Mystic Cowboy(47)

Two things happened at the same time. Rebel’s gut unclenched, flooding him with relief from a pain he had only dimly been aware of. He’d known he needed to be here, needed to see his people again, but he hadn’t realized just how deep the need had run. The reaction was immediate and physical. He could breathe again, for the first time in six years. He could finally breathe free.

And Anna gasped in horror.

“My God,” she said, patting him on the shoulder like he was a lap dog, not a husband. He turned to look at her, knowing it was futile but refusing to believe it. Her lips were curled back in disgust, like she’d stepped in dog shit. And then her eyes swiveled over to him. The adoration was gone. Instead, she looked scared. Terrified. “I just had no idea. You poor thing.”

You poor thing.

She’d loved Jonathan Runs Fast, but he’d been just an idea, an abstract idea so well rendered that it had been a trompe l’oeil, an illusion mistaken for reality. She’d loved an idea named Jonathan.

She didn’t love a thing—especially a poor thing like him.

And she never would.





“Why are you going so slow?” Madeline demanded, the wind snatching her words out of the air and bending them until she sounded like she was howling. Blue Eye tossed her head in agreement. This was way, way too slow.

Because the slower they went, the longer he could put this off, that’s why. He had no reason to expect the same reaction from a different woman. None. Hell, she already knew everyone.

But that didn’t stop the clawing worry.

Finally, after what seemed like milliseconds but was probably twenty minutes of trying and failing to keep Blue Eye reined in, they hit the last dirt road. He could see cars already parked haphazardly along the road. Grocery day was as good a day as any to have a party, after all. It was what Albert wanted, and he wasn’t going to let a little thing like feeling lousy interrupt a good party.

He didn’t want to dismount, as if staying safely up on his horse would somehow change the fate of the free world. Madeline parked in the grass behind the last car and hauled out a duffel bag half her size. Her back bowed under the weight.

Shit. He had to get off the horse. Only an asshole would let her carry that duffle around by herself. “Here. I’ve got it.”

She came up firing even as she let him take the duffel. “You know what you’ve got? You’ve got my boots. I want them back.”

“Not so sure about that,” he replied, taking a long step to put him out of swinging range. This was more like it. She was pulling, and he was enjoying it. “Those were serious blisters. It wouldn’t be sound medical advice to continue irritating your skin like that.”

She snorted, but kept pace. A slow pace. “You’re a fine one to be dispensing medical advice over there.”

He smiled in spite of the dread fact that they were getting closer to the light of the fire. There was no backing out now—but then, there’d been no backing out, period, not since he’d showed up at her clinic tonight, intent on seeing her again. All of her. He had the sudden urge to take her hand, to hold onto that touch for as long as he could, just in case. Just in case. “Don’t have to be a doctor to know that intentionally blistering your feet is not a good idea.”

They passed another car. “Rebel,” she said, and he heard the note of uncertainty in her voice. “How many people are coming to dinner?”

“I went grocery shopping. Anyone who needed groceries is here.”

She stopped behind the third car in line, Henry’s rusted-out Camaro long past its muscle car prime. “But it looks like half the rez is here.”

He couldn’t help but smile at the amazement in her voice. Amazement. Not horror. And that, in itself, was amazing. “Nah. Probably only forty or fifty people.”

“You bought groceries for forty or fifty people?”

He noticed it was taking that much longer to get to the house than normal. So? “In case you haven’t noticed, the only grocery stores on the rez are the Quik-E Mart and the food pantry. And Nelly could eat a pound of fresh strawberries in one sitting. Besides,” he added, knowing he needed to take a step forward, a step toward those strawberries but still not able to move his feet, “I wanted everyone to have reliable beef for a while.”

She let that slide. And she took a step toward him, a step closer. The dim light of the fire behind her gave all those wild curls a 24-karat glow, and the moon above made her eyes gleam like the brightest turquoise. She was such a jewel, a jewel of the High Plains. “And how exactly did you do that?” Her voice dropped a notch. He could see the wheels turning. She was trying to pull again, but she was going about it a new way. New since Saturday, anyway. “Hook a rack wagon up to Blue Eye?”