“Do you think I’d tell anyone?”
She turned her head and looked up at him, at the shadows the firelight cast across his handsome face: dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, that long Montgomery nose. Maybe it was the unusual circumstances, the dark night surrounding them, the fire at the center, but she felt close to him. “I kissed another man while I was married to Charley,” she whispered.
“That’s all?”
“That’s pretty bad in my book. What about you?”
“I backed out on a contract.”
“Was that really bad? If you changed your mind…”
“It was a breach of promise, and she thought it was very bad.”
“Ah, I see,” Jackie said, smiling as she wrapped her arms around her knees. “What’s your favorite food?”
“Ice cream.”
She laughed. “Mine too. Favorite color.”
“Blue. Yours?”
She looked up at him. “Blue.”
He came to sit by her, dusting off his hands. When Jackie shivered in the cool mountain air, he put his arm around her shoulders, as naturally as breathing, and pulled her head to his chest. “Do you mind?”
Jackie couldn’t even speak. It felt so good to touch another human being. Charley had always been cuddly and affectionate, and she had often sat on his lap, snuggling in his arms, while he read some airplane magazine aloud to her.
She didn’t realize she was drifting off to sleep until his voice jolted her awake.
“What’s the biggest regret in your life?” he asked sharply.
“That I wasn’t born with a few Mae West curves,” she answered quickly. She used to whine to Charley that the guys treated her like one of them because she looked like them: an angular face, with a square jaw, broad shoulders, straight hips, and long legs.
“You are joking, aren’t you?” William said, his voice full of disbelief. “You’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stopped dead in my tracks as I watched you walk down the streets of Chandler.”
“Really?” she said, now wide awake. “Are you sure you know who I am?”
“You are the great Jacqueline O’Neill. You’ve won nearly every flying award that is given. You’ve been everywhere in the world. You once were lost for three days in the snow of Montana, but you managed to walk out.”
“Actually, I rolled down a mountain. It was only by luck that I landed at some cowboys’ camp.”
He knew she was lying, for he’d read everything written about her at that time. After crashing in a snowstorm, she had made her way out, climbing down the side of a steep mountain by using dead reckoning, by navigating with the faint sunlight during the day and the stars at night. She’d kept her head, often leaving huge arrows made from tree branches in the snow so airplanes looking for her could find her. Smiling, he tightened his arm around her shoulders and was pleased when she moved closer to him.
“Ah, how do I walk?” she asked tentatively, not wanting to sound as though she were asking for a compliment, which was just what she was doing.
“With long strides that eat up the earth. Grown men stop what they’re doing just to watch you walk, your shoulders back, your head held high, your beautiful thick hair catching the breeze, your—”
Jackie started to laugh. “Where have you been all my life?”
“Right here in Chandler, waiting for the day you would come back.”
“You might have had to wait forever, because I never thought I would return. I was so restless back then. All I wanted was to get out of this tiny, isolated town. I wanted to move, to go places and see things.”
“And you got to do that. Was it as good as you thought it would be?”
“At first it was, but after seven or eight years I began wanting things, like a flower box. I wanted to plant seeds and watch them grow. I wanted to know for sure that where I went to sleep was going to be the place where I woke up.”
“So after Charley died, you came back to dreary old Chandler.”