Buch lesen: «All The Way»

“You were pregnant when you told me to leave!”

“And you left!” Liv shouted back. “You should have just asked me to marry you in the first place!”

“How could I? I didn’t know about her!”

Hunter watched Liv’s expression cave. He saw the tears gather in her eyes, shining and wet.

“Exactly,” she said, clipping off the syllables.

She put the car in gear. Hunter moved around in front of it to stop her from driving off. She wouldn’t actually run over him. At least, he didn’t think so.

“‘Exactly’?” he demanded. “What does that mean?”

Liv stuck her head out the window. “Why did you need to know about the baby, Hunter, to want to stay with me?”

She gunned the engine. He leaped aside just in time to avoid being flattened. He watched her car smoke up the road.

He scrubbed a palm over his mouth, still tasting her. Still wanting her.

He realized he could hate her for that alone.

Dear Reader,

It’s always cause for celebration when Sharon Sala writes a new book, so prepare to cheer for The Way to Yesterday. How many times have you wished for a chance to go back in time and get a second chance at something? Heroine Mary O’Rourke gets that chance, and you’ll find yourself caught up in her story as she tries to make things right with the only man she’ll ever love.

ROMANCING THE CROWN continues with Lyn Stone’s A Royal Murder. The suspense—and passion—never flag in this exciting continuity series. Catherine Mann has only just begun her Intimate Moments career, but already she’s created a page-turning military miniseries in WINGMEN WARRIORS. Grayson’s Surrender is the first of three “don’t miss” books. Look for the next, Taking Cover, in November.

The rest of the month unites two talented veterans— Beverly Bird, with All the Way, and Shelley Cooper, with Laura and the Lawman—with exciting newcomer Cindy Dees, who debuts with Behind Enemy Lines. Enjoy them all—and join us again next month, when we once again bring you an irresistible mix of excitement and romance in six new titles by the best authors in the business.

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

All the Way
Beverly Bird

BEVERLY BIRD

has lived in several places in the United States, but she is currently back where her roots began on an island in New Jersey. Her time is devoted to her family and her writing. She is the author of numerous romance novels, both contemporary and historical. Beverly loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 350, Brigantine, NJ 08203.

For Justin,

Jeff Gordon’s good luck charm and greatest fan (mine, too!)

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

Epilogue

Prologue

Saturday, September 3

Millsboro, Delaware

The murmur of the diners’ voices was muted and pleasant, the air redolent with hints of garlic and bread baking in the open-hearth kitchen. Olivia Slade Guenther was content, enjoying herself and the time with her daughter, then he walked into the restaurant.

His gaze rolled idly over them, then it jerked back to pin them into their flamingo-pink, not-quite-leather booth. Liv felt shock fly through her—icy and hot all at once, searing her nerve endings, then numbing them. Panic gripped her and she thought of running.

It was out of the question. For one thing, Vicky was still digging into her buttermilk-fried chicken, and she was chattering in judgmental tones about the pink rococo ceiling over their heads. And he was between them and the door.

Besides, Liv was damned if she’d let him see her sweat. She gathered air into her lungs and fell back on one of the many lessons she had learned at her Navajo grandmother’s knee. You are what you think you are.

“I’m tough as nails,” she muttered aloud.

“What?” Her daughter looked up at her, still chewing.

“Eat your dinner.”

Vicky swallowed, frowned. “I was.”

“Then concentrate on it.”

“Mom, it’s just chicken—and it’s not even as good as Aunt Kiki’s. How much can I think about it?”

There was that, Liv thought. Vicky was often too smart for her own good—not to mention her mother’s.

Hunter Hawk-Cole was three feet away now, approaching them.

“Don’t say a word,” Liv hissed under her breath.

“How come?”

“Because I said so.” Liv groaned aloud. They were the very words she had promised herself she would never say to a child of hers should she be blessed enough to have one. Then she opened her mouth and they fell out, shattering like fine china on the restaurant table. Less than a minute after he had walked back into her life, Hunter was once again challenging everything she knew about herself.

He stopped beside their table. One glance at Vicky and his midnight-blue eyes narrowed with speculation. No matter that Vicky was small for her age, that she could easily have passed for seven or even six. No matter that Hunter had every reason to believe she was Johnny Guenther’s daughter. Liv knew he’d figured it out that quickly—Vicky was his own.

