Dancing in the Moonlight

“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I stayed long enough to pick up my car and pack up my apartment, then I decided to come home. There’s nothing for me in Phoenix anymore.”

There had been once. She had a good life there before her reserve unit had been called up eighteen months ago and sent to Afghanistan. She had a job she loved, as a nurse practitioner in a busy Phoenix E.R., she had a wide circle of friends, she had a fiancé she thought adored her.

Everything had changed in a heartbeat, in one terrible, decimating instant.

Viviana’s expression darkened but suddenly she slapped the palm of her hand against her head. “What am I doing, niña, to make you stand like this? Come. Sit. I will fix you something to eat.”

“I’m not hungry, Mama. I just need sleep.”

“Sí. Sí. We can talk about all this tomorrow.” Viviana’s hands were cool as she pushed a lock of hair away from Maggie’s eyes in a tender gesture that nearly brought her to tears. “Come. You will take my room downstairs.”

Oh, how she was tempted by that offer. Climbing the rest of these stairs right now seemed as insurmountable to her as scaling the Grand Teton without ropes.

She couldn’t give in, though. She had surrendered too much already.

“No. It’s fine. I’ll use my old room.”

“Lena—”

“Mama, I’m fine. I’m not kicking you out of your bed.”

“It’s no trouble for me. Do you not think it would be best?”

If Viviana had the strength, Maggie had no doubt her mother would have picked her up and carried her the short way off the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom.

This was one of the reasons she hadn’t wanted her mother in Washington, D.C., through her painful recovery, through the various surgeries and the hours of physical therapy.

It was also one of her biggest worries about coming home.

Viviana would want to coddle. It was who she was, what she did. And though part of Maggie wanted to lean into that comforting embrace, to soak it up, she knew she would find it too easy to surrender to it, to let that tender care surround her, smother her.

She couldn’t. She had to be tough if she was going to figure out how to go on with the rest of her life.

Climbing these steps was a small thing, but it suddenly seemed of vital importance.

“No, Mama. I’m sleeping upstairs.”

Viviana shook her head at her stubborn tone. “You are your father’s daughter, niña.”

She smiled, though she could feel how strained her mouth felt around the edges.

“I will take your things up,” Viviana said, her firm tone attesting to the fact that Maggie’s stubbornness didn’t come only from Abel Cruz.

Maggie decided she was too tired to argue, even if she had the tiniest possibility of winning that particular battle. She turned and started the long, torturous climb.

By the time she reached the last of the sixteen steps, she was shaking and out of breath and felt like those shards of glass she’d imagined earlier were now tipped with hot acid, eating away at her skin.

But she had made it, she thought as she opened to the door to her childhood bedroom, all lavender and cream and dearly familiar.

She was here, she was home, and she would take the rest of her life just like that—one step at a time.

Chapter Two

She woke from dreams of screaming, dark-eyed children and exploding streets and bone-numbing terror to soothing lavender walls and the comforting scent of home.

Sunshine streamed in through the lace curtains, creating delicate filigree patterns on the floor, and she watched them shift and slide for several moments while the worst of the dreams and her morning pain both faded to a dull roar.

Doctors at Walter Reed used to ask if her pain seemed worse first thing in the morning or right before bed. She couldn’t tell much difference. It was always there, a constant miserable presence dogging her like a grim black shadow.

She wanted to think it had started to fade a little in the five months since her injury, but she had a sneaking suspicion she was being overly optimistic.

She sighed, willing away the self-pity. Just once she’d like to wake up and enjoy the morning instead of wallowing in the muck of her screwed-up psyche.

Her shower chair was still down in the Subaru and she wasn’t quite up to running down the stairs and then back up for it—or worse, having to ask her mother to retrieve it for her. She hadn’t been fitted for a shower prosthesis yet, and since she couldn’t very well balance on one foot for the length of time needed, she opted for a bath.

It did the job of keeping her clean but was nowhere near as satisfying as the hot pulse of a shower for chasing away the cobwebs. Climbing out of the tub was always a little tricky, but she managed and dressed quickly, adjusted her prosthesis then headed for the stairs to find her mother.

