Page 15

CHAPTER 15

What was she doing?

Diana wrenched herself back to her senses, out of the seductive vortex of Costa’s lips, his hands in her hair, his body against hers.

By the time regret crashed in a few seconds later, as the parts of her he had been touching a moment ago felt cold even in the desert sun, he had already stepped back too. They regarded each other from a few feet and twenty years apart.

“Do you think ...?” Costa began. He wet his lips. He looked hurt, angry, and she honestly couldn’t blame him.

“It’s just being here,” Diana said quickly. “All the memories.”

“I know, I have them too. But Diana ...” He looked at her painfully, almost desperately. “Could it work? Between us, I mean.”

It certainly worked physically. She didn’t need the memory of their one, fumbling loss of virginity in the pasture to know that. It had been clumsy and exciting in the way teen sex was, both of them were still figuring out how all the parts worked, and it was over too fast and not fast enough. And she would give almost anything to have him on top of her again, the fully realized promise of the lean muscles and deft hands of his late-teenage self, grown into strength and sureness.

And she couldn’t go through losing that again.

“We broke up for a good reason.” Her lips were dry in the arid breeze, and she kept touching her tongue to them. Or maybe it was that her mouth wanted to find his again. “Remember that, Quinn? You wanted to stay on the ranch. I mean, more than that.” The old betrayal swept over her, the sense of realizing all those years ago that he wasn’t the person she thought he was. That he didn’t love her like she thought he did. “You were determined to stay on the ranch. You wouldn’t accept any compromise.”

“I had to,” Costa shot back. “You were the one who didn’t understand.”

“No, you didn’t understand!” The feeling of being trapped slammed down on her again. Just like all those years ago, she could sense the future—Costa’s future—closing around her like the jaws of a bear trap: staying on the ranch, being miserable like her mother had been, having kids and raising kids, never doing all the things she’d dreamed of doing. “I had to get away. Go out, see the world, do things that weren’t this! Didn’t you ever want that too?”

“I did go out,” Costa shot back. “I did see things. Just because it’s not two thousand miles away doesn’t mean it’s not worth seeing. Or doing! I have a life here. I had a life here. And your—your life was somewhere else, and we both knew that.”

“I told you we could compromise!” she flared. “You could come with me to college, or?—”

“I couldn’t be gone that long, and we both know why!”

“—or,” she forged on, feeling the scarred-over wounds of those old arguments tear open and bleed, “I could go away for a couple of years and come back ?—”

“We both knew you wouldn’t!”

Diana recoiled as if slapped. “Are you calling me a liar?”

“No!” Costa said sharply. He reached out a hand, then let it drop. “But you didn’t, did you? Not for fifteen years. I wasn’t going to do a long-distance relationship for fifteen years, Diana. It’s not in me.”

She stared at him across that great gulf between them, helpless with fury and grief. “I would have come back if I promised.”

“I know. And you would have been miserable. Just like I’d have been miserable if I went with you.”

She knew it was true—on both sides. She’d had to go live her life, see the world, explore all the things she had been able to explore. And yet somehow all of that had circled around in the end and she’d wound up standing here again.

“You always let your family take up too big a chunk of your life,” she said, and she saw Costa’s face close off, pushing the argument away just like he had all those years ago. “Maybe you would have—maybe if you got away a little, you would have learned you didn’t have to?—”

“Take care of them?” Costa snapped. “Look after my aunts and my kid brother? Abdicate the family responsibility that’s been passed down to me from four generations of Costas on this land? Is that the future you’d have wanted for me, Diana?”

It was, actually. She wanted to see him live his life for himself, rather than constantly feeling tied to everything he had to do here. First it was the ranch, and the younger brother and cousins that he felt responsible for; then it was the SCB. Diana would have loved to throw a lasso around him like he was a recalcitrant yearling cow and drag him away so that he could feel the world open up around him the way it had around her.

But—she would have broken something in him forever by doing that. Responsibility, taking care of people .... that was who Cesar Quinn Costa was. To force him away from that would be to shatter the core of him, just like staying here would have caused hers to dwindle and collapse.

Diana sighed and jumped down from the edge of the dry trough. “All these years and we’re still the same people underneath it all, aren’t we?”

Costa unexpectedly gave a short laugh. “Stubborn, determined, set in our ways? Yeah, probably.”

He leaped down, but rather than pulling away, he took her hand. Diana startled a bit, and she felt him begin to pull back, but she closed her fingers around his.

