by Eileen Wilks
Furious, she grabbed the two empty plates and stacked hers on top.
Out in the kitchen, she talked herself back into a state approaching reason. It certainly wasn't reasonable to be angry that Nate had fixed her a sandwich and wanted her to eat it, or that he wanted her to wear a hat. She certainly couldn't blame him for her foolish imagination. If she'd imagined, when they were in the truck, that his eyes had hinted at a level of caring and support that his words and quick exit just now had denied her, that was downright dumb.
Hannah ate half her sandwich while standing up and lectured herself silently, then loaded the dishes in the dishwasher. Automatically, she glanced around to see what else needed doing.
Nate had left crumbs and a messy knife on the counter where he'd fixed their sandwiches. She wiped it down. The kitchen was looking better, she thought with satisfaction. She'd scrubbed and then polished one of the cherry cabinets, and it glowed now with the mellow luster of fine old wood. The floor was old and worn, but it was clean.
But the room still lacked something. There were no sugar bowls, no pretty trivets or pot holders, none of the things you expected to find in a woman's kitchen. Even the plates she'd just loaded in the dishwasher were plain, discount-store porcelain. It was as if she were the first woman to ever cook or clean in this kitchen—as if Jenny had never been here at all.
In fact, she couldn't think of anything she'd seen, anywhere in the house, that seemed as though it might have been picked out by the woman who had once lived here. Everything seemed either too old or too new. The old things were all of good quality, while many of the newer things looked like they been selected at random from someone's going-out-of-business sale.
Had Jenny taken everything with her? Or had Nate gotten rid of everything that had anything to do with his ex-wife? Hannah shivered. Nate's voice had held such venom when he spoke of his ex-wife, and that troubled her. Divorce could bring out the worst in people. Didn't she know that? Heaven knows, if she could have done Barry an injury in the first few months after he walked out on her, she would have. But—
"See if one of these will work."
She jumped. "Good grief, you startled me."
Nate came toward her. He was holding two cowboy hats: an expensive gray one with the sides rolled, and an old straw hat that the sun had bleached nearly white. He was frowning. "You looked a thousand miles away. And upset. Is there still a problem with your sister?"
"No." She shook her head. "No, she's fine. She already got her first paycheck—that's why she waited until now to call. She wanted to use her own money."
He nodded and came into the room, offering her the gray hat. "This one's in better shape. See if it fits."
Hannah looked at the hat he held out. It was a lady's Resistol. Had it belonged to Jenny? "The straw looks more my size," she said, and reached for it.
"The straw was my mother's favorite," Nate commented. "She always said the felt hat was too hot."
Hannah looked up at Nate. Both hats had been his mother's?
"I guess you won't be as hard up for money now. Your sister will be able to pay you back some of the money you loaned her."
He smiled. It was, she realized with a jolt, the first time she'd seen him smile like that—with his eyes, too.
"Maybe that will help you forget I'm your employer while we're riding."
Hannah's mouth opened. And closed again.
"There is something wrong, isn't there?"
"Oh, no. No, everything's fine." She took her time settling the straw hat on her head. She just needed a minute to think, that was all. She needed to adjust to the fact that Leslie was settled and would be sending most of her money back as soon as the post office opened tomorrow … and Hannah would be free to leave here. If she wanted to.
Hannah looked at Nate and tried to concentrate, but all she could think about was that she hadn't seen his eyes smile before. She'd seen him cold and she'd seen him angry. She'd seen his face taut with hunger. But she hadn't seen the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. She hadn't seen that warmth in them before—a heat as dark and inviting as banked coals on a cold day.
She didn't want to leave. She wanted to stay right here, and it had nothing to do with her responsibility to her patient.
Definitely, she was staying on the horse.
* * *
Chapter 9
«^»
The sky was a huge, dusty blue bowl overhead, its color filtered by high-flying clouds. Hannah had left her parka unzipped in spite of the chilly breeze. The sun was brighter and warmer than it had been in days, and she was glad to have the straw cowboy hat to shade her face. Her thighs were sore, her butt was sore, and when she shifted, the saddle creaked beneath her.
