Elizabeth Lowell: Fire and Rain

"Doubt it"

"I don’t I’m going to be the one who feeds them to you."

Luke’s slow smile doubled Carla’s heart rate and set Are to her nerve endings. He laughed a soft, rough kind of laugh and gave her the only warning she would get.

"There’s something to remember when you start feeding me, baby."

"What’s that?"

"I bite."

Who, in God’s name am I doing here? Have I gone entirely crazy?

"Here" was on a dirt road winding and looping and climbing up to the Rocking M. All around Carla for mile upon uninhabited mile, the Four Corners countryside lay in unbridled magnificence. It wasn’t the absence of people that was causing Carla to question her own sanity; she loved the rugged, wild land. It was the presence of people that was giving her stomach the ohmygod flutters. To be precise, it was the presence of one particular person – Luke MacKenzie, owner of a handsome chunk of the surrounding land.

And a handsome chunk himself.

In the back of her mind Carla kept hearing her brother’s advice. Chin up. Carlo. You can do anything for a summer. Besides, you heard Luke. He won’t be any harder on you than he is on any other ranch hand.

"Thanks, big brother," Carla muttered as she remembered Cash’s smiling send-off that morning. "Thanks all to hell."

Not that she was angry with Cash for being amused by her predicament. He had only been doing what big brothers always did, which was to treat their smaller sisters with a combination of mischief, indulgence and love. Nor was it Cash’s fault that Carla found herself driving over a rough road to a live-in summer job with the man who had haunted her dreams for every one of the seven years since she had been fourteen. Cash wasn’t at fault because he hadn’t been the one to suggest the bet that he had ultimately lost.

However, he had neglected to mention that Luke would be part of her birthday celebration. When Carla walked in the front door and saw him, she had nearly dropped the pizza she was carrying. Luke had always had that effect on her. When he was nearby, her normal composure evaporated. She had made a fool of herself around him throughout her teenage years.

Well, not quite all of my teenage years, Carla told herself bracingly. Iwas eighteen when I took the cure. Or rather, when Luke administered it.

After that, she had stopped finding excuses to go out to the Rocking M and watch the man she loved. But she hadn’t stopped soon enough. She hadn’t stopped before she had told Luke that she loved him and begged him to look at her as a woman, not a girl.

The memory of that disastrous evening still had the ability to make Carla flush, go pale and then flush again with a volatile combination of emotions she had no desire to sort out or describe. The one emotion she had no trouble putting a name to was humiliation. She had been mortified to the soles of her feet. But she had learned something useful that night. She had learned that people didn’t die of embarrassment.

They just wanted to.

So she had turned and run from the scene of her personal Waterloo. Driving recklessly, crying, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the man who was much too sophisticated for her, she had fled the ranch. All the way home she had told herself that she hated Luke. She hadn’t believed it, but she had wanted to.

Since then, Carla had tried to put Luke Mac-Kenzie out of her mind. She hadn’t succeeded. Every time she went out on a date, she only missed Luke more. Not surprisingly, she didn’t date much. The harder she tried to find other men attractive, the brighter Luke’s image burned in her memory.

No man can be that special, Carla told herself fiercely. My memory isn’t reliable. If I were around Luke now, as a woman, he wouldn’t be nearly so attractive to me. Familiarity breeds contempt. That’swhy I let all this happen. I wanted to get familiar enough to feel contempt.

That, or outright insanity, was the only explanation for what had happened the evening of her twenty-first birthday, a celebration of the very date when she had legally become old enough to know better.

Look on the bright side. A summer on the Rocking M beats a summer as a gofer for the Department of Archaeology. If I have to check one more reference on one more footnote, I’ll do something rash.

Get used to it. That’s what being an archaeologist is all about.

While learning about vanished cultures and peoples fascinated Carla, she wasn’t certain that a career as an archaeologist was what she wanted. She was certain that she was going to find out; she would begin work on her master’s degree in the fall. But first she had to get through the summer. And Luke.

Carla’s mind was still seething with silent questions when she drove into the Rocking M’s ranch yard, got out slowly and stretched. She was presently just under three and one half hours from the bright lights of Cortez, assuming that the weather continued fair and clear. In bad weather, she was anywhere between six and sixty hours from "civilization."

The isolation didn’t bother her. In fact, it was a positive lure; she had always felt drawn to the wide, wild sweep of the land. After she had turned seventeen, the only serious arguments she and her brother had ever had was over her tendency to go from camp with a canteen, a compass, and a backpack, and leave behind a note and an arrow made of pebbles to indicate the direction of her exploration. The fact that Cash did precisely the same thing didn’t lessen his anger at Carla; in Cash’s book, what was sauce for the goose was not sauce for the gander. When Carla had gone to Luke looking for sympathy, he had calmly told her that he didn’t want her going alone anywhere on the ranch, including the pasture across the road from the big house.

Carla’s mouth turned up slightly at the memory. She had been furious when the two men had ganged up against her. When she had started to point out that Luke was being unreasonable, he had told her that as long as she was on the Rocking M she would obey his orders. Period. End of discussion.

She hadn’t argued. The next time she went into West Fork for supplies, she had started looking for work. That afternoon she got work as the cook and housekeeper for the OK Corral, a small motel-coffee shop at the edge of West Fork. The job included room and board. She had gone back to the Rocking M, unloaded the supplies, and started packing her clothes. When she was ready to leave, she went looking for Ten, Luke’s ramrod. Ten had listened to her request, discovered where she was going to be working, and had gone to find Luke. Luke had flatly refused to let her use any of the ranch vehicles for any reason whatsoever, effectively imprisoning her on the Rocking M until Cash returned from his latest round of explorations.

Remembering the blowup that had followed made Carla’s faint smile fade.

"Such a long face."

The sound of Luke’s voice made Carla jump, for she had thought she was alone. She looked toward the long front porch of the ranch house. Luke was sitting in the shadows watching her. She couldn’t help staring as he stood up, stepped off the porch and walked into the bright sunlight It had been only a day since the card game in which she had lost her summer freedom, but she looked at Luke as though it had been a year since she had seen him.

Nothing about him had changed. Long-boned, hard, with a muscular grace that had always fascinated her, Luke overshadowed every other man she had ever known. He had haunted her, making boyfriends impossible. She could enjoy other students’ company, pal around with them, go to shows or football games; but she simply couldn’t take the boys seriously. When they wanted to go from friendship to something more intense, she gently, inevitably, withdrew.