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Zach felt a smile crack his lips as he let go of her.
“Yeah, and what is funny, or maybe egocentric is the better word, is that you’re accusing me of chasing you down. Seems just the opposite.”
“Me?”
“Mmm.” She nodded, her dark hair moving against her skin. “I might have chased you but it was, after all, those long, smoky stares you sent my way. After all the times you nearly kissed me, but didn’t. After you drove me up to the Clackamas River with the intention of seducing me, then backed out, I think, just to make me want you more.” She picked up a blade of grass and twirled it in her fingers. “Now I’m the bad guy?” She winked at him and he felt his blood stir again. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re missing the point.”
“Which is?”
He took both her hands in his and regret softened the harsh planes of his face. “That this has gotten way out of control. Way out of control. We both know it.”
“And how’re we going to get back in control, hmm?” she asked as, once again, he reached for his jeans. “By acting like this…attraction doesn’t exist?”
“Maybe.”
“It won’t work”
“Then we’ll find whatever it is that does,” he said gruffly. He started to dress, quickly. He didn’t have time for this. He needed answers and he needed them fast. When he turned, he was surprised that she, too, had thrown on her clothes, though her hair was mussed with pine needles and her face had the glow of a woman satisfied after weeks of deprivation.
She swung lithely onto the back of her little mare, sent a dazzling smile his way, and said, “Race ya,” as he was still yanking on his boots. With a holler that resounded through the trees, she kicked the black and galloped away, her laughter trailing after her. As if she didn’t have a care in the world. As if she wasn’t nursing wounds from an attack. As if no maniac was stalking her. As if she wasn’t involved with a man who could be her half-brother.
“Damn that woman,” he muttered, but he was up for the dare and hoisted himself onto the back of his buckskin. Within seconds he was chasing her, the trees and river flashing by in his peripheral vision, his objective, a woman with streaming black hair, in his sights.
Right or wrong, he was going to catch her, and when he did, he was damned sure the earth would move again.
The last thing Adria expected was for Zach to change his mind, and so quickly. But after she’d talked for hours with reporters and they were virtually assured that her face and story would be in the news yet again, he grew restless and told her that they’d leave and head back to Portland as she’d wanted. First thing in the morning.
Her feelings were ambivalent. She’d love to close off the rest of the world, to stay here with Zach and pretend that nothing else mattered, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t about to give up now.
While Zach was outside, cutting firewood, Adria poured herself a glass of wine and strolled into the den. Cedar walls and a river-rock fireplace surrounded a room filled with worn furniture, baskets of old magazines, and Indian blankets used as throws. Watercolors of horses and cattle and peaceful ranching scenes adorned the rough-cut walls. It was a cozy, well-used room that smelled faintly of ashes and burnt wood. She imagined Zachary spending his evenings here, his boots kicked off, the bottoms of his stockinged feet propped on the timeworn ottoman. A cozy vision, a warm thought, something she could envision herself being a part of. But that was crazy. Just because they’d made love, she was already fantasizing that they had a future together.
Stupid.
She ran her fingers along the spines of the books in the bookcase and found, tucked in a corner of one shelf, an old album with pictures of the family.
“I didn’t know I still had that,” Zach said, glaring at the album as he entered the room with an armload of firewood. The wind swept in with him and she smelled the scents of pine and musk mingling with the smoke as he struck a match on the stone hearth and lit the dry kindling. Flames crackled and sparked and she curled in a corner of the couch.
“I poured you a glass,” she said, nodding toward her wine. “In the kitchen.”
He returned with a bottle of beer as well as the glass of wine and set the stemmed glass on the coffee table for her. Then he lowered himself into a chair opposite her, twisted off the cap of his beer, and watched her as she sipped her chardonnay and slowly turned page after page.
“You won’t find much in there.” He drank slowly, and she felt his eyes upon her. Restless eyes.
“Is that right?” She didn’t stop gazing at the flat images. The pictures in the album were old and a little faded, some of the color washed out. Though there were none of Eunice, some spaces pointedly blank, a page yellowed around an empty spot where a snapshot had been removed, there were a few of Zachary, never smiling, always sullen, glaring at the camera as if it were his enemy.
There were shots of Katherine, too, playful poses where she smiled and flirted with the lens, a natural tease in front of the camera. Adria bit her lip as she studied the pictures and her heart twisted at a photograph of Katherine carrying a dark-haired toddler on her hip.
Zach took a long pull on his bottle, then bent over the fire again, tossing in two chunks of mossy maple.
“You never really told me about her,” Adria said, as Zach dusted his hands and stared at the hungry yellow flames licking the new wood. “You just dance around the issue.”
“I thought we already had this discussion.”
“As I said, ‘danced around’ the issue.”
“There wasn’t much to tell. She accused me of helping kidnap London and then later, when I tried to console her, one thing led to another and we ended up in the sack. Witt found out and threw me out. End of story.”
