Rugged Fire [Rugged Savage Valley, Colorado 4] (3 page)

Seb’s words flew into Lianne’s ears and then clashed and clanked around in her head for a while. Their echoing clamor left her deaf for a long moment. She had to force her way through them, slashing through their confusion, shoving through their dense midst, until she found words of her own to answer.

“So…I’m not getting the money?” She clenched her eyes tightly closed. Disappointment washed over her, and it took everything she had not to crumple under the weight of it.

“You are getting the money, just not as much as you asked. We reviewed your proposal and had to make cuts where we thought costs could be reduced. We’ll send you the revised version via e-mail, and then if you’d like to discuss anything, we are always here.”

Lianne listened numbly to the rest of Seb’s instructions, but mostly, she felt an overwhelming sense of failure moving through her body. It was heavy and thick. It began in her gut and spread its leaden weight outward into her blood and her limbs until even the skin stretching over her face felt heavy with it.

When she hung up, Jamie had a concerned look on her face. “You didn’t get it?”

Lianne shook her head.

“Oh, no, sweetie!” Jamie jumped off the couch and ran over to hug her neck. When she pulled away, her sympathy had been replaced with anger. “Those bastards. You know, I
thought
they looked like a couple of arrogant pricks. When I went to open my checking account when I first moved here, they just stood behind the counter and watched everyone. And then the only time either of them spoke was to correct one of the tellers or something like that. I mean, they just give off this ‘I’m better than you’ vibe, you know? Gosh, I want to wring their necks!”

Lianne shook her head. “No, no. That’s not what I meant.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll figure out a way to get you this money. I don’t care who those jerks think they are,
I
believe in you, and
I
know that you are gonna start an awesome company and sell awesome Savage Valley honey products and then rule the world.” Jamie hugged her again.

Lianne sighed. “Thanks for your vote of confidence, but that’s not what I meant. I meant, no, they didn’t not give me the loan.”

Jamie jerked away. “Wait…what? Say that again?”

“They approved my loan, but only partially. I’m not getting the full amount.”

“But you are getting some?”

Lianne nodded.

“How much? Like, is it enough to get going still?”

“I don’t remember the exact amount. They’re going to send me an e-mail.”

“Lianne!” Jamie shoved her. “You scared me! I was ready to break their noses for you. But this is good news.” Hopping up from her kneeling position in front of Lianne’s chair, Jamie marched toward the kitchen. “We should cook up a big meal and maybe scrounge up a little
something, something
to celebrate.”

Lianne rolled her eyes. She knew that “something, something” was just a nicer way of saying Jamie wanted to go see the Yeats twins. Lianne had warned her to stay away from those two, but as soon as Jamie realized they had a bad-boy reputation, she’d latched herself on to them. Lianne suppressed a shiver. If only Jamie knew what they really were, she might not be so quick to bat her eyes at them.

Growing up in Savage Valley and being a cousin to one of the original families to lay claim to this land, Lianne knew just what kind of critters were lurking about. Her cousins Noah and Carter were bear-shifters. Noah had told her when she was seven years old, trying to intimidate her into doing something that would get them into trouble. When she wouldn’t do it, she distinctly remembered Noah puffing up his chest and saying, “Oh yeah, well, I’m a bear-shifter, and one day I’m gonna turn into a bear, and then I’ll
make
you do it.”

Lianne had, of course, tattled on him, thinking he was telling lies, but then her mother took her over to the Strongs, and they all had a family discussion about the history of Savage Valley and how bear-shifters came to exist. And nipping at the tail end of that shocking discovery came a second revelation—Savage Valley also had mountain lion-shifters. And that was what the Yeats twins were, lion-shifters.

Thinking about twins and shifters, Lianne’s mind drifted to her meeting that morning with Seb. She hadn’t mentioned to Jamie just how agitated she’d been throughout. It wasn’t nerves, though, that had made her squirm in her seat and dart her eyes away from Seb’s every time he held her gaze.

