Reckless Fortune, page 18
But wishes never were horses, Autumn knew. No matter how many times you tried to tell yourself you heard hooves.
He glanced over at her as she sat down on the shared rock they’d decided was their couch. And for a man who spent so much time behaving as if he was oblivious to the niceties of human interaction—at least, that was what he did back at Lost Lake—she knew by now that Bowie was far too perceptive. Especially where she was concerned.
Tonight, she didn’t want him delving any deeper.
“I’m trying to decide why it is I never had a big life plan like everyone else,” she told him as she settled on the rock beside him.
Bowie was turning hot dogs on his spit. “I think most people have a plan. Me, I knew I needed a little break from Lost Lake. I wanted to see the world some before I settled myself down in one particular part of it.”
“I know everyone else is filled to the brim with all that wanderlust,” she said. “But I guess I liked the world I found myself in.”
“You like it, sure, but you also want a tropical vacation away from it so much that you signed up for a random mail-order bride contest all the way up in the Alaskan interior.”
Autumn blinked. Crap. She kept forgetting she was supposed to be an ambitious reality show contestant. She wasn’t one. Not in the way she’d claimed she was. Not for the first time during this camping trip, Autumn really wished she hadn’t had the bright idea to tell such an obvious lie. Given the fact that she was clearly the worst reality show contestant of all time. Something Bowie never commented on directly, but she thought it was only a matter of time.
No matter how often she remembered to talk self-importantly about content. Or mutter a few incomprehensible things about branding, a concept she’d given exactly zero thought to in her notably unbranded lifetime, she suspected she really wasn’t convincing him.
Also she kept forgetting.
Because there was far too much to do here. She’d set all her traps and had found a bit of success. It was summer, as Bowie liked to remind her, and the wildlife was far more obliging because they hadn’t hunkered down for winter yet. They’d brought ample supplies with them, but Bowie was teaching her how to use his bow, and she’d found the fish appeared to like her gill net just as much as fish did down in Lost Lake. And, sure, she’d certainly gotten all kinds of prime content for the contest, but she knew that wasn’t what she was going to take away from this.
She kept telling herself that this was like any summer romance she’d ever read about or watched on television. It felt like this because it would end. If it was real, if it had staying power, it wouldn’t make her feel too hollowed out with joy to bear it, some days. There was no way that was sustainable.
And that wasn’t even getting into the sex stuff.
Because one day, when she’d processed everything that had happened here enough to be cool and sophisticated about it all, she was going to have to have a talk with her sisters. Not the talk, which she’d had with them many times over the years—not that she’d been a good resource on that subject, but she’d read a lot of books and lectured them extensively anyway. That was all behind them now, thank goodness. What Autumn needed to talk to them about was the way they talked about sex.
As far as she could tell, not one of them had ever had good sex in their lives. Not one, according to the stories they liked to tell her about their exploits. Because for all the carrying on about boys back in the day and men now, all the would-be lovers who chased them around, and all the nights they liked to sit around telling stories while sounding nonchalant and worldly, the tales they told didn’t have one iota of the electricity Autumn felt with Bowie.
Not one single spark.
She was beginning to think that was because they’d never felt it and as their older sister and self-appointed protector, she couldn’t let that stand. They had to know.
But she’d lapsed off into thinking about sex again, and he was handing her a hot dog on a stick like it was the greatest of delicacies.
She took hers, holding the stick in front of her like a Popsicle. “Here’s the truth,” she told him. “I know what I’m good at and it’s not the kind of thing most people find exciting. I was telling your sister that what I’m really good at is being a housekeeper. But every time I look around for that kind of job, what people really want is a house cleaner. And I’m good at cleaning. I like it.”
“I noticed.”
“Your house is much neater than I thought it would be,” she conceded. “I came prepared for squalor.”
“I’m pretty sure that was supposed to be a compliment,” Bowie said, his eyes dancing. “I’ll take it.”
“I find cleaning a house meditative.” Autumn mused on that as she took a bite of her hot dog. “I guess I could go do that. It’s honest work, and I like that. But I also know myself. I have a feeling that cleaning and recleaning the same houses would get old. I’m not afraid of hard work. But, you know. There’s hard work and then there’s fruitless enterprises for very little gain. I’m not a fan of those.”
“I don’t know anyone who is.” They ate in their usual companionable silence, which Autumn could read entirely too much into if she let herself, and then Bowie shifted beside her on the rock. “Maybe your problem is that you don’t think big enough.”
“You mean like opening my own cleaning company?” She chewed thoughtfully. “I’ve considered that at different points. Especially now that so many gated communities are popping up in the Bitterroot. You know those people don’t clean their own houses.”
“You said you liked housekeeping, not cleaning.”
“It’s true.” She leaned closer to him, wrinkling up her nose. “I think that in another life I was meant to be a grand lady in some stately home in England. You know. Ordering servants around and planning meals for twenty every night.”
