Miranda ate her MRE in silence as Keith prepared a fire to roast his snake—once it finally stopped moving. She was edgy and acutely aware of him watching her. More than once she caught herself staring back. Her fascination had exponentially magnified with the knife throw, making him seem like some kind of larger-than-life adventure hero—her very own Jack T. Colton. A chuckle rose up in her throat as she recalled the snake scene from Romancing the Stone. Perhaps it was a case of delayed shock, but what began as a benign gurgle soon transformed into almost maniacal laughter.
“What is so damned hilarious?” he asked with a dark look.
“You.” She gasped for air. “Cooking that snake. I guess life really does imitate art.” She let out another chortle. “Are you certain it wasn’t a bushmaster?”
“Bushmaster?” His gaze narrowed. “We don’t have those here. They live in the jungle.”
“C’mon, don’t you get it?” Here she was almost dying of laughter, and he hadn’t even cracked a smile. “It was a joke. You don’t watch many movies, do you?”
“’Fraid not,” he said. “I never had much interest in movies. ’Sides that, the nearest cinema was almost two hours from my home.”
“What about cable TV?”
“No cable.”
“Satellite?”
“Nope.”
“No Internet either?”
He shook his head.
“Are you serious?” she asked, incredulous. “How did you ever survive?”
“Where I come from, there was always something more interesting to do outside.”
“And where was that?” she asked. “Mars?”
She was happy to see his lips twitch. Maybe he had a sense of humor after all. He’d given hints of it, but she’d yet to see it surface. She’d seen him before as a charming and seductive showman, and now as a brooding, standoffish wrangler. She wondered which version was the real Keith.
“Wyoming,” he replied after a moment.
“But your birth and school records were all in Long Island, New York. At least all I could find.”
“I left Long Island when I was thirteen.”
“To go to Wyoming? Why would you do that?”
“I had my reasons.”
“What kind of reasons?” she asked.
He shook his head with a derisive laugh. “So now you want the real story?” He then turned his attention to building a fire. He was quiet for several more minutes, long enough for her to think he didn’t intend to answer, but then he surprisingly broke his silence. “I grew up feeling like an outsider in my own family. I never understood why until the day this scary-looking dude with long hair, tattoos, and scars showed up claiming to be my father.” He spoke slowly, watching her warily. “I had no idea who he was and freaked out, but I didn’t tell anyone. A week later he came back, wanting to take me away with him. This time my mom was home. They got into it, and she called the cops and had him taken away. After that I started asking questions. Demanding answers.”
“Was it true? Was he your real father?” she asked, trying to imagine the shock and fear he must have felt.
“Yup. It turns out my mom was quite a rebel in her college days. She got involved with this Shoshone guy who was a leader in the American Indian Movement. He was bad news. He eventually went to prison for a murder up in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. That’s where he was when she found out she was pregnant, so she quietly married an accountant from New Jersey. They never told me anything about my real dad until he showed up. After I found out about all this, I couldn’t let it go. I tracked my father down. We exchanged some letters and phone calls. Then, one day, he sent me a ticket to Wyoming. So I went.”
“Your mother let you go? Just like that?”
“I didn’t tell her. When I got to my grandparents’ ranch, I called and told her I wasn’t coming back.”
“She didn’t care?” Miranda asked, her heart wrenching at what he must have suffered to have been so desperate to leave.
“I didn’t give her any choice,” he replied with a careless shrug. “Once I knew where I wanted to be, she never could have kept me away. I was finally home. I had a new family, my grandparents, lots of cousins, and more freedom than I’d ever known. Maybe I wasn’t born there, but I never felt I belonged anywhere else.”
“I can’t believe you weren’t bored to tears after living in the city.”
“It was a working horse ranch,” he said. “There wasn’t any time to be bored. There were always animals to take care of and things to fix. We also hunted a lot. Our freezer was always full of game. It was a completely different life—almost like stepping back in time.”