Winter at Mustang Ridge

by Jesse Hayworth

  “You might think I’d be a vegetarian,” Bill said, gesturing with his fork, “after so many years as a vet. But I never was a very good herbivore, and it’s deuced hard to grow veggies off-season without a greenhouse.

  “Is that a hint?” Nick asked.

  A glint of humor entered those familiar eyes. “Maybe.”

  “Should make a fun summer project. Sign me up.”

  Bill transferred his attention. “How about you, Jenny?”

  She kept it light. “Unfortunately, I’m only here for another couple of weeks.” It was on the tip of her tongue to offer that she’d be coming back to the area to film, and maybe she could coordinate the timing with the greenhouse project, but she kept that to herself. Nick hadn’t said anything about keeping in touch, and she didn’t want to be the one to bring it up.

  “Only two more weeks?” Bill said. “Is that when your new season starts?”

  Apparently more information had changed hands than she had realized. What else had Nick said about her? “Actually, I’ll get there ten days before I need to report. A bunch of the crew members are doing a Mayan ruin tour, really off the beaten track. We’ve even got a small grant to do some filming.”

  “It sounds warm.”

  “It will be. Though lately I’ve been seeing the appeal of cold weather more than I used to.”

  “You get accustomed to it. Right, son?”

  “Humans are pretty adaptable. Is there more salad?”

  The conversation bounced from vet stories to filming stories to local rumors and back again, and before she knew it, dinner was over and Bill was kicking them out to take a moonlit stroll while he dealt with the dishes. After a brief losing argument over the dishes thing, they followed orders. Jenny snagged Old Faithful on her way through the door.

  This place made her want to take pictures. Lots of them.

  “It’s dark out,” Nick warned as they took a wide loop around the cabin, following one of the trails Molly had cut in the deep snow.

  “You don’t say.” She grinned up at him. “There’s moon enough, and I’m a professional.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Her chin came up. “You want proof?” She stopped and lifted the camera. “Look a little to your left, focusing past me.”

  “I don’t—”

  She took two pictures in quick succession, clicka-click, and then checked the digital images. She gave a low chuckle. “You look very stern.” And, with the fur-lined ruff of his hood framing the sides of his neck and the cold, harsh winter behind him, he could’ve been an explorer, a pioneer. The silver-blue light darkened his hair and his eyes, yet caressed the high, sharp planes of his cheekbones and the angle of his jaw. He looked shadowy and dangerous, yet at the same time solid, reliable, and like he belonged. Her heart took a long, slow roll in her chest. “Smile this time.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Who’s the professional here?”

  “You are.” His eyes took on an interested gleam. “But how about . . .”

  She snapped a couple more shots, catching an expression that she thought could sell anything from chocolate to deodorant. “How about what?”

  “You let me do you next.”

  “With your father watching from the cabin?”

  “Ha-ha. I meant take your picture and you know it.”

  Her fingers tightened involuntarily. “You want to use my camera?”

  “Oh. Touched a nerve, have I?”

  “No, it’s just . . . No.” Changing angles, she snapped a frame and caught him just right, wearing a look of devilish challenge that no woman could possibly resist. At least she sure couldn’t. “Okay, it’s a deal. But you’ve got to do everything I say for the next half hour.”

  “Fifteen minutes, and I have veto power if things get too weird.”

  “Define weird.”

  “You know, nudity, marshmallow fluff, that sort of thing. Which, for the record, isn’t the slightest bit weird for me in the bedroom, but crosses the line when we’re talking about being out in my old man’s yard in a couple of feet of snow.”

  “So noted. And it’s a deal. Now, make a snowball and throw it past me. And so help me, if you hit the camera . . .” She let her warning glare finish the threat.

  “Awww. Spoilsport.” But he did as she asked, aiming way wide of her so she captured the spray of snow gone silver in the moonlight without catching the snowball in the face. “Good, good. Keep going. And remember, you’re having fun!”

