Trespass (3 page)

“Don’t hold your breath. But yeah…I guess I’d like that.” A couple days in a warm house with real food, a couch to sleep on and hot showers whenever she wanted, no charge? It sucked, lying to this nice man, but for safety and comfort, she could stay Nicole a little longer. “I’ll stick around, if that’s really okay with you. On one condition.”

“Okay.”

“You let me do something to help. Dishes or laundry or dusting. Anything.”

Russ laughed. “You hinting something about my homemaking skills?”

“No, not at all. Just, you know, stuff I know how to do. I won’t be much use in a barn or stable or whatever, even if I wasn’t hurt.”

He nodded. “Sure. I’ll put you to work.”

She stepped forward and offered her hand, liking the feel of Russ’s firm shake. “Cool. Deal.” She glanced around his home again, trying to remember what day of the week it even was. Then again, Russ likely did the same things every day. Animals probably didn’t take weekends off from being needy.

“How does your schedule work, anyway?” she asked.

“Get up, take care of the horses, feed the dogs, fix this or that until somebody calls. Go out on a job or two. Mail out invoices, muck around on the phone with insurance companies. Thrilling stuff.”

“Same thing every day?”

He shrugged. “Sort of. Then again, every day’s different.”

“Like when some random woman turns up while you’re trying to sleep?”

“Yeah, that can happen. Keeps things interesting.”

“Is this a busy time for you? September?” God, September already.

“Fall’s pretty easy. Spring is insanity between lambing and calving. I need the rest of the year to catch my breath.” He looked around the room. “Did you eat yet?”

She shook her head.

“Can I cook you something? Eggs or pancakes or…?”

She laughed. “Nobody’s made me pancakes in years.”

“It’s just the powdered stuff.”

“God, like I’m in a position to be picky. Go ahead. Pancakes sound amazing.”

She watched as this dusty stranger cooked a skillet of bacon, mixed batter, heaped her a plate of pancakes and rashers, and set a metal can of syrup before her on the table.

“Wow, thanks.”

He assembled his own plate and took a seat across from her. They ate in silence, her wolfing her food down once again, knowing she must look like some feral child rescued from the woods but unable to resist the impulse when faced with another free feast. She finished before Russ was halfway through his own food.

She got up and brought them each a fresh cup of coffee. “Milk or sugar?”

“Black’s fine, thanks.”

She splashed milk into her own mug and took her seat. She noticed Russ’s eyes. They were a weird color, pale grayish-green, his pupil a tiny black dot from the sun streaming through the window beside them. She looked at his faint crow’s feet, the fine lines drawn across his brow. Just a few grays hiding in the overgrown brown hair tucked behind his ears.
Thirty-four,
she guessed. “Can I ask how old you are?”

Russ took a sip then set his cup down. “Thirty-six.”

“Ah-ha.”

“You?”

She had to think about it for a second, conjuring Nicole’s borrowed birthday from her memory. “Thirty-two.” Younger in actuality, though she felt about a hundred.

He made a face. “Wow, I wouldn’t have guessed—”

“No kids or anything?” she cut in.

“No kids.”

“Me neither. And no farmer’s wife?”

He smiled tightly. “I wouldn’t dare call myself a farmer. And no, no wife. Not anymore, anyhow.”

“Oh. How long were you married?”

He sponged at his syrup with a forkful of pancake. “Just over three years.”

“Ah. Was country life not everything she thought it would be?”

Russ chewed and swallowed, strange pale irises aimed over the fields past the window. “I’m not divorced. My wife died.”

A block of ice dropped into her belly. “Oh God, I’m sorry. That was so rude of me to assume you’re divorced.”

He met her eyes. “It’s okay. And it’s been seven years. I’m not delicate about it.”

She toyed with her fork. “Can I ask what happened to her?”

He nodded, gaze drifting back to his plate. “She got thrown from a horse. Broke her neck.”

Sarah put her fingertips to her syrupy lips.

Russ laughed, presumably at her fraught expression. “I’m okay about it. Really. She’s been gone for longer than we were together, now.”

“That’s so…sad.”

He frowned thoughtfully, as though contemplating whether or not to get all philosophical about his dead wife.

“Were you there, when it happened?” she asked.

“No. Horse came back alone.”

“And you’re the one who…found her?”

