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He sure was.
Heat raced through his veins, and Mike told himself he couldn’t kiss her. Not within an hour of being reunited with her after they’d promised to stay in touch and they hadn’t. “So.” He cleared his throat. “Thirteen years. Do you want to start with something easy?” He looked away from her, out at the softly rolling landscape in front of him. A fence sat a dozen or so yards away, and then the fields expanded for a while.
Gerty settled back into his side, one hand resting lightly on his thigh near his knee. “I graduated at the top of my class from farrier school.”
A smile popped onto his face. “I bet you did.”
Her horse snuffled nearby, snacking on the delicious grass back here. “What about you? I assume you were top of your class at flight school.”
Mike let his eyes drift closed, his memories of flight school right there in his head. “I enjoyed it,” he said. “But I wasn’t the best.”
“Second then,” she said.
“Third, if you must know.”
“Mm, I figured.”
They fell into silence then, and Mike found he didn’t have much else of consequence to tell her. “I saw some rodeo pictures of you.”
She groaned and buried her face in his chest, moving closer to him to do it. Hip to hip they sat, and Mike’s old feelings for Gerty roared back to life in colors of blue, white, and yellow.
“I hate those pictures,” she said. “They make you wear so much makeup—and false eyelashes. I dang near ripped out my real eyelashes once after a competition.”
He chuckled and said, “Not everyone is as beautiful as you, Gerty.”
She let several beats of silence go by, but she didn’t tell him that his line was cheesy. He knew it was and he didn’t care. Shewasbeautiful, and he’d always thought so.
“I think I’m still washing the hairspray out of my hair,” she whispered.
Mike turned his head and took a deep breath of her hair. “Mm, I don’t think so. Smells like sunshine and horses and leather.” She hadn’t been wearing a cowgirl hat when he’d encountered her at the paddock, but he still wore a hat, the brim of which created a private bubble for him and Gerty. Not that they needed it. There probably wasn’t a human soul for a mile, and Tennessee wouldn’t care if he kissed her.
“Are you going to miss flying?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he whispered back. “There’s nothing like flying, Gerty. Nothing.”
“You’ll have to take me sometime.”
“All right.” He couldn’t drive a car, let alone fly anything right now. Not even a kite. It wasn’t a promise. It was just easy conversation with someone who felt like an old friend when Mike needed one of those very, very badly.
The silence stretched, and he relaxed and closed his eyes again. Gerty grew heavier against his side, and he looked down in time to watch her head droop. He had no idea when she’d arrived on the farm. He hadn’t seen her at his welcome-home party, but her parents had been there.
He gently eased away from her and let her head settle into his lap. She breathed in and out in long strokes, and Mike couldn’t look away from the softness of her face while she slept. She wasn’t just beautiful; she was stunningly gorgeous, and Mike wondered what the eighteen-year-old version of himself had been thinking, leaving her here in Ivory Peaks while he went off to college and then flight school.
He gently stroked his fingers along her hair. It felt like silk against his skin, no signs of hairspray at all. Gerty had never been very girly, and that hadn’t changed much. Her skin held very little color, though she’d obviously been outdoors a lot. His eyes ran from her bare shoulder and down her arm to her long fingers. Hands he’d held before. Hands he wanted to hold again.
His hormones shot through him, and he whispered, “I missed you so much, Gerty,” to the sky, the grasses, and her horse as he grazed nearby.
He couldn’t believe this was where he was right now. After all he’d seen. All he’d done. All the places he’d visited. All this time.
Sitting with his back against a tree, listening to the country stillness talk to itself, while the gorgeous Gertrude Whettstein took a nap with her head in his lap.
A sigh filled his soul, and again, it spoke of peace and quiet. “Thank you, Lord,” he whispered. “Thank you for this farm, and thank you for bringing me here when I needed it.” Then he leaned his head back and closed his own eyes.
He had appointments coming up, and surely his momma had sent out a search party for him by now, but for this moment, Mike forgot about the heap of troubles he faced so he could simply enjoy being alive, even if he wasn’t quite whole.
Yet.
* * *
