The Year of Luminous Love

by Lurlene McDaniel

  “Did I stay out here all night?” Ciana was horrified.

  “We did,” Cowboy said. “I found an old horse blanket in the back of my truck and covered you. Hope that’s all right and that you don’t mind smelling like horse hair.”

  The scent of horse clung to the blanket’s fibers. She rubbed her throbbing temples and cut her eyes sideways, a movement that sent pain knifing through her head.

  “Headache?”

  She closed her eyes, rubbing her temples. “More like a freight train.” She shivered, wondering what had pooped in her mouth. She raised her head. “What happened?”

  “You fell asleep while we were talking.” He grinned broadly, showing dimples through the growth of stubble on his chin and jaw. “I don’t usually have that effect on women.”

  His expression was teasing, but she groaned. “So nothing happened.” She emphasized the word.

  He leaned forward. “Well, while you were sleeping, I kissed your eyelids.”

  A knot of anxiety began to unwind inside her.

  His expression went serious. “But no, nothing happened that might make you want to slap me. You see, I want a woman to be aware of everything we’re doing together.”

  Ciana’s face went hot. “So now what?”

  He stood, offered her his hand, and pulled her to her feet when she took it. “We get some breakfast and hot coffee. Then maybe we can pick up where we left off.”

  They spoke little on the ride to a diner not far from the dance saloon. Ciana hugged the door of his pickup and watched the sun rise through the windshield, her brain dull, her emotions raw. She’d made an idiot of herself the night before. At the diner, she made a beeline for the restroom, pausing just long enough to read a sign for taxi services in the hallway. She pulled out her cell and called the first number, ordering a cab to come pick her up at the diner’s clearly posted address.

  In the small restroom, she could hardly look at herself in the mirror. She washed her face with the dispenser soap, rubbing off every speck of eye shadow and smudged mascara. It was time her cowboy saw the real her. She tugged her fingers through her tangled nest of cinnamon-colored hair, found a squished scrunchie in her string purse, and made her usual pony tail.

  When she settled at the table across from him, she saw mugs of steaming coffee and a plate of warm toast. If her fresh-scrubbed face startled him, he didn’t show it. “I thought this might be a good start,” he said. “I ordered fried eggs, bacon, grits, biscuits, and a short stack. You can order whatever you like.”

  Her stomach heaved and she grabbed the coffee, sipping the hot liquid. “Toast and coffee are fine.”

  His order arrived and she watched him smush the runny eggs into the grits and wished she hadn’t. “Want a bite of pancakes?” he asked. “Real maple syrup.”

  “Don’t think so.” She glanced out the window, willing the cab to get there.

  “Expecting someone?”

  She felt her face redden. “I … I called a cab.”

  “I’ll take you home.” He looked insulted that she might have thought otherwise.

  “I … um … don’t live around here. Long drive to my place.”

  He reached over the top of the table and took her hand. “I want to see you again.”

  She couldn’t imagine why.

  After a few seconds of silence, he said, “That would require your name and phone number.”

  Just then, she saw the cab stop in front of the diner through the large plate glass window. She stood, ambivalent. Why shouldn’t she give the information to him? She wanted to see him again too. “Um …” Her phone vibrated. “Let me get this,” she told him, feeling the pressure of the cabby revving his engine. She took out her phone and saw that she had a text message from her mother. Great. Had Alice Faye called Eden looking for her? That was all she needed. She punched the button. The text read: OLIVIA RUSHED TO HOSPITAL. COME NOW.

  Fear seized her. “Oh my God!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I … I have to go!” She ran for the door, even as he called for her to wait up. Ciana jumped into the cab.

  “Where to?” the cabby asked.

  “Windemere.”

  “Whoa. That’s a pretty expensive ride, lady.”

  Ciana dug into her string purse, found the hundred-dollar bill she’d brought to the dance hall but hadn’t spent, and waved it under the driver’s nose.

