When The Heart Beckons by Jill Gregory

Author:Jill Gregory
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: historical romance, jill gregory, romance, sensuous, adventure, western romance
Publisher: Jill Gregory
Published: 2011-08-01T13:51:13.117297+00:00

Chapter 15

The canyons shimmered with heat. Squinting up at the cobalt sky, Annabel thought that never before had any sky looked as big and bright and vibrant as the one stretching over the glorious red sandstone mesas of New Mexico.

It was midafternoon and they’d been riding hard since dawn. But as she and Steele plunged up the road that the blacksmith in Skull Creek had said led to the Rivers ranch, a strange exhilaration flowed through her.

Annabel had lost track of how many days they’d been traveling. She only knew that the land was beautiful and fierce, with its striking desert cacti, its white and purple sage, its mesquite and yucca. At sunset the scattered mountain ranges loomed like giant purple ghosts rising out of a mystical dream. By daylight, sun, sky, plains, and mesa formed an ever-changing landscape that took her breath away. A strange sense of destiny had overtaken her, and at this moment was more powerful than ever. She would find Brett—and it would be today. Within the hour. He was guarding the Rivers ranch at the end of this road, and she would actually see him before the day was done.

The journey with Steele had been strained ever since Silver Junction. The gunslinger had withdrawn in every way, treating her like a stranger. He spoke only when it was necessary to communicate something to her about the trail, or the weather, or when they would make camp. But he avoided looking at her, and touching her, and even when they camped for the night and settled down to supper at the same campfire, he kept all conversation to a minimum and by his very aloofness forced her to do the same.

Annabel wished she could read his mind. But his impenetrable mask of detachment was firmly in place and she’d found no way to breach it during any of the long, hard-riding days. Even at night, when the stars bloomed like icy white flowers in a sky of midnight blue, and the mountains loomed like dark foreboding giants all around them, and the land rustled with badgers and snakes and coyotes, wild things hunting their prey beneath the ghostly moon, he removed his bedroll as far from hers as the camp would allow, offered a curt “good night” and plopped his hat over his face before Annabel could do more than murmur a reply.

Silence. Coldness. An empty companionship like that of strangers sharing a train was all that lay between them as they rode long hours and days into the heart of New Mexico.

Yet, every time they accidentally touched, when his hand brushed hers as they passed a pan of biscuits back and forth, or when she stumbled into him, as she had once while gathering twigs for the campfire, a hot current seemed to leap between them.

This distance, this polite estrangement, was much preferable, she told herself. Close contact with Roy Steele was too much like tampering with fireworks—and besides, it made her feel guilty—guilty about Brett, and the love she’d nourished for years and years.

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