His overloaded life was why he stayed in bed all day. Bed he could manage. One blank moment followed by another. No demands. Nothing more than what he could hold.
“Your job, the drill—”
“There’s no more drill, Mia,” he said.
“Well, not there, clearly. But you have others—”
Jack shook his head. He may be lost in his life, but he knew this. “Without Oliver there is no drill.”
“But the university? Your job?”
“I’m on a leave of absence.” It felt good to heave this stuff off his chest. The decisions he’d made in his hospital bed still made sense. The idea of going back to campus, to his job, made him ill.
“How long?”
“Indefinite.”
“Because of your hand—”
“Because I screwed up!” he yelled and she rocked back.
Yes, you did, the voices cooed. Yes, you really did.
“Screwed what up?” she asked into the electrified silence.
He looked at her for a long time, seeing his reflection in her amber eyes.
Who the hell is that guy? he wondered in a panic. A stranger. A fool with a sandwich.
“Forget it, Mia. It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does.” She stepped in front of him when he tried to walk back down the hallway and he thought about pushing her out of his way. But she’d push back. It was what Mia did.
“Look at you, Jack. You’re skin and bones. You lock yourself up in that room all damn day and you roam the house at night. It doesn’t take a genius to see you’re not sleeping. Doesn’t take a genius to see that something is eating you up.”
“You going to be my confessor?” he asked, his voice a wicked lick of sarcasm. Something awful was waking up inside him, a beast he couldn’t contain. His hurt and anger at the way she’d left him that night in Santa Barbara, the way the events had unfolded from there, had created a two-headed monster out for blood.
“I would rather be your friend,” she said.
He licked his lips, his eyes on the hallway behind her shoulder. “Not my wife?”
She laughed, the sound finding every raw spot, every vulnerable place inside him. “You never really needed one of those, Jack.”
He practically threw the plate onto the dining table and stepped up to her, way closer than was comfortable. He walked until he could feel her breath on his face. The warmth of her body against the cold shell of his own.
“Why’d you run away that night, Mia?” he asked, nailing her to the ground with his eyes.
She opened her mouth, but no words came out.
His smile was wolfish. And his fingers—suddenly hungry for heat and the sensation of the living—touched her cheek. His thumb landed on the corner of her lush mouth, and she gasped.
Again, the voices, those whispers of self-destruction, chimed in. We want her. Again. And again.
“I know why you left,” he whispered and her eyes flared. “Because you’re a coward.” He was close enough to kiss her, so he did, pressing his lips to hers, moving so close their chests touched and heat rippled over him.
Against her lips, he whispered, “And so am I.”
He stepped away, picked up his sandwich and started to go back to his room. The medicine bottles on the dresser. The silence.
“What am I supposed to do with you?” she whispered.
“Nothing, Mia,” he said, wishing, for her sake, that he had a better answer. “Not one damn thing.”
MIA FELT AS THOUGH she’d just barely shut her eyes when the lowing woke her up. The deep guttural cry of a dozen cows in pain rolled over the Rocky M, right into her bedroom.
It’s started, she thought, awake in a heartbeat. Elation fueled her and she pushed off her covers and grabbed fresh clothes from her dresser.
The sky was pink and gray, the clouds milky.
Her light at the end of the tunnel looked like dawn and she couldn’t love it more.
In the barn, Chris was already pulling out the tattoo pliers and ear tags.
“Tim’s out there,” he said. “We’ve got one calf on the ground. Two more should be coming soon. All of them look good. Billy’s on his way—he’s making coffee. I figure Billy and Tim can handle the cows, Jeremiah and I can process and you can do the paperwork and float.”
“Sounds good,” she said. “I’ll call Jeremiah.”
Blue stood in his stall, his big brown eyes trained on Mia. “Not this morning, bud,” she whispered, giving the horse a scratch between the eyes.
They had a landline in the tack room and a list of frequently called numbers written on the whitewashed wall beside it. Halfway down, past Dr. Peuse, the big-game vet in town, the name Annie was scratched out and Jeremiah penciled in.
She dialed the number, wincing as she thought about the young cowboy and the early morning. But he’d agreed.
Surprisingly, the phone was answered on the first ring.
“Hello?” said a little voice. Crap. It was one of the kids.
“Hi, Eli?” She took a stab with the middle kid.
“Casey.”
“Sorry, Casey.” It was the baby. Wow. When had the baby grown up enough to answer the phone? At Annie’s funeral he’d been a little bump in his grandpa’s arms. Of course, all three boys, even Jacob, the twelve-year-old, had looked like babies that day. “Is your uncle there?”
“You bet,” he said.
Mia pinched the bridge of her nose. “Could you get him?”
“You bet.”
The phone clattered and in a few seconds she heard Jeremiah’s voice and Casey’s excited whisper.
“Hi, this is Jeremiah.”
“I’m sorry, am I waking you up?”
“No,” Jeremiah grumbled, his deep voice sounding as if it were sprinkled with gravel. “Casey took care of that. Casey always takes care of that. Your calves coming?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We could use you as soon as you can get here.”
“No problem. I’ll wake up Jacob and be over there in a half hour.”
