Summer Winds (12 page)

The day was rain-wrapped and gray, but I felt exhilarated, singing along with the country station and watching the redbirds dart across the road.

In roughly two hours, I pulled into a shop on the main street of Maze and went inside to select just the right item for Cash. It took me over an hour to discuss it and several hundred dollars out of my bank account, but I was happy to pay for the pleasure I was certain it would bring. I couldn’t wait to get home and surprise her. I had the entire evening planned.

Stopping at the 2-K on the way back, I asked Donnetta to pack up a couple of baked-chicken dinners because I didn’t have time to cook.

She eyed me suspiciously. “What are you up to, Ms. Stanwyck? No secrets shared, no food packed.”

I knew Donnetta wasn’t kidding. “Cash hurt her hands working out on the ranch.”

“Uh-huh.” She reminded me of someone’s mom, standing on the porch in an apron, clutching a wooden spoon in a hand propped on her hip, listening to a kid spin a story of half-truths.

“And I’m taking us both dinner.”

“Well, now, that’s nice.” I could see her mind ticking away like a Swiss wall clock.

“May I have my food now?”

“Of course you can. By the way, Stretch was in here and said he’s determined to take you out one of these days. You know we kid about him, but he makes a good living and he’s not that bad-looking.”

“Donnetta—”

“Just wondering if you’re getting a little bonkers from lack of company.”

“I have company.”

“Male company.”

“I have Perry and now Bo Nightengale.”

“
Company
company, as in sleepovers. I know, I know, mind your own business, Donnetta,” she admonished herself.

“I was thinking about a dog instead. He’ll keep me warm at night and never leave hair in the shower.”

Donnetta waved her arms in the air as if sending me off. Taking the large-handled brown bag, I happily fled, tearing down the dirt road and onto the highway that led to the ranch. I pulled into the driveway, scattering gravel, and Cash pulled up in the Gator from the other side of the property.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked. “I’m lonesome dove out here. No one’s around but me.”

“Why don’t you get washed up and come in for dinner. I picked something up for us at the café.”

She bolted from the vehicle and headed for the hand pump out in the front yard, splashing water everywhere like a spaniel.

I went inside and washed up and got the plates out, putting the gift I had for her to one side. Moments later she came into the living room on the way to her bedroom.

“So you like the old well?”

“Yeah, it’s like a time-travel machine or something. Real relaxing,” she said as she disappeared into her room.

I smiled, thinking about that. It
was
a time-travel machine. The very first ranchers who lived out here used it as their total source of water, filling buckets for cooking and bathing. It wasn’t hard to envision rough, callused hands grasping the rust-iron lever and pumping it up and down impatiently, maybe as a son argued with his father over work in the field, or a mother fretted over the health of a child inside the cabin, or maybe lovers used it as an excuse to meet and talk privately out of earshot of the family.

Cash returned with newly washed hair, still wet and shiny, and a pair of thin drawstring pants. Noticing her small, firm breasts clearly outlined underneath her T-shirt, I glanced at her body as I asked about her hands.

“They hurt like hell. Left one is much better but the right one is swollen and sore.”

“Let me see it again.” This time she stepped in very close and held the back of her hand against my chest with the palm up for me to examine. My breathing became erratic and I nearly lost my bearings, forgetting what we were looking at. “I’ll put something on it after dinner.”

I pulled away, disoriented, and focused on dishing up the plates. We sat cross-legged on the leather couch chowing down on the chicken. “Donnetta can cook. Not like you though.”

I grinned at her political correctness. The two of us sharing a meal together on this old leather couch as the sun went down felt perfect. Why, I couldn’t say. It just did.

“What happened to your husband?” She asked it in that direct way she had, without sympathy, taking the evening in a direction I didn’t want it to go.

“He died in an automobile accident.”

“Why are you so guilty about that?”

I got up and poured myself a glass of wine and then sat back down, giving myself time to collect my thoughts, eyeing this precocious young woman before I finally addressed her. “And why do you think I have guilt about it?”

