Page 51 of Fighting For You

"Knox, rebuilding my crystal collection isn't exactly a priority right now."

"Consider it a gift from me. Pick one."

She looked at me for a long second. Then she turned back to the tray and moved her fingers over the stones without picking any of them up. She passed the purple ones, the pink ones. Stopped at a rough gray stone that looked like nothing next to the others.

She picked it up and turned it under the lamp. From one angle it was plain and dull. Then she tilted it and the surface flashed with color, a deep blue-green that caught the light and vanished when she turned it back.

"Labradorite," she said. "It's a stone for new beginnings. For when you're starting over."

She held it in her palm and looked at it for a long time.

"This one."

I took it to the register. The woman behind the counter wrapped it in tissue paper and placed it in a small bag. She handed it to Nora, who held it against her chest with both hands.

"Thank you," Nora said.

She smiled at me, and I wanted to kiss her right there in the middle of the shop just to see if her smile could get any bigger.

The first drops of rain hit the window. Heavy, sudden, the kind that come all at once. Within a minute the street was dark with water and the awnings were pouring sheets of it onto the boardwalk.

The woman behind the counter looked past us toward the street. "Where are you two headed back to?"

"Las Vegas."

"Not tonight." She shook her head. "The mountain roads flood when it rains like this. Zero visibility, water running across the pavement. I wouldn't drive it." She reached under the counter and pulled out an umbrella. "There's a lodge up the street on the left. The Miner's Lodge. Tell them Marge sent you. Bring the umbrella back tomorrow when it clears."

I looked at Nora. "Do you mind staying?"

She smiled and shook her head.

We ran up the street under Marge's umbrella. The rain was coming down hard enough that it bounced off the dirt and soaked our shoes before we made it half a block. Nora was laughing, pressed against my side, one hand holding the umbrella and the other gripping my arm.

The hotel was old. Two stories, adobe walls, a wooden sign out front that said THE MINER'S LODGE in faded letters. Inside, the lobby was small and dim, the walls and ceiling covered with signed dollar bills, thousands of them, layered over each other going back decades.

The man at the front desk looked up from a paperback. "Room?"

"One room," I said. "Whatever you've got."

He handed me a key attached to a wooden tag. Second floor, end of the hall.

The room was small and clean. One bed, a dresser, two chairs by the window, a bathroom with a shower. The rain was hitting the window in sheets, and outside the mountains had disappeared behind a wall of gray.

Nora stood in the middle of the room with her arms crossed, her clothes damp, her hair starting to curl from the rain.

"You should shower first," I said. "Warm up. Leave your clothes outside the bathroom door and I'll get them laundered."

"Thank you," she said.

She grabbed the bathrobe off the back of the bathroom door, went inside, and closed it behind her. A minute later the door cracked open and her hand came through holding her clothes in a folded pile. I took them without looking.

I called the front desk and asked about laundry. They didn't have any. I hung up, looked around the room, and found a hair dryer in the top drawer of the dresser.

I stripped down to my boxers and sat on the edge of the bed with the hair dryer and Nora's clothes in my lap. Her skirt. Her top. Everything underneath. I held the dryer to her skirt and tried to focus on the task and not on the fact that I was holding every piece of clothing Nora Avery had been wearing ten minutes ago.

I could hear the shower running through the door. I could picture exactly what was on the other side of it, and I made myself stare at the wall and keep the dryer moving.

It hit me somewhere around drying my own shirt that neither of us had anything to change into. The bathrobes were all we had. We were going to be in this room, in those robes, all night.