Rugged and Restless

by Saylor Bliss

  She laughed softly. “That was pretty hard to miss, ace.” Innocent blue eyes drifted to my lap where I was still in recovery mode.

  “Don’t,” I whispered as my blood began to head south again. “Please. Or I’m not gonna care about anything but getting you up those stairs and loving you so good you won’t be able to walk after.”

  She continued to caress me with those eyes, my biggest weakness.

  “For the love of mercy, don’t do that!”

  Christine sniffed. “Crippling sex, huh?” Her smile scorched its way along my nerve endings. “Are you a gambling man?”

  My mouth twitched and I offered a half shrug. “I’ve been known to place a bet or two.”

  A sly, knowing smile curved her lips. Leaning toward me just enough to give me a view of the valley leading to her personal Main Street, she spoke in a husky voice. “Good. Because I see you your crippling sex and I’ll raise the stakes to mind-blowing sex.”

  Travis drew a shaky breath. “You aren’t going to make it easy, are you?”

  Without saying a word, Christine held me captive with her eyes and gave a slow shake of her head.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Christine

  Fingers of pink and gold sunlight reached from behind wispy clouds and splashed the sky above the plains with vibrant color. The sports car dominated the road, utterly responsive under Travis’s capable hands. I eyed them hungrily, those clever hands, and my body sizzled with the memory of his caresses, a flickering ember in the ashes of a blaze not fully extinguished.

  Because I couldn’t touch him, I stroked an appreciative finger along the edge of the leather seat. “This is a great car. Have you had it long?”

  He downshifted on the curve between two low hills and kicked the speed up a notch, simultaneously shifting in his seat. “Couple years. Saved her from the scrap yard and brought her back to life.”

  An effortless smile pulled my lips upward, and I tilted my head to survey his profile. “So the man has his own talents.”

  “You have no idea.” The mischievous crooked grin was a hair shy of an outright leer, bumping my pulse upward. “But I promise you will.”

  As they exchanged the two-lane highway for the long, dusty driveway of the ranch, the bright sun burst through the windshield causing shards of rainbow-colored light to dance over us both. I gently capture the source of the prismatic effect, a tiny crystal angel dangling from the rearview mirror by a pale blue cord.

  “Pretty.” I glanced at Travis to check his reaction, arching an eyebrow when he studiously showed none. I released the angel. “And a little… unexpected.”

  He keeps his eyes aimed on the driveway. A muscle working in his jaw, but he says nothing.

  “I don’t look at you and think angel.” I throw a teasing glance in his direction. “More like cowboy-on-the-white-horse hero.”

  His lips move upward but the smile never quite forms. After bringing the car to an abrupt stop in front of the stable, Travis sets the brake and cuts the engine. He stares ahead for a moment then seems to come to a decision and twists in the seat until he faces me, an inscrutable mask in place.

  “You’re mistaken,” he says, the words barely audible. “I’m no one’s hero.” He reaches out toward the angel, stopping just short of touching her, almost as though the touch might bring about unspeakable pain. “I put her there to remember someone.”

  Jealousy hits, more fierce than anything I had felt in the bar the night before. Like a welder’s spark, it arced through me and lands in the pit of my stomach. Somehow I managed to keep my voice even. “Someone you love?”

  Just before he smiles, I see a spasm of pain shadow his features. “It was heading that way. Heading that way real strong.”

  Heat rushes my face. “I’m sorry. I’m intruding.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s okay. She was a part of my life, but —that was a while ago now. She said she’d be there and then she just —didn’t stick around.”

  “And yet you want to remember her.”

  “Yeah.” This time his smile comes more easily, so not all the memories were bad ones. “Yeah, I do. I owe her that much. She believed in me, helped me through a bad time and I’m —grateful.”

  I swallow hard past the tightness in my throat. I didn’t know what he was going to say but I got the feeling “grateful” had been a last-minute substitution.

