Blood Ties

Chapter 2-1

2

Another stroke with the hairbrush, and then Joanna forced herself to pick up the elastic band that lay on the vanity and pull her hair back into it. Part of her had wanted to leave it down, to let it fall to her waist so Randall could see what it looked like when it wasn’t confined to a hair band, but the rational part of her mind told her that was a stupid idea. How the hell could she get any work done if she had hair flying every which way?

Honestly, she didn’t know what was going on with her brain. Their parting the day before had been prosaic enough, with her thanking him for coming out and him confirming that she wanted him back at ten the next morning. With that arrangement agreed upon, he’d gotten into his dusty Nissan pickup truck and driven down the lane that connected her property with the highway.

But she’d stood there for a long time after he was gone, staring after the disappearing truck. It was far too muddy for the little Frontier to have left a trail of dust behind it, but she still fancied something of him lingered in the air, a hint of his presence that couldn’t be erased.

Eventually, though, she’d gone into the house, fed the cat, and fixed herself a bowl of soup. She tended to make big batches of soup or stew or chili at the beginning of the week so she could feed herself off that for days, but that night, the minestrone had lost most of its charm. Even as she ate, she found herself wondering what Randall Lenz was up to, what he was having for dinner. Did he cook for himself, or subsist on takeout? And if he did live on restaurant or fast food, would he appreciate a home-cooked meal?

Maybe she should invite him over for dinner.

No, that was a bad idea. She didn’t know why she found herself so attracted to him. All right, he was objectively good-looking, with those piercing eyes and those regular, chiseled features. The little hint of gray at his temples just made him that much more handsome, in her opinion. She could tell he would probably age well.

Planning on growing old with him? Joanna mocked herself, although that inner voice didn’t have quite as much bite as she’d hoped, as if it, too, was sort of curious as to where things with Randall Lenz might end up.

They weren’t going to end up anywhere. He was going to come back and help her fix that remaining stretch of fence, and then he’d be done and would leave her life as quickly as he’d entered it. End of story.

And she needed to make sure she paid him. The day before, she hadn’t been able to think of a way to bring up the subject without sounding horribly awkward, but she knew that today she needed to hand him a check as she thanked him for all the work he’d done. She’d heard through the family grapevine that Connor had given him a stipend, just as though he was another member of the Wilcox clan, and so Randall couldn’t be hurting for money too much. All the same, she was not the sort of person to expect someone to work for free.

Joanna got her checkbook out of her desk drawer and wrote out the check. If Jasper had come and done the same work, she would have paid him five hundred dollars, and so she guessed it would only be fair to pay Randall the same amount.

When she was done with that task, she folded the check in half and stuck it in the pocket of her jeans. Resolutely, she forced herself away from the mirror instead of taking one last look at her hair and her lip gloss, and headed downstairs.

Five minutes until ten.

Stupid to feel this anxious about him coming over. Even if she had to admit to herself that she found Randall attractive, she also needed to recognize that he wasn’t the world’s nicest person. He’d shot Addie’s mother. He’d rounded up all those orphan — that is, clan-less — witches and warlocks and kept them imprisoned at the SED facility in Virginia. True, he’d apparently seen the error of his ways and freed them all, sacrificing his position with Homeland Security in the process, but the man was no angel. And —

Someone knocked on the front door.

Joanna hurried to answer it. Standing outside on the porch was Randall Lenz, dressed much the same way as he’d been the day before, only now he wore a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses that shielded his eyes from the morning glare.

He looked almost unspeakably hot in those sunglasses.

“Come in,” she said, finding her voice. “There’s still some coffee. Do you want any?”

“No, I’m fine,” he replied as he stepped inside.

That’s for sure, she thought.

It was impossible to miss the way his gaze quickly roved the living room, assessing his surroundings. That was the look of someone taking note of exits and windows, she realized, not necessarily appraising the interior design.

Which was probably just as well. Joanna loved her house, loved the warm wood walls and the heavy beamed ceiling overhead, the substantial river rock fireplace, but she knew it probably wasn’t going to win any design awards.

“I went ahead and brought the poles around to the work site,” she said quickly, not wanting an awkward silence to develop. “I figured that would save us some time.”

He nodded. “Then we might as well get to work.”

His comment closed the door on the possibility of any small talk. Joanna told herself that was probably for the best, since she’d never been much good at chitchat anyway.

“We can go through the kitchen,” she told him. “It’s faster, since it faces out toward the pastures.”

Without waiting for a reply — and good thing, because she didn’t get one beyond a faint head tilt — she led him from the living room, past the dining area, and on into the kitchen. The back door opened onto the porch that wrapped around the entire house, and she descended the stairs so she could follow the path as it wound its way back toward the pastures.

The day promised to be bright and sunny, and because there hadn’t been any rain or snow for more than forty-eight hours, some of the mud was finally starting to dry out. And thank God for that, because even as a weather-worker who could appreciate all four seasons and their infinite variations, she’d never been a huge fan of the gluey mud that inevitably resulted from springtime snow melt.