Her heart started pistoning. Tough as nails indeed.

“Of all the gin joints in all the world…” Hunter’s voice trailed off. “Well, Liv. What were the odds of us running into each other again on the East Coast?”

His voice had always reminded her of smoke. It had a way of sliding over her skin, of heating it to the point where she’d no longer needed promises. Liv grabbed her wineglass and downed half of its contents. “I was hoping for slim to none.”

“Then you’ve turned into a gambler after all.”

His words went through her like a knife that had been passed through flame. Liv was saved from answering by a group of Hunter’s fans.

As soon as they recognized him, diners popped up from the surrounding tables like hyacinths in a May garden. They crowded him, holding out menus, napkins, a few prepurchased race-day programs. He signed each of them without a smile, accessible enough but keeping that look about him that she’d noticed on television. It said there was something inside him that no one would ever touch again.

She knew what had changed him—or at least what he’d probably like her to think it was. Not you, Liv. You’re the only person who ever knew when I was gone. There had been anger and betrayal in his eyes when he had spoken those words to her, eight and a half years ago over a scarred oaken bar. But in the end, he’d gone.

When Hunter handed a menu back to a diner who was surely going to have to pay for it, silence proved to be too much for Vicky. She swallowed the last bite of her chicken. “What are you, famous or something?”

“Or something.” Hunter finally grinned for Vicky’s benefit. The curve of his mouth melted everything inside Liv as though the past eight and a half years hadn’t happened.

“Are you a movie star?” Vicky asked.

Hunter rested his palms on the polished surface of the table to lean closer to her. Liv felt something shrivel inside her as the man and child went nose to identical nose—then there were those same blue eyes, the same onyx hair, that stubborn thrust of both their jaws.

Vicky did not look like Liv. And she didn’t look like Johnny Guenther at all. At least, Liv didn’t think so. She had never forgotten a plane or an angle of Hunter’s face, but she had a hard time recalling Johnny’s features.

“Nope,” he told Vicky. “I drive cars.”

“That’s not special.”

“It is when you do it very, very fast.”

She thought about it. “My mom never does that.”

His eyes angled off her, to Liv. “Still methodical about getting where you’re going, Liv?”

“I’m exactly where I want to be, thanks.” Her nerves were beginning to feel like cut crystal, painfully fragile under her skin.

“Divorced?” His dark-blue eyes fixed on her ringless left hand.

Liv let go of her wineglass as though a snake had suddenly appeared inside it. She dropped her hand to her lap, under the table.

“And touchy about it,” he concluded.

“Now that all the social niceties have been exchanged,” she replied, “you can feel free to go.” Her throat felt too tight for the words.

He shot a brow up as though considering it, then he shook his head. “I don’t see that happening this time around.”

It was a promise and a threat. Liv had never known him to hesitate to make good on either one.

He straightened from their table, and she watched him stroll to one that had apparently been reserved for his party at the back of the restaurant. Those incredible blue eyes raked her one more time before he was seated. Liv took Vicky’s hand quickly.

“Come on, honey. Let’s go.”

“But I want dessert! That bread pudding—” Vicky broke off when Liv practically lifted her from the booth.

“We’ll stop at an ice cream stand on the way back to the motel,” Liv promised.

Vicky wrinkled her nose. “Oh, yuck, Mom. Please.”

“For once—just for once—couldn’t you be a normal child?” But it wouldn’t happen, Liv thought helplessly, it could never happen, because her daughter had been born into a lie and, to Liv’s great despair, nothing in her life had ever been very normal at all.

Chapter 1

Friday, September 9

Jerome, Arizona

“What on earth possessed you?” Kiki Condor, Liv’s partner and cook, actually yelled at her for one of the few times in their long, long friendship. She grabbed Liv’s wrist and pried the remainder of a sourdough roll from her fingers.

Liv let it go reluctantly. Without the distraction of the roll, she knew she was in trouble.

Liv was a master at diverting conversations—six years of running a bed-and-breakfast and having various strangers troop through her home asking personal questions did that to a woman. The exceptions to the rule were Kiki and Hunter Hawk-Cole.

