Red-Hot Ranchman

by Victoria Pade

  “Mmm. For the whole night. She’s kind of down in the dumps right now and decided she’d concentrate on showing him a good time rather than stewing in her own problems. She and Robbie are camping out in her backyard. He was thrilled.”

  “Is that a good idea, what with all that’s been going on lately?”

  “Julie has a high fence with a gate that locks and neighbors close enough to hear anyone holler if anything happens. I think they’ll be okay.”

  John held the door open for Paige, then closed it behind them, making sure it was locked before he led the way to his truck and opened that door for her, too.

  “I apologize for this,” he said, referring to the vehicle. “At home we had a car rental in town, so if I was taking a lady out I’d rent something more suitable to drive. But Pine Ridge doesn’t have one and I don’t know anyone well enough to borrow a car.”

  “It’s okay,” Paige assured him. She only owned a truck herself. For country living it was really the most practical.

  It did present her with a problem, however. There was no way short of pulling her form-fitting skirt up around her waist that she could get in—something she should have thought about but hadn’t.

  John saw her dilemma immediately. “Mind if I help?” he asked.

  “I think it might be a good idea.”

  No sooner had she agreed than he scooped her up as if she were his bride about to be carried over the threshold, and set her on the truck seat.

  It happened so quickly it shouldn’t have had the time to register, yet the scent of his after-shave, the feel of his hard chest against her side, the sensation of his strong arms around her, was enough to send more of those shivers of delight skittering through her.

  She tried to ignore them. But watching him round the front of the truck to his side only added to them.

  She was on thin ice tonight, she realized. She couldn’t have felt more feminine, more alert to every one of her senses, to her own womanhood, to her feelings for this man. And she certainly couldn’t have been more aware of John’s charm, his striking good looks, the sheer potency of his masculinity.

  She also couldn’t stop remembering the way the previous evening had ended, how wonderful it had been to be held by him, how heady were his kisses, his caresses…

  But none of that could be uppermost in her mind tonight. At least not until she knew what was going on with this man.

  If John was experiencing any of the sensual emotions she was, he hid it well. In fact, he seemed more tense than she’d ever seen him, more on edge.

  She thought that he must not be anxious to talk about what he’d promised they would discuss and that reticence helped quell her own stirrings as he slid behind the steering wheel and started the engine.

  “So what is Julie down in the dumps about?” he asked as if he wanted to fill the silence with small talk before Paige could fill it with questions.

  “She’s upset over Burt. Things aren’t going well for them. I was hoping they’d hashed it out yesterday afternoon—I knew he was with her and that’s why I didn’t want to interrupt them with the arrow incident. But I guess he’d just come to tell her he was going into Tinsdale to look through some of their police files, since they have a larger department and keep more extensive records. It didn’t help matters.”

  “Well, for my money, I think she’d be better off with somebody else. I like your friend Julie, but that Burt…” John let his voice trail off, shaking his head, his expression relaying his dislike of the sheriff.

  But just the way she felt inclined to defend John to Burt, she felt inclined to defend Burt to John.

  “Burt’s a good guy. He really is. He’s just frustrated and worried about the burglaries and what’s been going on around my place. But he’s always been a friend to everyone. Even in school—with him being older than us—Julie and I could run to him for help if we ever got into trouble.”

  “You don’t say that as if Julie was dating him at the time.”

  “She wasn’t. Six years is too big an age difference when you’re kids. They got together when she moved back to Pine Ridge after she’d gotten sick of city living—about a year before I came home.” And that was about all Paige wanted to say as regards Julie and Burt, so before John had the chance to pursue it, she said, “I didn’t think we were going to spend tonight talking about their romance, though. I thought we were going to talk about what happened this morning.”

  She watched John’s features settle into a blank expression except for the fact that his jaw clenched slightly and a muscle in the side of his cheek tensed. No, he was definitely not anxious to get into what had happened this morning.

  She wasn’t sure how to make it any easier, but in the attempt, she said, “You know, Robbie has been talking about how you made his frog come back to life, but I kept telling him that that isn’t possible—“

  “It isn’t.”

  “But I also kept telling him the frog must have just been dazed when he fell on it and come out of it as you were holding it, that you didn’t—couldn’t have—done anything to make it well again. That’s what I thought you’d say to him yourself. But you didn’t.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why is that?”

  For several minutes, he didn’t answer her. He didn’t say anything at all. He didn’t take his eyes off the road. It was almost as if he hadn’t heard her.

  Then he said, “Will you give me your word that what I tell you will stay just between you and me? That you’ll keep it in confidence?”

  “I guess that depends. Not if it would hurt somebody. Or be aiding and abetting…” Her voice trailed off because she hated how suspicious she sounded. But she couldn’t give him a blanket promise of confidentiality, either. Not until she knew what he was going to tell her.

  He looked at her out of the corner of his eye and she could see that he wasn’t thrilled with that answer. But it was the best she could give.

  “It won’t hurt anyone but me if you spread around what I tell you,” he said.

