“Will you wait a minute!” she hissed at him, trying to keep her skirt down.
“I told you, I’m in a hurry.” He set her down hard, stuffing her tote into her arms and shooing her along. She didn’t know where he wanted her to go.
“What have you got in this thing?” he asked about her suitcase.
“Bobby’s underwear!” she snapped as he passed her on his way toward the building.
“Well, come on!” he said over his shoulder. He had a slight limp she now noticed with some concern, knowing that it shouldn’t matter to her whether he limped or whether he didn’t. She couldn’t keep from noticing his broad back either, couldn’t keep from remembering her hands soapy and lavender-scented as she washed him, trying to give him some relief from the oppressive hospital heat. He was the most exasperating man, teasing her with that devilish way he had one minute, and treating her as if she were the ultimate burden of his life the next.
“Amelia, will you hurry? I told you I have to get out of here.”
She didn’t hurry—couldn’t hurry—in her beige high heels and her wrong clothes. “Mac—”
“Amelia, wait here before you fall down in those damn shoes.”
He was still giving orders, but annoyed as she was, she waited, standing there in her unsuitable high heels, feeling the sun hot on the top of her head. She would have liked to be in the shade, but New Mexico didn’t seem to have any. And she had a more pressing problem anyway: how to tell Houston McDade she couldn’t get into a small plane with him.
“Ready?” he said, abruptly behind her, making her jump. She dropped her purse on the hard, dusty ground. It was right in front of the toe of Mac’s cowboy boot. They both bent to retrieve it, but she was there first, and he let her have it. She straightened up slowly, taking the time to do an inventory: plain boot tops with no stitching or hand tooling, faded jeans with a small rip in the left knee, short leather chaps that were briar-scratched and worn, gray sweat shirt with tufts of curling dark hair showing out the top, no turquoise love beads, bearded chin, mouth under the mustache—mouth under the mustache, she thought again, letting her eyes linger there—tanned cheeks, hazel eyes surrounded by the thickest dark eyelashes she had honestly ever seen.
She swallowed heavily. “I’m not going to Chimayo with you,” she said. He didn’t answer. He simply looked into her eyes. “Did you hear me?” she asked.
“I heard you.” He took her by the arm and started walking.
“Mac,” Amelia said, trying not to walk with him. “Mac, I’m ashamed of it, but I just can’t. Don’t you understand?”
He didn’t stop walking, and he didn’t let her stop until they were standing in front of a red and white plane.’
“Didn’t I tell you I had cows in an arroyo?” he asked her quietly, shifting her suitcase to his other hand, then setting it down on the ground.
Amelia nodded, avoiding his eyes, but she didn’t want to look at that plane with the one engine either.
“Didn’t I tell you it’s going to rain?” Mac asked, continuing his interrogation.
“Yes!” she agreed, daring to glance at him.
“Well?” he insisted.
“I haven’t the vaguest idea what that means, and I’m not going with you.”
Mac started to reply, then bit down on it. It was all Amelia could do not to flinch. He kept staring at her.
“I told you I was afraid of flying,” she said, and he nodded, unbuckling the short chaps and tossing them into the plane. Her suitcase followed, then her tote.
“Mac—”
“Amelia, don’t frown,” he interrupted. “That’s the first thing I want you to do. Don’t frown!”
She tried to undo the worry on her face.
“That’s a little better,” he said of her effort. “Now, I know you’re a little worried here—”
“I’m not a little worried—I’m—”
“You’re a little worried,” he insisted. “But you don’t have to be. I’m a good pilot. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, Amelia.” He was caressing her with his deep, raspy voice. “Don’t look over there; look up here at me. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” he said again when she looked at him. He gave her a persuasive smile. “You can go out to the hangar there and ask the guys if you don’t believe me. I’m a good pilot.”
“Yes, thank you,” she answered in her most polite, most ladylike voice. “I believe I will.”