It was one of her favorite sounds in the whole world, the creak of saddle leather.
"Sure you don't want to turn around?" Nate asked. He rode beside her on the Appaloosa mare, a feisty animal with a mind of her own. He wore a beeper at his belt, an old denim jacket over the blue shirt he'd had on that morning, and his work hat—a black Stetson that looked as if it had been rained on, stomped on and generally mistreated for ten or twenty years.
"I'm fine. Ajax is a real gentleman." Someone had obviously spent hours and hours training him.
"A gentleman? He's a slope-shouldered, pigeon-toed commoner."
She laughed. It was easy to laugh today. The sun was bright, the air was cool and she was out in the middle of land as free and open as God's hand. And Nate could bad-mouth Ajax all he wanted. He wasn't fooling her. Hannah knew who had spent all those hours training the horse—the same man who insisted he only let his dog in the house once in a while … when it was cold … and only in the kitchen.
She had been right to come riding with Nate. She was sure of that. He wasn't dangerous, or violent, or any of those things the people at church had said. "Are we heading for those rocks up ahead?" A large outcropping of rock, higher than a house, broke the earth's skin about a mile away.
"If you're up to it. We've got time, and the weather should hold." He scanned the sky with the concentration of a man whose livelihood depended on the weather. "We'll probably get some wind out of the front that's piling those clouds up to the west, but no rain."
Hannah felt up to almost anything today. "Of course. I'm so glad I came," she said, filling her eyes with sky and horizons and a vastness that seemed to stretch halfway to forever. "It's beautiful out here."
He slanted her an unreadable look. "Most people don't think so."
"It's a hard land." Hard and rough, as choppy as a lake in a storm with its ridges and wrinkles and ridges, with no trees or buildings to break up the view. The dirt beneath their horses' hooves was the color of strong tea, and strewn with rocks. Grass grew in winter-dry clumps, brittle and sparse. A few Herefords grazed nearby, their rusty-red coats the only splashes of warmth in the landscape.
A hard land, she thought, glancing at the man riding beside her, tends to grow hard people. "But the land has its own sort of beauty. This is pretty basic country. I like that. I'm a pretty basic woman."
"Are you?" He gave her another of those unreadable looks.
"Basic to the point of being boring."
He gave her a look so full of dry humor that she laughed again. "It's true, though. I know how I look. Flashy." Her appearance had been a problem sometimes, a pleasure others. Like lots of things in life. "But I really am a pretty basic person. All I do is work and plan my career."
"What are your plans?"
"I want to be an R.N. I've got a ways to go still, but I'll get there." Enthusiasm came easily when she talked about her future. "I've been going to Tech whenever I could for the past couple years."
"That can't be easy, with the kind of work you do."
"I take jobs in Lubbock whenever possible to be near the university. I'm not in a hurry. Lord, I'd better not be, as long as it took me to get up the nerve to sign up for the first course!"
"Had you been out of scho
ol a long time?"
"Six years. I was self-conscious about it." Hannah chuckled. "I guess 'self-conscious' isn't quite right. 'Scared spitless' comes closer to describing how I felt the first time I sat down in a college class. I had my GED, and I'd passed the entrance exams, but I still didn't feel … adequate."
"Why did you drop out of high school?" He shook his head. "You seem like you'd have had better sense."
"Who has sense at sixteen? I thought I was in love, and when you're in love, you get married, right?"
"You dropped out of school to get married? At sixteen?"
He sounded angry. She looked at him curiously. "Married at sixteen, divorced at seventeen. I admit it wasn't too bright, but teenagers usually aren't, you know."
"Kids get married at that age because they have to," he said flatly, "or their parents wouldn't sign for them."
"I wasn't pregnant, if that's what you mean."
"Then why the hell did your father sign for you?"
