The Cowboy's Wife For One Night

She really hoped it was just a gasket problem, because that was the extent of her well knowledge. She pulled the wrench from the pocket of her canvas barn coat.

She crouched, her feet sinking in the mud, and wiped the grit and muck from the pump with her cold, numb fingers.

Her neighbor, Jeremiah Stone, who shared this well, knew even less than she did about pumps. Walter usually fixed these problems but…she shook her head, resentment flooding her. Walter was his own problem now.

Her head pounded and her stomach growled. She had two more hours of work before she could head back to the ranch. At least.

Sure would be handy to have Jack around.

Before she could stop herself, she glanced up at the ghostly sliver of crescent moon in the eastern sky and wondered where he was.

If he was safe.

Mia shoved away from the thought—from all thoughts of Jack. The memories of their one night together she thought she’d mull over in the cold lonely alone nights, were sharp—too painful to hold. The tenderness and heat, the touch of his hands, the shocking intimacy of his body inside hers—it hurt to think about it.

It hurt and it made her angry.

Angry at him. Herself. The situation. Everything.

And the anger simmered, boiled right under the surface of her skin. In the center of her head. Her stomach. She lived with it. Ate with it. Stared at the ceiling over her bed every night and burned with it.

There had been a barrage of emails from him in the weeks after she left. She opened one and deleted the rest—because that first one, full of concern and worry—had been just about too much.

Now he was concerned. Now he was worried. She’d been his wife for five years and after the night they had sex, he finally got involved.

Not that she expected anything different. That night hadn’t been something Jack would take lightly. Jack was about as honorable as they came—sure, absentminded and thoughtless at times, but the guy hadn’t taken their vows lightly. That he’d been celibate for five years, while shocking in theory, didn’t really surprise her.

That he’d finally slept with her was surprising.

Of course, she’d all but ripped off her clothes.

And as his email subject lines got more and more worried and finally started to get angry, it was easier to delete them without reading them. But then the emails slowed and finally, nine days ago, they’d stopped.

She forced herself to stay away from the news. She might have been too busy to see a lawyer about the divorce since coming back to the Rocky M, but in her heart it was over between them. And now she had no idea where Jack was. If he was okay. If his last trip had been successful.

She had nothing.

As she had for the last six weeks since grabbing her clothes and running away from Jack and the rooftop patio, she buried all those memories, her anger and every one of her fears in the endless work that came with the Rocky M.

“You okay, Jack?”

Jack barely heard Devon Cormick, who’d driven Jack from Los Angeles to the Rocky M, a mile outside of Wassau. Jack stared at the sprawling brown ranch house, the thin trail of smoke that lifted from the chimney into the darkening sky. The building sat in the shadows of a granite cliff.

The house he’d grown up in always looked in imminent danger of being crushed.

Home, he thought, the word foreign in his head.

The painkillers he’d taken once he got off the airplane in Los Angeles were still kicking around his system. The world felt thick and fuzzy to the touch and he knew being here was dangerous. Dangerous in a way that Darfur couldn’t even dream of being.

“Fine,” Jack said. Though he wasn’t. Wouldn’t ever be again.

“Are you sure you won’t reconsider?” Devon asked. “You could stay with us. Claire would—”

Jack shook his head; his throat was on fire.

“It will die down,” Devon said. The young man leaned forward over the steering wheel. The bruises at his temple and across his face were yellowing. One of the explosions had tossed him in the air like a rag doll, throwing him against one of the fences headfirst. It was a miracle his neck hadn’t been snapped. “The papers, the university. It can’t go on like this.”

But his hundred-yard stare out the front window said he wasn’t so sure.

Their return from Sudan after their survival of the military’s brutal attack had put Devon and Jack in the papers from coast to coast. And it wasn’t just the media; the university was all over him, too.

The dean had been inside Jack’s damn house when he got home. Like he had the right, much less a key. And the way he’d demanded answers… Jack wouldn’t argue, the university had a right to them. But they didn’t have a right to him. He wasn’t his pump. He wasn’t the damn drill.