  “You mean like gossip about it? I can give you my word I won’t do that. That I wouldn’t repeat it unless I thought it was necessary for some reason.”

  He nodded his head as if that was reassurance enough. But he didn’t go on.

  So Paige asked again, “Why didn’t you tell Robbie it was just a coincidence that the frog recovered in your hands?”

  “Because I wouldn’t lie to him.”

  “Then he’s right and you did do something to fix Pete?”

  John took a deep breath, sighed and looked over at her. “You remember my telling you about being struck by lightning?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, I lived through it but I didn’t come out of it unchanged.”

  And somehow she knew he didn’t mean he had merely gained a new lease on life the way she’d heard other people say when they’d had life-threatening experiences. His tone sounded too grim.

  “I spent some time in the hospital right afterward,” he went on. “There were seizures, visual disturbances, my heart even stopped twice more while I was there. It was almost as if there were earthquakes going through me. The doctors couldn’t figure out why, beyond thinking it was some kind of aftershock from the lightning, although nothing showed up on the tests they did. Then, after about three days, it all went away. No more seizures. No more heart problems. No more vision quirks. I was suddenly as strong as an ox. So they sent me home and everybody thought that was that.”

  “But it wasn’t?” she asked to keep him going.

  “About six months later, Dwight and I were horsing around in the barn and he got hurt. He fell and twisted his ankle—or maybe broke it, we never really knew. But he couldn’t walk on it without help. So I put my arm around him to be his crutch to help him up to the house. And that was when I first realized that something was different inside me. That something had changed.”

  “In what way?”

  “My right ankle buckled—t
he same ankle Dwight had hurt. But up to that moment there hadn’t been anything wrong with mine. When I fell down and broke contact with Dwight, I was fine again. When I got up and put my arm around him a second time, the same thing happened. We were both scared—like little boys can get, facing something we couldn’t explain. We sat there in the hay, not knowing what was going on, what to do. And then—I don’t even know why—I had the urge to put my hands on his injured ankle.”

  John paused and shook his head, as if even he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying. “I can’t explain to you what made that occur to me, because it was almost just an instinct. But we took off his shoe and sock—his ankle was swollen and turning colors already—and I wrapped my hands around it. I just held it, even though doing that made my own ankle hurt, too. But the pain only lasted a little while. I found myself concentrating on it, and the longer I did, the more it started to go away. In me. In Dwight. Until all the swelling and discoloration were gone and he could stand, walk, run, jump up and down on it as if nothing had ever happened to it.”

  “And were you all right, too?” Paige asked in a hushed voice, dumbfounded by what he was telling her.

  “Right as rain.”

  “Maybe it was just some sort of—”

  John shook his head again, this time refuting what she was going to suggest before she suggested it. “It wasn’t a fluke. It was the beginning. Not that Dwight and I knew it at the time. In fact, we didn’t even tell anyone in case we might be in trouble for it somehow. And we didn’t talk about it ourselves, but it was there, between us. I sure couldn’t forget it.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Nothin’ right away. Over time, things would come up—cuts and scrapes on Dwight or me that I’d be able to get rid of just by touch. My uncle started to catch on, started keeping an eye on me. Then, without saying anything directly, he’d complain of a sore elbow and ask me to rub it for him, or say he had a headache and tell me to massage his temples. He was testing me. And it was working on him, too, because I could get rid of any ache or pain he had. After a while, whenever we’d have a ranch hand hurt or down with an ailment, my uncle would call me, ask me to see to it, and I would fix whatever was wrong. Word got out. Folks started comin’ around and—”

  This time it was Paige who cut him off. He was saying all of this so matter-of-factly, but she wasn’t registering it that way. “Are you telling me that as a little kid you healed people with only the touch of your hands?”

  He glanced at her again, meeting her eyes with his. “I know it’s unbelievable, but yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  Unbelievable was an understatement.

  “Are you putting me on?” she asked, thinking for a moment that he must be, in spite of how serious he seemed.

  He smiled at her, but it was a quiet, knowing smile. “I’d put you on about a lot of things, but not about this.”

  That she believed, even if the rest was difficult to grasp.

  “But how is it possible?” she said, more to herself than to him.

  “I don’t know. And neither does anyone else, though they’ve tried hard to figure it out. I only know that when I touch someone sick or hurt or in pain, I feel that pain or infirmity in the same part of my body. So I know what’s wrong. Or I guess what I know is where it’s wrong—I don’t get any kind of instant diagnosis or knowledge. I just feel it. Concentrate on it and—”

  “Heal it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “People just don’t have powers like that,” she argued, still struggling to come to grips with his revelations.

  But even as she did, she recalled Robbie’s story about the frog. She remembered Frieda the cow, and Nijjy’s fetlock.

  “And you can cure animals, too?”

  He just shrugged his confirmation. Then he said, “And as for people not having powers like that, I’m here to tell you that I am a person. Not some freak, although there are those who look at me as if I am.”

  “Is that why you don’t want anyone to know?”

