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Spike stuck his head over the half door of his stall and blew air between his lips. Gina set her hand on his neck and stroked absently. “There’s a spring that runs through the ranch. The Ute always called it the river of the Nahua.”
Matt’s neck prickled, but he managed, he hoped, not to show how her words excited him. Where there was smoke, or Aztec words, there was most likely fire—or a really informative local legend.
“What’s a Nahua?” he asked.
“Catchall for the ancient peoples south of the border.”
“Like the Mayans and stuff?” Matt tried to sound clueless—he wanted to hear the story she knew, not influence her tale with what he did—and he must have succeeded, because her brow scrunched and she looked him up and down.
“You don’t teach history, do you?”
“I … uh…” Matt didn’t want to lie any more than he already had. Thankfully, Gina saved him the trouble.
“Let me guess. Phys ed?”
He shrugged, which she took as a yes.
“Technically, Nahua refers to any group that speaks Nahuatl,” Gina continued, “or the language of the Aztecs.”
Matt got that chill again. Sure, Gina was telling him things he already knew, but that she knew them, too, was kind of … hot.
“There were Aztecs here?” he asked.
“Doubtful. Like I said, Nahua is a catchall, and Nahuatl translates to clear or understandable. Isaac—Jase’s granddad—says any outsider who could be understood by the Ute was called Nahua.”
Matt could barely keep still at that tidbit. How would the Ute know the meaning of the word Nahua unless they’d encountered one? Certainly the Ute language, sometimes called Paiute, belonged to the Uto-Aztecan group of languages and was similar to Nahuatl, but—
“Isaac thinks the spring got its name because a Ute warrior came across an intruder there and they were able to communicate. Of course, considering the Ute, that intruder was probably skewered and left to bleed out in the water.” Gina’s lips quirked. “The Ute were never very good at sharing.”
Matt stepped closer, running his hand over Spike’s neck on the other side. The horse practically purred.
“Interesting,” Matt said, and his fingers brushed hers. The jolt made him stare at their still-touching fingertips, expecting a spark of static electricity to flare between them and freak out the horse.
Instead, Matt and Gina’s eyes met. In hers he could see the reflection of what must be in his. Surprise, nerves, wonder.
A strand of hair had sprung free of the braid and trailed down the side of her face, stirring just a bit in the breeze. He caught the scent of trees above the scent of the hay, and he couldn’t determine if the aroma rose from her skin, her clothes, or actual trees.
Her lips, those eyes, that hair, and the sharp green scent of her seduced. They were alone in the barn. No one here but them and the horses, and they’d never tell.
Matt began to lean forward; so did she. Somehow their fingers had tangled together up to the joints, and he was running his thumb along the back of her hand, enticed by the smoothness of her skin against his own world-roughened flesh.
Would she taste like water in a snowstorm or perhaps fire beneath the sun? Things he didn’t necessarily need but would always, always want.
Suddenly Spike threw up his head and the two of them jerked back as his mane flapped in their faces. How could Matt have forgotten that they were separated by a great, big, snarky horse?
When Gina was around, Matt forgot a lot of things. For instance … what had she been saying?
Oh yes. The springs. The story. The Nahua.
He searched for a way to get back on track with his questioning yet not be obvious that he was questioning. “Are there … uh … any local legends? Tales of magic? Of gods? Creepy wails and howls and things that go bump in the night? Cursed land? Mysterious caverns?”
Matt thought they were harmless questions. Ones that anyone, even a phys-ed teacher, might reasonably ask in relation to legends. Every area had a few, and many of them involved the supernatural. Of course Matt was a little rusty on harmless questions, having never asked one in his life.
Something flickered in Gina’s eyes, making the attraction he was certain he’d seen there die. She stepped back. Even Spike sensed something was wrong, because he snorted, kicked the side of the stall, and stretched his neck toward her, lips nibbling.
“I have to go,” she said, and then she practically ran from the barn.
“Hmm,” Matt murmured, watching her go. “Methinks she has heard a wail or a howl or a bump-in-the-night kind of legend. What think you, Spike?”
