furnished second bedroom, the one Aunt Mary had used as a guest room. Meredith had never used it—she’d been too afraid of seeing the Hardens to ever come back to Billings.
Her few things put away, Meredith took the bus to a small convenience store several blocks away and bought a sack of groceries. It had been years since she’d done anything so menial. She had maids and a housekeeper at her Lincoln Park house, and they took care of such things. She knew how to cook, but it wasn’t a skill she practiced often. She smiled at her own shortcomings. Aunt Mary liked to chide her for her lack of homemaking abilities.
She decided to walk back. Passing the enormous Billings city park she sighed at its beauty. The towering cottonwoods formed a green canopy over the lawn. Here, in summer, there were symphony orchestra concerts and ice-cream suppers. There was always something going on. Billings was a huge city with well-designed wide streets and plenty of elbow room, spreading between the Rimrocks and the Yellowstone River, with railroad tracks through the city and all around, because plenty of trains came through here. Agriculture and mining kept things going. Refineries were everywhere. So were vast ranches and fields of wheat and sugar beets. To the west stood the towering Rocky Mountains, to the southeast the Big Horn and Pryor mountains. Buttes surrounded Billings, leveling off to flat plains and rolling hills farther east. Meredith loved the country out of town, loved the vastness of it, loved the absence of concrete and steel. Distances were terrifying to easterners, but a hundred miles was nothing to a Montanan.
Her arms tightened around the grocery sack as she reached the street on which Great-Aunt Mary’s house stood. Odd, she thought, that sleek gray Jaguar hadn’t been sitting on the curb when she left. Perhaps the Realtor had come looking for her.
Digging in her jeans for her house key, she didn’t see the shadowy figure on the front porch until she reached the steps. Then she stopped dead. She felt her heart skip.
Cyrus Granger Harden was every bit as tall as Mr. Smith, but the comparison ended there. Cy was dark and dangerous-looking even in an expensive blue vested suit like the one he was wearing now. He stepped into the sunlight. Despite the anguish of the past six years, Meredith felt a surge of warmth shoot through her body as she looked at him.
He was older. There were new lines in that long, lean face with its high cheekbones, thick black eyebrows and deepset dark brown eyes. His nose was straight, his mouth a sensual delight, its firmly etched contours so familiar that Meredith had to drag her eyes back up. There was a Stetson tilted arrogantly over his broad forehead, covering hair that had the sheen of a raven’s back. His lean, dark fingers held a smoking cigarette; so he hadn’t quite given up that habit, she thought with faint humor.
“I thought it was you,” he said without preamble, his deep, cutting voice as harsh as the unrelenting sunlight on her bare head. “I can see the bus stop out my window.”
As she’d hoped. So he had seen her after all. She gave herself a quick, mental pep talk. I’m older, I’m richer, I have secrets, and he has no power over me. She repeated it.
Her full lips tugged into a careless smile. “Hello, Cy,” she said. “Fancy seeing you over here in the slums.”
His jaw tautened. “Billings doesn’t have slums. Why are you here?”
“I came back for your family silver,” she returned with a pointed stare. “I must have missed it on my last trip through.”
He shifted uncomfortably, ramming one hand into his pocket. It drew the thin fabric of his slacks against the powerful muscles of his long legs, and Meredith had to fight not to look. Unclothed, that body was a miracle of perfection, all dark skin and dark curling hair that wedged sexily down his chest and his flat stomach and feathered his legs….
“After you left,” he said hesitantly, “Tanksley admitted to my mother that you had nothing to do with the theft.”
Tony Tanksley, she recalled, was the “accomplice” she’d allegedly been in love and sleeping with. Only a jealous fool could have imagined Meredith going from Cy to Tony, but since Myrna had paid Tony to invent the story, the details she’d given him had been perfect. A classic frame. But regardless of that, Cy had believed her capable of infidelity and criminal acts. Love without trust wasn’t love. He’d even admitted that his only interest in her had been sexual. What a pity that her mother hadn’t lived, couldn’t have warned her about giving a man everything without counting the cost. The lesson she’d learned the hard way had been expensive.
“I wondered why the police hadn’t come after me,” she said easily.
His powerful shoulders moved under the fabric. “You couldn’t be found,” he said tersely.
Not surprising, considering the fact that Henry had stashed her on a Caribbean island during her pregnancy, with Mr. Smith to protect her. Nobody, but nobody, had been told her real name. She was known as Kip Tennison after their marriage, period. Now she was grateful for that safeguard. She’d been afraid that the Hardens might try to track her, if for no other reason than to embarrass her.
“How nice to finally know that,” she said with faint sarcasm, watching his eyes glitter as she shifted the bag of groceries. “A jail sentence wouldn’t have appealed to me.”
His face became more severe, his dark eyes narrowed under those thick brows as he studied her face. “You’re thinner than I remember,” he said. “Older.”
“Twenty-five next birthday,” she said breezily, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “You’re thirty-four now, aren’t you?”
He nodded. He moved his gaze down her body and back up. He felt as if he were dying inside all over again. Six long years. He remembered tears on that young face, and the sound of her voice hating him. He remembered, too, long, exquisite lovings in his bed with her arms clinging, her soft body like quicksilver under the heated thrust of his, her voice breaking as she moaned her pleasure into his damp throat….
“How long are you going to be here?” he asked tightly.
“Long enough to dispose of the house,” she replied.
He lifted the cigarette to his mouth. “You won’t keep it?” he asked, hating himself for being vulnerable enough to ask the question.
She shook her head. “No. I don’t think I’ll stay. Billings has too many enemies in it to suit me.”
“I’m not your enemy,” he replied.
She lifted her chin and stared at him with pure bravado. “Aren’t you, Cy? That isn’t how I remember it.”
He turned away, his eyes glancing down the wide street. “You were eighteen. Too young. Years too young. I never asked, but I’d bet I had your chastity.”
Meredith flushed. Cy watched the stain in her cheeks with faint amusement, the first he’d felt since he’d seen her get off the bus.
“So I did,” he murmured, tingling all over at having his suspicions confirmed.
“You were the first,” she said coldly. She smiled. “But not the last. Or did you think you were going to be an impossible act to follow?”
His pride bristled, but he didn’t react. He finished the cigarette and flipped it off the porch. “Where have you been for the past six years?”
“Around,” she said simply. “Look, this bag is getting heavy. Do
