“Fifteen plus three equals twenty!”
No one corrected his arithmetic.
Starlight shimmered over the grassy field to his left. The grass remained green.
But the wild flowers were gone.
He lost all awareness of time as his stallion ambled through the black night.
Thoughts of his baby pulled at his mind.
Memories of its mother tugged at his heart.
He stopped Secret and dismounted. Mulberry branches swayed above him. Glancing up at them, he wondered what their scientific name was.“Mullinas berrisinium,”he guessed.
His head bowed low, he kicked at pebbles as he walked circles around Secret.
When dawn whispered through the sky, he was still walking around his horse, but there were no more pebbles for him to kick.
Bewilderment sat in his mind like a rock, too heavy to move, too large to see past.
He stopped in front of Secret’s face. “What would I do with a baby, anyway?” he asked the stallion. “I’ll be so busy raising horses, I won’t have time to raise a child. What the hell is the matter with me? I don’t need some dumb kid tagging along after me!”
He kicked at dirt and watched it fly over Secret’s leg. “And it’ll probably be a girl,” he muttered. “I’ve taken care of women for forever and a day, and I’ll be damned if I need another one to take care of.”
He shoved his fingers through his hair. “I bet she’ll go back to Boston,” he muttered, staring into his steed’s huge black eyes. “She won’t stay in Texas because she’ll be afraid I’ll find her. She’ll wire her rich sister and brother-in-law, they’ll send her another trunk full of gold, and she’ll head east. And where she goes, my baby goes.”
He turned in the dirt and glanced at the pink and yellow horizon. Threads of blue wove through the pink and yellow, and he decided the sky resembled a pastel baby blanket.
He tried to visualize his child. First, he saw a little person with black hair and big brown eyes. Then he saw one with golden hair and blue eyes. He saw dark skin, and pale skin. He saw the child riding a horse; the child peering into a microscope.
He couldn’t understand his own child. Couldn’t imagine him or her, no matter how hard he tried.
But he could see its mother as if she stood right before him.
Melted butter. Her hair. Flowing, soft, warm, and fragrant. “And your eyes,” he whispered into the early morning breeze. “The color of tree bark. A well-worn saddle. Of whiskey.”
He saw her lips. Parted. Shining because she’d licked them. “Pink as Secret’s tongue. As boiled gulf shrimp. Pink as dawn,” he murmured.
Secret’s soft nickers floated around him.Secret.Soon he’d have thousands of Secrets. Horses that could reach a full gallop within seconds and stop on a dime. He’d live in his huge ranch house, look out over his twenty-five thousand acres of land, and know he was one of the wealthiest men in all of Texas.
Quite a feat for a young man who had dared to reach for a dream. In only a short time he would turn the fantasy into reality.
Nodding to himself, he took a deep breath of air and satisfaction, stuffed his hands into his pockets, and winced.
Something sharp pricked his right thumb. He pinched the object between his fingers and withdrew it from his pocket.
The pink and yellow glimmers of dawn struck the bloodred depths of ruby and fragile chains of gold.
He stared at the heart-shaped ruby, the dainty gold strings, and he remembered the pale slender throat against which it had once gleamed.
Something pulled at his heart again. Tenderly but insistently.
He closed his eyes. In the darkness he heard her.
Back in the fifteenth century, the heartstring was believed to be a nerve that sustained the heart. Presently the expression is used to describe deep emotion and affection, and one is said to feel a tug at the heart when so touched.
He stared down at the pin again, seeing a diamond in the middle of the ruby. Strange, he’d never noticed the diamond before.
