“That was nice of her.” Nick heard his own dull voice and bit into his cheek, trying to hold back the emotions.
“You sure you’re okay?”
He sighed.No.“Yeah.” He racked his mind for something else to talk about before he lost it. “Jacob told me his brother Mark is coming home soon.”
“Yeah?”
“No one’s seen him since his discharge from the Army,” Nick said.
“That’s right. A year ago.”
Should he relay to Sassy other details her cousin Jacob, a National Parks SBI special agent, had shared with him—specifically, about a possible human trafficking ring operating in the area? He thought of the dead woman in Dark Canyon Wilderness, about Fern and baby Gracie, Ava’s abduction… Glancing at the door to his room, he went through what had happened to Sassy over the last twenty-four hours…a near hit-and-run and a thwarted break-in.
He could easily believe what Jacob had told him. And he didn’t want it touching Sassy. He didn’t want it anywhere near her.
A curse blew through the quiet of the hall.
He frowned at the door. “Areyouokay?”
A pause. Then, “No.”
He rose to his feet. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing. I just… The zipper’s stuck.”
His feet planted in the thick carpet at the threshold of his room. She’d said something about changing when they’d returned home from the reservation. For her meeting with artists, many of whom she represented, she’d dressed in a flowing yellow maxi skirt with a purple chunky knit sweater over the top. She’d completed the look with a floppy wide-brimmed hat. By the end of the day, she’d managed to collect nearly a dozen pieces for the silent auction and had looked good doing it.
Nick knew how important the Colton fundraiser was to her. She wasn’t comfortable with the idea of generational wealth and enjoyed employing her family’s holdings to bring attention to the Indigenous and/or female artists she’d dedicated her life to championing. The money for the auction would filter back into the community, and the buzz the fundraiser would bring to Zephyr Gallery would benefit the artists she exhibited on a regular basis.
She grunted, clearly frustrated. He planted his hand against the wall, measuring the steps between his room and hers. “Need help?”
“Um…”
He waited. She’d been practically monosyllabic toward him after the visit to Ava and Chay’s place. As much as he’d loved watching her interact with the artists on the rez, he’d wondered over the clear verbal distancing. The quiet return journey to Dark Canyon had been markedly different than the ride away from it this morning, with their hands clasped and the radio at full blast.
“Yes,” came her hesitant reply.
He crossed the distance to her partially open door, parting it the rest of the way. Across the room, she stood before a full-length mirror. The chunky knit sweater puddled around her bare feet. Her hat lay upside down on the bed with Rogue’s large bottom overflowing the hollow bowl in its center. The cat flicked her tail irritably and narrowed her eyes on Nick as he froze in the doorway.
The sweater had been hiding the fact that the skirt was actually a dress—a sunny yellow sleeveless number that complemented the perfection of her warm copper skin.
His thoughts eddied, mind upending rapidly and emptying. The zipper was caught near the line of her waist. He could track the small round knobs of her spine. She held the bodice of the dress in place with her hands, eyeing him over one shoulder. When she shrugged, the movement of one wing-shaped shoulder blade made his mouth dry completely.
“I can’t get it over my hips like thisorover my head,” she pointed out, gesturing helplessly, “and I’m afraid to rip the back, because I just bought this dress last week and paid way too much for it.”
“It’s nice,” he said lamely, toes rooted to the floor.
She pivoted enough to get an angle on what was happening at the base of her spine in the mirror…enough for him to see that she’d shed the dress’s straps and the front of her shoulders and collarbone were bare, too.
His brain fried. It was the only excuse for the bolt of need that lit through him with all the devastation and intensity of a Saturn V rocket on the verge of implosion.
“The zipper’s teeth are caught in the fabric,” she noted. “Could you try prying it loose without tearing it?”
He spread his fingers on both hands apart and ignored the jarring protest from his injured one. Suddenly, they felt ungainly. He didn’t know what to do with them any more than he had when he’d hit his first growth spurt in junior high. Giving himself a good pep talk, he moved to her as she turned back to the mirror, gathering her long black tresses against the left curve of her slender neck.
Concentrate, Malone, he coached, tilting his head to get a better look at the culprit. The zipper had indeed tried to eat the dress’s yellow linen. “Hold still,” he said when she shifted on her feet.
The words came out rough, and she stilled. He saw gooseflesh pebbling across the surface of her back and closed his eyes. She was so beautiful. It wasn’t news to him. He’d realized it in eighth grade after he’d invited her to his house. They’d shut themselves in his room to work on a joint science fair project. He’d had the ideas. She’d had the artistic flair to make it come together in an attention-getting fashion the judges couldn’t possibly ignore. As they’d hunched over the trifold poster board on his floor, it had struck him.Shehad struck him—the way her smile dug into one corner of her mouth, the way she tucked her hair behind the shell of one ear, the slightly wide set of her eyes and the effervescent laughter that always lurked there, waiting to bring someone a smile.
