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  “What—” she began to ask. She’d been focusing too hard on making herself go cold again, and he’d caught her off guard.

  But it wasn’t working, the cold-heart thing. And, dang it, she really did want to know one thing about him. Just one.

  What would be the harm, if their time was ending soon anyway?

  She found herself trying again. “What was that all about?”

  He paused, as if weighing whether she truly wanted to hear it or not. Then, without warning, he sprang into the truck and scooped her into his arms, laying the kiss of all kisses on her.

  Dizzy…his lips on hers, his arms enveloping her…the scent of him becoming a part of her…

  Then he cupped her face between his hands, his eyes shining. Her lips throbbed, tingled, craved more.

  “Oil.” He laughed, and it sounded like some kind of release. “It looks like there could be oil on my land. I need to get back now, to be there so I can see to the details.”

  He broke into bigger laughter—crazy, overjoyed, complete laughter that invited her to join in.

  She did. “Congratulations. I…gosh.”

  What could she say? This was so unexpected, so…wow.

  And so none of her business.

  Still…oil? Oil?

  He must’ve sensed that he had ignored the stranger rule with his news, because he drew away, searching her face, then stroking back her hair before letting her go altogether.

  “I guess you’re a rich one then,” she said lightly, telling herself that his distance didn’t hurt. She’d caused it, after all. “A big tycoon.”

  “I’m—” He cut himself off, then stared out the windshield, a smile taking over his lips. “I’m free to go home now. That’s all I am.”

  He didn’t start the car. A semitruck roared past them, shuddering their vehicle. It felt like a precursor of some sort.

  And she was right.

  Slowly, he took off his hat, as if to open himself, then he looked at her. His gaze held such jarring wattage that she held her breath.

  Don’t feel this free, cowboy, she thought. Don’t say anything.

  But when he started, he couldn’t seem to stop, no matter how hard she tried not to listen.

  “I live in Fielding, Texas,” he said. “A little town in the east. Grew up on a horse-breeding farm, where we had paints and palominos for sale. Acres and acres of beautiful land that had been in the family for generations. And then my dad took over, running the place for years before…”

  He cleared his throat. “Understand, now, that my mom had died three years earlier, and Dad wasn’t over it. I saw how it broke him, how it took the care right out of him. He didn’t have the strength to be helming a business, and I should’ve seen it, except I was off advising other companies about how to best run their own holdings. Then Dad died, and my sisters asked me to come home. I found out just what he’d done to the ranch then, just what he’d left us with.”

  She was hearing it all, drinking up every sentence as if she couldn’t get enough.

  “We had a family friend,” he continued, “a neighbor who said he would do anything to help us avoid bank foreclosure. Timothy Trent said he’d buy most of our property and hold it, just until we could afford to purchase it back from him. That’s what he said, at least. But he betrayed my family.”

  He paused, a dark fire in his eyes. “The irony is that my associate who’s doing the testing just found documentation that, unbeknownst to anyone else in the family, my father had quietly done his own surveys on some of our land, mostly the parts that my neighbor stole, but he never got to all of our holdings. According to the old work, what Timothy Trent has is bone dry.”

  The fire in his eyes banked, and he leaned back against his seat with a wry grin. “Come to find out, too, that the community—Fielding and the ranch’s business associates—got wind of what Trent did and they’ve shut him out of everything. That means when I get back, I can drive him to the brink, and just before he falls over it, I’ll give him back his original money. I’ll get back what’s ours and no more. That’s all I want. His reputation is going to take care of the rest.”

  She’d never seen the cowboy so relaxed, as if weights had been on his shoulders and this news had removed them. She wanted to touch one of those shoulders—do something—just to see if there was any darkness remaining.

  Any fantasy.

  But she couldn’t. She was already in too deep.

  “You don’t have to tell me any more,” she said.

  “Why? Because you have a fantasy?” The cowboy shook his head, and it was obvious that the oil news had done something else to him, given him a burning energy. “We know each other’s bodies better than anyone else on this earth, I’ll wager, but we don’t know dip about anything else.”

  “That’s by design.”

  “A bad one.”

  He fully turned to her, and she defensively angled back toward the door. Noting her movement, he tensed, the veins in his neck coming to pulse to the surface of his skin.

  “So send me to hell for wanting to know your goddamn story,” he said. “Is that such a terrible thing?”

  Yes, she thought. Because as soon as I start the whole clingy-Lucy thing, you’ll be out of here, and I can’t take that anymore.

  She turned front and center, clasping her hands in her skirted lap. She was trembling and it was the only way she could hide it. “Just drive.”

  It was as if she’d stunned him. She could feel his shock in the renewed distance between them, even from his side of the cab.

  Finally, he put his hat back on, but he didn’t start the engine.

  Not yet.

  “I left home because I was sorely tempted to kill the man who wronged us,” he said instead. “No exaggeration there, either. And before I lost control of myself, my two sisters packed me onto the road, where I could cool off. And then I met you, this brunette in a diner who looked as sweet as springtime. You made me forget for a while.”

