When Night Falls (13 page)

If there was any woman he didn’t want to tangle with, it was the good kind—and Shelly was still innocent and sweet and fiercely a mother fighting for the child they shared. Dani had said that Shelly didn’t—hadn’t ever—dated, and that meant that…

Dammit, the slam of desire still rode him. One look at those long legs gleaming in the moonlight, the crevice of her breasts as she sat looking as though everything she’d loved would be torn away from her, that hair—the sleek, silky movement when she turned her head, and those eyes—green as meadow grass and so soft when she spoke of Dani, the love shining there, the fierce protection of a mother fighting for her child.

He should have been here. He should have—what? Maybe she was right, he was just a boy…Shelly had faced everything by herself…she knew how to love, how to give. What did he know how to do? Race? Find a party and a willing woman?

How the hell did he think he could give her something, anything, now?

The shadowy, musty air closed in on Roman, squeezing his chest. He rubbed the ache there, thinking of all the time that had passed, and the life he’d lived, the women he’d known. Shelly was a virgin when he took her that night, and she was still—he heard a noise and turned to see Dani in the
shadows.
His daughter, his child
. “Hey, kid. A little late for you to be out, isn’t it?”

“Nah. I’m going to be eighteen soon, and I’m a woman already. I do what I want, whenever I want. What are you doing here?”

He knew the tough talk; it had been his. “I’m thinking I’m going to start a garage. What do you think?”

She shrugged, but he caught the excitement in her pale face beneath the paint. Then Roman asked, “You said your mom does cleaning and laundry. I’m going to have to trade fix-up and car stuff for what I need, until I get on my feet. Do you think she’d buy that?”

“I can help you. I’ll do anything, wash your clothes, rags, whatever—even help clean this place. I love motors.”

“Do you wash your own clothes?” he asked, pushing her, resenting all the work that Shelly had had to do to pay their way. Just the way Dani turned her face was enough to remind him of Shelly, that wholesome, clean look.

“Sure.”

He knew she was lying. “Look, kid. Help me out. I don’t know many people here and it takes a bit to build up business. Your mom knows everyone and she’s got a good rep and I don’t. She’s a way in, if you know what I mean.”

Dani considered the thought. “Sure. I’ll fix it.”

“You do that, and when I’m on my feet and something comes in that is hot and fast, I’ll show you what I know about racing. You don’t need to be any biker’s girl. Not with your looks. And if you weren’t wearing that paint, you’d look that much better—like your mother. Besides, there isn’t anything like racing. You’d look real cute beneath a helmet, behind a steering wheel.”

I’m your father, a little bit late, but I’m trying
. “And kid, get this straight—what you want, between us, isn’t going to happen. I’m not looking for jail bait trouble. And I’m not going to be used to keep Jace in line, getting you what you want.”

Dani huffed and stomped out of the garage, slamming the front door behind her. He thought of going after her, of following her, and then he heard the rev of a motorcycle.

Roman rubbed his jaw and couldn’t help smiling. So the kid had a temper, just like her old man. Maybe that wasn’t good, but at least he understood. He probably understood better than her sweet mother.

The one thing he did not want to do was to hurt either Dani or Shelly. They’d both paid enough for him.

Then a motorcycle cruised outside and stopped, purring roughly. In another second, Dani slammed into the garage. She stood, legs braced, her hands on her slender hips, glaring at him.

“Wear a helmet when you ride, kid,” he said, just to get her going, to see why she’d come back.

“You’ve got a thing for my mother, don’t you? A lot of men do. They think because she had me with no old man taking the blame that she’s free and easy. Well, she isn’t, and neither am I. I can get what I want without the payoff.”

“Maybe I am interested in her. I don’t know yet,” he answered slowly, truthfully, and didn’t bother to tell Dani that she might not have a choice about the “payoff.” Some men just took. Was that what he did?

“I won’t be happy, you know. And I’m not her. No one is going to walk all over me and leave me flat like my old man left her. If I want a man, I usually get him, and I don’t put out.”

“That’s hard talk from a little girl.” The kid was honest, and he could deal with that. He heard the motorcycle rev outside and knew that Jace was just as hot-blooded as Roman was years ago. The boy would have to do some running to get his daughter, or he’d be in for a little lesson.

