Mountain Moonlight - By Jane Toombs Page 0,35

father. For not being there to applaud his successes or help him through his failures.

For neglecting him.

Unsettled by the direction his thoughts were taking him, Bram shoved them aside.

"How are your parents?" he asked Vala.

"My dad's still alive. Retired and living in Florida. Mom's been dead three years. I really miss her. She's the only one who supported my divorcing Neal. Dad thought I was giving up security for chaos. Which wasn't far from the truth for a while there. How about your mother?"

"She's living in California with her sister. My father died before I finished law school."

How, he thought, can you miss a man who was never there? A man you resented? Yet he did.

At last they came to the place where Pauline had told them the plants would be growing and found she was right.

As Bram grubbed for the roots, he said, "We did this backward. Should've done the digging first, then the bathing. Of course, we could stop on the way back...."

"In your dreams."

He put down the trowel, made a grab for her and kissed her so thoroughly he managed to get himself aroused. "Guess it'll have to be here, then," he murmured into her ear, only half teasing her.

"You are so bad," she told him, pushing away. "What's Pauline going to think when we come back with only two roots?"

"The truth, probably. I figure she deliberately split our search for the plants into two so she could send us off twice to be alone together."

Vala blinked, then nodded. "I should have realized that."

Her unconcern--she didn't care if Pauline knew they'd been making love--puzzled her. Meeting Bram again had turned her world upside down, no doubt of that. Proper Vala had shed inhibitions like leaves from a maple in the fall. And had fun doing it.

Although fun wasn't exactly the right word. Not even close, really. Making love with Bram was like nothing she'd ever experienced. It was so addictive that she kept wanting more and more.

"We can't keep on doing this," she protested when he reached for her again.

"Why not? Tell me you don't want me."

She'd have to lie to do that. About to succumb to the magic of being in his arms, she caught movement from the corner of her eye and froze, staring at a huge black and hairy spider no more than a foot away.

"Tarantula!" she cried, leaping to her feet.

Bram rose more slowly. "They're harmless."

"How can you say that when you know they're poisonous?" Vala kept her gaze fixed on the giant spider, now scurrying away from them toward a clump of cacti.

"If one does happen to bite you, it'd be no worse that a bee sting. Black widows are far more deadly."

She had no doubt Bram, an expert when it came to the Superstitions and what lived here, was right, but it didn't make her any less wary. "Tarantulas look dangerous," she muttered.

Poisonous or not, the spider's appearance put an end to even the thought of love-making in tarantula territory, at least as far as Vala was concerned. They finished gathering roots and rode back toward Pauline's singing a song from the time they were teens about flying away.

Vala felt as though she'd done that--flown away from who she was. A line from the song stuck in her mind, "...can't go back, never go back..."

She wouldn't want to. Bram had set something free she never realized she had. If she could just think about that instead of the trip ending and leaving Arizona. Leaving Bram.

"I remember listening to you play that tune on your guitar in the school parking lot," she said.

"Did you ever wonder if I was playing it for you?"

Vala laughed. "Joker."

"You're right. I was playing it for myself. To get attention. I wouldn't want to see Davis go down that road. The problem is to hold the attention, you have to get wilder and wilder, until you'd rather not remember what all you did."

"He won't be like that!"

Bram shook his head. "I hope not. My mother didn't think I would, either. She was and is a good woman who did her best." He didn't add that what he'd needed was a father, partly because he didn't want to reveal so much, but also because Davis obviously needed one, too.

Unfortunately, Vala could do nothing about the creep who'd fathered Davis and then refused to accept the kid. So what if your son didn't measure up to what you wanted? The important thing was to help him grow in ways