  He pulled out of the diner’s lot. She glanced out the back window to see her cowboy emerge from the diner. The cab gathered speed and he grew smaller and smaller as the distance widened between them. Ciana fought back tears—for Olivia, for the responsibilities resting on her shoulders, for having to leave such a man behind—but the spell was broken. She’d stayed too long at the ball.

  “Where are you and why haven’t you called me?” were the first words Ciana heard from Eden on Sunday afternoon when she answered her cell phone.

  “I’m at the hospital,” Ciana said.

  “What? What happened last night after I left you? You said you were fine—”

  “Calm down. I’m at the hospital because Olivia was brought in last night with pneumonia. She’s really sick, Eden.”

  “I’ll come right over.”

  “You don’t have to—” But Ciana was talking to empty air.

  Late afternoon sunlight shone through a window in Olivia’s area of the ICU room and onto the overstuffed chair beside the bed. Ciana watched Olivia’s chest rise and fall, listened to the rattle of her breath through the oxygen mask across her face. Her eighty-five-year-old grandmother looked frail. Her white hair, usually smooth and bright white, was a tangled yellowish mess, her cheeks were sunken, her hands spidery with blue veins. IV lines ran into the crook of her elbow, which was strapped down to the bed. Tears swam in Ciana’s eyes. Olivia couldn’t die. She just couldn’t!

  Ciana’s earliest memories were of Olivia telling her family stories, her voice pouring over words like sweet cream, bringing long-dead ancestors to life in Ciana’s imagination. She heard about how the great house had burned to the ground in the months following the Civil War, of how in the 1890s it was rebuilt brick by brick, board by board into the Victorian house they lived in today. Ciana learned why Beauchamp women kept the Beauchamp name even if they married. It was done as a pledge to Colonel Beauchamp made by his daughter, Madeline. When he lay in his bed passing from this world into the next, and with no sons to carry on the family name, Madeline swore that she and all future daughters would keep the name as their own whenever there were no male heirs.

  Ciana smoothed the pale green sheets on Olivia’s bed, folded her arms, and rested her head. She closed her eyes and drifted to the night before, to the cowboy who’d held her, kissed her, covered her with a blanket, to waking to his striking green eyes and to his voice saying, “I kissed your eyelids.” She didn’t even know his name, and yet last night had been magical, a fairy tale. She’d run away and left him, not leaving even a glass slipper behind. Gone without a trace.

  “Ciana, wake up.” A hand shook her shoulder.

  Ciana startled awake and looked up at her mother. She blinked, disoriented, unsure of where she was until the hiss of oxygen brought her back to reality. “Mom.”

  “If you’re that tired, go home. She’s unconscious. There’s nothing you can do for her. Get some rest and come back later.” Alice Faye sounded as cross as the expression on her face. “You look a wreck. What exactly did you and Eden and Arie do last night?”

  Ciana ignored her mother’s question. “I’m not leaving, Mom. What if Grandmother wakes up and gets scared? She needs to see someone she knows.”

  Alice Faye wore no makeup except lipstick, and Ciana saw how age was creeping over her mother’s face. She also saw Alice Faye’s hands trembling. Her mother needed a drink. Ciana straightened. “Eden’s on her way here. You go on home,” she said quietly.

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Alice Faye
patted Olivia’s hand, clouds of sadness forming in her eyes. “When Eden leaves, you come home,” she said in a choked voice.

  “She’s not going to die,” Ciana said, her chin trembling.

  Alice Faye didn’t meet Ciana’s eyes as she left the room.

  “How’s she doing?” Eden asked as she breezed into the room.

  Ciana looked up sadly.

  Eden put her arm around Ciana’s shoulder. “I’m really sorry. Take a break. Let’s go down the hall for a minute to talk. I saw a visitor’s area when I got off the elevator.”

  Ciana hesitated.

  “We’ll be steps away. Come on.”

  Ciana went, stopping to buy herself a soda before they sat down in padded chairs swimming in sunlight from a bank of windows.

  “Tell me what’s happened,” Eden said. “Is she going to be all right?”

  Ciana shrugged. “Don’t know yet. It’s a viral pneumonia.”

