High Country Baby

In her mind, without vocalizing the word, she said, Okay.

She tugged on the rings, but her fingers were swollen and they wouldn’t budge.

Clint wanted to give Taylor her privacy—he wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box at times, but even he could tell she was trying to have some sort of moment. When he saw her fighting to get the rings off her finger without any success, and wanting to begin the trek back to the ranch as soon as possible, he intervened.

“Put your hand in the water.”

That was a great idea. She had been so fixated on trying to pry the rings free, she hadn’t considered that simple and pretty obvious solution. After she submerged her hand in the frigid water for a few minutes, the rings slipped right off.

“Hey!” Taylor smiled spontaneously at Clint. “It worked.”

Clint was struck by that smile. Taylor’s face, which he had once dismissed as pretty-ish, was transformed when she smiled. She had charming dimples on each creamy, plump cheek, her teeth were white and straight, and the smile drew attention to the fullness of her light pink lips. Clint tipped his hat to her as a way of saying “you’re welcome.” She had married Christopher soon after graduate school, so she had worn these rings for most of her adult life. She had wondered if her finger would feel naked without them. It did.

Taylor gave the rings, cupped in the palm of her hand, one last look before she curled her fingers tightly around them, drew back her arm as if she was about to throw a baseball and prepared to hurl them as hard and as far as she could into the lake.

“Hey, now! Whoa, little lady!” she heard Clint exclaim as he grabbed her wrist to stop her. “I ain’t no jewelry expert, but those look like they could be worth a pretty penny.”

Taylor tugged her wrist out of his fingers with a frown. “My marriage is over, so they aren’t worth anything to me anymore.”

“If they’re real, they could be worth a whole heck of a lot to somebody,” the cowboy told her in a sharp voice. “There’s some folks who could live off them rings for a year or two, I bet.”

“Those rings...” Taylor muttered the correction to his English. She opened the palm of her hand and stared at the rings that she had worn with such pride for so many years. They only made her feel sad now and she wanted to be done with them. Yet, Clint was right—they were worth a lot of money. She was a spoiled woman, yes, that was true, but she had never been a wasteful one. Why couldn’t she pawn them and give the proceeds to charity?

Taylor stared for a second longer at the rings before she made her decision. Wordlessly, she tucked them into her pocket for safekeeping.

Taylor met Clint’s eyes. “I’m ready to go back.”

The cowboy squinted at her through a thin veil of white cigarette smoke. She waved the smoke away from her face as she walked by him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Clint put the partially smoked cigarette out on the bottom of his boot, and then clench the butt between his teeth.

Instead of taking the lead, as she expected, Clint followed her. It was ridiculous for vanity to rear its head on a rocky hike up a steep hill, but the entire time, she couldn’t stop fixating on the fact that her derriere, which had expanded considerably over the last year, was right at Clint’s eye level. He couldn’t avoid staring at it if he tried. Poor man.

“Careful, now.”

She hadn’t been concentrating on her foot placement.She stumbled, slipped backward, and the cowboy caught her with his hands on her rear end—one hand for each butt cheek.

Taylor brushed his hands away, jerked the tail of her shirt downward and pressed on.

“Sorry,” she said without looking at him.

Humiliating. She hated her middle-aged spread, especially the widening and dropping of her hind end. She had never been a stick-thin person, not even as a teen, but she had always liked her backside. Now—it looked so big and old.

The last part of the climb, the steepest part, where she had to climb with her hands supporting her weight, Clint took the lead. He bullied his way up the steep incline until he reached flat ground. He waited for her—he watched out for her. But he let her navigate the last part of the climb on her own terms. Right at the top, and right when she thought that she was about to beat the hill, she lost her footing again; she fell forward and started to slide downward as though she was on a kiddie slide. She felt Clint’s hand on her wrist. Their eyes met and she gave him the nod to let go so she could finish the climb on her own.

Once on safe footing, she looked back at the lake. She hadn’t thrown the rings into the lake with dramatic flare as she had envisioned, but it really felt like the divorce was final. Truthfully, Christopher had let her go long before the marriage had ended. And now, finally, she was moving on, too.

“If we start back right away, we can camp in the same spot.” Clint took his position on Honey’s right side to stop her from moving while Taylor used a boulder as a mounting block.

“I’m not going back to the ranch.”

