“Nothing wrong with your appetite,” she observed.
He made a sound, but his mouth was too full to answer.
She watched him eat four bowls of cereal. That was about right—two for dinner and two for breakfast. “Ready to go walking now?” she asked.
“Sure.” He took his dish to the sink and reached back for hers, which she handed to him.
Seeing the difficulty he was having trying to do everything one-handed, so he could hang on to his cane, she said, “I can do that for you.”
“I’m not a cripple!” When he turned to snap at her, he lost his one-handed grip on the dishes. His cane fell as he lurched to catch the bowls with both hands. Without the cane, his left leg crumpled under him.
“Look out!” Jewel cried.
The dishes crashed into the sink as Mac grabbed hold of the counter to keep from falling backward.
“Damn it all to hell!” he raged.
Jewel reached out to comfort him, but he snarled, “Don’t touch me. Leave me alone.”
Jewel had whirled to leave, when he bit out, “Don’t go.”
She stopped where she was, but she wanted to run. She didn’t want to see his pain. It reminded her too much of her own.
He stared out the window over the sink at the endless reaches of Hawk’s Pride, with its vast, grassy plains and the jagged outcroppings of rock that marked the entrance to the canyons in the distance.
“It must be awful,” she whispered, “to lose so much.”
His eyes slid closed, and she watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard. He slowly opened his eyes and turned to look at her over his shoulder. “This…the way I am…It’s just temporary. I’ll be back as good as new next season.”
“Will you?”
He met her gaze steadily. “Bet on it.”
She knew him too well. Well enough to hear the sheer bravado in his answer and to see the unspoken fear in his eyes that his football career was over. They had always been deeply attuned to one another. He was vulnerable again, in a way he once had been as a youth—this time not to death itself, but to the death of his dreams.
“What can I do, Mac?”
He managed a smile. “Hand me my cane, will you?”
It was easier to do as he asked than to probe the painful issues that he was refusing to address. She crossed to pick up his cane and watched as he eased his weight off his hands and onto his leg with the cane’s support.
“Are you sure it isn’t too soon to be doing so much?” she asked as he hissed in a breath.
He headed determinedly for the screen door. “The only way my leg can get stronger is if I walk on it.”
She followed after him, as she had for nearly a dozen years in their youth. “All right, cowboy. Head ’em up, and move ’em out.”
He flashed her his killer grin, and she smiled back, letting the screen door slam behind her.
It was easier to pretend nothing was wrong. But she could already see that things were different between them. They had both been through a great deal in the years since they had last seen each other. She knew as well as he did what it felt like to live with fear, and with disappointment.
She had worked hard to put behind her what had happened the summer she was sixteen and Harvey Barnes had attacked her at the Fourth of July picnic. But even now the memory of that day haunted her.
She had been excited when Harvey, a senior who ran with the in crowd, asked her to the annual county-wide Fourth of July celebration. She’d had a crush on him for a long time, but he hadn’t given her a second glance. During the previous year, her breasts had blossomed and given her a figure most movie stars would have paid good dollars to have. A lot of boys stared, including Harvey.
She had suspected why Harvey had asked her out, but she hadn’t cared. She had just been so glad to be asked, she had accepted his invitation on the spot.
“Why would you want to go out with a guy who’s so full of himself?” Mac asked after she introduced him to Harvey. “I’d be glad to take you.” As he had previously, every year he’d been at Hawk’s Pride.
“I might as well go with one of my brothers as go with you,” she replied. “Harvey’s cool. He’s a hunk. He’s—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get the message,” he said, then teased in a singsong voice, “Pearl’s got a boyfriend, Pearl’s got a boyfriend.”
She aimed a playful fist at his stomach to shut him up, but the truth was, she was hoping the picnic date with Harvey, their first, would lead to a steady relationship.
Mac caught her wrist to protect his belly and said, “All right, go with Harvey Barnes and have a good time. Forget all about me—”
Jewel laughed and said, “That mournful face isn’t going to make any difference. I’m still going with Harvey. I’ll see you at the picnic. We just won’t spend as much time together.”
Mac looked down at her, his brow furrowed. He opened his mouth to say something and shut it again.
“What is it?” she asked, seeing how troubled he looked.
“Just don’t let him…If he does anything…If you think he’s going to…”
“What?” she asked in exasperation.
He let go of her hands to shove both of his through his hair. “If you need help, just yell, and I’ll be there.”
He had already turned to walk away when she grabbed his arm and turned him back around. “What is it you think Harvey’s going to do to me that’s so terrible?”
“He’s going to want to kiss you,” Mac said.
“I want to kiss him back. So what’s the problem?”
“Kissing’s not the problem,” Mac pointed out. “It’s what comes after that. The touching and…and the rest. Sometimes it’s not easy for a guy to stop. Not that I’m saying he’d try anything on a first date, but some guys…And with a body like yours…”
Her face felt heated from all the blood rushing to it. Over the years they had managed not to talk seriously about such intimate subjects. Mac never brought them up except in fun, and until recently she hadn’t been that interested in boys. She searched his face and found he looked as confused and awkward discussing the subject as she felt.
“How would you know?” she asked. “I mean, about it being hard to stop. Have you done it with Lou?”
His flush deepened. “You know I wouldn’t tell you that, even if I had.”
“Have you?” she persisted.
