Six
Angie lay on the chaise barely noticing the heat. Absently she rubbed tanning oil on her arms and chest and legs, but her thoughts were far away. On Brig. She was running out of time. The Caldwells always threw a huge, end-of-the-summer barbecue at their home. Not only were The Judge’s business associates from all over Clackamas County invited, but dignitaries from Portland, civic leaders and anyone worth their salt in Prosperity were on the guest list. It was, aside from Rex Buchanan’s Christmas party, the event of the year.
Angie had been ducking offers from several boys including Bobby and Jed because she planned to go with Brig. Smiling, she thought of the tongues that would wag, the eyebrows that would rise, the shocked gasps that would be swiftly covered with hands when she showed up with her arm linked through Brig McKenzie’s.
A lot of the women, whether they admitted it or not, would be jealous; others would be stunned. She would certainly be the center of attention, and everyone would assume that she’d been seeing Brig for weeks…just long enough. But she couldn’t waste any more time.
She wiped off the excess tanning oil with a towel, then slid on a pair of shorts. Slipping her arms through a gauzy white blouse, she didn’t bother with buttons, letting the front gape open, then rolled up her sleeves.
As she walked into a pair of flip-flops, she unsnapped the band holding her hair away from her face and gave the thick waves a toss so that ebony curls framed her eyes and cheeks and cascaded in tumbled disarray down the middle of her back.
She’d run out of excuses to hang out at the stable, and short of asking Brig for riding lessons, she didn’t have a reason to loiter without looking too obvious. She couldn’t appear desperate…just mildly interested.
She could ask him to take her into town, or fix the rattle in her car, or go riding with her…
Never in her life had she had so much trouble getting a man to notice her; usually she had the opposite problem, but Brig was different from any man she’d met in Prosperity. Or Portland, for that matter. Though she’d spent all four of her high school years boarding at St. Therese’s, an all-girls Catholic school, she’d had ample opportunity to meet boys from Jesuit and Central Catholic as well as the male students who attended Portland State University, which was located a few blocks away from the hallowed brick halls of the all-girls school.
At the door of the stable she paused, dabbed at her lipstick and walked inside. Her nostrils curled at the harsh odors of urine and manure. And there was something else within the hot shadowy interior. Something out of place. Something that caused the hairs on the back of her neck to lift one by one.
“Brig?” she called out in the interior gloom. “Brig? You in here?” Sweat collected on her spine and she felt suddenly nervous. Edgy.
She strained to listen, but all she heard was quiet nickers and snorts and the rustle of hooves in straw. From the corner of her eye, she saw a movement. Her heart jumped. She stumbled back, nearly falling as she turned to find Willie standing near an open barrel of oats. He was holding a bridle and staring at her with unreadable blue eyes. “Jesus, Willie, you scared the hell out of me!”
He licked his lips nervously. “Sorry.”
“You know where Brig is?” Angrily she dusted her hands.
His eyebrows drew together in concentration, and Angie wanted to shake him. Half the time he was dumb as a stone, stammering and avoiding answering questions and looking all embarrassed. Other times he seemed sharp as a tack, smarter than a lot of the ranch hands, and Angie wondered just how stupid he really was. It was almost as if he used his handicap to his advantage. But he couldn’t, could he?
“Mac’s out with the cows.”
“I’m not interested in Mac. I asked about Brig.”
Willie worried his lip and looked away. His hair was a deep shade of brown, but it was dull and unkempt and curled randomly. His eyes were an unsettling hue somewhere between gray and blue. “Brig’s working.”
“I know that.”
“He don’t like to be bothered.”
“It’s all right, Willie.” Angie sighed inwardly and took a step closer to the half-wit. “I need to see him,” she said in a soft, cajoling voice.
“Why?”
Damn, the big moron was irritating, but there was no reason she couldn’t have a little fun with him. She placed her hands on her hips, outlining her small waist and thrusting out her chest. She saw the flicker of interest in Willie’s eyes, how he glanced at her cleavage, then looked up at the rafters to avoid staring. She sauntered up to him. “Come on, Willie,” she cooed. “I don’t have all day. Now”—she touched his dirty shirt on the sleeve—“where’s Brig?”
Willie’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and suddenly the stable seemed close and hot. He looked into her eyes, and she felt a little trill of fear and anticipation, for he didn’t bother hiding his lust anymore and she wondered if this time she’d pushed him too far. He was, after all, a man, a young, physically strong and healthy man. From the darkness of beard shadow, the breadth of his shoulders and the curling hairs that sprang from beneath his work shirt, there was little doubt that he was a fully developed male.
“What do you want?” he said in a rasping whisper so low that Angie’s heart began to knock. His eyes seemed suddenly unconfused and bright with challenge. She cleared her throat and stepped away from him, afraid of her own sexual power and his response—a response that would be purely animal and savage. Her mind clicked forward and she realized that Willie, poor, dumb Willie, just might be able to help her.
Thoughts like these were dangerous.
“I just need to talk to Brig.”
