“Want a beer?” Callen asked her.
“She’ll want a glass of that red wine she’s taken to drinking ’cause it wards off heart problems or some such thing. That there,” Clementine said, pointing.
“Is that so? I’ll get that for you.” Callen sauntered over, got a wineglass, poured while Bodine dutifully washed her hands.
“You eat this salad.” Clementine heaped some into a bowl, drizzled something on it, tossed it. “And don’t give me any lip about the dressing.”
“No, ma’am. Thanks,” she added when Callen handed her the glass.
She sat, took the first sip of wine, then as Clementine whipped a napkin over her lap, picked up her fork. “You sit down there and keep her company, Cal. Half the time late to supper and eating alone. Half the time! There’s a plate keeping warm in the oven, and see that she eats every bite.”
“I’ll do that.”
“You want some more apple pie?”
“My darling Clem, I’m sorry to say I’ve got no place to put another.”
“Well then, you take a nice slab of it over to the shack when you leave.” She gave him a pinch on the cheek, and his grin flashed like a summer lightning bolt.
“Welcome home. I’m going on now.” Instead of a pinch on the cheek, Bodine got a light slap on the back of the head that ended in a caress. “Every bite, young lady. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Good night, Clementine.” Bodine let the door of the mudroom close before she let out a sigh, picked up her wine again. “You don’t have to sit here and watch me eat.”
“Said I would. I swear I’d run off and marry that woman for her bite alone. Her cooking’d just be a bonus.” He took a slow pull on his beer, watching Bodine over it. “You got prettier.”
“You think?”
“I see. You always were pretty, but you added to it. How are you otherwise?”
“Good. Busy. Good and busy. You?”
“Glad to be back. I wasn’t sure I would be, so that’s a nice bonus, too.”
“You haven’t had time to miss Hollywood yet.”
He rolled his shoulders. “It was good work. Interesting. Harder than you think—harder than I thought when I jumped into it.”
To her mind the best and most satisfying work usually was. “Did you get what you needed from it?”
His eyes met hers again. “Yeah.”
“I know it’s been a couple years, but I want to say I’m sorry about your father. And sorry I wasn’t at the funeral.”
“Appreciate it. I recall you were sick, flu or something.”
“Or something. Three days of it. Sickest I’ve ever been, and I don’t look to repeat it.”
“While we’re at the sorrys, I’m sorry about your grandpa—great-grandpa. He was a good man.”
“About the best. How’s your ma, Callen?”
“Doing good. Better off where she is, with a grandbaby to spoil, another coming. We’re selling off the rest of the old place to your daddy.”
Bodine picked at the salad. “I don’t know if I should say I’m sorry.”
“No need. It doesn’t mean anything to me. Hasn’t for a long time.”
That might be true, she thought, but it had still been his birthright. “We’ll make good use of it.”
“I reckon you will.” He got up, took her plate out of the oven. “And look at you, Bodine,” he said as he set the plate in front of her. “Running the whole damn resort.”
Since Clementine wasn’t there to give her the beady eye, Bodine added a few good grinds from the pepper mill.
She liked the heat.
“I don’t do it by myself.”
“From what I hear, you all but could. I did some work for you today,” he added. “Chase figured it’d be best if I went over and worked with Abe, since it’s been some years, and get a feel for the operation.”
She’d known—only because Chase had thought to text her, after the fact. “Did you get a feel?”
“Got a start of one. So I’ll tell you, if you want to hear it.”
He waited a beat. She shrugged and ate lasagna.
“I agree with Abe on how you should hire another horseman. It’s true enough you can pull from the ranch, but you’d be better with somebody over there who sticks over there. I can take over for Abe easy enough by the time he leaves next month, but you’re still one short.”
Since she agreed with the logic, couldn’t argue with the advice, she nodded. “I’m working on it. I just haven’t found anybody yet.”
“It’s Montana, Bodine. You’ll find your cowboy.”
“I’m not just looking for a pair of boots.” She gestured with her fork, and on that stood her ground. “If I didn’t know you, you wouldn’t be filling in for Abe.”
“Fair enough.”
“But I do know you. Maybe you know somebody back in California who’s after a change of scene.”
He shook his head, studied his beer. “Change of scene’s built in, as you go where they need you. And the money’s too good if you are. I could call in a favor, but I wouldn’t feel right about it, asking somebody to give up that pay to do some trail rides and lessons, muck and groom.”
