Montana Sky

you.”
    “Are you trying to make me nervous?”
    He climbed onto the bed, straddled her, watched her blink in surprise. “Darling, I’m going to make you crazy.” He took the glass, dipped a finger in the wine, then traced it over her nipple. “I’m going to make you scream. Yeah.” He nodded slowly, repeating the process on her other breast.
    “You should be afraid. In fact, I like you being just a little afraid this time.”
    He trickled the last few drops over her belly, then set the glass aside. “I’m going to do things to you that you can’t even imagine. Things I’ve been waiting to do.”
    She swallowed hard as a new and fascinating chill ran over her skin. “I think I am afraid.” She shuddered out a breath. “But do them anyway.”

TWENTY-TWO
    I T WASN ’ T EASY TO TRACK WILLA DOWN ONCE APRIL HIT its stride, and with it the spring breeding season. As far as Tess could see, everything was focused on mating, people as well as animals. If she hadn’t known better, she would have sworn she’d caught Ham flirting with Bess. But she imagined he had been trying to wrangle a pie.
    Young Billy was eye-deep in love with some pretty little thing who worked a lunch counter in Ennis. His former liaison with Mary Anne had hit the skids, left him broken-hearted for about fifteen minutes.
    The way he strutted around, Tess could see he thought of himself as a man of the world now.
    Jim had some slap and tickle going with a cocktail waitress, and even the longtime-married Wood and Nell were exchanging winks and sly grins.
    With nothing disturbing the peace and pastoral quality of the air, everyone seemed ready to fall into a routine of work, flirtations, and giggling sex.
    There was Lily, of course, with wedding preparations in full swing. And Willa, when she stood still long enough, had a dopey grin on her face.
    It seemed to Tess that the cows were trying to keep pace with the humans. Though she couldn’t see anything particularly romantic about a man shooting bull sperm into a cow.
    She sincerely doubted the bull was thrilled with the arrangement either, but he was allowed to cover a few, just to keep him happy. And the first time Tess witnessed the coupling was enough of a shock to make her wish it her last. She refused to believe that the bull’s chosen innamorata had been mooing in sexual delight.
    She’d watched Nate and his handler breed his stallion too. She had to admit there had been something powerful, elemental, and a little frightening in that process as well. The way the stallion had trumpeted, reared, and plunged. The way the mare’s eyes had rolled in either pleasure or terror.
    She wouldn’t have called the process romantic, and it certainly hadn’t been anything to giggle about. The smells of sweat and sex and animal had been impetus enough for Tess to drag Nate off at the first decent opportunity and jump him.
    He hadn’t seemed to mind.
    Now it was another glorious afternoon, with the temperature warm enough for shirtsleeves. The sky was so big, so blue, so clear, it seemed that Montana had stolen every inch of it for itself.
    If she looked toward the mountains—as she often caught herself doing—she would see spots of color bleeding through the white. The blues and grays of rock, the deep, dark green of pine. And if the sun angled just so, a flash that was a river tumbling down fueled with snowmelt.
    She could hear the tiller running behind Adam’s house. She knew Lily was planning a garden and had cajoled Adam into turning the earth for the seedlings she’d started. Though he’d warned Lily it was too early to plant, he was indulging her.
    As, Tess mused, he always would.
    It was a rare thing, she decided, that kind of love, devotion, understanding. With Adam and Lily, it was as solid as the mountains. As often as she wrote about people, watchedthem so that she could do just that, she’d never grasped the simple and quiet power of love.
    She could write about it, make her characters fall in or out of it. But she didn’t understand it. She thought perhaps it was like this land that she’d lived on, lived with for so many months now. She had learned to value and appreciate it. But understand it? Not a bit.
    Cattle and horses dotted the hills where grass was still dingy from winter, and men worked in the mud brought on by warming weather to repair fencing, dig posts, and drive cattle to range.
    They would do it over and over again, year after year, season after season.