They got to work at once. Because they’d already gone through pretty much the same process the day before, they didn’t have to waste much time on strategies or planning, only setting the rails in place and making sure the footings on all the posts were secure.

From the next pasture over, the alpacas looked on with interest. Since they tended to be placid creatures, Joanna knew she didn’t have to worry about them getting too cranky about being all clumped together like that, although they’d obviously be happier when they had more room to spread out. Luckily, at the moment they seemed inclined to watch the goings-on from where they stood, rather than try to roam a little closer.

When she and Randall paused to take a water break a little before noon, however, his gaze strayed to the cluster of animals watching them from a few yards away. “Why alpacas?” he asked.

Well, at least that was an easy enough question to answer. “They came with the ranch,” she said, then sipped some water from her bottle. “I wanted to buy a place with some land, and the couple who owned the property were retiring and moving to Tucson. So, instead of trying to find new homes for the animals, I took them along with the house. I actually got a really good price because I was buying the whole thing as a package deal.”

Randall appeared to consider her reply for a moment, still with that slightly narrow-eyed, speculative expression on his chiseled features. “Some might say that was a lot for one person to take on.”

Joanna shrugged. “I needed to have something to do with my time. I really didn’t want to get a normal job the way most Wilcoxes do. But having the alpacas gives me a decent income stream, and keeps my civilian neighbors from wondering how I earn a living.”

“There’s a lot of money in alpacas?”

She could tell he was asking from a place of genuine curiosity, and not because he was trying to dig into her finances, so she didn’t take offense at the question. “More than you might think. Demand for alpaca wool always outstrips supply, and because my alpacas are from very good stock, the weanlings are also worth a lot.”

Randall absorbed this information before asking, “And it’s not a problem keeping them outside all the time? This past winter seemed fairly harsh.”

To someone who’d spent the past ten years or so living in Virginia, Joanna supposed it probably had. Even compared to New York City, Flagstaff could be damn cold. “Alpacas evolved in a place that has twice the altitude of Flagstaff. This is nothing to them — they actually have a harder time with hot weather than they do with cold. They have a shed where they can hang out on the really sunny days, but they like the shade from the trees better.”

The property’s former owners had planted a variety of trees around the pastures — oaks and maples and sycamores. Aspen trees ringed the house itself and provided an extra measure of privacy. Actually, it was partly the trees that had made Joanna decide this place needed to be her forever home. Growing up in Navajo territory, she hadn’t had many trees around except some scrubby juniper. She loved the shade the trees on her property provided, loved watching them through all the seasons of the year, even in the winter when they lifted bare, graceful branches to the sky.

Not that she would tell Randall Lenz anything like that. It would be far too personal a confession.

He smiled then, the shift in expression lighting up his icy blue eyes and showing a flash of white teeth. She got the impression he didn’t smile like that very often, which was too bad. It made him seem much easier to know.

“I suppose I wasn’t expecting to find a witch who raised alpacas when I came to Flagstaff,” he said, then drank some more of his bottled water. “But I’m finding that you Wilcoxes are a diverse lot.”

On the surface, Joanna wouldn’t have thought so, since the Wilcox clan tended to present a fairly uniform appearance — tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, good-looking people. There were variations, of course, but they still tended to share a certain look.

On the other hand, they were just as individual as any other group of a similar size, each with their own talents and strengths, foibles and failings. Because she’d been raised away from the clan for a good chunk of her life, Joanna thought she could be a bit more objective when it came to appraising the Wilcox family. All the same, she was proud to be one of them. In the past, there might not have been quite as much to be proud of, but a lot had changed since Connor took over from his late brother.

She kind of doubted Damon Wilcox would have allowed someone like Randall Lenz to settle in his territory.

“We try to be,” she said lightly.

So many questions crowded her mind, but Joanna didn’t think it would be appropriate to ask any of them. She and Randall barely knew each other, after all, and so she doubted he’d appreciate her inquiring whether he’d made any effort to locate his own clan, or if he’d done any experimenting to explore the limits of his own gift. According to Addie and Jake, Randall’s talent was luck. Joanna’s cousin Lucas had a similar gift, although he didn’t do much with it beyond letting it enhance his life in a myriad of subtle ways.

Did Randall think he was lucky? On the surface, it might not look that way, considering he’d lost his job with Homeland Security and been forced to resign in disgrace. He’d been successful in his former life, had a big house in Virginia and an important job, and now it seemed as if he didn’t have much of anything.

Then again, maybe he considered that a fair trade-off for discovering he was actually a warlock, and not just an ordinary man.

He didn’t say anything, only swallowed some more water and then set the bottle down on the passenger seat of her Polaris, which she’d parked a few feet away from the section of fence they were currently working on. Since she could tell he wanted to get back to work, she also set down her bottle and picked up one of the rails that were lying on the ground nearby.

“Let’s get to it,” she said.