Chasing the Sun (41 page)

“Good morning,” he said when he finally stopped for air.

She blinked up at him, her eyes round and slightly out of focus, her lips parted and pink and plump as berries. “You’re up,” she said.

He had to grin. “Oh, I’m definitely up.”

“Me, too, up,” Kate demanded, lifting her arms. Grinning, Jack picked her up and held her in one arm while he wrapped the other around Daisy so he could hug them both.

“Well, pretty ladies. Tomorrow I have to go into Val Rosa, but today we have all to ourselves. What shall we do?”

“Horsy!” Kate cried.

“No hikes,” Daisy added.

Jack laughed and kissed them both once more because it felt so good.

It was definitely going to be a grand day.

And an even better night.

IT WAS LONG AFTER SUPPER. MOLLY AND JESSICA HAD SAID their goodnights and ushered their children up to bed several hours ago, and the brothers had retired to Brady’s office to discuss the sale of the horses tomorrow. The house was quiet except for the scratching of the pen across the paper as Daisy sat at the small secretary in her bedroom trying desperately to form her scattered thoughts into written words.

Muttering under her breath, she tore another sheet of paper from the tablet, wadded it into a ball, and tossed it into the small fire crackling in the fireplace. Words had deserted her. Everything she wrote read like a bumbling list of excuses. Good-bye letters were so coldly impersonal.

Sighing, she rose and walked to the window.

The moon was full and bright, painting the world below in such stark shades of gray and cloudy white she could make out the horses in the paddocks, rocks in the yard, the individual boards on the side of the barn.

Leaning her forehead against the cool glass of the window, she sighed again.

Maybe she should just talk to him. Explain about the tour and her chance to train with Madame Scarlatti and sing on a real stage. Jack would understand.

Wouldn’t he?

She let her thoughts drift back through the lovely day—their last full day together. After Kate’s riding lesson and a visit with the barn kitty, they had spent the rest of the morning in the nursery with Kate and the twins and little Abigail. They read, they painted, they sang. The two little girls danced while Daisy played the piano and Jack accompanied her on the tom-tom drums and the twins shrieked out a song. It was chaos. After the noon meal, exhaustion had claimed Kate, and Daisy had left her napping in the care of one of the nursery girls, and had gone on a buggy tour with Jack. He seemed so carefree and happy, showing her all his favorite haunts and relating stories of pranks and scrapes he’d gotten into with his brothers. It was almost like he was reacquainting himself with his childhood ... or else telling his special places good-bye. But Daisy would let no melancholy thoughts intrude on the lovely day—the last day. She enjoyed every moment.

Supper had been more boisterous than usual. With Jack able to join them again and Elena leaving the next day, it was a lively celebration with a great deal of laughter over Jack’s ordeal and fond remembrances of Elena as a child. No sad thoughts or regrets intruded, and even though Daisy sensed an underlying poignancy about Elena’s departure, the family seemed to have accepted her decision to devote her life to the church. Brady was the only one who knew Daisy and Kate would be leaving the next day, too, although headed in the opposite direction, but other than a few thoughtful glances cast her way, he gave no indication. It was a lovely gathering and a perfect ending to a perfect day.

But now it was over. And here she sat in her lonely room, with a letter to write and a night of regrets and “what-ifs” to get through, and with every breath she took, she felt herself weaken a little more.

At the creak of the door behind her, she turned to see the very person she had been fretting over limp into the room.

She raised a brow. “I didn’t hear your knock.”

“That’s because I didn’t.” Grabbing her coat off a peg behind the door, he held it out. “Here, put this on.”

“Why do I need a coat?”

“Because it’s cool outside.” After she slipped on her worn gabardine, he took her hand and pulled her toward the door. “Come on. It’s a full moon and there’s something I want to show you.”

“What if Kate wakes up?”

“I sent one of the Ortegas to sit with her. Come on.”

“It’s dark,” she protested, even though she offered no other resistance as he led her out into the hall. “What do you expect to see in the middle of the night?”

He grinned back at her. “The inland ocean.”

“The what?”

