JEWEL CANTERED BEAR down an old, dried-up riverbed a few days later, her skin sticky with sweat, her breath a harsh rasp in her throat. As she rode, she kept a wary eye on the herd, the other on the sky. Without warning, storm clouds had rolled in, and it was no longer the guileless blue it had been when she and Heath set out. It matched her dark mood.
Kelsey’s surprise visit the other night had Jewel’s tail up. Fancy Pants had practically planted a flag in Heath’s heart to claim him. Worse, he hadn’t seemed to mind. He’d even told Kelsey she was pretty. Jewel groaned. She’d never received such a compliment from a man—probably never would. Who’d be attracted to a freckled, cowlicked cowgirl like her? She’d never given her appearance much thought before. Now she spent more time at the mirror than her pretty-boy brother Jared. And for no good reason. Heath wouldn’t pay her any notice if not for her ability to help his failing ranch.
Why moon over him?
She glowered at Heath’s broad back as he wheeled Destiny around in an effortless pivot to chase after a runaway.
Making a fool of herself, that’s what.
Heath’s off-limits status should make Jewel glad. She needed to focus on her job and impress James enough to be named range boss. Yet seeing Heath with Kelsey left Jewel hopeless. It was a darned unfamiliar feeling for a gal who’d always believed hard work would earn her what she wanted in life.
And what she wanted was Heath.
She heaved out an aggravated sigh.
No denying it; she was falling for him.
Wind blasted from the west, whirling dust. The tips of trees were getting pushed and pulled in all directions, and in the distance, thunder rumbled. How much closer was the storm? She studied the racing purple-bellied clouds and a jittery feeling settled in her bones.
“Yaw!” Jewel squeezed Bear’s sides, galloping full out as she raced alongside the cantering herd, guiding them as fast as she dared to a sheltered pasture on the mountainside opposite the approaching storm. With rain threatening, thunder growling, they needed to get the cattle to higher ground and out of flash-flood danger. The hard-packed, dry ground wouldn’t absorb a sudden rainfall. It’d create a torrent strong enough to sweep a hundred head to their deaths if she and Heath didn’t hustle them to safety.
“Yip! Yip! Yip!” called Heath, signaling the cattle dogs. They streaked in a black-and-white blur to keep the frightened animals together. His expression was hard, his body rising in the saddle as he craned his neck to check for stragglers. With Daryl back home tending to a sick LeAnne today, it was just them against the elements.
Rain was coming, Jewel could practically smell it now, but the air was still stifling and oppressive. She twisted around and peered behind her. The riverbed was the quickest route to the sheltered spot. If they didn’t make it in time, though, they’d be swept right off the mountain.
Thunder belched through the sky once more. This time, it wasn’t nearly as polite and distant as it had been before. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. A branch snapped. A bird called, a high-pitched sound, like a yelp, and another answered.
“It’s moving fast,” shouted Heath, pulling alongside her. His shirt clung to his muscular frame. Beads of sweat ran down his handsome, angular face.
“Weather report said only a twenty percent chance of rain,” she hollered back. Her eyes swept over the bellowing, tramping herd. Leaves gusted around her like green confetti as the wind began to build, and masses of foliage shuddered and bent as it whipped through a tree line.
“We’ve got to drive them quicker.” He pulled Destiny around and charged to the back of the herd.
Jewel galloped after him. “If we leave the riverbed, we can take a shortcut through that underpass.” She pointed to a jagged arch of rocks in the distance.
Heath leaned low over Destiny’s lathered neck as they pressured the cattle from behind. “Footing isn’t sound there.”
“It’s less likely to get hit with a flash flood. Better to lose one or two than a hundred.”
Lightning cracked and Destiny broke stride, briefly, before Heath gathered her again. “I don’t want to lose any!” he hollered.
“Then we won’t.” She met Heath’s eyes briefly and he nodded.
“Bend them left.”
