A Man of His Word Read online

  Impatient now to get to work, Sydney roused her crew. She used the drive out to Buck Sanders’s isolated ranchero to review her notes for the interview. Like Henry, Buck was a member of the Hopi tribe and could speak authoritatively on the farming and irrigation techniques their people had learned or stolen from the ancient Anasazi. That would fit right in with a central theme of Sydney’s documentary, which was to show the blending of ancient ways into modern culture as well as the mix of reality into myth.

  Under other circumstances, she would have begged an interview with Sebastian Chavez. His family had lived in the Chalo Canyon area for as long as anyone could remember. The proud blood of the Spanish and equally proud blood of the Hopi mingled in his veins. With his white hair, hawk’s beak of a nose and haughty bearing, he made the kind of visual impact that ordinarily made Sydney’s fingers itch for a camera.

  Now, just the thought of capturing him on videotape raised goose bumps.

  Could he hate her so much? Fear her so much? Had he tumbled that slab of rock into Canyon Rim Road in a deliberate attempt to harm her?

  The questions haunted Sydney as Henry guided her and her crew over narrow, dusty back roads. Finally Buck Sanders’s place came into view. Tucked under an overhang of granite, the adobe ranch house looked exactly like what it was—a small, working homestead. They’d shoot outside, Sydney decided. Take advantage of the natural light and great visuals.

  She made it a point to conduct interviews on the subject’s home ground whenever possible. She wanted them to feel comfortable, without the constraints that too often inhibited them in a studio or an artificial set. That meant lugging extra lighting from location to location, of course, but the results generally justified the extra effort.

  Generally.

  Today might prove the exception. Despite Sydney’s best efforts to put the taciturn Buck Sanders at ease, he couldn’t relax. He kept a death grip on his coffee cup, looked straight at Sydney instead of the camera, and waited for her questions, which he answered with as few words as possible. The result was a stiff, stilted interview and several hundred wasted feet of videotape.

  She had better luck with Joe Smallwood. Bright-eyed and leathery from his years under the Arizona sun, he spat out a chaw and waxed eloquent about the irrigation ditches that had delivered precious water from upriver to the mesa above the ruins more than a thousand years ago.

  “Those ditches run some twenty, thirty miles,” he ruminated in his tobacco-roughened caw. “Folks ’round here were still using stretches of ’em before the Chalo River dam went in.”

  She’d have to get some footage of the dam, Sydney thought as she and her crew drove to the next location. Maybe she’d tie the massive structure to both the drowning of the Anasazi village and the salvation of the farmers who came after them. The Bureau of Reclamation could probably dig some stock footage of the dam’s construction out of its archives for her.

  Or…

  She could ask Reece for a private tour of the structure. That would give her the opportunity to observe him in action, maybe help her understand this project that consumed him almost as fiercely as Sydney’s did her. She would talk to him tonight, she thought with a shiver of anticipation, about shooting some footage at the dam.

  Among other things.

  It took a surprising effort of will to blank those other things out of her mind and prepare for the afternoon’s interview. Luckily the hollow-cheeked retired schoolteacher-turned-eccentric needed little prompting to talk about the Weeping Woman. Laura Brent closed her eyes, transporting herself from a living room crowded with knickknacks and photographs, not to mention floodlights, cameras and sound equipment, to a place inhabited only by her imagination.

  “I hear her often,” she murmured. “Whenever the wind blows from the north and she cries for her lost love. Some say she was Zuni, stolen away from her home to the north. Yet the words, the lament, are Hopi.”

  Her voice rose, thinned.

  “Aiiiiiii. Eee-aiiiii.”

  It was the cry of the wind, the wail of a desperate woman. With all her heart, Sydney prayed Albert was getting this.

  “I heard her the week after I lost my husband to a perforated ulcer,” Laura said sadly, as if the long-ago event had happened just yesterday. “She cried for me.”

  “This is good,” Albert muttered as he played with the levers and dials on his unit. “This is good.”

