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“An expensive habit.”
“Yeah,” she said. “The library. Anyway, I’m not a resident here, so…”
“I’ll check some out for you if you like. Give me a list.”
She glanced at him as she passed him on the way out the door. “You’ve got a library card?”
“Sometimes they let cowboys in on free range days.”
“With fair warning to the public, I hope.”
God, she made him laugh. He wanted to push and goad her just to s
ee what she’d say next. She might be a touch prickly, but, hell, talking to Grace, he felt more awake than he’d been in months.
* * *
WHAT THE HECK was she doing hanging out with the cowboy again? When she’d walked out of that saloon yesterday—being very careful not to sway or trip over her own feet—she’d given herself a little talking-to.
Yes, she was bored. Yes, she was a little lost. But flirting with a guy just to pass the time? That was stupid. Especially when he was hot and lived a few feet away from her bed. It wasn’t as if she had a history of restraint. Or wise choices. Or self-control.
Case in point? Less than a day after telling herself to stay away from him, she was climbing up into his big black pickup and settling into the leather seat.
But despite her self-recriminations, Grace felt a thrill of satisfaction as she buckled up. She was going somewhere. Getting out of the house. How many days had it been since she’d even ridden in a vehicle that didn’t have dozens of seats? Even in L.A., she’d been taking the bus or train for weeks.
As Cole started the truck, she rolled down the window, breathed in the cool morning air, and she felt free.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
Where? She had no idea. She should go to the store. She should get to know the town better. She should find the post office and the bank and the library. But she took a deep breath and said, “Just drive.”
“You got it,” he said softly.
Cole turned toward town, which surprised her, but she watched the streets pass with new eyes. It was different when you were driving. Everything so quick and temporary and new as it passed her gaze. The Western shops were cheesy but charming. The wooden sidewalks so different from anything she’d ever seen. They passed the bus station where she’d first set foot in Wyoming, and then she saw them: the antlers.
“Oh, my God. There are thousands of them.” There were. They formed a wide, tall arch at the corner of a square park. When they turned, she saw that there was another arch on the next corner. And another on the other side of the park. And there was a carriage parked there, the horses shaking their manes in the bright sunlight. It really was amazing that she’d missed them.
“Did you want to stop and look?”
“No, keep going.” The tourist shops slid past her, the tourists already out in their shorts and sunglasses. They passed another carriage rolling along, two small children looking slightly stunned and unsure as the carriage rocked around a turn.
Then suddenly the crowded blocks of hotels and shops were gone. There was a green park, and then…nothing.
Nothing but a huge expanse of rolling meadows and a tumbling stream and flocks of birds rising up into the bright blue sky.
“Wow,” she said. She hadn’t expected this at all. Somehow it was all invisible from inside the town, but now she couldn’t imagine there was a town anywhere nearby.
They drove along the bottom of a ridge for a while, Grace staring hard over the fields that stretched out from there, watching for elk or anything else she might see. Then the ridge fell away and in the distance, the mountains rose up.
“Wow,” she breathed again. “It’s amazing.”
Cole caught her eye and grinned. “You know, this is what most people do the first day. Jackson’s nice and all, but nobody comes here for the small-town charm. It’s the mountains. The parks. The wildlife. The sky.”
The sky, yes. Something so simple as air, and yet it was beautiful. Magical. Stretching for miles of impossible blue before falling behind the mountains.
She wished she had a camera. It was almost an ache inside her, the need to try to capture the beauty of the moment. They had mountains in California, and she’d passed plenty on the bus ride here, but this moment was just…stunning. A perfect contrast to how screwed up and dark and complicated her life was. She felt insignificant, and that was a relief. That whatever mistakes she’d made, all the things she’d managed to mess up were all meaningless and small.
She wanted to capture that, somehow, in a picture, but she’d pawned her camera the week before. And the kind of cell phone that let you buy sixty minutes at a time definitely didn’t come with a camera.
