It was nice to see him. Comforting, even, and she knew it was all wrong. He was supposed to be leaving, because he didn’t love her.
So, a smart woman wouldn’t be so damn happy to see his socks at her bedside.
“You okay?” he asked, putting aside a small notebook computer. “Your head—”
“Hurts like hell,” she muttered. “Along with the rest of my body.”
“You remember what happened?”
She nodded. Blue had thrown her as soon as he’d heard the rattle from a snake underbrush. Or rather, Blue had leaped and Mia had been so wrapped up in her thoughts, she’d been caught with her pants down.
“I must have been out awhile,” she said, trying to sit up. Lightning strikes of pain exploded through her body and she gasped.
Jack jumped out of the chair to help, carefully easing her across her sheets until her back was leaned against the pillows against her headboard.
But still he fussed, too close.
It was salt in her wounds. She would always be expendable to him. Her feelings were an experiment; no, not even that.
His
feelings were the experiment. She was…nothing.
“What are you doing?” she asked, wishing she could be just a little snappier. A little more forceful. But force had been concussed right out of her. Now she was just hurting. Head, heart and body.
“Helping,” he said. “Can I get you something to drink?” He reached back over the edge of the bed. “I have water.” He lifted up a glass. “Or tea.” He lifted up a thermos. “Two sugars, loads of milk.”
That was the way she liked her tea.
She blinked at him, surprised he knew.
Oh, no,
she told herself,
it’s just tea. And you’ve been drinking it around him for years. Don’t get too excited.
“Tea,” she said, because her throat was dry and her brain felt like wadded-up tissue.
He unscrewed the stainless-steel lid and poured the caramel-colored liquid into it. Steam wreathed his face and the smell made her stomach growl.
“You’re hungry?” he asked with a smile.
And it was too much, him sitting there as if they hadn’t argued. As if she hadn’t told him to leave.
“When are you going?” she asked, and his hand paused as he passed her the cup. She took it from him, careful not to touch him. She didn’t even look at him.
“I can’t leave you now,” he said.
Her fingers flinched and tea spilled over the quilt.
She used the wrist of her long-sleeved T-shirt to clean it up.
“You need to rest,” Jack said. “Really rest. Like in bed.”
“And you’re sticking around to make sure I do it?”
“Someone has to,” he said.
“I don’t need a nurse,” she said. “Or a keeper. Or—” she looked right at him “—a husband. Not anymore.”
Jack’s face was dark and she knew she’d hurt him. Part of her was glad. A little reciprocated pain for all she’d felt over the years.
“Well, you need another guy out in the fields, if you’re moving the cattle to the north pasture.”
Mia bit her tongue, wishing it wasn’t true.
“Sure,” she finally said, sounding ungrateful even to her own ears. “I could use another hand.”
He gave her a long look, demanding she try again. But nicely this time. She stuck out her tongue.
“We’ve called your mother,” he said, laughing a little.
“What?” she cried, jerking upright, and the pain ricocheted from her toes to the ends of her hair.
She groaned and Jack went back to fluffing her pillows.
“She and Lucy will be here in two days.”
“No,” she moaned. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
Jack looked confused, the poor idiot, so unaware of the shit storm he just unleashed on his own head. “The ranch could use her,” Jack said. “I really don’t under stand what the problem is.”
“The problem is, Jack, my mother—my very Catholic mother—doesn’t understand why our marriage isn’t real.
Why we’re not giving her grandchildren as we speak.”
She put a hand to her forehead. Her head felt as if it were going to burst under the pressure.
“And Lucy.” She sighed. She loved her family. Adored them. Missed them terribly since they’d left. But she didn’t need them to come here to take care of her. Not while Jack was here. It was all difficult and confusing enough without adding her mother’s hope and her sister’s cynicism to the mix. “Lucy wants to kill you, Jack. She’s said so herself. In fact, I bet they’re not even coming up here for me. They’re coming up here to get their hands on you.”
Jack rubbed his neck, looking all too handsome and close and concerned. “It’ll be fine,” he said.
She managed to laugh. This could be fun, actually, watching her sister and Mom putting the gears to Jack. “I hope so,” she said, taking a sip of tea. “For your sake.”
And she knew that all the calving data in her notebooks needed to be transferred into the computer. That was something she could do; she could even put her feet up while she did it.
The clock on her bedside table read 10:30, and the house was quiet. Maybe no one would even know if she left her room for more than a bathroom break.
She turned the knob on her door and something jangled and thumped against the other side of the door. She jerked the door open to find her old bridle, the one done up in Christmas bells, looped around the doorknob.
Bastard!
The bedroom door next to hers opened and Jack, wearing nothing but an old pair of sweats, stepped out into the hallway.
He grinned, scratching his belly. “Going somewhere?” he asked.
“This is a little much, isn’t it, Jack? Why don’t you just lock me in?”
“No locks,” he said with a shrug, as though the idea had occurred to him and it was simply unfortunate he couldn’t go with his first choice.
The door across the hall opened and Walter appeared in the dark, wearing a pair of faded blue pajamas.
“It worked,” he said with a sly grin that Mia truly did not appreciate.
“Told you it would,” Jack said.