  Eden crossed her legs. “They’ll take good care of her here. I’m betting she’ll be fine.”

  “She’ll just have to go back to Evergreen.”

  “It’s a nice place,” Eden said.

  “It’s not her home.” Ciana ran her finger around the rim of the soda can. “She’s had a hard life, you know.”

  Eden knew Olivia’s history but waited for Ciana to reminisce.

  “She had a baby when she was eighteen—Charles Junior—and then two miscarriages. Two! She told me nothing’s sadder than burying an unborn baby. But her troubles weren’t over.”

  Eden nodded sympathetically.

  “Then when Charles Junior was just twelve, he was killed in a tractor accident. Granddad was out of town. He got home as soon as he could, but Grandmother was inconsolable. That boy was their pride and joy, their only child. And then he was gone in the blink of an eye.” Ciana sniffed back tears.

  “But next thing she knew, she had your mother,” Eden interjected, trying to lift Ciana’s spirits. “And your mother had you. So Olivia has lots of joy too. You’re the light of her life.”

  Ciana offered a rueful laugh. “And haven’t these last few years been a barrel of fun?”

  Eden sure didn’t want Ciana wandering down that road of memories. Nothing but feuding and fighting between Ciana and Alice Faye over Olivia’s welfare. “Then tell me something fun. Tell me what happened last night. Did you have a good time?”

  Ciana’s mood lightened, and she smiled shyly. “I met a gorgeous cowboy from Texas. He … he was amazing.”

  “Did you … um … spend the night with him?”

  “Yes, but not in the way you think. We sat out by the river. Talked. Kissed.”

  “And?”

  “And I fell asleep.”

  Eden pushed back in her chair. “You’re kidding.”

  “Woke up at sunrise covered with a blanket and him sitting next to me. So nothing happened.” She shrugged self-consciously. “Seems he wasn’t overly excited about having sex with an unconscious lump.”

  Eden laughed. “That’s a good thing! A lot of guys would have. So he didn’t jump you. Good for both of you. Then what happened? How did you leave him? How’d you get home?”

  “We went to a diner for breakfast.”

  “Is he going to call you? You going to call him?”

  Ciana said nothing.

  Eden intuited the truth. “Please tell me you two traded phone numbers. You didn’t, did you?” She remembered Ciana’s protectiveness of her precious Beauchamp name. “Did you at least tell him your name? Your whole name?” Silence. “How did you figure some guy all the way from Texas might have known who you were? Osmosis?”

  “It had nothing to do with me being cagey. I was going to tell him, but then I got Mom’s text, freaked out, and split.”

  “How did you get home?”

  “Taxi.”

  Eden whistled. “That couldn’t have been cheap.”

  “Didn’t matter. I had to get here.”

  “So you left him in the diner with no way for either of you to contact the other?”

  Ciana picked at a hangnail.

  Eden studied her. “All’s not lost,” she said brightly. “Just go back to the dance hall until you run into him again. I mean, if he’s interested, that’s where he’ll go and hang out. Plus we owe Arie a trip.”

  Ciana felt a glimmer of hope. “Maybe so. Where is she anyway? I sent her a text but haven’t heard from her.”

  “She called me early this morning. Said she’d be out at some ranch looking at horses.”

  “Why?”

  “She wouldn’t say. Wanted it to be a surprise.”

  Ciana rubbed her eyes, sighed, and stood. “I need to go back to Olivia’s room.”

  “You need to let me take you home.”

  “In a little while.”

  They returned to the room where Olivia lay. Her eyes were open, and her gaze darted everywhere, looking panicked. Ciana rushed to the bedside and picked up Olivia’s hand. “Grandmother! Don’t be afraid. You’re in the hospital. You’re sick, but you’re going to get well.”

  The old woman’s eyes fastened on Ciana’s face. She recoiled, snatching away her hand. “Who … who are you? I don’t know you.” Her voice was weak but her rebuff strong.

  “It’s me, Ciana.”

  Olivia shook her head. “No! My Ciana’s just a child. A little child.”

