A COWBOY'S PROMISE Page 3

  She didn't move, barely even opened her lips. "Do you want that cup of coffee or not?"

  Her voice was hard and clipped, but he believed. More, he could still taste just a hint of her, was still close enough that the scent of her—a scent that had always made even the worst of Abuk's nightmares go away—touched his nostrils.

  How the hell had he ever managed to walk away from her?

  How could he explain what he had done?

  "I want the cup of coffee," he said. His throat ached.

  "Then follow me." Her voice was cool, steady, at odds with the pain he'd seen in her eyes. She turned and walked ramrod straight to her truck.

  She was shaking so badly that it took her three tries to get the key in the ignition. She finally got it when she grabbed her right hand in her left to steady it and jammed the key in and turned it on.

  Then she gripped the steering wheel with both trembling hands and took deep, deep breaths.

  Charlie! Here!

  And even worse, kissing her!

  Thank God she'd steeled herself the moment he'd taken her into his arms.

  It hadn't been easy. He felt the same—hard and lean and warm. Maybe even a little harder and leaner than she remembered. He smelled the same. There was that hint of lime and leather and something indefinably Charlie.

  The memories had swamped her, made her ache and need—and want things she knew she absolutely did not want at all.

  She was done with him—just as he had been done with her.

  When she'd awakened that morning in Abuk to find herself alone in bed, she'd simply assumed that Charlie had got a call that had taken him out on an early lead and she hadn't heard it. She worked twelve-hour days in conditions that no one should have to work in—and when she slept, she slept like a rock. She rarely heard Charlie's phone.

  She hadn't been surprised to find him gone.

  It had happened before. When you did what Charlie did for a living, you never knew when something would happen.

  Something had happened.

  She didn't realize until later that what had happened was that Charlie had walked out of her life. Why?

  She'd screamed the question. She'd cried it. She'd asked it a hundred times. And yet, if she opened herself to the silence, she already knew.

  He hadn't loved her.

  It was as simple and as stark as that.

  She'd been fine to have an affair with, had been right there, ready and available for a desperate, passionate fling, the sort one had in the middle of a war zone where no one looked beyond today because tomorrow might never come.

  The problem was that the night before Charlie had walked, Cait had dared to talk about tomorrow.

  She had talked about all their tomorrows. She had talked about forever. Marriage. Family.

  And when she'd awakened, he was gone.

  And now, two years later, he was here … and he wanted to talk.

  Cait didn't want to talk. She didn't want to listen.

  Most of all, she didn't want to feel what she'd felt when he'd kissed her.

  Damn him! It was over. Completely over!

  And she was over him!

  She had a new man now. A better man.

  And she was going to tell him so.

  She wished they had just "talked" in the hospital waiting room. She didn't want to drag this out any longer than necessary. But it was probably better, she thought, closing her eyes and praying for strength, that they did it somewhere else.

  If they'd stayed at the hospital, Joyce would have heard every word.

  Joyce was a good soul, but she knew Cait and she knew Steve—and a strange man and Cait Blasingame having a heart-to-heart in the hospital waiting room would give her lots of fodder for the gossip mill.

  There would be plenty to talk about, anyway, simply because Charlie had showed up looking for her. And if Joyce had happened to glance outside and see that kiss…!

  Cait didn't even want to think about that.

  In her rearview mirror she saw a low-slung sports car—good God, was he driving a Porsche?—pull out of a stall, then come to idle close by. She could see Charlie behind the wheel, watching her, waiting for her.

  "Do it," she told herself firmly. "You can do this. Talk to him. Walk away from him."

  How hard could it be? It couldn't possibly be worse than being left in the middle of the night?

  There were several fast-food joints not far from the hospital. She picked one where she hoped she wouldn't know anyone and parked just outside the door. She got out and waited as Charlie's car—it was, in fact, a silver Porsche!—glided to a stop alongside hers. Her fingers clenched involuntarily, and she consciously unfolded them and brushed them down the sides of her slacks.

