High Country Baby. Joanna Sims

      Clint grabbed her by the ankle, pulled her shoe off and bent her leg backward so he could get a closer look at her right heel in the firelight.

      “Hey!” Taylor tugged against him. “Hey!”

      “Hold still.” The cowboy issued an order.

      Clint pulled a knife out of a small sheath on his belt. When Taylor caught a glimpse of the silver blade, she yanked her ankle out of Clint’s hand and pushed backward away from him.

      “Don’t even think about it!” she snapped at him.

      He had touched her smelly, sweaty foot! She didn’t like people touching her feet. She didn’t get pedicures because she didn’t want anyone touching her feet. She left her socks on during a massage because she didn’t want anyone touching her feet!

      “It needs to be popped.” Clint waved the blade quickly over the flames of the fire.

      “No it doesn’t. Everyone knows you aren’t supposed to pop a blister.”

      “We need to pop this one.” Clint rested his forearm on his bended knee. “It looks like it’s on its way to being infected. We’ll pop it, drain it—I don’t doubt you’ve got all manner of first aid in that mountain of stuff you packed...” He nodded toward her supplies. “Pour a little alcohol on it, let it dry out overnight—you’ll feel a heck of a lot better.”

      The man looked as though he’d spent most of his life healing something—she was inclined to believe him.

      “Are you sure?” Taylor asked.

      He nodded his response, so she said, “Go ahead then—but do it quick, please.”

      “It’s done.” The cowboy wiped the blade of his knife onto the leg of his jeans.

      Taylor opened her eyes and craned her neck to the side to get a look at her heel. “Huh—that didn’t even hurt.”

      She told Clint where he could find her first-aid kit. Popping the blister hadn’t hurt, but draining it and then dousing it with alcohol hurt like all get-out. The cowboy was clinical and unsympathetic. He expected her to sit there, quietly—take it like a woman. It was a silent challenge that she decided to accept. She could only imagine what this man thought of her—a soft, socialite city girl without the faintest clue about how to make it in the Montana wilderness. She was a city girl, and proud of it, but she wasn’t soft.

      The procedure was done and the cowboy returned to his side of the fire. He began to play a harmonica that he had retrieved from his saddlebag. He wasn’t just producing random sounds—he really knew how to play. He filled the cool night air with a slow string of pretty notes and those notes blended with the crackling of the fire and the sound of an owl in the distance.

      It was at that moment when Taylor felt as if she had really arrived in Montana. No, she wasn’t alone on the journey. But it didn’t seem to matter anymore. The experience she was having now, sitting by a campfire, beneath a blackened sky dotted with a smattering of white stars, listening to a real cowboy play the harmonica, made her feel like woman of the wilderness. An adventurer in her own right.

      Taylor stared into the fire, watching one particular piece of wood glow bright orange right before it broke apart and crumbled into smaller bits of red embers. She didn’t have the need to fill the silence with aimless talk as she normally would, which was helpful, because it took energy to talk and she didn’t have much of that to spare. Clint would take a break every now and again from playing the harmonica and she would catch the flash of something out of the corner of her eye. Curious, she glanced up to see Clint take a quick swig of something from a bottle. He was leaning down, his head turned away from her. He didn’t want her to see him drinking, but she already had.

      “What’s in the bottle?”

      Clint twisted the cap down and tucked the nearly empty bottle back into his saddlebag.

      “Tequila,” he told her reluctantly.

      “Enough to share?”

      Those weren’t the next words he had expected to hear. Taylor Brand didn’t strike him as the type of woman who would drink anything straight from a bottle, much less cheap tequila. Clint tilted his chin up enough so he could see her face beneath the brim of his hat. In the firelight, the natural prettiness of Taylor’s oval face caught his attention for the first time. She wasn’t model pretty, but she had the kind of face that a man could look at for the rest of his life. And, he was a man, so he had noticed that Taylor had a curvy body, on the thicker side, with round hips, a smaller waist and larger than average breasts. He preferred women who looked as though they wouldn’t blow over in a windstorm. Other than the fact that she was as city as a person could be, Taylor Brand was his type of woman.

      Clint pulled the bottle out of his saddlebag, twisted off the cap and stretched his arm to bridge the space between them. When Taylor took the bottle from his hand, he saw the flash of a large, round diamond and a platinum band on the ring finger of her left hand. Now, what was a married woman like Taylor doing trying to ride the Continental Divide by herself? When Brock had assigned him to this task, he’d been too angry and too hungover to think, much less consider anything from Taylor’s point of view. But even though there was part of him that was curious, he’d discovered early on in life that it was best to mind his own business.

      Taylor moved the bottle farther away from her face, then a little closer, so she could read the label. She really needed to get her eyes checked when she got back to Chicago. She could read the larger letters on the bottle, but the smaller letters were a chore to decipher.

      “Corazon Blanco...white heart.” She read the label aloud. Christopher had always insisted on using Gran Patron on the rare occasion they had hosted a margarita party together.

      She enjoyed a frozen margarita, light on the alcohol, but she had never taken a shot before. All of her friends would be shocked to see her drinking straight tequila from the bottle. But wasn’t that exactly what this trip was about? Getting out of her rut?

      Taylor used the tail of her shirt to thoroughly clean the outside and inside lip of the bottle. Then she brought it up to her lips and tried to pour the clear liquid into her mouth without touching the glass. She titled the bottle a bit too far and a large swig of the clear liquid spilled onto her tongue and slipped down her throat. Taylor started to cough and her body lurched forward, chin tucked, eyes watering as if she were crying. She waved the bottle at Clint so he would take it from her. Her tongue, her gums, her lips, her throat—they all burned. The bitter taste of the tequila made her want to gag. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and shook her head several times after she managed to get the coughing under control.

      “Yuck!” Taylor finally managed to get one word out.

      Clint took a mouthful of the tequila, sat back and watched the show. Taylor’s face was scrunched up into a sourpuss and she was wiping her eyes every couple of seconds. The woman clearly could not handle her tequila. When she gave her critique of his drink of choice, it made him smile.

      “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude,” Taylor said apologetically in a raspy voice. “But that’s repulsive.”

      Clint held the bottle up to the firelight so he could see how much of the tequila was left in the bottle. He swirled the liquid around for a moment before he decided that there wasn’t enough to leave for later. In one long tug on the bottle, he drank the rest of it as though it was water. He’d drunk tequila for most of his life—his father had given him his first taste when he was nine. It used to burn going down; these days he didn’t feel the burn until it hit his stomach. That burn in his stomach reminded him that he was alive and it was the sensation he craved. It was a sensation he’d grown to need.

      “I admit—” the cowboy stuck the empty bottle into his saddlebag “—it takes some gettin’ used to...”

      “I don’t know why anyone would want to get used to that.” Taylor wiped her tongue on her sleeve.

      Clint smiled a quick smile