As for him, Rafe was acutely aware that what he was on top of bore no resemblance to either the ground or the grass. It was soft, warm, enticingly fragrant and damn stirring. His body absorbed the sensations before his mind could even frame them.
Banking down the major part of his reaction, he allowed his concern to come to the foreground. Though he’d attempted to buffer his weight, he had come down rather hard on her.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Right now she couldn’t help thinking she was really far from all right, but not in the sense he meant it. Generally warm and outgoing, Val still kept a part of herself in reserve. The part that had, at the age of nineteen, run off with Scott Walters, a ruggedly handsome stuntman with the gift of always saying the right thing. He’d been her first love and she had loved him fiercely. Until, recklessly, he’d unintentionally broken her heart.
Since that day, she had carefully guarded her heart and kept a tight rein on her emotions. That went hand in hand with not trusting any physical reaction she might have to a good-looking man. Even a good-looking man who was trying to save her from being gored.
“I don’t think anything’s broken.” She saw him nod with relief, but other than that, he seemed to be making no attempt to get up. Was the man posing for a still life? “You can get off me now,” Val prompted.
The moment the words were out of her mouth, Rafe realized that he was not just partially on top of her, he was completely on top of her, the way a bodyguard might be with the person he was trying to protect at the very first sound of gunfire.
The imprint of her body was telegraphing itself to his torso in big, bold, capital letters. It took him a second to come to.
“Oh, yeah, right.” Rafe paused for half a beat to look over his shoulder and make sure that the bull had come to a stop and was still on his side of the fence.
Jasper was indeed there, and whatever pending rage had sent the animal charging right for them had clearly disappeared. The bull had stopped charging, stopped running and instead of pawing the ground as expected, the bull was now docilely examining what appeared to be a dandelion nestled in the midst of a light green carpet comprised of new shoots of grass.
Belatedly, Rafe replayed the woman’s words in his head and this time, he scrambled up to his feet, separating their two bodies despite the vast appeal of remaining pressed together for the duration of the morning.
Once up, he offered his hand to her.
Val looked at it for a moment, as if she was debating ignoring it and just bouncing up of her own accord. But this was no time to establish boundaries and if he wanted to help her up, she knew she should just accept it without making a fuss.
Val wrapped her fingers around the offered hand, trying not to dwell on the fact that her body was still tingling. It made her acutely aware of the fact that their two bodies had mingled as much as was physically possible, given the fact that their clothes had remained on and they weren’t engaging in any sort of a romantic liaison.
The moment she was up on her feet, Val quickly dusted herself off. She watched the bull warily out of the corner of her eye. As incredible as it seemed, the animal appeared to be almost subdued. Given his previous behavior, how was that even possible?
“You train him to do that?” she finally asked her so-called rescuer.
Rafe had no idea what she was talking about. “Excuse me?”
Val jerked a thumb in the bull’s direction. “Did you train him to come charging up out of nowhere like that?” she asked.
If he had trained the bull, there might be a position for this man on the set, she thought. They could never have too many animal trainers on board when they were filming this kind of movie.
Rafe looked at her uncertainly. He’d heard about Hollywood types, about how they lived in a world of their own making, but this was his first encounter with someone from that city and he was the type who always wanted to make sense of things, to understand them.
That caused him to ask, “Why would I do something like that?”
Val continued to brush bits and pieces of dirt and grass from her clothing and hair. “I would think that might be self-explanatory,” she told him, looking at Rafe pointedly.
Maybe she meant nothing by it. At any event, he supposed he should count himself lucky that she wasn’t screaming at him, or having a tantrum. So he laughed, shaking his head.
“I’m not an animal whisperer, if that’s what you’re getting at,” he assured her. “Jasper is his own bull and does whatever he wants to. My father bought him not that long ago for breeding purposes. So far, he’s shown more of an interest in playing poker than in mating with any of the candidates we’ve paraded in front of him. To tell the truth, this is the most alive I’ve seen Jasper since his former owner dropped him off.”
The bull, from what she could see, was now wandering off again. Feeling a little safer, her heart stopped beating wildly.
“Maybe he’d behave a little more macho if you changed his name to Bruce,” she suggested, watching the animal retreat.
Rafe grinned at the proposal. He sincerely doubted that the bull understood English. “A bull by any other name...” His voice trailed off as his grin grew in size.
She cocked an eyebrow at the attempted quotation. “Shakespeare?”
“Paraphrased,” Rafe allowed good-naturedly. “Anyway, I don’t think his name has very much—if anything—to do with his behavior.” The grin faded slightly as he became serious. “You sure you didn’t hurt anything?” His eyes swept over her.
She could almost feel them passing right over her body. This man, she had a feeling, would have fit right in with the men back in Hollywood. Something about him stirred the imagination—as well as her blood.
“Just my pride,” she answered.
His brow furrowed slightly. Pausing, Rafe bent down to pick up his Stetson and dusted it off. “I don’t think I understand. What does your pride have to do with anything?”
“I’m not exactly accustomed to being tossed over a fence and landing on my butt,” she replied, nodding at the fence.
From where he stood, there was nothing to be embarrassed about. Survival came first. “My guess is that you’re probably not accustomed to running from a charging bull, either.”
She laughed. “Can’t say I am,” Val admitted.
The woman was being an awfully good sport about this, Rafe thought, feeling magnanimous toward her. “You want to come up to the house?”
“To talk to your father?” she asked a little uncertainly.
Having grown up in the world that she had, acting and masking her thoughts were second nature to her. Otherwise, her uneasiness at the invitation might have been evident. She did want to meet with whoever it was that could give her permission to use this property for the film, but how did she know for certain that there’d be anyone there? The prospect of being alone with a man she found more than a little attractive made her feel somewhat nervous.
Val