“Then you find him.” Willie, his breathing uneven, stepped away from her, his fingers curling over the bit of the bridle he’d been trying to fix. He walked quickly away, nearly stumbling on a rake, looking as if he was suddenly as scared as she was.
“Damn it,” she muttered once he was gone. Sweat beaded across her brow and her hands shook. She’d have to be more careful in the future. Willie wasn’t the silly innocent he seemed. She remembered the day by the pool, when Felicity had taken off her T-shirt and flashed Willie a glimpse of her breasts. The half-brain had gotten a good look. He’d probably hidden in the woods, closed his eyes and brought up the memory of Felicity’s white skin and huge boobs and jacked himself off. Or had he been thinking of her?
Unable to shake the feeling that she’d inadvertently stepped over the threshold of a dangerous door that might never close again, she spent fifteen minutes searching the barns with renewed determination. She’d just about given up; Brig could be anywhere on the ranch, checking fence line or herding cattle acres away, clearing brush on the north side or with one of the hands in town picking up supplies.
Frustrated, Angie held her hair off her shoulders, hoping the breeze on her neck would cool her off. When she walked past the machine shed, she found Brig outside, twirling a tire in a trough of water, obviously searching for a leak in the thick black rubber. The trough was really an old oil barrel, cut in half and mounted on iron legs, the edges smoothed by a blowtorch, a pipe running from below to the drainage ditch, a hose hooked to an exterior faucet. Brig’s sleeves were rolled to his elbows, his shirt open, his brows slammed together in concentration.
If he heard her approach, he didn’t acknowledge it and only lifted his head when her shadow fell across the trough. Air hissed from the tire and he marked the black rubber with chalk.
“I thought you were supposed to be working with the horses,” she said, leaning her back against the brick wall of the shed. Heat from the sun had settled in the red bricks and then radiated outward to warm her skin.
“Didn’t know you kept tabs on me.”
Lifting a dismissive shoulder, she said, “I don’t.”
“Good.” He turned back to his work and snagged a dirty rag from his back pocket. “Then you weren’t looking for me.”
“Not really.”
He straightened and his cocky smile called her a liar. “Funny. I thought you were lookin’ for somebody the way you were wanderin’ through the barns and sheds. Thought it might be me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
He let out a deep chuckle that rankled her. “I never do.” Swinging the tire over his shoulder, he headed into the interior of the machine shed and Angie, though she would have loved to toss her head and walk proudly away, followed him inside.
“Why do you hate me?” she asked, once they were alone in the building. She managed a petulant look as sunlight streamed through the doorway and a few small windows, but the hot interior was shaded and private. The smells of oil and grease lingered in the air.
Brig hauled the tire onto a workbench and was reaching for some kind of patch.
“Hate you?” he repeated, glancing over his shoulder. “Now what gave you that idea?”
“You avoid me.”
“I have work to do.”
“You talk to Cassidy.”
“She’s interested in the horses,” he said quickly, but his jaw seemed to tighten a bit.
“Maybe she’s interested in you.”
“She’s just a kid.”
“Sixteen.”
“As I said, a kid.”
“Is that what you think of me?”
He let out a little laugh, and his gaze skated up the length of her, taking in her full hips, the feminine curve of her waist and the swell of her breasts straining beneath her open blouse as they pressed against the black top of her swimsuit. Sweat seemed to collect in that dusky hollow where Brig’s cynical gaze lingered for an instant.
“No one would mistake you for a kid, Angie.” He threw out a hip and reached in the pocket of his shirt for his pack of Camels. “Just what is it you want from me?” he asked, clicking his lighter and drawing a deep lungful of smoke.
She plucked the cigarette from his fingers and took a long drag herself, leaving a lipstick print on the white paper and letting smoke drift from her nostrils, the way she’d seen Bette Davis do in some old movie. “Why do you think I want something?” She tossed her hair and handed him the cigarette.
“It’s in your nature.”
“You don’t know anything about me.” She let her lower lip protrude just a fraction.
“I know enough.”
Oh, God, he was shutting her down! No boy had ever shut her down. Most of them were panting after her and she, a tease and flirt by nature, loved the sick kind of desire that smoldered in their eyes. But Brig was different, and beneath her need to have him want her, anger sparkled through her blood. He, the son of a runaway sawmill worker and some crazy woman, had the nerve to act as if he didn’t feel lust crawling through his blood. Well, she knew better. “Wouldn’t you like to get to know me just a little better?” she asked, stepping close enough so that when he looked down at her, he had to see her cleavage.
With the cigarette burning from the corner of his mouth, he seemed almost unapproachable, like some hard-assed range cowboy. He squinted through the smoke, but he didn’t back away.
“I’ve got a job to do. If you’ll excuse me.”
This wasn’t working. He wasn’t going to fall for blatant seduction, so she backed off quickly and turned around. “Look…I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to…well, to look like I was coming on to you.”
“Weren’t you?”
When she turned around again, she’d changed her expression. “I…I want to be your friend. The boys my age bore me, and frankly, they’re a pain in the backside.” She looked up at him, and her eyes were no longer at half-mast. “I guess I thought acting like…well, like that was the way to get your attention. I, um, need someone like you.”