  The car door opened and Charlie got out. He moved as if he hurt. Cait looked away. She wouldn't ask. She didn't care. Her fingers curled tightly again.

  "You look good," he said in that rough-silk voice of his as he came up to her.

  "You don't," she said bluntly, making a point at looking him over now.

  The light in the hospital had been soft, and it hadn't shown the new lines and hollows in his lean, gaunt face. They told her that the past two years had been hard ones. She knew about some of it—she'd seen the photos in his book.

  Fool that she was, she'd bought it.

  Resi, after all, was on the cover. She'd bought it because of Resi—because she had been a part of the poignant story of the life that Charlie had told in pictures.

  That was the only reason. But of course she'd looked at it all. After he'd left Abuk she learned that he had gone to Africa, into an area that was, if possible, even more ravaged. The life his photos showed there had been much the same. Obviously, it had had its effects on him, too.

  He was smiling at her now, but she noticed that it didn't reach his eyes. They were dark and serious.

  "No," he said now, in reply to her blunt assessment of his looks, "I don't suppose I do." He held the door open, and she went in.

  If Cait had ever let herself imagine seeing Charlie Seeks Elk again, it wouldn't have been beneath the glaring lights of a fast-food restaurant in Livingston, Montana, on a warm breezy summer night.

  Charlie had never been inclined to come to Montana. He'd even teased her about her "country girl" life, though sometimes she thought he might actually have envied it just a little.

  When she'd first met him she'd assumed he was, like many Indians she knew, born on a reservation from which he'd left to find a place in the world beyond it. He hadn't been, he'd told her.

  "The L.A. kid, that's me. Born and bred." He'd gone on to tell her in a few brief, stark sentences about his childhood. His father had been born on a reservation, though Charlie didn't even know which tribe it belonged to. He'd left to join the army and, after his discharge, he'd stayed in L.A.

  "What'd he have to go back to?" Charlie had said with a shrug. "Nothing for him there. Besides, he drank. He could drink anywhere."

  He'd met Charlie's mother in L.A. where she worked as a secretary. "My mom's family were dust-bowl Okies, mostly Choctaw, on the rolls at least," he'd said. "But they left in the thirties. No future for them there."

  They hadn't had much of a future in any case.

  Charlie's parents had had barely eight years together before his father's drinking led him to have a fatal car accident. Charlie had been three, his sister, Lucy, eight. Their mother had worked hard. She'd done her best for them. In fact, she'd been so focused on providing for them that she had neglected her own health and missed the warning signs of diabetes until it was too late.

  She'd died when Charlie was eleven. Lucy, at sixteen, decided she was old enough to take charge.

  "Luce did her best," Charlie had told Cait late one night. They were lying in bed, listening to gunfire, and it was the only time he'd ever talked about his sister. "She just didn't know how hard it was going to be. She wouldn't get help, wouldn't ask. She was afraid they'd take me away from her." He'd lain silen
t for a long time, looking at the wall, not at Cait. The gunfire rattled on, and Charlie said tonelessly, "She got herself killed on the streets."

  Cait looked at him now, remembering all that, resisting the memory.

  Charlie was ordering two cups of coffee.

  "Do you want anything else?" he asked. She shook her head. "One with milk," he told the spotty boy behind the counter.

  She was surprised that he remembered how she took her coffee. She wished he hadn't.

  While he was paying, she turned away and found a table on the far side of the room, grateful that she didn't know any of the few other patrons and didn't have to introduce him to anyone. Taking the bench seat, she slid in. She could see the room then. She could be the one who would sit protected with the wall at her back.

  As if he understood, Charlie was smiling a little wryly as he came toward her. Unless she closed her eyes or deliberately looked away, Cait had to watch him cross the room.

  He didn't move the way he used to. Charlie had always had a smooth, easy gait that had reminded her of a mountain lion on the prowl. He'd always been quick and lithe. "You move like a cat," she'd said once.

  "An alley cat," Charlie had agreed.