She’d had a crush on the Carson twins since she was approximately twelve years, three months, and twenty-six days old. She’d been walking along the creek out toward Noah’s house when she’d heard two laughing male voices. She thought it was Noah and Carter, so she headed toward them, assuming they had gone for a swim and intending to join them. When she rounded the bend in the creek, however, Seb and Will were both swimming in the nude in one of the deep pools. She quickly darted behind some shrubbery and watched them splash around in the water. They were six years older than her, and she had never seen a naked man before.

She didn’t know what that tingling in her lower parts meant, but she knew that she liked it.

After she’d been watching them swim around for a while, Will climbed out of the water, and Lianne gasped at the magnificent, frightening sight. But Will’s head snapped toward where she was crouching in the bushes.

“Who’s there?” he asked. She held still for a long moment, and eventually he’d shrugged and turned away. She’d never forgotten the sight of both of their big, muscled forms splashing and swimming so effortlessly in the water. In college, she hadn’t thought of them much, but the moment she’d stepped into the bank that morning, all of her old feelings came tumbling and rushing through her blood.

“Actually, Jamie,” she called to her friend who was still rummaging through the pantry and the fridge, “I think I’m going to head up to the attic.”

Jamie popped out of the kitchen. “The attic?”

“Yeah, I mean, just because I didn’t get the full amount, I can’t let something like that stop me, right?”

“Right. But what does that have to do with the attic?”

“Well, I was thinking that maybe if I got that cleaned up, I could make that into my lab. It’d be perfect in terms of ventilation and space requirements. And maybe if I can start doing some bulk orders, I’ll be able to raise the money for a store myself instead of relying on a loan.”

“Okay, yeah, maybe,” Jamie said, nodding. “But let’s at least have one little night to celebrate.”

“I kind of want to get started now. I want to start putting together a new cost projection chart with the attic scenario. Maybe I can have that ready for Seb by this weekend.” She pulled out a notebook where she kept ideas and written data from her leather case.

“Oh no,” Jamie whined. “You’ve got that crazed look in your eye.”

“Huh? Oh, sorry.” Lianne had already started working out some preliminary calculations. After she checked that e-mail from the Carsons, she’d have a better idea of what she was working with, but the attic might actually be a darn good idea.

“Well, if you’re going to be crunching numbers all night, I’m going out.” Jamie sashayed to her room, shaking her head. “One of us needs to have a life, at least.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lianne called after her, laughing.

A few hours later, after Jamie had headed to Catdaddy’s, Lianne thought she should go ahead and start going through the boxes up in the attic. She walked up the stairs to her room, put on some old sweats, and then pulled the ladder down from the ceiling. She crawled up, grabbed the closest box, and then brought it down to her bedroom.

Most of what she found was paperwork that she didn’t need anymore. She found all of her mother’s tax forms, plus various other receipts and documents that her mother had seen fit to keep. She also found a few boxes of her mother’s clothes. Lianne had donated most of her mother’s clothing to consignment shops after she passed away from cancer two years before, but there were about two boxes’ worth of things that she just couldn’t let go of—dresses or shoes or jackets that smelled of Lianne’s childhood, of being wrapped up and held by her mother’s deep, unrelenting love.

When she went back up to the attic for yet another box, she lugged an old yellow trunk toward the ladder. Her back was aching from all the lifting and ladder climbing, so she thought this one would probably be the last one for the night. After some maneuvering and a bout of panicked cursing when she thought the handle had broken, she got the unwieldy thing down the ladder.

She dragged it next to her bed and then opened it up. “Oh my goodness,” she whispered, sucking in a breath and running her fingers over the tops of dozens and dozens of notebooks. She pulled one out at random and flipped it open. Her mother’s handwriting scrawled its way from the top to the bottom. There were tiny ink illustrations and notes made in the margin.

Today I have vowed not to think of him. I didn’t remember his face when I made a sandwich for Lianne. I didn’t hear his laughter down the hall when I mopped the kitchen. I didn’t even imagine his hands on my shoulders while picking weeds from the garden. Tulips are his favorite, he once said. I think the garden looks cleaner without them.

