Suzanne Carey - The Bride Price

They hadn’t talked or even glimpsed each other in passing since the day her father had pressured him into leaving her for her own good, and he’d been fool enough to swallow the bait.

Now fate had taken a hand.

Seeing her again will either cure me or reinfect me with the same old yearning, he thought. As he pondered what to do about it, a remark his mother’s grandfather had once made drifted through his head. You can’t change the past, even if you acquire the wisdom to visit it, Henry Many Horses had observed in his quiet way. But you can learn a great deal from the lessons it has to teach.

Thanks to a last-minute flurry of activity in Kansas City, where she was pressed into taking depositions for another assistant who had the flu, Kyra wasn’t able to leave until noon on Saturday. I probably won’t make it to Flag in time for the discovery exchange, she thought as she headed southwest on Interstate 35 toward Wichita in her cherry red Jeep Cherokee. And I’ll miss my first opportunity to come face-to-face with David. It’s almost as if I planned it that way.

Kyra didn’t bargain on the fact that her compulsion to see him again would build as the miles racked up, causing her to press her foot a little harder on the gas pedal. By the time she reached Gallup, New Mexico, late Sunday afternoon, her yearning to see him and the strong apprehension that gripped her at the prospect were at each other’s throats. Within striking distance, she decided to stop early.

More alone in a roadside café and her motel room than she customarily felt in her Kansas City apartment, she tossed and turned that night, getting very little sleep. Finally, around 5 a.m., she gave it up, showered and dressed and headed for the checkout desk.

She arrived in Flagstaff shortly after 9 a.m., the appointed hour for the informal exchange of discovery in State of Arizona v. Naminga to start. Parking the Cherokee in a recently vacated spot and getting out to smooth her beige wool gabardine suit and neat French-braided chignon, she couldn’t quell her nervousness.

What if I’m still in love with him after all this time? she tormented herself. I don’t think I could bear it. I. have a right to get over him—to learn to be happy with someone else.

With its prominent clock tower, the red sandstone court-house where her father’s office was situated had long been a Flagstaff landmark. The dark-paneled lobby, with its murky portraits in oil and broad, imposing staircase leading to the second floor, was just as she remembered it. Only the anteroom to his private lair had changed. If possible, it appeared to be even more choked with files and papers.

“Long time no see,” Jody Ann Daniels greeted her, interrupting her typing to give Kyra her usual insouciant grin. “I hate to say it, but you look better every time I see you. The meeting got started a few minutes ago. Your dad said to tell you that if you made it in time, you were to go right in.”

Her heart in her throat, Kyra entered her father’s office, which hadn’t changed much since her childhood. Law books and Zane Gray novels still filled the shelves. Paintings of cowboys and hunting trophies crowded the walls, reflecting the bluff, plainspoken county attorney’s interests. A pair of skis he hadn’t used for a decade reposed in one corner, gathering dust.

Keenly conscious of David’s presence and the fact that he’d risen to his feet, Kyra postponed acknowledging him as she returned her father’s affectionate squeeze and greeted the court reporter he’d summoned, whom she’d known since high school.

At last, swallowing, she turned to face the man she’d snubbed, who owned the lion’s share of her attention.

So surprising against the palette of his coppery skin and coal black hair, David’s light, beautiful eyes seemed to burn with a fire that had something hidden at its heart. All the lectures she’d given herself notwithstanding, she wanted to drown in them, offer to be his hostage.

“Kyra,” he said simply in his soft, deep voice, holding out his hand to her.

If she was to maintain any semblance of control over the situation, she had to take it. Grasped lightly, it was firm, callused and warm enough to send little shivers of awareness racing up her arms. Every kiss they’d exchanged, every intimacy she’d permitted him in her formerly besotted state, seemed to hover between them in memory, suggesting renewed, even more passionate congress.

“Hello…good to see you again,” she murmured, realizing too late how idiotic and awkward the words must sound. They were hardly strangers. Or even mere acquaintances.

Holding her captive a moment longer than necessary, David responded that it was good to see her, too. She’d been a girl when he’d left. Now she was a woman. Another man had initiated her. With a fierceness he didn’t let show, he longed to step back in time and undo that hurt, claim the priceless opportunity he’d missed for himself.

He’d never been able to manage the first half of that equation where she was concerned. His feelings always got in the way. As for changing things, he’d long since learned that only the future held possibilities.

For her part, Kyra was overwhelmed by his quiet power and almost mystical resonance. In the years they’d been apart, he seemed to have acquired a depth and maturity that were stunning for a man in his mid-thirties. How can someone whose loyalties were so shifting, so available for purchase, project such an aura of decency and wisdom? she asked herself.

There didn’t seem to be any answer. Meanwhile, his physical magnetism was overpowering her. Though he was dressed for his lawyer’s role in a charcoal gray suit, white shirt and tie, she couldn’t help but imagine him in faded, slightly shrunken blue jeans. Compared to him, the husband she’d divorced and the men she’d dated since were ciphers—pallid imitations of the standard he’d set.

Somehow she had to resist if he tried to jump-start their romance. Remembering the money he took ought to do it, she thought bitterly. In her experience, the principles he claimed to espouse were so much poppycock.

Conscious her father was watching her for signs that she was still susceptible, she shuttered her feelings and pulled a worn wooden chair up to one corner of his desk. “Please…don’t let me interrupt,” she murmured. “I assume no one will mind if I take a few notes.”

In Arizona an “open file” rule prevailed, in which both sides in a criminal case could consult a list maintained by the county clerk in which the opposing attorneys catalogued the evidence they planned to present and their proposed witnesses. However, Kyra’s father had always held discovery meetings. He claimed to like the give-and-take, the small-town camaraderie, not to mention the chance to pick up some tidbit of information or other he couldn’t have accessed by any other means.

Taking up where he’d left off, Big Jim continued to run down his list of witnesses. It turned out to be a lengthy one, given the number of people who’d seen Paul Naminga and Ben Monongye trade blows outside the latter’s trailer. Many of the names, both Anglo and Native American, were familiar to her. However, she didn’t know the young girl who’d seen a man in Paul’s costume go into Ben’s trailer. Moving on to the preliminary tests investigators had conducted on the bloodstains, he offered David a copy of the lab report. “Something else has, uh, come up,” her father added in a tone that alerted Kyra he regarded it as a chink in his armor. “The crime scene unit found several hairs in the trailer where Ben Monongye was stabbed that don’t match his or Paul’s. Their natural color seems to have been black-gray…”