Page 59 of Due North
My bed was warm and soft when I finally settled into it again. The adrenaline drained out of me in the shower, and I barely made it to the bed before my leg collapsed. That left me nothing to do but think. Sleeping would have been good, but I couldn’t. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my sweet angel with her hand on a bison’s head. I couldn’t explain it. Blaze and Beau sure as hell couldn’t explain it either. They stared at me like I was delusional when I told them what I witnessed on the ridge.
I rocked my head on the pillow and tried not to think about Cece or Poppy, but that was impossible. If I wasn’t thinking about one, I was thinking about the other. They were a package deal, and I wanted them both. For some reason, Cece couldn’t commit to that. I could see her side of things easily enough. There were many unknowns when you date and love someone you work with in a place like this. I’d seen Blaze and Beau do it successfully, though, and I wanted the same chance. My head believed that it was too late, but my heart refused to cooperate.
The room was silent, and the swirling in my head intensified. The colors turned brown and green, swirling and dancing together like the bison on the ridge. The irony was that brown meant stability and dependability. That defines a bison. For me, it was a stabilizing color that kept me grounded and brought me back to nature. Green was hope. It was fresh. It was the promise of prosperity. They were confusing colors, especially when starbursts of purple were added to the swirling. Purple was wisdom, so I waited. I waited for the understanding that would help me find my way through this new hell. The hell of finally being ready to embrace a new life, only to have it ripped away in the blink of an eye again.
I rolled over, determined to get some sleep. I had to stop torturing myself with what I wanted but couldn’t have. I couldn’t make Cece trust me. All I could do was show her I was trustworthy. I thought I had done that, but I ended up failing in the worst way. I couldn’t change what she saw in the riding ring, and there was no explanation she would accept when she believed the truth to be something else. There was no way forward if she couldn’t see, or didn’t want, a future for us.
I rolled onto my back again and groaned. It might be time for a shot of whiskey. That wasn’t something I did often, but when the day had been long and the night short, sometimes it was the only way to get any sleep. I climbed from the bed, and the warmth of the room made me glad I’d taken the time to stoke a small fire in the potbelly stove before I went to bed. The cabin was toasty and would stay that way for the rest of the night. With the wind howling viciously outside, it would be needed. I hoped little Poppy was snuggled up warm and toasty against Cece. Amity had assured me she was fine and falling asleep while being rocked, but I wanted to see her for myself. I didn’t get that chance. I left the house quietly and didn’t look back, even though all I wanted to do was run back inside and take them both in my arms.
I set my cane against the wall and grabbed the bottle of whiskey, poured a shot, and sipped it while I leaned up against the table. Poppy Rose had been lucky. With the wind as strong as it was, things could have turned out much differently if we hadn’t found her so quickly.
Snow crunched under tires, and I pushed myself off the table, wondering who was out at this time of the morning. Please don’t let it be Tobi with another problem. I didn’t have it in me to fix another hole in the pasture wire. I set the glass down on the countertop, glad that I hadn’t turned the light on in the kitchen. Maybe she’d think I was sleeping and decide not to disturb me. I chuckled to myself. Fat chance of that happening. I was the foreman of this place, and the buck stopped with me regardless of the time of day.
The soft knock on the front door surprised me. Tobi would have pounded the hell out of my door until I answered. I limped to the door and whipped it open to see Cece’s red hair whipping around her face as she protected the baby against her, covered in a heavy blanket. I pulled her in the door and shut it against the wind, taking in her wild eyes and heavy breathing.
“Cece, what’s wrong?” I asked, pulling the blanket off Poppy’s head to see her sucking her thumb with pink blankie in her hand. “God, my sweet girl,” I sighed, lifting her off Cece’s chest and into mine.
She wasn’t wearing a coat, just the heavy blanket, so I kept her under it while Cece stripped off her jacket. “Leave her hat on,” she said, throwing her stuff on the couch. “I want to hold in her body heat.”
“I’m never letting you go,” I whispered, swaying Poppy back and forth with my nose buried in her cheek. She smelled of baby powder and innocence, something I didn’t have enough of in my life. “I love you so much, and your auntie too,” I whispered into her neck.
I jumped when Cece started rubbing my back, her touch comforting, electrifying, and terrifying all at once. I couldn’t live without her comfort or the way she brought me to life with just a look. She might shatter my heart again and again, but it was worth it just to be part of her life.
“We need to talk,” she whispered, her head on my shoulder.
I tipped mine onto hers but sighed heavily. “I don’t think I can tonight, Cece.”
“Then maybe you can listen while I talk?” she asked, trying to take Poppy from me.
I held tight to her, refusing to let her go. “Just let me hold her a little bit longer. I know I’ll have to let her go, but please, just a little bit longer,” I begged, tears in my eyes at the thought of another piece of my heart being ripped away from me.
Poppy looked up at me, her eyes still tired and her red locks framing her face. “Ba,” she sighed before she snuggled into my chest again and stuck her thumb in her mouth. Two letters, but they had the power to break me over and over until I was nothing but mush.
“Come on,” Cece said, leading me to the bedroom where she fixed the rumpled bedding and motioned for me to sit down. “Keep her with you until she’s asleep, then we’ll put her in the playpen by the heater. We need to keep her warm.”
I willingly climbed under the blankets with Poppy still on my chest and rubbed her back, feeling her body relax against mine the further she fell into dreamland. Cece pulled the blankets up around us and propped a pillow at my side so Poppy didn’t slide off my chest.
“Amity said you came over to the house to check on us but didn’t stay.”
“Sheriff Nash told me they didn’t take Poppy to the hospital, but I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to check on her but not disturb her. I also had to close that hole in the fence up on the ridge.”
“You could have had one of the hands do it,” she said, resting her hand on my shoulder as she rested on her side facing me. “You didn’t have to go back up there and do it yourself.”
“Yeah, I did,” I whispered, my eyes closed to block out how wonderful it was to have her in my bed again with her hair spread across the pillow. “I had to try and put right in my head what I saw up there.”
“No one will tell me what happened or how you found her. They said only you could explain it.”
I chuckled and rocked my head on the pillow. I’d been trying to explain it for hours, but I couldn’t. There was no explanation for what happened tonight, but I would have to tell her and let her draw her own conclusions. When I opened my eyes, she was still staring intently at me, waiting.
“All I could see was brown and white,” I started, our gazes locked in an unbreakable bond. “The colors filled me, and I knew she was on the ridge. I found her in Callie’s pasture.”
“In the pasture, or by the pasture?” she asked, her blue eyes clouding with confusion.
“In the pasture,” I said again. “Somehow, in the dark, Poppy found a hole in the fence and crawled through it.”
“What?”
“I’m telling you, Cece, she was just standing there, her hand under the bonnet of a bison cow, staring into the animal’s eyes.” I looked up and had my hand up in the air before I even realized it.
