The Last Chance Ranch (33 page)

He watched the quadrangle for a long time. As usual, everyone had thrown themselves into the preparations for the fair—a great many of them his students. He had been among them until an hour ago, when the sense of his own isolation had driven him upstairs to this quiet room. Once, he had enjoyed the bustle and noise, but that had been back in the days when he’d had someone to share it with. Now the fair seemed like just another obligation to fulfill.

Obligations. He eyed the stack of final exams on his desk, but the thought of wading through them held absolutely no appeal.

Picking up a pair of binoculars he kept in the office to examine the birds that often sang outside the window, he scanned the high branches and was rewarded with the sight of a shiny black crow alighting briefly on a branch before it swooped down toward a knot of discarded food on the sidewalk. Alexander watched the bird descend almost dizzily, snag the food and sail away.

Through the binoculars, he caught sight of a group of his students who were singing a rousing—and no doubt bawdy—song in front of a hedge. He smiled to himself. Farther on was a fellow professor, sprawled against a tree, eating chicken. A pair of dark-haired children chased one another in the grass. Handsome lads, he thought distractedly, moving his binoculars a little farther.

He paused as a woman came into view, no doubt the mother of the two little boys. The vivid yellow of her blouse caught his eye, a yellow impossibly at odds with the cloud of pale red hair skimming her bared shoulders. Those colors should never have worked together, he thought.

But they did. He admired the bold combination for a moment, and found his eyes sweeping the flawless, milk white of the woman’s skin. Generous breasts and hips balanced the roundness of her arms. As he watched, she laughed robustly, then reached out to snag one of the children, affectionately tumbling him into her lap to nibble his neck and tickle his ribs. There was a vividness about the woman, about the vibrant love spilling out from her that stirred Alexander deeply.

As the small boy giggled helplessly against his mother, Alexander felt a wistfulness move through him, a pinch of hunger he’d not felt in a long time. He watched the woman kiss her child almost reverently, then hold out an arm to the other boy, who sank next to her, his face flushed.

All three of them simply sat there for a moment, spent with the festival, dappled by the speckled shade that fell through the branches of an oak tree. Alexander felt the restless stirring within him grow and ache for an instant before he could push it away. He threw down his glasses and turned away from the window, shedding the mantle he’d worn for the festival in favor of his street clothes. There was no restlessness, no pain that a good round of combat in the dojo couldn’t cure.

One

E
sther Lucas was running late. As usual. This afternoon, it was for a typical reason. She’d been unable to find the boys’
gis
, which turned out to be exactly where she’d put them—folded in a neat stack on the dryer. It was the towels folded on top of them that had thrown her off.

Now she checked her watch and hurried the boys along. “Come on, guys. This isn’t a city hike. We have to get to the dojo.”

“Sensei said it’s important to be on time,” Jeremy, her youngest reminded her.

“I know.”
Sensei said
had preceded a solid third of his sentences in the past few weeks. Most of them were the kinds of things a mother loved to hear her children mouth, but they all mainly revolved around a sense of orderliness and balance that Esther had never mastered.

“We’re almost there,” she said. “See?” She pointed to a small, unassuming building sandwiched between a photographer’s studio and a quilting shop. A sign in the window announced the form taught, Shotokan Karate, and the instructor’s name, Ryohe Kobayashi, in Roman letters. The lovely calligraphy of Japan followed, presumably announcing the same information.

The boys slowed as they reached the door and entered the dojo with a dignity and hush that always surprised her. Esther tagged behind, scowling at the bank of heavy clouds that hung over the mountains. Ordinarily the precious hour the children spent at their lessons was the only time she had to herself in a day. She used it to stroll along the streets nearby, sometimes stopping for a cup of tea or a sweet while she waited.

Today, the impending rain made that impossible.

Just inside the doors of the studio was a bank of chairs and Esther settled in one, desultorily taking out a book to read while she waited, thinking with longing of the piece of pie she’d intended to treat herself to before the clouds had ruined her plan.

A pretty Asian girl sat behind a low counter to Esther’s right, tallying numbers on an adding machine. She smiled at Esther’s sigh.

