The broken boy - healed by innocence

On dance

*Faith*

I knew the moment he entered the ballroom. Like my father, he has a resounding presence about him. Even with his quiet ways, when he strides into a room, people know. It's as though the very air I breathe comes alive, the atmosphere charged. He rolls in like a welcome rainstorm.

"How did you get Cooper to dance with you?" I ask Maggie when I manage to catch a minute with her later, after dancing with too many cowboys to count.

The one I haven't danced with, however, is the one I want to more than anything, but he has allowed his boot heels to brush over the dance floor for only a solitary tune. I have waited my entire life to grow up enough that Cooper would stop treating me like a child.

I figure nineteen means I'm on the threshold of being a full she-wolf. Maybe I had even crossed over it after taking on the responsibility of expanding the Moonshadow enterprises into oil.

"I made him mad," Maggie says, handing me a glass of champagne.

I laugh with a measure of fondness edged with a bit of jealousy. "I have never understood y'all's relationship. You squabble more than any two people I know and yet you always remain friends."

Maggie sips her champagne, curiosity keeping her gaze wandering over the people dancing and milling about. As a recently hired reporter for the Moonshadowville Leader, the town’s only newspaper, she's always looking for an interesting angle that might make a worthy story. "We've been getting on each other's last nerve for close to twenty years now, I reckon. There's never been any rancor between us. Just a tendency to try to out-irritate the other."

"Do you love him?" I ask.

That question has Maggie jerking her head around so quickly I'm surprised she doesn’t make herself dizzy. "As a friend, nothing more. Besides, he has been madly in love with someone else for the longest and I can't compete with that."

I couldn't have been more surprised if Maggie had suddenly announced a cattle stampede inside the house. Any she-wolf would be fortunate to hold Cooper's affections, but he has never hinted that he had an ounce of interest in courting. "Who?"

Maggie simply shakes her head and turns her attention back to the guests.

"Maggie, you can't just drop something like that on me and not give me the details." I glance around. "Miss Tate, the schoolmarm?" She hade moved to town three years ago, was fairly young and pretty in a porcelain doll sort of way.

Maggie doesn't react at all.

"How about Lydia Pawsley?" The butcher's daughter. She is short and stocky, giving a man plenty to hold on to, unlike me, who has always been too skinny as far as I'm concerned.

In school, boys had teased me that a good wind would blow me away. More than once, my mother had been forced to scold me about my unladylike behavior of throwing punches when someone said something I didn't like.

Maggie sighs. "If you would pay any attention at all, you could probably figure it out."

I always pay attention to Cooper, especially lately. Everyone in town thinks of him as my brother, even sometimes referring to him that way, but I have never viewed him in those terms. He's just always been Cooper, my friend, my protector, my aggravator. "Does she love him?"

"Not like he loves her." She sighs.

"She's a fool then." Although even as I say it, I'm struck in the area of my heart with a twinge that resembles jealousy. The notion of seeing him courting some spinster, of watching him holding her hand, sharing conversations with her, giving her half of his sarsaparilla stick, brings with it a physical ache.

If he married, I would see less of him. He might even move off the ranch, move into town. I can't imagine not sitting across from him during meals. It had been hard enough when he had decided to live in a small cabin in the middle of a copse of mesquite trees a fair distance from the house. But he continue to join us for most meals.

"I have to agree with you there," Maggie says. "A fool and blind not to see she rules his heart."

"I have never even noticed him flirting with a gal." I say.

She smiles, "That's not Cooper's way. He's subtler than that."

Which couldn't be said for Cole. He has been showering attention and compliments on me since he arrived, and I'm struggling not to let it all go to my head. I have never had a gentleman express interest in stepping out with me, mostly because men feared the wrath of my father.

I take a sip of the champagne. People have been bringing me glasses of it all night, and with each one, I become more and more relaxed. Most of the town has been invited. Food is being served in the dining room while people wander through the various parlors, visiting, and coming to the largest one to dance. Cards are being played in one room, billiards in another.

If Cooper won’t dance with me, maybe he will at least challenge me to a round of billiards. We're pretty evenly matched when it comes to the game.