  “Stop.” She couldn’t know that he’d gotten attached in any way. It would be the beginning of the end, and she didn’t have the strength to endure yet one more rejection, one more slap to the self-esteem she’d just built up.

  “What do you want from me?” He sounded angry. “Am I humanizing myself too much? Or do you want the badass cowboy to stick around? I ran away so I wouldn’t be that brute whose fingers almost wrapped around another guy’s neck and squeezed the air right out of him.”

  She shook her head in total denial.

  “But,” he continued, “maybe that’s what you need. That dangerous stranger.”

  Heat gripped her throat. She didn’t know why. Maybe because hearing him say it made her fantasy into the same pathetic thing she had been escaping: something she couldn’t let go of.

  She swallowed, breathed, hoped she wouldn’t cry. What if the only way she could be her real self was to be with a stranger?

  What if she would never again feel the way she had during the past couple of days?

  She finally tried to talk and, even though it came out as more of a choke, it echoed.

  “Don’t take it all away from me,” she said.

  “Take what…”

  He trailed off, as if knowing she was emotionally flailing. Yet he didn’t say a word, as if only now realizing that he had much more on his hands than just a sex-starved woman.

  But when he started the engine, he didn’t make a U-turn. No, he drove straight ahead, toward their intended destination, as if he accepted her wishes for the time being.

  She wondered how long that would last now that their facades had been cracked.

  How long it would take for him to break her even more.

  10

  BY THE TIME they got to Grand Canyon Caverns, a pall of clouds had gathered across the sky.

  After parking the truck, Joshua took one look out the windshield and predicted a fallout day. And he wasn’t just talking about the sulfur lining the air to indicate rain. Someth
ing was about to come down.

  Something more than the taut near-discussion he’d already had with the brunette.

  Things had been quiet in the truck since he’d gotten that phone call from his college friend—the geologist—who was looking into the oil seeps.

  Come on home, he’d said. I’m about to find out just how much you’ve got going for you on this land, Josh.

  It looked as if it might be a smaller oil field, his friend had said, but Joshua wasn’t greedy. He only wanted to preserve his family heritage by claiming what Timothy Trent had taken. And since Joshua’s surveyor was a friend, they had agreed to keep news of the find quiet for now, while Joshua borrowed against his future with more college friends he trusted, private lenders who would stand to profit from a strike and hopefully give him enough money to maneuver with Trent. His geology friend would be well compensated for his discretion, too.

  Was it playing fast and loose? Yes, but it was no less than Trent, himself, had done with the Grays. Unless his neighbor took great steps to mend fences, he was also going to find himself with no one willing to do business.

  But Joshua should get back home now, even though he could do some preliminary work from the road. He had a lot to attend to, starting with consulting an oil and gas contract attorney who’d been referred by the geologist.

  Yup, he would start a marathon drive back home early tomorrow morning, barging straight through the nights and stopping at his lawyer’s before he got to Fielding.

  That left just one more day with the brunette.

  Only one.

  He watched her get out of the truck and wander over to a rest area where a T. rex replica bared its teeth at arriving tourists. Even though she had a destination, it still looked as though she was aimless.

  Don’t take it all away from me, she’d said back on the road.

  It had been his first deep glimpse beyond the sexy nympho and into an actual person—one he found himself wanting to explore more each and every passing day.

  With a last glance at the looming clouds, he grabbed a long-sleeved denim shirt from his duffel bag behind the seat, then alighted from the truck and followed her to the dinosaur.

  Meanwhile, he wondered how many times he’d told himself to be careful around her. She had been only a temporary anchor, and now that he had a real, almost complete home to return to—not a substitute who had assuaged him in the interim—it was supposed to be easy to let her go.

  Supposed to be.

  Coming up behind her, he refrained from touching her dark, wavy hair as the wind stroked it. He told himself not to feel the soft skin of her face with a casual caress, not to need to feel it.

  “Can you imagine,” he said softly, so as not to sneak up on her, “what it might’ve been like in the old days, driving through what was essentially a barren place and stopping at places like this for a taste of civilization?”

  She’d been rubbing her arms, and he wasn’t sure if it was for warmth or peace of mind. He would guess it was both. At any rate, he took the long-sleeved shirt and draped it over her shoulders.

  The contact brought her out of her reverie, and she touched the denim, as if surprised he thought enough of her to care that she might be cold.

  “Thank you,” she said, pushing her hands through the sleeves and pulling it around her body.

  “Don’t mention it.” He looked up at the T. rex. A change of subject, a retreat to neutral ground. “Sixty-six was the first direct route from Chicago to L.A., and places like these caverns built corny stuff like this guy to draw business.”

  “He seems kind of isolated out here without any other dinosaurs on display, doesn’t he?” The brunette cocked her head, considering the lone piece of kitsch. “Like he might be excited to see every single car that pulls into the parking lot?”

  “Yeah. I imagine he got real lonely when Interstate 40 came around and the original Route got relegated to side roads.”

  The wind moaned, and he tugged his hat down lower. It’d seemed so easy to take it off earlier, when he’d bared some of his soul to her in the truck after the phone call. He’d felt so unfettered by the oil news that revealing the rest of his life had seemed natural.

