Bravo Unwrapped (5 page)

He said, “I want to take you to dinner.” He glanced beyond her at Lupe, who had paused at the head of the stairs. “Lupe, you're officially
not
invited.”

Lupe shrugged. “So I'll check out the club scene.”

“Bars, Lupe. They're just bars.”

“Leave me my fantasies, at least.” She turned for her room.

Buck waited until the photographer disappeared from view before insisting, “Dinner. In an hour. We'll walk over town.”

More eating. So not her favorite thing lately. And eating with Buck, as well. That would mean an hour, at least, of sitting across from him, counting his eyelashes, thinking stupid thoughts like how no other man smelled like him, or laughed like him, or looked at her in such a dangerously delicious kind of way.

She was in trouble here.

No doubt about it.

Then again, there
was
the interview. She should concentrate on that. The sooner she got the material she needed, the sooner she could get back into her Manolos and away from Buck and New Bethlehem Flat. “I'll bring my tape recorder.”

“One hour. No excuses.”

She turned and left him without actually saying yes, though both of them knew she'd be ready. On time.

 

In her room, using the push-button phone, B.J. called Giles, who was still at his desk, bless his ambitious little heart, though it was well after seven at night in New York.

He listened patiently to her long list of notes and suggestions, then told her that everything was going fine. “Not a crisis in sight.”

“That's not normal.”

He laughed. She pictured him tossing those thick blond locks of his and felt homesick—for the city, for her office, for her own world where she could so easily avoid dealing with Buck.

“B.J.,” Giles chided. “You worry too much.”

“Call me. The minute there's any kind of problem, any time you need advice…”

“I will, I will.”

“Use this number.” She rattled it off. “Cell phones don't work here. And forget the Internet. It's not happening, either.”

“Okay, okay.”

“If I'm out of the room, you can leave a message. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“Makes sense to me. And I mean it. There is zero to worry about.”

The call was over too quickly, leaving her standing in her cozy little room at the Sierra Star B & B, staring out the window at the rough, silvered reflection of the moon on the river, wondering what she was doing there—and silently vowing to pull the damn article together fast and get the hell out of New Bethlehem Flat.

B
uck took B.J. to the Nugget Steakhouse—on Main Street, wouldn't you know? The Nugget had a main dining room and another room next door, which contained one of the town's two bars.

A stocky waitress in jeans and a polo shirt greeted Buck by name. He gave her that grin that bowled all the women over. “Nadine. How you been?”

“Can't complain.” Nadine led them to a booth. “What can I get you to drink?” She handed them each a menu.

Buck ordered a whisky and soda. B.J. asked for water. The waitress hurried off through the door to the bar.

B.J. opened her menu. “What's good?”

“How would I know? I haven't eaten here in over a decade.”

The menu was big enough that, held upright, it
blocked him from her view. Which was fine. After all, every time she looked at him, she only wanted to look some more.

He said, “You probably can't go wrong with the filet.”

She grunted in answer, staring blankly at the menu, wondering why she'd bothered to ask for his recommendation. It wasn't as if she would be eating or anything.

Morning sickness. Who ever thought of calling it that? Probably some idiot with a disgustingly positive attitude. For B.J., the problem went on all day and all night. If it kept up, she'd be the skinniest pregnant lady in Manhattan. She might die of starvation, and her poor unborn baby with her.

And she just knew he was waiting over there across the table for the moment when she had to stop hiding behind the menu and look at him again.

Might as well get it over with. She shut the menu, set it aside and went ahead and met his eyes.

Wouldn't you know? Compelling as ever.

She glanced away. For something to do as she tried not to look at him, she studied the decor.

The place was aggressively rustic, a virtual sea of knotty pine. Knotty pine crawled up the walls and spread across the ceiling. Their booth and the tables grouped in the center of the room were all made of knotty pine. The ladder-back chairs? Yet more knotty pine. Even the wagon-wheel chandeliers overhead were knotty pine, stained dark enough that it was hard to make out the knots. But B.J. wasn't fooled.

She knew knotty pine when she saw it—and she didn't care for it in the least. B.J. had
history
with knotty pine, history that involved a dead animal, a rifle and a hunting lodge in Idaho.

In October, the year she turned twelve, L.T. had taken her to Idaho to hunt elk. B.J. had always loathed hunting. She didn't want to watch her dinner die, she truly didn't.

But she'd learned to shoot and how to handle herself in the woods just to prove to L.T. that she could. That trip, she'd actually shot an elk. A gorgeous big bull with a massive rack. It was one of those things that just happened. She had the rifle and she knew how to use it and she knew what L.T. expected of her.

