She eyed his profile as he peered out at the rain slanting down, smooth skin over strong bones, eyelashes long and gold-tipped. Was that from working out in the sun? What did he do, anyway? She had yet to ask.
As she reveled in the warmth from the stone, she let her gaze travel down over the white shirt molded by the shape of his arms. His look had changed so much from the old days, when he switched between two very worn pairs of jeans—this was back in the days when jeans belonged to the working person, before they became a fashion—sun-faded cowboy shirts, ragged kerchief, and a battered, low-brimmed hat. The only thing shared between then and now was riding boots.
Godiva knew nothing about labels. Her fashion sense had firmly stayed in the hippie era. But his slacks looked expensive without being flashy, and his cotton shirt fit well over his broad shoulders and that long torso as flat as when she’d known him. She liked the idea that he stayed in shape . . .
Wow, that stone was sure putting out the heat.
Or was the heat inside? She was suddenly aware of a stirring way down deep, where she’d thought the ashes had long gone cold. In fact, she’d done her damndest to put those fires out, out, out.
Welp.
She mentally bullhorned a reality check on herself—a granny-aged battle-axe getting the hots was about as alluring as a bag of mad badgers. Get a grip!
She moved back a couple inches from that stone. When she moved, he stirred, looking down at her with the softest hint of a smile, but concern in his dark eyes. “You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said in her heartiest voice. “Fine, fine, fine. More than fine. If anything, it’s getting to be a tad crispy in here. Not that I’m complaining. Better than freezing, oh yessirree.” She was babbling. Click! Her teeth shut off the blather.
“Storm is starting to pass,” he said.
That was nice and neutral, but she was still feeling that curiously intimate atmosphere. Grasping for a reality that she was beginning to suspect was gone forever, she cleared her throat, stared at that glowing stone that he’d heated up with just a look, and said, “So let me wind up my sob story. I think I mentioned I spent the last of the sixties mooching around Haight-Ashbury, working various crap jobs and taking alternative courses, but I was always, always, searching for Alejandro Cordova, which was the name I’d written on his birth certificate. My mother’s name.”
“I know,” he said gently.
“I wrote to him once a month, and sent money every birthday and Christmas. And every year if I could manage, sometimes every other year, I begged off wherev
er I was working—or quit, if they refused to give me time off—and scraped together enough cash to take the Greyhound back to that suburb of Chicago to check that box. I told you all that. At least I didn’t find my own letters. Since they weren’t there, I comforted myself with the knowledge that at least he had them, which meant he was alive.”
She sighed, her shoulders tight, as she gazed out into the silvery-gray wall of rain slanting down. “Okay, that’s sufficiently depressing, and it’s bringing us to the questions we just can’t answer. So why don’t you tell me what you were doing when he found you? How he found you? Unless it’s some kind of shifter secret?”
“As for how, basilisks are very rare. I think I told you that his school friend Lance Jackson, and his dad, are part of the Midwest Guardians. They heard about me when I began rescuing horses, some of whom were shifters. Word travels fast in shifter circles. When Alejo first arrived, I took him with me to rescue some horses from a bad situation, and then another rescue that I heard about when we reached the west coast.”
“How did you get into rescuing horses?”
“That was my goal after I failed to find you, to rescue Gravas’s horses. They were a lot easier to find. They had been sold to a circus to pay off Gravas’s debts. Since I didn’t have two cents to rub together, I worked to take on the ones that wanted to leave. Some of them adapted to the circus life. The food was good, the people as well, and running in a steady circle was easier than the rodeo life, especially on the older ones. Look,” he indicated the outside, where a sun shaft slanted down. “We can probably head up the trail now.”
The stone was already beginning to cool off. Godiva began to hoist herself up—but fell back with a grunt. “Stench-weasels! My head is ready for the walk, but my joints seem to have decided on a mass protest.”
“Hand up?” he asked.
She was going to refuse out of habit—she hated letting anyone see signs of age—but somehow, with him, it didn’t matter so much. She was what she was, there wasn’t much point in trying to hide it, especially with her cane somewhere a thousand feet below.
He pulled her to her feet, then let her hand go as he tested the muddy ground with its pools and puddles. “Careful,” he said. “It’s slippery.”
Sandals were not the best footwear for muddy trails. Rigo set a slow pace—but after the second time Godiva’s sandal slid in liquid mud, he offered her his hand again.
She let out a sigh of relief as she grabbed on. His fingers tightened to a reassuring grip on hers, and with his aid they made faster progress.
He kept on talking in that low, easy voice. “So there I was at last, with a string of horses but nowhere to take them. Then I remembered my land deed.”
Godiva liked their hands linked. She knew she liked it, but she wasn’t ready to talk about liking it. That’s it, I’ve reverted to eighteen years old—with wrinkles, she thought as she gazed around at the canyon. It was even more spectacularly beautiful, its colors intensified by that scouring rain. The dust was gone, the air clear and clean. But already gusts of heat blasted down as the sun tipped past midday and began its slide to the west.
She shifted her gaze to Rigo. “Land deed? You had a land deed? And you forgot about it?”
“Here’s the funny thing about land,” he said. “The whole idea of owning it is all in the head.” He tapped his forehead. “That was something my Maya grandfather taught me, that the idea of such finite creatures as us owning land is pretty funny. But there’s enough of my other ancestors to understanding wanting a piece of property that is yours, where you and yours can stay safe and unwanted invaders can be kept out.”
“Right,” she said. “No one in my family ever had any land that I know of, but I loved it when I paid off my place and got a paper saying I owned it outright. Anyway, go on.”
“How it came about was years back, before I hit rock bottom with Gravas. During the Depression. I was riding with a good outfit then. We’d been booked in Eastern Colorado. A lot of silver miners used to come down to spend their earnings. I’d sit in on poker games just for something to do while I chugged my nightly dose. I wasn’t a bad player, actually pretty good—until the liquor took hold. I was winning one night when this hombre ran out of cash, so he threw a land deed into the pot to up the ante. Turned out he went around buying up bankrupt properties for bottom dollar, and had a sheaf of deeds. I won the pot, and the land deed.”