Black Ember (7 page)

Suddenly, her reasons for coming here seemed awfully blurry.

It seemed absurd that she had thought she could come here to North Dakota, dressed like she was going to a Halloween party, and spy on Buddy using some guise that she hadn’t even bothered to figure out in advance. That plan had started falling apart the minute the plane touched down. For one thing, apparently Buddy was still well enough—or stubborn enough—to live at home and even romance a woman. Camping! What kind of dying man went camping? Which begged the question of whether her mother had exaggerated when she said he was dying. Of course, there was a chance Georgia simply didn’t have her facts straight, but she was generally meticulous about details. Caryn should have come right out and asked Opal or Turk, but she couldn’t think of a way to phrase the question without raising suspicions.

Opal referred to her boss as an “old goat,” but Caryn thought she detected affection in her voice. She certainly hadn’t said anything to suggest that he was battling a fatal illness. Whatever the case, Buddy apparently was content to let the bar run itself until Monday night, which made him either a very careless businessman or a guy who just didn’t care any more.

All of which meant Caryn had to stay in character for a few more days if she wanted to maintain her disguise. And that meant returning to the horrible bar and waiting on the horrible customers and showing the world yet again how incompetent she was, unable to do a job that thousands of women did every day without the benefit of a fraction of the education that Caryn had received. Waitressing was far more difficult than she had ever imagined. At one point, earlier in the evening, when a customer had dropped most of a whiskey sour on her boots while his friend tried to stuff a dollar bill in her waistband, Caryn had considered quitting on the spot. Her bio-dad had never done anything for her, so why was she making this effort for him?

But it wasn’t Buddy’s fault that she’d become a celebrity. Wasn’t his fault that Caryn had inherited her mother’s thick blond hair and wide golden eyes, their features so similar that she couldn't have avoided becoming a recognizable celebrity, her privacy traded away before she could make the decision for herself. Designing jewelry had provided Caryn a welcome respite from the constant media attention; unlike some other offspring of celebrities, she’d been lucky enough to avoid flaming out. Still, even though she’d escaped public meltdowns and addictions and quickie weddings and scandals, the success of Caryn’s line as well as her broken engagement to one of the most eligible bachelors in New York ensured that there was always paparazzi around every corner, hoping for a good shot on a slow news day.

Georgia had managed to keep the identity of Caryn’s father a secret from the press, but given Georgia’s revelation that Buddy had tried to get in touch, Caryn was forced to examine what she had thought was true all these years.

But every time she tried to sift through what she knew about her bio-dad, she got distracted by thoughts of the man who’d come to her rescue tonight. A psychologist would have a field day with her—she was probably experiencing some sort of knight-in-shining-armor fantasy about Zane, who was a completely inappropriate substitute for her attention. Tomorrow, when she’d had a good night’s sleep and some coffee—any man who could cook like Matthew was bound to make great coffee—she’d borrow a phone and call her lawyers, who were masters of discretion. They’d have money wired, and they’d undoubtedly be able to find her a room as well, given the resources at their disposal and their experience handling celebrity scandals. That was the whole reason Georgia had hired them in the first place, and with their help, she and Caryn had never found themselves the target of stalkers or lawsuits or public battles of any sort. The attorneys were the best at what they did, and tomorrow they would bail Caryn out.

As she nestled in the soft old quilts, Caryn tried to quell the nagging longing to solve all her problems on her own, just this once. Being Carrie-slash-Barracuda was a pain in the butt, but it was also strangely…exhilarating. Especially when gorgeous oilmen with soulful gray eyes checked her out. Or argued with her or insulted her or brushed against her when he handed her a toothbrush, or any of the hundred other moments she’d shared with Zane tonight.

She’d come here to satisfy an old longing and find the answers to long-buried questions, and instead she was acting like a teenager at a prom, besotted with a man who clearly thought she was a pain or crazy or criminal, or all three.

She’d come to North Dakota knowing who she was and what she wanted. Now she wasn’t sure about either.

Zane stood on the back porch with a cup of coffee, staring moodily at the sun peeking up over the trees and wishing he had somewhere else to be.