In the sub-freezing pre-dawn, she'd crouched behind a big, gray rock and waited there for hours, being quiet and tough and self-reliant, the way L.T. expected her to be. She had it all figured out in her twelve-year-old mind. No elk was even going to come near her, so she wouldn't have to actually shoot anything.

Wrong.

The animal appeared out of nowhere. All at once it was just standing there in the early-morning gloom, looking off toward the snow-capped mountains to the east and the bright rim of light where the sluggish sun was slowly rising. Soundlessly, she shouldered her rifle, got the creature in her sights—and pulled the trigger. A perfect, clean shot. The bull dropped dead where it stood, forelegs crumpling, big brown eyes going glassy, making no sound but a loud thump as it hit the ground.

B.J. emerged from behind her rock and stood over it, still not believing that she'd actually killed the poor thing.

The knotty pine had come into play that night. Their hunting lodge was paneled, like the Nugget Steakhouse, all in pine. L.T. and the other men stayed up late, drinking and laughing and loudly discussing how
“little B.J.” had got her elk. Little B.J., who had gone to bed early, lay awake in the open sleeping loft upstairs, counting the knots in the paneling, thinking that she really hadn't meant to shoot that bull, and wishing the men would just shut up about it.

“You're too quiet,” Buck said.

She blinked and focused on him. “Sorry. Just thinking.”

“About?”

Nadine reappeared, saving B.J. the trouble of coming up with an answer. The waitress set their drinks in front of them, along with a bread basket, bread plates and their flatware rolled in white cloth napkins. “You two ready to order?”

“I am,” said B.J. She rattled off what she wanted and Buck did the same. Nadine scribbled it all down and hustled off again.

“So,” said Buck.

“What?”

“What was on your mind, just then?”

“When?”

He gave her a look—kind of weary and put-upon.

Oh, what the hell? “I was just thinking that I hate knotty pine. Knotty pine is depressing. Every damn knot is like a big, sad, reproachful brown eye—an eye that watches your every move.”

“Never thought of it that way.”

“This is probably not a good place to be on medication.”

“I kind of like it myself.” He tipped his head to the side and looked toward the center of the room. Admiring the knots in the tables and chairs? Apparently. The light from the hurricane lamp on their table shone on his dark hair. So silky, his hair.

And thick. Very thick…

“My dad brought us here once,” he said, turning to her again, smiling slowly when he caught her eye, causing certain responses, certain small, shivery feelings she instantly denied.

She cleared her throat. “How old were you?”

“Pretty little. Maybe five. It's one of my few memories of him. He was gone so much. He would show up out of nowhere, now and then, for a week or two, and then disappear again. That was the last time he came to town, when he brought us to dinner here. It was before Bowie was born—nine months before, if you know what I mean.”

She did. Blake had gotten Chastity pregnant, gone away, and never come back. “What a guy.”

Buck said, “That was pretty much his M.O. He'd show up, get my mother pregnant and leave. He'd come back in a year or so, get her pregnant again. Leave again. None of us ever got to know him or anything. He was the stranger who happened to be our father.”

Her editor's brain kicked in.
The stranger who happened to be our father.
That might make the cutline under a photo of the notorious Blake. They'd need to dig up an old picture….

And she should be getting this down. Any revelations about Blake Bravo could definitely be usable.

She grabbed her bag, dug out the mini-recorder, turned it on and set it on the table, down toward the hurricane lamp—out of the way, but close enough to pick up everything they said. “So Bowie never even met his father?”

Buck eyed the recorder. “Always on the job, right?”

“That's what I'm here for.”

He looked at her. A long look. “I keep hoping for more.”

“Well, don't—about Bowie and Blake…”

He said nothing, just looked at her some more.

And if she'd didn't watch it, she'd be looking right back, going ga-ga over his eyelashes and the sexy curve of his mouth. “Talk,” she commanded.

He made a low sound—something between a grunt and a chuckle. And at last, he got down to it. “Bowie, as the youngest, never met our father. And Brand, Brett and I never
knew
him. Not really. He hardly ever came around, and we were mostly too little to have a clue who he was.” Buck glanced down into his drink and then back up at her. “He had the weirdest, scariest light-colored eyes. Wolf eyes…but I told you that, didn't I? About his eyes. Back when you and I were together?”

She nodded. Back then, he never talked about his family much. Just that his dad had left them when Buck was very young—and about Blake's pale, strange eyes. “Tell me more about the time your dad brought you here, to the Nugget. You were five, you said?”

“Yeah. I was the only one of the kids who got to go. Brett and Brand were…two and three, I guess. Ma left them with my grandmother. It was December. I remember there were tinsel garlands looped on the light fixtures.” They both glanced up at the wagon-wheel chandelier over their heads. “And a tree, over there by the door to the street—a fresh tree, strung with those old-style big lights and shiny glass ornaments. I remember passing it as we came in, breathing in the piney smell of it, getting off on the way the lights glowed in the branches. It meant Christmas was coming and that gave my five-year-old heart a thrill.”