Walter nodded and turned himself around without the help of a cane or his walker. She was surprised to see how much improvement he’d made in the past two weeks. He was practically a different man, and she’d been so busy she barely noticed.
“Go to sleep, Mia,” Walter said over his shoulder and shut the door behind him.
“You heard the man,” Jack said, covering a yawn with his fist. She wished Jack would cover up his chest with a damn shirt. Honestly, what was a hydro-engineer doing with six-pack abs?
He was crowding her in the doorway, forcing her to step back into her room, but she wasn’t about to be herded.
“Come on, Jack,” she protested. “I’m so bored.”
“Watch TV,” he said.
“Have you watched TV lately?” she asked. “Nothing but bad talent shows and half-naked people in hot tubs kissing each other.”
He waggled his eyebrows. “That sounds all right to me.”
He put his hand on her arm, gripping her elbow to help her turn, and the contact made her body ring out like the Christmas bells on that bridle.
See,
she thought,
see what too much television will
do to a woman? Give her body ideas it has no business having.
She pulled away to give her unruly body a chance to simmer down. “You know I can sit at the computer just as well as I can sit in this room.”
“Computer?” he asked, pulling the blankets down off her bed, revealing the white sheets.
“The calving data needs to be entered into the system and I—”
Jack shook his head, making the wild rooster tail of his hair wave. His hair had gotten long since Santa Barbara, longer than she’d ever seen it. It made him look disreputable. She clenched her hands into fists against the urge to push them into that thick blond mess, feel the silky strands against her skin.
“You want to work?” he asked. “You know that’s against the rules.”
“It’s computer work! It’s not like I’m herding cattle.”
“Back in bed, Mia,” he said, shaking the blankets as if she were a bull. They stared at each other a long time, but she wasn’t about to go willingly back into her jail, not without some kind of concession.
“Okay.” He sighed, finally. “I’ll put the program on my laptop and you can enter the data in here tomorrow.”
Not bad as far as compromises went.
“All right,” she said, “but I’m bored now.” She sounded whiny, even to her own ears, but she was desperate.
“It’s ten-thirty,” he said. “Sleep.”
“I slept all day.”
Jack took a deep breath and again she tried not to look at his body. It was impossible. He was gorgeous, sleek and smooth, his chest was defined and strong, his arms thick with surprising muscles.
And his sweatpants hung on an ass she wanted to take a bite out of.
“You know, I’ve changed my mind,” she said, slightly scared of this renewed attraction, the intimacy of her bedroom and the thick night around them. No good would come of this. “Forget it.”
Her aching tailbone was beginning to think those white sheets and soft bed looked pretty good, so she crawled in carefully and yanked the blankets out of his hand.
He stared down at her, and Mia felt his gaze, like it was his hand, sweeping across her forehead and over her hair. He wanted to touch her, his intent was such a force, she could barely stand it.
And for a second, the stupid parts of her brain and the starved parts of her body joined forces and she thought, what the hell? He was here, they were married, she was bored out of her skull and it wasn’t as if they could do all that much considering the pain she was in—what harm could come of it?
Well, plenty. But the scales were beginning to tip out of balance and the harm didn’t seem so bad in the face of how much she wanted to touch him and be touched.
Loved, somehow.
Jack stepped away, his eyes on hers, and she wondered in a weird spellbound state if he was going to shut the door and climb into this bed with her. If that was how the boredom of this night would be dealt with.
Once again, stupid and starved got a little happy and her body started to hum.
But then he was out the door, brushing past the bells and making them ring.
For the best, she told herself, adding the small hurt to the piles of pain and unhappiness her relationship with Jack had brought her.
And just as quickly, he was back in her doorway, carrying a small case.
“You still play chess?” he asked, his eyes bright, his smile the sweetest she’d ever seen. He looked so much like the boy she’d fallen in love with that it stung.
Why did this feel more dangerous than touching him? They’d played a hundred games of chess, thousands. The smart part of her brain that had been somehow silent when she’d wanted to rub herself all over him decided to chime in.
Don’t do it.
Jack took her silence as a yes and stepped into the room, pulling the chair up closer to her bed. He opened the travel chess set to reveal the small black and white pieces nestled in little compartments.
Jack went still, looking down at the game as if it wasn’t what he expected. As if a snake lay curled up on the magnetic board.
“Jack?” she asked.
“Oliver—” His voice cracked and he cleared it. “Oliver and I played.” His thumb brushed over the white queen. “At night.”
Jack’s grief was a presence in the room and she could sense him withdrawing, watched him start to fold up the set so he could go back to his room and do whatever he’d been doing the week he first came to the ranch.
Grieving. Hiding.
And that wasn’t good for anyone. As dangerous as it might be to her heart for them to play chess the way they had when they were kids, it was far more dangerous for Jack to go back to hiding.
She put her hand on the board. “I’m black,” she said, pulling the pieces from their compartment. She set them up, pretending not to watch him, but so aware of him she could feel his emotions in the air. His grief and sorrow, his indecision. Everything.
And she could tell, by the way he sat, by the way he watched her and finally by the way he started to set up the white pieces, that his grief had turned to gratitude.
“Let’s see if you’ve gotten any better,” she said. “Somehow I doubt it.”
He laughed and the trash talk began.