Chapter 7 Bastien — Day 15 #2
He watched the shape of her in the rain — the long slicker to her boots, the wet braid, the way she set her feet in the mud without looking down.
He'd read a dozen profiles of women like her in his old life.
Ranchers. Growers. Vintners. He'd sat across polished tables from women who owned more land than half the duchies of Europe.
He'd never seen one walk a scared cow home in a storm before dawn.
It turned out to be a different thing than reading about it.
“She'll bruise on that near-side hip tomorrow,” Mara said, without turning her head. “Watch her the next few days. If she goes off her feed, we call the vet.”
“I'll watch her.”
“Rafe's on her stall for the morning check.”
“I'll tell him.”
“Tell Orin too. He likes her.”
“Yes.”
She glanced at him, sidelong, under her wet brim. “Yes what.”
“Yes, I'll tell him.”
She glanced at him under the wet brim, amusement briefly winning over the weather.
They got the heifer into the small stall next to Dancer's. Dry hay. Fresh water. Mara felt her legs one more time in the lamplight and nodded once, satisfied.
“She's all right.”
“Yes.”
“Good throw, second try.”
“Thank you.”
“You were slow on the first.”
“I know.”
She looked up from the heifer's shoulder, approval plain in her face.
“Get the horses down,” she said. “I'll be in the tack room.”
He got the horses down. He pulled the saddles, wiped the wet off them with a rag off the wall, threw a dry cooler over each of the horses, and got them into their own stalls with feed.
Roman butted his shoulder and blew warm air against his jaw.
Bastien rested his forehead against the gelding's neck for one long breath.
The horse smelled of clean sweat and wet leather and the small green sweet of oats already in his mouth.
“Good horse,” he said. “You did that. Not me.”
Roman blew again, like a horse who knew.
Bastien stayed with him a moment longer than he needed to. He wasn't putting it off. He wasn't quite ready either. Then he stepped back into the aisle and went to the tack room.
The tack room was warmer than the barn. There was a woodstove Thayer kept fed most nights and a bare bulb overhead that swung a little in the draft.
Bridles and halters hung along one wall in the same order they'd hung in for probably twenty years.
Saddles on the racks. A calendar from the Alpine feed store two years out of date, pinned to the wall with a rusted horseshoe nail.
Mara stood by the stove with her back to him. She'd shrugged out of her father's long slicker and was hanging it on a wooden peg. Her flannel underneath was soaked through in strips where the coat had pressed against it. Her braid was a rope of dark wet color down her spine.
He stopped in the doorway to pull his own coat off. Water came off it onto the boot mat in a small brown river.
“Boots,” she said, without turning.
“Yes.”
He toed them off and set them beside hers. Hers were smaller than his by a couple of sizes and darker with wet.
“There's a towel in the cabinet. Left side. Not the shop rags.”
He found the cabinet. Two thin blue towels sat folded on the left, the sort of towel a person kept in a tack room because ruining it would grieve no one. He tossed her the first one and kept the second for himself. She caught it without looking.
For a moment there was only the sound of the stove, and the rain on the tack room roof, and the two of them rubbing towels through their hair. Steam came off his shoulders where the wet shirt met warm air. The bulb overhead swung a slow inch, and the shadows on the wall of bridles swung with it.
“Your hands are shaking,” he said, before he thought better of it.
“They always shake after.”
“After what.”
“Cold work. It's a body thing. Give it ten minutes.”
“All right.”
“Yours too.”
He looked down. She was right. His hands were shaking on the towel. He hadn't noticed. “So they are.”
“It's not fear,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn't.”
“Good.”
He watched her, and he didn't watch her.
She was standing close enough to the stove that he could see the goosebumps on the fair skin above her collar, where the flannel had come open at the throat.
Her lips were faintly blue. Her hands were shaking, barely, the way any hands would shake after work like that.
She wasn't performing being fine. She was being fine.
He'd known a dozen women in gowns and boardrooms and none of them had looked like this.
Not because they weren't beautiful. Some of them had been.
It was that they'd been arranged. Composed.
Turned toward the room the way a painting is turned toward the door.
Mara wasn't turned toward anything. She was standing in her own life at four-thirty in the morning drying her own hair by her own fire, and if he weren't there she'd have done exactly the same thing.
He stopped that thought before it went further. He put the towel down.
“You should get out of that shirt,” he said, and immediately heard how it landed. “In front of the stove. Before you go cold through.”
“I know how to warm up in my own tack room, Beau.”
“Yes. Sorry.”
She looked at him.
She had gray-green eyes that read wet weather the way most people read a book, and she was using them on him now. He'd learned in two weeks that when she looked at you like this, she was deciding whether to say a thing she'd been carrying for a while.
The stove ticked. He waited, and she took her time.
“You're not who you say you are, are you,” she said.
Quiet. Direct. Not a question at the end of it, because she wasn't asking. She was telling him what she'd seen.
He took the slow, deliberate exhale he'd learned to take before hard things when he was ten years old and his father was about to ask him something with a right and a wrong answer. It filled his chest. It emptied it.
“Not entirely,” he said.
She held his eyes.
She didn't push. She didn't ask what part.
She didn't ask why. She didn't ask whose son he was, or what name was really on his birth certificate, or what he was hiding from.
She stood there with the towel loose in her hand and her braid dripping onto her shirt and let the answer sit between them like something she'd hooked and hadn't yet decided whether to keep.
He'd have told her. Right there, right then, if she'd asked one more question, he'd have told her the whole of it. His real name. His brother. The company. The chair he'd walked away from and the reason he'd come south. He was surprised, standing there in a wet shirt, to find he wanted to.
She didn't ask.
She looked at him a long moment more. Long enough that he counted three of his own heartbeats and lost count of hers.
Then she set the towel down on the bench beside her.
“Roman needs his front left picked out,” she said. “There was a stone.”
“I'll get it.”
“Good.”
She walked past him.
She didn't touch him going by. She didn't need to. The air she moved through his shoulder felt like a hand set gently against it, and then taken away.
She went out into the barn aisle. He heard her boots on the plank, then the barn door, then the yard.
He stood alone in the tack room with the stove ticking behind him and the rain still coming down on the tin and a wet towel forgotten in his hand.
He'd told her the truth. Half of one. She'd walked out with it.
He didn't know yet what she was going to do with it.
He wasn't sure she knew either. She could put him off the ranch by breakfast. She could pretend she hadn't asked.
She could come back an hour from now with the second question, the one he'd give a longer answer to.
Any of the three would be a version of her, and he'd earned all three.
The part he hadn't earned was the small quiet thing that had happened between his ribs when the lightning had shown him her face out at the wash. That belonged to him. She hadn't asked for it. She might never know he had it.
He put the towel down on the bench beside hers, picked up the hoof pick off the shelf where Thayer kept it, and went out into the barn to find Roman's front left foot.