“You had good Christmases, growing up?”

He nodded. “Ma made a big deal of it. She baked like a champion, played Christmas carols all day and half the night from the morning after Thanksgiving on. She decorated a huge silver-tip fir in the front room. She seriously decked the halls—and every flat surface in sight. The hotel—in those days she called it a hotel—was a damn Christmas wonderland and that is no lie. My brothers and I loved it.”

“It sounds fabulous.”

“It was.” Those dark eyes of his were shining.

Nadine trotted up, bearing a pair of totally retro salads: iceberg lettuce and wedges of tomato drizzled all over with ranch dressing. “Here we go.” She plunked them on the table and bustled away again.

B.J. looked down at her plate—and her stomach actually growled. Amazing. For the first time in a week, out of nowhere, she was starving.

“Back to dinner out with psycho-Dad,” she prompted as she unrolled her napkin, spread it on her lap, grabbed for her fork and dug in.

It tasted
so
good. She had to make a conscious effort not to groan in delight at the crisp texture of the lettuce, the creamy, perfect consistency of the dressing. She gobbled down several crunchy, delicious bites before it came to her that Buck wasn't talking.

She looked up from devouring her salad to find him watching her—again.

“Hungry?” he asked, annoyingly amused.

She took time to swallow, lick a spot of dressing off her upper lip and wipe her mouth with her napkin, before replying. “Yeah. So?”

“Last night at the Castle, you didn't eat much of anything.”

She wisely refrained from comment on that one and instructed instead, “Your father. With lots of detail, please. If I have to write this thing, you have to give me something to work with.”

“You can be very bossy, you know that?”

“And you can be a manipulative SOB—or did I mention that already?” She dropped her napkin in her lap and forked up another huge bite of salad.

“Yeah. You mentioned it.” He stared at her mouth as he lounged back in his seat, keeping one strong arm resting on the table—to the right of his empty drink and his untouched salad. “You're still steamed because I dragged you into this.”

She paused before stuffing that big bite into the mouth he kept staring at. “How did you guess? The story, please.”

He picked up his drink, rattled the ice cubes as Nadine rushed by—and finally continued. “We took a booth that night. The one right behind you, I think it was. I remember that Ma and my dad sat together. I sat across from them. I tried to be very, very good. And whenever my father would look at me with those scary eyes of his, I'd get this tightness in my stomach, this feeling that I wouldn't mind so much when he went away again. Little did I know that when he left that time, he was never coming back.”

B.J., having polished off her salad, longed to pick up her plate and lick the last of the dressing from it. Somehow, she restrained herself.

And besides, there was still the bread basket. She grabbed it and peeled back the warming towel to reveal four nice, big dinner rolls. Snatching one up, she slathered on the butter and then tore off a hunk and stuck it in her mouth.

God. Bread. Delicious—and Buck was watching her again, grinning that grin of his. She made a move-it-along circular gesture with her free hand.

He took his cue. “Recently—since a few years ago, when it all came out in the papers and I found out who he really was—I've been learning about dear old Dad. Blake kept a home base in Norman, Oklahoma, with a woman named Tammy Rae Sandovich. He had one child with Tammy Rae. A boy, Marsh.”

She swallowed. “Your half-brother…”

“One among many. I met Marsh last year. Great guy. Blake used to beat him—and his mother, too. A lot. So in hindsight, with the information I have now, I can't say I regret that dear old Dad didn't show up much, or that he stopped coming around when I was so young.”

B.J. felt a faint twinge of something that might have been sympathy—for Buck, for all the left-behind children of the evil Blake. With that twinge came the urge to reach across the table, to cover Buck's hand with her own, to reassure him, the way a friend would. It was an urge she took care to suppress.

Nadine set Buck's second drink in front of him. “Everything okay?”

B.J. swallowed again. “Great,” she said, and popped the last of the roll into her mouth.

Nadine beamed at B.J.—and scolded Buck. “Eat your salad. Steaks are on the way.”

“I'm getting to it, Nadine.”

The waitress clucked her tongue and left them—and Buck reached over and turned off the recorder. Before B.J. could swallow that last chunk of bread and object, he leaned closer and spoke low. “I talked to Ma—about what's up with Bowie and Glory.”

Okay, she was curious. She washed the bread down with water. “So, and?”

“Glory's pregnant.”

“Pregnant.” She set down her glass. She probably should have guessed—and was this too close to home, or what?

“Bowie wants to marry her.”

“So he said—more than once. And she said no. Repeatedly. At the top of her lungs, as I recall.”

Buck finally picked up his fork. “It doesn't matter what she said. He'll marry her, one way or the other.”