Lianne quickly flipped through the crinkly pages, looking for a name, looking for more details. Her mother had never told her who her father was. She knew practically nothing about the man, but from a cursory glance, it looked like her mother had filled pages and pages up with him. She pulled out another notebook to see if it, too, had scribblings about her father.

On the first page, her mother had written, “
WARNING OF THE WITCH: If your hand did not write these words, your eyes will burn out of their sockets upon reading them now. Do not venture forth. You shall regret it.”

Lianne giggled. Her mother had loved her reputation as the local witch. In fact, Lianne was almost certain her mother had a considerable hand in propagating the witchy rumors. Only Lianne knew exactly what her mother was capable of. And it wasn’t spells or potions or curses or burning people’s eyes out of their sockets.

Her mother simply saw how people fit together. She had once described her unique talent to Lianne. She’d said it was like the world was a tapestry. People and places and time and events, all of them threads making up the whole world, and every person in it had been woven into a great unending mantle that stretched over the earth. Every person had a unique strand that fit into the greater picture in an infinitesimal, intricate way, and her mother told her that she had the ability to pick out patterns and colors in people to see how they best fit together. However, this skill meant that she came to be known as somewhat of a matchmaker.

The great disappointment of her mother’s life, though, was that the man she fit with best was what her mother referred to as a “loose thread.” He fit in one place one day and another the next. He’d spent three months with Lianne’s mother, long enough to get her pregnant, and then he’d vanished.

Lianne didn’t know his name, didn’t know what he looked like, and didn’t even know if he knew of his daughter’s existence. She’d long ago abandoned the idea of some day tracking down her father. He wasn’t anyone really, just a figment of her imagination that she’d concocted and pieced together from fiction, but with the possibility of what was inside her mother’s notebooks, she felt old longings stir up. What if there
was
some clue or link inside of them that would point her toward her father? Would she go after him? Would she leave it alone?

She flipped to the first page full of her mother’s elegant scrawl.

Had trouble with a grass stain in Lianne’s jeans. She must walk on her knees for fun during recess, but then I mustn’t blame a seven-year-old for finding pleasure in such diversions. As I cursed the little, darling stains, I was reminded of when he told me to quit with the damn laundry and walk around naked for god’s sake. Sometimes I smell him in Lianne’s hair and skin. It can be quite difficult to hug her good night when this happens.

Lianne blinked, ripping her eyes away from the words for a moment to absorb the unexpected discovery.
My skin smells like my father’s?
The revelation washed through her and filled her with an odd delight. She lifted her arm to her nose and breathed in. She held the idea against her chest. She treasured the newfound knowledge, tucked it in, looked at it with adoration for a long while, but then finally left it to rest, safe and warm. She delved back into the notebook with vigor. She read for hours, finding particular joy with the odd bits of advice her mother provided for any unsuspecting reader. Snippets like, “
One may succeed only when one attempts,
” or, “
Sadly, there are afternoons when sacrificing the nap proves necessary.
” Lianne’s favorite, though, was, “
The more one feeds the cat, the less he hunts the mice. Therefore, one should cease to feed the cat. He must learn the power of tooth and claw for himself.
”

Her mother’s odd advice began to feel personal. Like somehow she had known that Lianne would one day discover the notebooks and that she would need the advice. Lianne didn’t need handouts. She wouldn’t let a few small setbacks keep her from achieving the biggest, most important dream she’d ever had. She wouldn’t allow herself to feel daunted by the sheer overwhelmingness of the project. She was the cat, and there was no one to feed her. She had to figure this all out on her own.

Yet, in the back of her mind was the comforting knowledge that Seb had promised to help her if she needed it. She knew he hadn’t offered that help in vain.

If she needed him, she could have him.

“Why on earth do you two have your coats on?”

William frowned at the worried tone in his mother’s voice. He and Seb had walked into the annex only moments before, and the anxiety had already hit. Their mother, Miranda Carson, lived in the annex, and the second she’d seen them in their heavy jackets, she’d become worried.