“You’ll see.”

They left the house and crossed through the barn and out the other side, where two saddled horses stood tied to a rail by the double back doors.

“You do ride, don’t you?” he asked, stopping before a small mare with a blaze running down her face that looked almost silver in the moonlight.

“Yes, but not frequently. And you shouldn’t be riding at all with that leg.”

“We’re not going far.” After helping her into the saddle, he untied the mare and handed up the reins. “She’ll follow. Just keep a light hand on the leathers.”

Luckily Jack’s injured leg was his right one, and he was able to swing into the saddle without putting a strain on it. Still, she could see it bothered him until he slipped the toe of his boot into the stirrup and let his knee take most of the weight. Without a word, he reined his big gelding toward the valley and kicked it into a mile-eating lope. Daisy’s mare followed smoothly behind.

They rode for less than a quarter hour before Jack pulled his horse to a stop on a small treeless knoll that rose out of the flats. Daisy reined in beside him. For a moment they sat quietly, looking out at the moon-gilded vista.

“Look,” Jack finally said. He stuck out a hand, palm down, and drew it in a slow, sweeping arc, mimicking the roll of the landscape. “Squint your eyes and feel the wind and let your mind drift.”

Daisy did, and there it was. The inland sea. The combination of rain and warm sunshine had sent the spring grass shooting up, and with every gentle gust, the tall blades bobbed and shimmered and rippled like waves on a rolling sea. The sense of movement was uncanny, and with the rhythmic shushing of wind through the grass, it truly sounded like water lapping against the shore.

On either side of the valley, pine-covered hills rose out of the silvered plain like dark islands stretching high into the sky to where the last patches of snow on the peaks gleamed white in the frosted light. Somewhere in a far canyon, a cow bawled, but to Daisy it sounded like it could have been the muffled blast of a distant foghorn. Other than that, and the soughing of the wind, and her own pulse beat in her ears, the silence was complete and eerie and magical. It was like being transported to another world of wind and water and endless stars.

He turned toward her. “Do you see it?”

He was smiling, his teeth a white slash against his darker face. The angles and planes of his strong features were so perfectly sculpted by moonlight she wanted to reach out and touch him and feel the warmth of his skin to assure herself he was real.

“Yes,” she said. “I see it.”

Jack’s ocean in the mountains.

Still smiling, he closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sky. His lips parted. She watched his chest rise and fall on a deep breath and could almost feel renewed energy flowing through him.

He needs this,
she realized.
He needs this openness and space around him. Without it, he’s like a caged bird.

And with that realization came another.

She didn’t want to be another bar in the walls of that cage. She didn’t want to be the one who held him back from his soaring dreams. And she could do it, she knew. If she stayed and bound him to her side with marriage, she could clip his wings forever. Jack would always be torn between her and Kate and the beckoning beyond. But since he couldn’t be two men at the same time, he would end up being neither. And the Jack she loved would be lost forever.

She couldn’t do that.

She had to let him go.
God, give me the strength.

His voice broke the long silence. “I used to come here as a kid.”

Braced against the searing emptiness, she turned toward him, praying for the courage to say what she must. “Jack.”

But his attention was turned toward the valley, his face softened by moonlight and memories. “On full moon nights, I’d sneak out and come here. I’d run the whole way. I would stand right here on this little hilltop and pretend I was on the bow of my own ship on my way to some other place, some other adventure.” He fell silent for a moment.

She watched him take in another deep breath and let it go in a rush.

“I could breathe here. I could be someone other than Brady and Hank’s little brother. I could be someone different. Someone grand.” Turning his head, he looked directly into her eyes. “I still can. If you and Kate stay with me.”

To watch you wither away?

“Jack,” she began, still not sure what she was going to say.

Again, he cut her off. “Or we can go adventuring together. The three of us. Go anywhere in the world we want.”

And give up singing forever.

“It would be an adventure, Daisy.”

She could hear the laughter in his voice. The joy and yearning.