  She took frame after frame, and damn, the camera loved him. He moved like a wild mustang, smooth and sinuous, yet so powerful that she wanted to stop and stare. But she had long ago learned that it was better to have the image in her camera than inside her head, so she changed angles and kept shooting.

  Then, suddenly, he stiffened and stared into the trees. “Hear that?”

  She froze, pulse kicking as she measured the distance between them and the cabin. She didn’t hear anything, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something out there with claws and teeth.

  “I don’t—” she began, but broke off as a distant howl rose up through the octaves. The sound shivered on the air, wild and boundless, sending tingly chills through her body. “Oh,” she breathed. “It’s beautiful.”

  The cry trailed to silence, but before she could do anything more than sigh, another, answering howl came from farther north. Then another. And another.

  Within moments, the forest rang with wolf song that was far enough away that there was little danger, yet close enough that her throat tightened with emotion and her skin prickled with atavistic fear. She wished Old Faithful could capture the sound. That wasn’t in the camera’s repertoire, though, so she captured the look on Nick’s face instead.

  Alert and focused, he made her think of an alpha stallion testing the air and standing ready to protect his mares, only in this case the mare was her. She wasn’t used to having someone put himself between her and danger, and sure wouldn’t have expected to like it. But an electric thrill ran through her body as a chilly breeze moved his rumpled hair and the fur ruff of his parka, making the moment come alive.

  Clicka-click.

  And that was it. She had gotten the a-ha, the perfect moment, The Shot. Wow. She didn’t need to look back at the picture to know it was right. Like that night in the storm when she was fifteen, she just knew. She lowered Old Faithful as the howls trailed off and the night went silent around them. Then she held out the camera. “Your turn,” she said softly. “That was incredible.”

  He took the camera, fingers lingering on hers. “Yes, it was.” And his full-on eye contact made her think again of the stallion, and realize that he wasn’t just talking about the photos or the wolves.

  The thud of her pulse stayed high, not from fear now, but from desire. He tugged on their joined hands, brought her in close, and brushed his lips across hers in the faintest, featheriest kiss.

  She leaned in, seeking more. More flutters of desire, more of the heat, more of him. They kissed long and slow, until the night seemed warm and he wasn’t so much holding her as anchoring her in a world gone surreal. Passion pounded through her—she wanted him naked, here and now, wanted him inside her.

  Snow, she reminded herself. Father in cabin. Big wolf-dog who doesn’t like sudden movements in her territory.

  Still, she nearly whimpered when he eased away. It was gratifying to see the heat in his eyes, though, and hear the rasp of his breath. “Let’s head in,” he suggested. “It’s getting cold.”

  “You don’t want to take any pictures?”

  “Not right now.” He looped an arm around her and steered them back toward the cabin. “I could do with some coffee. How about you?”

  There was no real reason for her to feel off balance as they reentered the cabin, no reason for her to want to give him a huge hug and then cling, feeling like the twelve days she had left weren’t nearly enough. This is good, she told herself as she stripped off her scarf and gave it a litt
le twirl. We’re good.

  Clicka-click.

  She looked up at the noise and came face-to-lens with Old Faithful. “Ack! Don’t—” She swiped at him as he took another couple of frames.

  He dodged. “Why?”

  Because I don’t like having my picture taken. “Because it’s adjusted for moonlight.”

  “Oh.” He held it out. “Could you fix it for me?”

  She took the camera and made the necessary tweaks, then hesitated before giving it back. Photos invariably made her look like she had the grace and IQ of a potato. Still, a deal was a deal, and she wasn’t backing out now.

  Handing the camera over, she said, “Just remember, you drool when you sleep, and I have Ruth’s email address.”

  “More blackmail!” said a voice from the mudroom doorway. “That’s perfect!”

  Startled not just by Bill’s appearance—and the flush that came from knowing he had heard the part about Nick drooling in his sleep—but also by his enthusiasm for the subject, Jenny turned. “Wait. What?”

  “You want blackmail ammo, I’ve got some for you. It’s waiting on the breakfast bar, along with coffee and dessert.”