Then he is walking toward me with a loose-jointed swagger that has my mouth going dry. Or maybe it's the champagne. It doesn’t exactly quench my thirst. He’s donned his Sunday-go-to-meeting jacket over his crisp white shirt with a thinly knotted tie. His face is clean-shaven, his thick hair… the shade of midnight… combed back. Once he's near enough to touch, he smiles. “Hey, birthday girl.”

Girl. Why couldn’t he have used the word she-wolf?

He places his hand on the small of my back, leans in, and busses a quick kiss over my cheek. I catch a whiff of the sandalwood cologne I had given him last Christmas, but underneath it is the beloved fragrance of leather and horses and the wide-open plains. He’s always smelled of hard work and the freedom to do as he pleases.

My parents have put far fewer restrictions on his activities than they have on mine. Partly because he is older, but also because he is male, so they don’t worry about him as much.

That difference has always annoyed me. A time will come when he will be running the ranch… and it's something I could manage with equal success if given the chance. But I have my oil and know I can make a name for myself with it. I have too much of my mother in me to fail.

“It took you long enough to get over here,” I scold.

“I didn’t figure you had notice with all the fellas buzzing around you.” He grins.

Oh, I have noticed.

“Think I’m going to call it a night,” he adds.

He might as well have smacked me upside the head. “The party’s not over until midnight. We have a couple of hours to go.”

“You’re not wanting for attention, and killing that rattler today plumb tuckered me out.” He says.

By attention, I have a feeling he is referring to Cole’s devotion. He has waltzed with me three times, has my mother on the dance floor at the moment. “You have to dance with me before you go.”

“I don’t dance.” He mumbles.

“You danced with Maggie.” I point out.

He glares at Maggie, who merely raises her hands in surrender. “We didn’t do it in secret.” She playfully pats his shoulder. “You watch out for rattlers heading home. Although I suspect they will be far less dangerous than Faith if you don’t dance with her. I’m going to get some more champagne.” She sashays off.

"Why won’t you dance with me?" I ask.

He sighs, “You’ve got plenty of fellas anxious to take you on a turn about the floor.”

“But none of them are you.” I hadn’t meant for my tone to be filled with such longing or wistfulness.

“Faith,” he begins, in that tone that both frustrates and thrills me.

“Why don’t you like me?” I ask.

The shock on his face is rewarding. “You can’t possibly believe I don’t like you just because I don’t want to step on your feet.”

I slip my arm through his. “You won’t step on my feet. Dance with me.”

I feel his resistance give way as the stiffness leaves the muscles in his arm, as though he had been bracing for this moment, but now that it has arrived, finds it not nearly as unpleasant as he had expected it to be. But when he starts to escort me onto the floor, I hold him back. “Let’s wait for the next one to start. I want a complete dance.” And a slow one.

For some reason, he has been avoiding me of late, has been finding one excuse after another not to be in my company, so I want to make the most of the moments to come.

I know my father has begun to give him more responsibilities around the ranch, preparing him for taking over as foreman as soon as our current foreman decides to hang his hat on the peg for the last time and set aside his spurs, but Cooper’s noted absence seems to encompass more than that. And I find myself missing him.

He doesn’t argue with me. Probably because he doesn’t want to make a fuss and draw attention. He is like that, but it's difficult not to notice him. I have never seen him be unkind to anyone, and yet he gives off a dangerous aura that signals he is not a man to take lightly. Perhaps it's because his smiles are rare. Or the way his eyes scan the world as though he is always searching for trouble, doesn’t quite trust what he's seeing as being the way things truly are.

I figure Maggie knows more about him because she had been around when Cooper joined the family. He had been part of it by the time I made my appearance. Whenever I ask anyone why Cooper lives with us when my mother hadn’t given birth to him, the answer is always the same, no matter who gives it: He needed a home.

A home. Not a house. As I have gotten older, the distinction isn’t lost on me. But whatever had happened to him before he came to my family is long buried, and I suspect it's submerged deeply enough as to never make another appearance. I know he has no other relations to speak of, no one to visit him or ask after him. I can’t imagine not having all my aunts, uncles, and cousins about.