When she finally made her painstaking way to the ground floor, she found the kitchen empty, but Viviana had left thick, gooey sweet rolls and a note in her precise English. “I must work outside this morning. I will see you at lunch.”

She frowned at the note, surprised. She would have expected her mother to stick close to the house the first day after her arrival, though she felt a little narcissistic for the assumption.

Viviana was probably out in her garden, she thought, tearing off a sticky chunk of cinnamon roll and popping it in her mouth.

Savoring the rich, sweet flavor, she poured a cup of coffee and walked outside with the awkward rolling gait she hadn’t been able to conquer when wearing her prosthesis.

The morning air was sweet and clear, rich with new growth, and she paused for a moment on the front porch to savor it.

Nothing compared to a Rocky Mountain morning in springtime. She had come to love the wild primitiveness of the desert around Phoenix in the dozen years she’d lived there, but this was a different kind of beauty.

The Tetons were still covered with snow—some of it would be year-round—but here at lower elevations everything was green and lush. Her mother’s fruit trees were covered in white blossoms that sent their sweet, seductive scent into the air and the flower beds bloomed with color—masses of spring blossoms in reds and yellows and pinks.

The Luna in spring was the most beautiful place on earth. Why had she forgotten that over the years? She stood for a long time watching birds flit around the gardens and the breeze rustle the new, pale-green leaves of the cottonwood trees along the creek.

Feeling a tentative peace that had been missing inside her for months, she limped down the stairs in search of her mother.

There was no sign of Viviana on the side of the house or in the back where the vegetable beds were tilled and ready for planting.

Maggie frowned. So much for being coddled. She didn’t want her mother to feel like she had to babysit her, but she couldn’t help feeling a little abandoned. Couldn’t Viviana have stuck around at least the first day so they could have had a visit over breakfast?

No matter. She didn’t need entertaining. She would welcome a quiet moment of solitude and reflection, she decided, and headed for the glider rocker on the brick patio.

She settled down with her coffee, determined to enjoy the morning on her own here in the sunshine, surrounded by blossoms.

The ranch wasn’t big, only eight hundred acres. From her spot on the patio she could see the pasture where her mother’s half-dozen horses grazed and the much-larger acreage where two hundred Murray Grey cattle milled around, their unique-colored hides looking soft and silvery in the morning sun.

She shifted her gaze toward the creek 150 yards away that gave this canyon and the Dalton’s ranch their names. This time of year the Cold Creek ran full and high, swollen with spring runoff. Instead of a quiet, peaceful ribbon of water, it churned and boiled.

The rains the night before hadn’t helped matters, and she could see the creek was nearly full to the banks. She whispered a prayer that it wouldn’t reach flood stage, though the ranch had been designed to sustain minimal damage for those high-water years.

The only building that could be in jeopardy if the creek flooded was the open-air bowery she and her father had built for her mother the summer she was ten.

She looked at the Spanish-tiled roof that gleamed a vibrant red in the sunlight and the brightly colored windsocks flapping in the breeze and smiled at the vibrant colors.

A little slice of Mexico, that’s what she and Abel had tried to create for her mother. A place Viviana could escape to when she was homesick for her family in Mexico City.

After the car accident that claimed her father’s life, she and Viviana used to wander often down to the bowery, both alone and separately. She had always been able to feel her father’s presence most strongly there, in the haven he had created for his beloved wife.

Did her mother go there still? she wondered.

Thoughts of Abel and the events leading to his death when she was sixteen inevitably turned her thoughts to the Daltons and the Cold Creek Land & Cattle Company, just across the creek bed.

From here she could see the graying logs of the ranch house, the neat fencelines, a small number of the ranch’s huge herd of cattle grazing on the rich grasses by the creek.

In those days after her father’s death, she would split her time here at the bowery between grieving for him and feeding the coals of her deep anger toward that family across the creek.

The Daltons were the reason her father had spent most of her adolescence working himself into an early grave, spending days hanging on to his dreams of making the Luna profitable and nights slogging through a factory job in Idaho Falls.