  He grasped my hand and cradled it in his. “I’ve been thinking of taking her out of here.”

  In silence, I searched his face. Maybe not so much in the past as he liked to think, she was still very much in his heart. So apparently Travis hadn’t returned to Pine Haven as unattached as the grapevine thought. Maybe not even as unattached as he thought himself.

  More bad timing. Didn’t that just figure?

  “No,” I said, warming my voice against the chill of disappointment that had settled in my heart. I liked the tenderness in his eyes. With a soft sigh, I touched the pretty bit of crystal with the tip of my finger, sending it into a gentle swing. “She’s exactly where she should be.”

  Travis

  Absently stroking my thumb over Christine’s knuckles, I immersed myself in the eyes I found so compelling, finding I liked what I saw of the woman behind them. I enjoyed the glimpses she occasionally let me see of the inner beauty beneath the sexy packaging. Would she understand my feelings for the angel who had saved my life?

  I thought about kissing her, I really wanted to. But my emotions were suddenly raw with thoughts of the past, and it wouldn’t be fair to Christine. I wasn’t even certain if, in that moment, I would be kissing her or the woman who had once given me the will to live. Nor was I certain, at that moment, which woman I really wanted to kiss.

  No, this wasn’t the time or place to indulge in another kiss. But oh, I did want to, almost more than I wanted to keep breathing.

  With a start, I realized she had gone quiet, and I looked up. In the golden light of early morning, her features were soft, the innocence in her smile almost angelic. And her eyes… I could spend forever looking into them and see something different every time.

  I gave her hand a light squeeze. “Ready? I’ll get us a couple of horses. You can load your kitchen sink pack into a couple of saddlebags.”

  “You’ll appreciate my efforts when lunchtime comes around,” she called after me. “Unless you want me to throw together some trail mix and you can rustle us up a rattlesnake.”

  I kept walking, tossing her a wave and a thumb’s up sign over my shoulder without looking back.

  This was going to be one interesting ride… if I could get through it in one piece without crippling my manhood. I picked my hat off the peg just inside the tack room, deliberately ignoring the off-white Stetson in favor of the black.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Christine

  The bank of windows overlooked the parking lot. Once, it had been a favorite place to check the weather before going home, or traffic conditions on the freeway on the other side of the blacktop. Sometimes I had enjoyed just standing and unwinding after a difficult call. The view of the outskirts of L.A. was nothing to write home about, but up close it offered a postage stamp sized patch of green grass, a row of palm trees, and sunshine.

  Or it had once.

  At the moment, the normally bustling freeway outside was dead. A line of cars stood unmoving; the road was probably impassable at some point and closed down. The horns had stopped blaring an hour earlier, just before many of the occupants had set out on foot. A few people had shown up at the dispatch office, but most appeared to be trekking west along the off ramp.

  Angry plumes of black and gray smoke clawed the sky to the north, an appalling beacon marking the place where lives had been lost… where one life was struggling in a futile attempt to hang on in the face of impossible odds.

  As if my thoughts had summoned him, the light above my workstation popped on, indicating radio activity. I raced back to my seat. “I’m here, Mick.”


  “Got some time to keep me company?” he wheezed.

  I looked around the office, noting every station was occupied, every operator talking and writing. “I’ve got some time. It’s slowing down a bit here,” I lied.

  “Do you know how long we’ve been down here?”

  I checked my notes, though I knew the answer without looking. “A couple of hours,” I said. “You should turn off your radio, try to save as much of the battery as possible.”

  “It’ll be all right for a little while.” Obviously reluctant to let go of the only human contact he had, he kept talking. “It’s black as pitch down here, Angel. Disorienting. Knowing you’re out there helps a little with that.”

  “You just stay strong and hold onto me. We’ll get through this together.”

  “Will you talk a bit?” He asked

  “What do you want to talk about?” I rolled my pen between her fingers, concentrating on the way the clear plastic picked up the outside light.

