All The Way

“And why are you just telling me now?” Kiki demanded as though she hadn’t spoken. “You’ve been home for five days!”

Because she’d dreaded just this sort of reaction, Liv thought. She licked crumbs from her fingers. “Nothing has happened since we ran into each other. I haven’t heard from him.”

Dig a hole over there, child, and dump the problem inside. Cover it up and walk away. It’s yours no more. More wise words, Liv thought, from her grandmother. She’d dug a hole when she had come home from Delaware, had kicked Hunter in there and had heaped dirt on top of him, and true enough, he’d stayed put.

So far.

Kiki jammed the rest of the roll down the garbage disposal. “I want every specific detail.”

Liv gave up. She went to the butcher block table and folded all 5’8” of herself into a chair there. Like their entire inn, the kitchen was done in western tones with an occasional Victorian touch—just as the place had been in its heyday. The floor and one wall were all aged brick. There were pretty rose-colored shutters on the windows instead of curtains. Old copper pots and utensils were strung across the ceiling. But the appliances were modern and state-of-the-art. Kiki had insisted that if she was going to cook for strangers, she was going to do it right. And though it had been Liv’s own inheritance that had funded the inn’s renovation from 1890’s brothel to twentieth-century bed and breakfast, Liv hadn’t tried to argue with her.

Liv scraped her long hair off her forehead and held it there. “Well, you already know that it happened at the trade show in Wilmington. Not at it exactly, but while I was there.”

“I told you not to take Vicky to that show. Do you remember? Didn’t I say I’d baby-sit while you were away?”

“She wanted to go and it seemed like a nice treat for her right before school started again.”

Kiki planted her oven-mitted hands on her narrow hips. “You knew there was a NASCAR race in Delaware that weekend and you took her anyway. Are you crazy?”

“The race was in Dover! And the trade show was in Wilmington! These are two separate cities. No, wait, hold on a second.” Liv held up a hand when Kiki opened her mouth one more time to berate her lack of judgment. “I got us a room fifty miles away from Dover in Millsboro. Our motel was way down near the southern border of the state. I took precautions. Vicky and I got up extra early every day of that show to drive all the way to Wilmington. What were the odds of Hunter coming to Millsboro the night before the race—for dinner? What were the odds of him suddenly deciding to mingle with his fans?”

“I’d say they were pretty damned good.” Kiki shoved another tray of biscuits into the oven, apparently not impressed with Liv’s assessment of them, either. “You took your daughter—his daughter—to a state the size of a postage stamp knowing that he would be there on the NASCAR circuit that same weekend. Did you want to run into him?”

“Oh, please.” But the pain that flared inside her was every bit as unimaginable as it had been eight and a half years ago when she had sent him away. “It was a calculated risk.”

“You always did stink at math.”

It was true enough. Kiki handled all of the inn’s bookkeeping for just that reason. Liv concentrated on what she was good at—charm, hospitality, service, and an uncanny knowledge of her state’s history. Between the two of them, the Copper Rose had prospered.

“I’ve made it a point to understand this stock car racing,” she said. “Hunter shouldn’t have been fifty miles south of Dover that night. The drivers keep Winnebagos on the track property from Wednesday through Sunday. They qualify on Fridays. On Saturdays they have two or three practices before the race the next day. They do…I don’t know…stuff to their engines. Adjustments. They spend all day Saturday priming those cars. Why would Hunter drive so far south for dinner with all that to do and a driver’s meeting two hours before race time on Sunday?”

“Because he’s Hunter and he’s never played by the rules.”

No one who had ever known the man could argue that one, Liv thought helplessly.

But she had never believed that Hunter could buck the rules, either. In a sport dominated by good ol’ boys from the south, he had come out of the west—a half-breed Indian raised on a northern Arizona reservation, an intense young man with something of the devil in his eyes and in his soul. When he’d gotten the crazy idea to drive race cars, Liv had never believed that he’d be able to break into the NASCAR network.

She clapped a hand over her mouth as though to hold in the pain of the memories. It had always been something with Hunter, some new idea, some wild hair, taking him off again to a new challenge. She’d thought driving was just more of the same. He’d driven the truck series at first, then the Busch series, finally bursting onto the Winston Cup level four years ago. He was a natural behind the wheel of a car. Now, to Liv’s reckoning, he had one Winston Cup somewhere in his possession because he’d topped the point standings last year. He did television commercials for his sponsors and he navigated the talk show circuit. The very thing that should have barred him from a sport filled with Dales and Bobby Joes and Beaus had turned out to be his magic. He was a dark, simmering, laconic American in the most original sense of the word, and he could make a stock car purr like a satisfied animal.

He’d found the one thing he could dedicate himself to…and it hadn’t been her. So she had married someone else. Someone who would stay with her. She had never told him about the baby—his baby—that she had been carrying at the time.

Liv folded her arms on the kitchen table and slowly lowered her forehead to them. “I just wanted a real home again.”

“We all wanted more than hogans and desert, Liv.” Kiki banged a cookie sheet into the sink. “That’s why we left.”