  Ciana was speechless. Olivia Beauchamp’s mind had retreated into the past, having forgotten the present completely, leaving grown-up Ciana and years of their lives together out in the cold.

  It was him. Arie was sure of it. She watched the group of five men pointing and discussing the newly arrived wild horses inside the small corral. The men’s backs were to her, but she was certain of the identity of the one in a black T-shirt and brown Stetson hat. It was Jon Mercer, five years older than the first time they’d met, but unmistakable. A girl didn’t forget her first serious crush.

  “What do you think?” her dad, Swede, asked in her ear. “Think you can choose a horse from this bunch?”

  They were at Bill Pickins’s cattle ranch, on the north side of town. Pickins owned acres of grazing land and raised some of the best beef cattle in the state. This year he’d experimented with bringing in a few wild mustangs from the Montana plains with the express purpose of training them for ranching work. Wild mustangs, rounded up by the government to be sold, weren’t very expensive; plus they were smart and genetically sound because they’d not been overbred. They had what horse people called “good feet”—they were sure-footed and in general could work without being shod. Blacksmiths were scarce and expensive. The downside was that they were fresh off the plains and not used to men, ropes, and corrals. Breaking and training took investment money, but Pickins was betting he’d come out ahead financially in the long run.

  Arie’s gaze drifted to the untamed horses, their coats hot in the afternoon sun and dusty from the dry earth. “They’re beautiful. How can I pick just one?”

  “Well, that’s why your present includes the trainer too—he’ll help you choose a good one. Can’t own a horse you can’t ride.”

  Arie’s heart swelled. This had been her gift from her family the night of the backyard barbeque days before. All of her family and relatives had chipped in to give Arie her lifetime dream—her own horse, a private trainer, six months of private boarding, feed, and tack. The gift was especially touching because many of her relatives weren’t wealthy. Yet still they’d pooled their money toward her surprise. Pickins had agreed to let her have first choice of the mustangs. Her dad had insisted on driving her to check out the herd. She was grateful that all her relatives hadn’t shown up for her big day.

  “Let’s go look at those horses,” Swede said.

  At the corral, Arie cut her eyes to Jon, wondering if he remembered her. She faced Bill Pickins, a big man in his sixties, his body as hard as rock, his skin leathered by years in the sun. His face lit up when he saw Arie, and he gave her a bear hug. “Hey, little la
dy! Here to take the pick of the litter from me?” his voice boomed.

  She laughed. “I want them all!”

  Swede shook Bill’s hand. “How do they look after a trip across the country?” He gestured at the snorting horses, clumping in a tight protective circle inside the fenced area.

  “Ask my trainer,” Pickins said. “Jon, tell your pupil what you think about these horses.”

  “They look good, especially after the cross-country trip. They’re strong. Used to free roaming and avoiding cougars and wolves since birth.”

  Arie’s heart skipped a beat as Jon’s gaze honed in on her. He grinned, touching the brim of his hat. She held out her hand and he shook it. “Arie Winslow. I think we met years ago.”

  His brow furrowed; then his grin widened. “I remember. You were a kid.”

  She felt heat crawl up her neck and face as she turned beet red. She hoped he didn’t remember her mooning over him like a lovesick calf.

  “She ain’t a kid no more!” one of the men shouted. Pickins and the other men hooted. Her father saluted her.

  Jon shook his head at the men, took her elbow, and walked her toward the stables. “Let’s lose these guys.”

  She went happily, leaving her father to talk with the others. Once at the stables, they sat together on a long bench facing the corral. “So you’re the trainer,” she said.

  “Hired for the summer,” Jon said.

  “You were seventeen when you showed up the last time.”

  “Visiting my dad. And you were …?”

  “Younger,” she said quickly. “My dad was doing a carpentry project in the Pickins’ house, so I hung around.” On the days she didn’t go to Ciana’s or meet up with their newly acquired friend Eden, she’d come along with her dad to handle any odd job he needed doing. She hoped Jon didn’t recall how she’d also haunted the stables just to catch glimpses of him.

  “You’d been sick. Wore a baseball cap all the time. How are you now?”