Kady was tempted. Very tempted. But she knew better than to turn her troubles over to this man. Some sixth sense made her refuse to tell him anything because she didn’t want her life involved with his. She just wanted to go home and never see this man again.
“You’re the boy in the photo?” she asked, trying to divert his attention. Maybe if she could get some answers from him, she’d find out why she was here.
“Yes,” he said, his jaw stiff, as though he didn
’t want to speak of that.
His attitude made Kady curious. “Is this your mother’s wedding dress?” she asked softly.
“I don’t know, I wasn’t at her wedding.”
In spite of her dilemma, Kady laughed, and the man smiled back. “I bet your sister grew into a real beauty.”
The man didn’t say anything for a while, then slowly withdrew the photo from the envelope. “No one will ever know. She was killed when she was seven years old.”
Kady drew in her breath sharply. “I’m sorry. I . . .” She looked down at the dress and remembered how she’d thought that the woman in the photo looked so happy. “Your mother—”
“Dead too,” the man said coldly, then looked up at Kady, his eyes hard, still full of misery after all these years. “This photo was the last one taken. Just days later there was a robbery at a bank in Legend, and as the thieves rode out of town all the good citizens of Legend opened fire.”
As Kady watched, his lips curled into a sneer. “When the smoke cleared, my sister and my best friend were dead. My father and grandfather rode out after the robbers, and two days later they too were dead. My mother died the next year of grief.”
For a moment Kady could only look at him in stunned silence. “I am so sorry,” she managed to whisper. “That’s why you hate guns, isn’t it?” she said, and the man nodded curtly.
Kady knew that this tragedy had something to do with why she was here. But that thought made her even more determined to return to her apartment, to go back through the rock and get out of whatever entanglement there was here. Standing, she walked to the edge of the path, then looked back at him.
“I need to find the petroglyphs,” she said softly. “Do you know where they are?”
“There are lots of Indian carvings in these mountains,” he answered. “You could hunt the rest of your life and not find them all.”
“But I must find them!” she said passionately. “You don’t understand. You understand nothing.”
“I am willing to try to understand if you’ll just tell me what is so important about a bunch of Indian carvings.”
Kady’s hands were in fists at her side. She was not going to start crying again. “I was born in nineteen sixty-six,” she said fiercely.
“But that would make you only seven years old,” he said, puzzled.
“Not eighteen sixty-six. Nineteen sixty-six.”
As she looked at him, several emotions played across his handsome face, a face tanned by the sun and years spent out-of-doors. “I see,” he said at last.
“I see that you don’t believe me,” Kady said, her mouth tight. “Not that I expect you to believe me.” She glared at him. “What are you thinking? That I escaped from an insane asylum? Are you thinking of locking me up so I can’t harm anyone? Are you—”
“You’re not very good at reading thoughts, are you? I was thinking that no matter when you were born, right now you need someone to take care of you. You need food and shelter and something else to wear. I think you should marry me, and I’ll—”
At that Kady began to laugh. “Men are always the same, aren’t they? Their solution for everything is to go to bed with them. A night of fabulous sex will make all the woman’s problems go away.”
The man was frowning, his eyes almost angry. “If sex was all I was after, I could have taken that from you before now. There’s no one here strong enough to stop me.”
That statement wiped the smile off Kady’s face. She turned away from him and took a step down the path. But she hadn’t gone far when his voice stopped her.
“I’ll take you into town,” he said, and she could tell by his tone that she had hurt his feelings. Her mother had told her to never laugh at a man’s proposal of marriage, no matter how ludicrous she found it.
She turned back. He was still sprawled on the rock, his eyes on his father’s watch, winding it, acting as though nothing had happened, but she could tell that she had offended him.
“I apologize,” she said, moving to stand near him. “You have been nothing but kind to me, and I owe you. It’s just that—”
Abruptly, he stood, and the size of him made her stop talking. He towered over her five feet two inches, and, besides, something about a corseted dress made a woman feel ultrafeminine.