He winked at her. “Hang on,” he said.
They bounced up through ruts and over rocks, taking washed-out corners too close, until they reached ten thousand feet, where a dozen cows steadily mowed their way across a meadow toward snow that had yet to melt in the shadows on the north side of the next rise.
Luke stopped in the middle of the meadow, got out, and opened the back hatch for the dogs. They raced off into the trees.
Madeline walked away from the Bronco and slowly turned in a circle. “It’s amazing,” she said, taking in the views. “You can see for miles and miles.”
Luke looked around at the white-tipped blue peaks, the dark clouds building in the east.
“It’s so vast and so quiet,” she said, her voice full of awe.
“Yeah, I love it up here,” Luke said. “In the winter, you can hear the snow fall.”
“I can’t imagine what that is like, hearing snow fall,” she said dreamily.
She turned around to him, her eyes shining with pleasure—until she noticed the cows lumbering toward them. Madeline started for the truck, but Luke caught her arm. “They think there is something for them in the truck. They’re going to walk right past you,” he said, and watched as the cows didn’t spare Madeline a glance as they meandered by. Finding nothing in the Bronco, they moved on, into the forest, probably sensing the rain moving in.
And indeed, the wind was picking up; it lifted the end of Madeline’s hair. She wrapped her arms tightly around her, shivering a little as the clouds overhead cast shadows across her face. From the first time Luke had seen her on Sometimes Pass, she seemed to get prettier every time he ran into her. Up here, with her hair loose around her, she seemed almost too pretty, the sort of pretty that made a man look again and again, as if he hadn’t seen it all the first time.
She was looking around the meadow, but when she turned, her gaze happened to land on Luke. They stood looking at each other for a moment, and Luke could feel something flowing between and around them. It was a little unexpected, a little unnerving, and completely exhilarating.
“Want to see something?” he asked.
“Sure!”
He pointed to the trees, and Madeline walked, picking her way in her clumsy shoes, across the meadow. At the tree line, she paused, and Luke stepped up behind her, leaned down so that his head was on the same level as hers, and put his hands on her shoulders, directing her attention to a stand of aspens. “Do you see it?”
“See what?”
“The blue jay condo.” He pointed at a dead aspen, its white bark turned gray. But in that bark were dozens of holes. As if on cue, a blue jay fluttered into their midst, perching on the edge of one hole, then disappearing inside.
Madeline gasped with delight. “Are they all nests?”
“Most of them. It was a woodpecker habitat at some point,” he explained. “The blue jays chased them out and moved in. Voilà, instant condo complex.”
Madeline rubbed her hands against her arms as she examined the aspen. The wind was picking up and the temperature had begun to drop as rain approached. Luke shrugged out of his denim jacket and put it around her.
Madeline tried to hand it back to him. “I can’t take your jacket.”
“You’re shivering, but I’ve got a couple of shirts on. And it’s going to get a whole lot colder when rain moves in.” He held the jacket open to her.
Another strong gust of wind prompted Madeline to step forward. She put her arms through the sleeves and smiled at him over her shoulder. “Thank you. And thanks for showing me the condo. It’s so beautiful here.”
“My mom used to say these mountains were her garden,” Luke said. “She hiked up into the forest most days, but she always came back to this meadow.” He chuckled at a memory. “In the summer, she’d come up here on Sunday afternoons to read her books. We had strict instructions she was not to be found unless someone was bleeding.”
“Nice,” Madeline said approvingly. “A sanctuary from boys, but the cows can stay.”
How lucky he’d been, Luke thought, to have these mountains as his backyard. Once, when he was twelve or so, he’d honed his tracking skills and had followed his mother up here. He’d found her on a blanket next to the truck. She was lying on her back, an open book across her chest. He’d raced across the meadow to surprise her, but she had surprised him—she’d had tears on her face.