“I can’t help you with stately homes,” Bowie said. “That’s not how we do it around here. But it seems to me that focusing on houses is the problem. What you need is an inn.”
“An inn?”
“You’d be a fantastic innkeeper,” he told her, as if he’d had the opportunity to judge a great many in his day. “You’re organized. You have a portable whiteboard. You like cooking, cleaning, and managing people. Seems like a good fit to me.”
Autumn opened her mouth to argue, but realized she didn’t really have an argument handy. Because everything he said was true. She did like all of those things. “You are . . . not wrong.”
“Here’s a fun fact,” Bowie confided in her, nudging her a little with the gloriously naked expanse of his arm that she found she enjoyed even through her layers. “I’m not often wrong. People don’t like to admit that. It ruins my mystique.”
“Do you have a mystique or a reputation?” she countered, though her head was still turning over that innkeeper thing. “I guess an innkeeper who has the bad luck to be without an inn is just . . . What? Destined for a sad motel somewhere?”
He gave her a reproachful look and another nudge at the shoulder to go with it. “That sounds like defeatist talk. You need to believe in yourself a little bit, Autumn. You only just this hot second discovered the purpose of your life. Maybe give it a minute to settle in before you throw in the towel.”
“I should build an inn right here.” She grinned at him. “All tents and mosquito nets. And hot dogs on sticks. I’ll have to turn them away in droves, assuming they ever find their way here.”
“If that’s your way of saying, Yes, Bowie, you sorted out my entire life and I owe you everything, how can I ever thank you enough? I accept.”
She shifted closer to him, tipping her face up so she could get closer to his. And again, the joy in her moved like a kind of madness, burrowing into her, hollowing her out. Like the only thing she could hold was this. Him.
But that was how she knew it wasn’t real. Because real life wasn’t tunnel vision. She knew that all too well. Real life was compromise, and settling, and all the things she’d watched her friends do over time no matter how happily they’d started out. It was fighting on holidays, cold silences, and sometimes, taking it out on the people around you. She’d seen all of that in her time, most of it in her own family, and she understood. That was real. And real was hard.
Still, here and now, this felt better than real. And she figured she ought to hold on to it—to him—as long as she could.
“Thank you, Bowie,” she said, with great solemnity to match the occasion. “For solving my life as only you could. Maybe when we get back to Lost Lake, an inn will magically appear.” She kissed him, then pulled back so she could get a little more of that dark blue. “Maybe it will be a traveling inn that can come with me wherever I go.”
“I think you’re going to have to let go of the tent idea,” he said, right there against her mouth, like these were love words. “Folks are picky. I’m pretty sure they like an inn that has walls to keep the critters out or really, it’s just camping.”
Then she stopped thinking about it, because he was pulling her into his lap and kissing her with that hunger that seemed to grow more intense every day.
Making their own light to match the endless summer.
And she didn’t feel realistic when she was kissing Bowie. She felt reckless and glorious. Autumn never wanted it to end.
* * *
• • •
But on the morning of their fourteenth day out by their own, private alpine lake, she woke up to find herself alone in the tent. That wasn’t necessarily unusual, though Bowie had showed a marked preference for waking up together, inventively. She pulled on her clothes and crawled out of the tent, shivering a little as she looked around because the morning was cool. She did her usual alfresco bathroom run, then walked out to the water to wash her hands. When she straightened, she saw Bowie standing down the beach near where he’d moored his plane.
She walked to him, thinking about another day in this paradise of theirs. She needed to check her traps. She still intended to do some tanning later in the summer and hoped that she might add to her collection of skins.
But when she got to Bowie, he was . . . different. Distant even though he stood right there.
Autumn knew in that moment. She knew.
He confirmed it in the next breath. “It’s time to head back.”
“I figured,” she said, though it cost her something to sound so casual when really, she wanted to cry. “We ran out of hot dogs two days ago.”
“We shouldn’t have stayed the extra week,” he said gruffly. “I do still have a business to run.”
And it felt like an accusation even though she knew, rationally, he hadn’t accused her of anything.
“Oh no,” she said, trying to sound like she was actually sorry instead of . . . epically not sorry at all. “Did we keep you from something?”
He turned then and she knew that look on his face. And she was even less interested in seeing it now. Now that she knew all the other things about him. All the things he could do to her. All the ways he was when they were alone.
God, she sounded like an overwrought teenager in her own head.
“Please don’t insult me by saying whatever it is you’re about to say,” she managed to say before he could start. “I’m not an idiot. You’ve made it abundantly clear that anything that happens between us is temporary. At this point it’s like beating a dead horse.”
“It’s not you,” he said.
He really said it.