Costa turned to look up the pasture, toward the line of trees that she remembered so vividly. They were scrubby and gnarled, barely clinging to life in the dry pasture. But they sheltered a hollow where the two of them had explored all the wonders of being newly minted adults.

“Want to walk around a little more?” Costa asked quietly. His thumb rubbed over the back of her hand.

She was wildly tempted—and afraid of what she might do if she gave in to that temptation. “Actually, we should probably get back to your place before they send out a search party.”

Costa’s aunts would do no such thing; they were probably delighted for the (as they thought) couple to spend time alone together. But Costa nodded, and they walked back slowly toward the horses, his hand holding hers the entire way.

When they reached the horses, Costa’s fingers slipped quietly out of hers. Diana mounted Rabbit and turned the horse’s head away from the barn, toward home—Costa’s home, that is.

As they retraced their previous course, Costa riding slightly behind her, he said abruptly, “You did come back, you know.”

“Fifteen years later,” Diana said dryly. “To Bisbee.” A shudder went through her at the thought of everything she had so recently lost there. She had been more-or-less successfully not thinking about it.

“Yes, but of all the places in the world you could have landed, you settled down less than a two-hour drive from where you grew up,” Costa said.

“I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

She could tell when he remembered why she didn’t want to talk about it, because a sudden silence hit. Then Costa said, “I’ll check in with the SCB when we get back, see if they’ve found anything.”

“Okay,” Diana said.

They rode back in a silence that was somehow at the same time more and less uneasy than the ride over. She felt as if they had settled into some kind of new equilibrium, and she could still feel his lips on hers. The kiss on the water tank was going to live on in her head forever, framed by the blue sky and the dusty hills.

But she could feel jagged-edged emotions shifting around inside her every time she allowed her thoughts to slip sideways, away from the “now.”

Could it work? Between us?

We would have to be different people, Diana thought. If only.

* * *

As they rode up to the Costa ranch, a kid’s voice hailed them. “Hey! Uncle Quinn! Look at me!”

There was a boy in the corral where they had saddled their horses, riding bareback on a painted pinto pony. Diana hadn’t seen Costa’s nephew Jay in a long while, but this boy must be him—bare feet pressed to the horse’s sides, a kid-sized riding helmet covering his sun-bleached brown hair.

Costa grinned, waved, and rode over to the corral. He and Diana dismounted and began unsaddling their horses. Meanwhile, Jay rode up to the other side of the pole fence. His real name was longer, Diana had gathered—Jason, maybe? No one had ever called him anything other than Jay in her hearing.

She had missed the wedding of Costa’s younger brother and his wife. All of that had happened while she was elsewhere, around the time she got out of the Army or while she was still skipping across the world, exploring her options, flying helicopters for development companies on foreign sites. She had returned to Arizona to see her mother through her final illness, and with the life insurance settlement, she had decided to buy a house. Fifteen years of globetrotting was enough, as it turned out; it was time to explore life as a homeowner with a regular job.

But it meant she had missed everything about Marco’s marriage and the baby, and by the time she came back into Costa’s life, things had settled into their current status quo. Marco was gone, and his widow and young son lived on the ranch.

“Oh, Quinn, there you are!” Jay’s mother Jenny came out of the barn with a bucket in one hand and a basket of eggs held awkwardly against her side. “Hi, Diana. I heard you two got in late last night.”

“Hi, nice to see you again,” Diana said. She liked Jenny, but never felt like she had much to say to her. Costa’s sister-in-law was a born-and-bred rural girl just like Diana. But unlike Diana, Jenny had embraced the rural housewife lifestyle. Today she was wearing a long skirt and sandals, her hair back in a simple braid that reached almost to her waist.

Jenny set down the bucket, and Costa greeted her with a brief embrace and kissed her cheek. “Need any help?”

“No, just taking some things up to our place.” Jenny and Jay lived on the back of the ranch, apart from the main grouping of farm houses where the aunts were. “Someone’s been absolutely wild to have you watch him put his trick pony through his paces, though.”

“Let’s get the horses taken care of, and then he can show me as much as he wants.”

After they had the horses unsaddled, rubbed down, and turned out into the pasture, Costa and Diana leaned on the fence and watched Jay ride around the corral bareback and do tricks. He got the horse to dance lightly around some pole obstacles, stood up on the animal’s back and then, for the finale, leaped to the top of a fence rail.

