“They did not know each other well, but your father was friendly with both Sean and Chief Shane. He admired what they did, and once said their work was just as important as his.”
“Oh.” The boy said no more, but Elena didn’t miss the thoughtful smile that curved his mouth.
And it wasn’t until later, as she sat alone with the game console turned back on for something she would never admit, that she liked the music from the game, that another thought surfaced. Her immediate reaction to her son’s question had been that it was significant. Very significant, and needing a serious, careful answer. Far more careful than if Sean was merely a friend, or someone she owed thanks to for helping Marcos.
Somewhere, in some part of her mind or heart, he had already become much more than that.
Chapter Twenty
Sean pulled off his shirt and inspected his arm, then flexed his left elbow experimentally. And grinned. Marcos had learned that last lesson well; he’d caught him off guard and put him on the mat with that leg sweep. And the kid had been deliriously happy about it. As he should be, given this was only his fourth lesson.
“I didn’t hurt you did I?” Marcos sounded anxious now.
“Nah,” Sean assured him. “But if we’d been out on a sidewalk somewhere, I’d be whining like a baby.”
“You’d never whine,” Marcos said with such confidence Sean felt a little humbled. Not knowing what to say to that he just grinned and took a swipe at the boy with his T-shirt. Then he gestured toward the tossed shoes and socks in the corner of the room.
“Gather up your stuff. Your mom’ll be here soon.”
“She already is,” Marcos said, gesturing in turn toward the doorway out into the hallway.
Sean froze. Then, slowly, he turned around. And there she was, her hand still on the door handle, staring at him. With an expression that made him conscious of his bare chest and belly in a way he never was in this room where it wasn’t at all unusual. He resisted the urge to check and see if his sweatpants had slipped a little too low, and instead just hoped they were heavy enough to mask his instant reaction to her.
“Get moving, then,” he said, pleased his voice sounded almost normal. “Don’t keep her waiting.”
The boy scampered off to gather his clothes and school bag. Sean hastily pulled his shirt back on. Walked toward her, wondering if he should apologize for his state of undress. Decided not; it was a gym room after all.
“He’s doing great,” he said as he stopped in front of her. “Put me on the floor today.”
“Is that why you were looking at your arm as if you needed to know if it still worked?”
She sounded concerned, so he smiled at her. “Just making sure.” He glanced over to where Marcos was trying to stuff his shoes into the already full backpack. “And I was thinking. Wednesday will be a week since we started this, so a break might be good for him. Maybe he could come out to the ranch instead, if you don’t mind. I’ll bring him home after.”
“I should be asking you if you mind.”
“If I did I wouldn’t have asked. He can hang out and see what it’s like. If you think he’d like to.”
“I know he would. He’s been asking questions about life on a ranch that I’m afraid I have no answers to.” She smiled. “My education and experience have been sadly lacking in that area, it seems.”
Sean felt as if a door had just swung open in front of him, and that with no idea where it would lead he had to decide in this instant whether to step through. And in that instant, he went with his heart and gut over his brain and that little warning voice.
“Broaden your horizons, then. Come with him.”
He’d half expected her to look startled. She did not. Instead she gave him a smile that his heart and gut wanted to interpret as meaning she’d been hoping he’d ask.
“I would like that. Very much. The only time I get to see a horse up close is for the rodeo parade, and that doesn’t seem right when I like them so much.”
Sean swallowed past the lump in his throat. “We could ride. We’ve got a couple of really sweet, gentle horses you and Marcos could use.”
“I believe I’ve ridden one of them a couple of times, for the parade.”
“Whiskers. Of course,” he said, feeling stupid for forgetting they loaned him out when a calm, gentle horse was necessary. But when he saw her—from a distance since he could never decide if he was going to look until the last moment—in that beautiful Mexican regalia draped over the saddle he barely even noticed the horse. Which, for a ranch-raised guy, was saying something.
“He seems quite sweet-natured.”
“He is.”
Marcos skidded to a halt beside them. “Who’s what?”
“Whiskers is sweet,” his mother said.
The boy blinked, then frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if you know Whiskers is a horse,” Sean explained.
“Oh!” And then he looked from his mother to Sean. “Horse? Does this mean I get to go to your ranch?”
Sean felt more at ease now, and gave Elena a crooked smile. “He’s quick, this one.”
She smiled back. “Yes. He is. And sweet like Whiskers, too, when he wishes to be.”
Marcos groaned. Sean laughed, knowing too well the last thing an eleven-year-old boy wanted to be known as was sweet.
“So, how about Wednesday afternoon, after school?” he asked. “I’ve got some time off coming.”
“Can I, Mom? Please?”
“I will pick him up from school and bring him,” she said. “Rosalina can handle anything that comes up at the restaurant, or call me if she cannot.”
So. She would come. Now he just had to see that she stayed after they arrived. Because he wanted her to see the place, to see how he lived, and to see how she reacted.
And why that was so important to him he wasn’t sure he wanted to face.
