“I don’t have to do much.” He half turned toward her, his elbow propped on the railing, his expression intent. “It’s mostly about lettin’ go and just thinking and feeling the movement as it comes. I feel the horse’s movements in my own body, and Destiny feels mine in his.”
Sara frowned. “I still don’t understand how you made that trick happen.”
“Best as I can explain it is, with horses, you don’t make anything happen. Like I said, it’s how he deals with the choices he’s been given, makin’ him feel he’s the one in control.”
She still must have looked severely befuddled because he smiled up at her. She’d seen his smile before, but it struck her anew how it changed his aspect entirely, and one could see, of a sudden, what a handsome man he was.
Handsome—and irresistible. But she had to resist him.
“I guess it would make as much sense as tryin’ to read Greek upside down and backward to someone who didn’t have a natural talent for it,” he allowed. He peered out across the frosted landscape. “Like how ranching has been for me—takin’ all of my attention and then some just to keep on top of it.”
“Really?” From her perch, she had a good view of the well-kept-up ranch yard and buildings. “If you ask me, it looks like you’ve got more than a handle on things.”
His gaze remained fastened on the horizon, but Sara got a sense that once again she’d given him some validation that he’d long gone without, because in the next moment he went on quietly, “I know ranchin’ well enough, been doin’ fine at it for years. But I’ve always felt like my ranching abilities only go so far, that I can finesse it up to a limit, and then the finer points escape me.”
He gestured, a sweeping movement with his open hand. “That...knowing with one glance over a bunch of cattle if there’s any that’re sick. Or whether a mama cow is fixin’ to drop her calf in the next day. Like Loren could.”
Cade glanced up at her. “Now, there’s a natural-born talent. My brother could spot a steer brushed up in a stand of tamarack I’d ridden by ten times. I sure enough got the horse sense, but when it came to knowin’ critters of the bovine kind, Loren got the nod.”
She wanted to ask him why he persisted in speaking of his brother in the past tense when he was so determined to keep him alive both in his mind and hers, but she was reluctant to recall any part of last night’s scene. Yet she couldn’t prevent herself from inquiring, “Then why isn’t Loren ranching and you training horses for a living?”
“I thought at one point he wouldn’t be able to stay away, but he must have found another calling, even more powerful than ranchin’ had been for him,” he said, deftly avoiding her question. “In any case, I don’t intend to wait any longer to follow mine. As soon as matters get settled with you and the young’un, and y’all are back in Albuquerque where you belong, I’ll be sellin’ off part of the herd, maybe rent a section or so out, so I can be on the road as much as I can showing Destiny.”
“But what if Loren does want to get back into ranching, if not now, then sometime in the future?” Sara asked, her throat tightening up of a sudden.
His gold-brown gaze roamed her features. “He’s welcome to come back. But I can’t go on planning my future around that possibility. Horses like Destiny don’t come along but once in a lifetime, and I’d be a fool to waste this chance. Destiny—your kind of destiny—has already taken me for a ride. Now that I’m back in the saddle, so to speak, I fully intend to hold on to the reins.”
Their faces were close enough their breaths mingled and swirled in a cloud between them. “This time, nothin’ is gonna stand in my way. I can’t let it.”
A quiet finality had entered his voice during the last part, and for some reason she felt as if he were trying still to make her understand something that was beyond her ken.
And she wanted to understand! It was too important not to.
“What happened between you and Loren, Cade?” Sara asked, needing to know the truth, even if it cost her. “And something did happen, didn’t it? I know you mentioned before that there’d been a falling out, but it had to be over something big to tear two brothers apart. Otherwise, why would that letter be the first contact you’d had with him in seven years?”
At her questions, he looked away. “It’s not for me to say, Sara. If Loren’s already told you, then you’ll find out when either he or your memory comes back. And if he doesn’t...if he didn’t tell you, then he’ll have had his reasons, which I’m guessing are that it’s all water under the bridge—now that he has you.”
She was more confused than ever. “But it’s obviously not water under the bridge with you, Cade.”
“Yes, it is,” he contradicted in a low voice. “It has to be, Sara.”
He turned to untie Destiny’s reins from the fence, evidently in preparation for leaving—again.
For a moment, Sara sat in silence trying to make sense of it all. His words had been characteristic of the determination and stubbornness he used like a scythe to cut through any argument to the contrary. But his tone was not. It was desperate. He was desperate...desperate for her to believe. Or perhaps he was desperate to believe—that he was in charge of his fate, could set its wheels in motion as he chose.
Or bring them to a grinding, screeching halt.
But he couldn’t! Sara knew it with a certainty she hadn’t had last night. He couldn’t—and neither could she, any more than either of them could have stopped Baby Cade from being born. And that was what she needed to make him understand.
“Cade, wait,” Sara said, reaching out to grab the arm of his coat to detain him. Too late, however, she remembered her precarious position on the fence rail, so that when she missed his sleeve, she lost her balance. For a few seconds she windmilled furiously, but the effort was for naught.
Sara pitched straight backward into a three-foot drift of snow.
