Conquer the Memories Read online

  “It’s not as if anything has to be decided this week,” she agreed, and yawned helplessly, sleepiness stealing over her like a silken web. She didn’t really object to the thought of a few weeks of doing absolutely nothing for a change. Still, there was a curious note in her voice. She had been so sure Craig would approve of the project, and instead he’d practically jumped in to quash it.

  She smelled warm and feminine and soft, snuggling closer to his warmth. Craig’s eyes blinked open in the dark, unseeing, his jaw oddly tight. He forced himself to relax. Sonia was never going to be content just sitting home for long; he knew that. To keep her down hadn’t been his wish at all, and never would be. But there were a dozen protective eyes on her at the ranch; the idea of her gone all day, vulnerable, among strangers…“Not that I want you to get bored,” he whispered. His lips pressed into her hair. “I’m going to the site in the morning. Think you can wake up early enough to come with me?”

  “Certainly. Except that you’re not going to the site tomorrow. Craig, it’s still too soon, you’re not-”

  “About eight. You haven’t been out there in a long time.”

  She sighed. She hadn’t accompanied him to work in a long time, primarily because he was so busy there that he barely had time to breathe. She could hear the implacable note in his voice, though, and thought fleetingly that if she went with him she could at least make sure he didn’t become overtired.

  “You want to go?” he asked.

  “I’d love to go.”

  “You’re not going to be cranky if I wake you up that early?”

  “I am never cranky in the morning,” she informed him.

  He chuckled. “Sleep,” he urged her. “I love you, little one.”

  Sonia slid a knee between his, settled her arms loosely around his waist and tucked her head just under his chin. No human being could possibly sleep that way for an entire night, but she couldn’t sleep at all if she didn’t start out that way.

  Craig did his part in the nightly ritual, arranging the comforter to her chin, then sliding his hand slowly down her back to her bottom, where his palm rested on the curve of her hip. Against her stomach, like a warm surprise, was the feeling of his throbbing and most intimate arousal, nurtured by nothing more than the physical closeness between them.

  In time, he fell asleep. Sonia cuddled contentedly, waiting for the darkness to claim her as well. Part of Craig remained distinctly unsleepy, still pulsating against her, making her half smile. And then not. Before the attack, she thought fleetingly, a cracked rib wouldn’t have stopped his making love to her. Nothing had ever stopped his making love to her, almost from the first moment he’d met her. Until now.

  ***

  Groggily, Sonia wandered into the bathroom, flipping on the faucets for the shower as she wrapped a turban around her hair. Waiting for the water temperature to warm, she was terribly afraid the nice, sleepy euphoria was going to fade the instant she stepped under the pelting spray.

  The ominous premonition proved true as she closed the sliding glass door and felt the pulsing hot water rush over her flesh. Her eyes even opened-a miracle. Through the cloudy glass, her eyes registered all the pale blue and silver features of “her” bath…she could hear Craig’s disgraceful baritone coming from the “his.”

  She was the one who’d thought that “his” and “her” bathrooms were critical when they were designing the house. After all, how long could romance last when one had to brush one’s teeth in front of one’s mate and have an audience for putting on makeup? Not to mention that she had a longtime habit of hanging out her pantyhose to create an obstacle course.

  “Sonia? Are you finally up, sleepyhead?”

  In principle, next-door bathrooms were a good idea. Except that Craig had modified the original architectural plans when they’d put the shower in. “No,” she murmured grumblingly.

  A glass door slid open behind her. Not the shower door that she’d just closed, leading into her bathroom, but the glass door that divided their individual shower stalls. Suddenly, there was nothing dividing their individual shower stalls; and one very naked, very wide-awake man with wicked dark eyes aimed a hand shower sprayer in her direction, attacking her unmercifully until she was gasping.

  “Feel more wide awake?” Craig said mildly. “It’s really much easier if you get it over all at once.”

  “Did you hear me asking for advice? You know, if we ever have a two-year-old, he’s going to feel right at home with you.”