“There’s a river in South America. It’s called the Amazon and it’s so big some have named it the River Sea. It can even handle steam-boats. Huge Anaconda snakes live there and man-eating piranha fish and a species of river dolphin called a Boto that the natives say can turn into a man. Kate would love it. You too. I’ve got enough money to take us anywhere we want, so why not see it all?”

“Jack, I—”

“First we’ll go north, all the way to the Yukon, another great river. Did you know they train dogs to pull sleds across the ice up there and they have mountains that are so tall the snow on top never melts? They call them glaciers. And the rainbows in the night sky”—he waved a hand toward the moonlit dome overhead—“hell, you won’t believe the colors, Daisy. They say they’re almost alive. The natives call it the ‘dance of the spirits’. It’s magical.”

He laughed, his teeth white in the moonlight. “I want to show it all to you. And what I haven’t seen, we can see together. The world’s a wondrous and astounding place, Daisy, and I want our daughter to know there’s more to it than just this valley.”

Our daughter.
But what of me?
Could she live a life without music? The breeze gusted and Daisy trembled as a cold draft cut through her thin coat like the blade of a knife. “I wish ...”
What?

To stay? To go? To hear him say he loves me? Would that be enough to give up the dream?

“You’re cold,” he said, frowning over at her. “I didn’t mean to keep you out in the wind so long. I just wanted you to see it.” He reined his gelding toward the house, Daisy’s mare trailing behind.

“Want to race?” he called over his shoulder, and before she could answer, he kicked his horse into a gallop. Her mare lunged after him.

Laughing like carefree children, they raced across Jack’s inland sea, while the waving grass shimmered around them, and the moon lit their way, and the breeze tugged Daisy’s hair from her braid and stung her eyes. And if Jack had looked back and noticed her tears, she would have laughed and told him it was just the wind.

But he didn’t look back.

JACK FELT THE SHIVER OF HER BODY WHEN HE LIFTED DAISY down outside the barn, and berated himself for not getting her a better jacket. But he wasn’t sorry they’d gone. It was the first time he’d ever told anyone about his “mountain sea,” and even though he knew it was just a child’s fantasy, he was glad he’d shared it with her. It had always been easy to talk to Daisy. She never mocked or judged, and when he was around her, he felt he could let the masks drop for a while.

“You go on in and warm up,” he said. “I’ll take care of the horses.”

He watched her walk through the darkened barn and out again into the moonlight. Her hair had come loose and lifted in the breeze, fanning around her shoulders like a silver veil. She looked smaller to him. Diminished somehow. And Jack had a sudden odd premonition that she would keep walking away from him until she disappeared altogether. But that was probably just a trick of the moonlight.

Tonight,
he thought, laughing softly as he unsaddled the horses. Was there ever going to be a grander night than tonight?

After he’d brushed the animals and turned them out into the back pasture, he put the tack away, secured the barn, and headed toward the house.

He took the stairs as quickly as he could. His leg was sore from the ride, but not as painful as yesterday, and certainly not troublesome enough to put him off his plans. He paused outside Daisy’s door to catch his breath and realized his hands were sweating and his heart was racing like a schoolboy’s. Which was stupid. He’d been bedding women for almost half his life. He’d bedded this woman. Many times. Probably. But this was different. This time it was important.

He pushed open the door. The room was dark, but he could see by the moonlight coming through the French door that Daisy wasn’t there. Then he heard movement in the water closet and smiled, picturing her in the tub, naked and soapy and sleek with water, her skin rosy from the heat. He wanted to go in there and strip off his clothes and climb into the tub with her. But he decided not to. She was still holding back for some reason and he didn’t want to rush his fences. Even as young as she was, Daisy was headstrong. She wouldn’t like being pushed too hard.

Stepping across the hall to his bedroom, he went through the dressing area and into the adjoining water closet. Quickly, he washed off the horse dirt, changed his shirt, and checked his teeth. When he went back into the hall, he almost plowed into the nursery girl as she came out of Kate’s room.

“Everything all right?” he asked, peering past her into his daughter’s room.

“
Sí
.” The young woman nodded and stifled a yawn. “
Todo está bien
.”