“Because you keep your body and your mind running like a jet engine, and when I mentioned him just now, you got irritable.” She barely moved and said nothing more. I could hear a clock ticking on the shelf above my desk, a sound I’d never really noticed before, listening for the passage of time a new experience for me.

“We hadn’t been married all that long and we had a fight and he left angry and the next call I got was from the highway patrol about twenty miles from here. They used the Jaws of Life and flew him to a Kansas City hospital where he was dead on arrival.”

She was silent for a long moment, then spoke unemotionally.

“What were you fighting about?”

“I had a very nice night planned for us and it’s getting pretty sad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have something for you,” I said, and she looked surprised as I went to the counter and produced the medium-sized box and handed it to her with less joy than I’d planned now that she’d clouded my mind with the past.

She began to unwrap her present slowly, pausing every now and then to look up at me. “Why am I getting a gift?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged, pleased with myself.

She was on the edge of the chair now, down to the final shreds of paper, and could clearly see the image on the box. Yanking it open, she carefully lifted out the Canon SLR.

“You’re always holding your hands up, making that little clicking sound like you’re taking a picture, so I thought, while your hands are healing, you could take some real ones. It’s not too heavy to hold. It’s a single-lens reflex, which the guy said you’d like, and it got a very good consumer rating.” As I rattled off the camera’s attributes, I could see the tears in her eyes. She looked stunned.

“Well, do you like it?”

Setting the camera aside, she stood up and wrapped her long arms around me and lifted me off the floor in a big bear hug, then swung us both in a three-hundred-sixty-degree whirl. I yelped, telling her to put me down. She set my feet back on the floor and then kissed me, missing my cheek and catching my neck.

“This is the absolute neatest thing I’ve ever gotten. I can’t believe you did this.”

A thrill ran through me that began at the very spot where her lips touched me and ran through my heart and even farther south to regions I refused to recognize. She loosened her grip but still had her hands on me, and I shivered. “Careful with your blisters.”

“You’re a wonderful person, Maggie Tanner. Thank you.” She seemed as touched by the gesture as the gift. Obviously, Cash Tate hadn’t received many expensive presents in her life since she’d always been an appendage to a surrogate family, an afterthought.

She broke away and picked up the camera again and stroked it lovingly, like a kid with a toy at Christmas. “This is a very expensive camera. Why did you do it?”

“Maybe to see you like this.”
Maybe to be lifted off my feet and
slung into the air and kissed on the neck, although I had no way to
predict her response or my pleasure.

She looked at me for a moment as if she wanted to say more but then buried herself in the camera instructions, swooning over the many things the camera would do. After thirty minutes, I cleared my throat. “Hey, I’m still here.” She swung the camera in my direction, pressed the button, and the shutter snapped crisply.

“Sorry, I moved.”

“Move all you want. This has a high-speed shutter so I can get action shots. But for now…” She towed me over to the chair and demanded I throw my legs over one arm and rest my head on the other.

As I complied, I could smell her cologne either on the leather pillow or perhaps on me where she’d held me, and the fragrance made me catch my breath. “I don’t sit like this.”

“Maybe you should.” She spoke from behind the view finder.

“Because you look real…” Click. “…sexy.” Click. Click.

I felt my facial expression change—relax, maybe. That’s the thing about a camera. Anonymous, intimate, infinitely close up, it looks deep into your eyes and finds the truth like a lover who can’t be fooled.

She moved my arm, tousled my hair, then came in very close, the shutter grinding away. Ending on her knees in front of the chair where I lounged, she rested her elbows on the edge of the cushion.

“Not so close. I don’t want all my wrinkles preserved for posterity.”

“You have no wrinkles. I love this camera, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” The words could just as easily have been “hold me” because I had lost track of what we were talking about.

Her eyes danced across my face as if waiting for an opening, an invitation. My breath was coming in short, rapid bursts as I envisioned touching her magnificent dark curls and fantastic features. I couldn’t stop myself from grasping her forearm, feeling the strength and size of her. At my touch, she knelt and bent her head as if about to be knighted and pressed her brow into my chest, resting quietly.

