Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

Farther up the road was a deep-green piney woods and a rusty turnstile that allowed fishermen to enter the woods on their way to the stream without letting cattle out on the road. Temple waited for me to answer her.

"You know how I feel about you. But you're unrelenting and unforgiving," I said.

She sat very still for a long time, her milky-green eyes filled with thoughts I couldn't guess at. She turned her head and studied my face.

"I don't know how much more of this I can take," she said.

"You want to go back to Texas?"

"After I nail the two guys who tried to bury me alive."

"That's the only reason you're here now?"

"That's a good question. Let me think very hard on it," she said, her mouth pinched with anger.

I pulled off the road into a stand of grand fir and pine trees and parked in a dry slough that fed into the stream. My head was splitting. I wanted to turn around and drive back to town, but Temple had already gotten out of the truck and slammed the door and walked through a clump of huckleberry bushes to the edge of the stream. The wind dropped and I could hear the heat of the truck engine ticking under the hood.

I got the food and a picnic blanket out of the truck and walked down the slough toward the bank. Through the trees I could see a huge dalles

and the stream sliding over sculpted boulders the size of small blimps. The air was loud with the roar of the water, sweet and cool with the spray that coated the rocks.

I tripped on a root and looked down at a fresh, hoofed track in the slough, one as long as my foot. To my right the reeds and huckleberry bushes had been broken or mashed down into the moistness of the silt and gravel along the bank.

I set down our food and followed the hoofed tracks through the reeds. I worked my way through an overhang of willows and stepped across a cotton-wood that beavers had cut down, then I saw the moose on a small promontory above Temple, its webbed rack the largest I had ever seen on an animal of any kind, its nostrils puffing with her scent.

She was standing on a sand spit, her hands in her back pockets, looking upstream, and she neither heard nor saw the animal behind her. I moved quickly along the bank, and the moose jerked its rack around, its eyes on me now, its weight shifting on the promontory, dirt scudding down into the water from its hooves.

Then I heard it whirl and turn in the undergrowth and I knew it was coming for either me or Temple.

I ran along the water's edge, yelling Temple's name. She looked at me, startled, then her face went white. I picked her up at the waist, locking my arms around her, and splashed into a side channel and came up onto an island. But the moose was right behind us, its hooves clacking across underwater rocks, its rack cracking a cottonwood limb in half like a twig.

I stumbled and fell, then rose to my feet and picked up Temple again and went over the other side of the island into the stream, into deep water and a fast-running, ice-cold current that swept us through a series of gray boulders that steamed with mist.

We floated around a bend, under an overhang of willows, into a pool that was deep in shadow. I felt the pebbled bottom under my shoes, and I pulled Temple toward me out of the current and we walked chest-deep toward the far bank, behind the protection of a beaver dam. But the bank had been undercut by the current so that it kept shaling under my weight as I tried to get out of the water. I grabbed the bottom of a willow and pulled myself up until I could find purchase with one knee, then I locked my hand on Temple's wrist and hoisted her up after me.

I heard the moose's hooves clatter once more on stone, then saw it lift itself, wet and blowing and magnificent, onto the opposite bank and disappear into the trees. Temple and I fell into the leaves, and I held her against me and kissed her face and hair and neck and covered her with my body and felt the firm muscles of her back and legs and gathered her against me with such force that I could hear the breath coming out of her chest. Her cheek felt as hot as a baby's waking from sleep.

I kissed her hands and mouth and the tops of her breasts and I unbuttoned her shirt and kissed her stomach and touched her breasts and thighs without permission or shame, then felt her hand begin loosening my belt. She peeled off her shirt and bra and threw them aside and put her tongue in my mouth and pulled my weight down on top of her. I rubbed my face in the wetness of her hair and kissed her eyes and sucked her fingers and put her nipples in my mouth, then I was inside her, inside Temple Carrol, inside all her pink warmth and the caress and charity and heat of her thighs. Her mouth opened and her breath rose against my skin with a smell and coolness like flowers blooming in snow, and she pressed me deeper inside her and held me tight with her arms and locked her legs in mine.

I wanted to raise up on my arms and kiss her again and look into the flush on her face and the mystery and beauty of her eyes, but I felt both of us rushing toward that irreversible moment that even memory cannot enhance, and I held her against me, my voice hoarse and weak and barely above a whisper, my poor attempt at a statement of affection lost in the roar of the stream and the creak of the wind in the trees and the rhythmic breath of Temple Carrol in my ear and the kneading of her palms on my spine. Then I felt a burst of light in my loins and a release from all the rage and violence that had fouled my blood for a lifetime. There was only the beating of her heart and the moist touch of her skin and the softness of her smile as I slipped out of her, exhausted and spent, and rested my head between her breasts while her fingers stroked my hair.

Chapter 27

Thursday morning I drove down to Stevens-ville, then east of town toward the Sapphires and Nicki Molinari's ranch. It was raining in the south and dust was blowing out of the valley, and in the distance there were veins of lightning inside the dust and rain. When I turned into Molinari's drive his man Frank was trying to catch up a horse that was eating the petunias in the flower bed.

He ran at the horse with a rope, then threw dirt clods at it. He tried to whip it across the flanks with a fishing rod and instead tripped over the garden hose and was almost kicked in the face.

Nicki Molinari came out of the barn, waving his hands.

"Frank, Frank, wrong way to go about it," he said.

"He ate all your flowers," Frank said.

"We'll get some new ones. Look, give him these molasses balls. See, let him eat them out of your palm so he don't bite your fingers," Molinari said.

"He went to the bathroom all over the walk," Frank said.

"I'll hose it off. I'm gonna talk to my guest now. You did fine, Frank," Molinari said.