Page 42 of Too Hot To Handle

And the land. She had discovered that she loved the land, too, a love that had been eclipsed by her unexpected passion for a man. She loved being able to walk out into the night and to hear nothing but the sound of her own footsteps, her own breath, her own heartbeat She loved standing on earth that had known the weight of millions of seasons and very few men. From the instant she had stepped down off the bus and seen distant, indigo mountains rising above a fertile land, something in her had uncurled from a tiny, hard seed and had begun to put down deep roots in the earth. Even now she could sense herself reaching toward the mountains, unfolding, growing, absorbing the beauty and the silence and the fragrant air.

She had been born in the city, but she had been born for the land.

With that certainty something eased inside Tory, dimming some of the pain that had paralyzed her. When she left in the morning, it wouldn’t be to go back to the narrow world she no longer wanted. She would go to find a new world full of mountains and silence and tender grass swaying in the wind. There would be a place for her in that world – cook or waitress, cashier or baby-sitter, it didn’t matter. There would be a way for her to eat and sleep and wake up surrounded by mountains and seasons. Part of her, at least, would finally have come home. As for the rest, it would either heal or she would adjust to living with pain. That, too, she had learned in the past.

But tonight, for a short time, for the last time, she would know again the beauty of being a leaf turning on a silver wind.

„This just isn’t your night, boss,“ offered Dutch, raking in a modest mound of chips. „Never knew you to try to fill an inside straight like that.“

Reever grimaced. He hadn’t meant to do anything so stupid, but since he had heard the lodge’s screen door squeak open and shut, he hadn’t been able to keep even part of his mind on the cards. He kept wondering what Tory was doing out in the night, if she were crying or simply walking, if the light had come back into her eyes or if she still looked far too old to be so young.

Twenty-one. How young is that?he asked himself harshly.A hell of a lot older than it ought to be. Being seduced and dumped does that to a girl. What did she ever do to you but be the kind of lover you ‘ve always wanted and never had? Forthis crime you refuse to touch her? For this crime you ‘re tearing her apart?

And me,he thought bleakly. /never knew how much it could hurt just to be alive. But then I never knew how much I could want a woman. City girl. Soft and sweet and just passing through the countryside. Too young to know what she really wants. Too young to know what love really is.

But I know. It’s like the land–enduring. It’s a fire in the soul as well as the body. I know that, but she’s too young to know it, no matter what soft words she says when she comes apart in my arms.

I wish to Christ I’d never touched you, city girl. Letting go of you is tearing me apart.

With a soft, vicious curse that made the cowhands look at each other uneasily, Reever picked up the cards he had been dealt. Faces stared back at him, faces laughing, crying, transformed by passion, pale with the kind of pain that he had never wanted her to feel. Tory’s face repeated endlessly, her voice calling his name in all the shades of longing and love as she gave herself to him without reservation.

Too damned young!

Reever realized that the men were utterly silent, watching him. He saw the cards crushed within his fist. As he slowly opened his fingers, mutilated cards fell to the tabletop. Without a word he got up and walked out into the night.

Tory wasn’t in the stable. She wasn’t feeding carrots to Twinkletoes or leaning over the stall door talking to Blackjack. She wasn’t standing in the small meadow behind the lodge. She wasn’t anywhere in sight.

Without breaking stride, Reever took one of the three paths down to the lake. He carried no flashlight because he needed none. In the full moonlight it was bright enough to read print. The path went through a stand of pines and from there down the gentle slope to the lake. At one point, just before the descent to the shore, another trail snaked off toward the low granite cliffs. Reever didn’t even look that way. He expected to find Tory along the moon-washed beach, watching tiny wavelets come apart.

There was no one along the shore. Reever felt a disappointment that was just short of pain. He searched the rocky beach again, unable to believe that Tory wasn’t there. He had been so sure he would find her. He walked the shore with long strides, wondering if she might be hidden in the shadow of the cliffs.

As he reached the middle of the beach, a pale flash of movement caught Reever’s eye. He looked up to his right, where a low granite cliff glowed like pewter in the moonlight. When he realized what he was seeing, he froze in disbelief.

Tory had been sitting so quietly that he had overlooked her. Then she had stood and thrown off her nightshirt. As naked as the moonlight itself, she walked with measured steps away from the edge of the cliff, turned as gracefully as a dancer and walked back toward the brink. With each step she moved faster, gathering herself, her intention clear in the elegant, poised tension of her body.

No! Stop!

The desperate cry went no farther than Reever’s mind. It was too late. Tory had reached the brink and sprung up and outward. Arms spread wide, body perfectly arched, she floated on the air as though she were truly the swan from which her dive had taken its name. At the last possible instant her arms came together over her head, her body straightened and arrowed downward. She entered the midnight lake in a dive so perfectly executed that the water was barely disturbed.

The breath came out of Reever in a harsh rush when he saw Tory surface and swim cleanly toward the beach. Distantly he realized that he was trembling. When she rose naked from the lake and walked up the long tongue of granite leading to the shore, she didn’t see him, for her eyes were turned back toward the cliff. Without hesitating, she climbed the trail to the top again.

Reever could have called out, could have stopped Tory, but he was frozen in the moment when she had dived into the lake with a grace and beauty that had literally taken his breath. He had not known that such a dive was possible.

Again Tory walked to the edge of the cliff, turned, paced a few steps away, then turned again, long legs eating up the distance to the brink. Her legs flexed and she arched up and out again. Her body bent at the hips, and she fell, turning and gleaming in the moonlight, describing a whole, incredibly slow circle that ended just in time for her to arrow cleanly into the water once more. Instants later she surfaced and swam for the ghostly tongue of granite.

Reever watched Tory leave the lake and climb the cliff trail again. She was like a condensation of moonlight, silent, shimmering with liquid silver, her feminine curves and hollows caressed by velvet touches of night. If he hadn’t seen the dark, wet marks of her passage over the granite tongue, he would have thought he was dreaming.

Again the steps, the turn, the gathering speed, the leap into darkness. This time her arms came against her body at shoulder and hip, and she spun quickly, a gleaming whirlwind that became a woman only at the last possible instant, parting black waters with clean silence. Soon she was on the cliff again, leaping, soaring, spinning, falling, and then again and yet again, each dive more complex, more difficult, more beautiful than the one before.

Reever watched without moving, transfixed by Tory’s skill. He had never known that the human body could be so elegant – and so ruthlessly disciplined in the search for perfection. He had never even imagined that such perfection was possible. Yet even as he silently celebrated Tory’s extraordinary grace, he felt part of himself sliding down into a grim blackness that knew no end.

He had been wrong. No matter what her years were or were not, Victoria Wells was not a young girl. Not in any way that counted. She knew what was real and what was not, what was enduring and what was transient. That knowledge was shouted from every elegant movement, every difficult dive. He was watching the culmination of years of enormous discipline and effort. Few adults were capable of that kind of sustained sacrifice for a distant goal. Tory had been, even as a child. The truth of it was written in every beautiful line of her body turning and falling so perfectly through the night.

Another truth was written, too. As Reever stood and watched helplessly, he realized that he had come out tonight to find Tory, to hold her, to make love to her until pain was no longer possible.

Instead, he had lost her, and pain was all that was possible.

You never had her, cowboy,Reever told himself bleakly.Look at her. You ‘ve never seen her equal. No one has. You might have made her sweet body sing, but you never could have competed with a lifetime of work and dreams. You finally found your woman–and it’s too damned late. She has another life, other dreams. She’s earned every one of them, too. All you can do is say goodbye.