When Dani slammed out again, he wondered how long it would be before she put two and two together and realized that he might be her “old man.”

Clyde stroked his chin and watched Dani stalk out of the garage a second time. The girl was as willful as her mother, defying the good folks of Madrid. He would do the town a favor by getting rid of the pair of them—mother and daughter. Shelly, because she knew too much, and Dani—well, because Dani was evidence that threatened Clyde.

After a week of working to rebuild her computer programs, getting the brochure electronically uplifted to send to the printer, meeting her Charis Lopez syndication deadline, Uma stepped out into the dawn. In a few hours, the sun would be high and hot, baking the streets. She began her warming up exercises for her regular morning run. Her body was stiff from too many hours in a desk chair, and her senses were still humming from Mitchell’s light kiss—and the tense dinner she’d planned to make peace among the three males. The dinner’s only reward was another Charis article, “When Men Bristle.”

But Mitchell hadn’t. He’d been enjoying the tension, and the gold watch on his wrist proved that he had battled his way up to a fat paycheck. He knew how to handle himself in conflict.

She lifted her hands to the gray dawn, spread her fingers, and let the light filter through them. With her father in Arizona, enraptured with the new Zuni pots his friend had acquired, the house was quiet. She’d never lived alone, and once the window’s glass had been changed and the repairman was gone, she enjoyed the freedom.

A week without Mitchell had been peaceful—relatively—until she’d remember that devastating, tormenting kiss. Everett was traveling again, attending a tourism conference in Vermont. Uma gathered the morning around her, planning her day. While the last week of July baked the days in
Madrid, mornings were perfect for gardening, and since the computer crash, she’d let her mother’s garden go far too long.

And the mornings were apparently good for mole hunting, she added, as she noted Lars Swenson prowling across his yard with what looked like a harpoon. Periodically, he waggled the handles of the pitchforks that were stuck in the ground. The theory was that moles could be driven by the vibrations, and Lars had lined up the pitchforks to face Charley Blue Feather’s house. One by one, Lars moved the pitchforks closer to Charley’s yard, driving the herd back to their home base.

Mitchell walked out to set his sun tea on the front porch, and Uma caught her breath. The dawn gleamed on his chest, and in his bare feet, he had that scruffy, just awakened look, his jaw dark with stubble. He glanced at her, scowled, and then walked across to Lars’s house. The old tomcat, tail held high, strolled across to join him, winding around his legs. It was all very neighborly and it didn’t concern her.

She now wore a good support sports bra
.

Mitchell was not going to bother her with those hot, dark looks
, she decided as that quivering, sizzling sensation began to warm her.

Pearl’s stinging call of yesterday morning still rang in the quiet air. “Dozer has been my yard man since Walter and I got married. Can you imagine him quitting, just now, when my garden is in full bloom, and me with a garden party coming up next week? Dozer sold his business to that—that criminal, Mitchell Warren. He can’t possibly know anything about gardening. Yet here he comes, pulls up to my yard, and starts unloading the riding mower from his pickup. Well, I tell you, I went out there and fired him on the spot.”

Later that afternoon, Pearl had called again. “I’ve called everyone in town I can think of. That Warren man has got all of Dozer’s business. No one else is doing yards. I’ll do it myself before I let him prune one bush or tree.”

Uma started jogging easily, refusing to look at Mitchell’s house as she thought of Shelly, terribly frightened of what Roman might do—or if Dani would discover her father’s identity.

Uma tensed as Mitchell nodded to her, the two men standing and pointing and apparently discussing the “mole herd.” She noted that his pickup was loaded with the riding and push mower and the open garage door gave her a full view of Dozer’s old business, from push mowers to insecticides and tree trimming gear.

She sailed into a full, fast run, crossing the pink dawn striping the pavement. The Warren brothers had certainly stirred up Madrid; gossip said that Roman was going to open the old garage and that he was now living in it. And “gossip” knew that he’d gotten the money from big syndicate crime partners who were just looking for a small town to use as a hideout.

