Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
The dry ground crunched beneath Jake’s feet as he walked through the black night from the big house to the row of cabins across the yard.
His father’s first and only love, his legacy.
And here Jake was hating it. The night was chilly enough that his breath crystallized as he breathed, and he hunched his good shoulder, trying to stay warm in just his T-shirt.
He hadn’t expected the altitude to affect him, either, but it did, shortening his already too short breath.
As he walked, he glanced around, wondering what kind of wild animals roamed the desert at night.
The place had a rather eerie glow to it with the pale blue light from the moon dancing over the rocky hills around him, casting shadows, flickering on the landscape like blue flames, and he wondered if that was where his father had gotten the name for the place.
He tried to take it all in but he couldn’t; it all seemed too big.
What if he’d come sooner, when Richard had still been alive? What if he’d tried harder to understand the father he’d never known, would he then feel something for this land? Something more than the disconcerting nothing he felt now?
The utter silence around him was abruptly broken by the lonely bellowing of a range bull, the wind sighing through the hills.
And then, thundering hooves. Jake tensed and searched the darkness.
There, about a hundred yards to the north of the barn, came a galloping horse.
Its rider had a stream of long, deep garnet hair blowing behind her, and she rode as if one with her horse.
Callie.
Since the last time he’d seen her had been in his dream, he had a little trouble separating the sweet, warm, soft woman who’d kissed him from the tough, impenetrable woman racing across the rough desert floor.
He supposed this was her idea of relaxation time, which he didn’t quite get.
Bouncing on a horse in the night across the hard, unforgiving ground seemed as much fun as a physical therapy session.
And still he watched, mesmerized in spite of himself.
She rode as if she’d been born to it, leaning over her horse a little, her body fluid with the horse’s every movement.
The moment seemed so intimate, he felt as if he were trespassing, and he nearly stepped back, but then she let out a heart-stopping scream.
The hair rose on the back of his neck. Was her horse racing out of control and she couldn’t stop it?
If so, she could fall and break her neck.
That was all he could think as he started running, gritting his teeth against the jarring his shoulder took with each step.
He got to the corral as her horse came thundering in.
“Hang on,” he yelled, and leapt up onto the fencing, not sure if he could catch a rein or Callie herself, or what the hell he thought he was going to do, only knowing he had to do something. “Callie, hang on!”
But then, about fifteen feet from his precarious perch on the corral fence, the horse suddenly pulled up, slowed to a trot, then a walk, and then right before him, stopped entirely.
“Jake?” Callie blinked down at him. “What are you doing?”
“Uh…”
The horse snorted its displeasure at the fun being over, and pranced around restlessly until Callie’s softly uttered, “Whoa” calmed her. Perfectly in control now, the horse stilled. Callie looked at Jake. “Why are you up there like that?”
“You screamed.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I heard you.”
She lifted a shoulder. “It felt so good to be out, I might have let out a little ‘woo-hoo’ or something.”
“Yeah.” His breathing was still choppy from his run, proving that a good fall and surgery played hell on a man’s conditioning.
And his balance on the fence wasn’t so good either.
He didn’t dare jump down; his shoulder was leaping in pain with every heartbeat.
Carefully he climbed down, gritting his teeth so hard he thought he just might grind them down to nothing, but hell if he’d show her he wanted to drop to the ground and whimper like a baby. “Just a little woo-hoo.”
“What did you think I—” She stared at him as her horse snorted again, stomping a long leg and hoof uncomfortably close to Jake’s foot. “Did you think I needed help? On a horse?”
The insulted tone was there in her voice, but with the adrenaline—not to mention pain—pumping through his blood, he didn’t much care. “You shouldn’t scream like that. I thought you were in trouble.”
“You thought wrong. Jake, you’re not at work. You’re not the hero out here.”
Right. He wasn’t the hero anywhere.
She bent over the horse’s neck, embracing the huge animal. Then, with one last pat, she hopped down. “And even if I had been in trouble, I can handle myself.” She grabbed the reins and led the horse toward the barn, sending him one last long, hard look over her shoulder.
Great, she could handle herself. “Good to know,” he muttered and rubbed his shoulder.
