“Somehow I’m not surprised you managed to make arrangements to be away from here for the afternoon,” Kern said dryly. “I thought you’d choose shopping, though, Tish. It’s a much farther distance to town.” He waited, but she offered no reply. “Rhea’s invited the two of us over for dinner at seven.”
Trisha turned from the door where Georgia was already headed out, her back suddenly stiff. “Well, you go, of course,” she said casually. “I don’t think I will, Kern. By then I’ll be tired.”
He was silent for a moment, and she looked back at him, unable to read the oddly disturbed look in his eyes. “That’s what you want, Tish?” he said deliberately.
“I-yes, of course it is.” To think of Kern with another woman…but of course it was the only answer she could give. She was not part of his life anymore; he wasn’t even asking her to be part of his life again. He was only asking her to sleep with him, and she had to be certain he understood she wasn’t interested.
It was past nine. About a dozen people were stretched out lazily around the campfire, all of them more or less in the same condition: grubby, sleepy and sated from the community dinner cooked on the fire not an hour before. Trisha had a half-full can of beer in her hand-she never drank beer-and her tousled blonde head and shoulders were slumped against a huge old log, with Jack on one side of her and little Georgia on the other. She surveyed her stretched-out legs and the absolutely filthy appearance of her jeans with rueful amusement, half listening to the lazy conversations around her. Jack had just put down an old country fiddle that seemed to know all the old Appalachian hill songs, and she was still humming a few in her brain, too tired even to put on her shoes.
“It was a bear and her two cubs, I swear it was…you’ve never seen anyone run so fast in your entire life…”
“The trout were just jumping for the bait…”
The stories were getting better as the hour was getting later. The smoke from the fire curled in a lazy spiral straight up the cloak of trees surrounding them, making a natural tepee. The night was sleepy warm, and she could hear the hooting of an owl in the distance.
“What I’d give for a life like this all the time,” a short, stoop-shouldered man murmured from the distance. “Hey, Jack, what do you have to do around here to buy a piece of ground?”
Jack stirred, edging up to a sitting position beside Trisha. “The way I understand it, there isn’t any land for sale around the Smokies. The government gets first shot, unless it’s an issue of direct inheritance. It was Kern’s grandfather who willed this to him, as I understand it.” He looked to Trisha for confirmation, who simply nodded, her eyes half closed as she stared into the fire.
“I just read the park has some 516,000 acres. I wouldn’t think anybody’d need more than that,” someone else said.
“Well, from here, we can’t protect enough land like this,” came another lazy voice from the far reaches of the fire. “I’ve been to the Rockies and I’ve been to the Tetons. Each mountain area’s got its own flavor-this one isn’t the grandeur, it’s the richness. You just can’t get tired of it; there’s more different colors of green than an artist could come up with; there’s the change in seasons and no end to the wildlife. I keep wondering how God even came up with it…”
Smiling, Trisha half sat up, curling up her knees and resting her arms across them. Her soft-spoken voice seemed part of the night, gentle, warm and sensual. “There’s a Cherokee legend about how these mountains came into being. The Indians say that at the beginning of the world everything lived in the sky, all the animals and the people. The world was just an ocean, no land, but unfortunately it got to be crowded up there in the sky, so the Cherokees sent down a little water beetle just to check out the possibilities. Well, the beetle dove to the bottom of the water and brought up mud and more mud, and finally that mud burgeoned up to form some land. But it was still too soft for anyone to live on, so the people sent down a giant buzzard to find a dry spot, but he became tired about the time he was over what was to be Cherokee country. His wings were flapping when he sunk down on the land, and all that flapping dried the mud in the pattern of mountains and valleys…”
“
“Tish used to love the old Cherokee legends. Has she told you about the Little People yet? They’re the keepers of history to the Cherokee, the spirits who come out only at night to share the legends and songs that are too old for any man to remember.”
Helplessly she found herself turning to look at him. His deep voice was droning out stories for the others, but his eyes captured hers. For a long unbroken moment there were only two of them, and Kern was the scarred pirate, with a physical power no man could match and a devil fire in his eyes when he looked at her. And for that moment she was his golden treasure, fragile, unable to deny his right to take and hold-and keep. The image held for as long as he stared at her, so strong that she could feel the change in her heartbeat, as real as the night wind that touched her skin. Answering someone’s question, he turned away, and she shivered suddenly in the darkness.
“One of those Cherokee spirits just walk over your grave, Trisha?” asked the woman, chuckling, on the other side of Georgia.
“Some ghosts just refuse to rest,” Trisha admitted, and with an uneasy little laugh brought her attention deliberately back to the group.
With her just-washed hair turbaned in a towel, Trisha surveyed the meager contents of her traveling wardrobe with irritation. The navy dress had a spot; the cream outfit had been worn twice; the jeans and shirt were filthy; and she’d been wearing the nightgown for five days straight. A long hike was what she’d had in mind for the day, with a grandfatherly man named Edwards she’d met the night before at the camp, a regular visitor of Kern’s. As she scooped up the clothes in one hand and carefully wielded her coffee cup with the other, she told herself that with luck she’d have the washing chore done in an hour and have the rest of the day free until four, when she and Kern had to pick up Julia.
As she stepped into the hall with her hands full, the towel she’d been wearing slipped, and by the time she’d taken three more steps it had evidently decided it was happiest in the floor. Automatically her eyes darted up, but there wasn’t a soul in the house, since Kern had left more than an hour before in the truck. With an irritated sigh she set everything on the floor, wandered determinedly back to Kern’s room and drew out an old, frayed long- sleeved shirt of his from the back of the closet. The yellow fabric fit predictably, an exercise in drowning. All that identified her feminine status disappeared, and it took five impatient rolls of each cuff just to rediscover her hands.
Adding a hairbrush to the pile on the floor, she snatched it all back up and carted it downstairs. Beyond the bedroom where Julia had stayed was Kern’s office study. Beyond that was a utility room, with washing machine and dryer and lemon-painted wall-to-ceiling cupboards for storage. Trisha put the washer setting on cool and gentle, pretreated the stains on the jeans and then leaned back as the machine filled, absently working the brush through her hair. A large low window made it a pleasant room to be in, utility status or not. Budding azaleas burgeoned over the windowsills; the mossy lawn just outside was lush and emerald, sloping gently to the woods. A pair of woodpeckers were busy trying to peck insects from the bark of a huge old mountain maple, and a red squirrel was perched paws-up in the middle of the lawn, scolding the world in general about nothing in particular. Trisha smiled in amusement; “boomers,” the locals labeled the squirrels, for they never ceased their chattering.
From the distance in the woods she caught the soft reflection of a pair of eyes. A white-tailed deer stepped one foot from the safety of cover to the open, civilized carpet of lawn, changed his mind and bolted with that coltish awkward leap that was a blend of grace and timidity so common in the breed. The red squirrel suddenly hopped after him-at last finding someone to listen? Chuckling, Trisha stretched lazily and took her coffee cup for a refill to the kitchen. It was at least twenty minutes before she needed to do anything else.
Her barefoot step was quick and quiet past Kern’s office, and then she backed up unconsciously with a startled frown. The room was new to her, and she’d made a point of not intruding near it since she’d been there. Teak paneling and a dark Oriental carpet reminded her very much of Kern’s office in Detroit, shut off from sights and sounds, the way he liked to work.