The music finally goes quiet and a frisson of anticipation courses through me, something I have not experienced all night, not even with the first dance of the evening. Handsome cowboys, bankers, lawyers, store owners, and Cole… I have taken the floor with a variety of men. Most of them young, unmarried, and yet with none of them have I counted the seconds until he takes me in his arms.

But with Cooper, I do, and when that moment comes, I know what has been missing all these years… the absolute and untarnished knowledge that this man might be part of my family, but he isn’t family. I am drawn to him, and it most certainly is not as a sister to a brother.

As he leads me into the waltz, he holds a hand aloft so I can perch one of mine on it while his other hand barely lands between my shoulder blades, over the silk, and I wonder if he has made a conscious effort not to touch my skin. Not all the men have.

My other hand comes to rest on his shoulder, where firmness greets me. Having seen him without a shirt numerous times, I know without a doubt he is comprised of ropey sinew and toned muscle.

The intensity with which he watches me fairly has my breath catching. He certainly hadn’t focused his gaze on Maggie in the same manner when he had brought her out onto the dance floor. If anything, the entire time he had given the impression he wanted to be somewhere else. I had expected the same but instead am left with the sense he might be memorizing the moment.

“You look beautiful tonight,” he says with such seriousness that anyone hearing him might have thought he was speaking to me for the final time, as one would to someone hovering on the precipice of death.

“Don’t I always?” I tease, hoping to lighten his mood.

He flashes me a grin, releases a huff of laughter. “You know you do.”

“And you’re handsome.” I tell him.

His smile is self-deprecating. “Now that the flattery is out of the way.”

“I mean it, Cooper. You’re good-looking.” His skin has a swarthiness to it from years in the saddle, mixed with his Shawnee heritage. His ebony hair falls over his brow, and my fingers itch to brush it back, to make it a little less wild, but nothing about Cooper has ever given the impression he was the least bit tame. “I could tell a lot of the she-wolves were hoping you would ask them to dance.”

He just shakes his head, never having been comfortable with praise. My father doesn’t give it often, but when he does he means it… and Cooper’s cheeks would turn a deep hue of red. I have always thought he was adorable when he blushed, but I have never teased him about it.

“Maggie told me that you love someone.” I say.

His eyes narrow, a muscle ticks in his cheek, his jaw tightens. “That girl has got the biggest mouth.”

“If you would tell me who she is, maybe I could help with your courting,” I say softly.

He gives me a pointed look. “What do you know about courting, Faith?”

That I have finally reached an age where my father would let gentlemen begin calling on me if they were willing to face the gauntlet of hard stares he is likely to bestow on them. “I know what she-wolves like. I could give you some tips.”

“I don’t need any tips. I can handle my own love life just fine.” He huffs.

“Is she here tonight?” I ask.

He flattens his lips, a sure sign he isn’t going to answer. How many times has he irritated me over the years by holding his silence on matters I wanted answered? Did boys like girls who climbed trees, rode horses better than they did, could lasso a calf, or could shoot a rifle with deadly accuracy?

Although he hasn’t kept silent on all the questions, he might as well have because his answer, “Just be yourself, Faith. You will have them falling at your feet,” wasn’t a great deal of help when it came to figuring out what a fellow wanted.

Then we are no longer talking, simply moving in rhythm to the music. His gaze holds mine, and I find myself falling into the dark brown depths of his eyes. No hint of humor resides within them. Instead, he is all seriousness and something I can’t quite decipher. But it draws me in, makes my fingers clutch him where they have a hold of him. All the other couples fade away until it is only me and Cooper gliding over the floor in tandem.

For as long as I can remember, it has been like this between us. No reason to use words to communicate, always knowing what the other needed, wanted, was thinking. Only now what is stirring within me frightens me with its intensity, and yet I have the sense he is struggling against the same unsettling awareness.

As soon as the music goes silent, he releases his hold on me so fast that anyone watching would have thought I had caught on fire.

“I need to get home. Happy birthday, Faith.” He says.

I wonder why, when he walks out of the room, it feels like he has taken the light with him.