Satisfaction flooded Jewel at Heath’s faith as she and Bear tore off down the right flank. They began pressuring the cattle to turn. A raindrop fell on her nose, then her cheek. Her heart raced. No! They had to escape the riverbed before the real weather hit. Hustling the cattle up a rocky slope was risky, too, but staying in a flash flood zone was suicide. The Brahmans bellowed, the whites of their eyes showing, as they picked up their hooves and trotted faster still, sensing the imminent danger.
Getting them out of the riverbed, however, meant driving them up and over its steep bank. As they neared the spot, the lead cattle slowed and balked. A sickening feeling in Jewel’s gut pinched harder as each second passed.
“Go! Go! Go!” Heath whistled to the dogs. Dodging the Brahmans’ kicking legs while lunging at their heels, they pressured them to keep moving, avoiding a pileup at the last possible moment.
Relief surged as the livestock followed their leaders, scrambling up the pebbled soil. Their hooves sought purchase to heave themselves up and over the sides. They began crossing beneath the underpass.
The wind picked up and tore Jewel’s Stetson from her head. Her braids whipped around her cheeks. With a solid crack, the swollen skies suddenly split above them. Rain peppered the hard-packed soil and rivulets of water rolled down the riverbed. Within minutes they were wet through.
By now only half the herd had clambered up the bank, the rest splashing in water rapidly rising over their hooves.
“Heeeee-yaaaaa!” She yelled so loudly that it felt as if the humid air was scorching her throat when she drew breath. Waving her red kerchief at a pair of hesitating Brahmans, she spooked them in the right direction.
She squinted at Heath through the now-pelting rain. He rode like the devil himself, flashing back and forth as fast as the lightning, urging the cattle forward and left without making them panic. Like her, he knew one breakaway animal could lead an entire group to their doom.
Bear splashed through the rising water. She couldn’t judge the terrain beneath them, couldn’t predict where a treacherous depression might turn his fetlock or worse. Compartmentalize. Focus on herding the animals from the imminent threat at hand.
Swiping the dripping water in front of her eyes, she zipped alongside the cattle, blocking their way when they tried to outrun the rushing water. It now swelled around their knees. The cattle dogs paddled beside them, fighting the current. Thunder rumbled, low and deep, and a lightning bolt hit a nearby tree and sent a limb crashing down.
As each second passed and the weather pressed in around them, her fear built into a hot, urgent creature. It threatened to explode inside her. By now, most of the cattle had made it up the embankment. The remaining Brahmans reared back at the smoking tree limb. Heath, grim-faced and bold, drove straight at them, and they scrambled over the branch to safety.
“Come on!” Heath made a sweeping gesture with his hand from the top of the riverbank.
Jewel eyed the raging water. Just before she urged Bear onto drier land, she spotted a floundering calf, caught in the current. Fear melted her insides. It bawled before its little head disappeared under the raging water. From the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of color just before Heath dived in after it.
Her lungs quit working. With the water moving that fast, Heath might die right along with the helpless animal. She squeezed Bear’s sides and sent him sprinting up the embankment. They thundered alongside the now-raging river. Without taking her eyes off Heath or the calf, she uncoiled her rope and began twirling it overhead. Meanwhile, Heath kicked his legs and swung his arms like mad, battling to reach the calf without getting pulled under and pinned beneath the current.
Keep a cool head.
Jewel eyed a piece of deadwood jutting out of the water downstream.
“Grab the log!” she screamed, galloping along the river’s edge. If Heath missed it, he’d be lost in the water, drowned.
Fighting back tears, she continued to lasso the rope through the pounding rain.
Please. Please. Please.
Spare them.
Just as the calf’s head disappeared once more, Heath grasped it, pulling the animal above the surface and clutching it to his chest.
“Grab the wood!” she screeched, pointing with her free hand at the downed tree several yards ahead of Heath.