Bitter anger filled her again at the memories. Abel would never have found himself compelled to work so hard if not for Hank Dalton, that lying, thieving bastard.

Dalton should have gone to jail for the way he’d taken advantage of her father’s naiveté and his imperfect command of English. Thinking he was taking a big step toward expanding the Luna, Abel had paid the Cold Creek thousands of dollars for water rights that had turned out to be virtually useless. Abel should have taken the bastard to court—or at least stopped paying each month for nothing.

But he had insisted on remitting every last penny he owed to Hank Dalton and, after a few years with poor ranch returns, had been forced to take on two jobs to cover the debt.

She barely saw him from the age of eleven until his death five years later. One night after Abel had spent all day on the tractor baling hay then turned around and driven to Idaho Falls to work the graveyard shift at his factory job, he’d been returning to the Luna when he had fallen asleep at the wheel of his old Dodge pickup.

The truck rolled six times and ended up in a ditch, and her kind, generous father was killed instantly.

She knew exactly who should shoulder the blame. The Daltons had killed her father just as surely as if they’d crashed into him in one of the shiny new pickups they always drove.

She sipped her coffee and shifted her leg as the constant pins-and-needles phantom pains became uncomfortable.

Was there room in her life right now for old bitterness? she wondered. She had plenty of new troubles to brood about without wallowing around in the mud and muck of ancient history.

Now that she’d come home, she saw no reason she and the Daltons couldn’t just stay out of each other’s way.

Unbidden, an image of Jake Dalton flitted across her mind, all lean strength and rumpled sexiness and she sighed. Jake should be at the top of the list of Daltons to avoid, she decided. He had always been the hardest for her to read and the one she had most in common with, as they had both chosen careers in medicine.

For various reasons, there had always been an odd bond between them, fragile and tenuous but still there. She would just have to do her best while she was home to ignore it.

A tractor suddenly rumbled into view, and she was grateful for the distraction from thoughts of entirely too-sexy doctors.

She craned her neck, expecting to see her tío Guillermo, her father’s bachelor brother who had run the ranch for Viviana since Abel’s death. Instead, she was stunned to find her mother looking tiny and fragile atop the rumbling John Deere.

Ranch wives were bred tough in the West, and Viviana was no different—tougher than some, even. Still, the sight of her atop the big tractor was unexpected.

Viviana waved with cheerful enthusiasm when she spied Maggie in the garden. The tractor shuddered to a stop and a moment later her mother hopped down with a spryness that disguised her fifty-five years and hurried toward her.

“Lena! How are you feeling this morning?”

“Better.”

“You should be resting after your long drive. I did not expect you to be up so early. You should go back to bed!”

Here was the coddling she had expected and she decided to accept it with grace. “It was a long drive and I may have overdone things a little. But I promise, I’m feeling better this morning.”

“Good. Good. The clean air of the Luna will cleanse your blood. You will see.”

Maggie smiled, then gestured to the tractor. “Mama, why are you doing the planting? Where’s Tío Guillermo?”

An odd expression flickered across her mother’s lovely features, but she quickly turned away. “Do not my flowers look beautiful this year? We will have many blooms with the rains we’ve had. I thought many of them would die in the hard freeze of last week but I covered them with blankets and they have survived. They are strong, like my daughter.”

With Viviana smiling at her with such love, Maggie almost let herself be deterred, but she yanked her attention back. “Don’t change the subject, Mama. Why are you planting instead of Guillermo? Is he sick?”

Viviana shrugged. “This I cannot say. I have not seen him for some days.”

“Why not?”

Her mother didn’t answer and suddenly seemed wholly focused on deadheading some of the tulips that had bloomed past their prime.

“Mama!” she said more firmly, and her mother sighed.

“He does not work here anymore. I told him to go and not return.”

Maggie stared. “You what?”

“I fired him, sí? Even though he said he was quitting anyway, that I could not pay him enough to keep working here. I said the words first. I fired him.”

