He turned his lips down, crossed his arms. A serious question. He shook his head. “Hers made mine look like heaven.”

“In what way?” The earnest teacher gazed out of bright blue eyes.

What could she possibly understand about Crystal’s life? Or his, for that matter? But she was so damned earnest, he had to at least give it a shot. “It was poor when I was there. Lot of drugs and booze and gangs. But no one could get their hands on guns. They do now.”

“The guns are the biggest difference?”

He shook his head slowly, struggling to find some way to quantify the difference, put it in terms she could understand. All the images he came up with—war and revolution and bad morale seemed too male to fit her experience.

“It’s never quiet,” he said finally. “Not ever. There’s a siren or a party or a television or somebody’s radio going twenty-four hours a day. It’s never really clean. It’s old and tired and forgotten.”

He narrowed his eyes against the memory, as if squinting would blur it enough to take the sting away. “If you want to walk down to the corner for a soda, you’ve gotta look out on the street to see who’s out there, first.” He paused, still thinking, and raised his finger to indicate there was more. “If you want to open the window, you better have bars. If you want to keep a pet, you’d better make damned sure it never goes outside. And at night, when things are bad, it’s a good idea to put the mattress on the floor.”

A small, intense crease appeared between her eyebrows, but her eyes were steady and clear. “Thank you.”

He nodded. “Probably lucky for her that her mother kicked her out of the house.”

“She’s pretty lucky to have you, that’s for sure.”

That caught him in the solar plexus. “Thanks.”

“Do you know anything about the father of her baby?”

He sighed. Shook his head. “She’s not talking, and I haven’t pushed. I gather it was consensual—beyond that, I guess it doesn’t really matter.”

“I guess that’s true.” She seemed about to say something else, frowning into the distance. “It’s just…”

“What?”

She shifted a little, brushed a wisp of dark hair from her cheek. “She stares out the window in class like she’s waiting for someone to appear. Like she expects it.”

Robert suddenly thought of Crystal’s favorite spot in the house: an overstuffed chair in front of the big picture window, where she would curl up as much as her growing belly would allow. She could sit there for literally hours, just looking outside. He’d thought she was simply looking at the mountains. “Very observant,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see if she has more to say.”

A nod. “Well, I guess we ought to go back in. I’m starting to get cold.”

“Yeah, me too.” But before she moved, he touched her hand. It surprised him that he did it, and he wasn’t aware that he had until he felt the tiny bones beneath his palm. She looked up at him, a little alarmed, and he was alarmed himself, though he didn’t pull away. There were a million reasons that starting anything with her would be a mistake, so he wouldn’t, but he wanted her to know that the thought had crossed his mind. It was an offering, maybe.

He couldn’t think of the right lightness of words to offer, so he only stood there, his hand covering hers, looking down into the wide dark blue eyes for a long, silent moment. “Don’t let anybody ever tell you it’s stupid to care,” he said quietly, more fiercely than he intended. “You don’t have to understand it to reach out.”

She nodded, dipped her head and slipped her hand from beneath his. “Thanks,” she said. “We should go back in.”

Every Saturday morning, Robert and Crystal did their chores, and this day was no different. The routine varied little—they put loud music on the stereo, taking turns choosing CDs, and scoured the house top to bottom. She liked tackling the kitchen, something he hated with all his heart, so he let her. Robert dusted and vacuumed the living room, shook out the couch cushions, singing along with the classic rock Crystal rolled her eyes over. Her choices were even sillier—movie soundtracks, mostly, with a lot of very gentle, pop love songs that she knew every word to. None of the rap or blaring rock some of the younger laborers on his crew were so fond of.

Thank God.

This Saturday-morning ritual delighted the girl. She rose early, pulled back her hair, discarded her windbreaker and rolled up her sleeves. Singing, she scoured the sink and stove, wiped down cupboards and walls, practically spit-shined the floors. Every other week, she even washed the windows, something it had never occurred to Robert to do. When she finished, she tackled the bathroom and gave it a similar polishing, then stripped off her rubber gloves and walked happily through the house, lighting strategic sticks of incense that smelled of grass and fresh air.

Midmorning, he took a list—one that Crystal insisted on preparing every week—to the grocery store. When he returned, she popped her head out of the kitchen, grinning happily. “Hey, Uncle, come look what I did for you.”

