Trevor took hold of Rick’s saddle horn and tugged on it, as if testing it. “Becky is special to me, Rick.” He held Rick’s gaze, his own narrowed. “Just thought I’d mention that.”
“That’s interesting,” Rick said, taking up the thinly veiled challenge as he dropped the stirrup, gentling his horse as it shied at the sudden movement. “She’s never mentioned you.”
Trevor laughed that off, patted Rick’s horse on the neck and left. Rick watched him move directly to Becky as if to stake his claim, but Becky turned away as he came near.
Chapter 9
The murmur of conversation faded away behind her as Becky picked her way through the trees, walking down a worn game trail. It was still light out and she wanted to grab a few moments of writing, away from people and chitchat and being perky and cheerful.
And watching out for Rick.
She lost track of how many times she’d glanced around looking for him, trying to keep her attention on the person talking to her, all the while searching out and finding Rick’s blond hair. His easy smile.
A refreshing cool slipped down the valley, pockets of it captured in the wooded area close to the creek. The late-evening sun slanted through the trees, its light softened. The noise of the group behind her grew more muffled, with each step she took replaced by the quiet sigh of the forest.
She found a large rock still warm from the sun. She kicked off her boots and socks and sat down, pulling in a deep cleansing breath. The whisper of the leaves overhead were like a gentle prayer, the gurgle of the creek over the rocks a soft counterpoint. It was always outside that she felt most inspired, and this was a picture-perfect spot.
From the notebook she had packed, she pulled out the pages she had printed. She glanced over them, reading what she had done before.
As her eyes skimmed over what she had already written, the peace she felt just a scant moment ago fell away. Once her writing had seemed lively, fresh, but now the words dropped like stones, unwieldy and overdone.
Her pen slashed across the sentences, eradicating what offended her.
Which was about half. She read and reread what she had left and after a moment’s thought scratched that out, too. Drivel. Dreck.
She set the printed pages aside and pulled out her notebook. Maybe she should just journal—maybe get some ideas for future “Runaround Sue” columns. She scribbled a few words, chasing an idea with her pen.
A thought gelled, took form.
Soon her pen was flowing across the page, her hand barely able to keep up with the ideas that burst through her mind. She had more than enough material for a couple of columns, but she couldn’t stop the energy that flowed and crackled.
“Hey, there.”
Becky’s pen jerked across the page leaving a black streak. She spun around, her heart pushing against her throat in anticipation and confusion.
Rick stood behind her, hipshot, a camera slung around his neck, his hands strung up in the pockets of his blue jeans, a half smile teasing his lips.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He strolled across the open space to where she sat, then leaned against her rock, glancing down at what she was writing. “Working already?”
Becky slapped the notebook shut, her racing heart a combination of her exciting writing spurt and Rick’s presence.
“Just noodling,” she said, willing her heart to slow. “Getting some ideas together. Just fooling around, really.”
And aren’t you starting to sound like you have something to hide?
“You must be inspired. I tried to get your attention a couple of times.”
Becky gave him a half shrug as if dismissing what she had been doing. “Sorry. I get a tunnel vision when I’m busy with something.” Still holding the notebook, she pulled her knees up to her chin.
Rick said nothing in reply, but she was as aware of his presence beside her as if he were shouting.
“So how does the scenery of this part of Alberta compare to other parts of the world?” she asked, anxious to remove the discomfort she felt in his presence. Idle chitchat became her fluttery defense.
“I’m often reminded of New Zealand. I did visit the Rocky Mountains in southern Alberta and they are as rugged here as they are there. But this valley also has its own beauty.”
Becky rested her chin on her knees, her eyes on the creek, but her attention straining toward the man beside her. “What places haven’t you been that you’d like to see?”
“Let’s see.” Rick settled down on the rock beside her, his shoulder brushing against hers. “China is a mystery. I’ve only seen a few parts of it. I’d love to see more of Africa. I haven’t been to Bolivia yet or the Falklands. I’d love to go kayaking down to Baja and even though I’ve been there a couple of times, I’d love to go back to Italy.”
“I liked the piece you did on hostels and the walking trails there.” Becky sighed lightly. “Made me want to visit.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I don’t think I’d like to travel alone, and most of my friends ended up moving away and getting married before they could commit to a trip. I suppose I could go if I really wanted to, but I’m usually too busy.”
“Way too busy. I’m surprised you get as much done as you do.”
“I have to write everything down.” She blushed as she thought of her Day-Timer in his hands. “But you know that.”
“How did you end up so involved?”
“We have a very active church, lots of young families. But they can’t do a lot of the work because they are young families.” She shrugged. “So someone needs to do the things that need to get done.”
“And that someone seems to be you.”
“I don’t run the church single-handedly.” Did she sound as if she did it all?
“No. But you seem to be carrying a lot of the burden.”
“I just want to be a wise steward of the gifts God has given me.”
Rick tapped the book on her lap. “And one of your gifts is this. Something you said yourself you don’t spend enough time on.”