“I never fitted in there, on the reservation. I know it was my birthright—a little bit, anyway—but I was always an outsider there. I spent six years there, craving what I’d lost when my sister and my parents died. I just wanted it back.”

“And that is precisely why you shouldn’t have gone anywhere near Dover on race weekend. Because Hunter wouldn’t give it to you, and you never forgave him for it.”

Liv looked up. That dull, hard throbbing came back to her chest, the same feeling that had pressed in on her all week since she had come home from Delaware. After seeing him just once, so briefly, she could taste him, smell him, feel him with every breath she took, all over again.

She didn’t want him back—that was outrageous. She would never risk Vicky’s stability that way. But she dreaded the thought that he would turn up, anyway. And she’d be easy enough to find. She’d never tried to hide.

He’d threatened to find her, after all. He’d promised.

Kiki wiped her hands on a dish towel. “We’re going to turn on the cable sports channel right now. We’re going to keep an eye on what Hunter Hawk-Cole is up to all weekend, at least as much as they’ll tell us.”

“The circuit takes him to Michigan this weekend.” When Kiki looked at her sharply, Liv flushed then she defended herself. “I checked. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t too close by. He can’t wander in for a say-hi if he’s in the Midwest.”

“He could call. The TV will still tell us what he’s up to while he’s there.”

Liv threw up her hands. “Do you think they mentioned on television that the bad boy of racing was going to have dinner in Millsboro last weekend?”

“No. But they might have said that he had a top-notch car and that he was confident. From that you could have deduced that he’d have some free time on his hands, that he wouldn’t have his guys poking at that engine all night. If I had been there with you, we would have ordered pizza into the motel room.”

Kiki had always been able to think practically in any fix. Liv wondered again, as she often did, why her friend wasn’t a doctor or a geneticist. While Liv had been learning the hospitality trade in Flagstaff, Kiki had attended the University of Arizona, majoring in obscure scientific challenges. She’d earned a doctorate. Now she co-owned the inn with Liv, and she was as content at the oven and with their books as she’d ever been over test tubes.

“Okay.” Liv flattened her palms on the table and pushed to her feet. “At least we’ll know we can’t hear from him when he’s actually on the race track.”

“Not unless he has a cell phone in his car.”

“They’re moving at better than 180 miles per hour!”

“Do you honestly think that would stop him?”

Liv winced at another onslaught of memories. “No.”

“Okay, then.” Kiki found the remote control to click on the television that was shelved against one corner of the kitchen ceiling. “But just for the record, I’m tying you to your desk all weekend in case you get any nifty ideas to go have dinner in Michigan.”

Liv was in the stock car with him.

Hunter felt her there beside him as he warmed up in Saturday’s practice session. There was no passenger seat, just empty space that wouldn’t weigh him down, framed by a lot of metal bracing. She sat there, anyway. Sometimes she was a teenager again. At other times she was the woman he had met in Delaware.

“I’ve thought about it,” the teenage Liv said. “I’m not going to chase the wind with you, Hunter. I’ve found someone who can give me a home, a family, everything I’ve always needed. You said when that happened, you would go away.”

“I’m your family,” he told her.

He’d been her family from the first time he’d seen her, Hunter thought now. She’d been living with her grandmother on the Navajo reservation. He’d met her on his first day at the district school there and he’d followed her home after classes to find her tending to Dinny Sandoval and her sheep. He’d been fascinated by her, enthralled by her, so different from all the others with her Irish-Navajo blood and her incredible, exotic face. So he’d kept coming around.

She’d only been twelve then, but the ache in her eyes had been as mature as a full-blown rose—for the life and the parents and the sister she’d lost in a freak accident that had exiled her in an alien land. She’d talked incessantly of babies, a family, and a white house with blue shutters in a city where a symphony played. As soon as she was old enough, she’d told him often, she was going to go and grab that dream.

They’d lain on their backs on the rocky ground and talked about it, the star-strewn desert night etched above them, passing a coveted bottle of ginger ale back and forth. The nearest store had been forty miles away, and neither of them had had access to a car, so they took care not to spill a drop.

Liv Slade didn’t belong on that reservation any more than Hunter did—and except for one grandmother, he was pretty much Native American down to his bones. He’d landed in that school because of an ill-fated eagle hunt. It had been one adventure too many. His old man had packed him up and had shipped him off to live with his Navajo mother.

That clan hadn’t particularly wanted him, either. He and Liv had both been strangers in a hostile country, and then they had found each other.

After high school, he’d escaped. He disappeared from northern Arizona for weekends at first, then for up to a week. Weeks turned into months sometimes, but he always came back eventually to check on Liv. He’d done passably well with the rodeo, could have been better, but the money wasn’t there and it lacked the elusive something he needed. He joined the Army and found the restriction and discipline intolerable. She’d turned fifteen, sixteen, then seventeen while he was away. Her grandmother had died that last year while Hunter was in Louisiana, poling boats through alligator-infested bayous.