Mystic Cowboy: Men of the White Sandy, Book 1 (12 page)

He looked over his shoulder at her, even though his eyes were still closed. The surprised blankness was gone again, and she caught the edge of his lazy smile again. “Do that. I’ll be right back.”

And then he walked out of the water.

Despite the heat that surged through her, she shivered. Not some sort of deranged hallucination. That was, hands down, the finest ass she’d ever seen. Rebel’s back came to a narrow V before his rounded cheeks dovetailed into legs that rippled—though she couldn’t tell if it was the water sheeting off them or the muscles twitching, but everything about that man said not only was he good with his hands, he was good with his legs.

Suddenly, she found herself wondering what he looked like on that horse with the bi-colored eyes. He might not be some Indian from an imagined past, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t imagine what he’d look like now. Legs twitching, hair flying, heart pounding as the horse raced through virgin grass.

Why, oh, why hadn’t she ever snuck a look at him riding away from the clinic?

Too soon, he was wrapped up in the towel again. “I’ll be right back,” he said, bounding up the hill with all the grace of a deer. Clearly, that was something he did a lot. All those muscles were earned the hard way.

Treading water, she waited as she tried to screw her head back on straight. It wasn’t that she’d freaked out when it had suddenly became a very real option that he was about to begin exploring her topography. No, it had nothing to do with the unexpected shock of something that sunk to her very center. Nothing to do with the certain realization that there would be nothing pitiful about sex with Rebel.

If he even had a bed.

No, she reasoned, her reaction had merely been the safest thing. If he’d actually gotten...anywhere, well, he’d have broken the natural-fluid seal her body had erected for the express purpose of keeping dirty river water on the outside, where it belonged. Yes, that was it. She was just concerned about microbes and stuff.

Sure.

The sun was getting lower in the sky. She was going to have to get home somehow. And she didn’t think she could walk back to her Jeep in those boots again. Just the thought of putting those instruments of torture back on her feet made her almost forget about everything.

Right until Rebel popped out of the tent. Then she forgot about her feet altogether. “You still down there?”

“I don’t know where else you’d think I’d go,” she shouted back. “You live in the middle of nowhere.”

“You should see the middle of nowhere I live in during the spring.” He was dressed now, sort of. A pair of cut-off jeans, the fringe billowing out behind him with each stride. “Makes this place look populated. Here’s your towel. Tell me when I can look, okay?” He draped it over the bush and turned to the fire and the pot that held dinner.

Making sure mud squished under her feet before she committed, Madeline left the water behind. She felt almost like a whole new woman. Almost. God only knew what her hair was going to look like after that.

“You don’t live here year round?”

“Nope. The river floods in the spring, so I go up into the hills.” He stirred the stew and began ladling it into bowls, his undivided attention on the meal—and not on her. He kept his promises. “In the fall, I go south a little farther. The river drops, and the water gets real shallow here.”

She wasn’t in the water anymore. She could drop this towel and parade around to his front, where he’d have to look at her, right?

And then what? He’d leap over the fire to have his way with her?

No. Knowing him, he’d probably just close his eyes.

He sat on his heels, messing around with the fire. His back—she could really stare at it, now that his backside was covered again—was a symphony of muscles moving together. Had she ever just admired? Had she ever looked at a man and not seen the sum total of parts that did and did not need to be fixed? Maybe this is what artists did—admired the form—because his form was
amazing
.

“Uh,” she said, trying to slip her panties back on without getting too much sand in them, “what about the winter? Don’t you get cold?” Yeah, that’s it. Just a couple of half-dressed friends discussing the weather. Nothing abnormal about any of this.

“Well, no.” He chuckled, and all those muscles chuckled with him. Hell, she felt like laughing a little, now that she thought about it. “Not when it gets real cold. I find a place to crash—always a floor for me at Albert’s—or I head into the city. I do most of my gallery stuff in the dead of winter. Spent almost a month in New York last February.”

The photograph popped up again. She still had trouble seeing that urbane, sophisticated man as the same one in cut-offs, ladling stew into bowls. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t pull it off.

She got her tank back on and her jeans safely zipped. There. She felt mostly better now. “You can look.”

His head jumped up, but then he slowly looked over his shoulder. “You look...good.”

Now, how was she supposed to take that? Good that she no longer looked like she was going to faint? That her hair was throwing all caution to the wind? That she only had on one shirt?

He turned back to the stew. “Water’s behind you.”

Yes, that’s right. She was thirsty. And, now that she thought about it, hungry. And whatever was in it, the stew smelled better than anything she’d dumped out of a can in the last month.

Cup full of water, she sat down on one of the two blankets and hugged her knees to her chest. The sun was hitting the hills in the distance at a sharp angle, bathing the trees in gold while the grass was in shadows. Somehow, she knew the sunsets here were even better than the ones she saw from her little cabin.

Rebel handed her a bowl and just sort of folded cross-legged onto the blanket. Her blanket. He wasn’t touching her, but he was more than close enough to do it if he wanted to.

She was not going to think about that right now. Right now, she wanted dinner. She pulled her knees up and tried to balance her dinner bowl on them, all the while wondering if he’d hunted the meat himself.

“So, what about you?” he said between spoonfuls of the most mouth-watering stuff she’d ever eaten.

Maybe this was deer meat? She wasn’t sure she’d ever tasted it before. “What about me?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you just dropped a couple of grand on something I would have happily given you. You single-handedly supplied the whole clinic. You don’t seem to mind not getting a big doctor paycheck.” He fixed her with the kind of look that didn’t so much expect an answer as demand it. “Tell me about it.”

“Oh. That.” Suddenly, she didn’t know how to approach this situation. Not that she’d ever thought him dumb, but in less than twelve hours, he’d gone from being the enemy to something closer to an equal. Much closer. “My father was the first person to successfully implant an artificial heart in Ohio.”