  Nick’s heartfelt groan came from behind her. “Not the photo album!”

  Jenny went on whole-body alert. “Are we talking about family pictures here?”

  “You betcha.” Bill thumped an album lying on the wooden counter. Arrayed around it were a trio of steaming mugs and a plate piled high with brownies. “Come and get it.”

  Grinning, Jenny headed for the kitchen, not even minding the clicka-clicks anymore. “Tell me there are baby pictures.” Not because she was particularly into babies, but because she had a feeling it would make Nick squirm.

  “And the year he was a Ninja Turtle for Halloween.”

  “Awww.”

  “Kill me now.”

  She spared Nick a glance as she took her seat at the breakfast bar. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m willing to share a really bad prom picture.”

  “No Halloween Barbie?”

  “Nope. Krista and I had Halloween down to a science from an early age—she was always a cowgirl and I was a paparazzo. Not sure if that was life imitating art or the other way around.” She grinned over at him only to be met by the business end of Old Faithful and the familiar clicka-click. “Stop that.”

  “Nope. My turn, remember?”

  She sniffed and turned to Bill. “I can’t tell you how much I’m going to enjoy this.”

  His dimples deepened. “This is just my collection of favorite Nick pics. If you’re a glutton for punishment, I’ve got a couple more boxes under the bed.”

  Nick’s groan nearly drowned out her exclamation of “My hero!”

  They spent the next half hour going through the album, which went chronologically from baby pictures to school photos and graduation snapshots, mixed in among candids that gave her glimpses of Nick as a jock, Boy Scout, and animal lover.

  When she lingered on one of Nick as a young teen bottle-nursing a wobbly calf, Bill said, “He was never one to skip from one dream job to another. With him, even if he played with the idea of being an astronaut or a rock star, being a vet was always on the list.”

  Jenny eyed Nick. “I can see the astronaut. But a rock star?”

  “I had an earring. Briefly.”

  Bill paused on a photo of Nick with a dark-haired beauty with a kind smile and eyes that reminded Jenny of her gran, where happiness mingled with humor. “This is Nick’s mother, Mandy. She loved wildflowers, watercolors, and rooting for the Boston Red Sox, even when they stank.” He cut a look in her direction. “She would have liked you.”

  That brought a pang, but Jenny kept her smile firmly in place and said, “She’s a lovely woman. I wish I had gotten a chance to meet her.” She didn’t look in Nick’s direction.

  Through it all, he kept Old Faithful close at hand, clicking away, until Jenny more or less forgot about the camera and concentrated on the fun of poking at him for a couple of boy-band haircuts and the infamous earring. The photos got sparser once they passed the college years, with just a few from his years in vet school.

  By then, she could hardly sit still. “Tell me you’ve got Africa pictures.”

  His father’s face lit. “You want pics of Nick in Africa? You got ’em.” He flipped the page to reveal two huge-seeming eight-by-tens of the same arrow-straight dirt roadway on a flat, dusty plain, with a baobab tree on one side and a small collection of thatch and plywood huts on the other. One was taken at dawn, with the pale blue sky dotted with pink-tinged clouds and a trio of skinny goats dozing near the houses. The other was taken during a gorgeous red-and-orange sunset that seemed to set the plains ablaze. “He sent me these the first week he was there. Took ’em himself.” He skimmed his fingertips over the snapshots. “I thought they were damn fine.”

  “They’re beautiful,” she said truthfully. “Magical.”

  “It’s hard to screw up an African sunset,” Nick said dryly, but set aside the camera to lean over the pictures.

  There were more photos of him in Africa than there had been from his school years, as if he’d been trying to make up for being abroad by sending lots of emails. She sure knew how that one worked. She marveled over pictures of him with friends, patients, and coworkers, and treating everything from a young goatherd’s dog to a baby gazelle with a broken leg.