It completely engulfed her, going down her back and up her front, into her eyes and muffling her hearing. She struggled to sit up and only sank down deeper.
From far away it seemed she could hear Cade shouting her name. Sara flailed her arms, trying to catch a breath and inhaling only snow.
Then, abruptly, she was being hauled up and out of the drift and into Cade’s arms.
“Sara, are you all right?” Madly, he brushed the snow out of her face, dislodging her cap so it fell to the ground. Her hair spilled out in a cascade.
“I think—” she coughed “—I think so.”
“Did you hurt anything—your back? Your head?”
He stooped, peering into her eyes. She could see the fear in his, and was abruptly plunged into a memory.
It wasn’t from her forgotten past, though. Suddenly, it was New Year’s Eve again, with the blizzard raging outside, the two of them cocooned in his bedroom as if suspended in time, bound there together, where all that mattered was saving a baby who was determined to be born at that moment whether either of them wanted him to be or not.
That was then, though; this was now. This time, she had a choice. A choice of whether to connect—or turn away.
“I’m f-fine,” she stammered.
“You sure? You sound like you might’ve got the wind knocked out of you.”
She shook her head. “No. The snow cushioned my fall. I was surprised more than anything.”
Sara glanced over her shoulder at the indentation in the drift and gave a nervous laugh. “Doesn’t exactly look like a snow angel, does it?”
“A snow elephant is more like it,” Cade observed. “I mean, you really hit bottom, there.”
Sara slanted him a sidelong glance from under her lashes. “Really?”
One side of his mouth dented in, while the other side puckered toward the middle, as if he were trying not to laugh. “Sure did. ’Cept how you looked buried in that drift, with those boot
s cocked up in the air—now that had horse opera comic relief written all over it.”
That decided it. She made as if to bend over and brush off the hem of her coat, but when she straightened she came up with a mitten full of snow, which she deftly ground into his face.
Momentarily stunned, Cade gasped, sputtered for air, and came back raring for action. Sara was already running in the opposite direction, though. Over her shoulder she saw him stoop to scoop snow into his glove before taking off in pursuit.
Hers was a lost cause, she knew, hampered as she was by her long coat and Virgil’s Bozo-size boots. She’d barely rounded the corner when Cade seized her by the waist. In one swift move, he swung her about, and before Sara knew it she had her back up against the side of the stable. And Cade pressed up against her, a fistful of snow held aloft.
He lifted one eyebrow. “Too bad you didn’t give me a chance to warn you, but when it comes to snowball fights, I definitely got that talent in the family.”
“Oh, yeah?” Sara gasped, struggling to get away before he chose to make use of his snowball. “Well, all the talent in the world won’t help get you out of the dangerous waters you’re in now, telling a new mother she’s as big as an elephant.”
“Oh, is that what this is about?”
“Yes!” Sara squirmed, still trying to get away, but she may as well have been a mouse under a cat’s paw. “I’m fed up to here with your tactless comments about how much I eat and what I look like!”
He did another of those slow perusals that somehow made her whole body blush.
“Trust me, darlin’,” he said in that drawl of his, “you’ve got a long ways to go before you can stand on the street corner in Sagebrush and sell shade.”
Darlin’. At last, he’d called her darlin’, and in that instant Sara realized just how much she’d wanted him to, had missed him doing so.
They were both in dangerous waters here. Both with a choice to make. Or did they? Because as for herself, Sara knew she couldn’t go back. The choice had already been made for her.
As a result, she found herself being dangerously honest.
“Even without remembering Loren, I don’t think you’d have to do anything so drastic as make a trade with him for his way with women,” she whispered, her heart in her throat.
“I was sixteen when I wanted that, Sara,” he said, his voice as low, with a particular thrum of warning in it.
And now? What did he want now, and what would he give in trade to make it his?
“I’m simply telling you,” she admonished softly, “your brother’s not the only one with all the skills—or luck.”
He didn’t respond, for she could see that at her words, his lashes had dropped as his eyes homed in on her mouth.
Involuntarily, Sara wet her lips.
The moment held for what seemed like an eternity in which time both suspended completely and raced past with the speed of light.
Then Cade lifted his eyes again to hit her with that gaze of his that was, amazingly, filled with the same promise as it’d been during her little one’s birth.
“Man, your eyes are blue,” he muttered, almost angrily.
As if that magnetic force bound them, their faces came an inch closer, and then apart two as the tension intensified, then closer three, gazes still locked, and holding...mere millimeters now...and holding...achingly, agonizingly holding...
And then his mouth was upon hers, a shock of unfamiliar contact and coldness. But only in the first instant, before he pressed and parted her lips and filled her with his tongue.
And oh, it felt right! So right it almost brought her to tears. As if they were two halves of a soul that had come together again for the first time in centuries. As if destined to. It wasn’t all her wishful thinking. It wasn’t.
Sara made a low sound of satisfaction deep in her throat, which Cade answered with his own, capturing her closer, sharing breath as he urged the kiss deeper as if seeking to surpass what was already edging into sublime, yet knowing nothing of how not to quest further.