  Better than good, Sydney thought exultantly. It was great. The sound take echoed the one they’d recorded in the canyon the other night with uncanny precision. During the postproduction editing process, Sydney would cut from Brent’s bright living room to the dark cave. Juxtapose the modern woman with the ancient one. Synthesize recent grief with ancient heartbreak.

  She was still on a high from the great visuals and audio when the crew set up in the motel’s lobby for the interview with the Jenkins sisters later that evening. The two women turned out for the shoot in their Sunday best. Adorned in squash-blossom necklaces and elaborate earrings, they made a study in contrasts. Through the camera lens, Lula came across as plump, dark-eyed and ready to dish out a healthy dose of laughter. Martha appeared thin, nervous and twittery.

  While Albert ran sound checks and Tish adjusted the lighting, Sydney chatted with the two subjects. They talked about the weather and the unseasonable rain, about business at the motel, about the ingredients in Lula’s own brand of steak marinade. Sydney didn’t hesitate to use audiotape lavishly in these preinterview sessions. Often she got plenty of good sound to use as off-camera fill if the on-camera interview went badly.

  When she sensed the sisters were comfortable, she surreptitiously signaled Tish to start shooting. Caught up in their dialogue, Lula and Martha didn’t realize they were being recorded on videotape. Slowly, imperceptibly, Sydney withdrew behind the glass shield that separated her from her subjects. Sitting off to one side, content behind her invisible wall, she listened while they poured out tales composed of equal parts gossip, personal accounts and dubious historical fact. Hands moving, heads nodding, they spoke of their ancestors. Of the town of Chalo Canyon. Of the Weeping Woman.

  Following their cue, Sydney eased into her role as interviewer for a moment. “Do you remember when you first heard about the legend?”

  Martha cocked her head. “Seems like I’ve heard about the Weeping Woman all my life.”

  “All your life? From the time you were a small child?”

  “Well, I’ll have to think about that….”

  Lula jumped in at this point. “I don’t! I know the very day I first heard about the Weeping Woman. It was thirty-six years ago.”

  “How the heck can you remember that?” her sister demanded. “You can’t even remember to let the dog out in the morning.”

  “That’s now. This was then.”

  With that somewhat confusing but firm declaration, the younger Jenkins sister launched into her tale.

  “Sebastian told me the story one night when he stopped in for a beer, ’bout six months after his wife ran off. He was red-eyed with fatigue and with carin’ for his ranch and the boy. We talked about cattle prices and the hay crop and the fierce wind that whistled through the canyon. He went all bitter and hard when I said it sounded like a woman wailing, but before he left the café he unbent enough to pass on the story of the Anasazi woman that his grandfather had told him.”

  Sydney leaned forward, her heart pounding. Sebastian was the original source of the legend? Damn, she wished she could interview him.

  “I sure never wanted to trek down to the ruins again after he told me how that poor woman jumped out of the stone tower,” Lula added, grimacing. “Then the dam went in, the canyon flooded, and the Weeping Woman became part of local lore.”

  Martha appeared struck by her sister’s account. “You know, I believe you’re right.”

  “I know I’m right. I always am.”

  “Ha!” The elder Miss Jenkins shattered the glass wall by appealing directly to Sydney. “As
k her who was right about that Buick she insisted we buy? The thing ended up in the junkyard less than a year after we drove it off the lot down in Phoenix.”

  “If you’d ever learned how to drive,” her loving sister retorted, “it would have lasted a sight longer.”

  Wisely, Sydney stayed out of the heated debate that followed. She terminated the interview some moments later, not that either sister noticed. The Jenkinses were still arguing over who ran the Buick into the ground when the crew packed up their equipment and left.

  Agreeably tired from the long day, Sydney trailed out of the lobby a moment later. She found Henry outside under the café’s awning, with his chair tipped against the motel wall and his face turned up to the darkening sky.

  “Thanks for coming with us today,” she told him with a grateful smile. “I doubt if I could have found Buck’s ranch on my own.”

  “You would’ve found it, Little Squirrel.” He pushed to his feet. “You have the heart to always find your way. So,” he added, glancing over her shoulder, “does he.”