He snorted and turned his eyes back to the tire.
“Jed and Bobby are giving me a hard time.”
“They are?”
“I told you about the bet.”
A look of contempt crossed Brig’s handsome features. “I thought you were kidding.”
“No,” she sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. “I know that sometimes people think I’m…well, a flirt, and I suppose I am, but I don’t sleep with boys, and because I’m who I am, you know, Rex Buchanan’s daughter, I’m kind of a target, I guess. I’ve heard that the locker-room talk is who’s going to do Angie Buchanan first. That’s why my dad sent me to St. Therese’s in Portland. At least one of the reasons. But now that I’m finished with high school and going on to college, the big talk in town is the same old disgusting question.”
Brig’s face remained impassive, almost as if he suspected she was lying.
“So anyway, I thought maybe I could become your friend, and because you’re…well, a little bit…tougher, I guess is the right word…the other guys would back off.”
He tossed his cigarette onto the floor and ground it out with his boot. “You know, Angie, not many women want me for their friend. Men and women…as friends…somehow it doesn’t work out.”
“Can’t we rise above it?” she asked and impulsively stood on her tiptoes, brushing the side of his cheek with her lips. Without even seeing his reaction, she ran through the shed’s open door and noticed a shadow move quickly around the side of the old brick building. Angie felt a coldness seep into her blood. Probably Willie again. God, that idiot was giving her the creeps. She shivered. She couldn’t imagine why her father didn’t just get rid of him.
But then her father was always partial to hard-luck stories, Brig McKenzie being a case in point.
I watched from the shadows.
Standing behind the Buchanan house, hidden by the thick cover of leafy shrubs and trees while twilight settled onto the huge home, I stared up at the windows, bright patches against a hot, dense night.
She was in the house, or so it appeared as her bedroom light was on…yes, I knew where all the rooms were and I glanced from the master bedroom with its bank of windows to the smaller dormers of the rooms that housed the members of their small, blended family.
Derrick’s room was the farthest down the hall, and through the open blinds, I noticed posters of football players and long-legged, big-breasted models or porno stars, leaning over with their come-hither eyes and wet lips. A tight ball of disgust tightened in my gut as my gaze traveled to Cassidy’s room, which was now dark, probably empty. I glanced around quickly because Cassidy was known to leave the house and hang out at the stable. My eyes searched the darkness, but I saw nothing. No movement. No sound of her quiet whistling under her breath. No sign of her.
Good.
My tense muscles relaxed a little until I looked up again and centered my attention on Angie’s room. And there she was suddenly, seated on the window ledge and staring up at the sky, maybe watching the rising moon.
She was silhouetted by the light from her desk, a black, curvy shadow against a golden lamp. Her gaze lowered and she searched the darkness. As if sensing I was near.
My muscles tightened, and for a second I thought our gazes locked, mine desperate and determined from my hiding spot in the dense foliage, hers wide and wondering, a little suspicious as she eyed the shadows. I didn’t breathe.
Go ahead and look, you bitch. Try and see me. Try to figure out what’s going to happen.
Finally, she looked away. Closed the window. Pulled down the shade as if to keep my gaze from wandering where it shouldn’t.
Which was stupid.
I took a chance.
Reached into my pocket and found my lighter. Then I held it to my nose and flicked it on, peering through the tiny flame, centering it on her window and the dusky silhouette beyond the shade.
Feel this, Angie?
Imagine it touching your skin, catching in your hair.
I smiled in the darkness, the flickering flame shifting before my eyes as I thought of her and what would happen to that beautiful, taut body.
Soon, it would be reduced to ashes.
Angie shivered and rubbed her arms despite the heat of the night. She glanced at the window, closed tight, shade drawn, and told herself she was being a ninny. A fool.
No one was watching her out there in the trees surrounding the lawn. No one was plotting to harm her. The worst thing that could have happened was that retard Willie was skulking about again.
She felt a twinge of regret at her unkind thoughts about him. It wasn’t his fault that he was a few cards shy of a full deck. And hadn’t she seen the way he’d looked at her the other day when she’d touched his sleeve? She’d had a glimmer that he wasn’t as stupid as he let on, that he knew far more about what was going on at the Buchanan estate than anyone else, and that his dumb, poor town idiot routine might well be an act.
He was, after all, a man.
So she should be careful around him.
As should Cassidy and Felicity and even that witch Dena. Who knew what thoughts traveled through Willie’s weak brain. She grinned at the thought of Willie and Dena, then shoved the ridiculous image aside.
She had more to worry about than creating her own personal boogeyman in the woods. Lots more. She had to concentrate.
Flopping onto her bed, she grabbed a heart-shaped pillow and held it tight to her breast. Tears threatened her eyes and she bit her lower lip. This was not the time to break down. She sighed and began putting the final touches on her plan and tamped down the rising sense of dread, the panic that was lately consuming her. Glancing at the calendar posted above her desk, she cringed.
She was running out of time.