Happiness welled up in her unbidden, like water from a hidden spring, for something amazing had happened. He’d become the Cade of before, the man who’d held nothing back from her, who, with great passion, had made her a promise to take care of and keep her and her baby as his own for as long as they needed him.
Yes, the promise...and the passion.
Cade’s arm tightened around her, pressing her that much closer still.
He seemed to realize the constraints hindering them, for he released her only long enough to tear off his gloves before taking her face between his hands and fusing his mouth with hers again. His thumbs caressed her jawline, back and forth, then drifted down her throat to the edge of her collar, to dip just underneath it to where her pulse beat wildly.
Whimpering for want of touching him the same way, Sara spent precious seconds struggling with her mittens, finally yanking them off and letting them fall to the ground. Yet her urgency left her of a sudden as she drew away slightly, mouth throbbing and vision hazy except for the warmth of Cade’s eyes. Slowly, she reached up and lifted his hat from his head, tossing it carelessly aside.
Then, equally slowly, equally deliberately, she wove her hands into his hair and tugged him down to her to lose herself in him again.
And lose herself she did, completely. How could she not when he held nothing back? Neither of them did.
They were desperate, she realized. These were stolen moments. And stealing was wrong.
Sanity returned, but hung only by a thread. Oh, what kind of woman was she?
“Cade, wait,” Sara cried, drawing away.
He groaned.
“Cade, this is too dangerous...what if someone sees us?”
Truly, they were wrapped in a cocoon, with all thought and time suspended. Nothing of the past mattered; the future had yet to be written. All that was real, all that mattered was the present. It was all that would ever matter....
Yet they weren’t trapped in a blizzard, with no one and nothing to depend upon but each other. Then, she’d had to let the knowns in her life take precedence over the unknowns. They had both had to.
Now, though, they knew. And they each had obligations, if not a choice.
With a dry sob, Sara buried her face against his neck.
Wordlessly, he pressed his palm to the back of her head, and she felt him swallow painfully again and again as he held her. Held them both.
Finally, she lifted her head. “Oh, Cade, what are we going to do—”
“No, don’t say it,” he interrupted, pressing three fingers to her lips. “Don’t say anything either of us would regret.”
“But we can’t keep ignoring what’s happened between us, hoping it’ll go away!”
“Nothing’s happened!”
Sara watched numbly as he collected hats and gloves and mittens, slapping them against his thigh to shake the snow loose, all very much with the look of a man who needed to do something right now, where only seconds ago it had seemed enough to simply be.
He handed her belongings to her without looking at her, and she thought she’d cry.
She held it in, though just barely.
“Cade,” Sara finally said when it became clear he wasn’t about to speak. “Please. Can’t we at least talk about it?”
“Why?” He turned on her. With the sun shining directly in his eyes, they looked bloodshot, and a flush painted the hollows of his cheeks. “What good will talking do when it can’t go anywhere? It’s got to stop right here, right now, don’t you see that?”
He drove his fingers through his hair, and when he placed his hat on his head she could see his hand was shaking. “You’re my brother’s wife, Sara! And we both need to remember that!”
“You think I don’t know th
at? Cade—” She swallowed back the tears in her throat. “—I wish I could remember Loren, truly I do. I keep looking for him in our baby’s features. But I don’t see him there!”
Dropping her chin, Sara squeezed her eyes shut, as if one last time hoping to see—or not see—with a certainty what she knew in her heart to be true. “And when I do see him, in those vague dreams of mine, I don’t feel for him...what a wife should feel for her husband. And something tells me I never did.”
The silence was unnatural, lacking any sound of bird or animal or other signs of life. Even the incessant wind had dwindled to nothing.
“What’re you saying, Sara?” Cade finally asked, as deathly quiet.
She shook her head miserably, her eyes still shut. It helped, right now, to have the ability to close out part of the world. She couldn’t do that forever, though. “I don’t know. Who knows why I’m repressing my memory of Loren, if that’s what’s going on inside my head?”
Finally, she opened her eyes and found him. “But that doesn’t change this—this bond between us. And I can’t just make it go away because it’s wrong. Right or wrong, I can’t go back to before.”
“You’ve got to, Sara,” Cade repeated desperately.
She shook her head slowly, her eyes never leaving his. “I’m truly sorry, Cade, but I can’t, any more than you can. Call it destiny or fate or the luck of the draw, it doesn’t change what is, and that is I love—”
“No!” Taking a step forward, he gripped her upper arms, practically hovering over her. Sara faced him resolutely, not knowing whether he meant to try to make them both, with characteristic determination, continue to deny the truth, or to embrace it—and her. Either way, she wouldn’t back down.
A whole spectrum of emotions crossed his expressive eyes, from guilt to hope to anguish to relief. She simply stared back at him, her own naked, honest emotion in her eyes.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
They both jumped at the sound of Virgil’s voice. He stood at the entrance of the corral, wearing no coat or hat. Just a scowl of censure on his face.
New Year's Baby (Harlequin Heartwarming) Page 12