“I know who it is,” she retorted. And all the things she didn’t let herself think about, all the feelings she kept at bay, all that terrible joy and the ache in her heart, seemed to roll up together inside of her. She wanted to cry, but she wasn’t a crier. She was the one who wiped tears away for others. Autumn drew herself up. “Because maybe you haven’t noticed, Bowie, but I’m fantastic.”
But that didn’t really give her the girl-power hit she was going for there, because Bowie only shook his head. “No one’s denying that. But that’s not the point.”
“Then what is?” She shook her head at him. “Because you act like someone who doesn’t want this to be temporary. Day in and day out. And yet every now and again, it’s like you suddenly remember—”
His gaze was a dark storm and she hated it.
“I like to think I keep my promises,” he said, as if the words hurt him as they passed his lips. “That’s why I don’t make many of them. When I do, they’re forever. And I knew I shouldn’t have let this happen, because it’s too tempting to break my promises with you.”
A terrible notion bloomed inside of her. “Are you married?” Something in her belly turned when his mouth flattened. “Are you?”
“Look,” he said, shoving his hands into his hair. “I accept responsibility for this. I don’t know why I thought I could cross lines with you then act like it didn’t happen. But don’t worry. It’s not going to affect this contest for you. It’s all over the contracts we signed. There’s no expectation of a relationship. All they really want is pretty pictures.”
“Bowie.” She didn’t scream his name and she would never know how she refrained. “You can’t actually think that you can spend two weeks with me, intimate in every possible way, and then not tell me whether you’re married or not when you start talking about keeping promises. You know that’s unacceptable, right?”
“I’m not married,” he bit out.
Her heart was still pounding. Her head hurt. “That’s a relief. Because I didn’t have adulterer on my bucket list.”
But it wasn’t really a relief. In the sense that she felt no easing of . . . anything, really.
Because all he did was nod. Then again, like he was taking blows. It was maddening. “I told you I take responsibility. I mean that. All you need to do is tell me what you need and it’s yours.”
“I mean, off the top of my head, I’d say sharing with me what promise you made that you must now dramatically keep would be a good start.”
He looked less like he was bravely fending off blows then, and more like he didn’t like her tone. “Everyone has secrets, Autumn. I don’t see how telling you mine is going to make this any better for you. Because it isn’t going to change anything. It doesn’t matter what I tell you. We’re going to go back to Lost Lake. You’ll either stay out the summer or you won’t.” He moved a hand in the space between them. “This? You and me? That’s done.”
Later, she thought, she might be grateful for the simple brutality of that. Because he was right. It didn’t matter what he said. She wouldn’t accept it. She didn’t want to accept it. So what was the point of arguing about it?
And suddenly, it became absolutely crucial that she not show him how hurt she was by this. It was okay if he thought it was her pride. But Autumn would walk off into the woods and feed herself to the bear population before letting him think for even one second that her heart was involved.
“Thank you for the clarity,” she said instead of all the things she wanted to say. “I’ll go pack.”
She was proud of the way she walked away from him, with her back straight and her head high. Not storming away, but not lingering, either. Like there wasn’t a single thing broken. Certainly not her.
Though she could admit, when she got back into the tent, that one of the reasons she’d been able to stroll away like that was because she’d been hoping he might call her back.
He didn’t.
Instead, they packed up their camp completely and stowed everything away on the plane. And much too soon, they were in the air again. Autumn had no choice but to stare down at that sweetly perfect lake, the high mountains in the distance, and face the fact that she would likely never see it again.
Stupid heart. It just kept breaking.
But she settled in for the flight and tried to get her bearings the way she always did. She stared out the window at the gloomy cloud cover while she tried to come up with a plan for how she intended to handle the rest of the summer. It was July now, but still early in the month. It was a long, long way to Labor Day.
“Bowie,” she said, even though she’d partly been planning to never speak to him again, “did you realize we missed the Fourth of July?”
And at first, she thought the blue streak he swore at that was some kind of veteran’s response to missing such a patriotic holiday.
But it quickly became clear it wasn’t. He was saying something into his radio, but then swore again, as if maybe the radio wasn’t working—
“Hold on,” he shouted at her, right before every instrument in the cockpit seemed to go wild and something loud happened entirely too close to the plane.
And then they plummeted from the sky.
Fourteen
The storm came from nowhere. That was the trouble with mountains, and with these mountains in particular. They were sneaky, and sometimes they hid, especially when storms rolled in fast. This one with too much lightning for Bowie’s taste.
Thunder crashed too loud and too close, a ruckus that only called attention to the lightning that hit them once. Then again.
Normally that would be fine, if not ideal. Planes were built to withstand lightning—but this time, the lightning got lucky and knocked out his instruments.
That shouldn’t have been a problem. Bowie was well trained. He knew how to fly by sight and feel, but visibility dropped dramatically. He had to roll the plane midair to try, belatedly, to get around the storm that suddenly seemed to have it in for him.
He spent more time than he should have trying to fight his way through the worst of it, but the worst of it kept coming.
