could you do it?” she whispered and thought she saw his shoulders flinch. “How could you let me leave when you wanted me to stay? Why, Justice? You didn’t say a word to me when I left. Either time.”
He stopped dead and even the cool wind sliding in off the ocean seemed to still. The dogs went quiet and it felt as if the world had taken a breath and held it.
“What was there to say?” His jaw tightened and he bit off each word as if it tasted bitter.
“You could have asked me to stay.”
“No,” he said, heading once more for the barn. “I couldn’t.”
Maggie sighed and walked after him, measuring her steps to match his more halting ones. Of course he couldn’t ask her to stay, she thought.
“Oh, no, not you. Not Justice King,” she grumbled and kicked at the dirt. “Don’t want anyone to know you’re actually capable of feeling something.”
He stopped again and this time he turned his head to look at her. “I feel plenty, Maggie,” he said. “You should know that better than anyone.”
“How can I know that, Justice?” She threw her hands high, then let them fall to her sides again. “You won’t tell me what you’re thinking. You never did. We laughed, we made love but you never let me inside, Justice. Not once.”
Something in his dark blue eyes flashed. “You got in. You just didn’t stay long enough to notice.”
Had she? She couldn’t be sure. In the beginning of their marriage, it was all heat and fire. They hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other. They took long rides, they spent lazy rainy days in bed and Maggie would have told anyone who had asked that she and Justice were truly happy.
But, God knew, it hadn’t taken much to shake the foundations of what they’d shared, so how real could any of it have been?
Her shoulders slumped as she watched him continue on to the barn. He held himself straighter, taller, as if knowing she’d be watching and not wanting to look anything but his usual, strong self. How typical was that, Maggie thought.
Justice King never admitted weakness. He’d always been a man unable to ask for anything—not even for help if he needed it—because he would never acknowledge needing assistance in the first place. He was always so self-reliant that it was nearly a religion to him. She’d known that from the beginning of their relationship, and still she wished things had been different.
But if wishes were horses, as the old saying went…
Maggie was shaken and not too proud to admit it, at least to herself. Pushing her turbulent thoughts to a back corner of her mind to be examined later, she took a deep breath, forced some lightheartedness into her voice and quickly changed the subject.
“So,” she asked, glancing back at the two dogs trotting behind them, “why are Angel and Spike here instead of out with the herd?”
There was a pause before he answered, as if he were grateful for the reprieve.
“We’re training two new dogs to help out,” he said. “Phil thought it best to give these two a couple days off while the new pups are put through their paces.”
She’d been a rancher’s wife long enough to know the value of herd dogs. When the dogs worked the cattle, they could get into tight places a cowboy and his horse couldn’t. The right dog could get a herd moving and keep it moving while never scaring the cattle into a stampede, which could cause injury both to cowboys and to herd. These dogs were well trained and were spoiled rotten by the cowboys, as she remembered. She’d teased Justice once that apparently sheepherders had been right about using dogs in their work and that finally ranchers had caught on.
She smiled, remembering how Justice had reacted—chasing her through the house and up the stairs, laughing, until he’d caught up to her in their bedroom. Then he’d spent the next several hours convincing her to take it back. No cattleman alive had ever taken advice from a sheepherder, he’d told her, least of all him.
Spike and Angel darted past Justice and Maggie, heading through the open doors of a barn that was two stories tall and built to match the main house’s log construction. The shadows were deep, and the only sound coming from the barn was that deep, insistent lowing Maggie had heard earlier.
“Hey, you two, come away from there!” A sudden shout came from inside the barn, and almost instantly both dogs scuttled back outside and took off in a fast lope across the dirt. If they’d been children, Maggie was sure they would have been laughing.
“What’s that about?” she asked, watching the dogs race each other to the water tank kept as a sort of swimming pool for herd dogs.
“Mike’s got a cow and her calf in there. Probably didn’t want the dogs getting too close,” Justice told her, walking through the barn to the last stall on the right. There he leaned one arm on the top of the wood partition, clearly to take some weight off his leg, and watched as an older man expertly ran his hands up and down a nearly three-month-old calf’s foreleg.
“How’s he doing?”
“Better,” Mike said, without looking up. “Swelling’s down, so he and his mama can go back out to pasture tomorrow.” Then he did lift his gaze and smiled when he spotted Maggie. “Well, now, you’re a sight for sore eyes. Good to see you back home, Maggie.”
“Thanks, Mike.” She’d gotten more of a welcome from the cowboys and hired hands than she had from her own husband, she thought wryly. “So what happened to this little guy?”
Maggie wandered into the stall, keeping one wary eye on the calf’s mother, then sank to one knee beside the smaller animal. He was, like most of Justice’s herd, Black Angus. His black hide was the color of the shadows filling the barn, and his big brown eyes watched her with interest.
“Not sure, really,” Mike said. “One of the boys saw the little guy limping out on the range, so he brought them in. But whatever was wrong, looks like it’s all right now.”
The calf wasn’t small anymore. He was about six months old and wearing the King Ranch brand on his flank. He was well on his way to being the size of his father, which would put him, full grown, at about eleven hundred pounds. But the way he cuddled up to his mother, looking for food and comfort, made him seem like little more than an overlarge puppy.
The mingled aromas of hay and leather and cow mingled together in the vast barn and somehow made a soothing sort of scent. Maggie never would have believed she was capable of thinking that, since before meeting and marrying Justice, she had been a devout city girl. She’d once thought that there was nothing lovelier than a crowded shopping mall with a good-size latte stand. She had never liked the outdoors as a kid and had considered staying in a motel as close to camping as she ever wanted to get.
And yet being on the King Ranch had been so easy. Was it just because she’d loved Justice so much? Or was it because her heart had finally figured out where she belonged?
But then, she asked herself sadly, what did it matter now?
“See you later, Mike,” she said, then tugged at Justice’s arm. “Let’s get you moving again. Gotta get your exercise in whether you want to or not.”
“I