He had three weeks off, something he’d been looking forward to every day of his last hitch. He was happy for his friends, for their wedding and the baby on its way, and he was even all right with standing up as a groomsman for Matthew, though Deneen was making him a little nuts with her wedding planning craziness. At least she was inviting Jayne’s friends from back home, and Zane had been idly considering a little wedding-night hookup with a girl from out of town…a girl with no expectations and no strings attached.

That’s what Zane did best with: low expectations. There was a reason he’d left the law firm back in Arkansas, and it wasn’t the one most people suspected. The truth was that Zane hadn’t minded the long hours and the grueling caseload, the briefs and precedents and arguments, the fact that he saw more of the firm’s interns than his own family and barely recognized his own apartment.

He’d been happy to let everyone assume that he was simply burned out. Because the real reason he’d left was hard to face: Zane was a quitter, and always had been. A coward. When the going got tough, he ran.

Back when he was in middle school, he and Matthew had snuck out one night and rode their bikes to the convenience store in the part of town where they were never allowed to go, and stole two tall bottles of beer and a couple of packages of beef jerky. They’d snuck the beers and snacks inside their windbreakers, and made it out of the store before the old guy who ran the place followed them outside and started shouting in an unfamiliar language. Zane hopped on his bike and pedaled like hell…and Matthew stayed behind and apologized, and when his parents came to pick him up he agreed to go over to the store every day after school for a month and help clean and stock. Matthew had never ratted Zane out, and Zane had never forgiven himself for leaving him.

Then there was the time in college when he flunked two statistics quizzes in a row. He’d been studying biology with a vague idea of becoming a doctor, but rather than suck it up and go see the professor, consult a tutor, put the extra time in with the books, he simply switched to an easier major.

Or later, when he was in law school, and his father had two strokes in a row. Sure, his folks’ house was a couple of hours away, and his mother told him to concentrate on his studies, but school wasn’t the reason he didn’t come home and help, didn’t heed his sister’s pleas to visit his father during his difficult recovery.

Zane was the guy who took the easy way out, the path of least resistance. Whenever things got too inconvenient or dangerous or uncomfortable, he made himself scarce.

The real reason he left the law firm was that he couldn’t stand to be in the courtroom, day after day, with his doomed clients, the ones whose cases weren’t strong enough to get the attention of the more senior members of the firm. One after another he lost his cases, and even though his mentor promised him it would get easier—that he just had to put his time in like everyone else until a new crop of junior lawyers arrived to take on the dirty work—he didn’t care enough to tough it out.

So he quit.

The day that Matthew told him he could find good-paying work hundreds of miles from home, Zane called his boss and told him he wasn’t coming back. He’d inconvenienced the other lawyers at the firm, who had to juggle the cases he left behind, and he’d disappointed the partner who had hired him and believed in him. The truth was he’d felt guilty ever since he arrived in North Dakota almost a year ago.

The work on the oil rigs had helped a lot. At first it was simply a distraction, the act of getting up each day and working long hours with his hands, giving his all to the hard physical labor and exacting technical work of bringing the crude up from the earth. But over time, he grew to love the rhythm of the day, to love belonging to a team who worked together and depended on each other in a way that he’d never experienced before. Sure, Zane had friends at the law firm, and he’d respected and admired the partners. But on the rig, he literally put his life into the hands of his fellow workers every day and was responsible for their safety as much as his own.

He’d actually begun to feel a little better about himself, eleven months into his employment. He was no longer a ‘worm,’ the name given the new guys, no longer the subject of the practical jokes from the more experienced workers. He belonged, and he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that.

Then yesterday, his comfortable little world had been turned upside down by a girl punk on the run from her past. He’d been the only safe haven around, and he’d stepped up and helped, something Zane supposed he ought to feel good about. But he didn’t. He felt lousy, to the core. Because he could feel it coming on again, the urge to escape, to dump her, to wash his hands of all responsibility. Carrie was bad news. Her panic when he mentioned calling the cops had made that clear. It was entirely possible that she’d broken the law, and was running from the authorities, or escaped from jail, or was looking for her next con. Or, maybe she was running from an abusive husband or boyfriend, trying to escape a nightmare scenario he wanted no part of.