After Diana stopped having a heart attack about the kid falling off—which didn’t seem likely; it was clear Jay had been riding since he was big enough to sit on a horse—she found herself mostly watching Costa. His face was soft and fascinated, and he called out encouragement or praise as the boy put the pony through its paces, and occasionally advice as well. Not like an adult humoring a child’s fancies. He was really interested.

It made her think of Costa holding Emmeline, the way his face went so soft and his entire body language radiated protectiveness.

He would have made a good dad, she thought. Then she wanted to metaphorically smack herself for thinking in the past tense. It wasn’t too late. Lots of people had kids later in life.

But—with whom? The very thought of Costa having kids with someone else made her bristle with what she knew was completely irrational jealousy. Still, the whole reason why they had the fake relationship arrangement was because neither of their careers really allowed for family and kids.

.... you settled down less than a two-hour drive from where you grew up.

Costa’s hand brushed her shoulder briefly, and she turned as if drawn by a wire. “Looks like visitors,” he said, nodding down the hill. On the far side of the ranch houses, there was a dust cloud and an approaching vehicle. “It’s probably Delgado. Hey, Jay, nice job! We gotta go, but I’ll come up and visit with you and your mom when I get a chance.”

The kid waved and slid off the fence rail onto the pony’s back again.

Diana and Costa had just arrived in the main ranch yard when a silver SUV, covered in dust, pulled in. The car door opened and Cat Delgado stepped out.

“Heya, boss,” she called. “You said the road was bad, but hoo-ee. I don’t think my suspension will ever be the same. Those are some washboards that my grandma could’ve used to scrub the entire family laundry.” She turned back as her passengers got out.

The first person out of the car was a cheerful woman with a pretty round face framed in waves of chestnut hair. Costa shook hands with her and introduced her to Diana as Nicole Yates, the SCB’s social worker from Seattle.

The tall, dark-haired man who had just followed her was presumably the other field agent, a handsome man in his thirties with short dark hair, tattoos visible on his biceps beneath the sleeves of a tight black T, and a stud earring in his left ear. He was helping unbuckle the seat belt of an adorable little girl with large dark eyes and brown braids.

Straightening, he held out a hand. “Chief Costa.”

“Agent Mendoza. Vic, this is Diana Reid, a search and rescue pilot helping out with this operation. Diana, Agent Vic Mendoza.”

Diana nodded, feeling both pleased and embarrassed to be introduced as part of the operation. Mendoza had a ready smile and a firm grip, and she liked him immediately.

“Agent Mendoza. It’s a pleasure.”

“Likewise. Call me Vic.”

When Mendoza released Diana’s hand, he put it down and the little girl promptly slipped her hand into it, standing close to his side.

Costa said, “And this is?”

“My daughter Molly,” said Mendoza. “This is Miss Reid and Mr. Costa. Say hi, Molly.”

“Hi,” said the girl, with a shy grin displaying a missing tooth.

“You can call me Diana,” Diana said. “How old is she?”

“Eight,” Molly said promptly. “And a half.”

“Half birthdays are important,” Costa said solemnly, and Molly gave him a look that suggested she was well aware the adults were putting her on. “Well, I’m forty and a half, and I was out for a horseback ride with my friend Diana just now.” He mimed fanning his face, and the little girl giggled. “Let’s go up to the ranch house and hydrate.”

As they started walking up to the ranch house, Molly detached from her dad’s hand and ran to look at various things, the cactus flowers having particular fascination for her.

“She seems sweet, but are you entirely aware that I didn’t requisition a child?” Costa asked.

“I know. I had to bring her; I don’t have anyone to leave her with at home, at least for longer than overnight. And,” Vic said quietly, stepping closer, “right now she’s just started shifting, so it’s a bit hard for her to control. Agent Delgado said everyone here is a shifter or knows about them; is that right?”

“Yeah,” Costa said. “It’ll be fine. My clan has seen plenty of kids through their early shifting. Just so that I know whether we should be looking in the treetops or in holes in the backyard, what does she?—”

Vvvvviiiiiip!

“—turn into,” Costa finished unnecessarily, as Vic, without even breaking stride, lunged to the side and caught a hummingbird an instant before she plunged headfirst into a cactus.

“We’re still working on steering,” Vic said. “You okay, honey?”

Diana glanced from the pile of little-girl clothes deposited limply on the path, as if the girl inside of them had melted, then to Vic, who was carefully putting the hummingbird into his shirt’s breast pocket. Nicole, barely pausing, bent to scoop up the discarded clothing, evidently very familiar with handling shifter children.

