Firelight at Mustang Ridge (6 page)

T
ired of being around people and noise—even the happy kind—Danny slipped away from the party and down to the little pond she had glimpsed from the driveway. Tucked into a low-lying valley that had escaped the wildfire, it had a flat shore on one side that was liberally dotted with hoofprints, while the other side offered a rocky overhang that looked perfect for cannonballs.

Sitting at the edge of the overhang with her heels hooked on a narrow ledge and nothing but water below her, she gazed down at her own reflection, which blurred around the edges, like she was underwater. It was strangely hypnotic, oddly relaxing. Or maybe the relaxation came from the pull of overused muscles, the knowledge of a job well done, and the pleasant emptiness that had cloaked her mind.

“Hey,” a voice said from behind her. “You up for some company?”

Oddly, the answer wasn't an immediate
hell, no,
and not just because she recognized Sam's voice. Twisting around, she found him standing some distance away,
looking as sweaty and rumpled as she felt, but holding a couple of beers and a plate of pizza.

Her stomach growled, even though a minute ago she would've said she wasn't hungry. “Are you going to share?”

He settled in beside her and put the plate between them. Holding out one of the beers, he said, “To demolition.”

She clinked her bottle to his. “To using the right tool for the job. And thank you.”

“For the sledgehammer?”

“That, the privacy, the food.” She shot him a sidelong look. “I got the
Hulk, smash
urges out of the way, so you don't need to worry I'm going to go psycho on you after dinner. I just had some things I needed to get out of my system.” She stretched out her free hand and wiggled her fingers. “All gone.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “You sure?”

“For now, yes. Beyond that, I'll take it day by day.” Not so much when it came to Brandon—the shock had worn off and the sting had already started to fade. It would take longer to work through the dreams, though, and the fears.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I know how that goes.”

“So I heard.” At his sharp look, she said, “Gran told me a few things about you. I hope you don't mind.”

“It's a small town. Gossip happens.” He took a pull on his beer, then added, “I'm flattered my name came up.”

Was he fishing to see if she was interested? She couldn't tell, not with him sitting close enough that she could feel an echo of his body heat on her skin and see that there was silver and blue mixed in with the gray of his eyes.
Leaning away, she said, “I figured I should apologize to her for letting the fire get out of hand. She kind of took it from there. Mostly, I think, because she wanted to tell me what a nice guy you are.”

He rolled his shoulders, but said only, “Well, since you know my story, or at least some of it, it seems only fair for you to even things up by answering a question for me.”

She hesitated, but then surprised herself. “Okay. Ask.”

“What do you have against the
Rambling Rose
?”

“What . . .
That's
what you want to know about me?”

His teeth flashed. “Not necessarily. But it's a start.”

A quiver of awareness went through her, a feminine
aha
that said he was interested, all right, or at least flirting a little. And the thing was, she was tempted to flirt a little right back. He had given her his sledgehammer, after all, and he had those big, wide hands. So she said, “I don't like small spaces, especially dead ends. The tent has zips in the front and back, and I sleep with a knife under my pillow in case I need to cut my way out.”

“Always?”

“Do I always sleep with a knife under my pillow?”

Faint lines deepened at the corners of his eyes. “Have you always been claustrophobic?”

“It's only been the past eighteen months or so.” Aware that she knew more about him than he probably wanted, and turnabout was only fair, she backed up some. “Before that, growing up in Maine, I was the one who was always poking in the smallest, darkest hidey-hole I could find, just to see what was inside.” Which made it that much worse, having lost that, too. “It didn't even matter if I got stuck, because my parents
were always there to pull me out. Or my sister, Charlie. Our parents never scolded us, never told us to be more careful. They just wanted to know what we had found. Bigger, better, faster, higher . . . that's the Traveler family motto. Or one of them, at any rate. We were all about the outdoors, all the time—skiing, climbing, obstacle races . . . If I could win it, I tried it, and usually did pretty well. I won a bunch, crashed some, healed up, and did it all over again. Until one day, my luck ran out.” Her voice went hollow on the last word.

