He backed up, and for the first time she saw how much he needed the cane. His face turned white around the mouth with pain, and he swore under his breath.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“No problem,” he said. “Leg’s almost as good as new. Figure I’ll start jogging tomorrow.”
“Jogging?”
He gave her a sheepish look. “So maybe I’ll start out walking. Want to go with me?”
She daintily pointed the toe of her once-injured leg in his direction. “Walking isn’t my forte. How about a horseback ride?”
He shook his head. “Gotta walk. Need the exercise to get back into shape. Come with me. My limp is worse than yours, so you won’t have any trouble keeping up. Besides, it would give us a chance to catch up on what we’ve both been doing the past six years. Please come.”
She wrinkled her nose.
“Pretty please with sugar on it?”
It was something she had taught him to say if he really wanted a woman to do something. She gave in to the smile and let her lips curve with the delight she felt. “All right, you hopeless romantic. I’ll walk with you, but it’ll have to be early because I’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow.”
“Figured I’d go early to beat the heat,” he said. “Six-thirty?”
“Make it six, and you’ve got a deal.” She reached out a hand, and Mac shook it.
The electric shock that raced up her arm was disturbing. It took an effort to keep the frown from her face. This wasn’t supposed to happen. She wasn’t supposed to be physically attracted to Mac Macready. They were just good friends. Yeah, and horses come in purple and orange.
She closed the bathroom door and sank onto the edge of the tub. She had always thought Mac was cute, but he had matured into a genuine hunk. No problem. She would handle the attraction the way she had from the beginning, by thinking of him as a brother.
But he wasn’t her brother. He was a very attractive, very available man. Who once had been—still was?—her best friend.
She clung to that thought, which made it easier to keep their relationship in perspective. It was much more important to have a friend like Mac than a boyfriend.
JEWEL REPEATED THAT SENTENCE like a litany the next morning at 5:55 when Mac showed up in the kitchen dressed in Nikes and black running shorts and nothing else. The kitchen door was open and through the screen she was aware of flies buzzing and the lowing of cattle. A steady, squeaking sound meant that her youngest brother, Colt, hadn’t gotten around to oiling the windmill beside the stock pond. But those distractions weren’t enough to keep her from ogling Mac’s body.
A wedge of golden hair on his chest became a line of soft down as it reached his navel and disappeared beneath his shorts. She consciously forced her gaze upward.
Mac’s tousled, collar-length hair was a sun-kissed blond, and his eyes were as bright as the morning sky. He hadn’t shaved, and the overnight beard made him look both dangerous and sexy.
Without the concealing T-shirt and jeans, she could see the sinewy muscles in his shoulders and arms, the washboard belly and the horrible mishmash of scars on his left leg. He leaned heavily on the cane.
She poured him a bowl of cornflakes and doused them with milk. “Eat. You’re running late.”
“Oh, that I were running,” he said. “I’m afraid walking is the best I can do.” He hobbled across the redbrick tile floor to the small wooden table, settled himself in the ladder-back chair opposite her and began consuming cereal at an alarming rate.
“What’s that you’re wearing?” he asked.
She tugged at her bulky, short-sleeved sweatshirt, dusted off her cutoff jeans and readjusted her hair over her shoulders. “Some old things.”
“Gonna be hot in that,” he said between bites.
But the sweatshirt disguised her Bountiful Bosom, which was more important than comfort. “Hungry?” she inquired, her chin resting on her hand as she watched him eat ravenously.
“I missed supper last night.”
She had checked his bedroom and found him asleep at suppertime and hadn’t disturbed him. He had slept all through the afternoon and evening. “You must have been tired.”
“I was. Completely exhausted. Not that I’d admit that to anyone but you.” He poured himself another bowl of cereal, doused it with the milk she had left on the table and began eating again.
“Nothing wrong with your appetite,” she observed.
He made a sound, but his mouth was too full to answer.
She watched him eat four bowls of cereal. That was about right—two for dinner and two for breakfast. “Ready to go walking now?” she asked.
“Sure.” He took his dish to the sink and reached back for hers, which she handed to him.
Seeing the difficulty he was having trying to do everything one-handed, so he could hang on to his cane, she said, “I can do that for you.”
“I’m not a cripple!” When he turned to snap at her, he lost his one-handed grip on the dishes. His cane fell as he lurched to catch the bowls with both hands. Without the cane, his left leg crumpled under him.
“Look out!” Jewel cried.
The dishes crashed into the sink as Mac grabbed hold of the counter to keep from falling backward.
“Damn it all to hell!” he raged.
Jewel reached out to comfort him, but he snarled, “Don’t touch me. Leave me alone.”
Jewel had whirled to leave, when he bit out, “Don’t go.”
She stopped where she was, but she wanted to run. She didn’t want to see his pain. It reminded her too much of her own.
He stared out the window over the sink at the endless reaches of Hawk’s Pride, with its vast, grassy plains and the jagged outcroppings of rock that marked the entrance to the canyons in the distance.
“It must be awful,” she whispered, “to lose so much.”
His eyes slid closed, and she watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard. He slowly opened his eyes and turned to look at her over his shoulder. “This…the way I am…It’s just temporary. I’ll be back as good as new next season.”
“Will you?”
He met her gaze steadily. “Bet on it.”
She knew him too well. Well enough to hear the sheer bravado in his answer and to see the unspoken fear in his eyes that his football career was over. They had always been deeply attuned to one another. He was vulnerable again, in a way he once had been as a youth—this time not to death itself, but to the death of his dreams.
“What can I do, Mac?”
He managed a smile. “Hand me my cane, will you?”
It was easier to do as he asked than to probe the painful issues that he was refusing to address. She crossed to pick up his cane and watched as he eased his weight off his hands and onto his leg with the cane’s support.
“Are you sure it isn’t too soon to be doing so much?” she asked as he hissed in a breath.
He headed determinedly for the screen door. “The only way my leg can get stronger is if I walk on it.”
She followed after him, as she had for nearly a dozen years in their youth. “All right, cowboy. Head ’em up, and move ’em out.”
He flashed her his killer grin, and she smiled back, letting the screen door slam behind her.
It