*
Elena slowed as they neared the turn. The intricate stonework fence and pillars were solid and beautiful. The arched metal gate with the circled Lone Star in the center was simple but evocative. And the Lone Star flag at full mast on the pole to the right of the gate rippled in the breeze. The house wasn’t visible from here, and the entrance road curved and disappeared through a thick stand of trees. She knew the Highwater ranch was smaller than it once had been, that they’d had to sell off some acreage back during a bad patch, but it was still more land than she could imagine keeping up with.
There was also a freestanding pillar, shorter, along the left side of the entrance, which housed an intercom. She realized she would have to announce their arrival to get in, and wondered who would be on the other end. She pulled to a stop beside the device, rolled down the window and reached out.
“Wait, Mom! I have a code.”
She looked at the number pad. “A pass code?”
“Yeah. Sean told me what to do,” he said excitedly. She thought about just making him tell her the number, but he was so excited she couldn’t do it. He’d been anticipating this afternoon all day today, and most of yesterday.
“How fast can you get out, run over and punch it in, and get back in the car?”
“Before the gate opens all the way,” he promised.
Moments later he proved himself right, the passenger door slamming shut before the gate slipped completely clear of the road. She drove through the opening, toward the stand of trees fifty yards ahead, trying to picture them in spring when they would be fully leafed out. It would be a wide swath of green, she could tell. And lovely.
The road dipped, then rose again, then repeated, giving her the sense of truly being in the Hill Country, more than she ever felt in town. And she was surprised at how much it tugged at something inside her, something deep and basic. She needed to get out here more.
Well, not specifically to the Highwater Ranch of course, but out where she could see and sense the hills that had given this home she loved its name. There were benefits to living in town, the closeness to the r
estaurant, and to all the amenities, but this, this called to her. Besides, the house was still her mother’s, and while she had made them more than welcome and insisted she loved having them there, Elena still felt a bit hemmed in by living in the house she’d grown up in. She’d gotten used to being in charge, especially when Enrique had been deployed, and it had been difficult to cede control of the household.
Perhaps that was why she had been so stern with Marcos in the beginning. Not only because she was terrified of losing him as she had his father, but also because he was the only thing she was fully in charge of, back when he’d been a rambunctious six-year-old.
But he was growing so fast now, and in less than two years he would be thirteen. And she felt another tug deep inside at the thought of being the single mother of a teenager.
“There’s the house!” Marcos yelped. “Wow, it’s big.”
“It must be, since all the Highwaters live there.”
“And is that a…a barn? Where horses live?”
“I believe it is,” she said with a smile.
“And look, somebody’s riding!”
She looked where he was excitedly pointing, toward a fenced enclosure surely too large to be called a corral, although she had no idea what it would be called. But there was definitely a horse, a sleek, golden brown animal who seemed to be flowing rather than galloping in a big circle.
And aboard him was Sean. She slowed to a halt.
“Why are you stopping?” Marcos protested.
“I want to watch for a moment.”
Apparently that was acceptable, because he said, “Okay.”
She knew just enough about balance and riding to stay in the saddle during the slow walk down Main Street during the rodeo parade. This was an entirely different matter. This was skill, power and grace, a melding of horse and rider that was on a level far above anything she’d ever aspired to. He might not be the rodeo rider his brother Shane was, but obviously Sean was quite at home on a horse.
Only then did she notice the other person there, a young woman who had been sitting on the top rail of the fence, but now swung over and dropped down outside the fence. And headed toward them.
“Who’s that?”
“That is Sean’s sister, Sage,” Elena said, recognizing her both from her frequent stops at the restaurant and her blazing demonstrations of reining and cutting horses at the rodeo.
Marcos’s eyes widened. “She looks like a cowgirl.”
“Indeed she does,” Elena said, watching the tall, slender woman, with long, dark hair in a single thick braid down her back approach. She was dressed in a long-sleeved blue shirt, jeans, and a pair of well-worn chaps, the style Elena thought was called shotgun. Her expression was not particularly welcoming, and Elena’s brow furrowed.
“You can park over there,” Sage said, gesturing toward a space out of the way toward the house. Her tone matched her expression.
Marcos barely waited until the car had come to a stop before leaping out. He looked up at Sage. “Sean says you’re the toughest cowgirl in Texas.”
And that easily her entire demeanor changed. She looked at the boy and smiled, and it was a warm, genuine one. “Does he, now? I’m glad to see that lesson finally got through to him.”
“He says you can outdo most cowboys, too.”
“Well, now you’ve done it.” Her smile at Marcos became a grin. “Now I’m going to have to make him cookies.”
“Can I go watch him?” the boy asked, looking eagerly toward man and horse.
“You can sit on the fence. Just don’t go in the arena,” Sage cautioned. “Poke’s working.”
Marcos nodded and took off at a run. And the moment her son was gone, Sage shifted back to an expression that was almost unreadable, but certainly not the bright welcome she’d given Marcos. She didn’t think she’d ever done anything to antagonize the young woman. In fact their encounters at the restaurant and elsewhere in town had been pleasant, so she was not certain what was wrong.
Sage matched her own five foot eight, so she met her gaze levelly. “You are not happy to see me here.”
