practice session. There was no passenger seat, just empty space that wouldn’t weigh him down, framed by a lot of metal bracing. She sat there, anyway. Sometimes she was a teenager again. At other times she was the woman he had met in Delaware.
“I’ve thought about it,” the teenage Liv said. “I’m not going to chase the wind with you, Hunter. I’ve found someone who can give me a home, a family, everything I’ve always needed. You said when that happened, you would go away.”
“I’m your family,” he told her.
He’d been her family from the first time he’d seen her, Hunter thought now. She’d been living with her grandmother on the Navajo reservation. He’d met her on his first day at the district school there and he’d followed her home after classes to find her tending to Dinny Sandoval and her sheep. He’d been fascinated by her, enthralled by her, so different from all the others with her Irish-Navajo blood and her incredible, exotic face. So he’d kept coming around.
She’d only been twelve then, but the ache in her eyes had been as mature as a full-blown rose—for the life and the parents and the sister she’d lost in a freak accident that had exiled her in an alien land. She’d talked incessantly of babies, a family, and a white house with blue shutters in a city where a symphony played. As soon as she was old enough, she’d told him often, she was going to go and grab that dream.
They’d lain on their backs on the rocky ground and talked about it, the star-strewn desert night etched above them, passing a coveted bottle of ginger ale back and forth. The nearest store had been forty miles away, and neither of them had had access to a car, so they took care not to spill a drop.
Liv Slade didn’t belong on that reservation any more than Hunter did—and except for one grandmother, he was pretty much Native American down to his bones. He’d landed in that school because of an ill-fated eagle hunt. It had been one adventure too many. His old man had packed him up and had shipped him off to live with his Navajo mother.
That clan hadn’t particularly wanted him, either. He and Liv had both been strangers in a hostile country, and then they had found each other.
After high school, he’d escaped. He disappeared from northern Arizona for weekends at first, then for up to a week. Weeks turned into months sometimes, but he always came back eventually to check on Liv. He’d done passably well with the rodeo, could have been better, but the money wasn’t there and it lacked the elusive something he needed. He joined the Army and found the restriction and discipline intolerable. She’d turned fifteen, sixteen, then seventeen while he was away. Her grandmother had died that last year while Hunter was in Louisiana, poling boats through alligator-infested bayous.
Liv had kept up the old woman’s sheep on her own after that because if the authorities found out she was a minor living alone, they would come and whisk her off again. The reservation had never been home for her, but Liv was determined that she wasn’t going anywhere else until she could do it on her own terms. She kept up the charade for almost a year, and the Anglo authorities never caught on.
That was the way he had left her in January that year, in Dinny’s winter hogan alone, the old woman’s clansmen close enough for comfort. Then he came back one day in June to find that the girl had gone and a woman had taken her place.
Hunter had driven up in his rattletrap pickup to find her wrestling in the dust with a lamb.
Already the heat had a dry, pressing weight, though it was barely midmorning. The lamb bleated in distress as she chased it, both of them kicking up red-brown dust that hung in the thin air. She had a syringe in one hand, held high as though it were a sword and she was about to plunge it into stone. Hunter stopped the truck and got out to watch her, enjoying the spectacle.
“Hey, you!” he called.
She didn’t hear him. She pinned the lamb, straddling it, then she came up on her hands and knees. Her bottom was thrust in his direction, cupped in frayed, hacked-off denim. A horse might have kicked him in the chest for the impact the view had on him.
Sometimes the need to love her actually burned inside him. It was why he never stayed home too long.
He wasn’t her dream. He was a man who needed to keep moving. He wasn’t what she needed.
But, God, he cherished her.
She hooked her left arm around the animal’s neck and raised her right hand again, armed with the needle. Then the lamb wriggled out from beneath her. Liv went after the animal at a fast crawl, her dark hair caught in a ponytail that streamed down her back until it finally splayed over each hip with her movement. Then she got to her feet in one fluid motion that had his twenty-year-old tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. She leaped at the little beast, going airborne.
“Jeez, Livie! You’re going to kill yourself!”
But she didn’t. She came down on top of the lamb, rolling with it, both arms wrapped around it now. She’d lost the syringe, and she swore a blue streak that had his jaw hanging. Still holding the animal, she groped in the rocky dirt for the needle. Just as he moved to get it for her, she found it and finally got it buried in the animal’s flank.
When it was done, she let the lamb run off. She flopped over on her back, staring up at a sky that the heat had baked the color out of. She laughed, a woman’s throaty chuckle of triumph that almost brought Hunter to his knees.
In all the time he’d known her, he’d never wanted her as much as he did in that moment. It took Hunter a moment to find his voice.
“My money was on you.”
Liv sat up slowly enough that he had the sudden, uncanny feeling that she’d known he was there all along. “You didn’t have any money, pal, not the last time I checked.” Her eyes were too dark. They were usually a deep, chocolate brown, but temper could turn them to the charred color of fired wood. “That’s it for the herd. As for you, fish or cut bait.”
He knew what she was talking about, couldn’t pretend that he didn’t, even if it made something roar suddenly in his head and sent his heart galloping.
Liv stood, then she leaned over to brush the dust off her legs. “Here’s the thing, Hunter. I’m cleaning up my past here. Are you part of it, or are you my future?” She straightened and crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you want me or don’t you?”
He thought that if he answered that honestly, he’d probably be damned to hell for all eternity.
But Liv didn’t seem to want words. She walked toward him with that long, leggy stride of hers, then she yanked her T-shirt over her head before he could reply and tossed it aside into the dust. It was the reservation. There wasn’t another hogan for fifteen miles. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts—and oh, how he had fantasized about them over the years—were as full and ripe as the rest of her. Her shorts rode low on her hips. She stopped three strides from him.
“I love you, Hunter. And I’m tired of waiting for you to grow up.”
He almost choked. “For me to grow up?”
Her voice dipped, losing some of its force. For a moment she sounded almost as lost as she had been the first time he’d met her. “I want to be with you. I want to take at least one good thing away from this place when I go. I want it to be you.”
“Babe—”
“I