Zane wasn’t anybody’s savior. All those lost cases at the law firm were proof of that. His family had forgiven him all his teenage growing pains, and hadn’t even seemed to notice that he’d neglected his father during his recovery, but Zane knew he was a coward. If Carrie needed protecting, he wasn’t the man for the job.

So, why was he having such a hard time getting her off his mind?

Zane flung the last of his coffee off the deck and onto the flowerbeds, cursing. He should never have brought her here. He could have called Cal and asked him to send someone from social services; they were certainly used to dealing with people who had nowhere else to go. Local churches were housing the homeless in basements all over town; whole families were sheltering in the old firehouse since the new one had been built.

The point was that there were plenty of other options, even for a girl with no money and no ID. And instead, he’d brought the girl home with him.

Zane kicked one of the porch’s columns, cursing again.

“Um…do you want more coffee?”

He hadn’t heard the front door open. Zane whirled around to find Carrie standing there, holding the coffee pot, dressed in his T-shirt and the skirt she’d had on yesterday, her hair wet from the shower. Her feet were bare, and her toenails were polished a pearly shell pink, very much at odds with the chipped black polish on her fingernails. Her wet hair was standing up at an odd angle, a chunk of it falling over her eyes, which were a shade of luminous gold that didn’t look at all right with the reddish-black color she’d dyed her hair.

“Whatever,” Zane snapped, unsettled. He tried not to let himself stare at the way she looked in his T-shirt. It had been his favorite, one he’d picked up during football tryouts his freshman year of high school, and just happened to be on top of the stack when he went to get her something to wear to bed last night.

Except that wasn’t really true. Yes, the shirt was on top, but he could have easily asked Jayne or Deneen to loan her something. The truth was he wanted her in his shirt. Wanted to know that she was sleeping down the hall, curled up on the same couch where they watched football on Monday nights and played board games when they didn’t have to work the next day.

And that wasn’t all he wanted. As he gave up the battle and let his gaze travel down her milky pale legs and shapely arms—back up over the outline of her breasts under that old T-shirt—up to her long neck and delicate earlobes peeking out between that terrible haircut—he realized he wanted to protect her. And kiss her. Definitely kiss her, wanted to run his tongue over the tiny indentation above her upper lip, and nibble gently along that jaw that would have been almost elegant if it had belonged to another woman.

She took his mug from his hands and poured coffee into it, doing a far better job than she had serving beer last night. When she handed the mug back to him, she smiled, dimples appearing at the corners of her mouth, her eyes clear and bright without the gobs of makeup she’d had on the day before, and he suddenly noticed that something was missing.

“Where’s all your metal?” he asked. The nose and eyebrow rings, the silver coils that wrapped around her ear cartilage, were gone. And he couldn’t even see the holes they’d run through.

“Oh,” Carrie said, instantly wary. She touched her ear, as though searching for the missing jewelry. “I, um, need to go put them back in.”

“How are you going to do that?” Zane demanded. A feeling was growing inside him—irritation at having been duped, probably, even if it was a small thing. He stepped closer and closed his thumb and finger around her ear, pushing her hair away. “There aren’t any
holes.”

He was close enough to smell her scent, a mixture of the fruity shampoo Deneen and Jayne used, and something else that was her alone, like flowers crushed on a stone warmed by the sun.

She put her hand over his and hesitated for a second before pushing him away and stepping back.

“So they’re fake,” she said frostily. “I have commitment issues when it comes to shoving needles through my flesh. I’ll get around to having the real ones done once I…once things settle down a little.”

“Is that right.” He didn’t know whether to be amused or annoyed. He closed the distance between them again and traced his fingers up the edge of her ear, confirming that nothing remained of the clunky studs, not even a dent. As his fingertip rounded the top of her ear and explored the edge of her face, tracing the smooth curve of her cheekbone and up to her eyebrows, she shivered beneath his touch.