Breaking the Rules (10 page)

For one long moment, she was snagged by his pale green eyes, so startling in his dark face. The expression in them grew from sleepy to amused. “Mornin’” he said, the word slow and deep. He moved a little, settling his head more comfortably in the pillows. Mattie’s blood danced.

“Morning,” she said, and hated herself for the soft, whispery sound of it.

“How long you been sittin’ there?”

“I don’t know.”

He reached out unexpectedly and touched her calf. “Like what you see?”

To her surprise, Mattie didn’t move away. Along his jaw was a shadow of beard, and his hand, moving lazily on her leg, was strangely stirring. The wild, raw need in her jumped another notch. He touched her ankle, his gaze on her face, moving all over it like a caress.

“I won’t bite.” He tugged a little on her leg. “Come on.”

Panic struck her. Abruptly, she jumped up and moved away, putting her back to him. “I’m starving,” she said. “I was about to wake you up so we could get something to eat.”

“Is that what you were doing?”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly, and turned. It was a mistake. He’d shifted so he lay on his stomach, his head sideways on the pillow, his long, brown, muscled back displayed in full beauty. The sight of it struck her hard. Her breath left her on a little sigh.

“Don’t,” he said. The teasing fled his eyes. “It was all a long time ago.”

The scars. “Zeke, that’s not—”

His face was painfully wary and sharply shuttered. “Yeah,” he said shortly, and got to his feet. “Tell me you didn’t sit there feeling sorry for me, Miss Mary. Wondering how poor old Zeke got so messed up.”

She pressed her lips together. “I didn’t have to wonder,” she said quietly. “I lived in a lot of foster homes. Most of them were okay, but there was a man in one of them who did that to some of the boys.”

“Well, mine wasn’t a foster parent. He was the real thing.”

“Was?”

“He got beat to death in a bar fight when I was seventeen.” He grabbed his shirt from the back of the chair and tugged it on. “It was the happiest day of my life.”

Mattie said nothing.

He took his socks from his boots and grimaced. “It’ll be nice to get some clean clothes on. I hate dirty socks.” He put them on, anyway. “I’ll run and get us some breakfast and we can get on the road again.”

“No, Zeke.”

“Thought you said you were hungry.”

“Not no food, no more hiding. I can’t stand to be in here like this, all cooped up. I’ll wear your sunglasses if you think it’s that big a deal.” She had another agenda in mind, too, but she’d wait until he’d eaten something before she plunged into that. “I want to be outside.”

He considered for a minute. “You still don’t take it seriously, do you? You think you’re in some movie and some good guy is going to come along at the right moment every so often.”

That stung. “No, I just…” She shook her head. “I don’t want to be stuck in this room when there’s a whole beautiful little town out there to look at.”

He chuckled. “You oughta see your eyes when you say that. I thought they quit making such sweet women a long time ago.”

“Is that a yes?”

“I guess it is.”

O
ver big plates of pancakes and scrambled eggs, Mattie leaned forward. “Can I take off these glasses in here? I feel silly eating breakfast with sunglasses on.”

“The waitress already heard your excuse. You’ve got a light-sensitivity problem.” He grinned, rather wickedly, Mattie thought.

“But I can’t see the view at all.” She peeked over the top of the sunglasses to the stair-stepped expanse of blue mountains, drawn across the horizon like a jagged curtain. “I never dreamed there was anything so beautiful.”

“It is beautiful,” he said, and Mattie thought his eyes, soft with appreciation, ran a close second to the view. “I always think about it when I’m not here.”

Mattie dipped her head, letting the glasses slide down her nose, to look at him. “You mean this was a destination? You drove here on purpose?”

Zeke chuckled. “Yep.”

Nonplussed, she put down her fork. “Oh.”

He went back to his pancakes. The waitress came by with more coffee and Zeke gave her a friendly smile. She smiled back. Naturally.

That single exchange—Zeke’s effortless and omnipresent charm and the waitress’s immediate response—brought everything into focus for Mattie. She didn’t know what his motives were, why he’d so selflessly rescued her, but she couldn’t let it go on. “Zeke,” she said, “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

“Mmm.” He swallowed. “I hear a ‘but’ in there.”

“I can’t let you do any more. If you’d be so kind as to take me to the bus station, I’ll get out of your hair.”