Sage’s eyes, which were yet a different Highwater blue, almost the color of the bluebonnets that blanketed the Hill Country in the spring, widened slightly. “Well, that was direct.”
“You’ve always impressed me as a direct sort of woman.”
Sage’s mouth curved the tiniest bit as she nodded. “Sean’s told me enough about Marcos to know that he’s made a strong connection with your son.”
“He has. And he has helped me tremendously to understand Marcos, how he thinks, why he reacts the way he does sometimes.”
“Or doesn’t react?” Sage suggested.
“Exactly that,” Elena agreed, smiling at just how much help Sean had given her.
“Sean hasn’t always had the easiest time, and I’m guessing you understand from Marcos why. They think differently, and some people aren’t very understanding or forgiving of that.”
“That is, sadly, quite true. And Sean has been a great help to Marcos in handling that. But just what is it that’s bothering you?”
Sage seemed to hesitate. “I hope you’ve made it clear to him that that’s all you want. Help with your son.”
Elena went very still. Stared at the young woman, whose expression had become almost mutinous now. Elena said nothing, because in that moment she could find no words.
“Look,” Sage said after a moment, “Sean would hate me telling you this, but he’s had this weird thing about you for years. Been kind of in awe.”
What Joey Douglas had told her came back in a rush: …he thinks you’re like the Queen of Last Stand.
“I have never wished for this,” she said carefully.
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is that it gives you the power to really hurt him, and I don’t want my brother hurt.”
Elena studied the woman before her, saw the fiercely protective look in her eyes. Acknowledged it with a nod before saying, sincerely, “I admire and appreciate your love for your brother. But you’re mistaken.”
Sage looked startled. “I know my brother,” she insisted.
“I meant,” Elena said, “in thinking the only thing I want from him is help with my son.”
And there it was, at last, in so many words, what she’d been dancing around for days now. And since there was not a single thing to say after that, she simply walked away, leaving Sean’s sister staring after her.
Chapter Twenty-One
He’d known they were here, he’d heard the chime of the system announcing someone had keyed in the gate code. Even focused on Poke and his workout, he’d heard the car, seen it out of the corner of his eye. If it wasn’t for the fact that he’d agreed to work the horse so Sage could watch, see things in a way she couldn’t when she was the one aboard, he would have stopped right then.
He didn’t change or shift when he saw Marcos clamber up to the top rail, and neither did Poke. Sage had trained him so well he barely flicked an ear toward the fence as they went by. So Sean knew the horse was aware of the boy, but he wasn’t about to let a new arrival distract him from the mission at hand, honing that reining skill to a high edge. The least he could do was go along, and focus on that mission himself.
And then he saw Elena.
Poke kept going because he was well trained, but Sean completely lost all awareness of what the hell he was supposed to be doing. Because as gorgeous as she was in her usual, more polished attire, Elena de la Cova was breath-stealing in form-fitting black jeans and a snug black sweater. And the form they fit had his pulse hammering and his breath quickening.
In all those years he’d never quite realized, or allowed himself to realize, how…how utterly female she was. But it had never been about sexiness before, because he’d never dared even think about her like that. For years he’d had some pristine vision of her in his mind, as if she were some untouchable, beautiful sculpture far beyond his vision and reach.
That kiss had
blasted that all to bits. Maybe that’s why it seemed so different now. Why all he could see now was this living, breathing woman with the flashing eyes and luscious shape. Or maybe it was simply because she was here, on his home turf, the ranch. Was it as simple as seeing her where he’d never expected to? Or maybe it was a throwback, to all those times when, desperate for distraction, he’d tried to picture her here, in this place, in his life. He’d never been able to really pull that off—it was too distant from his reality. It hadn’t been distant from his fantasy, though. He remembered one of the games he’d played endlessly in the days after his father’s funeral. A game where the goal was to rescue the kidnapped princess, and you were allowed to choose the avatar for the endangered royal. He’d picked the dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty instantly, and was well into the game before he’d realized why. He’d—
“Hey, nerd-brain! Snap out of it.”
Sage’s shout yanked him back to the present. Poke had come to a halt in the middle of the arena, clearly puzzled by the sudden lack of presence of his rider. He felt himself flush; it had been a long time since he’d lost himself while on a specific task that required focus. He’d dared to hope he’d broken the habit permanently, but obviously he had not.
He leaned over and gave Poke an apologetic pat on the neck. “Sorry, buddy. My fault.”
Poke tossed his head and snorted, in a “Don’t let it happen again,” sort of way. Sean knew it wouldn’t, because Sage might not ever let him ride her most prized animal again.
“Finish the pattern,” Sage called out. “Or you’ll really mess him up.”
He doubted that. Poke was too smart and Sage had done too good a job training him, but when it came to this, his sister was the boss. Shane had made that clear the day they’d all voted to put the ranch and stock in her care.
So he sent the horse back into an easy lope, thinking he wouldn’t mind a little more time to recover from his unexpected lapse before he actually had to face Elena. He knew since she was here by his invitation he should be there to welcome her, in fact should never have gone ahead with this ride in the first place, but Sage had asked and she rarely did, so—
A Lone Star Christmas (Texas Justice Book 3) Page 13