“I owe you, Jeremiah.”
His laugh was weary and she again wondered how Jeremiah Stone, rodeo star, was handling the turn his life had taken after his sister’s death.
“I’ll remember that,” he said with a laugh.
They hung up and Mia grabbed her pocket-size notebook, made sure she had the right forms and at least three pens in her shirt pocket. She pulled the beat-up black kit out from under the wobbly table in the corner and checked that she had enough syringes and vitamin E shots.
It was going to be a busy day.
THE SUN WAS HOT by ten and a furnace by noon. Sweat ran down Mia’s back and across her face, but the day was going well.
Most of the newly born calves had found the teat and were nursing. There were three cows who had been in labor a long time and she was getting worried about breech calves.
“You want me to call Peuse?” Jeremiah asked, not looking up from the calf whose ear he was tagging. They stood by the open bed of the truck that had become their processing center.
“Not yet,” she said, holding the calf with all of her strength. Her muscles burned from the effort.
“We’re good,” he muttered and set down the tattoo pliers. Together they lifted the calf to the ground, where he stood, wobbled and lowed for his mama.
Mama lowed back and the calf, on shaky newborn legs, staggered to the left of the truck.
“Tim!” she heard Chris yell, his voice laced with panic. She turned away from the mama and calf reunion and searched the far side of the pasture for any sign of her guys.
“Tim, watch it! She’s on her feet! Tim—”
Mia and Jeremiah shared a quick look and then took off at a run for the small hill and copse of trees in the corner of the field.
Chris and Tim met them at the top of hill. Tim, the almost always silent cowboy, was swearing like a sailor and holding his hand wrapped in a shirt that was quickly turning red.
&n
bsp; “It’s not that bad,” he said quickly, when he saw Mia’s face.
She glanced up at Chris who shook his head. “Two fingers are broken and he should get stitches.”
“What the hell happened?” she asked, pushing her hat back on her head.
“He got between the calf and the dam,” Chris said.
“You’re kidding me,” she moaned. Such a beginner’s mistake.
“I think my five-year-old knows better,” Jeremiah said with a wicked twinkle in his blue eyes.
“This isn’t funny!” she yelled and all the men straightened. “We’re not even a quarter of the way through the herd. And I can’t spare one man, much less two, so you can get chauffeured into town to get looked at.”
“I can stitch him up,” Jeremiah said. He lifted his hat and ran his fingers through sweaty black curls.
“Really?” she asked.
“I did it all the time on the circuit.”
Those rodeo guys were a tough bunch.
“What about the fingers?” she asked.
“Tape ’em,” Tim said, looking contrite and pained. “I’ll be fine.”
“No,” Chris said. “You’ll be one-handed, at best.”
One-handed. One-handed, when she was three men short.
“Do what you can,” she said and watched as Tim and Jeremiah walked back toward the barn.
In the distance, the house sat in the shadows of the granite cliff behind it. A house with two men in it.
She tried to take a calming breath to divert the sudden river of purpose that had welled up in her. But there was no diverting it. She was short men and the house was lousy with them.
Walter, she knew, even with the medicine, would be no good out here.
But Jack was another matter.
He’d taken off that cast. Wasn’t walking with a cane.
Just thinking his name ignited a brush fire in her brain.
Jack, who’d seen and worked a dozen calving seasons.
Jack, who’d called her a coward last night and then hid in his room like a child. Jack, whose dark eyes and mercurial animosity had kept her awake tossing and turning most of the night, tormented by anger and a very unwanted lust.
She’d never asked for a damn thing, not once in five years of marriage.
And she’d been proud of that.
But now it was going to change.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE DOOR OPENED easily under her fist and Jack, lying on his bed, sat up. Mia’s eyes raked his bare chest, the lean strong muscles.
She worried briefly about his injuries, but she could get him to process with Jeremiah. He could still work a pencil and a tagging gun.
“Mia?” he asked, nonplussed, his lips curved in a strange little smile and she realized she was still staring at his chest.
She flung open the door to his closet, but it was empty. So were the drawers in his dresser.
“You looking for something?” he asked.
The duffel bag beside his bed was overflowing with T-shirts and jeans. She picked up one of each and threw them at him.
“Get dressed,” she said.
“What are you doing, Mia?” He sighed. “I told you I just wanted to be—”
“I’m drowning!” she snapped, her hands in fists at her side because she wanted to grab him and shake him. She didn’t want to need him. She didn’t want to beg him for help, but her back was so far against the wall she was about to become wallpaper.
“I’m three men short, Tim’s hurt and we’re not even a quarter through the herd.”
Jack glanced out the bare window. At the big blue sky outside. She couldn’t read his still face, couldn’t see her old friend in those familiar features, the man who would have been the first guy out the door this morning to help her.
Mia pulled the words that didn’t want to see the light of day out from the very back of her throat. “I need you, Jack,” she said through her teeth. “Five years of marriage and I never asked you for—”
He held up his hand. “You don’t have to beg,” he said and shoved an arm through his shirt. “Give me a minute.”