“You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.” But his eyes were steady on hers and he seemed somehow very
solid
beside her.

“There's not much to tell, really.” Not if she wanted to sleep tonight. “My ex-boyfriend and I were out climbing with a few friends—the route wasn't all that gnarly, and it had a great picnic spot at the top. There was this one section of chimney we wanted to try—that's a narrow gap where you put your back on one rock face, your hands and feet on the other, and work your way to the top.” Swallowing to loosen the sudden tightness in her throat, she said, “It was a little sketchy because we had to drop in halfway and climb up from there, and things were real narrow, with jagged rocks at the bottom. But the upper part looked doable, so I volunteered to go first. I was the smallest and lightest . . . and, well, I liked being first. I roped up, set some safety lines, and started the climb.” It had been wider than she had anticipated, slipperier. And she probably wasn't sleeping tonight after all. “I was about halfway to the top when it happened. There was this little ledge I had to get past. The rock looked solid,
felt
solid, but when I put my weight on it,
the whole thing gave. And I went with it.” She fought not to remember the noise, the moment of free fall. The impact. “I wound up lying at the bottom, pinned under the broken ledge. It was nearly eight hours before the rescue team could get me out.”

“Damn.” His voice was rough. “That's a hell of a thing.”

Pain. Cold. Numbness creeping in. The terror of realizing she couldn't move her toes. Brandon and the others peering down at her, calling, “They're coming” and “It's going to be okay,” but then disappearing to huddle together as they waited for the rescue team, leaving her staring up at the sky. Alone. Swallowing hard, she continued. “I broke my arm, and being pinned that long damaged the nerves in my spine. It was six months before I could walk across the room, a year before I was anywhere close to normal. Physically, at least.”

Usually it bothered her when people stared at her like he was doing, but there was something about him that blunted the irritation. The lack of pity in his gray eyes, maybe, or knowing that life had knocked him around some, too. “And here you are,” he said, “throwing books and swinging hammers.”

A corner of her mouth kicked up at the reminder. Looking back at the burned-out farmstead, where the pizza party contrasted starkly with the ruined house, she said, “It's crazy, isn't it? How one split second can change everything? One ember from a wildfire, and a family loses everything. One cracked ledge, and I spend the rest of my life avoiding danger and counting exits.”

“You flip over the right rock and you're rich,” Sam said. “Then a couple of months later you take the scenic road rather than the bypass, and you wind up dead.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Really, truly sorry.”

“Thanks.” His eyes flicked to her. “Right back at you. And for the record, living out in the Wyoming backcountry with a bear fence and a six-shooter is hardly what I call avoiding danger.”

She shrugged. “I don't want to climb anymore, don't want to race, don't want to do anything that involves faster, harder, or higher. My parents don't know what to do with me, or what we're supposed to talk about.”

“I bet your dad wishes he'd been there that day, to pull you out.”

He would see that, wouldn't he? She nodded. “He wants me to come home. I think he's afraid I don't trust them to have my back anymore, but that's not it. Or maybe it is, a little, because now I know it's up to me to have my own back. More, I need to figure out what
I
want to do next. Before, it made sense to stick near home and work in my family's pro shop, right at the bottom of Maverick Mountain. Skis and snowboards in the winter, mountain bikes in the summer, plenty of flexibility to compete at whatever, and it was all good advertising.” She took a sip of her beer, was surprised to find it halfway gone, the alcohol giving her a low-grade buzz. “He wants me to take over the office work, build up the Internet sales, do some advertising. I've got a business degree, after all. But I don't know.”

“It's not enough anymore?”

“The shop is huge. It's got tall ceilings, lofts, windows and doors everywhere. But when I'm in there, I
can't breathe.” She glanced sidelong at him. “And that's something I haven't told anyone else. Which I think makes us even.”