Off to the left through an archway, was the main room. Long and wide, it consumed the rest of the space in the dojo except for a few smaller rooms toward the back.

Her wandering gaze caught on the figure of a man at her end of the dojo going through elaborate, stylized exercises. It was tai chi, Esther realized after a moment; the same form her friend Abe practiced.

But Abe had never looked like this.

The man wore only a loose pair of trousers, leaving his chest and feet bare. Tall and lean, with thick, unruly dark hair and a beard, his movements sent the long muscles in his arms and back rippling with the sleek grace of a jungle cat. His skin was tawny, his nose blunt and broad, and his hair curled over his well-shaped head like a mane.

A mane, Esther thought. Yes. He was no ordinary jungle cat. A quickening shivered through her middle. He looked like a lion—king of all the lesser beasts, master of jaguars and tigers and foolish monkeys. It was in the arrogant tilt of his proud head, in the intelligence of his wide brow.

The quickening rippled outward from her belly, into her limbs. Who was he? She knew she had never seen him here before.

As he shifted once more, the light from a window high on the wall spilled over him, showing tiny strands of silver in the glossy mahogany hair. He wore a neatly trimmed beard, and it had been heavily painted with the same silver. Esther inclined her head with a small frown, sure he’d not yet seen forty. She wondered if genetics or tragedy had given him that early frost.

Absently she thought she should quit staring. But somehow it seemed as silly to turn her eyes away from the natural splendor of his male form as it would be to turn away from the brawny shoulders of the mountains. She let herself admire him until his set was complete. He paused, shaking his hands loosely. The heavy canvas trousers rode his hipbones, showing a lean, tanned stomach with a line of dark hair running over the muscles as if for emphasis. Another quiver ran over her nerves.

Then he met her gaze and for an instant, she was riveted. It was an unflinchingly masculine face, rendered in clean, bold strokes. But she was snared less by the face itself than by something strangely compelling in his unsmiling expression. There was incandescence in his eyes, and a definite sense of recognition.

As she watched, a strange flash of bleakness bled everything else from his eyes, giving Esther a fleeting glimpse of a hopelessness so vast she could barely fathom it.

Abruptly he bent down to pick up a short canvas robe. As he walked toward the back of the room, carefully skirting the mat where the children were practicing, he shrugged into the robe. He didn’t look back.

Esther touched her breastbone, feeling her heart threading below. A blast of rain struck the window behind her and she started, whirling to look at the gray sheeting into the glass. The bleakness in the man’s eyes had looked just that color, she thought, and decided that tragedy had silvered his beard.

* * *

Several days later, Esther washed shelves in the organic and natural foods shop she ran from the front of her old home. The alternative radio station was playing a Jelly Roll Morton tune and the fragrance of a freshly brewed pot of her special herb tea wafted through the sunny, plant-filled room. Expertly she analyzed the scent as she dusted antique tins that held plastic bags of the same mixture of rose hips, hibiscus, chamomile and various other beneficial herbs.

“Too much hibiscus this time,” she told the Victorian face on the ornate box.

The bell over the door rang and Abe Smith limped in. “Caught you talking to your tins again,” he teased with a shake of his head.

Esther grinned ruefully. “You always do.” She watched him carefully, a tall man with thick dark hair he wore too long and the remains of an ache-ravaged childhood on his face. He moved stiffly, each step carefully measured. “Bad day?” she asked gently.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I need some of that bath stuff you make for me.”

“Well, you just sit yourself down. I’ll make you a cup of tea to drink while you wait.”

“Real sugar.”

“No problem.” She shot him an amused glance. The two of them shared a love of white sugar, although Esther tolerated honey in her tea when purists were shopping. “I’ve got some glazed doughnuts in the kitchen if you want one,” she added in a conspiratorial tone.

He shook his head. “Not today, thanks.”

When he settled with his tea, she measured herbs for his bath preparation. In spite of the fact that she’d found the recipe in a sixteenth-century text on herbal lore, it was hardly an exotic mixture—ordinary garden herbs.

“Where’s Jeremy?” Abe asked, sipping his tea.

“Outside, no doubt killing dragons or scaling mountains or slaying the enemy with his superior brand of martial arts.”

“What a kid.”

