head. “That’s not it, either.”
“Okay, then I totally know what it is.” Jess made a show of drying every drop of water from her skin. “Now that I’ve touched the magical pool, I’ll fall madly in love with the next man I see?”
This time Cole’s laugh came straight from his belly. “Exactly. That’s exactly the legend I was going to tell you.”
“Liar.”
“Maybe.” He paused, went quiet, and she could almost hear him raising his eyebrows comically. “So why won’t you look at me?”
“No reason.” She leaned back down and reached her fingers into the water. “If I touch it again, does it erase the curse?”
“Curse? What woman in her right mind views falling in love as a curse?”
Jess swished her hand in the warm water. “Ha. More than you’d think, cowboy.” She stood up and spun slowly, eyes on the moon, then on the pool of water, where awesome power from above met mystical power from below. “I’ve never seen anything like this. I would much rather have fallen in this water this afternoon.”
“If you had, you’d probably never have wanted to get out.”
“Can you swim in it?” The pool stretched for thirty feet or so, end to end, but she couldn’t tell how deep it was.
“Why?” He winked. “Do you want to?”
Hmm. Get naked in a hot spring with the most gorgeous man on earth? In the middle of a moonlit wilderness so beautiful it almost hurt to look at it?
She cleared her throat carefully. “Maybe sometime when I have an actual swimsuit on. I’ve gone through two outfits today already.”
“Clothing would be optional.” He winked, and her entire body responded.
Dammit.
“Do you—ever show this to the guests?” She fought to regain control over this feeling of—desire that threatened to make her do something stupid.
Cole shook his head. “No. Some things we like to keep to ourselves. Decker and I found this way back when we were kids. You’d have thought we’d discovered Mars or something, the way we came flying back to the house to tell Ma. She let us think we’d discovered it until we were teenagers, I think. Finally she fessed up that she’d come galloping through the same hills at our age, just dying to tell someone she’d found Heaven.”
Jess looked around, breathing in the piney air, feeling the spray of the waterfall land softly on her face. “I can’t believe you and Decker got to grow up practically on horseback, roaming these mountains and meadows.”
“Well, there was an awful lot of hard work that went with the galloping, but yeah. It’s pretty much paradise out here.” His face got serious. “Well, it was. For a while, anyway.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make it sound like everything was perfect. I know it—wasn’t.” Jess’s stomach tightened as she thought about Cole’s father, about his penchant for whisky and women, in that order. About how he’d stuck Decker in a rattletrap Chevy and pointed him off the ranch after their little sister had drowned. About how Cole and Ma had just about had to sell their own hides to fend off the bank when they realized he’d put up the ranch as collateral on a high-roller weekend in Vegas, then run his truck into a tree at ninety miles an hour, looking to leave it all behind.
“I know you didn’t.” Cole took off his hat and spun it thoughtfully. “What about you? You’ve been coming out here for two years, and I don’t think I even know where you grew up.”
“Oh, my growing-up years were hardly as exciting as yours. You’d be bored.” Her stomach flipped at his question. No way was she going down that road tonight. She’d been enjoying a few minutes of not thinking about that road.
“Doubt it. I’m curious, really. I can hear a trace of a southern accent when you talk. Are you a Mississippi girl at heart?”
“South Carolina. Just outside of Charleston.” On the way wrong side of the tracks. 37 Breezy Meadow Trailer Park, to be precise.
Cole looked at her, waiting for more, but she couldn’t find the words she usually used when she got this question. Over the years she’d developed a pat answer that glossed over details and managed to shut down further lines of questioning in one fell swoop. The key was delivering it with that sweet southern smile she’d seen her mother use for all those years.
But for some reason, she wasn’t able to call up her standard phrases, wasn’t able to summon up that hide-everything