His face was close, his eyes hard to read. But then the corners of his mouth tipped up in a sexy half smile and he angled the neck of his beer bottle toward her. “Then I'd like to propose a toast.”

“Which is?” she asked, expecting something about life as a roller coaster, or how she should appreciate her family.

“To the strange and awesome powers of Mustang Ridge.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

He nodded toward the party, where Wyatt and Krista sat at the edge of the crowd with a handful of the dude ranch's guests, all grubby and soot-streaked, but laughing like they were the best of friends, rather than just passing through for a week. “Wyatt has told me, over and over again, how people come off that bus enemies and leave friends, and how kids arrive not talking to anybody and wind up singing along at the bonfire. He'd be the first one to admit that he's a thousand times happier now than he was the first time he set foot on the ranch, and he's not the only one. So it seems to me that if you're ready to make some changes in your life, you came to the right place.”

Grateful—that he understood, that he wasn't going to push—she tapped her bottle to his. “To Mustang Ridge.”

*   *   *

Over the next couple of days, Danny attacked the personality quizzes with a vengeance, working her way
through
What Kind of Donut Are You?
—a jelly-filled cruller covered in a hard chocolate shell, again with the barrier layer and the mushy insides—
What Is Your Myers-Briggs Animal?
—a cat, self-confident and a good listener, but overly private, needing her personal space, and not good with long-term commitment—and
What Is Your Superpower?
—time travel, which said she was a perfectionist, a planner, and a romantic.

She didn't know about that last one, but, hey, the goofier-the-better theory sort of implied the answers weren't all going to be spot-on. Besides, Farah hadn't promised lightning-bolt insights—she had thought Danny needed a new way of looking at things, something fun to push her outside her mental comfort zone. She also liked to say that when one rehab exercise got easy, it was time to switch it up to something else that wasn't nearly so comfortable, thus avoiding a plateau. Which was how Danny found herself setting aside
What Harry Potter Character Are You?
and
What's Your Favorite Medical Procedure?
and pulling out the tarot deck Farah had given her, instead.
Just go with the flow and relax,
Farah had instructed.
Shuffle until it feels right, then turn over the first card that calls to you
.

“Okay, okay. I'm shuffling.” How would she know when it was right, though? It wasn't like there was an indicator light or a convenient
ding-ding-ding
sound to tell her when she was done.

A rustle brought her attention up just as two familiar bushy-tailed forms dropped from a tree onto the roof of the RV, and from there scampered down to the edge of the awning. Seeing that he had her attention, the
bigger of the two flicked his tail and stomped his feet in the unintelligible—at least to her—squirrel dance that she had decided to consider a greeting.

“Howdy, Chuck. Hey, Popov.” She had figured since they kept coming back, she might as well name them. “What do you think? Are my cards ready yet?”

Even as she asked the question, she fumbled the shuffle and a card fell out, tumbling to the table and skidding to a stop beside her laptop. Popov—smaller and reddish, and quicker to investigate than his companion—moved partway down the awning strut, attention fixed on the fallen card.

“Sorry,” she said, snagging it. “And how many times do I have to tell you guys that I'm not going to feed you?” Though admittedly she couldn't police every crumb, which was probably why they stuck around. “Anyway. Let's see what the cards have in store for me today.”

She flipped the card over, half expecting the Tower, which she was pretty sure symbolized change. Instead, she got a man and a woman in a full-body embrace and a title at the bottom:
The Lover
s.

“Whoa. That's . . . Hm.” She wasn't sure how to feel about that one, especially when she'd caught herself thinking about Sam a few too many times since that night at the Sears place. Not that there was any reason
not
to think about him—he was as appealing in her mind's eye as he was in real life, with the bonus that she could stare without him knowing. She didn't want to lean, though, didn't want to get into anything serious when she needed to be working on herself. And she took her lovers seriously.