You don’t find time, you make time.
“I need to learn to organize my days better.”
“That may be,” Rick said quietly. “But maybe you also need to learn to say no. To stop thinking if you don’t do a job, it won’t get done. If you do that, you might make more time for your writing. And maybe some traveling.”
“Maybe I’m just a homebody.”
Rick smiled at that. “Nothing wrong with that when you’ve got a good home to be in.”
Becky turned her head toward him, wondering if she’d imagined the wistful tone in his voice.
“I’ve always been thankful for my home,” she said quietly. “For the faith I was taught there, a faith that has grown over the years.”
Rick’s sigh drifted through the still air. “Well, that’s another place you and I differ. Faith and family—neither have been a part of my life for a long time.”
“But you grew up with it?”
Rick nodded. “I was taught all the right things, but traveling around the world, seeing the things I have…” He shrugged lightly. “Like I told your grandmother, I can’t believe in a God that allows so much suffering.”
Becky had heard this refrain so many times from people who wanted to ignore God, she was surprised Rick wasn’t at least a little more original. “And what about what you’re looking at now? What about this beautiful place? What about the people you’ve already met? What about all the good things that happen in the world?”
“What about it?”
“How can you not believe in a God who allows so much good? Who blesses us with so many good things? If you are going to acknowledge the one, you have to acknowledge the other.”
Becky looked away, hoping, praying that God could use her words. “Life is so incredibly complex and intertwined, so intricate. You just have to look at how an eye works, our lungs, our thoughts. Trees. Leaves. Photosynthesis.” She stumbled ove
r her words, trying to encapsulate Creation in the limited medium of conversation. “It’s so amazing and breathtaking… There’s no way you can believe this just happened. And if it didn’t just happen, then where did it come from? Who made it? And if you acknowledge that someone made it, you have to realize this was a great and powerful God who did—”
Becky felt Rick’s hand on her shoulder. She stopped talking and turned to him.
“Such passion,” he said softly. “You almost persuade me…”
Becky’s breath caught in her throat. And she winged up another quick prayer. “I think you believe already, Rick. I think you just need to acknowledge that God cares about you. That He wants you to be a part of Him.”
Rick tipped his head to one side. “And that’s a problem, I’ll admit.”
Becky’s heart brightened. It was small. But it was a start. Please, Lord, help him let go. Help him to know that he needs Your saving grace.
As their gazes met, a connection trembled between them, as real as a touch.
A faint breeze sifted down through the trees, catching Becky’s hair and tossing it lightly across her cheeks. Rick reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear, letting his hand linger on her face.
This had to stop. There was no way she was allowing her heart to be held by hands that would, someday, be gripping the steering wheel of a vehicle heading out of Holmes Crossing. Permanently.
She put aside her notebook, jumped off the rock and headed out to the creek.
“What are you doing?” Rick called out.
Cooling off. Giving myself some breathing space.
“I just feel like wading.” She carefully picked her way across the large stones, smoothed by centuries of water flowing over them.
“You’re going to freeze your feet in that cold water.”
Becky ignored him and rolled up her jeans. She stepped out into the water and ice clutched her feet with numbing fingers. She sucked in her breath and took a few more halting steps, her arms flailing to catch her balance on feet she could hardly feel. This was ridiculous, but she wasn’t going to back down.
“Look at me,” Rick said. “I want to catch that expression on your face.”
She spun around, holding her hand up in warning as she tottered on feet now totally devoid of feeling. “Don’t you dare, Rick Ethier.”
But he was already clicking the camera. “I did dare.” He walked closer and took another picture.
Becky bent over and scooped her hand through the water, spraying him.
Rick jerked his shoulder aside to protect his camera. When he turned back to her, his lopsided grin did not bode well.
He laid the camera down. “That was not a good idea, missy,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. Too late she realized what he was going to do and tried to take a step away, but her ice-cold feet wouldn’t respond. “I’m sorry, Rick.”
“Too late for apologies.”
He splashed toward her in his boots and before she could move again, he caught her around her shoulders, under her knees and swung her off her feet.
She shrieked and tried to fight him, but he was much stronger than she was.
“Put me down,” she squealed, pushing against his chest as he waded farther out into the creek.
“That camera has been my constant companion for many years,” he said, shaking his head. “Trying to make it wet was a declaration of war.”
She grabbed on to his neck, fully conscious of the ice-cold water splashing below them. “If you drop me, I’ll take you with.”
He grinned down at her, his wide smile bracketed by dimples and lighting up his whole face. “That sounds like a challenge,” he said softly.
“And you can never turn that down.”
“How well you know me.” Rick looked down at her but didn’t move.
Becky had a sense of time wheeling around the two of them. Slowing. Rick’s smile faded as their gazes locked, their breaths mingling. And then, without any forewarning, his lips touched hers, softly first, then more firmly.