“Right,” Esther replied dryly. “What a kid. He’s a daredevil with all the caution of a kamakazi.”

“But he’s got a great imagination.”

“Sure. All I have to do as a mother is see that he makes it to adulthood in one piece so that he can do something with that imagination.” She rolled her eyes. “I have my doubts some days.”

Abe wiggled his nose, a sure indication he was about to tease her. “Great soldier material.”

“Not if I can help it,” she replied firmly and frowned at him. “Honestly, how can you even tease me about that?” He was so full of shrapnel he could barely walk some days.

“Once a Marine, always a Marine.” He lifted a heavy eyebrow, amusement in his dark eyes. “And unlike soldier boy out there in the backyard, for me it was all in pursuit of the admiration of women.” His nose wiggled again. “It worked for all the guys in the movies.”

She gave him the sealed plastic bag of herbs. “Good thing the good Lord invented women,” she said with a wry smile. “Otherwise, who would heal you?”

“We’d figure something out,” he said.

Esther grinned. They’d met when Esther was eight, Abe almost thirteen, and had been friends ever since. “How are you, really?”

“I’m okay, Mom. Just a little stiff.”

“All right. I’m going to go check on Jeremy, then.” But as she was turning toward the back of the house, the bell rang over the door. For an instant, she listened to see if she could hear her son’s voice. It came to her faintly, full of the undertones of command he used in playing his games. Reassured, she turned to greet her new customer.

Him.

The lion man from the dojo stood just inside the door, looking no less powerful than he had last week. Instead of loose trousers and bare feet, he wore a hand-tailored cotton shirt, open at the collar, and jeans that fit his lean thighs well. Light from the windows haloed his thick, curly hair and outlined the breadth of his shoulders. In his big, brown hands he held a white Panama hat.

For an instant, all she could do was look at him in surprise, and he seemed as stunned as she. When the silence between them stretched to an almost unbearable length, Esther finally broke it.

“Hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”

Abe jumped up. “Esther, this is a friend of mine from the dojo, Alexander Stone.”

The man extended his hand. “Hello,” he said. “Abe has been telling me about your expertise with herbs.” The voice was richly textured, as deep as a summer midnight, the edges and vowels of his words clipped with a British accent. Esther felt it flow over her spine as his strong, callused hand grasped hers firmly.

Rattled, she shot Abe a glance. “He has?”

Alexander dropped her hand. “I’ve been looking for someone to help teach a summer class. Abe said you’re the most knowledgeable herbalist in Boulder.”

“He overestimates me,” Esther said with a smile. His eyes, she thought, were a very unusual shade of blue—a clear aquamarine that made her think of marbles.

“You’ve got the right woman,” Abe interjected from his seat by the tea table. “Esther is about to be modest and mild, but she’s the best there is.”

Again she was about to protest, but a single scream pierced the air, cutting through the sound of the radio and their conversation. Without an instant’s hesitation, Esther turned and ran for the backyard, her heart pounding in fear. Jeremy was, in addition to being an eccentric little daredevil, very loud, and he was known to shriek in frustration. But the scream she heard had been one of pain and fear.

As she slammed out the back door, she cursed herself inwardly. Her instincts had told her to check on Jeremy a moment ago. She should have listened—they’d proved true more than once. If anything serious had happened to him—He lay beneath the crab apple tree unmoving, flat on his back. Esther raced toward him and kneeled in the grass. “Jeremy!” she cried.

He opened his eyes and coughed, then promptly burst into tears.

“Are you all right, honey?”

“I fell!” he wailed and sat up to throw himself into his mother’s arms. The tears were as much a defense from the wrath of the scolding he knew was coming as in fear.

She hugged him for a moment, then loosened his grip around her neck to look at his face. “How many times have I told you to stay out of that tree?”

“But, Mommy—”

“Not a word, Jeremy. You could have broken your neck.” She paused to let the meaning sink in. “You can’t watch any television for the rest of the week.”

His head dropped, the dark curls tumbling forward in glossy disarray, and his plump lower lip popped out. “Okay,” he said in a tragic voice. Then he realized the consequences of his actions. “That means I can’t watch Sesame Street!” He wept, and threw himself against her chest again.