“Why? Guillermo loves this place! He has poured his heart into the Luna. It belongs to him as much as us. He owns part of the ranch, for heaven’s sake. You can’t fire him!”

“So you think I’m a crazy woman, too?”

“I didn’t say that. Did Guillermo call you crazy?”

Her mother and her father’s brother had always seemed to get along just fine. Guillermo had been a rock of support to both of them after Abel’s death and had stepped up immediately to run the ranch his brother had loved. She couldn’t imagine what he might have done to anger her mother so drastically that she would feel compelled to fire him—or what she would have said to make him quit.

“This makes no sense, Mama! What’s going on?”

“I have my reasons and they are between your tío and me. That is all I will say about this to you.”

Her mother had a note of finality in her voice but Maggie couldn’t let the subject rest.

“But Mama, you can’t take care of things here by yourself! It’s too much.”

“I will be fine. I am putting an ad in the newspaper. I will find someone to help me. You are not to worry.”

“How can I not worry? What if I talk to Guillermo and try to smoothe things over?”

“No! You are to stay out of this. You cannot smooth this over. Sometimes there are too many wrinkles between people. I will hire someone to help me but for now I am fine.”

“Mama...”

“No, Magdalena.” Her mother stuck her chin up, looking at once fierce and determined. “That is all I will say about this.”

This time she couldn’t ignore Viviana’s firmness. But Maggie could be every bit as stubborn as her mother. “Fine.” She pulled herself up to stand. “Between the two of us, we should be able to manage until you’re able to hire someone.”

Her mother gaped, her flashing dark eyes now slightly aghast. “Not the two of us!”

She reverted to Spanish, as she always did in times of high emotion, and proceeded to loudly and vociferously tell Maggie all the reasons she would not allow her to overexert herself on the Rancho de la Luna.

Maggie listened to her mother’s arguments calmly, hands in her sweater pockets, until Viviana wound down.

“Don’t argue. Please, Mama,” she finally said, her voice low and firm. “You need help and I need something to keep me busy. Working with you will be the perfect solution.”

Her mother opened her mouth to renew her objection but Maggie stopped her with an upraised hand. “Please, Mama. The doctors say I must stay active to strengthen my leg and I hate feeling so useless. I want to help you.”

“You should rest. I thought that is why you have come home.”

Maggie had her own reasons for coming home but she didn’t want to burden her mother with them, especially as she was suddenly aware of a deep, powerful need to prove to herself she wasn’t completely helpless.

“I will be careful, Mama, I promise. But I’m going to help you.”

Viviana studied her for a long moment while honeybees buzzed through the flowers and the breeze ruffled the pale new leaves on the trees, then she sighed.

“You are so much like your father,” she said in Spanish, shaking her head. “I never could win an argument with him, either.”

Maggie wasn’t sure why she was suddenly filled with elation at the idea of hard, physical labor. She should be consumed with fear, with trepidation that she wouldn’t be able to handle the work. Instead, anticipation coursed through her.

She meant her words to her mother—she needed something to do, and pitting herself against the relentless work always waiting to be tackled on a small ranch like the Luna seemed just the thing to drag her off her self-pitying butt.

* * *

“No wonder the kid’s not sleeping.” Jake finished his quick exam and let his three-year-old nephew off the breakfast bar of the sunny, cheerful Cold Creek kitchen. Glad to be done, Cody raced off without even waiting for a lollipop from his uncle.

“What’s the verdict?” his sister-in-law, Caroline, asked, her lovely, normally serene features worried.

“Ear infection. Looks like a mild one but still probably enough to cause discomfort in the night. I’ll write you a prescription for amoxicillin and that should take care of it.”

“Thank you for coming out to the ranch on such short notice, especially after a long day. We probably could have waited a day or two but Wade wouldn’t hear of it. He seems to think you have nothing better to do than spend your free time making house calls to his kids.”

“He’s right. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.” Jake smiled at her but Caroline made a face.

“If that’s true, it’s about the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Why?” he asked. “Because I love the chance to see my niece and nephews?”

