the most part, had been impossible. Still, Liv had stuck it out for ten months until this opening had come up in the bar.
She intended to learn the hospitality business from the ground up, from the stables to the food and beverage facilities to the head office. Tonight she would entertain a few drunks and begin to learn the workings of the back of the bar. Unfortunately, she was going to have to do it looking like a cross between a beauty pageant queen and Annie Oakley.
The cowboy boots weren’t bad, she decided, except they were red. Her legs were good enough to tolerate the very short skirt. Personally, she thought the boots would look better with shorts, but it wasn’t her call to make. If she ever had her own place, she thought, the barmaids would wear boots with shorts. And the boots wouldn’t be red.
At the moment, however, she was stuck with petticoats—bustling white petticoats, layers of the damned things—under the full short denim. Liv turned this way and that in front of the mirror, but the contraption really didn’t afford her a good side. It was topped by a tiny denim vest that was laced up the front with red ribbon. In all her years on the reservation, she’d never once seen fit to put on a cowboy hat, but she wore one now.
Liv stuck her tongue out at her mirrored image to show what she thought of the whole getup.
“Yeah, but it presents some interesting possibilities for getting you out of it again.”
Liv squealed and spun away from the mirror. “Hunter!” He stood in the rest room door. “Where did you come from? You didn’t say you were coming back! You can’t be in here!”
“Nobody stopped me.”
“You can’t go through your whole life just…just doing things because no one locked the door on you!”
His face changed. For a crazy moment while it felt like the bathroom tilted on its axis, he actually looked confused, Liv thought. She realized that she had never commented on his life before, on the way he flew higher and danced faster and did everything better simply because it was there to be done.
But she had never needed so desperately for him to calm down and stay put before, either.
She wasn’t ready for him, Liv thought, her heart jumping oddly—and that was new, too. She’d always been just purely elated to see him again, but this time nerves scurried in her stomach. She’d been planning to buy a pregnancy test kit this weekend, to be sure. Then she’d thought she would write him, either asking him to come back so they could talk, or putting it right down in her letter.
Hunter, I’m pregnant.
She hadn’t anticipated that he would just show up like this out of the blue.
The rest room tilted back again and Liv felt light-headed. She closed the distance between them unsteadily, framed his face with her hands and kissed him soundly. “Sorry. You just surprised me.”
He wrapped his arms around her, the moment forgotten. “I had some time off so I came back. The guy out at the bar said you were in here. He said it was okay for me to come after you because they hadn’t opened yet.”
Liv lifted her left arm behind his shoulder to see her watch. “I’ve got five more minutes before they throw the doors open. Come back to the kitchen with me. My locker is there. I’ll get you the key to my apartment. You can wait for me at home.”
“What time do you get off?”
He was nibbling on her mouth, making it hard for her to think. “Um, midnight. But it will be one o’clock before I clean up my station here and get there.”
His lips claimed hers fully. “I can’t wait that long.”
“Then maybe you should stop going away.”
She hadn’t meant to say that, either. Maybe it was just hormones making her shaky. Or maybe it was just that night after lonely night, she watched her friends with their men, aching inside for her own as Hunter chased wild dreams a continent away. He’d spent the past month in New England on a fishing boat. And she’d slept by herself, and sometimes she’d cried with frustration. Why couldn’t she just have a normal relationship? Why couldn’t he love her enough?
Unconsciously she put a hand to her tummy, wondering if a baby would make the difference. She pulled out of his arms.
“Let’s go. I can’t be late starting my first night.”
“Liv, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just wish I wasn’t working tonight, now.” She managed to grin for him. “Why didn’t you write that you were coming back?”
“Because I didn’t know until two days ago, and then I just hit the road. I figured I’d get here before the mail could.”
“There’s always the telephone.” She scowled at him. “Did you get fired?”
“Actually, I quit.”
“You didn’t like fishing?”
“I found something I might like more.”
Her heart lurched. Please, please, please let it be me.
“It’s a long story,” he continued. “I’ll tell you when you get home tonight. You’re going to be late, babe. Better get moving.”
Liv had no choice but to agree. Her shift had started one minute ago.
They went to the kitchen and she gave him her key. She kissed him goodbye at the back door and somehow she got through the night. She didn’t learn much about the bar business, but then, she hadn’t expected to under the circumstances. Everything inside her tugged her toward the door, toward home and Hunter and whatever it was he had finally found. Only a tiny corner of her mind was on the patrons, the bar, the tips she shoved relentlessly and absently into the pocket of her gruesome petticoated skirt.
At 12:45, she fairly burst out the bar door. She jogged to her car and drove home faster than she should have. Hunter, Hunter, Hunter, her mind chanted. He would tell her he was going to stay this time—he had come home unexpectedly, after all, and in the rest room he had hinted that he’d finally figured out what he wanted to do with his life. He would stay, and she would tell him about the baby. Her period was a month late. The test was only a formality, after all.
When she parked her car outside her apartment building, her palms were slick with perspiration and her heart felt as though a riot of microscopic beings was going on in there. She pressed her hand to her tummy again as she raced up the stairs to her second-floor unit. He was asleep on the sofa when she let herself inside.
For a moment Liv just stood, watching him. How could a man be so beautiful? He made something ache inside her. Most of it was loving him, but part of it was pure appreciation. Even in repose, one arm tossed back over his head, the other dangling over the edge of the sofa, he looked as arrogant and magnificent as the hawk his mother’s family was named for. Liv went to kneel on the floor beside him. She kissed his mouth to wake him.
“You look just like those ancestors you used to talk about all the time when we were kids,” she murmured. “You look like a warrior.”
“Maybe a dead warrior.” He sat up. “I was out cold, wasn’t I?”
Liv
