Hayburner (A Gail McCarthy Mystery) (13 page)

"That must have been hard," I said sympathetically.

"Not so much," Blue said. "They both went to good homes, like I said. I can see them and know they're doing fine. It's okay."

"But how can you stand to move from here to an apartment in Watsonville?"

Blue got up and stirred his skillet. "I can stand a lot of things," he said quietly, with his back to me. I took a swallow of my drink and watched his broad back under the blue denim shirt.

"So, what's paella?" I asked him.

"It's a rice dish made with saffron. It usually has some kind of seafood, maybe sausage, maybe chicken. It varies according to locale. I learned my version in the South of France. In my misspent youth."

"Did you have a misspent youth?"

"Depends what you mean." Blue turned and smiled at me. "I think my folks hoped I'd go to college, become a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. The American dream and all that.

"When I got out of high school I told my dad I wanted to travel. He said it was probably a good thing for a young man to see a bit of the world in the year between high school and college. So off I went."

Blue smiled at me again. "I didn't come back for ten years."

"Did you support yourself the whole time?"

"I did. My father wasn't a rich man, and I wouldn't have asked him for money, anyway. I'd saved all the money I made working for Tom Billings; that's what got me started. And then I just worked my way along.

"I was a dishwasher in France, and I worked for a greenhouse grower one winter in Greece while I waited for the weather to turn warm so I could go to India. I was a gardener in Australia. I taught English in Iran." Blue grinned. "They fired me because I couldn't spell. In between jobs, I smuggled a little pot to make ends meet."

"You sold pot?" I was quite honestly surprised.

"I told you I had a misspent youth." Blue shrugged. "I spent time in jail in Bali, too."

"You did?" Jail in Bali sounded a good deal more exotic than most personal histories I'd listened to. "What were you in jail for?"

"Possession of marijuana." Blue shrugged again. "I was there six months. Had to bribe my way out."

"And then you were taught by the senior tutor of the Dalai Lama?"

"That's right. Quite the study in contrasts, my life."

"It is that." I took another swallow of my drink and stared at Blue in fascination as he stirred his skillet. I had never met anyone remotely like him before. "What other adventures have you had?"

"Well, I hiked through parts of India that probably hadn't seen a white man since the Raj. Little children would run and hide behind their mothers when they saw me. They thought I was a devil. If I stopped at a tea shop, a crowd would gather, as if I were some exotic animal exhibit."

"Wow." I laughed.

"Yeah." Blue poured a little more margarita into both our glasses. "I ended up going trekking in the Himalayas and got lost one night in a snowstorm. It got so dark I couldn't see and the terrain was so treacherous that I was afraid to move around at all, even to make camp. I thought I'd fall into a ravine. I had no wood to make a fire, so I just stood next to a big rock that sheltered me some and pretty much ran in place all night to keep from freezing to death. It was a long night, I can tell you."

"Wow," I said again.

Blue laughed. "That wasn't the worst of it. Somehow during that trip I ended up catching hepatitis, and I was so sick when I made it back to Katmandu I could barely walk. I managed to get on an airplane and fly to Bangkok, where there were doctors, and I lived there in the Hotel Malaysia for six weeks-basically living off room service."

"All alone?" I asked.

"All alone," he said. "That did get me down. I almost flew back to the States when I felt a little better. But somehow, I didn't. I went to Australia instead."

"Wow," I said yet again.

"So, you see," Blue smiled at me, "moving to an apartment in Watsonville is not really a big deal."

"I see," I said. This man had certainly been through enough to be able to put life's ups and downs in proportion. Taking another sip of my drink, I asked him, "You spent quite a bit of time in Australia, didn't you?"

"Five years," he said.

"And then you came back to America?"

"Not exactly. I traveled around the East for a while before I came home."

"I bet you had a few more adventures," I teased him.

"Am I boring you?" Blue gave me an inquiring look.

"Not at all. Really. Truly. I'm fascinated."

Blue began ladling food onto plates. Over his shoulder, he said, "I did have a few more interesting experiences. I left Australia as part of a crew on a boat that was solely powered by wind. No engine at all. We were on our way to a remote Indonesian island to pick up another sailboat. On the way we got becalmed, and a trip that was supposed to take three days took three weeks."

"What did you do?"

"Fortunately, we were prepared. We had enough water, and the hold was full of a kind of pumpkin they called a 'Queensland Blue.' And we fished, of course. We had pumpkin soup and fried pumpkin, and innumerable versions of fish-and-pumpkin stew." Blue grinned. "To this day I don't care if I ever eat any kind of squash again."

I laughed.

Blue handed me a plate of fragrant, steaming rice and seafood. "It's sort of a one-dish meal, I'm afraid," he said.

I accepted a fork, napkin, and a glass of white wine and told him truthfully, "It's perfect. Just the sort of meal I like."

Paella turned out to be wonderful. The saffron added a subtle flavor, warm and rich, not peppery. Blue's dish included clams, shrimp, chicken, and bell peppers. "The way I learned to make it in the Pyrenees," he said.

"You've certainly led an interesting life."

"That's one way of putting it. I'm afraid my parents might be more inclined to go with the misspent-youth theory."

"Why did you come back to America?" I asked him.

"My parents," he said simply. "I'm their only living child and they're getting older. I felt I needed to live where I could see them from time to time."

"But you didn't move back to the family farm."

"No, by the time I came back, they'd sold the farm and moved into the condo in Fresno. But I would never have chosen to live in the Central Valley, anyway. Too claustrophobic for me. I always knew that if I came back to the States to live, it would be on the California coast."

"And here you are."