“Because you need something besides work, even when that work involves family! I’m not going to lecture you. But if you were my client, we would definitely have to work on finding you some hobbies.”

Caroline was an author and life coach who had moved her practice to the Cold Creek after she married his oldest brother eighteen months earlier and willingly took on the challenge of Wade’s three young kids.

In that time, she had wrought amazing changes at the ranch. Though the house was still cluttered and noisy and chaotic, it was filled with love and laughter now. He enjoyed coming out here, though seeing his brother’s happiness only seemed to accentuate the solitude of his own life.

“I don’t have time for a hobby,” he answered as he returned his otoscope to his bag.

“My point exactly. You need to make time or you’re going to burn out. Trust me on this.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I’ve been right where you are, Jake,” she said. “You might scoff now but you won’t a few years in the future when you wake up one morning and suddenly find yourself unable to bear the idea of treating even one more patient.”

“I love being a doctor. I promise, that’s not going to change anytime soon.”

“I know you love it and you’re wonderful at it. But you need other things in your life, too.”

Her eyes suddenly sharpened with a calculating gleam that left him extremely nervous. “You at least need a woman. When was the last time you went on a date?”

He gave a mock groan. “I get enough of this from Marjorie. I don’t need my sister-in-law starting in on me, too.”

“How about your stepsister then?”

“You can tell her to keep her pretty nose out of my business, too.”

She grinned. “I’ll try, but you know how she is.”

They both laughed, as technically Caroline filled both roles in his life, sister-in-law and stepsister. Not only was she married to his brother but her father, Quinn, was married to his mother, Marjorie. The happy couple now lived in Marjorie’s little house in Pine Gulch.

“I heard through the grapevine our local hero has returned,” Caroline said with a look so sly he had to wonder what he possibly might have let slip about his barely acknowledged feelings toward their neighbor. “Maybe you ought to ask Magdalena Cruz on a date.”

A snort sounded in the kitchen and he looked over to find his youngest brother, Seth, lounging in the doorway. “Maggie? Never. She’d probably laugh in his face if he dared asked.”

Seth sauntered into the kitchen and planted himself on one of the bar stools.

Caroline bristled. “What do you mean? Why on earth wouldn’t she go out with Jake? Every woman in the county adores him.”

Though he was touched by her defense of him, he flushed. “Not true. Seth’s the Romeo in the family. All you have to do is walk outside to see the swath of broken hearts he’s left across the valley.”

“Does that swath include Magdalena Cruz’s heart, by any chance?” Caroline asked.

Seth snorted again. “Not by a long shot. Maggie hates everything Dalton. Always has.”

“Not always,” Jake corrected quietly.

Caroline frowned at this bit of information. “Why would she hate you? Oh, I’ll agree you can be an annoying lot on the whole, but as individuals you’re basically harmless.”

“You never knew dear old Dad.”

Seth’s words were matter-of-fact but they didn’t completely hide the bitterness Jake and his brothers all carried toward their father.

“I don’t know all the details,” Jake said. “I don’t know if even their widows do—but Hank cheated Viviana Cruz’s husband Abel in some deal the two had together. He lost a lot of money and had to work two jobs to make ends meet. Maggie blamed us for it, especially after her father died in a car accident coming home from his second job one night.”

“Oh, the poor thing.” Caroline’s eyes melted with compassion.

“Maggie left town for college a few years after her dad died. She studied to become a nurse and along the way she joined the Army National Guard,” Jake went on. “The few times she’s been back over the years, she usually tries to avoid anything having to do with the Cold Creek like a bad case of halitosis.”

Unless one of the Daltons happens to stumble on her in the middle of the night, he thought.

“Hate to break it to you, Carrie, but you might as well take her right off your matchmaking radar.” Seth grinned around a cookie he’d filched from the jar on the counter.

Caroline looked disappointed, though still thoughtful. “Too bad. From all her mother says, Lieutenant Cruz sounds like quite a woman.”

Oh, she was that, Jake thought a short time later as he drove away from the ranch. Their conversation seemed to have opened a door in his mind and now he couldn’t stop thinking about Maggie.