He glanced up and briefly met her eyes. The determination she glimpsed heartened her. He wasn’t giving up, and neither was she. Just as the water tore him toward its deadly center, Heath managed to hook an arm around the end of the limb, the other anchoring the calf to his chest.
“Hold on!” she hollered.
Heath’s feet appeared, dragged off the bottom. The only thing holding him in place was his strong one-handed grip. How long could he withstand the flash flood’s punishing pressure?
Jewel gritted her teeth and eyed the distance between her and Heath. She wasn’t going to wait around to find out. Timing the moment, she released the lasso and the rope dropped in the water, inches from Heath.
He stared at it, then back up at her, the tendons in his neck taut. To grab it, he’d have to let go of the calf. Jewel hauled back the rope. She knew his choice. She’d make it herself.
Another toss and the rope hit his shoulder. Heath lost his grip reaching for it, and she screamed when he went under. A second later, he popped back up with the calf on the other side of the log, barely holding on. The rain was relentless still, heavy and driving.
Beneath her, Bear shifted back and forth when another bolt of lightning lit up the sky. It illuminated Heath’s white face, his blue lips. She had to get him out of there. Now.
Swinging hard, her eyes never leaving Heath’s, she circled the rope once, twice, three times, then tossed it, watching as it slithered through the water-logged air to drop over Heath’s shoulders. Relief swept through her with tidal force as he shifted his body to ease it down over his torso. She stepped Bear backward to tighten the line. On the other end, the relentless pull of the gushing water worked in opposition.
“Hold on!” she yelled.
He nodded and, to her amazement, began to edge his way along the log toward the shore his arms still wrapped around the calf with only the lasso around him to keep him upright. What incredible strength and balance, she marveled, watching him, as she held the line steady. If he stumbled, he might pull her, and Bear, into the water, too, but she believed in him too much to fear the possibility.
At last, he stumbled up the embankment and set down the calf. It wobbled forward a few steps, caught sight of its mother, and scampered her way to join the rest of the herd now milling in the sheltered area beyond the underpass. Jewel flung herself from her saddle, rushed to Heath and threw her arms around him.
“I thought you were going to drown.”
“Not a chance.” Despite his brave words, his teeth chattered. Another lightning bolt smacked against the mountainside. “Let’s take shelter.”
They secured their horses beneath a rocky outcropping then, hand in hand, they struggled across the drenched field toward an old shack sitting inside a copse of trees. The lock was broken, and the shack abandoned, though an old leather harness and empty feed bags remained among the dust and cobwebs.
Clothes clung to limbs, hair to burnished cheeks, and they tumbled, panting, into the shack. The damp walls and earthy darkness made the space feel more like a dungeon than a respite from the storm.
Heath grabbed a burlap cloth and wrapped it around her shoulders, pulling her close. A sneeze ripped from her. His gaze roamed from the top of her soaked head to her squelching boots. “You’re soaked.”
“So are you.”
He shrugged. “I’m waterproof.”
“You shouldn’t have jumped in after that calf.”
“Why? Because you were going to?” When she nodded, he chuckled. “Guess that makes us a pair.”
“Does it?”
The smile faded from his face and warmth spiraled in his eyes. His rough hand cupped her cheek. “Thanks for getting me out of there.”
She held up four fingers on her left hand and three on her right. “Cades ahead by one.”
He caught her hand and brought it to his mouth, pressing a kiss to the center of her palm.
“Heath,” she groaned, turning away, but he tugged her back to his chest, his forearm resting firmly across her rib cage, one large hand wrapped around her waist.
“Jewel,” he murmured in her ear, the husky bass sending shivers dancing down her spine.
His body hugged hers from his chest to his thighs, her hair brushed his face, his masculine scent tickled her nose, and his mouth was poised at the sensitive lobe of her ear, as if ready to demand surrender.
Should she give in to her feelings at last?
Heath was promised to another…
But right now, after saving him from drowning, didn’t a bit of his life, even if it was just this moment, belong to her?