  “This is my favorite.” Bill turned to a two-page spread clipped from a magazine. Entitled “The Long Road to Twenty-Thirty,” the article led with a half-page picture of a dozen or so men and women wearing Twenty-Thirty Project T-shirts and mugging for the camera, standing in front of a huge baobab tree—possibly the same one from the other pictures. In the middle, flanked by a blonde on one side and a dark-haired guy with a flyaway beard on the other, was Nick.

  Jenny read the article, fingertips trailing over before and after pictures of a village, showing new livestock enclosures, tighter houses, and a working well. According to the article, those improvements were just the tip of an iceberg that included more productivity from the crops and animals, better schools and unprecedented access to health care. Swallowing past a lump in her throat, she said, “You changed people’s lives.”

  He shrugged, doing an aw shucks. “It was—”

  “He sure did,” Bill said proudly, tapping his son’s image, and then that of the pretty blonde beside him. “And Lily, of course.” He said it like Jenny should know the woman.

  Had Nick stiffened, or was she imagining it?

  Cool fingers walked down the back of her neck and her stomach tightened. Leave it, she told herself. It wasn’t her business. They were just having . . . Damn it. “Who’s Lily?”

  Nick hesitated before he said, “She was—still is—a hydroengineer in the Twenty-Thirty Project.”

  The quivers didn’t go away.

  Jenny studied the clipping, seeing the way Nick and the woman leaned into each other. “She was your girlfriend, I’m guessing.” I’m not jealous, I’m not. She didn’t have any right to be jealous, didn’t have any claim to him beyond a winter-break fling.

  Nick glanced away. “We were engaged.”

  Scratch that. She was totally jealous.

  23

  Nick got them out of there soon after, pleading a long drive and an early morning, and waving off his old man’s apologies for having stepped in it.

  Jenny had done her best to cover her surprise at the whole ex-fiancée thing, but she had obviously been rattled. And, just as obviously, Nick had screwed up by not telling her. His father had buttonholed him and made that one clear, in no uncertain terms.

  “Sorry about that,” he said as they trudged to the Vetmobile, with their shoulders bumping but their hands in their pockets. “I should’ve mentioned Lily before now. I just—”

  “You don’t have to explain. I’m the one who’s sorry. Your exes are none of my business.”

  “Then why are you mad at me?”

  She stoppe
d and turned to face him, expression earnest. “I’m not mad at you, truly. I’m mad at myself for acting like this. And to be honest, I’m trying to figure out where it’s coming from. It’s not like I thought I was your first or something.” She hunched her shoulders. “It’s just . . . I don’t know. I need some time to think.”

  “Whatever you want to know, just ask.”

  “Not yet.” She turned and set out for the truck once more. When he caught up and got her door for her, she said, “Thanks. Now I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  “Anything. Well, within reason, anyway. I’m not too keen on walking home.”

  She rewarded him with a wan smile. “Could you give me the drive to figure it out? Normally when my brain gets all jammed up like this, I take a walk, have some alone time, and get my head straight. I don’t want to leave things weird between us overnight, though, so I’m just asking for the drive time.”

  Something shifted in his chest. He moved in, hunkering close to her. “Jenny, sweetheart. You can have . . .” Whatever you want, he started to say, but that would’ve been too much, too soon, so he substituted “All the time you need.” And even that wasn’t entirely true, because their remaining days were numbered.

  Her breath puffed out white in the chill air. “Thank you.” She eased up and brushed her lips across his.

  He didn’t let himself think it was a good-bye kiss. But at the same time, he wasn’t sure what to think. Did she feel betrayed, or was she truly mad at herself? She’s not a game player, he reminded himself as he fired up the engine.

  To his relief, the silent drive wasn’t uncomfortable. In fact, it gave him a chance to settle down, too, and get his own thoughts in order. And, he realized, consider what Jenny might be thinking and feeling, not just about Lily but about him. About them. By the time he pulled into the parking lot at Mustang Ridge, he thought he had it figured out, thought he knew what to say.

  Killing the engine, he popped off his seat belt and turned to face her. “I’d like to say something.”

  Her eyes widened. “I’m the one who owes you an explanation.”