JACK STUMBLED OUT into the pasture like one of the calves. New and unsure. The sun was bright, the smells powerful. It was an assault on every sense he’d been wrapping in gauze for the past few weeks.
“Jack?” Chris, the lean, tough foreman who’d been working here since Jack was a kid, stepped up to his left and Jack tried not to flinch in surprise. Christ, he was jumpy.
Back inside! the voices cried. Back to bed!
“Hey, Chris,” he said, trying to fake a smile.
“I’d shake but—” Chris held up his hands, swathed in gloves, covered in blood.
Jack nodded. “Deferred shake,” he said with a laugh.
“On account of your hand and knee, we’re going to put you up on the truck—”
“My hand is fine,” he said, not entirely sure why. But now that he was here, he wasn’t blind to the work. He remembered how tired Mia had looked last night, passed out in the chair, and guilt hit hard. A week he’d been hiding in that bedroom, more a coward than he thought. “So’s my knee.”
Chris blinked, those cagey blue eyes missing nothing. “Okay, then,” he said. “You can be with Billy down at the chute. We’re waiting for Peuse to handle a couple of difficult births.”
Jack nodded. He wanted to ask where Mia was, but he bit back the question.
He approached the chute and a young hand—Billy, he supposed—handed him tattoo pliers and ear tags. “Right ear for bulls, left for—”
For a second the hand’s voice was drowned out by his father’s telling him the exact same thing when he was nine years old, helping out on his first calving.
“Heifers. I remember,” Jack said. And he did. Eighteen years of his life surrounded by cattle. He’d forgotten the rituals, but they surfaced as soon as he stepped into the chute. They weren’t unwelcome, not like the memories of his mother. His father. Those he kept locked away, never to resurface. But he’d always liked the work. Liked that it was an entire world in and of itself, while at the same time a part of a cumulative whole. It felt good to turn off his brain and use his body.
His muscles, asleep and stiff, woke up to the exertion and within a few minutes, he was sweating and swearing with Billy.
Within a few hours, the voices were silent.
PEUSE CAME AND WENT, treating two calves with scours, and by nightfall, a good two-thirds of the calves had been born. The remaining third looked good to go in the next few days, at a far more reasonable pace. Jack was covered head to toe in the realities of calving.
“You stink, man,” Billy said. The good-natured cowboy had been cracking jokes all day, and the pull of camaraderie was painful.
Because Oliver, his comrade, the great jokester, the man Jack’d worked beside more hours than he could count, was dead. Blown into so many pieces there was nothing left to bury.
Jack didn’t want to joke. To shoot the shit. Not with anyone but his old friend.
He wanted to work himself into stillness. Quiet.
So, it was easier to resist Billy’s efforts at chumminess. To hold himself distant and aloof.
“Go on and take a shower,” Jack told Billy. The role of boss had never been a tough one for him. “Get some food.”
“I better check on Mia. She hasn’t had a break all day.”
“She works hard,” Jack said. The loyalty she inspired in her men was significant. And he was proud of her.
“There’s more work than people. She does her share and then some.”
Jack turned to Billy as a question that had bothered him since he first returned to the ranch came back around. “Where are all the seasonal guys?” he asked. “Every spring we’d hire a few extra guys. Why hasn’t Mia?”
Billy shrugged. “You’ll have to ask her, but I’m pretty sure there ain’t any money to do it.”
“Come on,” Jack scoffed. “No money for spring cowboys?”
Billy nodded. “Your old man did a number on this place—”
Jack jerked. “Dad?”
Billy waved his hands. “This conversation is way above my pay grade,” he said. “You want to ask those kinds of questions, better talk to Mia.”
Jack nodded. “Go on in,” he said. “I’ll check on her.” Billy didn’t need the offer a third time. He made his way around the chute and headed toward the bunkhouse.
Chris and Tim had already gone to get food put together, but he hadn’t seen Mia in the past few hours.
The sky was indigo against the black mountains. Soon it would be fully dark, the sliver of a moon not much illumination, and he couldn’t leave her out here to finish whatever work was left.
He headed toward the far corner of the pasture, toward the hill and the trees where most of the cows seemed to go once they knew birth was close.
Cresting the hill, he saw Mia sitting cross-legged on the ground, feeding a calf from a bottle, while the dam licked the baby.
A man crouched beside her and as Jack watched, the stranger cupped her shoulder, smiled into her face. Intimately. Mia’s laugh, weary and throaty, echoed over the small valley. The man said something in Spanish and she responded in kind.
Jealousy made a sudden, angry puncture wound in his chest. I can speak Spanish, he thought, sullen and childish.
“Mia,” he said, as he approached. She turned, looking at him over her shoulder. The cowboy stood up and tipped back his hat.
“Hi, Jack,” he said, a slow-burning smile crossing his familiar face. “Been a while.”
It took a second but soon the dots connected in his head. “Jeremiah Stone,” he said with a laugh. Their closest neighbor. He and Jeremiah had gone to school together until Jeremiah dropped out of high school to be a rodeo stud. They hadn’t had a whole lot in common—some summer baseball games, a mutual crush on Helen Jones. They had been two different kinds of boys.
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