style="font-size:15px;"> “I never had your wings. I just plummet to the ground again when I try to fly. It’s where I belong.”
He’d gone. He’d moved on to North Carolina and a spot on one of Pritchard Spikes’s pit crews, and she hadn’t laid eyes on him again until the weekend in Delaware. Now he was back and he looked…dangerous.
She’d never feared him before, she realized wildly, but she did now. Even that first day when he’d turned up on a piebald gelding in Ama’s grazing yard, his dark-blue eyes narrowed to slits against the sun, his long black hair tickling itself in the wind, looking as heathen as her worst nightmares. Even then, she hadn’t been afraid. He’d asked her if she wanted some help. She’d said sure. She had loved him. Instantly, childishly, with a wild excitement and an obscure yearning for things she didn’t yet understand.
Now the golden light in the bar turned his dusky skin to amber. His hair was swept back off his forehead, but it was long enough in the back to nudge his collar. His cheekbones were still slashes, and his eyes were still narrowed against something, but this time it wasn’t the light. It was her.
“What do you want from me?” she asked bluntly.
His mouth didn’t exactly soften, but he grinned like a shark. “Once you wouldn’t have had to ask me that.”
Heat slid through her. Liv gulped Remy and coughed a little. “That was then. I don’t know you anymore. Now you’re some kind of national sports icon, used to getting his own way.”
“I’ve always gotten my own way.” Except once. But Hunter couldn’t let himself think about how she had sent him away. Not now. It would buckle something inside him. And this was war.
“This brings us back to my original question,” Liv said. “What is it you’re after with this little surprise visit?”
“You weren’t surprised.” He’d thought about it a lot since their meeting that morning. She’d been jarred, yes. But surprised? No. She’d known he’d come.
He watched her open her mouth as though to deny it, then she did that thing with her shoulder. A hitch, then a dip. On any other woman, it would have been called a shrug. With Liv, it meant, I’m not giving you an inch unless you earn it.
So he started back at the beginning. “Tell me about Johnny. The guy who didn’t father your daughter. Tell me why you never mentioned a baby that last night I passed through Flagstaff. Damn it, Livie, you never said anything about being pregnant at all!”
He knew because he remembered every word.
“I never had your wings,” she said. “I just plummet to the ground again when I try to fly.”
No. She belonged in the sky with the sun, Hunter thought, burning bright while he flew. Why couldn’t she see that? “Who?” he rasped. “Who is he? Who had you?” His fists hurt, cramped tight, ready to kill.
“No one.” She brought her chin up to challenge him. “Yet.”
“You’re going to marry someone you’ve never even been with?”
“Sex isn’t everything.”
He laughed, and the reflex was flame-hot sand in his throat.
“I need a picket fence, Hunter. Will you give it to me? Stay here? Get a job?”
“I’ve had jobs, Livie! I’ve always had a job. Is that what this is about? What do you think I’ve been eating with and buying gas with to drive back here all the time?”
Her eyes said it was the wrong answer. They went to charred black. “Go to hell, Hunter Hawk-Cole.”
He was reasonably sure he was already there.
“I called Flagstaff City Hall for your marriage license,” he said now, watching her expression. “About a year later.”
Liv felt bony, white knuckles grab her heart and squeeze. “Apparently, you never bothered checking for the divorce decree, too.”
“I figured you had enough grit to make it last. But I was wrong about a lot, wasn’t I, Livie? Did he know the baby wasn’t his?”
Johnny had known. It was why he had married her. Johnny had been her knight in shining armor. He’d loved her and was decent enough to try to give her what she’d needed most—a father for her child. “That,” she said hoarsely, “has no bearing whatsoever on this conversation.”
She saw him clench his jaw. “I really have a keen interest in finding out whether or not you passed my daughter off as someone else’s.”
She’d never done that. “You have a really rock-bottom view of my integrity, don’t you?”
“Why should my opinion be higher?” He saw her flinch and was glad. But Hunter had always loved the way she could recover.
“He knew.” Her chin came up. Her eyes narrowed haughtily.
“Does she?”
“She has a name.”
“Victoria Rose. I looked that up, too.” He hadn’t wanted to admit it, but the words were out before he could stop them.
“When?”
“Two weeks ago. Just to check. She was born eight months and twenty-nine days after the last time you and I were together.”
“Bingo.”
“You’ve still got that attitude, don’t you? The world can kiss your butt and you’ll give them directions to find it. Why that name?”
He wanted to know everything, he realized, and that surprised him. He had never wanted a child. He knew what adults could do to a kid. His Anglo relatives had dragged him to their churches when he was little. He’d been caught between three cultures—Christian, Hopi and Navajo. But all three of them had one theme in common. The sins of the father…
He had never intended to visit his own shortcomings upon progeny. He was damaged, baggage-laden, and he had always craved anything that would make him forget that for a while. Speed. Alligators. Spitting in death’s face. But whether he’d looked for her or not, Victoria Rose was here.
And he wanted to know about her. Every detail.
“The name,” he said again when Liv didn’t answer. “It’s not in your family, it’s not in mine. Was it his? Guenther’s?”
Liv hesitated, then she got that glint in her eyes. “Desert Rose was a little avant-garde for the life I envisioned for her.”
“So it was supposed to be Desert Rose.”
Again she hesitated. “Yes. But Victoria was more traditional.”
“Was she ever one of those kids who hated her name?”
He watched her expression spasm. “You don’t need to know this.”
“I do.”
“Damn