  Sydney spun around. When she spotted Reece climbing out of his Jeep, his hair and eyebrows coated with a whitish dust, the heart Henry had just referred to started knocking against her ribs.

  Reece didn’t notice her and Henry under the awning. His stride long and swift, he headed toward his room.

  After a quick goodbye to Henry, Sydney did the same.

  Chapter 12

  R eece closed his room door behind him, fully intending to honor his promise to Sydney to take things slow.

  He’d spent the past fifteen hours struggling to douse the simmering heat that rose under his skin whenever she slipped into his thoughts. With the noise and distraction that came with blasting away three thousand cubic yards of concrete, he’d pretty much managed to keep her firmly at the back of his mind.

  Gritty and bone-weary after all those hours in the heat and the sun, he’d climbed into his Jeep for the long drive back to town. Only minutes after the majestic curve of the dam disappeared from the rear-view mirror, Sydney had pushed right to the forefront of Reece’s worries.

  Deputy Sheriff Martinez had called earlier to confirm that his people had delivered the sample slab of sandstone to the Department of Mine Engineering’s metallurgy lab in Tucson. Reece himself had contacted Jan Kingsley, who promised to get the sample under the electron microscope within the next twenty-four hours.

  In the meantime…

  Reece smiled grimly, crinkling the grit at the corners of his eyes. In the meantime, he and Sydney would slow down, temper the heat that sizzled between them, find the balance between her schedule demands and his. Learn more about each other. He’d take time to understand the artistic vision that took her down into a canyon with thirty pounds of equipment on her back, maybe even share a few more laws of physics with her.

  Like the inclined plane.

  And the simple lever.

  Groaning, Reece banished the instant, erotic image of her inclined and him levering. How in blazes he was going to manage slow escaped him at this moment, when all he could think about was a hot shower, a cold drink, and Sydney in his arms.

  That question came to the fore when she pounded on the connecting door between their rooms just moments later. She smiled up at him, her face almost as dusty as his, her hair a wind-tossed mass of mink under a red L.A. Dodgers ball cap.

  Instantly, his priorities rearranged themselves. To hell with the cold beer, he decided on a surge of need. It would probably just mix with all the dust he’d swallowed today and harden into concrete in his stomach. And the hot shower could wait. The feel of this woman in his arms couldn’t. Not for long, anyway. Particularly when her smile delivered the same wallop as the roughhouse punches he and his brothers used to lay on each other.

  “Hi.”

  The simple greeting contracted Reece’s stomach. “Hi.”

  “How did it go today?”

  “We hit the inner core in the lower-right quadrant.”

  “Is that good?”

  He grinned. “Very good. We expected that it would take at least two days to expose the core, but the contractor had a real pro setting the charges.”

  “So they’re done blasting?”

  “Looks like it.”

  He knew what was coming before she slanted him a quick, speculative look.

  “Does that mean I can take my crew back down to the ruins tomorrow?”

  Reece hesitated, reluctant to break the unwelcome news that more violent thunderstorms were headed their way. The Upper Colorado region had already received record rainfalls for the year. From all indications, the Lower Colorado basin would soon do the same.

  Spurred by the latest forecasts, the subcontractor had performed the near impossible and finished the blasting in a single day. Now all Reece had to worry about was the possibility of flash floods raging through the canyon and taking out his crippled dam, not to mention Sydney and her crew.

  “Why don’t we talk about schedules after I clean up?” he suggested.

  She eyed him suspiciously, probably guessing that he was the bearer of bad news, but didn’t push it. “Okay by me. I’ll get a couple of beers from the café. You look like you could use something cold and wet.”

  Just in time, Reece bit back the observation that he was far more interested in something warm and wet. Like her lips. Or the curve of her neck. Or any part of her she wanted to make available.

  “You,” he announced instead, sliding a palm around her nape, “are a woman of remarkable intelligence and perception.”

  “You’ve noticed that, have you?”

  Her smug little smile almost destroyed what was left of his control. It took a severe effort of will to keep the pacing deliberate, the touch light.