  “You look beautiful.”

  “I haven’t had my coffee.”

  “Coffee couldn’t possibly make you look more beautiful. Sonia, you are delectable in the buff,” Craig said gravely.

  Color touched her cheeks, and a small smile curled on her lips. “Why can’t you just let me be mean and cranky in the morning? Why do you always have to put me in a good mood?” she complained, switching off the faucets as Craig shut off his. Dripping, Sonia brushed deliberately against him on the way out of his shower door, and reached for one of his towels.

  That was the other problem with the “his” and “her” bathrooms. Hers was a waste; it was never used. His toothpaste was better, too, and she’d gotten into the habit of stealing his shaving cream when she shaved her legs. Worse than that, she’d unfortunately become addicted to watching the way he vigorously rubbed his hair dry with a thick towel. And besides, she’d stocked his red-and-gold bath with huge, luxurious scarlet towels, twice the side of those on her side. With his towel wrapped around her, she squeezed his blue-and-white toothpaste onto her toothbrush, which inevitably seemed to be in there anyway.

  “Think you can actually be ready to go in about half an hour?” Craig asked her.

  “No problem,” she promised him.

  She watched in the mirror as he took the towel off his head and leaned with both elbows on the marble counter, regarding her as she brushed her teeth. “Before we were married, I swore I’d never do this in front of you, you know,” she told him.

  “You were always modest about the silliest things.”

  “Turn your head.”

  He did, deftly removing her thick scarlet towel at the same time. In all her naked dignity, she escaped to the bedroom a few minutes later. Ten minutes after that, she was dressed. A short-sleeved black crepe blouse tucked into a black-and-white checked skirt; red sandals, red button earrings and a red silk rose on her lapel finished the outfit. She flicked on mascara, whisked blusher on her cheeks and smoothed on cherry lipstick-all the makeup she ever wore. She might not be awake, she mused, but her husband was still fooling around with shaving cream.

  She wandered promptly toward the smell of coffee.

  The kitchen was positively drenched in sunlight. Cheerful yellow beams danced on the old Spanish tiles and on the fireplace in the breakfast nook. She closed her eyes, inhaling the aroma of coffee like an addict deprived of his fix, then took the first sip and wandered out of the dazzling brightness with the cup in her hand. One could only take so much cheerfulness this early.

  Now, now, you’re in a better mood than you’re letting on, she chided herself absently. Darn it, you like being married to that man.

  So what else was new?

  She paused in the doorway to the living room, still sipping her hot brew. The cathedral ceiling gave the room an airy feeling. She’d furnished it with big overstuffed furniture in cream, not at all a practical color for a ranch-but then, they half lived in the kitchen and Craig’s den. Eight feet up, a narrow lanai ran along the inside walls; dozens of hanging plants spilled down from that. They were the absolute devil to water, but no arguing from the team of Craig and Charlie could make her give them up. Rugs and wall hangings in brilliant Indian and Spanish patterns added color that caught the morning sun…primarily because they’d put so many windows in the room. More cheerfulness, she thought wryly.

  From those open windows, she had an inspiring view of the mountains, all smoky in the distance this morning. The rain last night,
so rare for June, had drenched all the shrubs and greenery she’d planted a few years before. She needed to cut some roses and bring them in, she thought absently. And knew that it wasn’t the morning that was making her grumpy, but worry that Craig was overdoing it by going back to work so soon, even if it was only for a few hours.

  “Ready?”

  She whirled. He could not have looked healthier, her husband in his conservative white shirt with navy-and-gray patterned tie. A suit coat hung over his arm, matching his gray pants. He had on his tough go-to-work expression; a no-nonsense attitude radiated from his lithe stride. At least until his eyes appraised her from head to toe.

  “Now, black and white is very conservative,” she informed him.

  “Not on you.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “You’ll draw eyes,” he said flatly. “In the next life, I’m going to marry a little mouse with a sunken chest who wears only brown.”