His gaze lifted to hers. “Why did I?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Yeah, you did. It was time to come home.” Then the lightning grin flashed again. “And maybe I missed you and your long legs, Bodine.”
“Mmm-hmm.” The sound was both amused and sarcastic.
“I might’ve, if I’d known you’d gotten prettier.”
“I might’ve missed you back if I’d known you’d filled out that skinny build.”
He let out a laugh. “You know what I realize right now? I did miss you. I missed this kitchen, too. Though, boy, it’s got some fancier touches since I was in it last. Barn doors on a pantry big enough to rate them. A big-ass shiny stove, and that faucet coming out of the wall. Clementine says it’s to fill the pots that go on it.”
“The grannies got Mom hooked on those home improvement shows. She all but drove Dad crazy until she talked him into redoing it.”
“There’s more I missed. I’d like to go by and see Nana and Miss Fancy.”
“They’d like that. You got all you need in the shack?”
“More than. It’s fancier, too, than it was back when Chase and I would sneak in there to plot our adventures.”
“And locked me out.” Still just a little bitter about that, she realized.
“Well, you were a female.”
She laughed at that, at his cleverly horrified tone. Maybe she’d missed him a little, too.
“I could ride as well as both of you.”
“You could. It annoyed the hell right out of me. Chase said you lost Wonder a couple winters back.”
Bodine had ridden, loved, and groomed the sweet-going mare since they’d both been two. “Just about broke my heart. Six months before I could pick another for mine.”
“You picked well. Your Leo’s got brains, and spirit. Want another glass of that wine?”
She considered. “Half.”
“What’s the point in half of anything?”
“It’s more than none.”
“Sounds like settling.” But he rose, got the bottle, set it on the table. “Looks like you’ve about cleared your plate, so I’ve done my duty by Clementine. I should get on.”
“You want that pie?”
“No. If I took it, it’d be sitting there, trying to seduce me into eating it, and I’d never get any sleep. It’s good seeing you, Bo.”
“You, too.”
When he left, she sat a moment, taking stock, absently rubbing the penknife she carried in her front pocket—always. The one he’d given her for her twelfth birthday.
Maybe, just maybe, she still felt a little of that crush. Just a light flicker of it.
Nothing she needed to worry about, nothing she wanted to act on. Just a little flicker at seeing the man he had become from the boy for whom she’d had teenage heart flutters.
It was good to know it, acknowledge it, and set it neatly aside.
She picked up the wine bottle, poured precisely half a glass.
It was more than none.
— 1991 —
He ordered her to call him Sir. Alice memorized every line of his face, the exact timbre of his voice. When she escaped, she’d tell the police he was about forty, white, around five-feet-nine, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. Sort of sinewy and very strong. He had brown eyes, brown hair.
He had a puckered scar on his left hip, about an inch long, and a splotchy brown birthmark on his right outer thigh.
He often smelled of leather, beer, and gun oil.
She’d work with a police artist.
She’d had more than a month to curse herself for not paying more attention to the pickup. Even the color didn’t stick in her memory, though she thought—mostly thought—faded, rusty blue.
She couldn’t give them his license plate, and maybe he’d stolen the truck anyway. But she could describe him from his cattleman’s hat right down to his scarred Durango boots.
If she didn’t manage to kill him first.
She dreamed about that, about somehow getting her hands on a knife or a gun or a rope, using it to kill him the next time she heard that cellar door open, the next time she heard those boots come heavy down the steps to her prison.
She had no idea where she was, whether she was still in Montana, or if he’d driven her to Idaho or Wyoming. He could have flown her to the moon for all she knew.
Her prison had a concrete floor, walls covered in cheap paneling. It had no window, and only the single door up a shaky flight of open steps.
She had a toilet, a wall-hung sink, a skinny shower with a handheld sprayer. Like the air in the room, the water in the shower never approached warm.
As if to provide her privacy, he’d tacked up a ratty curtain to separate the toilet area from the rest.
The rest was ten paces square—she knew because she’d paced it off countless times, straining against the shackle clamped to her right leg that prevented her from climbing more than the bottom two steps. It held a cot, a table bolted to the floor, a lamp bolted to the table. A bear climbing up a tree formed the base for her light and the forty-watt bulb.
