Bravo Unwrapped

Morning sickness. Who ever thought of calling it that? Probably some idiot with a disgustingly positive attitude. For B.J., the problem went on all day and all night. If it kept up, she’d be the skinniest pregnant lady in Manhattan. She might die of starvation, and her poor unborn baby with her.

And she just knew he was waiting over there across the table for the moment when she had to stop hiding behind the menu and look at him again.

Might as well get it over with. She shut the menu, set it aside and went ahead and met his eyes.

Wouldn’t you know? Compelling as ever.

She glanced away. For something to do as she tried not to look at him, she studied the decor.

The place was aggressively rustic, a virtual sea of knotty pine. Knotty pine crawled up the walls and spread across the ceiling. Their booth and the tables grouped in the center of the room were all made of knotty pine. The ladder-back chairs? Yet more knotty pine. Even the wagon-wheel chandeliers overhead were knotty pine, stained dark enough that it was hard to make out the knots. But B.J. wasn’t fooled.

She knew knotty pine when she saw it—and she didn’t care for it in the least. B.J. had history with knotty pine, history that involved a dead animal, a rifle and a hunting lodge in Idaho.

In October, the year she turned twelve, L.T. had taken her to Idaho to hunt elk. B.J. had always loathed hunting. She didn’t want to watch her dinner die, she truly didn’t.

But she’d learned to shoot and how to handle herself in the woods just to prove to L.T. that she could. That trip, she’d actually shot an elk. A gorgeous big bull with a massive rack. It was one of those things that just happened. She had the rifle and she knew how to use it and she knew what L.T. expected of her.

In the sub-freezing pre-dawn, she’d crouched behind a big, gray rock and waited there for hours, being quiet and tough and self-reliant, the way L.T. expected her to be. She had it all figured out in her twelve-year-old mind. No elk was even going to come near her, so she wouldn’t have to actually shoot anything.

Wrong.

The animal appeared out of nowhere. All at once it was just standing there in the early-morning gloom, looking off toward the snow-capped mountains to the east and the bright rim of light where the sluggish sun was slowly rising. Soundlessly, she shouldered her rifle, got the creature in her sights—and pulled the trigger. A perfect, clean shot. The bull dropped dead where it stood, forelegs crumpling, big brown eyes going glassy, making no sound but a loud thump as it hit the ground.

B.J. emerged from behind her rock and stood over it, still not believing that she’d actually killed the poor thing.

The knotty pine had come into play that night. Their hunting lodge was paneled, like the Nugget Steakhouse, all in pine. L.T. and the other men stayed up late, drinking and laughing and loudly discussing how “little B.J.” had got her elk. Little B.J., who had gone to bed early, lay awake in the open sleeping loft upstairs, counting the knots in the paneling, thinking that she really hadn’t meant to shoot that bull, and wishing the men would just shut up about it.

“You’re too quiet,” Buck said.

She blinked and focused on him. “Sorry. Just thinking.”

“About?”

Nadine reappeared, saving B.J. the trouble of coming up with an answer. The waitress set their drinks in front of them, along with a bread basket, bread plates and their flatware rolled in white cloth napkins. “You two ready to order?”

“I am,” said B.J. She rattled off what she wanted and Buck did the same. Nadine scribbled it all down and hustled off again.

“So,” said Buck.

“What?”

“What was on your mind, just then?”

“When?”

He gave her a look—kind of weary and put-upon.

Oh, what the hell? “I was just thinking that I hate knotty pine. Knotty pine is depressing. Every damn knot is like a big, sad, reproachful brown eye—an eye that watches your every move.”

“Never thought of it that way.”

“This is probably not a good place to be on medication.”

“I kind of like it myself.” He tipped his head to the side and looked toward the center of the room. Admiring the knots in the tables and chairs? Apparently. The light from the hurricane lamp on their table shone on his dark hair. So silky, his hair.

And thick. Very thick…

“My dad brought us here once,” he said, turning to her again, smiling slowly when he caught her eye, causing certain responses, certain small, shivery feelings she instantly denied.

She cleared her throat. “How old were you?”

“Pretty little. Maybe five. It’s one of my few memories of him. He was gone so much. He would show up out of nowhere, now and then, for a week or two, and then disappear again. That was the last time he came to town, when he brought us to dinner here. It was before Bowie was born—nine months before, if you know what I mean.”

She did. Blake had gotten Chastity pregnant, gone away, and never come back. “What a guy.”

Buck said, “That was pretty much his M.O. He’d show up, get my mother pregnant and leave. He’d come back in a year or so, get her pregnant again. Leave again. None of us ever got to know him or anything. He was the stranger who happened to be our father.”

Her editor’s brain kicked in. The stranger who happened to be our father. That might make the cutline under a photo of the notorious Blake. They’d need to dig up an old picture….

And she should be getting this down. Any revelations about Blake Bravo could definitely be usable.

She grabbed her bag, dug out the mini-recorder, turned it on and set it on the table, down toward the hurricane lamp—out of the way, but close enough to pick up everything they said. “So Bowie never even met his father?”

Buck eyed the recorder. “Always on the job, right?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

He looked at her. A long look. “I keep hoping for more.”

“Well, don’t—about Bowie and Blake…”

He said nothing, just looked at her some more.

And if she’d didn’t watch it, she’d be looking right back, going ga-ga over his eyelashes and the sexy curve of his mouth. “Talk,” she commanded.

He made a low sound—something between a grunt and a chuckle. And at last, he got down to it. “Bowie, as the youngest, never met our father. And Brand, Brett and I never knew him. Not really. He hardly ever came around, and we were mostly too little to have a clue who he was.” Buck glanced down into his drink and then back up at her. “He had the weirdest, scariest light-colored eyes. Wolf eyes…but I told you that, didn’t I? About his eyes. Back when you and I were together?”

She nodded. Back then, he never talked about his family much. Just that his dad had left them when Buck was very young—and about Blake’s pale, strange eyes. “Tell me more about the time your dad brought you here, to the Nugget. You were five, you said?”

“Yeah. I was the only one of the kids who got to go. Brett and Brand were…two and three, I guess. Ma left them with my grandmother. It was December. I remember there were tinsel garlands looped on the light fixtures.” They both glanced up at the wagon-wheel chandelier over their heads. “And a tree, over there by the door to the street—a fresh tree, strung with those old-style big lights and shiny glass ornaments. I remember passing it as we came in, breathing in the piney smell of it, getting off on the way the lights glowed in the branches. It meant Christmas was coming and that gave my five-year-old heart a thrill.”

“You had good Christmases, growing up?”

He nodded. “Ma made a big deal of it. She baked like a champion, played Christmas carols all day and half the night from the morning after Thanksgiving on. She decorated a huge silver-tip fir in the front room. She seriously decked the halls—and every flat surface in sight. The hotel—in those days she called it a hotel—was a damn Christmas wonderland and that is no lie. My brothers and I loved it.”

“It sounds fabulous.”

“It was.” Those dark eyes of his were shining.