Falling Again for the Animal Whisperer

by Becky Wicks

  Blaze was pulling him back in. Jodie couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Foam was still frothing at the corners of the horse’s mouth from the sheer effort, but the whole thing had happened in seconds, maybe thirty at the most.

  Blaze had purposely lengthened the line between them and was using his strength to pull Cole back in from the water. He was saving Cole’s life.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘PARACETAMOL... ASPIRIN... I need something.’ Her nerves were shot. ‘Cole, where do you keep your medicine?’ She knew he couldn’t hear her as he was in the shower.

  She pulled open the middle drawer, the top drawer, the bottom drawer... Nothing but cutlery, pens, cables, dog treats. He hadn’t told her where it was. He’d insisted he was fine, but she knew he’d be in pain soon enough, if he wasn’t already.

  They’d ridden the horses back slowly, with Blaze beside them. Cole was bleeding under his jacket, she’d seen it when she’d peeled it off him as soon as they’d reached the cabin, but he’d brushed off his injury. ‘Go shower, get warm,’ he’d told her.

  So she had, and now she was back. How could she leave him? Russell was in the hospital, and she could tell Cole blamed himself for not checking on Blaze sooner. She knew the way his brain was wired. He would never blame a horse.

  You could have lost him. He could have drowned.

  The thought was like a knife wound to her heaving chest as tears threatened to consume her.

  ‘Where would you keep your medicine?’ she said to his kitchen walls, moving mugs and coffee flasks, and an empty bread bin. Cole would keep the medicine somewhere odd, she thought, like under the sofa.

  Her eyes caught on something under the bench by the door, covered in jackets.

  Dropping to her knees in her track pants, she pulled out the bright red medicine kit and flipped the latch under the huge white cross. Paracetamol. That would have to do.

  She slid the box back, but it was stuck now, jammed halfway out. Reaching behind, it her hands landed on something smooth, made of glass. She pulled out a photo frame covered in dust and swept a hand across it.

  Cole and her, sitting on Mustang, bareback.

  She fell on her bottom, holding it.

  There was another box, she noticed now—the box his stetson had arrived in. She slid it out from under the bench and sifted through photos from their summers together. He’d kept all these?

  One fell out.

  There was Cole, looking up at her from the floor, leaning with his arms crossed and his leg kicked back against a red tractor. She was behind him in the photo, grinning from the driver’s seat. It must have been taken the first summer they’d met.

  There was Casper in another one, just as she remembered him in his trademark waxed cotton cap and quilted moleskin jacket, with one arm around her shoulders and the other holding a chicken.

  Another photo. Her and Cole at twelve or thirteen. She recognised Chesil Beach—this must have been the day they’d gone on a fossil hunt. She held it closer, studying his tanned hand wrapped tightly around hers on their bucket of treasures. That had been around the time that parts of her had started tingling in anticipation of his touch. Just his hand, hauling her up to a rock for a photo, had felt like another moment in heaven.

  Another photo. Her and Cole at fourteen. Cole was even more tanned in this one, holding a pitchfork like a guitar out in the stables. He’d been skinny before but now he was filling out. He had muscles from labouring with hay bales and farming equipment, and a wild mop of curls. This was right before he’d taught her to ride bareback, solo, she remembered with a smile.

  This was the summer she’d thought Cole was finally going to kiss her...but he didn’t. The kiss had come at fifteen. There was no photo from that year, but she could see it as clear as day. They’d been swimming in the river, looking for kingfishers. Cole had swum right up to her beneath the wrought-iron bridge.

  She’d thought he’d been about to dunk her; she’d been laughing and splashing him in his new blue board shorts. She’d been self-conscious of her new womanly body, and awed by his new broad chest and the thick, dark hair in places he hadn’t had hair before. But his hands had found her waist under the water. Without a word, he had pulled her into the shadows under the bridge and kissed her. Her first kiss. Cole had been her first everything.