  Just one taste, he told himself as he lowered his head. A small sampling.

  The moment his lips covered hers, Reece knew one sampling wouldn’t be enough. She smelled of wind and woman, of sunshine and Lula’s special brew of supercharged coffee. Her mouth shaped instantly to his, as though she’d learned the angle of his jaw, the contours of his face.

  Despite his clamoring body’s protest, Reece managed to keep to just the one kiss. When he pulled back, she gave a shaky little laugh.

  “You taste like cement.”

  He cocked a brow. “Have you ever tasted cement before?”

  “No, but there’s a first time for everything.”

  “So they say.”

  The small blue vein in her throat drew both his gaze and his touch. He edged his thumb down the faint line, felt her pulse fluttering under his thumb pad.

  “Maybe they’re right,” he murmured.

  This tight, driving need was definitely a first for Reece. Lying awake, listening to the whistle of the wind last night, he’d gone over every minute of those hours in the ruins. By the time he’d dragged himself out of bed, he’d almost been convinced that he’d imagined his grinding need. That Sydney hadn’t arched under him and exploded in that shattering release.

  Now he knew he hadn’t imagined anything. Her blood pulsed under his thumb. Her skin felt like satin under his touch. God, he wanted her. Needed her the way a chocaholic needed his sweet, dark fix. The hours he’d spent with her had drowned his doubts, his half-formed, almost subconscious disdain for the woman everyone in Chalo Canyon had painted as a homewrecker.

  An engineer down to his steel-toed boots, he was still trying to measure her impact on his internal Richter scale when she backed away. To Reece’s immense satisfaction, her breath came as hard and fast as his.

  “I’ll…I’ll get the drinks,” she gasped. “Pound on the door when you’re ready.”

  He was ready, more than ready, even before he stepped into a cool, stinging shower. Slow, he reiterated through gritted teeth. They were going to go slow. Even if it crippled him, which seemed a definite possibility at this point.

  He soon discovered that Sydney’s definition of slow differed considerably from his. She answered his k
nock fifteen minutes later with a dew-streaked bottle and a kiss that completely destroyed the effect of his cold shower.

  Twenty minutes later they tumbled onto her bed, naked and panting.

  “I thought about you all day,” she admitted between hard, hungry kisses. “You got in the way of my shoot.”

  Since her tongue was busy exploring his ear at that point, Reece ignored the faint but unmistakable accusation.

  “I thought about you, too, between detonations.”

  “You did, huh?” Her breath fanned his ear, hot, damp, incredibly arousing. “Why don’t we see what we can do to set off a few more explosive charges?”

  Her tongue got busier. Instantly Reece got harder. Groaning, he hunched a shoulder. Wrapping both hands around her waist, he slid her down a few inches. The friction of her breasts on his chest, her hips on his pelvis, set off more than just a few explosions. The ache that had started low in Reece’s belly grew hotter, tighter, wilder with each taste, each teasing, wondering touch.

  In the dimness of the ruins yesterday, she’d set him on fire. In the puddle of light thrown by the lamp beside the bed, she was gloriously greedy in her want, spectacularly generous in her giving. He dug his hands in the dark hair that spilled over her shoulders, lost himself in the damp, smooth heat of her mouth.

  They were both slick with sweat when Sydney slid a leg over his and rose up on her knees. Yesterday he’d pleasured her so thoroughly, so skillfully. Today, the urge to do the same brought her upright, her hands on her thighs, her hips straddling his.

  Her throat closed with the sight of him stretched out beneath her, his muscled shoulders bunched and tight, his chest matted with sworls of black hair. Those lean hollows and flat planes could only come from hard labor and rigid discipline. This was no weekend jogger, no desk man with privileges at an exclusive spa. He lived as he worked, she suspected. Rigorously. Strenuously.

  But it was his eyes that transfixed her. Blue, fierce with hunger, dark with anticipation as she eased onto his rigid shaft.

  When they joined, he sucked in a sharp breath, holding himself still while she slid down his length. Slowly, so slowly, she lifted. Came down. Rose again.