thick. Very thick…
“My dad brought us here once,” he said, turning to her again, smiling slowly when he caught her eye, causing certain responses, certain small, shivery feelings she instantly denied.
She cleared her throat. “How old were you?”
“Pretty little. Maybe five. It’s one of my few memories of him. He was gone so much. He would show up out of nowhere, now and then, for a week or two, and then disappear again. That was the last time he came to town, when he brought us to dinner here. It was before Bowie was born—nine months before, if you know what I mean.”
She did. Blake had gotten Chastity pregnant, gone away, and never come back. “What a guy.”
Buck said, “That was pretty much his M.O. He’d show up, get my mother pregnant and leave. He’d come back in a year or so, get her pregnant again. Leave again. None of us ever got to know him or anything. He was the stranger who happened to be our father.”
Her editor’s brain kicked in. The stranger who happened to be our father. That might make the cutline under a photo of the notorious Blake. They’d need to dig up an old picture….
And she should be getting this down. Any revelations about Blake Bravo could definitely be usable.
She grabbed her bag, dug out the mini-recorder, turned it on and set it on the table, down toward the hurricane lamp—out of the way, but close enough to pick up everything they said. “So Bowie never even met his father?”
Buck eyed the recorder. “Always on the job, right?”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
He looked at her. A long look. “I keep hoping for more.”
“Well, don’t—about Bowie and Blake…”
He said nothing, just looked at her some more.
And if she’d didn’t watch it, she’d be looking right back, going ga-ga over his eyelashes and the sexy curve of his mouth. “Talk,” she commanded.
He made a low sound—something between a grunt and a chuckle. And at last, he got down to it. “Bowie, as the youngest, never met our father. And Brand, Brett and I never knew him. Not really. He hardly ever came around, and we were mostly too little to have a clue who he was.” Buck glanced down into his drink and then back up at her. “He had the weirdest, scariest light-colored eyes. Wolf eyes…but I told you that, didn’t I? About his eyes. Back when you and I were together?”
She nodded. Back then, he never talked about his family much. Just that his dad had left them when Buck was very young—and about Blake’s pale, strange eyes. “Tell me more about the time your dad brought you here, to the Nugget. You were five, you said?”
“Yeah. I was the only one of the kids who got to go. Brett and Brand were…two and three, I guess. Ma left them with my grandmother. It was December. I remember there were tinsel garlands looped on the light fixtures.” They both glanced up at the wagon-wheel chandelier over their heads. “And a tree, over there by the door to the street—a fresh tree, strung with those old-style big lights and shiny glass ornaments. I remember passing it as we came in, breathing in the piney smell of it, getting off on the way the lights glowed in the branches. It meant Christmas was coming and that gave my five-year-old heart a thrill.”
“You had good Christmases, growing up?”
He nodded. “Ma made a big deal of it. She baked like a champion, played Christmas carols all day and half the night from the morning after Thanksgiving on. She decorated a huge silver-tip fir in the front room. She seriously decked the halls—and every flat surface in sight. The hotel—in those days she called it a hotel—was a damn Christmas wonderland and that is no lie. My brothers and I loved it.”
“It sounds fabulous.”
“It was.” Those dark eyes of his were shining.
Nadine trotted up, bearing a pair of totally retro salads: iceberg lettuce and wedges of tomato drizzled all over with ranch dressing. “Here we go.” She plunked them on the table and bustled away again.
B.J. looked down at her plate—and her stomach actually growled. Amazing. For the first time in a week, out of nowhere, she was starving.
“Back to dinner out with psycho-Dad,” she prompted as she unrolled her napkin, spread it on her lap, grabbed for her fork and dug in.
It tasted so good. She had to make a conscious effort not to groan in delight at the crisp texture of the lettuce, the creamy, perfect consistency of the dressing. She gobbled down several crunchy, delicious bites before it came to her that Buck wasn’t talking.
She looked up from devouring her salad to find him watching her—again.
“Hungry?” he asked, annoyingly amused.
She took time to swallow, lick a spot of dressing off her upper lip and wipe her mouth with her napkin, before replying. “Yeah. So?”
“Last night at the Castle, you didn’t eat much of anything.”
She wisely refrained from comment on that one and instructed instead, “Your father. With lots of detail, please. If I have to write this thing, you have to give me something to work with.”
“You can be very bossy, you know that?”
“And you can be a manipulative SOB—or did I mention that already?” She dropped her napkin in her lap and forked up another huge bite of salad.
“Yeah. You mentioned it.” He stared at her mouth as he lounged back in his seat, keeping one strong arm resting on the table—to the right of his empty drink and his untouched salad. “You’re still steamed because I dragged you into this.”
She paused before stuffing that big bite into the mouth he kept staring at. “How did you guess? The story, please.”
He picked up his drink, rattled the ice cubes as Nadine rushed by—and finally continued. “We took a booth that night. The one right behind you, I think it was. I remember that Ma and my dad sat together. I sat across from them. I tried to be very, very good. And whenever my father would look at me with those scary eyes of his, I’d get this tightness in my stomach, this feeling that I wouldn’t mind so much when he went away again. Little did I know that when he left that time, he was never coming back.”
B.J., having polished off her salad, longed to pick up her plate and lick the last of the dressing from it. Somehow, she restrained herself.
And besides, there was still the bread basket. She grabbed it and peeled back the warming towel to reveal four nice, big dinner rolls. Snatching one up, she slathered on the butter and then tore off a hunk and stuck it in her mouth.
God. Bread. Delicious—and Buck was watching her again, grinning that grin of his. She made a move-it-along circular gesture with her free hand.
He took his cue. “Recently—since a few years ago, when it all came out in the papers and I found out who he really was—I’ve been learning about dear old Dad. Blake kept a home base in Norman, Oklahoma, with a woman named Tammy Rae Sandovich. He had one child with Tammy Rae. A boy, Marsh.”
She swallowed. “Your half-brother…”
“One among many. I met Marsh last year. Great guy. Blake used to beat him—and his mother, too. A lot. So in hindsight, with the information I have now, I can’t say I regret that dear old Dad didn’t show up much, or that he stopped coming around when I was so young.”
B.J. felt a faint twinge of something that might have been sympathy—for Buck, for all the left-behind children of the evil Blake. With that twinge came the urge to reach across the table, to cover Buck’s hand with her own, to reassure him, the way a friend would. It was an urge she took care to suppress.
Nadine set Buck’s second drink in front of him. “Everything okay?”
B.J.