Page 84 of Tempting as Sin
She smiled through milking Tinkerbelle, even though her face ached where it touched the goat’s side. And when Rafe came back with the basket of eggs, she let him milk Edelweiss and was glad for it. Glad to have him beside her for the walk back up to the house afterwards, too, helping her ignore the calls of, “Lily! Over here!”
They couldn’t have breakfast on the porch, which was a shame, and she wondered, as they finished up, how long the cameras would stick around. Surely not longer than today, not unless Antonio showed up again. The paparazzi would abandon Montana for a more target-rich environment. Unless…Her hand stilled in the act of lifting her coffee mug to her lips, and Rafe looked at her and said, “What?”
“I’m just wondering,” she said, “whether Antonio will come back. He hates to lose.”
Rafe snorted. “Him? Nah. Pussy,” and she had to laugh.
“Not everybody’s been bitten by a shark and a snake,” she said. “Not everybody’s Australian-manly.”
“And you know what we call those other blokes.”
“No. What?”
“Unfortunate.” He grinned. “He’s not coming back, and what could anybody else do to you? Nothing. Not anymore. You’ve got a shop that’ll be in the news, that’s all.”
She got off her stool and went into the living room, and Rafe followed her. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, kneeling beside Chuck and checking his incisions. “I think we can take off his cone. He still shouldn’t be running today, if we can help it. Tell Bailey to keep him on his leash, would you?”
She was unfastening the Velcro that held the cone to the collar. She was also wishing that Rafe wasn’t looking at her so closely.
“What?” he said again.
“Nothing.” When he kept looking at her, she said, “I’m a little unsettled, that’s all. I have this feeling like something else is going to happen. Crazy. What else could? I’ll be glad when the next couple days are over and we’re back to normal. You’re riding today, huh?” She wanted to ask him how much longer he’d be up here, but she didn’t.Take each day as it comes,she told herself.He’s here now.
“Yeah,” he said. “No rest for the wicked. Who knows what Jo has planned. Jumps, probably, trying to turn me into a steeplechase jockey, since I’m not actually grabbing the saddle horn anymore. Never mind. Challenge is good. Ever onward.”
“If you’re going running afterwards,” she said, “you should pick up some bear spray. I should’ve said that on Saturday. Especially if you don’t have Chuck with you. And make noise going around curves, all right? Grizzlies aren’t crocodiles, but if you surprise them, they can be scary. Black bears will run away. A grizzly might not, especially if she has cubs.”
“No worries,” he said. “I have the spray.”
“All right, then.” She wished she could rid herself of this niggling sense of unease. It was almost like when something was wrong with Paige, but it wasn’t that, she could tell. Too much change, that was all. She’d had her life down, had a routine, even if it could be a lonely one, and now she didn’t. She gave it up, finished unfastening Chuck’s cone, and said, “You’re free to fly, Chuck. Run with the wind. Except don’t.”
Rafe laughed, and they dropped the subject. And at nine-thirty, he left with Chuck in the back of the car, his head hanging out the window, since they’d found he barked less that way, and Lily decided to use her unexpected day off the way she should have used heractualday off. Laundry, cleaning house, and making goat cheese and a batch of raspberry jam, none of which would require going outside. Routine was good, and so was staying busy at something constructive. Let the photographers stand around in the rising heat. If they waited long enough, they could get a shot of Rafe coming back.
She was stirring sticky, bubbling magenta jam, brushing her hair back from her steaming face with one hand and thinking this would have been a better job for the evening, when her phone rang. She swore and let it ring. Once she had the jam in the sterilized jars, though, and had popped the tops on, she checked it.
Rafe. She’d probably missed him, darn it. It was nearly one. He’d have had lunch, changed, and started on his run already. He ran, he’d told her, two hours a day on the steep mountain trails, which was something Paige would probably do, too, but that Lily couldn’t even imagine. She called him just in case.
“Hey,” he said when he picked up. She was just about to ask about the lesson, but he spoke first. “Bailey never turned up.”
Something was happening in her chest. Her lungs, tightening in the familiar anxiety response, squeezing out her breath. Why? How was that a big deal? Bailey was an eight-year-old child. She’d found something more fun to do, and she didn’t have a phone to let them know.
Not Bailey.
“Before you ask,” Rafe said, “I have Chuck with me again, and I went by her grandmother’s place. I’m here now, in fact. Nobody home. I don’t see Bailey’s bike, either. Same car in the driveway, though, so maybe her grandma’s at a neighbor’s.”
“Without her car?” Lily said. “That seems odd. She didn’t seem like she walked much of anywhere. Including to the neighbor’s. And Bailey didn’t have her helmet. I should have bought her a new bike, and never mind going slow and not spooking her. One where she could reach the pedals better. If she fell off, without a helmet…”
She looked at her jars of jam, cooling in a roasting pan. She needed to clean this up, then finish her goat cheese, which was hanging in its cheesecloth from a rack near the sink right now, the whey dripping into a bowl. She’d planned to roll it in herbs. She also needed to do her hand washing, so she could hang it on the line once Rafe came back, since she didn’t want to go out there alone.
Except that she was grabbing her keys and her purse anyway. She never went out in her grubby clothes, and she sure didn’t go out with a bruised face and no makeup, but it looked like she was doing it anyway. “I’m coming down,” she said. “We should look for her. Just in case. It’s not like her at all. Is it?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not. I don’t have a great feeling either. But don’t come down. I’ll come up and get you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yeah. I do. Lily,” he continued when she would have said something, “it’ll take ten minutes, and at least one of those photographers is probably still out on your road. The only one who isn’t set up outside the store watching Martin have the time of his life, or interviewing the kid in the ice-cream shop. Besides, you’ll want to leave Chuck in the house. Much cooler.”
