glanced at her feet. He liked her habit of going barefoot at home. It gave a certain intimacy to a situation that she made a real effort to keep on a business level. He wondered why. Was he so far from her type that the idea of anything personal between them had never occurred to her? Was she cautious enough that she would never allow herself to get involved with a man without a name or a past? Or was she insecure enough to think that business—her help—was all he wanted from her?
Someday he would find out.
While she went to the bedroom, he walked around the table. They’d worked last evening and all morning, together yet separately. He’d sat on the floor, the wall at his back, sorting stacks around him. She had worked at the table, and her stacks were neater. The credit card statements that he’d put in one pile she had sorted by company and year. She’d even sorted the kids’ artwork by signature. The biggest stack was Eve’s work, the smaller pile Hal’s. There were only three items in Roy Jr.’s pile—a Mother’s Day greeting, a construction-paper Christmas card and a drawing.
He held up the drawing by wrinkled corners. The crayon lines were childish and crooked, but the forms were easily identifiable: a yellow house with a woman standing on one side, a baby in her arms and a child at her side. On the other side stood a tall, menacing figure. Instead of stick-fingered circles for hands, the figure’s hands were clenched, colored in black, and his scowl was fierce. The sky on the mother’s side of the house was sunny and blue. Above the father it was gray and threatening.
Roy Stuart Jr. couldn’t have been older than seven or eight when he’d drawn the picture, just a little boy who should have been innocent, carefree and ignorant of the evil in the world. But he hadn’t been. His father had seen to that.
So had his mother.
“It’s not a pretty picture, is it?” Juliet stood behind him, her hand on his arm. For an instant, the drawing was forgotten. All he could think of was how warm her touch was, how slender and perfectly formed her fingers were. All he could want was more—both hands touching him, hell, her entire body touching his. Too soon, though, she drew away, squeezed his arm, then walked to the door. “I’m ready.”
So was he. How unfair that he was ready for something so much more intimate than she was offering.
He returned Roy Jr.’s drawing to the table, moving it to the bottom of the pile, before following Juliet out.
At the hardware store, she paid for the two dead bolt locks he chose, then they returned to the car. “Back home?” she asked over the roof.
“Want to drive up the mountain? We can see…” The image of a place popped into his mind, a clearing ringed with large boulders, with a pine-needle carpet and a view to forever. The picture was so clear and exact that he knew he’d been there before—in that nebulous before that haunted and eluded him—and he knew exactly how to get there.
He would give a year off his life to know how he knew.
Juliet slid behind the wheel, started the engine and waited for him to climb in. He gave her directions out of town, turning off the main highway, switching from one road to another as they climbed higher through the forest. After six, maybe seven, miles, the last road they’d taken came to an end, and he sat still, staring.
Yes, he’d been here. A number of times. Important times.
Leaving Juliet and the car, he walked between two granite boulders taller than he was and through the clearing. It climbed up at a gentle slope, then abruptly dropped straight down two hundred feet or more. Years ago, a split-rail fence had been built a few feet back from the cliff for safety’s sake, but time and the elements had tumbled most of it. Vandals had played a role, too, burning the fallen wood in a makeshift fire ring in the middle of the clearing.
“Oh, Martin, it’s beautiful.” Juliet had stopped a few feet away, and her gaze was directed to the northeast, where the mountains spread out as far as the eye could see. It was beautiful. Breathtaking. Awe inspiring.
“On a clear day, you can see…” All the way to heaven. Where had he heard that? Who had told him?
“Forever.” She tore her gaze from the vista to look at him and sobered. “This is one of those places you remember.”
He nodded.
“Did you come here often?”
Instead of giving the answer he’d come to detest, he turned his back on the mountains. Except for the view, there was nothing special about the clearing. The same boulders, trees, mosses and wildflowers that made up this area could be found in a million other places in any direction he turned. Awe-inspiring views could be found all over, too. So what made this place special?
Damned if he had a clue.
“Can we sit down?”
“Sure.” He started toward the rocks nearest the fire ring. They were just the right size for huddling around a fire but only a fraction of the size that apparently interested Juliet, who was looking for footholds to reach the top of a ten-foot-tall boulder. “Go to the other side,” he advised, and she disappeared from sight. A moment later she reappeared on top.
“Come on up.”
How had he known that the jagged surface on the opposite side of the rock served as well as any staircase could? Had he come here with family, friends, girls, all of the above or none of them? Had he shared picnic lunches, camped around the fire or created his own private lovers’ lane?
As he reached the top, his gaze fell on Juliet, sitting cross-legged and straight-backed. Recreating that last possibility—if he’d ever created it in the first place—certainly held merit. Right here on this boulder would be a hell of a place to make love. Maybe the act itself wouldn’t be the best—he felt damn near like a virgin again—but the location would make it memorable.
Juliet would make it memorable.
He sat down, close enough to touch her if he let himself, not so close that he would be tempted to let himself. For a long time she simply looked out. For a longer time he simply looked at her.
Gradually his watchfulness made her uneasy. She glanced at him, gave half a smile, looked away, then glanced back. It wasn’t an uncomfortable or negative uneasiness but more of a self-consciousness. An awareness. A beautiful-woman-to-lonely-man sort of thing.
He forced himself to look away, to shift away, putting solid rock between them. Supporting himself on one elbow, he stretched out and offered conversation that was as harmless as he could imagine—and a world away from what he wanted to say, something along the lines of, Do you want to make love on top of the world? Do you want me? Would you have me? “Did you ever imagine growing up in Dallas that someday you’d be living in a place like this?”
“Growing up in Dallas, I never imagined that a place like this existed.” She moved away, too, finding a place where stone jutted up to provide a backrest. “My family has lived and died in Texas for more than a hundred years. I didn’t expect to be any different.”
“I’m glad you are.”
Juliet clenched her teeth as she felt her face warm. He said that as if he meant it. Of course, he did—on a business level. It was a fair guess that no one else in the city of Grand Springs could match her ability with computers, though there were probably some kids who came close, and she was possessor of a logical mind and strong deductive reasoning. For all the good it’d done him. So far her computer had told him that Roy Stuart Jr. didn’t have a listed phone number or any social media networking pages. Wow. Big deal.
“It’s not as if I’ve been much help.”
He grinned. “It’s not as if I’m talking about your help. Overall, I’d have to say that losing my memory has not been a particularly pleasant experience, but if there is an upside to it, it’s meeting you.”
To hide her nerves, she clasped her hands together in her lap, stretched out her legs and crossed one ankle over the other. He recognized her discomfort, anyway,