  She chuckled. “Don’t kid yourself, sexy. You’re not going to be rid of me in the next life, either. Not by a long shot.”

  “You’ve obviously had your coffee.”

  “In the next life, I’m the one who’s going to wake up nice and cheerful. You’ll be the meanie.”

  “You’ll still be stuck with me,” he said wryly, and swung an arm around her shoulder as they headed for the car.

  It was an hour’s drive to the construction site. Anticipation increased in Sonia as they neared the project. She hadn’t been there in months, not only because Craig had been involved in meetings in Washington, but because a site where shale oil was being extracted was hardly the most natural place for a woman to be, unless she wore a hard hat and geologist’s boots.

  Craig parked the car, viewing his wife’s antsy movements with a chuckle. “I have this terrible feeling you have a secret wish to run a bulldozer. Are you going to be able to contain yourself while I work through a few things in the office?”

  “What do you pay a bulldozer operator?” she demanded.

  “I refuse to answer that.”

  “You haven’t really told me in a long time how the project’s been going.” She understood the basics. Craig’s in situ processing method of extracting oil from shale was ecologically sound as well as profitable. That balance had always been the tricky thing. And Craig’s method, if anyone asked Sonia, was the only one that really worked.

  “How long are you going to be?” she asked him as they walked toward the two-story office building.

  “No more than an hour or two.”

  “I’ll just wander around, then.”

  “No,” Craig said swiftly.

  Sonia’s eyebrows arched up in surprise. “Craig, I don’t want to get in your way. You know I’m perfectly happy just poking around. Everyone knows me…”

  He obviously wanted her in sight, she thought with amusement. Mrs. Heath met him at the door of his office, her crinkly gray hair standing on end as it always did. Piles of crises had accumulated in his absence, all of which Mrs. Heath politely indicated he should immediately resolve.

  She served Craig a cup of coffee, then he went about the business of resolving. John was one of his geologists; his crisis had something to do with the marketing of nahcolite, a by-product of the extraction process. After that, Senator Brown wanted to discuss a section of the Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act that worried him. After that, the director of the Bureau of Mines…

  Somewhere in midstream her husband seemed to realize he was holding her hand. He didn’t look the part of a lovesick teenager, Sonia thought with wicked humor; he looked very much the man in control. Tough and rough and hard and smart. She divested herself of his hand long enough to wander to the window.

  Outside was a barren wasteland of sagebrush with the sun beating relentlessly down on it. It always amazed her that such a short distance from home, green rolling landscape turned into gutted gullies and arid rolls of parched land. The aboveground shale-oil workers always argued that messing up the landscape here was hardly an ecological crime. At first glance, of course, one saw no beauty. At second glance, however, one might see a herd of mule deer grazing on one of the hills, an eagle swooping down, a plant bursting into flower. Even the pitted gullies had their own kind of lonely beauty.

  Two tall, gray, windowless structures gleamed silver in the morning sun, and a fleet of large trucks, bulldozers and cranes was parked by the office. That was all, though. No one could ever guess that three hundred people were probably working underground at this moment, or what was happening there.

  Her feet were itching to take the huge elevators down to see what was going on at the heart of the project. She knew the mechanics…more or less. Oil was down there; that was a given. In conventional mining, the shale was brought to the surface, and the oil separated from it by a heating process called retorting. That method, unfortunately, left a legacy of slag, polluted water and air no one would want to breathe.

  When the mining was done underground, very little water was required, no air pollution resulted and the slag presented only minor disposal problems.

  It was so simple; Craig had explained it to her a dozen times. Underground, the men dynamited, leaving masses of broken oil shale. The rubble was later exposed to tremendous heat, which caused the oil to separate from the rock. Then the oil was pumped up and sent to the refineries. So simple, to produce a few hundred thousand barrels of oil a day that the country desperately needed…

  And not simple at all, Sonia thought absently. Meeting energy needs was never simple. Any sudden increase in fuel supplies was enough to send prices plummeting, enough to destroy national economies as well as oil companies. Craig’s project received funds from the federal government and from private investors, all of whom had the same goals: to produce fuel in a way that would not upset economic systems, didn’t harm the environment and earned profits. Craig’s process was designed to achieve that goal.

