The Summerhouse Read online

  Yet, for a moment, Ellie hesitated. A couple of people urged her to get some food and join them, but instead, Ellie stood where she was, not moving. She could follow Valerie and ask her who the blacksmith was in the barn. Was he like Lew, a Harvard man who happened to like to fly planes?

  Or was he an itinerant farrier who had three wives in different places around the state? Did Valerie and Woody have masses of trouble with all the women visiting them and getting a serious case of the hots over the man? Was he one of those cowboy gigolos who made sure all the women guests had a great time?

  Suddenly Ellie realized that every idea she’d come up with was bad. Was it Leslie or Madison who had said that not all men are bad? It was Madison. She’d said that Thomas had once been in the world and he was a very good man.

  “Come join us,” said someone as he looked back at Ellie. “Moonlight and warm water. What else do you want?” the man asked, and his eyes issued an invitation.

  Ellie had to stop herself from saying, “Privacy.” She was Alexandria Farrell the writer now, not Ellie Abbott, so she had to be on her best behavior. She smiled at the man and made a little motion with her hand as though to say that she wanted to go with him but she had prior commitments.

  With a sigh and a shrug, he went through the doors onto the artfully lit patio.

  And Ellie ran out the side door that she knew led to her dear little guesthouse, which right now seemed to be a haven of peace and refuge.

  Once she was alone and away from the others, Ellie felt relieved, but she also had the feeling that something was going to happen. She was jittery inside, expectant. For a while she stood on the porch and looked out at the night. She could hear music from the house, and she was glad that she wasn’t there with the crowd.

  She walked all the way around the porch, straining her eyes to see into the darkness. Where was he? she wondered. Why hadn’t he come to her?

  After about thirty minutes had passed and the high mountain air grew cold, she rubbed her arms and went inside the house. The lights were soft and the furnishings inviting. She liked the little house.

  For a while she tried to write in her journal, but she couldn’t focus her mind. She was waiting for something.

  “Or someone,” she said, annoyed with herself. She was nearly forty years old, and—Smiling, she thought that she still had three more years before that birthday came, but if she was zapped forward as quickly as she’d been sent back . . .

  Forty, she thought. She shouldn’t be pacing the room like a caged tigress. She should be . . . What? Taking crochet lessons?

  At eleven she took a shower and told herself to calm down, that she was acting like a teenager, and that she was married and past the age to be excited about anything except recipes and her approaching grandchildren—which she wasn’t going to have because she’d never had any children.

  By the time she got out of the shower, she was calmer. And she was back to being the fatalist that her therapist Jeanne would recognize. So she’d had a few moments with a guy in a barn. So a good-looking assistant to a billionaire had flirted with her. And a man at a party had issued an invitation that she’d chosen to take very personally . . .

  She got into bed, tried to read one of the books she’d bought that day, but she couldn’t. Instead, she turned off the light and closed her eyes.

  To her disbelief, she felt sleepy, but a sound outside made her sit up instantly. It wasn’t a quiet sound, but loud. One. Two. Three. Four. Four thumps on the wooden floor of the porch.

  Ellie opened her eyes so wide that they hurt. A horse was walking very slowly around the deep porch that ran all the way around her little house. She could hear each hoof beat, hear the click of the shoes.

  Ellie didn’t think about what she was doing. If she’d been asked, she would have said that she was past the age of leaving the house without having eye makeup on, not with her pale lashes, but now she didn’t give a thought to what she looked like. Or to the fact that all she had on was a thin cotton nightgown.

  She tossed off the down duvet and took off running the instant her bare feet hit the floor.

  There were no lights on on the outside of the little house, and there had been when she’d returned from the party. But now everything was dark, with only the lights from the big house barely visible through the trees.

  At first she didn’t see him. And for a horrible instant, she thought that maybe she’d imagined the sound of the horse. In her bare feet, she ran around the porch to the back of the house.

  And there he was. The moonlight was behind him, so she saw him as a silhouette more than as substance. He was dressed in black on a black horse and it was dark.

  But Ellie knew it was Him. She felt it.

  The saddle leather creaked, and she saw the flash of something white, a button maybe, and she knew that he was putting his arm down for her.

  She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t have a single thought of not going with him. Nor did she think of talking to him, of asking his name, about his life, where he went to school, nothing. No, right now all that she felt was . . . just that, feeling.

  She took his hand, big, warm, calloused, the kind of hand she loved, the hand of a useful man, and vaulted onto the horse behind him. Her narrow nightgown wasn’t made for horse riding. It rode up until it barely covered her bottom. Her legs were as bare as if she’d been wearing a high-cut bikini.

  It was as though she knew what to do. Her arms slid around the back of him, clasping over his chest, and for a moment she put her head down on his back and breathed in the clean scent of him. He’d been working. He wasn’t dirty sweaty, just very male sweaty, that kind of smell that made her know he was male and she was female.

  His body moved as he rode, and she felt her breasts against his back. How long had it been since she’d felt anything like this? Since she was little more than a kid, she’d been with one man, her husband. When had her marriage become sexless? When had it become more about control and one-upmanship than about sharing? Sharing anything?

  At first he rode sedately, as though he were making the horse tiptoe across the ranch. Ellie hadn’t explored the place much, but in the moonlight she could see long, low buildings, and she imagined that there were people sleeping inside the buildings. The idea that the world was asleep and that they were the only ones awake appealed to her.

  After a few minutes, she relaxed her grip around his chest and lifted her head from his back. Then she held her breath as he reached back and ran his hand over her bare thigh, stroking it, his hand roaming as far as he could reach up her bare buttocks. The sensation Ellie felt nearly made her fall off the horse.

  She heard what could have been a chuckle from him; then he said softly, “Hold on tight.” These were the first words spoken between them. She liked his voice. It was a whisper, but she liked the deepness of it.

  In the next moment he turned the horse sharply and they were on a trail. There were fewer trees here and no buildings, so she could look around him and see the open trail in front of them. But she only had a glimpse because the next moment he snapped the reins, moved his legs backward, and the horse took off running at a speed that made Ellie dizzy.

  She clasped the man hard, buried her face in his warm back, and held on with all her might.

  He raced the horse for several minutes; then there was another turn and they slowed down. This time they started climbing. She could feel and hear the horse’s hooves on stone. A couple of times she heard loose rock falling.

  But even when they seemed to be going straight up and Ellie was holding on so tightly that she feared that she was cutting off his circulation, she was never, for even one second, afraid. She wasn’t afraid that he didn’t know how to handle the horse, nor was she afraid of where he was taking her.

  After a while the ground flattened out, and Ellie loosened her hold on him. He guided the horse so it walked slowly and carefully, so she wasn’t surprised when she lifted her head and saw that they were on a trail tha