"And here I am," he agreed. "Close enough to visit my folks two or three times a year, and living in one of the most beautiful places on earth."

"You ought to know," I said.

Blue smiled.

"How'd you end up working at the rose farm?"

He shrugged one shoulder. "I knew I wanted a job in agriculture, and I liked the Monterey Bay area. So I went around to various greenhouse growers and asked for work. Brewer's needed a laborer."

"You started at the bottom, then?"

"Oh yeah. I started out watering plants for minimum wage."

"And went on to become their breeder and greenhouse manager."

Blue shrugged again and looked down. I stared at him. The curling red-gold hair, the long, lean, muscular frame, the slender hands and strong chin. I ached to touch him. I took a swallow of wine and went back to eating paella.

Blue looked up from his food. "Are we going to work with your colt tomorrow?"

"If you have time, I'd love to have you there. Do you really think I ought to ride him?"

"It depends. If you go through the same routine you did today, and he doesn't show any fear, I'd get on him, sure."

"We haven't even bridled him yet."

Blue drank some wine and said slowly, "The way Tom taught me, we got on them before we bridled them. We always rode them for the first time with the halter on their heads, and we did it as soon as they were comfortable with a saddle on their backs. Like I said, for some horses that takes quite awhile. Others, like your Danny, get there very quickly."

"Why do you get on them like that?" I asked him.

"It's easier for them. We didn't try to control them much, just got them to move around, get used to having a human on their backs. When they were used to that, which usually takes somewhere between three and a dozen rides, depending on the horse, we'd start putting the bridle on them and teach them to be guided by the reins."

"So what happens," I said carefully, "if you get on one with just a halter on him and he decides he wants to buck?"

Blue smiled at me. "A relevant question, from your point of view."

"That's right." I laughed.

"Well, first off, a colt will buck you off with a bridle on his head just as well as he will with a halter, if that's what he wants to do. A bit won't stop a green horse from bucking, nor will he usually respond to it much. Having a bit in his mouth is more likely just to scare a colt. So, a bridle's no protection.

"What I've found is, if you get on a colt and just stay relaxed, let him move however he wants to move, hold onto the saddle horn if you need to, just pretend you're a sack of potatoes, they mostly never buck. If they do, you just encourage them to move forward with your legs, and most of the time, they'll come out of it." Blue looked at me. "I'll ride your colt for you, if you'd like me to."

I shook my head. "No. That's the point. I want the experience of breaking a horse. I want to be the first one on him. But I'm curious about one thing. Is there any reason to be in a hurry about it?"

Blue sighed. "Well, there is and there isn't. No, you don't need to hurry, but you do get a feel for these things. I'd say your colt was ready to ride. If you put it off because you're afraid of him, well, I don't know how to say this, but the horse will know. If you just get on him and ride him like it's no big deal, it will be no big deal.

"If you hold off and dink around and dink around, bridling him and sacking him and checking him up and tying him around and driving him, like I've seen people do, all because you're essentially afraid to get on him, the horse senses that getting on him is a big deal to you. So it becomes a big deal to him."

"I see," I said. "They do seem to sense what we're feeling, don't they?"

 
"They do," Blue agreed. He smiled at me. "How about you? Do you sense what I'm feeling?"

I wrinkled my nose at him. "Would it involve me sitting next to you?"

 
"It would," he said. Putting the crockery aside on the counter, he patted the couch next to him.

I smiled and got up and settled myself into the curve of his body. Putting my hands on either side of his face, I pulled his mouth gently down toward mine. "Did you know I've been wanting to do this all night?" I asked him.

"I know I wanted to," he murmured.

Then we were quiet, kissing, touching, exploring. I stroked Blue's back; he ran his fingers through my hair and unbuttoned my blouse. Delicately, shyly, he unbuttoned his own shirt and then pressed the bare skin of his chest against mine.

We held each other like that for a long time, nuzzling and kissing. As I fitted my mouth to his, I was aware of a subtle, elusive sweetness in the air, a scent that seemed to drift through the open windows and mingle with the smell of the sea.

"What's the perfume I smell?" I said softly into Blue's hair. "It smells like flowers, but your roses aren't in bloom."

"I've got a tub of jasmine and nicotiana planted outside my bedroom window," he said. "I like the way it smells when I go to bed. Maybe you might like it, too."

I ran my fingers through the curls at the back of his neck and down his spine. I felt light-headed with desire.

"Maybe I'll just have to see," I said.

Blue stood up and held out his hand.

For a second I hesitated, my mind shouting its innumerable warnings. But the rush of sweet pleasure in my body mingling with the heady sweetness in the air was too strong. It drew me toward Blue; I stood and put my hand in his. He kissed me gently and led me into the bedroom.

Like the living room, Blue's bedroom was tiny, paneled in teak like the cabin of a boat. The double bed was covered with a Navajo blanket in sandstone red, sage green, sky blue. The windows by the bed were uncurtained and open. I could smell the scent of flowers.

Quietly, Blue slipped my blouse off my shoulders and stroked my back with his hands. Reaching up, I put my arms around him and buried my face in his skin, in the unique, personal odor of him.

"I want you, Gail," he said. "I'll do my best to be good to you." He bent down and I could feel his mouth moving down my neck and my breasts.

I sighed. Every atom in my body felt as if it were rushing to meet his. "I think I'm ready," I told him, as I put my hand on his belt buckle.

TWELVE

I woke up Sunday morning in Blue's bed. Waking in a new lover's bed can be disconcerting or delightful. In this case, it was the latter.

I opened my eyes to Blue's mouth on mine, and then, gently, he moved on. He kissed my body leisurely and at length. I watched him in the mirror that hung on his closet.