River Walker by Cate Culpepper

Author:Cate Culpepper [Culpepper, Cate]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Lesbian, Romance, Paranormal
ISBN: 9781602821897
Google: XR82QwAACAAJ
Amazon: 1602821895
Publisher: Bella Distribution
Published: 2010-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

*

Elena’s ancient Ford rattled all the way to the campus, but it got them to Breland Hall. Grady unlocked the door to her office and waved Elena through.

“Whoa.” Elena lifted her hands and stopped abruptly, bringing Grady up short. She turned in a slow circle, taking in the artifacts on the walls and the tall shelves full of books. “Grady, this is a wonderful office. I want to spend all day in here.”

“I like it too, but it’s a little cramped for a meeting of five.” Grady went to her desk and scrawled a few lines on a legal pad.

“Will you tell me where all of these things came from someday?” Elena’s hand hovered respectfully over a small twig of petrified wood on Grady’s desk. “Like this stick?”

Grady smiled as she tore the sheet off the pad. In the richness of the art in her office, no one else had ever noticed the simplest of her souvenirs, and her longtime favorite. “That was a gift from my first field assignment. It’s a prayer stick. An old holy man from a Cayuse tribe whispered a prayer for me into it, some kind of wish. I still don’t know what he asked for, but he was a funny, kind man. It was something good. He told me to keep it close, and I always have.”

“You always should.” Elena’s eyes were shining. “There’s a story like that behind everything in here, isn’t there?”

“Pretty much.” Grady couldn’t imagine a better morning than sharing those stories with Elena, but she was already eager to leave. She wanted to be outside, breathing in the desert’s crisp air, while the sun was still mild. And that urge had nothing to do with restlessness, for once—Grady simply felt good.

She taped the note telling her students where to find them to her office door and ushered Elena out.

The awakening campus was alive with birdsong as they walked among the handful of students dedicated enough to sign up for early-morning summer classes. Grady had developed a real fondness for this college and its widely diverse citizenry in her six months in Las Cruces. NMSU wasn’t small, but it felt almost cozy after the political in-fighting of other universities.

Elena strolled with her hands clasped behind her, close beside Grady—perhaps closer than usual, as she was a guest on Grady’s turf. She wore one of her many light skirts and an old-fashioned white blouse, a unique style among the proliferation of jeans and shorts on campus. But Elena smiled openly into every face they passed and received more amiable nods in reply than Grady would have expected from sleepy students.

The graveled rooftop of the Pan American Center would be hell on earth in four hours, but this early in the day, it still provided a cool refuge. The high stadium offered an unobstructed view of the Organ Mountains that Grady found hard to resist, and she wanted to share it with Elena. Her boots crunched over the gravel as she led the way to a raised cement slab near the east side of the roof.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.