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She hadn’t responded to his phone calls or to his note. So what? There were a dozen reasons that could explain why she hadn’t. How come he hadn’t confronted her? Demanded that she look him in the eye and give him those reasons?
And that letter from the general.
My daughter joins me in offering you our deepest gratitude…
Alessandra had offered him much more than that. Her sense of humor. Her intellect. Her courage. Her body. And, unless he was completely crazy, her love.
How come he hadn’t confronted her about that, too?
Superman, she’d called him, but his behavior since the accident qualified him more as Mighty Mouse.
Tanner tapped his heels harder against the horse’s sides. He leaned over its neck, clucked to it, urged it into a trot, then a canter, then a gallop.
Maybe planes weren’t omens, but they sure as hell were reminders.
A plane had brought him here. Now another would take him to New York. To the woman he loved.
The woman who loved him.
He was sure of it.
* * *
It had taken a little luck and a lot of backtracking to find Tanner’s ranch.
The GPS wasn’t the problem. Neither was the paper map. It was the terrain that was the problem, dirt roads heading off in a dozen different directions, roads without names or with names that had nothing to do with the annoying voice of the GPS.
Alessandra had listened to it say Recalculating enough times to make her start to talk back to it, and not politely.
Finally, when she figured she had to be getting close, she stopped at a gas station, marched inside and asked the guy behind the counter if he knew where she could find the Flying Eagle ranch. He scratched his grizzled jaw, hitched up his sagging pants…
She felt as if she’d wandered onto a movie set.
“You’re almost there,” he said, and he stepped outside with her, pointed a gnarled finger north, then west, then north again, told her to look for a low butte, a thicket of quaking aspens, a small pond and right after that, a right-hand turnoff into the woods.
“Go three, four miles, you’re there.”
Alessandra prided herself on speaking fluent, almost completely accent-free American English, but quaking aspens and buttes were not in her vocabulary. This was, she decided, not the time to feel foolish about asking for explanations.
The old man sighed. A butte was a flat-topped hill. Quaking aspens were tall, straight, white-barked trees whose leaves seemed to dance in the slightest breeze.
Alessandra thanked him, let him pump some gas into the SUV, and got back behind the wheel.
Half an hour and two wrong turns later, she saw a wooden sign that bore the name Flying Eagle Ranch. It stood beside a narrow, unpaved road that led into a stand of enormous pines.
She put the SUV in neutral, told her heart not to race, and turned onto the road.
It arrowed through the pines for what seemed a long time, but eventually she saw it.
A house.
Several outbuildings.
A corral.
Flying Eagle Ranch.
Chay had given Travis a description and he’d passed it on to her. A small house, Chay had said, built of logs. A wide porch. Outbuildings at a short distance behind the house. And there’d probably be an old black Silverado truck parked out front.