“When you tempt fate,” Kiki continued, “you have to be prepared for it to jump up and bite you in the—”

“Hush,” Liv warned quickly, automatically, but Vicky was out in the barn. The girl idolized her aunt Kiki, and she was never shy about repeating her words verbatim. Sometimes it was funny. Sometimes it had Liv trooping down to the school for parent-teacher conferences.

Liv tried again to change the subject. “You know, something about that recipe needs work.”

“And why are you just telling me now?” Kiki demanded as though she hadn’t spoken. “You’ve been home for five days!”

Because she’d dreaded just this sort of reaction, Liv thought. She licked crumbs from her fingers. “Nothing has happened since we ran into each other. I haven’t heard from him.”

Dig a hole over there, child, and dump the problem inside. Cover it up and walk away. It’s yours no more. More wise words, Liv thought, from her grandmother. She’d dug a hole when she had come home from Delaware, had kicked Hunter in there and had heaped dirt on top of him, and true enough, he’d stayed put.

So far.

Kiki jammed the rest of the roll down the garbage disposal. “I want every specific detail.”

Liv gave up. She went to the butcher block table and folded all 5’8” of herself into a chair there. Like their entire inn, the kitchen was done in western tones with an occasional Victorian touch—just as the place had been in its heyday. The floor and one wall were all aged brick. There were pretty rose-colored shutters on the windows instead of curtains. Old copper pots and utensils were strung across the ceiling. But the appliances were modern and state-of-the-art. Kiki had insisted that if she was going to cook for strangers, she was going to do it right. And though it had been Liv’s own inheritance that had funded the inn’s renovation from 1890’s brothel to twentieth-century bed and breakfast, Liv hadn’t tried to argue with her.

Liv scraped her long hair off her forehead and held it there. “Well, you already know that it happened at the trade show in Wilmington. Not at it exactly, but while I was there.”

“I told you not to take Vicky to that show. Do you remember? Didn’t I say I’d baby-sit while you were away?”

“She wanted to go and it seemed like a nice treat for her right before school started again.”

Kiki planted her oven-mitted hands on her narrow hips. “You knew there was a NASCAR race in Delaware that weekend and you took her anyway. Are you crazy?”

“The race was in Dover! And the trade show was in Wilmington! These are two separate cities. No, wait, hold on a second.” Liv held up a hand when Kiki opened her mouth one more time to berate her lack of judgment. “I got us a room fifty miles away from Dover in Millsboro. Our motel was way down near the southern border of the state. I took precautions. Vicky and I got up extra early every day of that show to drive all the way to Wilmington. What were the odds of Hunter coming to Millsboro the night before the race—for dinner? What were the odds of him suddenly deciding to mingle with his fans?”

“I’d say they were pretty damned good.” Kiki shoved another tray of biscuits into the oven, apparently not impressed with Liv’s assessment of them, either. “You took your daughter—his daughter—to a state the size of a postage stamp knowing that he would be there on the NASCAR circuit that same weekend. Did you want to run into him?”

“Oh, please.” But the pain that flared inside her was every bit as unimaginable as it had been eight and a half years ago when she had sent him away. “It was a calculated risk.”

“You always did stink at math.”

It was true enough. Kiki handled all of the inn’s bookkeeping for just that reason. Liv concentrated on what she was good at—charm, hospitality, service, and an uncanny knowledge of her state’s history. Between the two of them, the Copper Rose had prospered.

“I’ve made it a point to understand this stock car racing,” she said. “Hunter shouldn’t have been fifty miles south of Dover that night. The drivers keep Winnebagos on the track property from Wednesday through Sunday. They qualify on Fridays. On Saturdays they have two or three practices before the race the next day. They do…I don’t know…stuff to their engines. Adjustments. They spend all day Saturday priming those cars. Why would Hunter drive so far south for dinner with all that to do and a driver’s meeting two hours before race time on Sunday?”

“Because he’s Hunter and he’s never played by the rules.”

No one who had ever known the man could argue that one, Liv thought helplessly.

