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.
“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.
“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.
“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.”
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.
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.
As soon as Jeremiah got to his feet, as a baby, he’d run wild.
But Jack had always liked the guy.
“How are you?” Jack asked, reaching out to shake his old friend’s hand.
“Not bad,” Jeremiah said.
“You visiting Annie?” he asked, remembering Jeremiah’s redheaded spitfire of an older sister.
Jeremiah’s eyes went dark and Mia ducked her head, coughing into her sleeve.
“Annie died,” Jeremiah said, his voice tight. “Cancer.”
“When?” Jack asked, grief for his old friend blowing through him.
“A few months ago. I’ve taken over the ranch.”
“Where’s Gibson?” he asked, referring to Annie’s husband.
“He died in a car accident three years back,” Jeremiah said.
Jeremiah’s face was shuttered and Jack got the firm impression that he didn’t want to answer any other questions.
And there was nothing Jack understood better.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “She was a good woman.”
Jeremiah nodded, his jaw hard.
“Go on home,” Mia said, breaking the unbearable tension of the moment. “And thank you so much.”
“No problem,” Jeremiah said. He glanced up at Jack. “You can repay me by fixing that pump up in the high pasture.”
“It’s broken again?” she asked, her voice so weary it practically fell asleep on her lips.
Jeremiah nodded, his blue eyes watching Jack. “Good thing the water man is back,” he said. He slapped Jack’s shoulder and tipped his hat again. “’Night, folks.”
Jeremiah walked away, leaving Jack and Mia alone among the nursing cows. He watched Mia stroke the soft ear of the calf beside her. Her fingers looked so small, so delicate.
“I didn’t know about his sister,” he whispered. “Or Gibson.”
“I emailed you when it happened. Both times,” she said and he winced. Probably only one of a million things that hadn’t registered on the plane of his life.
He thought of Jeremiah, the handsome cowboy, the charm that had cut through the female population of Wassau Public School like a blade through butter. The bad-boy rodeo star with a wicked grin had been a potent teenager and seemed to be just as potent a man.
“Is Jeremiah why you want a divorce?”
She gaped at him for a moment before bursting into laughter, startling the calf in her lap.
“Shhh,” she cooed, coaxing the animal’s mouth back to the bottle.
“Is he?”
“No, Jack. He isn’t why I want a divorce. He’s taken over Stone’s Hollow and his sister’s three boys. He barely has time to sleep, much less seduce the neighbors.”
Three boys. He looked back at the cowboy getting into his truck in the wide gravel lot beside the barn. The idea of Jeremiah raising kids didn’t seem to fit, but then not much did these days.
Jack sat down in the grass beside Mia, his body so grateful for the rest it nearly cheered.
“How’s the calf?” he asked, pointing to the baby still sucking on the bottle.
“Calf is fine, big as all get-out, but Mom isn’t producing any colostrum yet.”
“You give her some extra feed?”
She nodded and the silence stretched out.
“Thanks for your help today,” she said, not looking at him, while he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her.
“You’re working too hard,” he said.
“Well, you know, ’tis the season.”
“You need a few extra hands around here, Mia,” he said.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Billy said something about there not being enough money to hire anyone.”
Mia’s head turned so fast her ponytail whipped the side of his face. “Billy’s a gossip.”
“Most cowboys are,” he said. “Is it true?”
She pulled the drained bottle from the calf’s mouth and got to her feet.
“You suddenly care about this ranch?”
“No.”
“Then stop asking—”
“I care about you, Mia. I always have.”
“Well, you have a pretty crappy way of showing it, Jack!” she snapped. “You show up here and lock your self in your room.” She crouched and gathered her stuff, the gritty gloves, the case for vitamin E shots, mumbling under her breath. “You won’t answer my questions. I have to force you—”
He put a hand over hers and she stilled. He shouldn’t have kissed her last night. It was stupid. Made things muddy between them.
“I’m sorry,” he said, watching her.
“For what?” She lifted her face and met his eyes. The electrical current of their connection buzzed through him.
“For showing up the way I did.” Her forthright gaze was too much and he looked away. He had a lot to apologize for. “For treating you the way I did the other night.
I’ve been…” God, what could he say?
“A mess?”
He smiled. “Sure, we’ll go with a mess.”
“You have every right, Jack. What you’ve been through—”
“Well, I didn’t need to take it out on you. I’m sorry about last night.”
Perhaps it was a trick of the fading light, but it looked as if Mia was blushing and he wondered if she’d gone to bed thinking of his fingers on her face. Her lips.
A hot wave of desire rolled over him and he was suddenly desperate for the taste of her again, for a taste of life before the bombing.
“I still want a divorce,” she said, and he felt like a fool, sitting there with half an erection.
“Fine,” he said, pushing himself to his feet. “I won’t stop you.”
She nodded once, looking for a moment as if she had something else to say, but in the end she just turned on her heel, took three steps and stopped again.
He would have smiled if he was still that kind of guy.
“I have to ask,” she said, bowing her head. Her neck, white in the dusk, seemed so vulnerable, so achingly appealing he wanted to press a hundred kisses to her soft skin. Her heartbeat.
“Oliver?” she asked, and he flinched, all tender thoughts obliterated. He didn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything. She turned, her eyes damp.
“What about him?” he asked, unable to push a woman with so much grief in her eyes, grief he understood far too well, away.
“Was he in pain…before he died?” she whispered. “Was he scared?”
Oh, Mia,
he thought, her sorrow tearing through him.
He shook his head, wondering how to tell her that all they found of Oliver after the bombing was a shoe and his flask.
“It was fast,” he whispered and she sighed in relief.
Before he knew it, she was in front of him, wrapping her strong arms around his waist, pulling them together.
Her hands were warm and wide on his back.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “You must miss him so much.”
The contact was distracting, like very loud static. He couldn’t think past all the noise his body was making.
But slowly the comfort of her touch seeped into him, shoving aside his grief and guilt, touching him in those cold dark places that he didn’t think would ever feel warmth again.
“I do,” he breathed. And pulled her against him as if his life depended on it.