  Sonia stirred restlessly at the window. She was shamelessly proud of him. When push came to shove, though, she couldn’t care less about the project when her husband’s health was at stake. She turned and watched him for a moment with ruthlessly critical eyes.

  Craig was on the phone; Mrs. Heath was in the doorway; John, in a short-sleeved shirt with his hard hat cockeyed, was leaning over Craig’s desk. Her man had loosened his tie twenty minutes ago, rolled up his shirt cuffs even before that. One arm was lazily folded over his ribs, but there were no pain lines around his eyes, no drawn look between his brows that signaled a headache.

  And he was busier than a one-armed juggler. Smiling, Sonia slipped toward the door with a wink for Mrs. Heath. She was perfectly content wandering around on her own and hardly wanted to be in Craig’s way.

  She’d made it to the end of the corridor before she felt a warm hand slip into hers again. She glanced up to find a very handsome man with a shock of brown hair over his forehead and a very clear pair of blue eyes focused on hers.

  “That stuff will wait,” Craig told her. “I’ve got things to show you.”

  He did, she admitted. Her husband had a great many things to show her, in spite of being constantly interrupted by people who needed-and claimed-his attention. His hand still remained irretrievably locked with hers.

  The dusty workers from underground, talking about tolerances and heat and percussion problems, must have thought it strange.

  So did Sonia. Craig had never before exactly tied her to his wrist while he went through the mundane details of his work. She didn’t mind. She’d always liked the simple intimacy of holding hands.

  Whither thou goest, I shall go, she thought whimsically. Mr. Hamilton, you’re not feeling just a little violently possessive this morning, are you?

  She said nothing aloud. He loved her, and sooner or later he’d notice what he was doing. She hoped sooner. She wanted to make a trip to the ladies’ room.

  Chapter 6

  “Come on, Charlie. You know you’ll have a good time if you come with us,” Sonia coaxe
d. As additional bribery, she handed him a lemon meringue pie to hold, then turned to wrap the bowl of potato salad with plastic wrap. Neither the huge bowl nor the single pie would even dent the hunger of the billions of people she knew her mother had invited for the barbecue-but then, everyone would bring similar offerings. June Rawlings believed in annually celebrating the first of July, for no good reason that anyone worried about.

  “I’ll just take this out to the car for you,” Charlie said gruffly. “But I got too much to do to go anywhere.”

  She trailed him out to the back of the SUV, which was already loaded with swimming suits, two root-wrapped rosebushes as presents for her mother, a long skirt to wear later, and some tools Craig was lending her father. She stood back up from the truck and blew a wisp of curl from her cheeks. “You’re going,” she told Charlie with an affectionate and most determined gleam in her eyes. “No more nonsense about being too busy. It’s too hot to work, you know my mother will kill you if you don’t show up, and you’re too darned old to be shy. Furthermore, you’re going swimming when you get there.”

  Charlie gave her a disgusted look and hitched up his jeans. “I’ll go swimming when hell freezes over.”

  “It just did.”

  “You’ll have a fine time without me,” Charlie said stubbornly.

  “But I won’t have to have a fine time without you.”

  Charlie sighed. “You used to be agreeable when you first married him, you know. Now suddenly it’s all Miss Bossy and Sure of Herself-”

  “Oh, hush.”

  “Now what are you two arguing about?” Craig demanded from behind her.

  “The same thing we’ve been arguing about all morning.” Sonia turned with a sneaky wink for her husband. “If we don’t get going, the lemon pie’s going to melt. We’re not leaving until Charlie gets in the car. The pie’s going to be ruined, I’m going to cry-”