All The Way. Beverly Bird

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      “Because I said so.” Liv groaned aloud. They were the very words she had promised herself she would never say to a child of hers should she be blessed enough to have one. Then she opened her mouth and they fell out, shattering like fine china on the restaurant table. Less than a minute after he had walked back into her life, Hunter was once again challenging everything she knew about herself.

      He stopped beside their table. One glance at Vicky and his midnight-blue eyes narrowed with speculation. No matter that Vicky was small for her age, that she could easily have passed for seven or even six. No matter that Hunter had every reason to believe she was Johnny Guenther’s daughter. Liv knew he’d figured it out that quickly—Vicky was his own.

      Her heart started pistoning. Tough as nails indeed.

      “Of all the gin joints in all the world…” Hunter’s voice trailed off. “Well, Liv. What were the odds of us running into each other again on the East Coast?”

      His voice had always reminded her of smoke. It had a way of sliding over her skin, of heating it to the point where she’d no longer needed promises. Liv grabbed her wineglass and downed half of its contents. “I was hoping for slim to none.”

      “Then you’ve turned into a gambler after all.”

      His words went through her like a knife that had been passed through flame. Liv was saved from answering by a group of Hunter’s fans.

      As soon as they recognized him, diners popped up from the surrounding tables like hyacinths in a May garden. They crowded him, holding out menus, napkins, a few prepurchased race-day programs. He signed each of them without a smile, accessible enough but keeping that look about him that she’d noticed on television. It said there was something inside him that no one would ever touch again.

      She knew what had changed him—or at least what he’d probably like her to think it was. Not you, Liv. You’re the only person who ever knew when I was gone. There had been anger and betrayal in his eyes when he had spoken those words to her, eight and a half years ago over a scarred oaken bar. But in the end, he’d gone.

      When Hunter handed a menu back to a diner who was surely going to have to pay for it, silence proved to be too much for Vicky. She swallowed the last bite of her chicken. “What are you, famous or something?”

      “Or something.” Hunter finally grinned for Vicky’s benefit. The curve of his mouth melted everything inside Liv as though the past eight and a half years hadn’t happened.

      “Are you a movie star?” Vicky asked.

      Hunter rested his palms on the polished surface of the table to lean closer to her. Liv felt something shrivel inside her as the man and child went nose to identical nose—then there were those same blue eyes, the same onyx hair, that stubborn thrust of both their jaws.

      Vicky did not look like Liv. And she didn’t look like Johnny Guenther at all. At least, Liv didn’t think so. She had never forgotten a plane or an angle of Hunter’s face, but she had a hard time recalling Johnny’s features.

      “Nope,” he told Vicky. “I drive cars.”

      “That’s not special.”

      “It is when you do it very, very fast.”

      She thought about it. “My mom never does that.”

      His eyes angled off her, to Liv. “Still methodical about getting where you’re going, Liv?”

      “I’m exactly where I want to be, thanks.” Her nerves were beginning to feel like cut crystal, painfully fragile under her skin.

      “Divorced?” His dark-blue eyes fixed on her ringless left hand.

      Liv let go of her wineglass as though a snake had suddenly appeared inside it. She dropped her hand to her lap, under the table.

      “And touchy about it,” he concluded.

      “Now that all the social niceties have been exchanged,” she replied, “you can feel free to go.” Her throat felt too tight for the words.

      He shot a brow up as though considering it, then he shook his head. “I don’t see that happening this time around.”

      It was a promise and a threat. Liv had never known him to hesitate to make good on either one.

      He straightened from their table, and she watched him stroll to one that had apparently been reserved for his party at the back of the restaurant. Those incredible blue eyes raked her one more time before he was seated. Liv took Vicky’s hand quickly.

      “Come on, honey. Let’s go.”

      “But I want dessert! That bread pudding—” Vicky broke off when Liv practically lifted her from the booth.

      “We’ll stop at an ice cream stand on the way back to the motel,” Liv promised.

      Vicky wrinkled her nose. “Oh, yuck, Mom. Please.”

      “For once—just for once—couldn’t you be a normal child?” But it wouldn’t happen, Liv thought helplessly, it could never happen, because her daughter had been born into a lie and, to Liv’s great despair, nothing in her life had ever been very normal at all.

      Chapter 1

      Friday, September 9

       Jerome, Arizona

      “What on earth possessed you?” Kiki Condor, Liv’s partner and cook, actually yelled at her for one of the few times in their long, long friendship. She grabbed Liv’s wrist and pried the remainder of a sourdough roll from her fingers.

      Liv let it go reluctantly. Without the distraction of the roll, she knew she was in trouble.

      Liv was a master at diverting conversations—six years of running a bed-and-breakfast and having various strangers troop through her home asking personal questions did that to a woman. The exceptions to the rule were Kiki and Hunter Hawk-Cole.

      “When you tempt fate,” Kiki continued, “you have to be prepared for it to jump up and bite you in the—”

      “Hush,” Liv warned quickly, automatically, but Vicky was out in the barn. The girl idolized her aunt Kiki, and she was never shy about repeating her words verbatim. Sometimes it was funny. Sometimes it had Liv trooping down to the school for parent-teacher conferences.

      Liv tried again to change the subject. “You know, something about that recipe needs work.”

      “And why are you just telling me now?” Kiki demanded as though she hadn’t spoken. “You’ve been home for five days!”

      Because she’d dreaded just this sort of reaction, Liv thought. She licked crumbs from her fingers. “Nothing has happened since we ran into each other. I haven’t heard from him.”

      Dig a hole over there, child, and dump the problem inside. Cover it up and walk away. It’s yours no more. More wise words, Liv thought, from her grandmother. She’d dug a hole when she had come home from Delaware, had kicked Hunter in there and had heaped dirt on top of him, and СКАЧАТЬ