He was angry. On her behalf, apparently. That gave her an odd feeling. "I didn't give him a lot of choice. I told him he could either give me away, or he could wait for me to run off to be with Barry." She felt a twinge of the old guilt. Patrick McBride loved his daughters fiercely, however poorly he understood them. It had hurt her to hurt him.
"He was your father," Nate said flatly. "He should have protected you better."
"How could he? I was set on having my way. And he was there for me afterward." He'd shown up at her door about a month after Barry walked out, all eager to get himself thrown in jail for beating up the heir of one of the town's richest families. Hannah smiled and shook her head. Patrick McBride had a real talent for showing his love for his daughters in ways apt to cause them trouble or embarrassment.
"He quit his job in Colorado," Hannah went on reminiscently, "and started back to Montana, but his truck threw a rod outside of Billings. He left it there and kept on coming, hitchhiking the rest of the way." He'd shown up broke and breathing fire, and talking him out of his revenge had been quite a task. Somehow, in the process, Hannah had lost any lingering taste for it herself. After a while, she'd just plain gotten tired of hating Barry. You had to let go of the hard, hateful feelings, or you kept one foot in the past, dragging it along with you. She had wanted to move on.
She glanced at Nate. She wasn't at all sure he'd moved on.
"What was he doing in Colorado if you were in Montana?"
She shrugged. "That's how Dad is—his feet get to itching, and he has to be off. In fact, that was part of the reason I got married instead of just—well, you know. He'd decided he was ready to go, and I didn't want to go." Hannah's need for roots had mingled with curiosity and plain old lust to make marriage seem inevitable. Maybe other girls her age hadn't thought they had to get married to have sex, but Hannah's head had been filled with fairy tales and wedding bells.
She expected a ribald comment from Nate, or maybe a smile. Instead, his eyebrows—both of them, quirky and straight—stayed caught in a frown. "Your father could have stayed there with you. You would have come to your senses sooner or later."
"No," she said sadly, "he couldn't. After my mom died, he just couldn't stay anywhere for long."
He didn't answer at first. When he did, his voice was quiet. "My father changed, too. After my mother died. He wasn't the man he'd been before."
"Changed how?"
"He'd always had a bad temper, but he rarely let it loose when she was alive. Afterward…" He shrugged. "Mark and I got good at staying out of his way when his temper was up."
Had their father hurt them? Physically hurt them? Given what she'd heard in town, it seemed possible. She wanted to ask. She wanted to tell him that he wasn't like his father, no matter what those people had said. But his expression was closed and forbidding again, as if he regretted having said so much.
She let the conversation lapse.
Silence felt natural out here. So many of nature's sounds were small and secret, like the whisper of a breeze that tugged at her borrowed hat, or the panicked escape of a jack-rabbit surprised by their passage. Nature could get noisy at times, of course, like when one of the wild storms of the plains blew in, cracking the sky open with thunder and making the air scream with wind and rain.
As if in answer to her thoughts, as they neared the tumble of rock that was their goal, a low growl of thunder sounded off in the distance. To the west, out near the border between land and sky, long streaks of gray rain arced from dusky clouds to dusty ground.
She grinned. "I thought you said we wouldn't get any rain."
"We won't. Wind's carrying it south. It won't reach us."
The rocks they'd been aiming at were much larger than they'd looked from a distance. A huge slab of granite poked up through the soil in a flat-topped ridge, with crumbles of stone in all sizes scattered around.
"There's a path to the top. It's enough of a climb to be a good stretch after the ride out here," Nate said, swinging down from the mare's back. He led the horse a few steps closer to the rock and tied the reins to something.
When he stepped aside, she saw that there was a metal ring driven into the rock. "You must come here pretty often."
"Mark drove that in years ago. He … used to spend more time on the ranch than he does now. There's just the one tie-down, but you won't need to tie Ajax. He'll hang around. This lady doesn't have his good sense," he said patting the mare on her spotted flank.