But she had never believed that Hunter could buck the rules, either. In a sport dominated by good ol’ boys from the south, he had come out of the west—a half-breed Indian raised on a northern Arizona reservation, an intense young man with something of the devil in his eyes and in his soul. When he’d gotten the crazy idea to drive race cars, Liv had never believed that he’d be able to break into the NASCAR network.

She clapped a hand over her mouth as though to hold in the pain of the memories. It had always been something with Hunter, some new idea, some wild hair, taking him off again to a new challenge. She’d thought driving was just more of the same. He’d driven the truck series at first, then the Busch series, finally bursting onto the Winston Cup level four years ago. He was a natural behind the wheel of a car. Now, to Liv’s reckoning, he had one Winston Cup somewhere in his possession because he’d topped the point standings last year. He did television commercials for his sponsors and he navigated the talk show circuit. The very thing that should have barred him from a sport filled with Dales and Bobby Joes and Beaus had turned out to be his magic. He was a dark, simmering, laconic American in the most original sense of the word, and he could make a stock car purr like a satisfied animal.

He’d found the one thing he could dedicate himself to…and it hadn’t been her. So she had married someone else. Someone who would stay with her. She had never told him about the baby—his baby—that she had been carrying at the time.

Liv folded her arms on the kitchen table and slowly lowered her forehead to them. “I just wanted a real home again.”

“We all wanted more than hogans and desert, Liv.” Kiki banged a cookie sheet into the sink. “That’s why we left.”

“I never fitted in there, on the reservation. I know it was my birthright—a little bit, anyway—but I was always an outsider there. I spent six years there, craving what I’d lost when my sister and my parents died. I just wanted it back.”

“And that is precisely why you shouldn’t have gone anywhere near Dover on race weekend. Because Hunter wouldn’t give it to you, and you never forgave him for it.”

Liv looked up. That dull, hard throbbing came back to her chest, the same feeling that had pressed in on her all week since she had come home from Delaware. After seeing him just once, so briefly, she could taste him, smell him, feel him with every breath she took, all over again.

She didn’t want him back—that was outrageous. She would never risk Vicky’s stability that way. But she dreaded the thought that he would turn up, anyway. And she’d be easy enough to find. She’d never tried to hide.

He’d threatened to find her, after all. He’d promised.

Kiki wiped her hands on a dish towel. “We’re going to turn on the cable sports channel right now. We’re going to keep an eye on what Hunter Hawk-Cole is up to all weekend, at least as much as they’ll tell us.”

“The circuit takes him to Michigan this weekend.” When Kiki looked at her sharply, Liv flushed then she defended herself. “I checked. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t too close by. He can’t wander in for a say-hi if he’s in the Midwest.”

“He could call. The TV will still tell us what he’s up to while he’s there.”

Liv threw up her hands. “Do you think they mentioned on television that the bad boy of racing was going to have dinner in Millsboro last weekend?”

“No. But they might have said that he had a top-notch car and that he was confident. From that you could have deduced that he’d have some free time on his hands, that he wouldn’t have his guys poking at that engine all night. If I had been there with you, we would have ordered pizza into the motel room.”

Kiki had always been able to think practically in any fix. Liv wondered again, as she often did, why her friend wasn’t a doctor or a geneticist. While Liv had been learning the hospitality trade in Flagstaff, Kiki had attended the University of Arizona, majoring in obscure scientific challenges. She’d earned a doctorate. Now she co-owned the inn with Liv, and she was as content at the oven and with their books as she’d ever been over test tubes.

“Okay.” Liv flattened her palms on the table and pushed to her feet. “At least we’ll know we can’t hear from him when he’s actually on the race track.”

“Not unless he has a cell phone in his car.”

“They’re moving at better than 180 miles per hour!”

“Do you honestly think that would stop him?”

Liv winced at another onslaught of memories. “No.”

“Okay, then.” Kiki found the remote control to click on the television that was shelved against one corner of the kitchen ceiling. “But just for the record, I’m tying you to your desk all weekend in case you get any nifty ideas to go have dinner in Michigan.”

Liv was in the stock car with him.

Hunter felt her there beside him as he warmed up in Saturday’s practice session. There was no passenger seat, just empty space that wouldn’t weigh him down, framed by a lot of metal bracing. She sat there, anyway. Sometimes she was a teenager again. At other times she was the woman he had met in Delaware.