Carefully, he crossed his fork and knife on his empty plate and pulled his coffee cup forward. “How long do you think you’ll last before old Brian tracks you down again?” He cocked his head. “Maybe next time you won’t be lucky enough to be warned ahead of time.”

“I’ll dye my hair,” she countered. “Get some weird glasses at Goodwill or something. It’s not as hard as you think to become invisible.”

His mouth twitched. “And you aren’t nearly as invisible as you think you are.” He leaned forward, dropping his elbows on the table. “How are you gonna hide that long, pretty neck? That sexy mouth? That siren body of yours?”

Mattie had touched her neck when he mentioned it, but her cheeks flushed bright red at the last turn of phrase. “You don’t have to get crude,” she protested, lowering her eyes.

“That’s a long way from crude, Miss Mary,” he said with a scowl. “Believe me.”

“Zeke,” she said in a small voice, “you scare me. How do I know you aren’t worse than what I’m running from?”

“You don’t,” He plucked the check from the table between them. “Not in any way that matters, in facts and figures. Guess you’ll have to trust your instincts.”

“What instincts?” she said scornfully. “The ones that led me to think a major criminal was just a nice Catholic fellow?”

Zeke stared at her, his face utterly expressionless. “Don’t give me that look,” she snapped. “Say something.”

“What do you want me to say, Mattie? I’m not gonna try to prove myself to you.”

Now she realized she’d wounded him the smallest bit. He probably had justification for feeling hurt, too, but that didn’t change Mattie’s uncertainty. She stared at him, struggling for clues to his true nature.

Her instincts. What had her instincts said about Brian Murphy? Hadn’t there been moments of warning, moments his smile seemed forced? Dozens of times, hadn’t she beaten back the screams of those instincts because she so desperately wanted what he seemed to offer?

And what did they tell her about Zeke? She bit the inside of her cheek, seeing a man who’d known a lot of pain. A man who could likely be violent if the need arose, but wouldn’t be if he could avoid it. She saw the man who danced with a fussy baby to calm him and the man who’d rescued her without a moment’s hesitation.

“I don’t want to be a burden,” she said at last. “You can’t imagine how much I hate that.”

“You couldn’t be a burden if you tried.” His mouth softened. “I couldn’t live with myself if you went out there and got yourself killed.”

Terrific, Mattie thought. A pity case. “Zeke—”

“Listen, Mattie.” He covered her hand with his own. “I’ve been lost in my own problems for longer than I like to say. Let me help you.”

She looked at his hand, at the long fingers and strong, sinewy lines. There was both strength and gentleness in that hand, just as there was in the man himself. “All right,” she said. “Where are we going?”

He smiled. “I have some land up in the mountains. Cabin isn’t fancy, but it keeps the rain off. We’ll go there until we can figure out what comes next.”

“Okay,” she said. “I trust you.”

His fingers curled around hers. “Let’s go.”

* * *

The day before, Mattie had been too numb with shock to appreciate the pleasures of riding on the back of a motorcycle. This morning, there was no such muffling.

They left town and headed up into the mountains, traveling on a normal blacktop highway, well maintained and obviously heavily traveled. After a while, Zeke turned onto a smaller, narrower road. They followed the strip of asphalt upward, over passes that hugged the sheer side of a cliff, the drop on one side thousands of feet. A delicious dizziness engulfed Mattie at the dangerous thrill of it, and she couldn’t help gripping Zeke more closely. He chuckled at such times, a rumbling she felt through her fingers on his chest rather than heard through her ears.

They rode through little towns with names like Santa Ana and Kinnikinnik and Ute City, little more than scatterings of cabins and a shop or two along the state road. Here hunters bought permits, anglers picked up tackle, campers stocked up on beer and groceries they’d forgotten.

The
wilderness
, Mattie thought with a thrill of happiness. Just like Laura in the
Little House
books, she was striking out for adventure in a sparsely settled, wild place. A hundred years ago, there had been only mountain men and Indians and animals and silence. Zeke, she thought with some certainty, would have been among them. In any age, she had a hunch he’d be an outsider, a loner.

