Renegade Man by Parris Afton Bonds Read Free Book Online Page B

been absent from his life, he had conveniently forgotten that small,
arbitrary fact. The hell of it all was that she was unaware of the power he had
long ago delegated to her, however unwillingly. He had gone down fighting
against this extraordinary attraction like a sailor beguiled by a singing
mermaid.
    “How long have
you been watching?”
    “About twenty
minutes.” Her arms were wrapped around her sleek legs; her chin was nestled on
her knees. A smudge of dirt shadowed her cheek, and tendrils of hair escaped
her carelessly gathered ponytail, only to be trapped by the perspiration at her
temples. At her side, the Lab was napping, probably dreaming of chasing cats or
field mice. "Don’t you get claustrophobic or something, under the water
all that time?”
    He pulled back
his hood and tugged off his gloves. “If you do it enough, it becomes second
nature.”
    His ear, attuned
to the hum of the dredger’s engine, picked up an out-of-sync noise made by the
compressor. Just great, he thought, adding up the amount a new compressor would
cost.
    “Why do you do
it? Everyone says your chances of finding any sizable amount of gold on a
virgin claim are nil.”
    He plopped down
on the other side of her, propping his weight on his elbows. “That’s what they
said about finding oil in Baghrashi, where every reputable geologist had
insisted oil would never be found. Now the country is floating on the largest
pool of oil in the world. Like oil, gold is where you find it. But it’s more
than that, Ritz. It’s the gold itself. It’s always in the purest state. You can
dig it up when it’s been lying under the ocean for four and a half billion
years and its luster won’t have dimmed.”
    He realized he
was spilling his feelings to her, just as he often had more than twenty years
before. One thing he could say about Ritz, she was a damned good listener. His
gaze lowered from her attentive eyes to the valley created by her breasts,
exposed by the brown chambray shirt she had knotted at her midriff. Sweat
sheened her sun-pinkened flesh. Wanting, a phantom pain left over from earlier
days, ached insistently inside him and that same old song began playing inside
his head.
    How do you
forget a memory? he wondered. Now, when he looked back, he could see how his
young, carefree, careless love couldn’t have kept her his any longer. Time was
merciful enough to diminish pain... yet memory could still tug at the heart
when it passed through.
    She shifted
uneasily under his regard. “I came by to make my own apology. 1 was pretty rude
earlier this week.” She rushed on before he could reply. “I’m on my way into
town. Need anything?”
    He couldn’t
believe the chance fate had handed him. “Yeah, but I doubt you’ll be able to
get it on your own. If you don’t mind, I’ll hitch a ride in with you.” She got
to her feet and dusted off the back of her pleated khaki trousers. “I don’t
mind.”
    Her suddenly
closed expression told him that she hadn’t expected him to ride in with her. “Just
give me a moment to change,” he said easily.
    He wasn’t inside
his camper more than five minutes, but when he reappeared in jeans and a shirt
she was pacing back and forth underneath an old elm, her dog padding patiently
behind her.
    Jonah clapped on
his battered Stetson. “Ready.”
    She eyed his
shirt, the sleeves of which had been cut off at the frayed shoulder seams. “I
suppose.”
     Cupping her
cheek, he wiped away the smudge of dirt with his thumb. “You haven’t changed a
bit, Ritz. Still sporting a dirty face, aren’t you?”
    Her voice was
stony. “Let’s go.”
    While she drove,
she kept her mouth closed and her eyes on the road, and he in turn was able to
take his secret fill of her. Once she flicked a nervous glance at him. He only
smiled, but afterward he regretfully focused his attention elsewhere. From his
side of the Chevy, he could see a red-tailed hawk circling lazily on the
thermals that spiraled upward