Eileen Wilks - Cowboys Do It Best

The air was cool with moonlight and rich with the smell of earth after rain. Chase welcomed the chill as much as the fresh scent. He lay crossways in his too-small bed in the little room off the kennel and looked at the patterns the moonlight made on the ceiling.

He was so hard he hurt. But for the moment, just for the moment, he didn’t mind, because it was a good kind of a hurt, an alive kind, the sort he hadn’t felt in over a year, not since he woke up in the hospital and realized his days of following the circuit were over. Since then he’d been with a few friendly ladies, but he hadn’t really wanted.

It was good to want again.

The wind had pretty much departed with the rain, so the shapes the shadow branches made on Chase’s ceiling shifted only slightly in the remnants of a breeze. Chase shifted, too, uncomfortable, but not really minding the ache that was keeping him awake.

Chase’s temporary quarters were about what he’d expected. The floor was cement, with a rag rug next to the bed. The single window had been painted shut with the same blue paint that was flaking off the chest of drawers, and the closet was the result of someone’s less-than-expert carpentry.

But the room was one huge step up from the couch where he’d spent the last two nights. It had a door that he could. close when he wanted—or leave open like he had it now. And it was as ruthlessly clean as the tiny bathroom next to it. He supposed the hard-headed woman he worked for must have come in here and scrubbed everything with one hand while he was moving the horses after lunch. She was just not too bright about some things, but Chase was already certain that sort of stubborn, prideful behavior was typical of Summer Callaway.

The storm that had threatened had made an appearance briefly. While he and his pretty boss lady and her son had sat at her kitchen table and eaten fried chicken with ovenfried potatoes, mustard greens drenched in hot sauce and biscuits with butter and honey, the rain had come. It had been one of those quick, noisy cloudbursts, lots of wind and a fast, hard drenching that finished up so abruptly you could just imagine someone upstairs turning off the tap. But while it had lasted...

Eating in the kitchen with a widow woman and her sixyear-old son might have made Chase feel itchy. It hadn’t. He’d felt comfortable. Maybe, he thought now as he watched the moon shadows, the combination of hot food and him on the inside of four snug walls, with a lot of wind and rain on the outside, was what had made him feel so relaxed and contented. Hard to say. Contentment wasn’t a feeling he’d had much experience with.

Chase shifted again in the dark, his skin hot with the same fever that had his groin aching. He shoved the covers off. Chilly night air flowed over his naked body, air freshly washed by the recent rain.

The contentment hadn’t lasted. Chase didn’t know what had called up the old memory. Maybe the rain. Maybe it had been the feeling, insidious and terrible, that had snuck in under his guard—that feeling of safety and permanence. Of family. By the time they’d finished eating—and getting in each other’s way trying to get the dishes done, since the fool woman wouldn’t admit that having only one arm to use hampered her in the slightest—he’d been starting to feel itchy. But it had still been raining, and Ricky had looked awfully hopeful when he’d asked Chase to play checkers.

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