He followed, dropping his bags on the counter. The room was fairly large, with a big window looking out toward the mountains, and all the cupboards, stove and refrigerator on one wall. A small windowed alcove had previously held a small breakfast bar and two stools, where they usually ate. But she’d dragged the breakfast bar into the kitchen below the window and dragged the old Formica-and-chrome table into the alcove.

“You shouldn’t have been moving this stuff, babe. I would have helped.”

“I used my butt,” she said with a grin. “Look at what I brought in, though.” She opened the drawers set into the alcove one by one. “All your stuff, so you can have a good place to work.”

“Ah, Crystal, this is so good,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. The drawers had held miscellaneous kitchen junk before, which she’d sorted out and moved. From his bedroom, she’d carried all his jewelry and glass supplies, and carefully organized them by type, even fitting the drawers with cardboard dividers to keep things neat. Touched, he kissed her head. “Thank you.”

“I know you gave up your workroom to give me a place to sleep,” she said. “This will work pretty good, don’t you think?”

“It’ll be even better. Look how much great light there is in here.”

“Okay.” She slapped her hands together—that’s that. “I’m going to get my sheets. Then will you show me again how to do those corners?” Now that the weather had warmed up, she loved washing the sheets and hanging them out on the line to dry.

“Sure.” He put the groceries away, then followed her to her room when she came in with an armload of sweet-smelling linens. On her narrow twin bed, he illustrated the army corner, tight and smooth, then pulled it loose. “You try.”

Adroitly she did it, but he saw her trouble was in the fact that she couldn’t quite bend well enough to get it tight. “Let me help, babe.”

She straightened, laughing a little, her hand on her round belly. “It gets harder to do things, and I forget.”

It startled him, that happy, girlish laugh, especially in reference to her pregnancy. Trying not to make too much of it, he knelt and tucked the corners tight. “I don’t want you to move anything heavy anymore, got it?”

“Yes, sir.” She saluted.

“You really love cleaning, don’t you?”

“My mother thinks it’s crazy, too. She never stuck to routines—but it makes things so cheerful when they’re clean, don’t you think?” She looked around with a little smile.

Robert straightened and looked at it through her eyes. Sunlight streamed in through the clean windows with their pressed, clean curtains. No litter of beer bottles or ashtrays sat on the coffee table, only a nice arrangement of plastic fruit that appalled him, but Crystal had picked out. She washed it every week and patted it dry.

He’d rented the place because it was the right size for him, a little box with a kitchen and two small bedrooms and a living room that opened on to a small wooden porch. It sat at the outskirts of town, so he didn’t have to deal with neighbors much or any lawn to speak of, just the omnipresent meadowlands with their offerings of columbines and long-stalked grasses. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a great house.”

“You should have a cat or something.” She plumped her pillows vigorously and slid one into a crisp pillow-case.

Aside from little requests like the feather duster she’d gone nuts for at Kmart, and the plastic fruit, it was the first time she’d even obliquely asked him for anything. “You want a cat?”

A shrug.

It struck him forcefully that he was no longer alone. After years and years and years of eating dinners by himself in front of the television, and getting up to everything exactly the way it had been the night before. He had somebody to talk to when he was blue. He had someone to say, “Hey, look at this,” when there was something on the news. Somebody to share chores with, eat meals with.

He’d only done what was necessary when Crystal showed up; he’d made room for her, done the best he could. But now he realized how much she’d done for him. “Maybe we oughta go see if they have any at the pound.”

Her face glowed. “Really?”

“Sure.” He tugged on the end of her braid. “I like cats. Maybe we can get two, one for me and one for you.”

“They have to be inside cats, though. No going outside. I don’t like that.”

“Okay.” He wandered to the door, pulling his T-shirt over his head. “I’ll jump in the shower, then you can have it. Maybe we could have lunch first somewhere.”

“McDonald’s?” she asked with hope.

“Ugh. No. Someplace better.”

She grinned, looking impossibly young and pretty and sweet, the way she should. “Grown-ups are so boring.”

He tugged the rubber band out of the bottom of his braid and shook out his hair. “Look who’s talking.” He threw his T-shirt at her. “McDonald’s is not high cuisine.”

“Yuck!” She threw the T-shirt back at him. “And don’t use such fancy language.”

“It’s good for you.”

The doorbell rang, and Robert picked up his shirt from the floor. “Get ready and we’ll go.” Probably the paperboy, who showed up at the dot of eleven every second Saturday. He stuck his hand in his pocket and found he only had a five. “Hang on!” he called, and went to the bedroom for a ten.

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