Though he’d taken her backpack, he’d left her a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, and orders to use them, as cleanliness was next to godliness.
He’d provided a single scratchy towel and a washcloth and two thankfully warm blankets. A copy of the Bible sat on the table.
For food, an old wooden kindling box held a box of Cheerios, a partial loaf of white bread, small jars of peanut butter and grape jelly, a couple of apples—as Sir claimed they kept the doctor away. She had a single plastic bowl, a single plastic spoon.
He brought her dinner. It was the only certain way she knew another day had passed. Usually some sort of stew, but occasionally a greasy burger.
She’d refused to eat the first time, screamed and raged at him instead. So he’d beaten her senseless, taken her blankets. The next twenty-four hours, a nightmare of pain and chills, convinced her to eat. To keep her strength up so she could escape.
The bastard rewarded her with a chocolate bar.
She tried begging, bribing—her family would give him money if he let her go.
He told her she was his property now. Though she’d clearly been a whore before he’d saved her on the side of the road, she was his responsibility now. And his to do with as he pleased.
He suggested she read the Bible, as it was written a woman was to be under a man’s dominance, how God had created woman from Adam’s rib to serve as his helpmate and to bear his children.
When she called him a crazy son of a bitch, a fucking coward, he set aside his own bowl of stew. His coiled fist broke her nose before he left her weeping in her own blood.
The first time he raped her she fought like a mad thing. Though he beat and choked the fight out of her, she fought, screamed, begged against every rape, day after day until the days blurred together.
One of those days he brought her a slice of fried ham cut up into bite-size pieces, a heap of mashed potatoes with red gravy, a scoop of mushy peas, and a biscuit. He even provided a red checkered napkin folded into a triangle, shocking her speechless.
“It’s our Christmas dinner,” he told her as he settled to eat his own meal on the steps. “I want to see you eat with appreciation what I went to some trouble to make.”
“Christmas.” Everything inside her flooded and trembled. “It’s Christmas?”
“I don’t hold with all that gift-giving nonsense or the fancy trees and whatnot. It’s a day to celebrate Jesus’ birth. So a good meal’s enough for that. You eat.”
“It’s Christmas. Please, please, God, please, let me go. I want to go home. I want my ma. I want—”
“You shut your mouth on your wants.” He snapped it out and her head jerked back as if from a blow. “I get up from here before I finish this meal, you’ll be sorry. You mind me and eat what I give you.”
She used her spoon, managing to shovel up some ham and chew it even though her jaw still ached from the beating he’d given her a few days before.
“I’m so much trouble to you.” Over a month, she thought. She’d been in this hole in the ground with this maniac over a month. “Wouldn’t you rather have someone—a helpmate like the Bible says—who could take care of you? Cook for you?”
“You’ll learn,” he said, eating with a deceptive calm and patience she’d already learned to fear.
“But … I can cook. I’m a pretty good cook. If you let me go upstairs, I could cook for you.”
“Something wrong with that meal you’re eating?”
“Oh, no.” She ate some of the gluey potatoes. “I can tell you went to a lot of trouble to make it. But I could take on that trouble, do the cooking and cleaning, be a real helpmate.”
“I look stupid to you, Esther?”
She’d stopped shouting her name was Alice weeks before.
“No, Sir! Of course not.”
“You think I’m so stupid, so weak to the seduction of a woman, I don’t know you’d try to take off if you go up those stairs?”
His mouth twisted. His eyes went to that terrible dark.
“Maybe you’d try shoving a kitchen knife in my gullet first.”
“I’d never—”
“Shut your lying mouth. I’m not going to punish you as you deserve for saying I’m stupid because it’s the birth of Baby Jesus. Don’t try my patience on that.”
When she subsided and ate in silence, he nodded. “You’ll learn. And when I deem you’ve learned enough and good enough, I might let you upstairs. But for now you got all you need down here.”
“Could I ask you for something, please?”
“You can ask. Don’t mean you’ll get.”
“If I could have the gloves and another pair of the socks that were in my pack. It’s just my hands and feet get cold. I’m afraid I’ll get sick. If I caught a chill, I’d be more trouble to you than I already am.”
He gave her a long, silent study. “I might consider that.”
“Thank you.” The words wanted to stick in her throat like the food, but she forced them out. “Thank you, Sir.”
“I might consider it,” he repeated, “if you show me the proper