They reached the porch, and he leaned down and kissed her lightly, keeping himself from grabbing her and kissing her the way he wanted to.He started to move away, but her hand held him.
“Don’t go,” she said.“Please don’t go.”
“I want to give you time.”
“I don’t need time.I need you.Tonight.Tomorrow.Forever.Don’t you know that yet?”
“You should have everything,” he whispered.“Everything that comes with courtship.Roses and trinkets and parties.”
“I like short courtships.And I don’t care about roses and trinkets and parties.”
He closed his eyes and bent over, letting his lips play over hers, feeling the softness, the welcome, the invitation.
“I want you to be sure,” he said painfully, his body straining toward her.After the loneliness of the past ten years, the uncertainty of the past few days, he needed her warmth, that total faith she had in him.The faith that had been so lacking in himself.
Shea smiled, a smile made so lovely in the moonlight.Luminous.Luminous and sure.And so full of love.“I am so very sure,” she whispered.“Come in with me.I need you so much.”
There was something to be said, he thought as he reached down and picked her up, for a very, very short courtship.
And a home, his first home, after all, was waiting.
Epilogue
August 1878
Jack Randall was returning today.
Shea was in the ranch house, changing Sara’s dress for the third time.Sara, at three, was always into something.Her latest adventure had been in the chicken yard, where an angry hen had knocked her into the mud.
Rafe had had to grin at the mud-caked little girl with the mischievous eyes and big, sheepish smile.Nothing daunted Sara.Particularly not the prospect of meeting her one-and-only grandparent.
Rafe wished he could regard the upcoming meeting with as cavalier an attitude.
He had not seen Randall in five years.Rafe had taken Shea to the Colorado prison for visits four times a year, but he’d always waited outside, and Shea had never questioned it.She knew it wasn’t her father as much as the idea of being back inside stone walls.To this day he kept the windows in their room wide open and still occasionally went up to the valley and stayed overnight.Shea sensed when those spells of restlessness were coming and, until the babies came, she went with him.Sometimes now they would take the children, all three of them.They would sit on the rock above the pool and watch, just as they had in the beginning.For three years the she-bear and cub had come to the pool, and then the she-bear stopped coming.Shea had worried and wondered and worried some more, but they never saw it again.
Deer would come, the fawns growing into adults, and then one day the cub brought another bear, a young female, with him.Seasons.Everything had a season.
Just as he had.Now he was a father with three active youngsters: young Clint, who was four; Sara who was three; and the baby, Megan, who was eight months old.They were Rafe’s season, just as Shea was.He loved them all desperately, too much sometimes, he feared.He didn’t want to crush them with it, but he had waited so long and found he had so much love and tenderness stored in some hidden place.
And now Jack Randall was coming back.Rafe had offered to meet him, but Randall said he wanted to come alone.He wanted to savor freedom, and no one understood that as much as Rafe did.
Little Clint came running out of the house.“Papa, I want to go riding.”
Rafe caught him and lifted him up.He was such joy, a bolt of energy and curiosity.“We have to wait on your grandpa,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because he’s been waiting a long time to see you.”
“Why hasn’t he come before?”
Rafe had known the question was coming.He and Shea had discussed it and decided not to he, never again if they could avoid it.“He couldn’t, Clint.He was in prison.”
“What’s prison?”
Rafe lifted his son up on the railing of the corral, which held a dozen horses.The Circle R was fast becoming known for its fine horses.
“You know when you do something wrong, I punish you,” Rafe said carefully.“Like going too near the horses without your mother or me with you.”