  “What do you do for fun?”

  “Mmm, lots of different things. I read… just about anything. Go for walks, watch old movies on cable. I do Community Theater.”

  “An actress, huh? You’re in the right city for it.”

  “Oh, no. I’m not looking to be discovered,” I assure him. “I can’t imagine a worse life than acting for a living. It’s just a fun little storefront group.”

  “What plays have you been in?”

  “I did some Shakespeare in college,” I say. “Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew.”

  “Kiss me Kate, we will be married o’ Sunday.’”

  “Quoting Shakespeare?” I giggle in unexpected delight. “You’ve managed to completely surprise me.”

  “Good. I like my women off balance,” he says. “Tell me more.”

  “Okay, I played Marian the Librarian in The Music Man last year.”

  “A musical. So you sing?”

  “Just something I dabble at.” Heat flames across my cheeks.

  “Sing something for me,” he pleads.

  “Sure. When you get out you can come see me in Oliver!”

  “I don’t want to wait. ‘If music be the food of love, play on,’” he quotes softly.

  I chuckle. “I can see I shouldn’t have told you about singing. Or about Shakespeare.” Though I silently admit my heart would always melt for someone who could quote the Bard of Avon so easily.

  “Too late. You did. Now you have to sing.”

  “You make my head spin,” I say, only half joking. “I’ll bet you’re a real tornado on a date.”

  He laughs. “You’ll find out. Stop stalling.”

  “Okay, let me think. Um, do you like Bette Midler?”

  “Sure.”

  I look around the office. The other operators were engaged; no one was paying attention to me. A little self-conscious, I quietly sing a song about the nature of love, and how hope grew from nurturing love’s seeds. When I finish, the line was quiet and I thought maybe I’d lost him.

  But then a soft sigh whispers in my ear. “I love your voice,” he says after a minute. “I’m gonna want to hear a lot more of it. Maybe you’ll do a private concert.” He chuckles. “Makes me really want to kiss you, though.”

  If only our meeting could really go somewhere. I’d never felt so easy with a man before. “Maybe your voice makes me want to kiss you back.”

  “Tell me more about you,” he begs. “I’d sure like to get to know you, Angel. Get a head start on those kisses I’m giving you as soon as I get out.”

  In between bursts of static we talked, sharing the inane bits of information two people getting to know one another often exchanged, as if we were meeting for the first time over coffee.

  He liked the color of the sky on a clear day in the mountains. I liked ice cream in the winter. He liked to go for runs on the beach at sunrise. I liked puppies and kittens. He didn’t have any pets but he’d saved a mother dog and her pups from a fire once and it had gone crazy kissing his face.

  “My hero!” I sigh in my best Southern belle voice.

  After a long pause, he finally whispered, “Naw, I’m not a hero. I’m just a man stuck under a building, talking to an angel he’d really, really like to kiss now.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Christine

  “Here you go, Bluebell.” Travis emerged from the stable leading a pair of horses. “You ready to ride?”

  I flashed him a grin. “Now that kind of depends what I’m going to be riding.”

  His startled blink signals a direct hit by my double entendre.

  Score!

  Christine 1… Travis 0.

  “I notice you go out without a hat. Not a good idea to ride without protection.” He tosses a white Stetson in my direction.

  Those green eyes of his light with mischief, when I catch his own double meaning, and I lick my lips.

  Tied. 1 to 1.

  “Nice to know you’re thinking about me,” I murmur, setting the hat in place. Especially since I’d been thinking about him nonstop for the past few days.

  Travis gives me a leg up onto a small but sturdy sorrel gelding named Galaxy. With a carefree grin, he mounts a buckskin gelding, with the rather unimaginative name of Buck. Side by side, we move onto the trail without speaking. Early morning sun slants across dew-coated fields of hay ready for harvest, turning them the color of fresh honey.

