Page 44 of Red Boar's Baby

“Take care of them?” Costa snapped. “Look after my aunts and my kid brother? Abdicate the family responsibility that’s been passed down to me from four generations of Costas on this land? Is that the future you’d have wanted for me, Diana?”

It was, actually. She wanted to see him live his life for himself, rather than constantly feeling tied to everything he had to do here. First it was the ranch, and the younger brother and cousins that he felt responsible for; then it was the SCB. Diana would have loved to throw a lasso around him like he was a recalcitrant yearling cow and drag him away so that he could feel the world open up around him the way it had around her.

But—she would have broken something in him forever by doing that. Responsibility, taking care of people .... that was who Cesar Quinn Costa was. To force him away from that would be to shatter the core of him, just like staying here would have caused hers to dwindle and collapse.

Diana sighed and jumped down from the edge of the dry trough. “All these years and we’re still the same people underneath it all, aren’t we?”

Costa unexpectedly gave a short laugh. “Stubborn, determined, set in our ways? Yeah, probably.”

He leaped down, but rather than pulling away, he took her hand. Diana startled a bit, and she felt him begin to pull back, but she closed her fingers around his.

Costa turned to look up the pasture, toward the line of trees that she remembered so vividly. They were scrubby and gnarled, barely clinging to life in the dry pasture. But they sheltered a hollow where the two of them had explored all the wonders of being newly minted adults.

“Want to walk around a little more?” Costa asked quietly. His thumb rubbed over the back of her hand.

She was wildly tempted—and afraid of what she might do if she gave in to that temptation. “Actually, we should probably get back to your place before they send out a search party.”

Costa’s aunts would do no such thing; they were probably delighted for the (as they thought) couple to spend time alone together. But Costa nodded, and they walked back slowly toward the horses, his hand holding hers the entire way.

When they reached the horses, Costa’s fingers slipped quietly out of hers. Diana mounted Rabbit and turned the horse’s head away from the barn, toward home—Costa’s home, that is.

As they retraced their previous course, Costa riding slightly behind her, he said abruptly, “You did come back, you know.”

“Fifteen years later,” Diana said dryly. “To Bisbee.” A shudder went through her at the thought of everything she had so recently lost there. She had been more-or-less successfully not thinking about it.

“Yes, but of all the places in the world you could have landed, you settled down less than a two-hour drive from where you grew up,” Costa said.

“I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

She could tell when he rememberedwhyshe didn’t want to talk about it, because a sudden silence hit. Then Costa said, “I’ll check in with the SCB when we get back, see if they’ve found anything.”

“Okay,” Diana said.

They rode back in a silence that was somehow at the same time more and less uneasy than the ride over. She felt as if they had settled into some kind of new equilibrium, and she could still feel his lips on hers. The kiss on the water tank was going to live on in her head forever, framed by the blue sky and the dusty hills.

But she could feel jagged-edged emotions shifting around inside her every time she allowed her thoughts to slip sideways, away from the “now.”

Could it work? Between us?

We would have to be different people, Diana thought. If only.

* * *

As they rode up to the Costa ranch, a kid’s voice hailed them. “Hey! Uncle Quinn! Look at me!”

There was a boy in the corral where they had saddled their horses, riding bareback on a painted pinto pony. Diana hadn’t seen Costa’s nephew Jay in a long while, but this boy must be him—bare feet pressed to the horse’s sides, a kid-sized riding helmet covering his sun-bleached brown hair.

Costa grinned, waved, and rode over to the corral. He and Diana dismounted and began unsaddling their horses. Meanwhile, Jay rode up to the other side of the pole fence. His real name was longer, Diana had gathered—Jason, maybe? No one had ever called him anything other than Jay in her hearing.

She had missed the wedding of Costa’s younger brother and his wife. All of that had happened while she was elsewhere, around the time she got out of the Army or while she was still skipping across the world, exploring her options, flying helicopters for development companies on foreign sites. She had returned to Arizona to see her mother through her final illness, and with the life insurance settlement, she had decided to buy a house. Fifteen years of globetrotting was enough, as it turned out; it was time to explore life as a homeowner with a regular job.

But it meant she had missed everything about Marco’s marriage and the baby, and by the time she came back into Costa’s life, things had settled into their current status quo. Marco was gone, and his widow and young son lived on the ranch.

“Oh, Quinn, there you are!” Jay’s mother Jenny came out of the barn with a bucket in one hand and a basket of eggs held awkwardly against her side. “Hi, Diana. I heard you two got in late last night.”

“Hi, nice to see you again,” Diana said. She liked Jenny, but never felt like she had much to say to her. Costa’s sister-in-law was a born-and-bred rural girl just like Diana. But unlike Diana, Jenny had embraced the rural housewife lifestyle. Today she was wearing a long skirt and sandals, her hair back in a simple braid that reached almost to her waist.

Jenny set down the bucket, and Costa greeted her with a brief embrace and kissed her cheek. “Need any help?”

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