  Jodie pressed her bare feet to the cold tile floor, clutching the photos to her heart as the mental image of Cole slipping away in the river tore a new hole in her chest. They’d had their disagreements and spent the last twelve years apart but if anything happened to him she knew she would die herself, even after all this time.

  The tears wouldn’t stop now. She didn’t know how long she sat there, falling apart, on the floor, but Ziggy laid a sympathetic head on her lap and she was very grateful for the comfort.

  A sound from the bathroom made Jodie shove the photos and medicine kit back, but a letter slipped out from the pile. At least it looked like a letter, sealed in a cream-coloured envelope. There was nothing on the front, but she recognised the old-fashioned wax stamp Casper had always used, sealing the back closed.

  Hearing Cole moving about, she put it back with the photos and laid the framed photo back on top, wiping her dusty hand on her tracksuit bottoms.

  By the time Cole stepped from the bathroom, running a towel over his hair, in nothing but clean jeans, she was stoking the fire, trying to dry her eyes, as well as her wet hair and damp tank top.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked her, dropping to the leather couch then wincing at the pain to his shoulder.

  ‘Better than you, I think,’ she said, still fighting to gain control of her shaky voice and limbs. He was here, he was OK, and she had to pull herself together.

  The buckle of his jeans blazed red from the fire behind her. Her eyes fell to the lines on his body from his belt to the trail of dark fuzz up to his belly button. Shuffling between his knees on the rug, she popped the paracetamol from their foil case.

  It had been a long time since she’d seen Cole without his shirt on. He looked even better now than he had then, only he was still bleeding.

  ‘You’re really hurt, Cole.’

  ‘I told you, I’m fine.’

  ‘That’s what you always say, Cole, even when you’re not.’

  He tipped up her chin with a finger, looking her deep in the eyes. ‘Hey, I’m sorry I scared you.’

  ‘What if you’d died, the same way your dad did?’

  Cole’s face darkened. ‘I’d have hoped more people would miss me.’

  The shadows on his abs caused a flicker of a memory. One hot second of them making love. Then another memory, years before they’d been an item, of Cole telling her he’d broken his finger. It had been over Christmas, when she’d been back in Greenwich, so they’d talked about it on the phone.

  When she’d offered to fly down on Christmas Day to be with him, he’d told her not to be so dramatic. ‘I told you Jodie, I’m fine. It was an accident, he didn’t mean to...’

  ‘Who didn’t mean to?’

  ‘The dog, when it jumped up at the door and slammed it shut on me! Tell me what’s going on with you?’

  She took his strong, gentle hand on his lap, opened his palm and put the pills in it. Why was she remembering that now? Because he was in pain and embarrassed that someone might want to help him?

  ‘Swallow,’ she said, reaching a tentative finger to his wound. His right upper arm was bruised from a collision with a rock.

  ‘You got lucky, you won’t need stitches,’ she told him, but his skin was already a wicked shade of purple around the cuts. His biceps stretched out another deep red scratch as he chased the pills with water from a mug.

  ‘Cole, that horse saved your life today.’

  His gaze fell to her lips, right before he leaned across her to put the mug down, sending the scent of familiar
musky soap to her nose, deep to her core. ‘Not many people would believe that.’ Her stomach flipped as he caught her fingers and pressed a hard kiss to her knuckles.

  ‘I saw what he did. I saw Ziggy dive in after you, too,’ she managed, though her heart was thrumming.

  He cradled her face in his hand, and his thumb caressed her cheek. She leaned into him, closing her eyes. Every nerve ending flared at his touch.

  ‘I need to tell you something,’ he said.

  She held her breath. Her gut told her she wasn’t going to like this.

  ‘Casper left a photo of you out on his desk, not long after he got back from your wedding in Edinburgh.’ Cole ran a finger softly across her lower lip, sending a flock of butterflies straight between her legs. ‘Seeing you in that white dress, married to someone else, knowing you were carrying his baby... Do you want to know what I did?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I rode Mustang out to West Bay cliffs. I yelled at the sea until my throat was on fire, and you know I never yell. A guy with a dog ran over and asked if I was OK.’

