Thankful For You

Dallas picked up the reins to whoa her big blue roan gelding.

“He’s tight and fast,” Dallas said, her face flushed bright red from heat and exertion. “I can’t wait to get back out there. I can’t wait!”

“When you plannin’ on gettin’ back out there?” Ketch asked.

Nick, from her point of view, was paying particular attention to her answer to that question. The only thing she wouldn’t like about being back out on the road was the fact that she wouldn’t be spending time with Nick. They had been building a friendship, a genuine friendship, out there at Lightning Rock, and she was going to miss him. She truly was.

Dallas swung out of the saddle and landed on the ground easily. She slipped the reins over her horse’s head, loosened the girth and started walking over to the one spot where she could rinse the sweat off her horse’s neck and back.

“I think I’ve just about got enough stuffed under the mattress to make a go of it once I’m finished takin’ care of Pop’s business.”

Ketch stayed around to talk with them for a couple of minutes longer before he headed off to tend to the rest of his day. She finished rinsing off Blue before she turned him out with the rest of the horses. After such a great practice session, she really didn’t want to ruin her good mood by tackling more of the cleanup.

Back at Lightning Rock, she said to Nick, “I’m so greasy and grimy, and the water pressure in that ol’ outdoor shower Pop rigged up is as about as useless as tits on a bull. I swear I’ve got a week’s worth of dirt in my hair that I can’t get out. If I don’t take a quick minute to jump in the lake, you’ll be able to smell me from a mile away.”

He smiled at her. “Let’s avoid that.”

She stood there for a moment, just enjoying the way it felt to have Nick Brand smiling at her. So handsome, that man. She got butterflies in her stomach whenever he watched her practice—she never got nervous around anyone when she raced the barrels, but something about Nick was different. Something about Nick made her feel different.

* * *

While Dallas grabbed a bottle of shampoo, a bar of soap and a threadbare towel, Nick pondered on the way Dallas had looked at him just seconds before. She had stared into his eyes and although the moment was fleeting, he had wanted it to keep right on going. She was such a complicated woman that it was hard to figure her out. Maybe that was part of the attraction. She was a challenge.

“You can come, if you want. I’m wearing a bathin’ suit.” Dallas said, “I don’t suppose you brought anything to swim in?”

“No,” Nick said. And now, more than ever before in his life, he coveted his few pairs of clean, dry underwear. Besides, wet white underwear in front of Dallas? The family jewels looked much smaller after an exposure to cold water.

“Do you want to swim?”

“Now that you’ve put the idea in my head, I’d love to get in the water.”

“Go grab me one of your pairs of jeans, then.”

He returned with his last pair of clean jeans; he’d been avoiding wearing them because they were brand-new and too expensive to use for the kind of dirty work he’d found himself doing of late.

“Give me a minute,” Dallas said.

“Hey...what are you going to do with those?”

“Give me a minute,” she said again.

Good as her word, she was back in about a minute. “Here. Go put these on and let’s go.”

Nick took his jeans from the cowgirl. His expensive jeans were now shorts. He didn’t bother to ask her what she had done or why she had done it. That part was obvious.

“These were brand-new,” he said.

“They’re still new.”

The way she shrugged made him believe that she was completely naive to the price of the jeans she had just ruined.

“They’re just shorter. Go put ’em on.”

* * *

Dallas peeled off her sweaty T-shirt, balled it up and dropped it on the bank of the small, clear-water lake. She sat down to yank off her boots as quick as she could. So hot, sticky and gritty. She couldn’t wait to get into that cool lake water. Her luck and her curse were that she was focused to a fault. All she could think about after practice was cooling off in the lake.

“I’d thought that I’d been to all of the Bent Tree lakes when I was a kid,” the lawyer said to her.

“It’s always been my private spot.” Dallas unzipped her jeans, shoved them down over her hips and legs so she could step out of them.

Dallas had strategically worn her old Speedo bathing suit under her clothing so she could get into the lake anytime she wanted. Her feet were tough from years of walking barefoot, so the pebbles and broken brush along the side of the lake didn’t bother her.

