Dancing in the Moonlight

He watched her drive away, then wiped his greasy, muddy hands on his already grimy scrubs and hurried to his Durango, pulling out behind her.

As he passed his own driveway a moment later, he thought with longing of his warm bed and the sandwich calling his name, but he drove on, following those red taillights another five miles until she reached the entrance to the Rancho de la Luna—Moon Ranch.

When she drove her little Subaru through the gates without further mishap, he flashed his brights, then turned around to drive back toward his house. Somehow he wasn’t a bit surprised when she made no gesture of acknowledgment at his presence or his small effort to make sure she reached home safely.

Maggie had been doing her best to ignore him for a long time—just as he’d been trying equally hard to make her notice him as someone other than one of the despised Daltons.

Despite the exhaustion that had cranked up a notch now that he was alone once more, he doubted he would be able to sleep anytime soon. He drove through the dark, quiet night, his thoughts chaotic and wild.

After a dozen years Magdalena Cruz was home.

He had a sudden foreboding that his heart would never be the same.

* * *

Jake Dalton.

What kind of bad omen made him the first person she encountered on her return?

As she headed up the curving drive toward the square farmhouse her father had built with his own hands, Maggie watched in her rearview mirror as Dalton turned his shiny silver SUV around and headed back down Cold Creek Road.

Why would he be driving back to town instead of toward his family’s ranch, just past the Luna? she wondered, then caught herself. She didn’t care where the man went. What Jake Dalton did or did not do was none of her concern.

Still, she hated that he, of all people, had come to her aid. She would rather have bitten her tongue in half than ask him for help, not that he’d given her a chance. He was just like the rest of his family, arrogant, unbending and ready to bulldoze over anybody who got in their way.

She let out a breath. Of course, he had to be gorgeous.

Like the other Dalton boys, Jake had always been handsome, with dark wavy hair, intense blue eyes and the sculpted features they inherited from their mother.

The years had been extremely kind to him, she had to admit. Though it had been dark out on that wet road, his headlights had provided enough light for her to see him clearly enough.

To her chagrin, she had discovered that the boy with the dreamy good looks who used to set all the other girls in school to giggling had matured over the years into a dramatically attractive man.

Why couldn’t he have a potbelly and a receding hairline? No, he had to have compelling features, thick, lush hair and powerful muscles. She hadn’t missed how effortlessly he had changed her flat, how he had worked the car jack it had taken all her strength to muscle, as if it took no more energy than reading the newspaper.

She shouldn’t have noticed. Even if he hadn’t been Jake Dalton—the last man on the planet she would let herself be attracted to—she had no business feeling that little hitch in her stomach at the sight of a strong, good-looking man doing a little physical exertion.

Heaven knows, she didn’t want to feel that hitch. That part of her life was over now.

Had he been staring? She couldn’t be sure, it had been too dark, but she didn’t doubt it.

Step right up. Come look at the freak.

She was probably in for a lot of that in the coming weeks as she went about town. People in Pine Gulch weren’t known for their reticence or their tact. She might as well get used to being on display.

She shook away the bitter self-pity and thoughts of Jake Dalton as she pulled up in front of the two-story frame farmhouse. She had more important things to worry about right now.

The lights were off in the house and the ranch was quiet—but what had she expected when she didn’t tell her mother she was coming? It was after 2:00 and the only thing awake at this time of the night besides wandering physicians were the barn cats prowling the dark.

She should have found a hotel room for the night in Idaho Falls and waited until morning to come home. If she had, right now she would have been stretched out on some impersonal bed with what was left of her leg propped on a pillow, instead of throbbing as if she’d just rolled around in a thousand shards of glass.

She had come so close to stopping, she even started signaling to take one of the freeway exits into the city. At the last minute she had turned off her signal and veered back onto the highway, unwilling to admit defeat by giving in so close to her destination.

Maybe she hadn’t fully considered the implications of her stubbornness, though. It was thoughtless to show up in the middle of the night. She was going to scare Viviana half to death, barging in like this.

She knew her mother always kept a spare key on the porch somewhere. Maybe she could slip in quietly without waking her and just deal with everything in the morning.

She grabbed her duffel off the passenger seat and began the complicated maneuver for climbing out of the car they taught her at Walter Reed, sliding sideways in the seat so she could put the bulk of her weight on her right leg and not the prosthesis.

Bracing herself, she took a step, and those imaginary shards of glass dug deeper. The pain made her vaguely queasy but she fought it back and took another step, then another until she reached the steps to the small front porch.

Once, she would have bounded up these half-dozen steps, taking them two or three at a time. Now it was all she could do to pull herself up, inch by painful inch, grabbing hold of the railing so hard her fingers ached.

The spare key wasn’t under the cushion of either of the rockers that had graced this porch as long as she could remember, but she lifted one of the ceramic planters and found it there.

As quietly as possible she unlocked the door and closed it behind her with only a tiny snick.

Inside, the house smelled of cinnamon coffee and corn tortillas and the faint scent of Viviana’s favorite Windsong perfume. Once upon a time that Windsong would have been joined by Abel’s Old Spice but the last trace of her father had faded years ago.

Still, as she drew the essence of home into her lungs, she felt as if she was eleven years old again, rushing inside after school with a dozen stories to tell. She was awash in emotions at being home, in the relief and security that seemed to wrap around her here, a sweet and desperately needed comfort even with the slightly bitter edge that seemed to underlie everything in her life right now.

She stood there for several moments, eyes closed and a hundred childhood memories washing through her like spring runoff, until she felt herself sway with exhaustion and had to reach for the handrail of the staircase that rose up from the entryway.

She had to get off her feet. Or her foot, anyway. The prosthesis on the other leg was rubbing and grinding against her wound—she hated the word stump, though that’s what it was.

Whatever she called it, she hadn’t yet developed sufficient calluses to completely protect the still-raw tissue.

The stairs to her bedroom suddenly looked insurmountable, but she shouldered her bag and gripped the railing. She had only made it two or three steps before the entry was flooded with light and she heard an exclamation of shock behind her.

She twisted around and found her mother standing in the entryway wearing the pink robe Maggie had given her for Mother’s Day a few years earlier.

“Lena? Madre de Dios!”

An instant later her mother rushed up the stairs and wrapped her arms around Maggie, holding her so tightly Maggie had to drop the duffel and hold on just to keep her balance.

At only a little over five feet tall, Viviana was six inches shorter than Maggie but she made up for her lack of size by the sheer force of her personality. Just now the vibrant, funny woman she adored was crying and mumbling a rapid-fire mix of Spanish and English that Maggie could barely decipher.

It didn’t matter. She was just so glad to be here. She had needed this, she thought as she rested her chin on Viviana’s slightly graying hair. She hadn’t been willing to admit it but she had desperately needed the comfort of her mother’s arms.

Viviana had come to Walter Reed when Maggie first returned from Afghanistan and had stayed for those first hellish two weeks after her injury while she had tried to come to terms with what had been taken from her in a moment. Her mother had been there for the first of the long series of surgeries to shape the scar tissue of her stump and had wanted to stay longer during her intensive rehab and the many weeks of physical therapy that came later.

But Maggie’s pride had insisted she convince her mother to return to Pine Gulch, to Rancho de la Luna.

She was thirty years old, for heaven’s sake. She should be strong enough to face her future without her mama by her side.

“What is this about?” Viviana finally said through her tears. “I think I hear a car outside and come to see who is here and who do I find but my beautiful child? You want to put your mother in an early grave, niña, sneaking around in the middle of the night?”

“I’m sorry. I should have called to make sure it was all right.”