  “It’s part of the reason,” he said in a way that made it clear it wasn’t the main part, without telling her what the main part was. Then he glanced at her again and added very firmly, “Things can’t start up here the way they did in Texas.”

  “What happened in Texas?”

  “Crowds of folks found me, needing help. Not a day went by from the time word got around that I didn’t have people showing up on the ranch, askin’ after me.”

  “Even as a kid?”

  “From the time I was not much older than Robbie is now until I left two months ago. And I…can’t do that anymore.”

  “You can’t or you don’t want to?” she asked, not understanding why he’d seemed unsure how to word his response.

  He lapsed into another silence, not as long as the one before, but a silence that left her curious nonetheless. Then he said, “Don’t get me wrong. I was glad to help people who needed it. There was a part of it—a big part of it—that was satisfying, rewarding. But I came here to get away from it all. To live a normal life now. That can’t happen if you talk about this. Folks come—believers and doubters alike. In droves. Wantin’ help, wantin’ to disprove the power, wantin’ to exploit it, wantin’ to study me like a bug under a microscope—”

  “Have you been studied?”

  “Up one side and down the other. There’s a research institute that hounds me. They tested me all over the place when I was ten, again when I hit puberty, again in my twenties before I said enough was enough. There’ve been studies on the sustained effects of the healings, people wantin’ to try to harness whatever it is that comes from me, other folks who want to prove it’s a hoax, that I’m some kind of con artist.”

  That set off a red flag in Paige. “Is healing how you made your living in Texas?” she asked warily.

  “I’ve never taken a penny for it. Not once. But that doesn’t matter to the doubters. Some of them seem to want my head on a platter anyway. Believe me, it gets crazy. And I’m through with it all.”

  “Is this why you’ve kept to yourself so much since moving to Pine Ridge?”

  “That’s it.”

  They’d arrived at the restaurant in Tinsdale by then, the nicest restaurant that side of Denver. It was in an old Victorian house that sat far back from the parking lot behind a stand of trees and a little brook crossed over by a footbridge.

  John pulled the truck up to the valet-parking shed and stopped. But he ignored the man who came around to his side to take over the vehicle and instead turned slightly in the seat to look squarely at Paige.

  “I didn’t ask you to dinner tonight to get into all of this. But now that I have and you know the truth about me, do you think we could go in and have the evening we would have had if I hadn’t said anything?”

  Paige was still assimilating what he’d told her, finding it not easier to believe, but harder, the longer she tried. Yet when she looked into that handsome face of his, saw the sincerity in his expression, she wasn’t sure she actually didn’t believe him, either.

  “We can talk more about it another time,” he added when she still hadn’t answered him. “But just for now I’d like to let it go. Not to have this night ruined by it. If that’s possible.”

  Paige wasn’t sure what to do. It wasn’t as if this was a situation she’d been prepared for. She considered telling him to take her home. But somehow that didn’t seem called for. Yet she also wasn’t sure she could sit across a table from him and not talk about it.

  “This is all very strange,” she said.

  He chuckled wryly. “You’re telling me?”

  Paige could see the valet hovering outside John’s door. John kept his eyes on her, waiting expectantly. She thought that it might be a good idea to let the information simmer in her brain, to save the rest of the myriad questions she had until after that simmering was complete.

  “Come on,” he urged. “For tonight, forget about the whole thing and let’s ju
st have dinner.”

  Forget about it? Not likely. But could she put it aside for a few hours? Maybe she was throwing caution to the wind, but there they were, all dressed up at a great restaurant, and regardless of what he’d just told her, Paige really wanted to have this evening with him.

  So, hoping she wasn’t being a fool, she finally said, “All right,” sounding tentative even to herself.

  Still, John grinned at her as if she’d passed a test and it occurred to her that he really had had the experience of being considered a freak, maybe by someone who had mattered to him.

  And in that, too, she found reason to let go of what he’d revealed to her. Reason to try not to think about it at least long enough to show him that, although she didn’t quite understand it and didn’t know whether or not she could believe it, it hadn’t left her seeing him as anything monstrous.

  John got out, handed the valet his keys and rounded the truck to open Paige’s door. Getting out was not as difficult as getting in, so she swung her feet onto the running board and merely took the hand he offered, holding it as she stepped down.

  Once again, she was aware of the unusual sensation that coursed through her when their hands met, and for the first time she had a cause for it other than the attraction that was between them. Not that any of it sat any easier on her mind.

  But in a way, it offered a sort of confirmation that there actually was a power in him, and some of her doubts began to fade. Maybe it even helped her take a step toward acceptance.

  In fact, it occurred to her that if everything was true—and she couldn’t think why he’d make up a story like that—he’d just bared his soul to her, opened a locked door on his past, on himself, and let her in, let her know something about him that he didn’t want anyone else to know.

  And while that still didn’t mean she knew him inside and out, backward and forward, through and through, it was a big leap in that direction. A leap that helped her let down her own guard more than she had in a long, long time.

  As if Paige knew no more about John than she had the day before, they spent the evening pleasantly, just two people who enjoyed each other’s company, who shared a strong attraction.