  Now his movements were much less graceful. He moved slowly and carefully, and there was a hesitation in his gait. Cait was certain that his caution owed less to the fact that he was carrying two full cups of coffee than that he had tangled with something bigger and stronger and tougher sometime in the past two years.

  When he reached the table, he set one cup, a stirrer and three small half-and-half containers in front of her, then put his own down and took the seat opposite her. She saw him wince a little as he bent his leg to sit down.

  "What happened?" She couldn't not ask, but she was glad her voice sounded cool and mostly indifferent when she did.

  "I got shot."

  It struck her as odd the way he said it. It wasn't offhand exactly, but the old Charlie would have made a joke of it.

  "The bastards tried to blow me away," he would have said, and then he would have laughed at just one more brush with death.

  But this Charlie wasn't laughing.

  He peeled the top off his cup of coffee and sat with his hands wrapped around it. His fingers were laced together and his knuckles looked almost white with strain. Cait stared at them, then lifted her gaze to his eyes once more.

  He closed his eyes for just a second and, with his fingers knit together like that, he almost looked as if he was praying.

  Saying grace over a coffee cup? Cait thought. Charlie? Hardly.

  Then he opened them again and took a breath. "That's why I'm here." His fingers clenched just a fraction. "Because I got shot." Another breath. His hands shifted a little on the cup. "Because I almost died. Actually—" that wry corner of his mouth lifted again "—I did die. Coded, I think the word is. I saw eternity." He stopped, but his eyes never left her face. "And you weren't there."

  A group of teenagers across the room were laughing and arguing. The milk shake machine was whirring madly. There was the faint sound of the electronic voice from the drive-up saying something about taking an order, please.

  And Charlie was talking about getting shot and dying and seeing eternity and her … what? Not being there?

  Cait felt as if the world was spinning. The roar in her brain was deafening. She just stared. The pit of her stomach burned and she hadn't even yet drunk the coffee.

  She wondered eventually if he expected a response. She couldn't imagine what one would be.

  But apparently he didn't expect one, because after a moment's silence he went on. "I couldn't face eternity without you, so I came back."

  "To life?" The words, thank God, came automatically and sarcastically and not without a certain measure of self-defensiveness.

  But Charlie simply nodded. "Yes."

  Cait shook her head. She reached for one of the half-and-half containers and, with trembling fingers, ripped the top off and dumped the contents into her cup. Then she did the same with the second and with the last. It was too much milk. She liked two, not three. She didn't care. She had to do something—and that was the only thing there was.

  Agitated, she stirred the coffee. She didn't look at Charlie. But she could feel his eyes on her. Scrutinizing.

  All of a sudden she was furiously angry. How dare he!

  "Let me get this straight," she said finally, as evenly as she could. "You got shot. You died. And when you got to heaven or hell or wherever you went, I wasn't there so you came back?" She was looking at him now. Her eyes were shooting daggers at him.

  He didn't flinch. He looked, if anything, calmer. "More or less. Yes. Of course, I didn't think I'd died. I knew I'd been shot. I got caught in a crossfire. Hit three times. I lost a lot of blood. I could hear them taking me to the hospital. Tony Sellers and another guy. I could hear them yelling at each other, and they must have finally got me to the hospital because all of a sudden it sounded less like streets and more like buildings. Gurneys. Metal. You know?"

  He didn't wait for her reply but went on. "And that's when I started seeing this light. It was really bright, like sunlight at the end of a tunnel. And then it started spreading out, like when the sun comes up, spilling light all over, and I began to see people." His eyes came back to meet hers for just a second.

  Then they drifted away again and he was staring off into the middle distance. "I saw my father," he said quietly, "and my mother. And my sister."

  "Who are all dead," Cait said impatiently. He had told her once that he was the only one left in his whole family.

  "And then I saw Chase and Joanna and their kids. And the Cavanaughs and the Craigs. You remember me talking about them?"

  She nodded reluctantly. They were friends of the Whitelaws and, barring a total disaster, she was sure they weren't all dead.