“You much of a swimmer?” Dallas loved the feel of the earth, warmed by the sun, beneath her bare feet. She always had, ever since she was a little girl.

Nick joined her by the edge of the lake. She glanced over at him as he peeled off his shirt. It was a quick glance, but long enough to notice how light the skin on his stomach was compared to the golden color of his arms and neck. He was a fit man; not ripped and shredded like a bodybuilder, but toned as if he spent some of his time, at least, working out. She seemed to like looking at Nick whether he had a shirt on or not.

“I was captain of my high school swim team.”

His profile to her, Nick seemed to be taking stock of the clear-water lake.

“It’s deep enough to dive from that boulder over there.” She pointed a couple of feet away from where they were standing.

Not able to spend one more second in her grubby skin, Dallas tromped through the short brush, careful not to step on the Sweet William wildflowers that grew in brightly colored clumps along the bank of the lake.

The boulder was hot beneath her feet. To her, the burning was a challenge. The longer she could stand it, the tougher she was. And being tough, being able to handle her business alone in the world was a matter of survival. She didn’t have anyone to depend on. Now that Davy was gone, she didn’t feel like she had a family. The way her brother had treated Davy in his last years, like he was a pariah—that wound might scar over, but it would never truly be healed.

No. She was alone in this world.

Dallas stepped to the edge of the boulder, lifted her arms above her head and touched her fingers together like a steeple. With one strong vault, she arced into the air and cut the water with her hands with only the smallest of splashes. She knew this lake—had spent hundreds of hours in her youth swimming in this lake. This lake was her swimming pool; the banks of this lake were her playroom. At Lightning Rock, she was more at home than any other place on earth. She hadn’t known how attached she was to the place—she hadn’t realized how hard it was going to be to say goodbye to this beautiful slice of paradise—until she had begun to clear out her father’s belongings. How many times a day had she stopped herself from tearing up? Countless.

Dallas touched a rock lodged at the bottom of the lake before she somersaulted forward to push herself up to the surface with her feet. She broke through the surface of the water just in time to hear Nick’s warning.

“Incoming!”

Dallas was treading her legs so she could wipe the water off her face and out of her eyes. She opened her eyes just in time to see Nick performing a cannonball off the boulder. Nick landed a short distance away from her with a giant splash. Some of the water displaced by his cannonball hit her in the face. She sputtered a little bit, spitting out lake water and wiping the water out of her eyes for a second time.

“What score would you give me?” Nick asked after he swam over to her.

The man’s arm strokes had been clean, strong and confident. She had spent so much of her time around rodeo men who had a propensity for stretching the truth a bit, she had half doubted Nick’s claim to be captain of his high school swim team. But not anymore.

The cool, fresh water made her feel renewed. She smiled with a laugh and held up two fingers playfully. “I had a better cannonball when I was nine.”

“Oh, yeah?” Nick asked, treading water beside her. “You think you can do better? Show me.”

The competitive spirit in her made her swim to the edge of the lake and back to the boulder to at least match, if not surpass, Nick’s “city boy” cannonball. Without paying attention to the time, the two of them tried to one-up each other in the cannonball arena. They should have been heading back to the homestead and tackling the trailer, but instead, they frolicked together in the lake as if they had nothing better to do and all the time in the world. The early afternoon slipped away from them, and it wasn’t until Nick called a tie that Dallas decided to let the competition end. She shared her bar of soap and shampoo with Nick, and they both left the lake a heck of a lot cleaner than they had gone in.

Together, they sat on the boulder to dry off in the sun. Sitting next to Nick, at one of her favorite spots in the world, felt as natural as being on the back of a horse. It didn’t—couldn’t—escape her notice that Nick had been making it easy for her to let down her guard. He liked her, she could see that in his eyes when he looked at her—she could hear it in his voice when he spoke to her—but he’d always been respectful. He’d always been kind. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt so close to a man. Was she falling for Nick Brand? Her feelings were so mixed-up lately, she couldn’t be sure. But, the nervous excitement she felt in her stomach whenever he stared into her eyes made her think that she might be falling for the Chicago lawyer. Hard.