  The silence between us swells to its own life, and with it my own uncertainty. What was he thinking? Why didn’t he talk? Why didn’t I? What was I doing here? As soon as we came to even ground, we opened up to an easy, ground-eating lope. Still we didn’t talk, but the ride began to work its magic and I started to relax. I contented myself with watching Travis.

  He sat easy in the saddle, his hand light on the reins. His own movements were the perfect counterpoint to those of his horse, and he didn’t look like he’d spent any time at all away from the ranch. He was taking in the scenery the same hungry way he’d been looking at me earlier. Sunlight flashed off the bright red shirt that pulled a little too tightly across muscular shoulders, but it didn’t seem to bother him and it gave me a bit of eye candy to admire.

  Enchanted by his boyish eagerness, I raised my camera and discreetly captured some shots. When he glanced at me, I sent him a sweet smile; fairly certain he hadn’t caught me snapping his picture.

  Travis

  Climbing back on a horse had been another given returning to Pine Haven. Like all the other facets of my homecoming, I moved easily into it but once again found myself wondering if it was right. I hadn’t expected the simple act of having a horse beneath me to generate such overwhelming emotion. I wanted to talk, craved the human companionship I’d been finding with Christine, but I found myself fascinated by the land, how much and yet how little it had changed.

  And I’d become uncharacteristically tongue-tied with her.

  To the north, a series of bluffs came into view, and the trail led us into the shadows of a narrow canyon. The walls were close. When I’d chosen the route, I hadn’t realized how much the tight quarters would bother me. Little twitches between my shoulder blades grew stronger, as the passage between the rock walls grew tighter.

  If anything should happen there, the canyon walls would render the handheld radio in my saddlebag useless.

  A movement on the bluff above us sent a barrage of gravel sliding down the cliff. Probably an elk or a bighorn. Buck shied and I flinched. The sound of falling debris prickled at my nerves, scraping along old memories and drawing them to the surface. I glanced over my shoulder to warn Christine about the mini-avalanche but she had already guided Galaxy to the far side of the trail. She waved a reassuring hand then tilted her head to look upward, squinting at the edge of the cliff overhead.

  “Is there another way out of here?” Her voice trembled, an echo of the tremors in my gut.

  “Yeah,” I said, a little more brusquely than I’d intended. “We’ll take a different way home.”

&nbs
p; Christine

  The walls of the canyon finally began to open up, the single narrow path widening and flattening into a trail of loose shale. My tension eased.

  Slowing the pace, Travis pointed to the left and urged Buck upward through a break in the trees. The path was lined with sediment, washed down from the heights through years of spring rains and winter melts.

  Gravel crunched and rolled underfoot as the two horses climbed the steep wash. I never would have chanced it with Cloud. Any second, I expected Buck or Galaxy to lose footing and tumble back to the bottom. So far, though, the seasoned geldings proved sure-footed.

  They burst into the sunlight on a high crest.

  “Oh, my…” I drew in a deep breath. The view was certainly worth the case of nerves I’d used up on the trail getting to it.

  The valley was long more than wide, bordered on two sides by dense pine forest stretching toward the distant shadow of the Absaroka Range. A creek meandered through the center, edged by tall grasses and yellow and white wildflowers.

  Each direction held more wonder and I snapped at least a dozen different pictures without moving. “I thought you said this was open range.”

  Travis scanned the deserted meadow, a puzzled frown shadowing my face. “It is. It’s where Hawk MC turns the herd out for the summer.”

  “Where are the cattle?”

  I snapped a picture of Travis looking over the valley. His love for the land was reflected in his expression. He drank in the sight like a very thirsty man drinking from a well.

  “That seems to be the question of the moment,” he said after a long time.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Christine

  On horseback, I followed Travis, amused when he would cast a look over his shoulder as if to assure himself I was there. I was expecting one of those glances any minute now. And there it was. With a laugh, I squeezed the camera’s shutter and captured his impatient hurry-along look before nudging Galaxy to catch up.