They stood frozen for several long seconds, locked in the strange embrace, eyes closed, mouths slightly open, trying to breathe without movement, without sound, and growing light-headed in the attempt. Jewel’s hands had risen to Heath’s arm when he pulled her to him, and she stood motionless against him, her hands gripping the hard limb holding her. She didn’t dare say his name, didn’t dare utter a sound. Surely it would break the spell. Then she felt his lips move ever so softly against the lobe of her ear, skim the uppermost edge of her jaw, then travel back again.
Jewel resisted the sweet shudder sliding down her spine, but Heath must have felt the tremor as his lips left her skin. He didn’t pull away or loosen his hold, though. Was she about to have her first kiss? It felt as unstoppable as the weather, a seismic shift cracking open her heart. She wanted Heath to be her first…
Her only?
Opening her eyes, Jewel slowly angled her head back, feeling his breath mark a path across her cheek as she raised her face and lifted her chin. Then it was her breath tickling his cheek and warming his lips. Again, they paused, muscles tensed, straining to feel everything, to miss nothing, and still not cross the line. Heath’s eyes remained closed and hers followed suit as they approached that line, stood at its edge and then tumbled over it, into each other.
She turned, and his arms went around her, holding her tight. She liked the feel of his embrace, sheltering her, when she’d never craved a man’s protection before. It was oddly empowering. Exhilarating. Their bodies melded as he buried his head in her neck, dragging in a deep breath. Her pulse pounded, and her hands trembled. A deep shudder rose through him and he shook in her arms, and then he moved.
Clasping her cheeks in his large hands, he said something too low and too quick for her to make out as he tilted her head back and kissed her. There was nothing soft about it, like in fairy tales or her girlhood imaginings. This was a man’s kiss, firm, real, ardent, full of the same yearning clamoring inside her. He tasted of something sweet; the cold tang of rainwater was still on his tongue. Little shivers raced through her body as she lost herself in the kiss. Her hands slid up to his shoulders and her fingers dug into the fabric covering his firm skin. The kiss was doing crazy stuff to her senses, warming her through while making her shake.
She’d never felt this before. How could such sweet wildness come from a single kiss? The release and freedom of finally letting go, of complete and utter acceptance, of having what you wanted, what you yearned for without worrying about being weak. Open. Vulnerable. The immediate and absolute rush of longing was so potent it clouded her thoughts, elation springing from tasting Heath on the tip of her tongue. Nothing compared to this. Why had she guarded herself from her feelings for so long? What she’d missed…
Heath broke the kiss, breathing heavily as he cradled her face. “Jewel. We need to think about this—”
She could barely catch her breath. “We will.” She dragged her hands up his neck, smoothing her thumbs along his jaw. “But not now. I deserve now. We both do.”
Heath didn’t move, and she wasn’t even sure he breathed. A lock of wet black hair clung to his face and when he finally lifted his chin, the vulnerability in his gaze seized her heart. His handsomeness was almost too perfect, but in that moment, he looked utterly human and the slightest bit lost.
I’m here, she wanted to scream. Stop searching.
Her heart pounded fast, but her blood felt sluggish. Was he going to stop worrying about others and live in the moment with her…just this once?
* * *
HEATH’S RESISTANCE MELTED as he stared into Jewel’s expressive eyes. Mouths touched. Pressed, sought, then slid away. And his lids lowered. The intense moment defied reality, and he wanted to live in that dark limbo without his bearings.
Jewel snuggled closer as Heath shifted and the kiss began again, the angle different, more direct, less testing. Bold. Fervent. Natural. The words slipped through Heath’s mind, and he nodded slightly. Yes. That was it. Natural.
Right.
With his mouth pressed against Jewel’s, Heath explored the space between them with a slight touch of his tongue. Her ardent response was instantaneous.
And that heady combination of vulnerability and unvarnished passion pulled him under with the unstoppable force of the flash flood. It was like nothing he’d ever experienced before, and she cradled his face, letting him lose himself in the flavor, the texture, the heat of her mouth on his.
