She didn't move back. She tilted her chin up slightly, and I put my hand against the side of her face. Then I kissed her like a man who understood exactly what line he was crossing and did it anyway.
She kissed me back, bringing one hand up to rest on my chest. The kiss was slow and deep and better than I had any right to expect from someone I'd spent considerable energy avoiding.
I pulled back just enough to look at her. Her eyes opened. The hazel was more gold than green in this light, and she watched me with a steadiness that said she was waiting to see what I’d do next.
“Rory comes back tomorrow,” I said.
“I know.”
“And after that?—”
“Jace.” Her voice was quiet. “I know.”
I dropped my hand from her face. She didn't step away. We stood in the open barn door in the early evening light and the house behind me empty, and I was aware — with perfect, inconvenient clarity — that the next choice was not one I could make tonight and walk back from in the morning.
CHAPTER 6
BELLA
I'd been awake since three. I'd spent the night turning the kiss over in my head from every angle, the way I'd evaluate a photograph in the dark hours after a shoot. The composition. The light. What it would look like printed. Whether it would hold up.
That kiss held up.
At five thirty, someone knocked on my door. It could only be Jace. I pulled a robe around my shoulders and opened the door to find Jace standing on the landing in a flannel shirt I hadn't seen before. He hadn't slept either. I could see it around his eyes.
"Get your camera," he said. "I want to show you something."
"Now?"
"Yeah. The light won't last." He didn't say anything else, just turned and went back down the stairs and I stood there for a second with my hand on the door frame, doing the math on whether this — the man knocking on my door at five thirty after kissing me in his barn the night before — was a continuation or a reversal.
I pulled on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeve t-shirt then reached for my camera. Whatever it was, I wanted to be part of it.
He was waiting in the barn with two horses already saddled, the bay mare named Rosalee, and Cutter, who hadn’t stopped tracking me since the morning he'd quit spooking at my shadow.
"Have you ridden before?"
"Some." I let him lift me onto Rosalee without arguing the point. The last horse I'd been on belonged to a friend in Bozeman two summers ago, and before that it had been camp. Both counted, though neither was the same thing as a mountain trail. "Where are we going?"
"East. The ridge." He swung up into Cutter's saddle in one fluid motion. "Forty minutes there. You'll be all right. Rosalee will take care of you, and the trail's wider than it looks."
He took it slow. Much slower than he would have if he’d been riding it alone. He checked back over his shoulder at every turn and didn't make a thing of it. Once, where the path narrowed around a granite shelf, he shifted Cutter's track without telling me and I realized after we'd cleared it that he'd just put his horse between me and the drop.
A man who couldn’t stop managing risk was now managing me up his ridge.
I photographed the dust the horses kicked up at the steep parts. The way the early sun lit the underside of a pine bough. The back of his hat, twice, because that was the angle I had.
What kind of man invites you to see a sunrise on a Sunday morning when his daughter is at her mother's lodge and the clock is running toward one o'clock? The kind who doesn't have any other way to say what he needs to say before that clock runs out. I knew that the same way I knew anything about him, by reading what he wasn't doing instead of what he was.
The overlook opened without warning. The trail curved around a stand of pine and there was a drop and a view that went all the way down to the valley floor. Mustang Mountain spread below us small and unaware of being watched.
I stopped Rosalee and shot the view before either of us spoke. Then I shot the boundary marker. It was a weathered post at the edge of the clearing, a notch cut into the wood at a height that suggested the cutter had been on horseback. Jace dismounted and stood next to it with one hand on the top.
"This is what you wanted me to see?"
He nodded. "Kincaid land runs north from here. Or it did. The Hollisters claimed it ran northeast."
"And nobody knows which is right."
