He shook his head, wanting to tell her to stop bullshitting. “Can’t be too many of those.”
“You’d be surprised.” She spoke clearly for the crew’s benefit. “I was certainly surprised last year when I discovered the man who’d promised to marry me had joined a reality television show and never even told me. Especially since he’d agreed to wed within forty days from the time he drew the short straw. What if I hadn’t been able to cut my fieldwork short? What then? Would you have lost the game and ruined Base Camp for everyone?”
He opened his mouth to say he had, too, informed her—through Sue. Had been practically begging her for months to come home and sort things out.
“Oh, that’s right.” She beat him to the punch. “You had a backup bride, didn’t you? Avery.”
“Avery isn’t a backup bride.” He caught two of the crew exchanging smiles. Elizabeth really knew how to keep them happy, didn’t she?
She lifted an eyebrow. “Which makes you an oath-breaker, doesn’t it? Aren’t you afraid the ghosts of the past are going to hunt you down and find you?”
Hell. Walker rode out the shiver that traced down his spine, determined Elizabeth not see she was getting to him. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this full-frontal attack. He prided himself on not being superstitious, but plenty of things had happened in his life, both here in Montana and overseas during his missions, that he couldn’t explain. Growing up on the reservation you knew damn well the past could affect the present.
He wanted to say he wasn’t responsible for what his father had done, but they were all responsible for each other, weren’t they? The debts of the parents were passed down to their children—the evidence of that was all around them in the way the world was warming up, the way the poorest nations were paying for the sins of the richest.
“You don’t want me.” He cursed the upbringing that wouldn’t let him destroy her on national television, despite the fact she seemed ready to destroy him.
She laughed. “Is that what this is about? You don’t want to trade Avery’s idolizing worship for my knowledge of exactly who you are? Should I spell out the past to her? Tell her everything?” She emphasized those last words, sending him another message, and he realized this was the reason for the whole stunt. She wanted him to know she wouldn’t hold back from saying things in front of the cameras. From airing their families’ dirty laundry in front of millions of viewers. He could live with that.
Could Sue?
Walker swallowed. Sue had dealt with so much already.
“Come on, Elizabeth. Avery doesn’t idolize me.” Elizabeth was pissing him off. She didn’t get to come here and cut Avery down. He didn’t like the way she was threatening him, either. Threatening Sue, actually. Walker knew Avery—she was compassionate enough to forgive anything. It was Sue who’d be devastated by what Elizabeth might say.
“But she idealizes you, doesn’t she? Avery idealizes everyone.”
So Elizabeth had watched the show. Was she jealous of Avery? Walker couldn’t make that fit with the girl he’d grown up with.
“You want to give up your career and come live here—at Base Camp?” he returned. None of this made sense.
“Why not? You’re fighting climate change, too, in your way. Lord knows there are wildfires in Montana.”
True enough, but who would pay her to study them here?
“Why come so early this morning?”
She shrugged out of the light jacket she was wearing and tossed it through the open window of her truck onto the front seat. “Warm today, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer that.
“I’m here to help with your chores,” she said in answer to his previous question. “That’s what a good wife does, right?”
Now she was goading him.
“Why do you want to be my wife, Elizabeth?” He wasn’t going anywhere until he had an answer.
Elizabeth surveyed him, then looked past his shoulder to the crew fanned around them. Grinned suddenly in a way that took him totally aback, so that when she crossed the space between them, went up on tiptoe, cupped his chin in one slim hand and kissed him on the cheek, he didn’t react until she was gone again, heading for the pastures.
“Because I’ve been lying my whole life, Walker.” She raised her voice so it would be clear to the viewers when this exchange was included in the next episode. “I’ve been in love with you since I knew what love was. Now let’s see those famous bison of yours.”
Walker stayed where he was, stunned. The crew dithered around him, unsure which of them to follow and film.
In love with him?
Like hell.
His attention was caught by the flash of more headlights. A truck he didn’t recognize swept into the turnout where the others had parked, caught them all in its beams, paused, reversed with a squeal of tires and high-tailed it out of there. Elizabeth, already some yards away, stopped to look, too, and stayed where she was long past when the vehicle had disappeared again, as if bracing herself for its return.
“Do you know who that was?” he challenged her.
She shook her head quickly. “No idea. Do people do that? Try to get a look at this place? Fans of the show or whatever?”
“It hasn’t happened before.” Not since Deader Than Ever had picketed them and their fans had thronged the place.
She shrugged. “I’m going to see those bison.”
He watched her stride away, thoughts churning in his mind. She was lying. She’d never loved him.
She needed something else from him. Publicity, maybe? Did she want to advance her career by being on TV? Or did she harbor a grudge for the wrong his father had done to her parents? Had she come to wreak some twisted vengeance of her own?
He turned to stalk back to the bunkhouse.
And came face to face with Avery.
Happy face!
Avery could hear her acting coach’s voice as clearly