Mac laughed, putting his hands on her shoulders to keep her from actually going. “Get into the plane,” he ordered.
Amelia took a deep breath.
“Less than a hundred miles,” he whispered, his hands warm and gentle on her shoulders and his head close to hers. “You can make less than a hundred miles.”
“How much less?” Amelia forced herself to ask.
He turned down the corners of his mouth. “Ten,” he offered.
“Ten?” she said in alarm.
“Okay, two,” he added quickly.
“Two!”
He hugged her to him with a laugh, then held her at arm’s length, leaving her all—all addled again.
“Darlin’ Amelia,” he coaxed, “I know you can do it.” He bent his head again to whisper into her ear. “Less than a hundred miles. You can do that; I know you can. You can, can’t you?” he insisted, and finally she nodded.
“I… can do less than a hundred miles,” she agreed, frown firmly back in place.
“I knew you could,” he praised her. “Come here.” He gave her no time to change her mind; however, her skirt was no more suited to climbing into small planes than to climbing into the backs of pickup trucks. She needed a lot of help, and Mac’s hand brushed the underside of her breast as he steadied her for the climb. She felt his warm touch all the way to her toes, and that, combined with her fear of flying, made her not comprehend a word he was telling her. He finally gave up and assigned her places to put her hands. She kept her eyes tightly closed for the rumbling takeoff.
“You okay?” he asked when they were in the air.
“I—I guess so,” Amelia answered, her eyes still firmly closed. When she opened them, Mac was grinning from ear to ear.
“I want to pick on you so bad,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’ll have the heart attack.”
“I might,” she assured him, straining to be heard over the engine noise. She was still squeezing the places Mac said were all right to squeeze, but her eyes were open. She felt a moment of panic when he reached in the back for something—a well-worn paperback copy of Richard Bradford’s Red Sky at Morning.
“Your book,” he said, handing it to her.
“My book?”
“Don’t you remember? You lent it to me when Bobby was in the hospital. I’m not ready to give it back yet. I’m just giving it to you for the duration.”
“What duration?” she asked, glancing at the book.
“This flight. So read. Out loud.”
Amelia looked at him blankly.
“You’re a reading teacher—so read,” Mac said.
“I can’t read now!”
“Sure you can. You open the book to page one, and you start with the first word on the left in the first sentence. Then you continue left to right down the page, top to bottom.” He raised his eyebrows, then gave her a devilish grin. “No? Well. Give it to me. I’ll read—you fly the plane.” He let go of the controls, and the engine went into an ominous whine that coincided with Amelia’s shriek.
“Are you crazy?” she cried, clutching his arm.
“Are you going to read?” he countered.
“Yes! I’ll read!”
Amelia stared at the cover of the book. She didn’t have the nerve to pretend she’d rather look at the scenery; one had to look down to do that. She fumbled until she found page one, then took a deep breath.
“I can’t hear you,” Mac said in the singsong voice of a marine drill instructor, and she grinned. “And don’t try to leave anything out. I know it by heart.�
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From the looks of the pages, Amelia half-believed him. She started reading aloud. Mac kept glancing at her; she could feel it, feel his eyes traveling along the line of her face and throat to the swell of her breasts.
Starved for a man, she thought again among Richard Bradford’s words. That’s why you feel it.
She read for what seemed to be a long time until he finally stopped her by putting his fingers over the page.
“You feeling better now?”
“About what?”
“About flying. The reading helped, didn’t it?”
Amelia stared back at him. She did feel better. It had taken only a few pages for her voice to lose its fear-of-flying quiver.
Mac was smiling. “This used to be my plane,” he said, and Amelia looked at him in surprise. “We—Pop and me—lost our shirts last year. We scraped the money together to pay the grazing fee on public grazing land, and we went into hock to buy some calves from a cow-and-calf man. We fattened them up, but the beef prices weren’t high enough when they were ready to sell to give us a profit. We got out with the house and the acreage, but I had to auction off the plane. I used to charter out to some of the big ranches—wives and daughters who wanted to go shopping in Albuquerque or to the opera in Santa Fe. Now Pop and I are back having to work the bigger ranches up north instead of our own place so much, and I fly planes here and there for the guy who runs the airport. Hey. Sorry. You don’t want to hear all this.”