He was an idiot. He wished he was in San Diego; at the station playing cards waiting for the fire bell; at his small house with a good hot pizza and cable TV; at a bar sharing drinks with a woman… anywhere but here.
For the second time that night, he headed toward the cabins. He pulled a key out of his pocket, the one Callie had given him with an unusual look on her face; as if she’d wanted to both laugh and wince in sympathy.
In this case, he’d take the sympathy. He came to a stop in front of the second cabin. His brother’s.
Half brother, he reminded himself, because blood didn’t seem to mean much to Tucker these days.
It hadn’t always been that way. Once upon a time, Tucker had thought the sun rose and set on Jake’s shoulders. That had been nice, real nice, but Jake shook off the memories and reached for the handle just as the door opened. Light spilled out into the night.
Tucker stood in the doorway with a scowl on his face. “You going to stand there muttering to yourself all night, or are you coming in?”
“This was a bad idea.”
“No shit.” Tucker stood back and gestured him in. “But there’s no other choice until morning, unless you want to sleep in your rent-a-cowboy truck.”
Jake glanced at the Toyota in the driveway, the one he’d rented at the airport. He had no idea why Tucker might object to it. “What other choice will present itself in the morning?”
“You can leave.”
Jake smiled grimly and stepped inside. “You used to come running when I came home. You’d throw your chubby little arms around my legs and laugh while I tried to walk with you on me.” Nothing had ever made him feel more important, not before, or since.
“Yeah, well, I was just a stupid kid then.”
Jake refrained from asking him what had changed, and looked around. To say the place was small would be an understatement. There was a kitchen nook and living space, which held a fireplace with a couch in front of it. Behind the couch was a cot. He looked at it and groaned.
“There’s always the truck,” Tucker reminded him.
“You know, you might show a little more gratitude to the guy who got you out of your one-way ticket to juvy-hall, moved you out of the town where at least half the population wanted to kill you, and handed you a job.”
Tucker just stared at him from sullen eyes.
“Or not,” Jake muttered, and weary beyond exhaustion, sat on the couch.
“Try again, Sherlock.”
Jake got up, walked around the couch, and kicked the cot. “Do I at least get a pillow—” It hit him in the face. “Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. You paid for it.”
“Is that what’s up your ass? You’re mad at me because you owe me money?”
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“You know what, Tucker?” Exhausted, he sank to the cot. He toed off his shoes and lay back carefully. “Remind me to pound the shit out of you tomorrow.” He just prayed he had the energy. He closed his eyes and, fully dressed, fell into a deep slumber.
Later that night, Callie lay in her bed watching the moon’s shadow play across her ceiling. She could still picture Jake balancing himself on that fence, trying to save her from a runaway horse.
The idea was laughable, and yet…
What kind of guy did such a thing for a woman he hardly knew? A firefighter, she had to admit. A man well used to putting others’ safety ahead of his own.
She might almost like him for that, if their earlier conversation wasn’t haunting her.
“It’s time to work on this place, give it some value.”
“It has value.”
“Not resale, it doesn’t.”
The words had stuck with her ever since he’d fallen asleep after uttering them by the hot tub. The first time she’d stepped foot here, she’d been seventeen years old, with twenty bucks in her pocket and no more possessions than could fit into her ratty old backpack…
The memory never failed to make her smile, though she hadn’t been smiling then. She’d been secretly shaking in her boots. Richard Rawlins had stood in front of her, looking so big and formidable, hands on his hips as he stared down at the bedraggled young homeless girl asking for a job.
“Whatcha got in the way of skills, girl?” he’d demanded in a craggy voice that suggested he’d been yelling at bedraggled young homeless girls just like her for years.
But she was good at not letting anyone see her squirm.
Real good. Some might say that she was too proud as well, but she didn’t think so.
She was just independent, fiercely so, but having never been able to depend on anyone but herself, she had good reason.
“I can clean up after the animals,” she’d told him.
Her mother had been a small-time singer, chasing fame in bars across the South for most of Callie’s youth.
This had meant nocturnal, sporadic mothering, and she used the word mothering quite loosely, because really, if there’d been any mothering done at all, it had been done by Callie herself.