The sleepy town was stirring, fierce arguments in the barber shop and the cafe and at the gas station. Bred from Native Americans and homesteaders, cowboys and frontiersman, half of Madrid knew they would endure whatever came their way. Those wanting to stimulate Madrid’s cash flow recalled Bonnie and Clyde days, how the lawmen, reporters, and tourists had piled into the city. For a town built in one day during the Land Rush at the turn of the last century, anything seemed possible. But the “civilized” element, the society class in which Pearl moved, were outraged.

Gossip also said that Everett and Mitchell had shared a booth at Shirley’s Ice Cream Parlor the morning after her make-peace dinner. Whatever could they have been discussing?

She ran down Main Street, cool and quiet in the morning, before the stores opened. Then, at Tabor Street, Shelly swung into a run beside her. Since Shelly’s energies were nec
essary to her house cleaning and laundry work, Uma was surprised.

The two women ran in stride down Main Street, and then Shelly said between breaths, “Roman is at my house, fixing something, every day. Dani is furious, but she’s not telling him why. She thinks he’s interested in me, and she wants him.
Him
…interested in
me
. I could kill him. Dani thinks it is a trade-off, an exchange—my laundry and patching for his house repair. He’s already fixed the air conditioner and he’s starting on the flooring. I do not like having him around. He’s making me feel as if I can’t take care of anything!”

Uma frowned slightly; Shelly wasn’t a person to complain, but the Warren brothers could excite even the most placid temper—and clearly Shelly was frustrated, using running to work off her early morning mood.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she continued. “But I haven’t lived with a man around the house—you have. They leave the toilet seats up. That is unnerving, and so is the way Roman looks at me—let alone if I tell him I can’t afford the work that he is doing—ironing and laundry just won’t cover it. The whole town is lit up and gossiping. It’s only a matter of time before someone—you’ve always got good advice. What can I do?”

Just then Mitchell’s black pickup cruised slowly by Uma. “’Morning, ladies,” he said, and Uma unconsciously picked up speed, nudging Shelly down a side street.

Shelly looked at Uma and shook her head. “Roman’s garage is down Maloney Street. I’m not going down there. What’s wrong?”

Uma shook her head, preferring silence. “May I help you, Mitchell?” she asked finally, politely, pointedly as she looked at him.

“Dinner at my place tonight, Uma. Just a neighborly payback for dinner the other night at your house,” he said, with a
narrowed smile she didn’t trust. Mitchell didn’t wait for an answer, pulling forward on the street.

When his pickup slid onto a side street, enveloped by the cool shadows, Shelly studied Uma and noted, “You look as if you’re going to give him a very nasty hand sign.”

Mitchell’s invitation wasn’t sweet, and ran more to the dictation of a powerful man expecting his orders to be obeyed. “I wouldn’t. I’ve never done anything of the kind. But that man can really get to me.”

“Excuse me,” Roman said as Shelly stood at the sink, wiping the counter. He leaned close, his arm went past her, his bare chest warming her back as he turned the faucet and let the water run cold enough to drink.

She didn’t move, feeling Roman’s body close to hers, his breath against her cheek. He turned off the water and both his arms came down on the counter to frame her. “Problems?” he asked too softly.

Problems?
Roman was too close, and whatever leaped within her all those years ago was threatening to do the same now.

After a week of him hammering and running a power saw, putting in new windows, and putting in new pipes in the kitchen and bathroom, she had a definite problem that stretched into her sleepless nights, her tense days—Roman. She was apt to find him anywhere, lying with his tools on the kitchen floor, head and shoulders beneath the sink, grinning at her from on top of the roof, at a window he was repairing from the outside, caulking the tub—

The lowered intense look of those gold eyes could stop her like a doe caught in headlights. She’d argued with him logically, fought with him, and yet just there, riding on the edge, was a sensual pull she didn’t want.

She looked down at her hands near his, white knuckled as they gripped the counter. His thumb slowly cruised over the
back of hers. “I’ve told you that I don’t have the money for the repairs, for the materials. You’re making me feel as if I can’t cope, and it’s only a matter of time before Dani discovers that—”

He blew on her nape, shifting the tendrils that had come free from her ponytail. “What are you doing running early in the morning, Shelly, when you’ve got a full day of work ahead of you?”