“Anyway,” Vic went on as if there had been no interruption, “it makes finding a caretaker difficult, as you might imagine. I’m a single dad, and we don’t have any close relatives in Seattle. There’s a babysitter I trust, but I wasn’t sure how long I’d be gone.”

“You know this could be dangerous,” Costa said levelly.

“No more than back home,” Vic returned evenly. “Molly knows Daddy’s job can sometimes be scary—don’t you, honey?—but we have bad guys up in Seattle, too.”

The hummingbird’s head poked out of his pocket, looking around with bright eyes.

In the ranch house, Molly was handed off (literally) to the aunts, along with her bundle of clothing. As they went off to ply her with orange juice and cookies, Costa passed around bottles of water and cups of coffee to the adults. Diana tried to keep her traitorous fingers from lingering on his as he gave her a cup of coffee, made exactly as she liked it.

“Can I see the baby?” Nicole asked. “It sounds like there’s a possibility this is connected to the shifter lab we broke up in Washington a while back. I thought it was a one-off, but they might have had other branches.”

“Wait, wait,” Diana interrupted. “Quinn clearly knows this, but I don’t. What happened?”

Delgado also looked curious. Nicole gestured them to a collection of overstuffed chairs in front of the picture windows, looking out on the sweep of the desert and the empty road approaching the ranch.

“So this was about two years ago,” she said. “The Seattle SCB broke up an illegal lab that had been trying to find a way to infuse shifters’ special traits—our healing ability in particular—into human test subjects. The experiments didn’t really work, and the results could be ... monstrous. Though not always. We rescued four healthy, beautiful wolf shifter kids, and I’m currently raising them with my husband Avery.”

Her face grew incredibly soft as she spoke. Coming back to herself, she added, “You’ll notice I’m holding myself back from pulling out my phone and showing you a million pictures.”

Costa met Diana’s eyes. Diana grinned. Costa held up one finger. Diana said, “How about just one picture?”

Nicole’s entire body language radiated relief and delight. She took out her phone. “Oh, no reception here?”

“No,” Costa said. “No cell service on the whole ranch, unless you get pretty high up in the hills, where you can sometimes get a signal.”

“Well, that’s okay. I’ve got my whole camera roll.”

The group of them dutifully cooed over a few pictures of Nicole’s husband, a handsome thirty-something man with floppy dark hair, playing with what looked like four adorable, fluffy husky puppies.

“I always wondered what made my sister go from not really caring about anyone’s baby pictures to spamming us in the family chat,” Nicole said. “And then these four came along, and all of a sudden I understood.”

“You’re really raising quadruplets?” Delgado asked. “How do you ever find time for ... anything?”

“It’s certainly been a challenge, especially since Avery and I both work.” Nicole put her phone away. “But I wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world. I think when you know, you just know, and I think Avery and I both knew right away that the kids were meant for us, and we were for them—perhaps even before we realized we were meant for each other.” She got up. “Now I’m going to go have a gander at the kiddo, and I’ll start working out a placement plan for her.”

When you know, you just know. Diana firmly told herself that the unhappy clutch in her chest at the mention of Emmeline finding a foster placement was just natural fondness for a small, helpless thing. She would have felt the same at letting go if she’d been helping take care of a lost kitten, she was sure.

Still, she didn’t quite dare meet Costa’s eyes. She didn’t want to see what was written there. Diana looked down at her cup of coffee, then up at Delgado, who smiled at her. Meanwhile, Costa turned his attention to Vic.

“So that’s Nicole’s part in this,” Costa said. “I know you came down because you thought you might have a lead on that card we found at the site.”

“Yeah, and I took the time to pick up something before I left.” Vic opened his wallet and slipped out a card. “Look familiar?”

He handed it to Costa. Diana leaned over to look. It was a white rectangle, business card shaped and sized, slightly discolored and foxed around the edges as if it had been carried around in a pocket or wallet. On the front, there was a stylized blue shape that Diana took to be an alligator or crocodile, jaws open and head curled around so it was looking back with its tail sprawling toward the edge of the card.

Costa flipped it over. In pencil scrawl, on the back of it there was a phone number (very smudged, as if it had been rubbed out and rewritten) and an even more badly smudged set of numbers in the bottom right corner reading, almost illegibly, 36/4.

“It does look like the same kind of thing,” Costa said. He handed it to Diana, who nodded. “Where did it come from?”

“It’s mine,” Vic said. He smiled lopsidedly. “Have you heard of the shifter underground fighting rings?”