Russ nodded.

“Was it one of the two horses—”

“No.” He shook his head. “I’m not one to blame an animal for doing what’s in its nature, but that’s too far even for me. I sold that horse.” He stood and took their plates to the sink.

She nodded, somber and unseen, feeling sad for this man, way too young to be seven years widowed. Way too kind.

Russ moved to the window, pushing the sill up to shout at where one of the dogs had its feet up on the wooden fence, barking at the horses. “Kitten!”

The dog looked to him, busted, dropped to the ground and trotted away. Russ closed the window and rolled his eyes.

“Kitten?” she asked, smirking at him.

“My wife named her. Because of…” He drew invisible triangle ears above his own head. “When she was a puppy. That, and she used to eat yarn.”

“Gotcha. She wasn’t much of a kitten last night.”

“They wouldn’t have hurt you, you know. They’re just territorial.”

“Like their owner?” she asked, and gave the handle of his rifle, leaning against the bottom of the window frame, the gentlest of kicks.

“Careful.”

“Sorry.”

“Well, I’m sorry too,” he said, “about them scaring you. And you probably weren’t in the mood to have some crazy man in his underwear come running toward you with a loaded weapon.”

She laughed at the visual, though at the time it hadn’t been funny at all. At the time all she’d registered were two sets of teeth vibrating with angry growls and a strange man advancing on her, his near-naked body stark and threatening in the yellow porch lights.

“Weirder things have happened to me in the last couple weeks,” she concluded with a shrug.

“I won’t ask.”

“Thanks.”

They shared a brief but awkward silence before Russ went to the sink to start the dishes. Sarah walked over and pushed at his arm until he stepped aside. “Let me do that.”

She felt Russ’s eyes on her and the scrutiny didn’t bother her. Frankly she wished she had a bit more to offer him than a tangle of wet hair and her battered, underfed body draped in his ill-fitting shirt. That the idea of a strange man sizing her up wasn’t a source of panic was wondrous in itself.

She washed and rinsed the dishes, handing them to Russ to dry and put them in their places. She liked the soft-looking brown hair on his forearms, the flex of his tendons and the strong shapes of his fingers, his weird mix of rugged and clean, cowboy and doctor.

“So your horses,” she said. “Do you actually ride them or are they patients or…?”

“They’re mine. I ride them most days, though not as much as I’d like.” He took a cup from her and wiped it dry.

“They aren’t like, work horses, right? They don’t pull equipment or anything?”

He laughed. “Where in the heck are you from? Manhattan?”

“Not Montana, that’s for sure.”

“Well the days of plough horses are over around here. They’re just for riding, those two.”

“What are they called?” she asked.

“Lizzie and Mitch.”

“Are they…boyfriend and girlfriend? Like lovers or whatever?”

Russ set down the fork he’d just dried, gripping the counter’s edge and sinking into a silent, body-quaking laugh. He straightened up, wiping his eyes. “Lovers,” he wheezed.

She smiled, embracing her own ignorance. No point having an ego with the man who’d picked buckshot out of her. “You know what I mean.”

“No, Mitch is a gelding.”

“What’s a gelding?”

Russ made a snipping motion with his fingers at groin-level.

“Oh, ouch.”

He nodded and accepted the plate she handed him.

“That sucks for him,” she said. “Do
you
ever have to do that? You know.” She made the finger-scissor motion.

“Sure.”

“You ever worry the ghosts of a thousand jilted, nutless horses will come back to haunt you?” She pointed her eyes at his belt.

Russ made a nervous face. “Not sure I like the way you think, Nicole.”

She swallowed, not entirely comfortable hearing him address her with such familiarity, and not by that name, certainly. The warm rapport faltered, then she banished the unwelcome anxiety. She suspected she was safe here…and if she wasn’t, it didn’t help to think about it.

She handed him the last dish and shut off the faucet. “Did you grow up around here?”

He shook his head. “I grew up in Idaho, but my great-grandfather and my grandfather lived pretty close, about forty miles from here.” He nodded toward the back of the house as though this might mean somewhere to her.

“Were they farmers?”

“They were both farriers—you know, they shoed horses. They did pretty much everything I do, just without the formality of a license.”

“So all this is like, in your blood?”