Then he opened his eyes. What am I doing?
Their eyes met, and Heath ached to lower his lids again, even as he lifted his mouth and dropped his hands from her body.
“Jewel,” he whispered.
“Don’t stop,” she pleaded, and her eyes begged.
“We have to,” he said more firmly.
He forced himself away, and his hands fell to his sides, guilt swamping him as he thought of Kelsey.
When her lashed lifted, the confusion in her eyes flayed him. She reached out, but he shook his head and stepped backward. “I’m sorry.”
Jewel’s face was pale, and Heath could see her pulse hammering in her throat. His own pulse pounded in his head, and a bead of sweat trickled down his spine under the shirt he wore beneath his plaid coat.
“You’re a beautiful woman. Headstrong, passionate, stubborn and challenging.”
Jewel’s eyes snapped to Heath’s, and he saw a flash of joy in their dark brown depths before it flickered out with the realization that there was more. He wasn’t finished.
“But I’m with Kelsey. Engaged to marry her…”
Jewel didn’t respond. Not at all. Not a glance. Not a word.
“Jewel?” The question was soft. But he knew. He could feel the connection between them, dark, slippery. Dangerous.
She turned and lifted her eyes to his. Eyes filled with the same longing drumming inside him. His breath caught in his throat as he stepped away. He had to move away from her.
What had he done?
She wasn’t just flirting, testing an attraction. She cared about him. And he was unable to give himself to her. The truth he’d been avoiding rose in his chest like an oil spill. It coated everything, stopping his heart.
“I can’t,” he whispered.
“You can.” She closed the distance to meet him. Her eyes shone, and her lips trembled.
For a moment, he let the possibility pull at him again. Could he? He shut his eyes and tried to imagine walking away from Kelsey. Daryl’s words echoed in his head. Choose wisely. There are no takebacks for Lovelands.
He had a responsibility to safeguard Kelsey, and Jewel, until he settled his heart.
“I can’t, Jewel,” he said more firmly. “I won’t.” He would be strong and not lose the battle in this moment. Not even for Jewel.
“You already have.” Her voice was mild, but the pain was sharp, making her mouth twist. The agony on her face echoed in his chest. She was reflected in him and he in her. When she was in front of him, she was the only thing he could see. But he needed to view the bigger picture, his life, his future. Hard to do when she filled his vision.
He closed his eyes briefly and took a deep breath. When he opened them again, only resolve remained.
“It was wrong, Jewel. On so many levels. We both know it. Neither of us can afford to let it happen again. It won’t happen again.” He kept his hands clenched at his sides, holding firm. “We’re only as good as the promises we keep. And I’ve made a promise. You don’t want a man who doesn’t keep his promises.”
“I don’t want a man who doesn’t know his heart—or follow it, either.”
A muscle in his jaw jumped, and his lips firmed. “Even if I weren’t engaged to Kelsey, our loyalties lie with our families. Would you choose me over your brothers? Your ranch?”
After a long moment, her head dropped, and the din of the rain slowed to a patter, then ceased. “I guess we’ll never know.”
Without a word, he held out his hand.
“Please just go, Heath. Just go,” she whispered.
“I don’t want to leave you like this.”
“I need you to leave me now.” Her voice grew stronger.
“I won’t do that,” he insisted, willing her to yield.
“You already have,” she said again. And when her eyes rose to his, the tender, vulnerable woman was gone, replaced by the tough cowgirl. “Go, Heath.”
It was his turn to give way. “I’ll be outside, checking the herd. Join me when you’re ready.” With a heavy heart, he turned and opened the door. Outside, the storm had abated, welcoming a rainbow of soft pastels reflected in silvery puddles.
“Heath.”
Her voice stopped him before he shut the door.
She held up four fingers on both hands, silently telling him he’d won another point…but kissing her wasn’t a game, and whatever the score, he knew, deep down, he’d just lost.