Clint mounted his horse and took it upon himself, without her objection, to lead Easy. Once he was settled in the saddle, he rode up beside her. “No?”

“No.”

Clint rested his arm across the saddle horn, his mouth frowning. “Just how far are you planning on goin’?”

“Two weeks in, two weeks out.”

“A month.”

Honey danced to the side, away from his horse. Taylor circled back around so she could face him and finish the conversation.

“My uncle didn’t tell you.”

It took all of his self-control not to say something he would regret. Hank hadn’t bothered to tell him, and neither had his stepbrother. Just like Brock. Why had Clint thought that anything would be different between them after a five-year break? If he didn’t need the money so badly, he’d let Taylor have her way and send her packing on her own. But he was buried in debt, his truck needed an engine rebuild, creditors were hounding him and his cell phone was shut off. He couldn’t get back to the rodeo without money for the entry fees. He was flat broke and flat stuck.

“No matter.” Clint told her. “Let’s ride.”

Taylor’s pace for the rest of the day was slow and steady. It didn’t matter to Clint where they stopped for the night; it mattered to him that he wasn’t heading back to the ranch. He’d still been drunk from the night before when Brock gave him the order, but not drunk enough to have forgotten a major piece of information like the fact that he’d be babysitting for a month. No. Brock had left that little detail out. It was lucky that his stepfather, a full-time drunk and part-time rodeo clown, had managed to teach him how to survive in the wilderness with limited supplies. He hadn’t, however, managed to teach Clint how to survive without a steady supply of cigarettes and tequila.

That night, after they made camp, he taught Taylor to build a small mound fire. Admittedly, she had surprised him—she had actually researched riding the divide and had brought a fire blanket for building mound fires in order to have the least environmental impact. He loved this land and her desire to preserve it impressed him.

Taylor sat down near the fire to catch as much warmth from the low flames as she could. The temperature changed so quickly on the divide—one minute she was boiling in the sun and the next she was freezing at sundown. At least she was starting to adjust to the sore muscles and aching joints and the drastic change in her diet. She really wanted to drop some weight on this trip. It was time for her to shed the extra pounds and claim the next phase of her life with a renewed sense of vigor and excitement.

“You’re not much of a talker, are you, Clint?” Taylor broke the long silence.

“I’m in the business of mindin’ my own business.” Clint flicked his cigarette into the fire.

He reached into his saddlebag and pulled out the harmonica. She smiled a little—she had enjoyed listening to his playing the night before and hoped that he would play again. Taylor breathed in deeply, let it out slowly and tuned her ears to the notes streaming out from the little instrument. She hadn’t counted on company, but Clint’s role in her adventure had started to solidify in her mind. He was her protector. Her unwilling cowboy bodyguard.

“Who taught you to play?”

“David.”

He read the next question in her eyes and answered without her having to ask it.

“My stepfather.” After a moment, he added. “He adopted me when I was eight or nine—gave me his last name. That’s a heck of a lot more than I can say for my real father, that’s for damn sure.”

There wasn’t any emotion in Clint’s voice when he talked about his father—not negative, not positive. But after he answered her question Clint put away the harmonica, stood up and walked a few feet away from the fire. From the light given off by the fire, she could see the cowboy in silhouette and a flash of red as he lit a cigarette. She had unintentionally hit a nerve. His father was a topic she would avoid in the future—in her mind, Clint wasn’t a three-dimensional person. He was a cowboy, and he was hired to ensure her safe return to Bent Tree Ranch. She didn’t really need to know any more about him than that.

Taylor stood up, brushed the debris from the seat of her jeans.

“Well—good night.”

She thought that she saw him tip his hat to her, but she didn’t wait around to make sure. She quickly went through her nightly routine, changed into her cotton pajamas and crawled into her sleeping bag. Taylor swatted the flashlight overhead with her hand. She watched the light, letting it shine into her eyes for a brief moment as it passed over her face—up and back, up and back. She reached up and grabbed the flashlight, turned it off.

In the dark, she stared up at the ceiling of the tent. All night she had caught herself unconsciously rubbing her thumb over the unembellished skin of her left ring finger. Would there ever be a man who wanted to place a ring on that finger again? Did she want there to be? It was debatable. But children... Taylor moved her hands down to her abdomen. Oh, how she had wanted there to be children.

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