All The Way

Liv had kept up the old woman’s sheep on her own after that because if the authorities found out she was a minor living alone, they would come and whisk her off again. The reservation had never been home for her, but Liv was determined that she wasn’t going anywhere else until she could do it on her own terms. She kept up the charade for almost a year, and the Anglo authorities never caught on.

That was the way he had left her in January that year, in Dinny’s winter hogan alone, the old woman’s clansmen close enough for comfort. Then he came back one day in June to find that the girl had gone and a woman had taken her place.

Hunter had driven up in his rattletrap pickup to find her wrestling in the dust with a lamb.

Already the heat had a dry, pressing weight, though it was barely midmorning. The lamb bleated in distress as she chased it, both of them kicking up red-brown dust that hung in the thin air. She had a syringe in one hand, held high as though it were a sword and she was about to plunge it into stone. Hunter stopped the truck and got out to watch her, enjoying the spectacle.

“Hey, you!” he called.

She didn’t hear him. She pinned the lamb, straddling it, then she came up on her hands and knees. Her bottom was thrust in his direction, cupped in frayed, hacked-off denim. A horse might have kicked him in the chest for the impact the view had on him.

Sometimes the need to love her actually burned inside him. It was why he never stayed home too long.

He wasn’t her dream. He was a man who needed to keep moving. He wasn’t what she needed.

But, God, he cherished her.

She hooked her left arm around the animal’s neck and raised her right hand again, armed with the needle. Then the lamb wriggled out from beneath her. Liv went after the animal at a fast crawl, her dark hair caught in a ponytail that streamed down her back until it finally splayed over each hip with her movement. Then she got to her feet in one fluid motion that had his twenty-year-old tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. She leaped at the little beast, going airborne.

“Jeez, Livie! You’re going to kill yourself!”

But she didn’t. She came down on top of the lamb, rolling with it, both arms wrapped around it now. She’d lost the syringe, and she swore a blue streak that had his jaw hanging. Still holding the animal, she groped in the rocky dirt for the needle. Just as he moved to get it for her, she found it and finally got it buried in the animal’s flank.

When it was done, she let the lamb run off. She flopped over on her back, staring up at a sky that the heat had baked the color out of. She laughed, a woman’s throaty chuckle of triumph that almost brought Hunter to his knees.

In all the time he’d known her, he’d never wanted her as much as he did in that moment. It took Hunter a moment to find his voice.

“My money was on you.”

Liv sat up slowly enough that he had the sudden, uncanny feeling that she’d known he was there all along. “You didn’t have any money, pal, not the last time I checked.” Her eyes were too dark. They were usually a deep, chocolate brown, but temper could turn them to the charred color of fired wood. “That’s it for the herd. As for you, fish or cut bait.”

He knew what she was talking about, couldn’t pretend that he didn’t, even if it made something roar suddenly in his head and sent his heart galloping.

Liv stood, then she leaned over to brush the dust off her legs. “Here’s the thing, Hunter. I’m cleaning up my past here. Are you part of it, or are you my future?” She straightened and crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you want me or don’t you?”

He thought that if he answered that honestly, he’d probably be damned to hell for all eternity.

But Liv didn’t seem to want words. She walked toward him with that long, leggy stride of hers, then she yanked her T-shirt over her head before he could reply and tossed it aside into the dust. It was the reservation. There wasn’t another hogan for fifteen miles. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts—and oh, how he had fantasized about them over the years—were as full and ripe as the rest of her. Her shorts rode low on her hips. She stopped three strides from him.

“I love you, Hunter. And I’m tired of waiting for you to grow up.”

He almost choked. “For me to grow up?”

Her voice dipped, losing some of its force. For a moment she sounded almost as lost as she had been the first time he’d met her. “I want to be with you. I want to take at least one good thing away from this place when I go. I want it to be you.”

“Babe—”

“I don’t want promises from you, Hunter. I can take care of the rest of my dreams on my own.”

She leaped at him suddenly then, her arms around his neck, her lithe legs wrapping around his waist, her mouth clamping on his. She gave him no chance for finesse, no time for it. Something inside Hunter broke.