“I’ve thought about it,” the teenage Liv said. “I’m not going to chase the wind with you, Hunter. I’ve found someone who can give me a home, a family, everything I’ve always needed. You said when that happened, you would go away.”

“I’m your family,” he told her.

He’d been her family from the first time he’d seen her, Hunter thought now. She’d been living with her grandmother on the Navajo reservation. He’d met her on his first day at the district school there and he’d followed her home after classes to find her tending to Dinny Sandoval and her sheep. He’d been fascinated by her, enthralled by her, so different from all the others with her Irish-Navajo blood and her incredible, exotic face. So he’d kept coming around.

She’d only been twelve then, but the ache in her eyes had been as mature as a full-blown rose—for the life and the parents and the sister she’d lost in a freak accident that had exiled her in an alien land. She’d talked incessantly of babies, a family, and a white house with blue shutters in a city where a symphony played. As soon as she was old enough, she’d told him often, she was going to go and grab that dream.

They’d lain on their backs on the rocky ground and talked about it, the star-strewn desert night etched above them, passing a coveted bottle of ginger ale back and forth. The nearest store had been forty miles away, and neither of them had had access to a car, so they took care not to spill a drop.

Liv Slade didn’t belong on that reservation any more than Hunter did—and except for one grandmother, he was pretty much Native American down to his bones. He’d landed in that school because of an ill-fated eagle hunt. It had been one adventure too many. His old man had packed him up and had shipped him off to live with his Navajo mother.

That clan hadn’t particularly wanted him, either. He and Liv had both been strangers in a hostile country, and then they had found each other.

After high school, he’d escaped. He disappeared from northern Arizona for weekends at first, then for up to a week. Weeks turned into months sometimes, but he always came back eventually to check on Liv. He’d done passably well with the rodeo, could have been better, but the money wasn’t there and it lacked the elusive something he needed. He joined the Army and found the restriction and discipline intolerable. She’d turned fifteen, sixteen, then seventeen while he was away. Her grandmother had died that last year while Hunter was in Louisiana, poling boats through alligator-infested bayous.

Liv had kept up the old woman’s sheep on her own after that because if the authorities found out she was a minor living alone, they would come and whisk her off again. The reservation had never been home for her, but Liv was determined that she wasn’t going anywhere else until she could do it on her own terms. She kept up the charade for almost a year, and the Anglo authorities never caught on.

That was the way he had left her in January that year, in Dinny’s winter hogan alone, the old woman’s clansmen close enough for comfort. Then he came back one day in June to find that the girl had gone and a woman had taken her place.

Hunter had driven up in his rattletrap pickup to find her wrestling in the dust with a lamb.

Already the heat had a dry, pressing weight, though it was barely midmorning. The lamb bleated in distress as she chased it, both of them kicking up red-brown dust that hung in the thin air. She had a syringe in one hand, held high as though it were a sword and she was about to plunge it into stone. Hunter stopped the truck and got out to watch her, enjoying the spectacle.

“Hey, you!” he called.

She didn’t hear him. She pinned the lamb, straddling it, then she came up on her hands and knees. Her bottom was thrust in his direction, cupped in frayed, hacked-off denim. A horse might have kicked him in the chest for the impact the view had on him.

Sometimes the need to love her actually burned inside him. It was why he never stayed home too long.

He wasn’t her dream. He was a man who needed to keep moving. He wasn’t what she needed.

But, God, he cherished her.

She hooked her left arm around the animal’s neck and raised her right hand again, armed with the needle. Then the lamb wriggled out from beneath her. Liv went after the animal at a fast crawl, her dark hair caught in a ponytail that streamed down her back until it finally splayed over each hip with her movement. Then she got to her feet in one fluid motion that had his twenty-year-old tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. She leaped at the little beast, going airborne.

“Jeez, Livie! You’re going to kill yourself!”

But she didn’t. She came down on top of the lamb, rolling with it, both arms wrapped around it now. She’d lost the syringe, and she swore a blue streak that had his jaw hanging. Still holding the animal, she groped in the rocky dirt for the needle. Just as he moved to get it for her, she found it and finally got it buried in the animal’s flank.