  ‘Jealousy almost drove you off a cliff, huh?’ Jodie joked weakly, swiping her hair behind her ear. ‘And yet you never once tried to come and get me back.’

  The rug was hot under her knees as she knelt between his legs. He lowered his head, urging her lips ever closer. Her fingers inched around the waist of his jeans, tracing across his hip bone before curling about his belt, urging him down from the couch to the floor without any words. He let out an anguished groan as he slid to the rug, still lacing his fingers through her hair, keeping her head close enough to kiss.

  ‘Why didn’t you try to get me back, Cole?’

  ‘All this time, I thought you’d fallen in love with someone else.’

  They seemed to hover there in silent longing, until she’d had enough. She crushed her lips to his. She wanted...no, needed him. All of him. Cole’s body loosened. His arms encircled her like a cage, more possessive by the moment.

  ‘You have no idea how much I missed you,’ he growled against her lips, as his fingers found her bra straps and slid them down her shoulders.

  She realised he probably meant he’d missed their amazing sex but she wasn’t about to ruin the moment with more questions.

  In seconds he was worshipping her bare breasts with his lips and kisses in the firelight, and her breathing was ragged and raspy in his hair. He urged her down onto the sheepskin rug, hovering over her, taking her in. She was older now than when they’d last been together like this, and she wasn’t used to a man’s gaze on her body, not the way Cole was looking at her.

  His eyes showed nothing but admiration and lust as she traced her fingers along the lines of his abs. He knelt between her legs, reached up and pulled his shirt over his head, tossing it to the couch. He was all man; broader, bigger, muscled from a life outdoors intensified by lifting saddles and straw bales and labouring over the gardens at Everleigh.

  Every muscle on his torso rippled in the firelight. Their bickering and unresolved issues seemed to melt away. She blocked it all out, or rather her tendons, muscles and limbs ignored her head and its burning questions. The thrill of his touch was too intense to deny.

  Heat was all she felt. Heat from the fire, heat from Cole, heat from the sparks between them as he came back over her, his good arm getting lost in the sheepskin rug as he trailed a finger from his other hand over her breasts, slowly down to her belly, tracing more delicious kisses in its wake. His close-trimmed beard left trails of delicious tingles on her skin.

  She’d used to love it when he’d worshipped her like this, sometimes more than the act of making love itself. The gentle, teasing touch, as soft as a moth on her skin, created tingles of anticipation all over her.

  Lying on her back, Jodie shivered at his touch, arching from the rug to allow him to lower her sweatpants, then allowing a pent-up moan to escape her throat as his fingers found the once-familiar path to the parts of her that only he had ever known how to truly make tremble.

  ‘I’ll stop if you want me to.’

  Somewhere in a distant galaxy another version of herself screamed Yes, stop, but in his hands she was mute, relishing in the chemistry bubbling and fizzing between them. It was theirs and theirs alone.

  His fingers wove through hers on the rug above her head, and every few kisses he squeezed them tight, as if he needed to check if she was really there with him, doing this, after all this time. She was here, she realised, heart and soul, inching out of her underwear with her lips still glued to his.

  ‘Jodie...’ He stopped, as if to question their actions again, or tell her something he’d been keeping to himself. She couldn’t tell, but she didn’t care now. She was already gone, into him, consumed by him. Her naked body seemed to remember his, like a song that had been on the tip of her tongue but which she’d somehow forgotten the words to till now. They didn’t need words, she remembered that now. Making love had always been their principal means of communication.

  * * *

  ‘How is your daughter doing?’ Jodie asked the solicitor, crossing her legs under the desk in fitted green military-style trousers that she knew Cole hadn’t seen before. She’d felt his eyes on her bottom walking in here, but she hadn’t known quite how to look him in the eyes yet.