“I guess. Must skip random generations, since my dad’s a dentist.” Russ drained the coffee pot into their mugs and switched the machine off. He wandered over to take a seat on his ugly old burnt-sienna easy chair and Sarah followed, lowering herself carefully onto the couch, a palm on her tender ribs.

“Can I ask what
you
do?” he asked. “When you’re not hitchhiking and eating me out of house and home?”

Her good mood cooled again. “I’d rather not say.”

Russ held her eyes a moment, smiled in a sad, sympathetic way that she hated and loved equally.

She glanced around the room for a change of subject. “No TV?”

“Nope. No cable out here, plus I don’t really care for it.”

“Internet?”

Russ shook his head. “That one’s a bit troublesome. I’d probably save myself a lot of time if I had it, but it’s one of those things I just never get around to. If I really need it, I’ll go to a neighbor’s or head in to town and use the library’s computers.”

“Gotcha.” Actually, no internet was a relief—a good excuse to stay in the dark about what might be happening back home, ignorant bliss about any efforts being made to find her. TV, though…she’d miss that, especially since she wouldn’t be making the news, not way out in Montana. Oh well. There were other ways to stay distracted.

She drained her cup and set it on a side table, slapped her palms to her knees with finality. “So. Put me to work.”

“Okay.” He looked around the room, thinking. “How about laundry? You’re probably missing your own clothes.”

She nodded, a lie. If she never again saw those clothes she’d been living in these last three weeks, it’d be too soon. At least she’d been wearing sneakers and not heels when she’d wound up a fugitive. “Do you have a machine, or do I like go down to the river and scrub them against the rocks?”

He shot her an adorable, annoyed look. “There’s a machine, smart-ass. You want to put those jeans in too?”

She looked down at the denim, stiff with dirt and sweat and whatever else lurked in the places she’d been sleeping. “Yeah.”

Russ disappeared into his bedroom and emerged to toss her a pair of boxers. He headed to a drawer by the sink, coming back with a couple of safety pins.

“Thanks.” She changed in the bathroom, hiding her wallet behind some junk in the cabinet beneath the sink. She felt eerily naked, braless under Russ’s soft old work shirt, commando in his boxers, a breeze finding her through the threadbare cotton. The sensation was about twenty percent sexy, eighty percent dopey. She cinched the waist with a pin and closed the fly with the other. She walked back out into the den in her mismatched, borrowed plaids with her jeans tucked under one arm, bra and panties folded inside.

Russ carried his hamper out of his bedroom. Sarah followed him past the closed door to what she now assumed must be a time-capsule room full of wifely objects, stuff too painful to look at but even more painful to part with. Or who knew—maybe it was where he hid all his kinky bondage props. Kindness and practicality aside, Russ Gray could be anybody, with who-knew-what to hide.

He led her out the back door and down some steps to a garage-ish room that connected the house and the stable, full of shelves and tools and that fertile, horse-crappy farm smell. An ancient washer and dryer were parked in one corner. Russ set the hamper down and got the machine filling.

“I can handle the rest,” she said, shooing him away. “Let me earn my keep.”
Let me make this up to you,
she added, preemptive guilt twisting her gut. She knew when she moved on from here, she’d be indebted to Russ for more than just his hospitality… Probably whatever cash he had in his wallet and some food for the road, things she prayed she’d be able to pay back one day, when and if her life ever settled down again.

Russ grabbed a box of detergent from a shelf and plunked it on the dryer. He left her alone, heading back inside.

She dumped some powder in the machine, and dropped in her jeans and underwear. She winced as she leaned in to grab things from the hamper—her own dirty, bloody camisole and shirt, Russ’s jeans and underwear, socks and handkerchiefs, a seemingly endless supply of heather-gray T-shirts. She dropped the lid and trotted back up the steps into the house, past that door to the mystery room.

Russ was on the phone again, leaning over the kitchen table and jotting on a spiral pad. “Uh-huh… Just calfhood? How many, do you think? Sixty? Nope, no problem. I’ll come first thing, a week from Tuesday… You too. Bye now.” He set the phone down and made a few more notes.

“More balls to snip?” she asked.

Russ jumped and put a hand to his heart.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Oh, don’t be. I’m just not used to having company yet. Not the kind that talks. And no, no ball-snipping, smarty-pants. Boring old routine vaccinations.”