Hannah shifted uncomfortably in the saddle, but she remembered her plan and didn't get down. It wasn't that she didn't trust him…
He raised his eyebrows. "Coming?"
Moving around sounded really good. The rocky ridge looked inviting—but so did the man watching her. "I don't think so."
Humor gleamed in his dark eyes. "I'm not going to jump on you. Not without giving fair warning, anyway."
She grimaced. "Fair warning" might not be enough, not the way her body acted around him. "I think I'm better off up here."
"Hannah, you trusted me to tell you whatever else you should know about me—about what happened six years ago. Will you climb the rocks with me now, and listen?"
She didn't want to. She almost wheeled Ajax's head around and kicked him in the ribs. Her fingers actually twitched on the reins before she stilled them. The urge to gallop away was so startling and so absurd that she sat frozen, staring down at him. Hadn't she decided that it was best this way? She'd stopped those old biddies at the church from giving her their version of Nate's past because she'd thought she should hear it from him first.
That was why she'd stopped them, wasn't it?
But she hadn't thought that he would bring it up this soon. And now, looking down at him standing by the granite out-cropping, tasting her heartbeat in her throat and with fear ghosting across her mind, she understood that she wasn't as sure of anything as she had thought. Not of him. Not of herself.
But he was waiting. And she couldn't turn away from whatever he wanted to tell her. She swung down from Ajax's back.
"He won't wander," Nate told her. "Leave the reins loose."
The path he had said existed turned out to be a figment of his imagination—or so she informed him when her hat fell off less than halfway up.
Both of her hands lost some skin to the rough rock, and when they reached the top she was breathing hard. It wouldn't have been a bad climb if she hadn't been wearing cowboy boots, but the stacked heels, pointed toes and slick soles that were great for stirrups were more than a little awkward on steeply slanted rock.
But she made it. And maybe something other than exertion had her breath coming quick and shallow when she finally stood beside him on the sloping top. Maybe something stirred inside her just because she stood next to him here, with the wind lifting her hair and the land spread out around them … or maybe that stirring had little to do with the landscape.
She could ignore it. "It's wonderful up here. I can see why you might make the climb often."
"I come w
hen I can, but this is more Mark's spot than mine. At least, it used to be." He moved away, toward a long shelf of rock that ran along one side of the nearly level ridge where they stood.
She followed him slowly.
He stopped where that rocky lip was chest-high to him, leaned his forearms on it and looked out at the land below. "I can't imagine not living here. Even when things were at their worst, I couldn't give up the ranch and make a life elsewhere. I considered it once—" his mouth twisted up "—for about five minutes."
She joined him. The rock was nearly shoulder-high for her, and blocked much of the rising force of the wind. She, too, leaned on it and looked out at a landscape both sweeping and subtle—a view built of rock and dirt and sky and the way the tiny lives below had woven themselves into the larger life of the land. The sight moved her.
So did the man. For once Nate's expression was easy to read, almost naked as he looked out. The home-hunger she saw burning there brought a lump to her throat. This was a man who needed the land, this land, the way some people needed fame or wealth, and others longed for love. "It must have been hard on you, being in jail. Not knowing how long you'd be locked up."
"I made bail," he said. "I had the ranch to stand as surety. But … yes. It was hard." He looked at her curiously. "You don't really have any roots, do you? You moved around as a child, and you're still moving. Harry said you take jobs all over the state."
"Oh, but that's temporary. I know how to handle moving around. Lord, I ought to. I've done it all my life. It's not what I want, but it's okay for now, because I know it won't go on forever."
"You intend to settle down, then?"
"Yes." The wind was picking up. When she turned her head, it blew her hair in her face. She tucked it behind her ear. "I'm going to have a home. It may take me a while—even after I get my degree I won't be earning a fortune—but I'm good at saving money. I know how to be patient."
"Where will you settle?"
She shrugged. "Somewhere in Texas." The wind whisked her hair back in her face.