“Don’t be like that,” Winnie said, her voice gentle. “I won’t tell. Ever. Honest.”
Keely relaxed. She drew in a breath, watching the creek bubble over rocks. “It doesn’t hurt anything, what I feel. He’ll never know. And it helps me to understand what it might be like to love a man—even if that love is never returned. It’s a taste of something I can never have, that’s all.”
Winnie frowned. “What do you mean? Of course you’ll be loved one day! Keely, you’re only nineteen. Your whole life is ahead of you!”
Keely looked at her friend, and her dark eyes were soft and sad. “Not that way, it isn’t. I won’t ever marry.”
“But one day…”
She shook her head. “No.”
Winnie bit her lower lip. “When you’re a little older, it might be different,” she began. “Keely, you’re nineteen. Boone is thirty. That’s a big age difference, and he thinks about things like that. His fiancée was only a year younger than he was. He said that people should never marry unless they’re the same age.”
“Why?”
Winnie sighed. “I’ve never talked about it much, but our mother was twelve years younger than dad. He died a broken man because she ran away with his younger brother. He always said he made a major mistake by marrying someone from another generation. It was just too many years between them. They had nothing in common.”
Keely felt heartsick for the family. “Is your mother still alive?”
She bit her lip. “We…don’t know,” she said. “We’ve never tried to find her or our uncle. They married, after the divorce, and moved to Montana. Neither one of them ever tried to contact us again.”
“That’s so sad.”
“It made Boone bitter. Well, that and then his fiancée cutting out on him. He doesn’t have a high opinion of women.”
“You can’t blame him, really,” Keely had to admit. She patted her horse’s neck. “It’s sad, isn’t it, that we’re both too young for the men we care about?”
“Only in their minds,” Winnie returned. “But we can always change their opinions. We just have to find an angle. One that works.”
Keely laughed. “Doesn’t that sound easy?”
Winnie grimaced. “Not really.” She tugged on the reins, backing her horse out of the creek. Keely followed suit. “Let’s talk about something more cheerful,” Winnie said on the way back to the ranch. “Are you coming to the big charity dance?”
Keely shook her head. “I’d like to, even without a date, but both my junior bosses are going, and so is our senior tech. I have to be on call.”
“That’s awful!”
“It’s fair, though. I was off last year.”
“I remember. Last year you stayed home.”
Keely studied the pommel as the leather squeaked under the steady motion of the horse’s body. “Nobody asked me to go with them.”
“You don’t encourage men,” Winnie pointed out.
Keely smiled sadly. “What for?” she asked. “Any man who asked me would have been second best. I don’t want to get involved with anyone.”
Winnie had always been curious about Keely’s odd private life. She wondered what had happened to the other woman to leave her so alone. “It’s just a dance,” she pointed out. “You don’t have to agree to marry the man when he takes you home.”
Keely burst out laughing. “You’re terrible!” she choked.
“Just pointing out an obvious fact,” came the amused reply.
“Anyway, I’ll be working. You go and have enough fun for both of us.”
“Any man who took me would be second choice, too,” she reminded her friend. “The difference is, I want to go so I can rub my date in Kilraven’s face.”
“He won’t go,” Keely murmured.