  But she’d rejected his personal overture—not that he should’ve been surprised.

  A gentleman would respect her wishes to stay strangers for one more day, he told himself. What was the point in pushing things when he had to leave anyway?

  A moment passed as she inspected the T. rex then crossed her arms over her chest. “When the road broke up, that’s when we changed, don’t you think?”

  She was talking about something more than just Route 66. More than even just society at large.

  “I mean,” she clarified, as if getting back on firm ground, “it’s like families started breaking, too. And we all became a little more cynical.”

  “But the road’s still here.” The wind tried to cuff his hat, but he held it in place until the elements backed off. “The spirit of it will never go away.”

  Neither of them said anything for a second, but his brain was busy enough for all the conversation in the world.

  Without her having to even say a personal word, he knew that there was a sensitive woman behind the siren. That she had maybe come on this trip with her friend for a reason other than vacation.

  And he wanted to know why: wanted to know what got her out of bed every day, wanted to know what might make her happy after a long day of work, what might set her mind to rest at night so she could dream uninterrupted.

  Almost as if she’d sensed that this moment had gone beyond sightseeing, she flashed a subdued smile at him and started walking toward the main building, where they’d decided to take one of the forty-five-minute cavern tours.

  That’s all he was going to get from her: a glimpse of more profound feeling, a hint of what the future could’ve held if this had been a different time or a different place.

  A dead end.

  Accepting that—because what other choice was there?—he arranged their tour, then put his hand on her back and guided her to an elevator with the rest of their group.

  The conveyance took them down into the natural limestone dry cavern, where their tour guide gave background about their surroundings: formed in prehistoric times, then discovered by a man on his way to a poker game in 1927 when he fell into a hole and came back with friends the next day to explore with ropes and lanterns.

  At one point, the guide even turned out the atmospheric lights that highlighted the artful calcium-deposit formations, just to show them what it might be like to be trapped without illumination.

  True darkness fell over them, so fathomless that Joshua found himself looking inward instead of out. And when he felt the brunette grasp his hand, he even believed that he was imagining it.

  But then the lights came back on and he realized that she was actually pressed against him, pulling closed the shirt he’d draped around her earlier.

  When the tour moved on, she didn’t let go of him. He held on tightly, making the most of what he had left with her.

  When they got back up to the top, where a curio shop and restaurant awaited, the brunette squeezed his hand in some kind of thanks for holding her, then headed outside.

  “You okay?” he asked, following to make sure all was well.

  “Now I am.” She came to lean against her side of the truck, which faced an expanse of empty parking lot. The wind fluttered the hem of his shirt against her skirted thighs. “I didn’t like that dark part too much, so this open air feels really good.”

  “The darkness didn’t last that long.”

  “Long enough.”

  She leaned her head back against the cab and closed her eyes.

  “Damn,” he said. “It really did get to you.”

  She laughed, but it sounded more like an attempt to chase away her imbalance than anything.

  “I always needed the night-light when I was little,” she said. “You know, because the boogeyma
n was under the bed or in the closet and I thought that keeping my eyes wide open—” she saucered her gaze to emphasize her comment “—would keep him away.”

  “Did it?”

  Her gaze returned to normal. “Yes. I had this entire routine, I guess you could call it, where I would put a chair in front of the closet door so it would make noise if the monster crept out. And I put one of my mom’s old Christmas decorations along the line of my bed. It had bells on it, so I could hear if anything disturbed them. Then I would wait there, listening for noise until I eventually fell asleep.”

  Maybe it was the darkness that had brought this all out, Joshua thought, because nothing else had encouraged her to share this much before.

  He paused. Yeah, it’d been the darkness, all right. Just as the darkness of his stranger act had obviously drawn her out in a more physical way with him, too.

  “Those scary days are gone though,” he said. “You can sleep now, without those bells. I’ve seen evidence.”

  “I suppose it’s easier with someone else around. Darkness reminds some people that we’re really alone.” She smiled self-consciously. “It would’ve been nice to have some kind of company back then, as well, I think. Just someone who was there. My parents wouldn’t let me in their room, even with the boogeyman around. My brother just laughed and told me to let him sleep. They all said I was a big girl and I could take care of it myself, so…I arranged my routine to compensate. It wasn’t the first routine and it sure wasn’t the last, either. I also colored inside the lines with my crayons and arranged all my toys just so.”

  He was watching her closely, carefully, wishing there was a way for him to take her into his arms without scaring her off.

  Then, as if realizing she’d said too much, the brunette spread out her hands, putting an end to the conversation. “And there you have my life story. I hate to feel like I’m by myself, cowboy.”

  She turned toward the truck’s door and tried the handle. Surely she hadn’t expected it to be unlocked, so he suspected that she was only avoiding him now.

  “I hate to tell you,” he said, gently taking hold of her shoulders and turning her toward him again, “but whatever fantasy you might’ve had about strangers is done. We stopped not knowing each other about five orgasms and three conversations ago.”