High Country Baby. Joanna Sims

secured the horses in a place where they were still visible from below and then started the twisty, rocky trip down to the lake. She lost her footing several times, slipping on loose rocks. She had to break her fall with her hand on one occasion, so her wrist was throbbing and the palm of her hand was scraped, but reaching the edge of the pristine lake was worth the mild damage to her body.

      Clint stood away from her, his thoughts a complete enigma behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses. Taylor stood at the lake’s edge, the ice-blue water lapping close to the toes of her barely used boots. She closed her eyes and listened. She listened to her own breath. She listened to a bird’s call in the distance. She listened to her heart. The day she had thought would never come had, indeed, arrived.

      She opened her eyes to look down at the engagement ring and matching wedding band she still wore on her left ring finger. Christopher had planned such a romantic proposal the night he had given her this nearly flawless, colorless two-carat round stone. It had been everything a pragmatic, yet still romantic twenty-two-year-old could wish for in a proposal. He had arranged for private dining at her favorite restaurant. He’d had her serenaded by a classical guitarist. They danced and laughed and then he got down on one knee, took the shaking fingers of her left hand and asked her to marry him.

      She couldn’t wait for him to slide that ring onto her finger. It was, of course, a very large stone set in platinum and purchased from Tiffany. It was bigger than she had wanted—more than she had needed—but the appearance of success had always been more important to Christopher than it had been to her. And she knew that her mom, who often didn’t approve of her choice in clothing or hairstyle, approved of Christopher, and she would definitely approve of the engagement ring.

      In her mind, without vocalizing the word, she said, Okay.

      She tugged on the rings, but her fingers were swollen and they wouldn’t budge.

      Clint wanted to give Taylor her privacy—he wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box at times, but even he could tell she was trying to have some sort of moment. When he saw her fighting to get the rings off her finger without any success, and wanting to begin the trek back to the ranch as soon as possible, he intervened.

      “Put your hand in the water.”

      That was a great idea. She had been so fixated on trying to pry the rings free, she hadn’t considered that simple and pretty obvious solution. After she submerged her hand in the frigid water for a few minutes, the rings slipped right off.

      “Hey!” Taylor smiled spontaneously at Clint. “It worked.”

      Clint was struck by that smile. Taylor’s face, which he had once dismissed as pretty-ish, was transformed when she smiled. She had charming dimples on each creamy, plump cheek, her teeth were white and straight, and the smile drew attention to the fullness of her light pink lips. Clint tipped his hat to her as a way of saying “you’re welcome.” She had married Christopher soon after graduate school, so she had worn these rings for most of her adult life. She had wondered if her finger would feel naked without them. It did.

      Taylor gave the rings, cupped in the palm of her hand, one last look before she curled her fingers tightly around them, drew back her arm as if she was about to throw a baseball and prepared to hurl them as hard and as far as she could into the lake.

      “Hey, now! Whoa, little lady!” she heard Clint exclaim as he grabbed her wrist to stop her. “I ain’t no jewelry expert, but those look like they could be worth a pretty penny.”

      Taylor tugged her wrist out of his fingers with a frown. “My marriage is over, so they aren’t worth anything to me anymore.”

      “If they’re real, they could be worth a whole heck of a lot to somebody,” the cowboy told her in a sharp voice. “There’s some folks who could live off them rings for a year or two, I bet.”

      “Those rings...” Taylor muttered the correction to his English. She opened the palm of her hand and stared at the rings that she had worn with such pride for so many years. They only made her feel sad now and she wanted to be done with them. Yet, Clint was right—they were worth a lot of money. She was a spoiled woman, yes, that was true, but she had never been a wasteful one. Why couldn’t she pawn them and give the proceeds to charity?

      Taylor stared for a second longer at the rings before she made her decision. Wordlessly, she tucked them into her pocket for safekeeping.

      Taylor met Clint’s eyes. “I’m ready to go back.”

      The cowboy squinted at her through a thin veil of white cigarette smoke. She waved the smoke away from her face as she walked by him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Clint put the partially smoked cigarette out on the bottom of his boot, and then clench the butt between his teeth.

      Instead of taking the lead, as she expected, Clint followed her. It was ridiculous for vanity to rear its head on a rocky hike up a steep hill, but the entire time, she couldn’t stop fixating on the fact that her derriere, which had expanded considerably over the last year, was right at Clint’s eye level. He couldn’t avoid staring at it if he tried. Poor man.

      “Careful, now.”

      She hadn’t been concentrating on her foot placement.She stumbled, slipped backward, and the cowboy caught her with his hands on her rear end—one hand for each butt cheek.

      Taylor brushed his hands away, jerked the tail of her shirt downward and pressed on.

      “Sorry,” she said without looking at him.

      Humiliating. She hated her middle-aged spread, especially the widening and dropping of her hind end. She had never been a stick-thin person, not even as a teen, but she had always liked her backside. Now—it looked so big and old.

      The last part of the climb, the steepest part, where she had to climb with her hands supporting her weight, Clint took the lead. He bullied his way up the steep incline until he reached flat ground. He waited for her—he watched out for her. But he let her navigate the last part of the climb on her own terms. Right at the top, and right when she thought that she was about to beat the hill, she lost her footing again; she fell forward and started to slide downward as though she was on a kiddie slide. She felt Clint’s hand on her wrist. Their eyes met and she gave him the nod to let go so she could finish the climb on her own.

      Once on safe footing, she looked back at the lake. She hadn’t thrown the rings into the lake with dramatic flare as she had envisioned, but it really felt like the divorce was final. Truthfully, Christopher had let her go long before the marriage had ended. And now, finally, she was moving on, too.

      “If we start back right away, we can camp in the same spot.” Clint took his position on Honey’s right side to stop her from moving while Taylor used a boulder as a mounting block.

      “I’m not going back to the ranch.”

      Clint mounted his horse and took it upon himself, without her objection, to lead Easy. Once he was settled in the saddle, he rode up beside her. “No?”

      “No.”

      Clint rested his arm across the saddle horn, his mouth frowning. “Just how far are you planning on goin’?”

      “Two weeks in, two weeks out.”

      “A month.”

      Honey danced to the side, away from his horse. Taylor circled back around so she could face him and finish the conversation.

      “My uncle didn’t tell you.”

      It took all of his self-control not to say something he would regret. Hank hadn’t bothered to tell him, and neither had his stepbrother. Just like Brock. Why had Clint thought that anything would be different between them after a five-year break? If he didn’t need the money so badly, he’d let Taylor have her way and send her packing on her own. But he was buried in debt, his truck needed an engine rebuild, creditors were hounding him and his cell phone was shut off. He couldn’t get back to the rodeo without money for the entry fees. He was flat broke and flat stuck.

      “No