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The mountains. Fields forever, a barn in the distance, and those great, glorious Rocky Mountains. She loved them here in Colorado, and in Montana, and in Calgary.
“How many girls have you kissed?” she asked.
Mike looked at her, but he had his arm around her, and she lay against his chest, her arm across his stomach. “We’re goin’ there?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I told you about that boy I dated as a senior.”
“No one else,” he said. “Not James.”
Gerty’s teeth didn’t immediately clench. “Yeah, not James…yet.”
“How many boys have you kissed?”
“Just you and Brady,” she said, her voice not very loud tonight. “After that, I kissed men.”
“Yeah, all right.” The smile on his face carried in his voice. “How many men then?”
Gerty didn’t have to count too high. “Including you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Including me.”
Since their kiss the day he’d come home from the hospital, Gerty had wanted to kiss him like that again. She hadn’t, because his momma was a bit of a hoverer, and Gerty still had a job she had to do. Mike had taken time off from Pony Power so he could heal, but he still came out to the stables every day.
Pony Power was a bustling place, though, and it wasn’t like she could kiss him with the same passion and precision as they had in his cabin. She wasn’t sure a kiss like that could be replicated anyway.
“Six,” she whispered.
“Wow, Gerty,” he said. “Two boys and six men?”
“I’m almost thirty,” she said. “That’s not too many. It’s like, one man every two years.”
“More than me,” he said.
“You were kissing men?” she teased.
“No.” He ran his fingers up and down her forearm gently, causing the hair there to stand at attention. “Last week, in my cabin, that was my fifth kiss.”
That surprised Gerty, but she said nothing. “Flying helicopters kept you busy, I suppose.”
“I’m not the outgoing one in my family.”
“You don’t have to be outgoing to kiss a woman.”
“Yeah, but you have to talk enough to ask someone out.”
Gerty watched the sun sink lower in the sky, the gold really starting to come out. “The very day I arrived on this farm, some of the first words you said to me were, ‘Go out with me.’”
“That’s because you’re not a stranger,” he said. “I knew you from before.”
“Mm.” Gerty let her eyes drift closed, satisfied that Mike had told her all she needed to know about his romantic past. He’d never been very serious with anyone, and she’d have to tell him about James sooner or later.
“Are you going to fall asleep?” he whispered.
“Only if you tell me a story in that sexy voice of yours,” she whispered back.
He chuckled—that was sexy too—and drew in a breath. “Once, I had to fly a mission with this guy whose nickname was Stonewall. Funny guy and a heckuva pilot. He used to say that….”
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