His hands found her bottom, holding her to him. Then they were both down in the dust while his tongue dove for hers hungrily, an agony building inside him too fast. He dragged off her shorts, then his own clothes, then he found his way inside her in one desperate thrust. She cried out, then she made a mewling sound in her throat and clung to him, riding with him fast, fiercely, crying out his name. And all Hunter could think was that this time he’d really come home.

A voice squawked in his headset, startling Hunter out of his reverie. It was his spotter, a guy who stood on top of the grandstand with radio in hand and an eagle’s view of the track. He warned of pile-ups around the next curve and unseen cars traveling in his blind spots.

This time there was panic in the man’s voice, and Hunter’s vision cleared to see the turn-two wall in front of him. He pulled hard on the wheel, swerving around toward the apron of the track again.

“What the hell are you doing?” the spotter bellowed. “Man, you’re all over the track!”

“Car feels a little loose.” It was the term that described how—at killer high speeds—the back end of a car could fishtail and try to catch up with the front. “I’m just playing with it to figure out how much we need to adjust.”

Then he glanced at the nonexistent passenger seat one more time. The grown-up Liv was there now.

Her perfect face was framed, not by straight, waist-length hair, but by long layers, brown streaked with russet and tipped by gold at the ends. She’d wanted him once. She had said she loved him. Then she’d found someone else in four short weeks, and she’d sent him away.

Now there was the matter of the child.

His child, Hunter thought. Not Guenther’s. What had she done? Why, Livie, why?

His spotter’s voice began crackling in his ear again, so loud now as to be almost wordless. Hunter focused on the track again. The turn wall was in front of him one more time. He corrected too fast, too hard. His reflexes were caught in the past.

The back end of the race car slid around and cracked into the concrete, crumbling like paper in a giant’s fist. Then he was diving nose first toward the infield, coming down off the embankment. Mikey Nolan, in the 42 car, had been coming up hard behind him. He tried to avoid Hunter’s skid, but he connected with his left-rear quarter panel, rocking Hunter’s car around one more time. Hunter slid up the track and straight into the wall with a full-frontal, jarring impact.

When he came to, he smelled gasoline and heard the deadly snap of fire.

Liv screamed.

The sound tore from her throat, raw and unwilling, as she shot up from the sofa in her private sitting room where she’d been watching the practice session. On the television, Hunter’s gold car with the number 4 emblazoned down the sides in black flames was smashed against the outside wall of the race track. Its hood was flattened, its rear end was destroyed, and real flames were licking out from behind the left rear wheel.

As she swallowed hard against another reflexive sound, a truck rolled up and suited men jumped out of the bed, armed with fire extinguishers.

Then the net came down from the driver’s side window, and she saw Hunter’s hand shoot out, giving a thumbs-up sign that he was okay. The TV announcer lamented that he’d qualified for the pole position in tomorrow’s race and now his car was more or less demolished. He’d have a back-up available, but changing cars now would put him at the back of the starting line.

“Oh, you stupid, insane fool!” Liv choked. “When is it enough for you? When? How damned far do you have to take it?” Her heart was rioting.

A fist thumped against her door. Kiki’s voice shouted through the wood. “Are you all right? I heard you scream.”

Liv went to open it. Kiki shot into the room, looking around both skeptically and a little wildly. Liv nodded wordlessly at the TV.

Kiki’s black eyes took in the scene there as Hunter levered himself out through the driver’s window. The stock cars had no doors. The seams and hardware would create drag. “So Michigan doesn’t agree with him,” Kiki muttered.

Then Vicky hurtled into the room.

Her knees were scraped and reddened as they usually were, and her long, black ponytail was falling loose from some hard play. “What’s going on? Somebody said you were all up here.” Then she, too, focused on the television screen. “Hey, isn’t that the guy we saw in the restaurant last weekend?”

Kiki was closest to her. She caught Vicky’s arm and turned her smoothly away from the TV. “What guy?”

“Mom knows who I mean. Some famous guy.” Vicky craned her neck around as Kiki steered her toward the door. “It is him. He said he drives cars real fast. He’s hurt.”