When it was done, she let the lamb run off. She flopped over on her back, staring up at a sky that the heat had baked the color out of. She laughed, a woman’s throaty chuckle of triumph that almost brought Hunter to his knees.

In all the time he’d known her, he’d never wanted her as much as he did in that moment. It took Hunter a moment to find his voice.

“My money was on you.”

Liv sat up slowly enough that he had the sudden, uncanny feeling that she’d known he was there all along. “You didn’t have any money, pal, not the last time I checked.” Her eyes were too dark. They were usually a deep, chocolate brown, but temper could turn them to the charred color of fired wood. “That’s it for the herd. As for you, fish or cut bait.”

He knew what she was talking about, couldn’t pretend that he didn’t, even if it made something roar suddenly in his head and sent his heart galloping.

Liv stood, then she leaned over to brush the dust off her legs. “Here’s the thing, Hunter. I’m cleaning up my past here. Are you part of it, or are you my future?” She straightened and crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you want me or don’t you?”

He thought that if he answered that honestly, he’d probably be damned to hell for all eternity.

But Liv didn’t seem to want words. She walked toward him with that long, leggy stride of hers, then she yanked her T-shirt over her head before he could reply and tossed it aside into the dust. It was the reservation. There wasn’t another hogan for fifteen miles. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts—and oh, how he had fantasized about them over the years—were as full and ripe as the rest of her. Her shorts rode low on her hips. She stopped three strides from him.

“I love you, Hunter. And I’m tired of waiting for you to grow up.”

He almost choked. “For me to grow up?”

Her voice dipped, losing some of its force. For a moment she sounded almost as lost as she had been the first time he’d met her. “I want to be with you. I want to take at least one good thing away from this place when I go. I want it to be you.”

“Babe—”

“I don’t want promises from you, Hunter. I can take care of the rest of my dreams on my own.”

She leaped at him suddenly then, her arms around his neck, her lithe legs wrapping around his waist, her mouth clamping on his. She gave him no chance for finesse, no time for it. Something inside Hunter broke.

His hands found her bottom, holding her to him. Then they were both down in the dust while his tongue dove for hers hungrily, an agony building inside him too fast. He dragged off her shorts, then his own clothes, then he found his way inside her in one desperate thrust. She cried out, then she made a mewling sound in her throat and clung to him, riding with him fast, fiercely, crying out his name. And all Hunter could think was that this time he’d really come home.

A voice squawked in his headset, startling Hunter out of his reverie. It was his spotter, a guy who stood on top of the grandstand with radio in hand and an eagle’s view of the track. He warned of pile-ups around the next curve and unseen cars traveling in his blind spots.

This time there was panic in the man’s voice, and Hunter’s vision cleared to see the turn-two wall in front of him. He pulled hard on the wheel, swerving around toward the apron of the track again.

“What the hell are you doing?” the spotter bellowed. “Man, you’re all over the track!”

“Car feels a little loose.” It was the term that described how—at killer high speeds—the back end of a car could fishtail and try to catch up with the front. “I’m just playing with it to figure out how much we need to adjust.”

Then he glanced at the nonexistent passenger seat one more time. The grown-up Liv was there now.

Her perfect face was framed, not by straight, waist-length hair, but by long layers, brown streaked with russet and tipped by gold at the ends. She’d wanted him once. She had said she loved him. Then she’d found someone else in four short weeks, and she’d sent him away.

Now there was the matter of the child.

His child, Hunter thought. Not Guenther’s. What had she done? Why, Livie, why?

His spotter’s voice began crackling in his ear again, so loud now as to be almost wordless. Hunter focused on the track again. The turn wall was in front of him one more time. He corrected too fast, too hard. His reflexes were caught in the past.

The back end of the race car slid around and cracked into the concrete, crumbling like paper in a giant’s fist. Then he was diving nose first toward the infield, coming down off the embankment. Mikey Nolan, in the 42 car, had been coming up hard behind him. He tried to avoid Hunter’s skid, but he connected with his left-rear quarter panel, rocking Hunter’s car around one more time. Hunter slid up the track and straight into the wall with a full-frontal, jarring impact.

When he came to, he smelled gasoline and heard the deadly snap of fire.

Liv screamed.