Breathe, she reminded herself when he drew back, his eyes clouded now with an indefinable emotion. His eyes flicked over her face, as if seeking some clue there as to what had just happened.
In silence he touched his lips to hers again, then turned and strode back with her to the rock she had been sitting on. He set her down as carefully as if she were some fragile creature. Then he knelt down beside her, brushing her hair unnecessarily back from her face, his fingers trailing down the side of her face.
Becky caught his hand. As she pressed it to her cheek, confusion wrestled with attraction.
This was wonderful.
This wasn’t a good idea.
He wasn’t on the same level spiritually as she was.
He was seeking.
He was leaving.
She lowered his hand to her lap, and held it there. On the back of his hand was a faint star-shaped scar. She traced it lightly again and again as she tried to put these new emotions into the proper place in her life. Her mind told her one thing, her heart another.
A heart that had never been touched like this. It scared her that it was Rick, temporary and negative, who had been the one to do so.
“Is something wrong, Becky?” he asked, tipping her chin up with his other hand. “You’re so quiet.”
“I’m not sure what to do. How to feel.” She laughed lightly, suddenly self-conscious as she looked up at him. “I’m not the casual dating type, Rick. I never wanted to fall into that pattern.”
“I know.” Rick stroked her chin with his thumb, a serious cast to his expression. “Your grandmother sent me a not so veiled warning where you were concerned.”
“She would.” Becky tried to laugh, to ease the tension that gripped her heart.
“So this is where I should apologize for kissing you.”
“Why?”
Rick hunkered back on his heels and picked up her foot. “Because if you don’t believe in casual dating, you don’t believe in casual kissing.” He started massaging her foot, which only succeeded in heightening Becky’s confusion.
“Was that what that was? A casual kiss?”
Rick kept his head bent over her feet. “I don’t know what it was, Becky.” He rubbed her foot harder. “My goodness, girl. Your feet are like ice.”
Becky let it go. She was too confused to even know which emotion to track down. Which feeling was real. With Rick she had to depend on her head to guide her. Not her heart.
“You did warn me about the cold water,” she said, moving the conversation to a safer place.
“Some people have to find things out the hard way, I guess.”
He took her other foot in his hands and rubbed it, too, bringing the circulation back.
“What about you? You got your boots wet. The bottom of your pants, too.”
Rick shrugged her concerns away. “These boots have been in water before. I’ll dry them at the campfire.” Rick lowered her foot and picked up her boots and socks. “At least yours are dry.”
“At least if I’m going wading, I do some planning.” She slipped her socks on, thankful for the return to the usual conversational mode.
“Spontaneity is the spice of life.” Rick stood and helped her off the rock. “Don’t forget your notebook.”
“And you don’t forget your camera.”
Rick shook his head. “Have to have the last word, don’t you?”
But Becky just smiled back in spite of everything and picked up her notebook. Once again Rick had put her in a self-defeating position.
The night sky was endless.
If he looked at the scattered stars long enough, he could get lost, sucked into the vast depths of a universe unmeasured and incomprehensible by man’s tiny mind.
Better to stay grounded here, lying on the plain, hard dirt. Rick sighed lightly, tucking his hands behind his head, tracing the constellations in the sky as the point of a rock dug into his hip.
God’s creation.
A sliver of light streaked silently across the sky and Rick smiled, wishing Becky could have seen it. She would have expressed the appropriate awe instead of figuring out the purpose of pieces of rock burning up through the atmosphere.
Maybe he needed to stop critiquing and listen more. Maybe he needed to go looking for God, instead of waiting for his questions to be answered.
Rick yawned and pushed himself off the ground, glancing once more at the vast sky above him. Fragments of a Bible verse came back to him.
“When I consider the heavens…the works of Your hands…what is man that Thou art mindful of him…”
What indeed?
Rick swung the saddle on his horse, his gaze sweeping the campsite as he did. How easily he found her. Like his internal radar had an automatic “Becky” setting.
She was washing up the dishes from breakfast in the central opening of camp, chatting and laughing with the two women helping her. She wore her hair up this morning, emphasizing the delicate bone structure of her face. At that moment she looked up and found him. A tentative smile edged her lips but then she glanced away again.
All morning she had kept her distance from him and he had respected it, but all morning he found himself hearing only her voice above other voices. Seeing only her face.
His horse nudged his shoulder with his head, as if pulling his attention to the job at hand. Rick laughed to himself and bent down to bring the cinch up and around. With a few flips of the latigo he had it on enough to hold it for now. He would tighten it before they left.
Becky was gone.
Which was just as well. He did have work to do.
He turned on his camera and walked around. He already had hundreds of pictures on the memory card, but he wanted to make sure he had captured the obvious enthusiasm the people had for this trip.
It was his last opportunity. When the group headed out farther up the valley, he and Becky and their guide would return to the ranch.
He wanted to stay here, in this place away from the office, away from the stress and pressures of the magazine and its relentless deadlines.
A Place in Her Heart Page 12