Rebel stared at her with that pleased smile on his face. “A good doctor?”

“He was one of the best.”

“I should have known that.” The tone of his voice said he heard the
was
loud and clear. “And your mother?”

“Partner in her law firm. She was the top divorce lawyer in Columbus before she died. But she handled cases pro bono for a women’s shelter too. A lot of times, we’d serve Thanksgiving dinner there.”

“How old were you?”

“What, when she died?”

He nodded. The dusk was settling over them. In the light from the fire, his face took on an otherworldly look. He really did look like a medicine man. She swallowed. If she didn’t think about Mom, it didn’t hurt. Not much, anyway. She braced for the rush of emotion. “Nineteen. I was a sophomore.”

Mom had hidden her breast cancer diagnosis from Madeline until after she’d finished her finals so it wouldn’t impact her grades. Mom had died a month later. For a long time, the if-onlys had ruled Madeline. If only Dad had been an oncologist instead of a cardiologist. If only Mom’s regular doctor had ordered the mammogram sooner. If only Madeline had been older, farther along in her studies.

If only Mom had lived.

But instead of the wave of emotions she always tried to block out with more work, something strange happened. The predictable sorrow mixed with the guilt didn’t come. Instead, she just felt a sense of peace. It was unsettling.

Silently, Rebel set his bowl aside and stoked the fire until the glow surrounded them. Staring into the flame was like being hypnotized. That sorrow-and-guilt slush was there, but she could see it was old, tired. It needed to rest. It was ready for her to let go of it.

“Did you get to say goodbye?”

“Yes—to her.” Mom had come home one last time. Mellie had been scared, terrified by nightmares, but Madeline had been the strong one. Mom had needed her to be there and hold her hand. And Madeline had needed to be there. But the moment her chest had stopped rising, stopped falling, the if-onlys had started.

The flame danced and flickered, turning wood to ashes, and ashes to dust.
Goodbye, Mom
, she thought.
I love you.

And, just like that, the if-onlys were gone.

She looked up, feeling like she did when she delivered a baby. The heady rush of freedom had her smiling. Hell, she almost felt like laughing.

Rebel wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at the fire. “But not your father?”

Dad—well, Dad hurt, but in a different way. “He died of a heart attack in his sleep last year.” The leading cardiologist in Columbus dead at sixty-seven from a massive coronary event. And if Mellie had been upset when Mom died, she’d been inconsolable about Dad. Mellie had started on the if-onlys. If only Madeline had gone into cardiology like she was supposed to. If only Madeline had read the signs a little better. If only they both hadn’t gone out to dinner without Dad that night. It hadn’t been more than three hours after the funeral before Mellie had burst back into Madeline’s guilty silence, sobbing so hard that Madeline had barely been able to understand her apology. Which had almost made it better, but not quite. “It was just one of those things.” That’s what she told herself, anyway. That was what she had to tell herself.

He nodded. So he hadn’t guessed everything. She was willing to bet he didn’t have to guess about much more now. “That’s not how your—younger sister, right? That’s not how she saw it.”

Her jaw dropped, but she tried to snap it shut. Unsuccessfully. It was like he was reading her mind, and if that was the case, she was screwed. Big time. “You’re doing it again.”

The firelight caught the faint smile. Could he get any better looking? “I didn’t change the subject.”

She tried to glare at him, but something in her wouldn’t let her. She couldn’t find a part of her that was irritated, not even a little. Just wonderment. “If you tell me you had a vision that I had a younger sister, I’ll throw a boot at you.”

Oh, there was that blush again. Or maybe it was just the sunset that made his face glow like that. “You are, I beg your pardon, a bossy know-it-all who has to be right all the time. Pretty standard for an oldest child.”

The sudden—well, not quite an insult, because it was probably all true—took her back. “Excuse me?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say your sister is some free spirit who always got away with everything. Like Jesse.”

This was becoming a disturbing trend. Was there anything he hadn’t guessed right on today? “Well, maybe not just like Jesse.” Sure, Mellie had the unique capacity to drive her bonkers, but Madeline didn’t take on personal responsibilities for her, not like Rebel seemed to do for Jesse. Still, there might be enough similarities to rub him wrong. “Free spirit doesn’t begin to describe her.”

And she didn’t get away with everything, just more than Madeline did. “She’s artistic, but unfocused. One year she’s in England, studying the masters. The next, she’s learning how to weld so she can understand outsider art better. Some of her stuff is okay...” And God only knew what Mellie would do in front of someone like Rebel—a verifiable hunk who was a verifiable artist? Madeline put her money on swooning.

“So what does she do with her art if she’s not any good?”

“Actually, she spends a lot of time doing after-school stuff with city kids. She’s a big believer in the healing power of art and all that.” It occurred to Madeline that Mellie would love Nelly. She could just see the two of them drawing huge murals on the side of the clinic, or making sculptures out of found objects, or whatever it was Mellie did that made kids love her. Heck, their names even went together. Mellie and Nelly would really tear up this town.

“And you spent
how much
on that bag for her?”

He was doing it again. Maybe she should focus all of her efforts on
not
thinking about his body. Maybe she should be thinking about the Stay-Puft marshmallow man. Safer than thinking about verifiable hunks. She tried to shrug off her amazement. “It was your work, you know.” Yeah, that’s right. No big deal, not several grand on ceremonial pipes, not skinny dipping and certainly not the way he was looking at her, like he really was reading her mind. “I figured I would have spent the money on supplies anyway, and you’d probably use most of it to pay someone’s bill. She’s a nice sister. She should get something out of it.”

“Hmmm,” he hummed, and she swore she felt the vibrations from a foot away. Then he turned to look at the fire again. “I’m sorry about Walter.”