11. Crystal

 

 

The bite mark on her neck healed overnight, as Cody had told her it would. By the following morning, it looked like it had been healing for weeks; nothing was left but a small, slightly tender scar.

It had felt a bit strange in the beginning to have a new scar, but as she got used to looking in the mirror and seeing that pink mark on her neck, she felt nothing but pride. She kept having to stop and pull back her hair so she could look at it. No matter where Cody went, a part of him would always stay with her like this.

And Cody was right, she could sense him now, in an odd kind of way. It wasn't like she could tell how far away he was or what he was doing. There was just a faint sense of Codyness, especially when she touched her fingers to the claiming mark. And there was a yearning that went with it. Having him farther away than she could touch or see was too far. She wanted him with her always.

She thought she probably should have been having second thoughts about the mate bonding, but in truth, all she felt was a resolute satisfaction.

No matter what decision they made, about what to do with the farm and where to live, they were going to have to make it together. And that was exactly how she wanted it.

In the meantime, she kept herself too busy to think too much about it. Cody still wasn't spending the nights, but he came over early in the morning and left late. Usually, at least one of the ranch women came with him, most often Daisy and Saffron, occasionally Tara or brisk, cheerful, take-charge Charmian. Cody worked in the yard, pruning the fruit trees, cutting brush, finishing the bridge, repairing farm equipment. Crystal kept up her treasure hunt while she also worked on fixing up the house, trying to tell herself the whole time that she was fixing it up for whatever new owners eventually bought it.

But she could only fool herself for so long. It wasn't for the new owners that she'd cleaned up the antique vases she found in the attic and filled them with wildflowers; it wasn't to please some other farm wife that she had polished the old brass cookware until it shone. When Charmian helped her drag the aired-out furniture back indoors, Crystal set it up how she wanted it, arranging every piece just so.

And every day, she walked up to the spring again. It had become her favorite place on the farm. Sitting by the spring in the cool shade, she felt closer to her grandfather than anywhere else on the property. She had a feeling that this had been one of his favorite places, too. There was a big flat rock beside the pool that made a sort of bench, so level and flat that she suspected it wasn't natural; it had been found somewhere else and dragged to the pool for sitting on.

"What should I do?" she whispered out loud. "I don't want to leave. Why did you have to make this so difficult? If you had an inheritance for me, for us, couldn't you just put it in your will like a normal person?"

Nothing answered except the soft whisper of wind in the trees. And yet, she almost felt as if someone might be listening. A breath of wind touched her face, and she closed her eyes.

It was late afternoon. When she listened carefully, she could hear the rumble of a distant engine. Cody had gotten her grandfather's tractor running again, and he was using it to pull stumps along the broken line of the pasture fence so they could string new fencing.

Even if she hadn't been able to hear the tractor, she would have known he was close by, through the bond they now shared.

It was so hard to believe she was going to have to leave tomorrow.

By unspoken consent, she and Cody hadn't spoken of it, instead going through this day as if it was a perfectly normal day. But her two weeks were almost up. As it was, she'd stayed a day longer than she'd intended to. Rather than having a leisurely two-day drive back to St. Louis, she was going to have to drive through the night to make it back in time for work on Monday.

How could two weeks have sped by so quickly? And to think when she first came here, she thought she'd be bored. She had wondered how she could ever fill that much time in this remote place. By all rights, she should be hungering for the city again. She ought to be yearning for a decent cup of coffee, craving her favorite Ethiopian restaurant, looking forward to being able to check her email without having to drive down to Wildcat Forks ...

But she didn't miss any of that. Instead, the idea of leaving this place felt like it would tear her soul in two.

And then there was Cody. She didn't know what to do. She couldn't ask him to leave his ranch and clan.

There's another option, she told herself. She could sell the farm, pay off her family's debts, and move onto the ranch with Cody. That was a perfect solution, wasn't it? She would still have her mate and the rural lifestyle that had turned out to fit her like a totally unexpected glove. She really liked the other ranch women, and she would have them around her every day ...

