“Since…?” Josie prompted again.
“Since I’ve been around J.J.,” Rachel said, her voice barely audible, “and the way he treats me…the way I feel.” She looked up, her eyes burning with misery. “Now, I’m wondering if I ever even knew what love is.”
Josie made a scoffing sound. “Who does? Some people are lucky, maybe, and get it right the first try. Some of us have to make a few mistakes before we figure it out. But when you do…” Josie’s smile was gentle. And enigmatic. “I think you’ll know. I know I did.”
Rachel stared at her and touched away a tear from her own cheek while her mind swirled with questions. But before she could put one into words, the cell phone in Josie’s pocket played a sweet, minor tune.
“That’s Sage now,” Josie said, reaching for it. “I’ll ask him about the horses.”
Murmuring into the phone, she rose, picked up the coffeepot and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Rachel to wonder if this was how it felt to be blindsided by a truck.
“You really don’t have to do this, you know,” Rachel said.
It wasn’t the first time she’d said it, so J.J. didn’t bother to reply. He did look over at her though, because he couldn’t help it. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that, either, and he still thought she looked so damn cute on the back of that horse, a black appaloosa with a spotted white rump and a glossy black mane and tail. She was wearing a pink ball cap Josie had loaned her, and her hair was pulled up in a ponytail that stuck out through the hole in the back of the cap and cascaded down her back in a pretty close match to the horse’s tail. She had on jeans and a top made of some flowery silky material that gathered in under her breasts and hung loosely down past her waist and left her arms and a good bit of her chest and back bare. Her skin was flawless, and the color of vanilla ice cream.
“I hope you remembered to put on sunblock,” he said.
She smiled at him, showing her dimple. “I did. Did you?”
“Got my hat,” he said, giving her a smile back, one a good bit darker than her own. “And my shades. That’s all I need.”
“You should be careful, you know,” she replied, drifting closer to him to give him a critical once-over. “Out in the desert, with your blond hair and fair skin…”
He snorted. “What are you, my mother?” Then he felt like the jerk he was when she just gazed at him with those inscrutable eyes of hers, and he saw just hint of a blush come into her cheeks.
He was glad the aviator shades he was wearing covered his own eyes, because he wasn’t sure what she might have been able to read in them. Hunger, maybe? Something for sure that would give away what he was thinking… remembering.
“I’m careful enough,” he said gruffly, and added, “Just another reason why I need to get the hell out of the damn desert.”
She looked away and didn’t answer. They rode along in silence for a while, and J.J. could hear quail calling somewhere off in the hills. Overhead in the cloudless blue, a hawk circled lazily, and closer by, a yellow-and-brown bird flushed out of hiding by Moonshine fluttered up out of the grass and glided away, skimming the tops of the meadow flowers.
He had to admit it wasn’t too bad. Not here, not like this. With her.
“It’s not so bad, is it?” she asked, as if she’d followed his thoughts.
“What, this? This isn’t desert, this is mountains. Sort of.”
“No,” she said, “I mean the horse. Riding.”
He thought about it, flexing his legs in the stirrups to ease the unaccustomed pressure on his backside and eying the view between the horse’s two pointy ears down there at the end of its long, long neck. The ears twitched now and then, pointing this way and that, speaking a language all their own, Rachel had told him. He had to admit his horse-a brown one named Misty-had been behaving pretty well, plodding along keeping pace with Rachel’s, not showing any inclination to sudden and unexplained leaps or bursts of speed. Hadn’t seemed to object to having a strange man on her back. Hadn’t tried to throw, kick, trample or bite him, anyway. So far, so good.
“No,” he said, “it’s not so bad.”
He saw her draw a breath and her shoulders relax just a little, and wished he could give her more.
They were riding in an arm of the meadow that extended north beyond the old adobe ranch house and barns, following the creek higher and deeper into the canyon. Where the meadow ended, Sage had told them, a trail continued on into the High Sierras-the part known as the Kern Plateau. There had once been cow camps in those high meadows, accessible only by horseback and pack mule; now there were vacation cabins in some of them, and you could drive there on well-maintained roads. But higher still, only the hiking trails traversed the Sierra Nevada range, past Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the lower forty-eight states, past the groves of Giant Sequoias, all the way to the Cascades and the Oregon border.
Here, as the meadow narrowed down to a ribbon of green, J.J. could smell the sun-warmed pines and feel the cool breezes blowing off of melting snow, and he felt himself growing tense and stubborn, fighting the peace and beauty and grandeur of it. Fighting against the call of the wild, maybe? He didn’t know. He only knew he felt angry, and frustrated because he didn’t know who or what he was mad it.
“Would you like to stop for a while?”
She was looking at him, a little pleat of concern between her eyebrows. Evidently the shades weren’t hiding his thoughts as well as he’d hoped.
“Sure,” he said.
Her horse angled off toward the creek without any noticeable instruction from her, and his horse followed along, naturally, without any guidance whatsoever from him. Moonshine, too, appeared ready to take a break from meadow recon, and flopped down in a drift of lupines and stretched out on her side to bask in the sun.
In the shade of the willows along the creek bank, Rachel halted and dismounted with what he thought was amazing grace, given the fact that she was less than a week away from having given birth. She dropped her horse’s reins to the ground-Sage had explained the horses were trained to “ground tie,” which he gathered meant that as long as the ends of the reins were touching the ground the horse wouldn’t run off and leave him stranded. Then she took hold of J.J.’s horse’s bridal while he dismounted with something considerably less than grace.
While he was doing stretches and deep-knee bends and trying to work the saddle stiffness out of his legs, Rachel walked both horses down to the creek to let them drink. Then she rubbed them down with a cloth she’d tied onto the back of her saddle, crooning to them in the same tone he’d heard her use with her baby, which gave J.J. an itchy feeling he couldn’t find a reason for. He just knew he found it irritating as hell, all that affection and attention being bestowed on a couple of
When he thought he could walk without looking like a bow-legged cartoon version of a city slicker, he made his way down to the creek bank, knelt on one knee-trying not to groan audibly-and scooped up some water to wash his face. It was cold as ice. Or melted snow, which it was. When he straightened up, Rachel was standing with one hand on her horse’s neck, gazing at him. That same little frown hovered between her eyebrows.
“What?” he said, wiping ice water from his numb face.
She shrugged, but didn’t look away. “I was going to ask you the same thing.” She took a breath, closed her eyes, then blurted out, “Jethro, what’s wrong?”
He could have blustered his way out of it, of course he could have. But something inside him was going still and calm, telling him the moment had come. So he didn’t say anything, just looked at her and waited.
She took off her hat, so she wouldn’t have to look up at him from under the brim, he supposed. But for him, it just made it harder to look at her; she seemed more vulnerable, somehow, without it.
Holding the hat clutched in one hand, she gave it a little wave and said in a rush, “Is it about last night? The fact that I kissed you? And I know you said sorry, but