Could she hear my runaway heart? Did she know what I was thinking or feeling? And why couldn’t we stay like this forever? I ran my fingers through her hair, stroking her scalp. Perhaps she just wanted mothering or sisterly contact or some human connection. It didn’t sound as if she’d had much of that growing up. But what was
my
purpose…my wanting? Why was I holding this woman against me, thrilled by her touch?

The deep-voiced conversation in the front yard broke the spell.

Cash jumped up and met the men as they swaggered up on the porch.

“You okay in there?” Bo asked loudly.

“Yeah, fine,” Cash answered, and pushed the screen door open to walk out on the porch.

“Her truck was here,” Bo said, referring to me, “but the lights were off in the house. Pretty early to be going to bed.”

I realized we’d been so caught up in what we were doing that we hadn’t turned the house lights on as it grew dark.

“I got a new camera and was trying the flash at different light levels,” Cash said, as I flipped on the overhead lights that now seemed bright and garish. I noted that Cash was instantly ready with the plausible lie, as if she’d spent a good deal of her life finding ways to hide the truth.

“Maggie around?” Perry chimed in, sounding like he was investigating a crime and didn’t quite believe the story he was getting. I stepped into view behind Cash. “
There
you are. Anything in particular you want us to start on in the morning?”

A silly question. Perry didn’t need me to tell him what to do.

He had the whole system down and had done it for years. He was just worried about my whereabouts and checking up on me like an old mother hen. And a part of Perry just liked to be in the know.

“The three of you need to move that pipe out of the fields in the morning and stack it out of the way of the haying equipment.” I attempted to straighten my rumpled hair.

“Will do. First thing then, Cash?” Bo said.

“First thing.” She closed the door and locked it, turning to look at me.

Standing in the middle of the room with the glaring lights overhead, I was aware that I’d almost lost my senses. “Well, I’m going to bed and read for a while. Unwind.”

“Maggie…” She tried to block my way.

“I know, you love it, and I’m so happy you do. Just have fun with it.” I patted her arm as you would a friend and disappeared into my bedroom before she could say anything else.

So what happens to me when I’m around her? Something!

It’s the way she’s masculine and then feminine, strong and then
vulnerable, young and then old. Magnetic.

I’d held her head against my chest, stroked her hair, bought her a gift. None of those acts, in and of themselves, would have meant anything if she had been Donnetta. So why, doing them with Cash, did I feel like I had something to hide?

I need to get that out of my head. I have nothing at all to hide.

Nothing has happened. I’m just fond of her, that’s all. Let yourself
enjoy giving her a gift, for God’s sake
.

It had rained for six straight days and nights and was bordering on biblical. The fields were muddy, the hay bent over, and the animals’ hooves grew soft and spongy. Only a few pieces of the landscape remained above the mud. Our vehicles tore up the pastures as we slogged over them to check on horses, cattle, or the hay crop. Weather service said today ended the soggiest June in a decade. While all around me Mother Nature had gone soft, I was determined to harden my resolve—enough of contemplating something I never intended to experience and therefore a fulfillment I wouldn’t miss.

I was so determined to put a wall between Cash Tate and my strange urges that perhaps I overreacted, always crossing the living room with a purpose rather than lingering to talk, spending lots of time in the barn and making several trips into town so I could keep my physical and emotional distance from her.

Perry had his own relationship issues as he cussed the skies, the hay, and Bo Nightengale, who got on his nerves as a bunkhouse partner.

“He snores and snorts and hawks and spits and carries on. He’s louder and more disgusting than a couple of rutting hogs,” Perry complained to me.

“Is he a good worker?” I asked, unloading groceries from the car.

“I’m talkin’ about evenings with him and now who knows if he’ll be useful for haying because there’ll be no haying. We may never get dry enough to hay again. Shoulda knowed we wouldn’t be cutting. Almanac predicted it.” His complaining always harkened back to the
Farmer’s Almanac
and how we’d agreed to abide by it and then hadn’t.