“Yes, I do,” Amelia assured him, and she did. She glanced at him, and he smiled, obviously warming to his favorite subjects: grassland, beef prices, and cows. He loved what he was doing—Amelia had no doubt whatsoever about that—and she appreciated his enthusiasm. She was beginning to relax. Flying—or at least flying with Houston McDade—wasn’t so bad after all. She realized suddenly how much she trusted him. He had told her he wouldn’t let anything happen to her, and she believed him.
Mac motioned for her to look down. “We’re going on a little tour,” he said, and she looked at him in alarm. “Little,” he repeated. “I said little tour. See those mountains over there?”
Amelia forced herself to look out the window to her right, seeing the green peaks in sharp contrast to the pink-brown foothills.
“Where’s Santa Fe?”
“Back that way,” he answered, pointing over his shoulder. “You missed it. Those are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains over there.” Thunderheads were rolling up over the far edge of the mountain range, a heavy light-on-dark gray with flashes of lightning already visible. He was taking the plane on a wide, low circle. “Look down there.”
Amelia looked down at the postage-stamp blots of yellow-green and at the clusters of white houses below them.
“That’s Truchas,” Mac said. “Richard Bradford used Truchas as a setting for his book.”
“How do you know that?” Amelia asked.
“Read it in National Geographic,” he said with an unabashed truthfulness that made her laugh, marveling all the while that with her worry over Bobby and her anxiety about flying she could do it. She stared at Mac’s profile openly now because he was busy with gauges. He was older than she remembered, and healthier. She could see his ribs and part of his chest through the cutout armhole of the sweat shirt, and the bulge of his muscular thighs through the worn jeans. He belonged in a cigarette ad, or in an ad for one of those rugged men’s colognes. It occurred to her how little she’d thought about Daniel during this trip. Shortly after their separation she’d religiously used Daniel as a check list for every man she met. She let her eyes wander to Mac’s hands. They were strong hands, she already knew from experience, a workingman’s hands—all tanned and callused and somewhat battered with scratches and nicks on the backs and the knuckles. The imagined sensation of his rough hands on her bare skin came to mind before she could push it aside.
“Amelia!” Mac said sharply. “You’re not fading out on me, are you?”
She looked at him a moment, trying to unscramble her thoughts, then shook her head.
“You might want to close your eyes again,” he told her. “I’m about to land.”
Amelia looked out the window. “There’s no airfield,” she said unnecessarily.
“No?” he asked in a tone of voice she should have recognized by now. “Well… what the hell,” he decided, and the nose of the plane plunged downward.
Amelia’s face was being buffeted with small bursts of lukewarm air.
“Feeling better?” Mac asked.
Amelia looked up at him as he quietly fanned her with his big cowboy hat.
“You just had to do it, didn’t you?” she accused him, still trying to get her breath. He’d scared the wits out of her, and now she couldn’t breathe—and she was sitting on the ground in a white linen suit.
“It was just a landing, Amelia,” Mac said innocently. She felt like hitting him.
“Oh, sure. You always land in the middle of nowhere.”
“Actually, this is the backyard.”
“You did that on purpose!”
Mac grinned. “Now, Amelia, I always land here—”
“You did it on purpose!”
His grin widened. “Well, yeah, Amelia, I did. I couldn’t help it. You’re just a woman a man has got to pick on.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” she cried, and she couldn’t get her breath. Mac fanned harder. “You—could show a little—concern—” she gasped.
“Amelia, I’m fanning as hard as I can. What do you want?” His lovely hazel eyes were filled with amusement. She glared at him and tried to breathe.
“You big—dumb—cowpuncher!” she managed with what she was sure was her last breath. She was dying, and all he could do was grin.