She inhaled deeply of the spice-scented mountain air, thin and cool in spite of the summer weather. She filled her eyes with the colors of the high country: the azure sky punctuated with arrows of deep green pine, the slender white trunks of aspen like bars of light in the dark forests, the misty dark blue of the distant mountainsides, falling away to purply black in the shadows of the valley. She liked the wind in her face, and immediacy of seeing it all without windows to blunt the view, and the deep growling purr of the bike itself.

Most of all, she liked the feeling of Zeke before her and the pleasure of being able to touch him freely without having to explain why—to him or to herself—it was so satisfying. She was careful to keep the clasp of her hand light, non-intrusive, careful not to press too much or too often into the temptation of his back. Businesslike, she held onto his sides, imagining a dance chaperone’s hand placed between their bodies. There was nothing she could do, no adjustment she could make, to keep her thighs from clasping the sides of his hips and legs. She tried not to make too much of it, but it was impossible not to feel it—those long hard thighs, the shift of muscle in his buttocks. Intimate and casual at once.

At midmorning, a sudden bank of clouds moved in over the valley. They filled the sky almost at once, as if some cosmic force had tossed a thick gray blanket over the sky. When the sun disappeared, the temperature dropped, and a chill wind sprang up. Mattie shivered.

“We’re almost there,” Zeke called over his shoulder. “We might get wet, but it won’t be too bad.”

“Okay!”

Just as the first light sprinkles began to spatter them—amazing how the speed of the bike made even such light spatters hurt—Zeke turned onto a narrow dirt track. Tire tracks showed where a truck had come through, over and over.

The path bumped and twisted through thick trees; potholes and rocks littered the way. Then, the rain began to fall in earnest.

“Sorry,” Zeke called, fighting his way up the steep path. “I can’t go any faster or we’ll likely go flying.”

“I’m all right,” she returned and leaned closer into him for protection. Her shoulders and arms and back were getting soaked, but it wasn’t an unpleasant experience. The rain released the smell of earth and spice inherent to the forest; it cascaded over the tree trunks and dripped in crystal drops from pine needles. Beautiful.

Also cold. When they pulled into a clearing, Mattie dismounted and ran with Zeke into a small, neat cabin, newly built, by the look of it. Details blurred in the steadfast rain.

“Whew,” Zeke said, shaking himself off, closing the door behind her. “You never know when those storms’ll hit until they’re right up on you.”

Mattie tugged off her helmet, dropped her bags by the door and took the towel he offered. “Brrr. Amazing how cold a summer rain can be! “

“Takes some getting used to, all right.” He rubbed his long hair. “Rain is always cold in Colorado. Most of the time in the summer, there’s so much lightning you don’t want to be out in it anyway.” Looping the towel around his neck, he asked, “You want some coffee?”

“Please.”

He stepped outside for a minute, pot in hand, and Mattie assumed he had to get water from somewhere. She glanced around curiously. The cabin was a single large room with a fireplace at one end and a bed at the other. Between was a modern-looking stove, next to some open shelves, well stocked with supplies. A mishmash of cups, glasses and unmatched plates were neatly stacked on one, the others held pots and pans, canned goods and sturdy tin canisters.

Opposite the stove, below a window, sat a couch and a worn chair. Another floor-to-ceiling block of shelves held books, paperbacks, mostly. A double bed, covered with a sleeping bag, completed the picture.

The room smelled of new wood, and time had not yet darkened the yellow pine planks on the floor. The wooden, multi-paned windows fit the rustic atmosphere, but they were new, no doubt ordered to fit. As Zeke returned, she asked, “Did you build this cabin?”

He lit the fire on the stove with a kitchen match and put the blue-and-white spatterware coffeepot on the fire. “Yeah,” he said and rubbed more dampness from his face as he looked around. “Someday, this is supposed to be the living room, but for now, it’s pretty much everything.”

“Yourself?” she asked, touching the smooth pine wall. “You built it all?”

Zeke grinned and held up his big, lean hands. “All by my little lonesome.”

“Amazing.”

He took a can of coffee from the shelf and measured it into the pot. “My dad was a carpenter,” he said, not looking at her. “He made sure I knew how to do it right.”

The father again. Mattie collected the note to add to the others she held in her mind, but said nothing. Wandering over to admire a hand-carved windowsill, she thought,
nice revenge
. “Pretty impressive,” she said aloud.