  "And my buddies from high school, Lopez and DeShayne." Charlie smiled faintly. "I even saw goofy old Herbert who could spit water through his front teeth. I saw a lot of other people." He paused and studied the tabletop for a long moment, then looked up once more. "But I didn't see you."

  "Maybe I didn't get an invitation," Cait said tartly.

  "You didn't."

  "Well, then…"

  "Because I'd walked out on you."

  "Tell me something I don't know."

  "I love you."

  Oh, God, no! Please, not that! Don't let him say that.

  Cait's feet thumped, firm and flat on the floor, bracing her. She clutched the coffee cup so tightly that she was in danger of crushing it and sending coffee all over the table. "Don't," she said fiercely through her teeth. "Tell. Me. That."

  "It's true."

  "And that's why you left in the middle of the night?"

  Charlie shook his head and raked a hand through his hair. "I didn't know it then. I didn't want to know it then," he corrected himself.

  "How nice for you," Cait said bitterly. "Well, how about this—I don't want to know it now."

  She tried to shove her chair back, realized she was sitting against the wall and couldn't shove anywhere. So, clumsily, she slid out the side of the bench and got to her feet. "I'm going home."

  Charlie hauled himself awkwardly to his feet, too. "Cait, don't. Finish your coffee. Talk to me. God, I know it's weird. But it's true."

  "It might be true, that doesn't matter. I don't have to listen to it!" She started toward the door.

  He followed her, dogged her footsteps. "Look, Cait. I know I hurt you. Bad. I know that. I was wrong. I'm sorry."

  She kept right on walking, head high, facing straight ahead. Not until she had gone out the door and reached her dad's old truck did she stop and turn to confront him. "Yes, well, I'm sorry, too. But that is over. It's finished. It's been two years, Charlie!"

  "That's not a long time compared to eternity." His voice was quiet. Steady. Reasonable. All the things she was not.

  Cait folded her arms tightly across her breasts and shivered, anyway
, feeling the cool night air knife down the back of her neck. She didn't want to turn and look at him, but she knew she had to, knew he wouldn't settle for less. So she turned. She stared straight into his eyes.

  The best defense was a good offense. Wes had always taught her that.

  "So what now, Charlie? Why are you here? What do you want?"

  He seemed to balance lightly, not awkward at all now. Settled, cool. Like a gunfighter, she thought. Like a man in control.

  "I want you to marry me, Cait."

  She'd had to ask.

  All the bright and shining dreams she'd once had—of the future, of the two of them, of a lifetime and an eternity spent together—rose up once more.

  Ruthlessly she crushed them right back down.

  "I'm already getting married, Charlie—to someone else."

  A semi rumbled past above on the Interstate. The teenagers, still talking and laughing, jostled their way out of the restaurant and tumbled into a pair of pickup trucks and roared away.

  He didn't move. He opened his mouth, but for a long moment no sound came out. Then at last he said, "You can't."

  Red flashed before her eyes. "What do you mean, I can't? Who the hell are you to tell me what I can and can't do?"

  He took a ragged breath. "I mean … you kissed me. You—"

  "You kissed me, Charlie!"

  "You responded!"

  "No, I didn't!"

  But damn it, yes, for just an instant she had. She crushed that thought, too. She hugged herself tighter.

  "No, I didn't," she repeated with all the quiet force she could muster.

  He just looked at her. "Cait." He said her name gently, cajolingly, persuasively.

  She steeled herself against him. "No. I'm sorry you almost got killed, Charlie. I'm sorry you nearly died. I appreciate the fact that you 'missed' me in 'eternity.' But I'm marrying someone else."

  "Who?"

  "What difference does it make? You don't know him."

  "Do you?"

  "How dare you? How dare you come back into my life after two years and just assume that I'm going to jump into your arms? You hurt me, Charlie! You walked out! You left me cold and you never even said why! I know why. I'm not stupid. I figured it out. You didn't want anything more than an affair. You didn't want marriage. You didn't want a family. You didn't want what I wanted. You didn't love me."