Tempting the Rancher by Leslie North

Author:Leslie North [North, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

January didn’t know the hour, but she had to escape the four walls, find space, feel cool air against her heated face. A few hours of sleep had remedied the worst of her brain’s heaviness after a cathartic cry. She wrapped herself in the quilt, fetched her journal from her pack, and slipped on her boots before heading outside.

The night showed signs of lifting. Lighter blues encroached on the horizon. The moon made its return, post-storm, to illuminate nature’s surfaces. She found an oak tree near the cabin’s corner with blushing autumn leaves and plenty of footholds. The cabin roof seemed like the perfect place to add to her travel journal.

Nat’s warning about wood rot returned to her. His practicality, his fear of the unknown, denied him moments that he would circle back to in his old age. Breathtaking moments, like the one when she settled onto that roof Clem had built with his hands and joined the sky with the vantage of a bird. In moonlight, she added three pages—sketches of the trees growing spindly with the chill, poetry that made zero sense, Nat’s name scrolled in different ways because it brought her comfort.

When the first fingers of orange gripped their side of the world, Nat joined her. Being Southern, he asked permission, as if the cabin were a ship and she its captain, as if he had already made it hers. His generosity, his selflessness, sharpened her regret at leaving.

She shared the quilt. He sat close. She rammed her pen through the messy bun atop her head so it wouldn’t roll off the roof.

“Mae is good. She’ll be fine.” His voice was quiet, low, relaxed. Like they had all the time in the world when she knew they didn’t. This place was good for him. She never wanted him to lose the part of himself that craved the stillness.

January nodded.

“J, I—”

“Don’t,” she whispered. “I understand.”

She held out her palm for his. He took her hand and wrapped the ratty quilt tighter around them. Head tipped against his shoulder, she found she no longer held anxiety in her stomach at being honest with him. They were past that, right where they had always been.

“Want to know the real reason I’m going to Nepal?”

“Prayer flags and rickshaws?”

January smiled. “Someone once told me if I went to the right place, just high enough, I could see the curvature of the earth from there. Then, and only then, would I know my place in it.”

“Sounds like some advanced bullshit.”

A warm giggle originated in her chest. She let it out. It felt amazing. “It does, doesn’t it?”

“All you have to do is squint at the horizon to see it curve.”

She squinted. He squinted. Like a pair of octogenarians who had lost their glasses. Sure enough, Nat was right. Just high enough, in the right place, the world curved, and she felt her place in it.

“This epiphany calls for a celebration.” January wiggled off her right boot and sock then handed Nat the pen she had stuck in her hair.

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