“It’s just the altitude, Amelia,” he said, trying to keep a properly concerned face. “I told you it was a lot higher here. You ought not let yourself get so upset when you’re not used to it.”
“I ought not let myself—! Well, pardon me, McDade. Any more pearls of wisdom?” she asked sarcastically.
“Yeah,” he said, his grin breaking loose again. “Don’t worry if your nose bleeds.”
She looked at him so wildly that he laughed out loud, reaching down to take her by the shoulders to make her stand.
“Oh, get your big—dumb—hands off me!” Amelia cried, trying to get away from him and showing a lot of leg in the process. “I don’t need your help!”
He paid no attention whatsoever to her protests. “Amelia, I don’t mind you calling me big, but do you have to follow it with dumb every time you say it? You’re going to make me feel bad here—”
“Who cares if you feel bad!” she snapped, too oxygen-hungry to think of anything more original. She shoved at his hands as he tried to brush the dirt off her white skirt.
Mac straightened up, still trying to keep from laughing. “I think, Amelia, I can remember a time when you did,” he said, getting her all rattled again because he was standing so close to her and because he was determined to look into her eyes. “How do you feel about getting wet?” he added before she could yell at him again.
“Don’t tell me; let me guess. It’s going to rain.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he assured her. “Let’s go. Come on, come on!” He was pulling her by the hand, but she jerked it free in spite of how much she enjoyed the feel of it.
“Okay,” he said with a shrug, starting out across the open field where they’d just landed.
“My luggage!” she called after him.
“We’ll get it later!” he yelled back, not bothering to look around.
“Backyard, my foot,” Amelia muttered under her breath, getting her shoulder tote out of the plane. But she made up her mind to follow that strong, broad back. The land around her was austere by Tennessee standards, sparse of tree and dwelling and grass. She recognized the middle of nowhere when she saw it.
“Hurry up, Amelia!” Mac yelled at her.
She was hurrying the best she could, given her air
-hunger and her wobbly shoes and her narrow skirt. There was no way she could catch up with him, limp or no limp.
Mac came back for her, taking her by the arm and saying nothing, bringing her along with him no matter how she felt about it. She was having trouble keeping her balance on the rough, rocky ground.
“Going to rain,” Mac announced, and rain it did. There were no preliminary drops, no civilized warning such as one might expect in Tennessee. It was simply like walking into a car wash.
Amelia gave a small whimper as she was immediately soaked to the skin. The ground was too hard to absorb such a downpour, and she was splattered mercilessly by muddy, bouncing raindrops.
Mac was giving her another one of his too-cute grins while she let out a more pitiful whimper, repositioning her purse and whacking him hard with it.
“Ow! Amelia, that hurt!”
“Good! I’m going to show you ‘hurt,’ you—”
“Atta girl!” a man’s voice called from the sidelines to the accompaniment of whistles and applause.
Amelia stopped mid-swing. They were in the backyard.
“Oh, my Lord,” she groaned. She hadn’t seen the house for trying to see where she was stepping on the rough ground. And a huge crowd of people waited patiently on the rambling, lean-to porch for the rain to stop.
“Hello, darlin’,” Mac’s father said as he made his way toward her. “You got here the hard way from the looks of it.” He took her along with him, giving her a big hug as soon as he had her under the shelter of the porch. “Did you get my Christmas cards?” he asked, holding her at arm’s length.
“Every year,” Amelia managed to say, smiling in spite of her bedraggled state, her fondness for Pop McDade overriding the malice she harbored at the moment for his son. “Did you get my brother?”
“I got him, honey,” Pop said, patting her gently on the cheek. He still wore his round wire-rimmed glasses, still had his white mustache. And his blue eyes still had that same sad look about them that Mac’s had, making her wonder again why it was that real cowboys had such sad eyes. He took her by the hand to lead her through the mass of people who waited under the porch.
Such Rough Splendor Page 4
