His Forever Valentine

“Run?” Val echoed incredulously. “Why would you tell me to...?”

This was no time for a debate. Instead of biting off a few choice words of explanation, Rafe grabbed her hand. Rather than pushing her ahead of him, he went the other route. He pulled her in his wake.

Hard.

And then she finally heard it. She heard the cause for his alarm. The sound of something pounding on the ground felt as if it reverberated right through her, like an earthquake in the distance.

The “earthquake” felt like it was coming closer by the moment.

Val turned her head in the direction the sound was coming from.

That was when she saw it.

A bull.

A huge, black bull was charging directly at them.

At her.

Val needed no further incentive to take flight. A veteran of several marathons—every one of them undertaken for some sort of a good cause—she immediately upped her game. With her pouring it on, Rafe no longer had to pull her in his wake. Despite the situation, a hint of admiration at her speed filled him when he realized that she was now keeping up with him and that at any moment she was going to pull ahead of him.

“He’s gaining on us!” Val cried, beginning to realize that just maybe this competition between the charging bull and them might not end well after all.

Less than a minute later, Val saw that they were not just running from something, they were running toward something. Directly up ahead was a long stretch of wire fencing.

“Will that keep him from trampling us?” she managed to ask as she continued running alongside of Rafe for all she was worth.

“It damn well better,” was all he allowed himself to say.

There was no point in telling her that he had a plan B. That if worse had come to worst and Valentine had frozen with fear, he’d been prepared to divert the beast, to get the bull’s attention so that it would run after him rather than attack the woman who had turned up on his property unannounced like this. Rafe hadn’t been raised to subscribe to the “every man for himself” school of thought. His father would have never allowed it.

But luckily, the woman with the improbable first name was not only sexy as hell, she was fit, which in this case meant that she was capable of keeping up with him and—for now—keeping ahead of Jasper, the whimsical name that Alma had awarded the bull that they had bought a year ago to breed with some of their cattle.

Reaching the fence less than a minute ahead of the charging bull, Rafe quickly pushed his uninvited guest up and over the fence. The next second, he dove over it himself. Rafe managed to clear it—all except for his left boot, the tip of which got caught on the very edge of the fence.

What began as a clean execution became less so as he found himself falling short of his intended mark.

Rather than hitting the grass, Rafe landed on top of Val, who was just in the process of turning around. Instead of gaining her feet, she gained added weight. Enough weight to push the air right out of her.

A startled cry, comprised of protest and surprise, echoed through the morning air, riding on the air he had knocked out of her.

As for him, Rafe was acutely aware that what he was on top of bore no resemblance to either the ground or the grass. It was soft, warm, enticingly fragrant and damn stirring. His body absorbed the sensations before his mind could even frame them.

Banking down the major part of his reaction, he allowed his concern to come to the foreground. Though he’d attempted to buffer his weight, he had come down rather hard on her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Right now she couldn’t help thinking she was really far from all right, but not in the sense he meant it. Generally warm and outgoing, Val still kept a part of herself in reserve. The part that had, at the age of nineteen, run off with Scott Walters, a ruggedly handsome stuntman with the gift of always saying the right thing. He’d been her first love and she had loved him fiercely. Until, recklessly, he’d unintentionally broken her heart.

Since that day, she had carefully guarded her heart and kept a tight rein on her emotions. That went hand in hand with not trusting any physical reaction she might have to a good-looking man. Even a good-looking man who was trying to save her from being gored.

“I don’t think anything’s broken.” She saw him nod with relief, but other than that, he seemed to be making no attempt to get up. Was the man posing for a still life? “You can get off me now,” Val prompted.

The moment the words were out of her mouth, Rafe realized that he was not just partially on top of her, he was completely on top of her, the way a bodyguard might be with the person he was trying to protect at the very first sound of gunfire.

The imprint of her body was telegraphing itself to his torso in big, bold, capital letters. It took him a second to come to.

“Oh, yeah, right.” Rafe paused for half a beat to look over his shoulder and make sure that the bull had come to a stop and was still on his side of the fence.

Jasper was indeed there, and whatever pending rage had sent the animal charging right for them had clearly disappeared. The bull had stopped charging, stopped running and instead of pawing the ground as expected, the bull was now docilely examining what appeared to be a dandelion nestled in the midst of a light green carpet comprised of new shoots of grass.

Belatedly, Rafe replayed the woman’s words in his head and this time, he scrambled up to his feet, separating their two bodies despite the vast appeal of remaining pressed together for the duration of the morning.

Once up, he offered his hand to her.

Val looked at it for a moment, as if she was debating ignoring it and just bouncing up of her own accord. But this was no time to establish boundaries and if he wanted to help her up, she knew she should just accept it without making a fuss.

Val wrapped her fingers around the offered hand, trying not to dwell on the fact that her body was still tingling. It made her acutely aware of the fact that their two bodies had mingled as much as was physically possible, given the fact that their clothes had remained on and they weren’t engaging in any sort of a romantic liaison.

The moment she was up on her feet, Val quickly dusted herself off. She watched the bull warily out of the corner of her eye. As incredible as it seemed, the animal appeared to be almost subdued. Given his previous behavior, how was that even possible?

“You train him to do that?” she finally asked her so-called rescuer.

Rafe had no idea what she was talking about. “Excuse me?”

Val jerked a thumb in the bull’s direction. “Did you train him to come charging up out of nowhere like that?” she asked.

If he had trained the bull, there might be a position for this man on the set, she thought. They could never have too many animal trainers on board when they were filming this kind of movie.

Rafe looked at her uncertainly. He’d heard about Hollywood types, about how they lived in a world of their own making, but this was his first encounter with someone from that city and he was the type who always wanted to make sense of things, to understand them.

That caused him to ask, “Why would I do something like that?”

Val continued to brush bits and pieces of dirt and grass from her clothing and hair. “I would think that might be self-explanatory,” she told him, looking at Rafe pointedly.

Maybe she meant nothing by it. At any event, he supposed he should count himself lucky that she wasn’t screaming at him, or having a tantrum. So he laughed, shaking his head.

“I’m not an animal whisperer, if that’s what you’re getting at,” he assured her. “Jasper is his own bull and does whatever he wants to. My father bought him not that long ago for breeding purposes. So far, he’s shown more of an interest in playing poker than in mating with any of the candidates we’ve paraded in front of him. To tell the truth, this is the most alive I’ve seen Jasper since his former owner dropped him off.”

The bull, from what she could see, was now wandering off again. Feeling a little safer, her heart stopped beating wildly.

“Maybe he’d behave a little more macho if you changed his name to Bruce,” she suggested, watching the animal retreat.

Rafe grinned at the proposal. He sincerely doubted that the bull understood English. “A bull by any other name...” His voice trailed off as his grin grew in size.

She cocked an eyebrow at the attempted quotation. “Shakespeare?”

“Paraphrased,” Rafe allowed good-naturedly. “Anyway, I don’t think his name has very much—if anything—to do with his behavior.” The grin faded slightly as he became serious. “You sure you didn’t hurt anything?” His eyes swept over her.