  Ms Tanner looked up from the papers on the desk between them. ‘It was nothing serious but she’s much better now. Thank you for asking. Again, I’m sorry this meeting had to be rescheduled. My husband was away on business so there was no one else to watch her.’

  ‘It’s not a problem. It gave us time to...’ Cole trailed off, catching Jodie’s eye as Ziggy stretched out across his feet under the desk. Her insides jolted. She could still feel the slight burn of his kisses on her lips and an echo of euphoria that was now disguising itself as mild discomfort between her legs—the kind of physical afterglow you only ever experienced after making love more times than you can remember in one night.

  It didn’t take much to send her mind back to how she’d melted into him, but in the cold light of day she was starting to regret her raging libido already. Time to what? She wondered what he’d been about to say. Time to fall back into bed together? Of course he wouldn’t say that in front of the solicitor, but what if he was thinking it?

  She’d given herself to him willingly, and she wasn’t particularly proud of that. Whatever force of gravity that had seemed to bring her body back to his had left her reeling and fumbling through the morning, wondering what the hell had happened to her brain.

  They’d both returned to earth to find missed calls from Ms Tanner about the meeting. Jodie had almost forgotten they still had to talk with her.

  ‘You were lucky. Casper had this all planned out,’ the round-faced, flame-haired Irishwoman told them from the leather-backed chair.

  ‘For how long?’

  Ms Tanner leafed through the pages in front of her with neatly manicured fingers. ‘For almost five years.’

  ‘Five years?’ Jodie was stunned. Cole dragged a hand through his hair. She knew he was probably still in pain from yesterday. He hadn’t exactly been careful with his arm, rolling around in the living room with her all night, but he was doing his best to hide any discomfort.

  ‘We find it’s better to initiate conversations about estates by focusing on the owner’s wishes and concerns, rather than on who gets what,’ Ms Tanner explained, pushing her glasses up her nose. ‘So that’s what we focused on when Casper came to us. The potential long-term care needs he had in mind for Everleigh came back to you, Mr Crawford, and you, Ms Everleigh.’

  ‘Ms Tanner, can I see that plan?’

  ‘Of course.’ She slid the papers over the desk to Jodie. ‘You’re free to look over all this again in your own time. You can come to an agreement between yourselves. If selling is on your mind at the end of the stipulated time spent here, Ms Everleigh, you should know
there are legal arrangements already in place regarding which assets are held for designated beneficiaries without the need for a court process...’

  Jodie scanned the documents, listening dutifully, swigging from her coffee cup as Ziggy warmed her cold feet as well as Cole’s, like the dog had accepted her into his pack already.

  She hadn’t even contemplated probate, or the prospect of divvying up what would be hers and what would be Cole’s. That would feel more like a separation than the day he’d broken up with her; not that splitting away from Cole in any way, shape or form should bother her now, she thought defiantly.

  And yet here we are now...

  They’d just made incredible love and her heart was rioting in her chest.

  ‘Do you have any thoughts about selling, Mr Crawford?’ Ms Tanner asked him.

  Cole sat up straighter on his chair. Again Jodie noticed him trying not to wince at his shoulder pain—stubborn fool. ‘This is my home,’ he stated bluntly. ‘I’m not going anywhere, and I wouldn’t particularly want anyone else coming in as a partner either. Jodie knows what Casper wanted for this place better than anyone.’

  She caught his eyes again and he held them this time, searching hers like he was waiting for her to either agree, or thank him, or maybe even confirm here and now that she wouldn’t be selling anything either, once she’d done what Casper had asked of her.

  Shame, guilt and irritation flared up out of nowhere. She’d put herself in an awkward situation last night. She’d been so caught up in Cole and the moment that she’d completely forgotten she was supposed to be staying away from the man who’d, oh, so casually ripped the rug out from under her once. She might know Everleigh better than anyone else who might walk in off the street, wanting a piece of it, but she owed Cole nothing. He was the one who’d kept her away from here for so long in the first place by ending their relationship.