And she'd have to go through every day working on someone else's ranch, feeling like a guest—a welcome guest, but a guest nonetheless. She'd have to live right next door to her family farm while someone else tended these fields, someone else sat beside this spring.

It would be torment. She'd rather live back in St. Louis, where at least she wouldn't have constant reminders around her every day.

She opened her eyes again at a soft rustling. In front of her, the pool glistened, reflecting the pink-tinged sky, the trees and rocks.

Across from her, a deer had just stepped out of the woods.

Crystal held her breath. Every time she came to the spring, she'd been hoping to see the deer and fawn again. The little cloven hoofprints let her know that they came here regularly. But until now, she hadn't seen a trace of them.

The deer looked around, scenting the wind. It paused for a long moment, then trotted to the water's edge and lowered its head to dip its delicate muzzle into the pool.

Crystal didn't dare move a muscle.

She wasn't positive this was the same deer until a fawn detached itself from the woods and made its gangly way to the water's edge. It waded into the edge of the water with its skinny little legs and leaned down, but its legs were too long and its neck too short to drink the way its mother was doing. So it tried to kneel down, and accidentally dipped its whole head in the water. It came up snorting and sneezing.

Crystal couldn't help herself. A tiny giggle escaped her.

Both the deer jumped. The fawn scampered back into the woods, herded by its alert mother. In a moment, the two of them had faded away as if they'd never been.

Crystal let out her breath in a slow sigh. They had been so close. Her spine tingled with the magic of the encounter. She couldn't get too upset with herself for accidentally laughing at them. Until that moment, it was like they didn't even know she was there, as if they had accepted her completely as part of the scenery.

Maybe next time, I'll manage to be totally quiet.

What am I thinking? Next time? There's not going to be a next time. I'm leaving tomorrow.

She looked up and realized the sun had set behind the mountains. It was always cooler by the spring than out in the pasture, but now a genuine chill began to creep into the air, chasing away the heat of afternoon. If she didn't head back to the farmhouse now, she was going to have to walk back in the dark, and she wasn't quite that familiar with the place yet. It would be embarrassing to get lost in her own woods and make Cody have to track her down.

She wasn't scared, though. Even though there could be bears and mountain lions in the woods, a woman who was mated to a bear shifter needed to fear nothing. The biggest predator on this mountain was her mate, her Cody.

"I want to stay," she said aloud, tears springing to her eyes. "Please, Grandpa, help me. Show me where your treasure is. Give me a way to stay here and keep the farm."

A sudden gust of wind rattled the trees. Realistically Crystal knew it was only the evening temperature change stirring up breezes, like it always did at dusk, but it still raised the fine hairs on her arms. A leaf broke free of the willow hanging over the pool and fluttered down to dimple the surface, swirling around in the current before it was drawn into the rushing outflow.

Another leaf fluttered down beside Crystal, landing lightly on her favorite flat rock. Layers of dead leaves had built up here over the years; she'd had to brush them aside to make herself a nice place to sit. Now she poked at the dead leaf layer, pushing it off the suspiciously smooth top of the rock, and her fingers brushed over a cleft.

Wait ... there was something scratched into the top of the rock.

She pushed more leaves aside. As she she bared the top of the rock, letters were exposed. They looked like they'd been cut with a chisel.

T-R-E—

One letter at a time, she uncovered the inscription.

TREASURE

SPRINGS

"Treasure springs?" she murmured, and Cody's words came back to her, about the ranch being located here because of the spring. Worth its weight in gold, he'd said.

She touched the letters with her fingertips, and a laugh bubbled up in her throat. Oh, the irony.

"This is your treasure, isn't it, Grandpa? The spring is the treasure."

I'd rather have the gold, she'd told Cody. But that wasn't true at all. She wouldn't trade this spring for a hundred gold mines. Without this spring, there would be no farm.

But it meant there was no magic pot of money hidden on the property. No perfect solution that would allow her to pay off her family's bills and keep the farm too.

She was going to have to sell it.

Crystal drew a deep breath past the lump in her throat, and got up off the bench. "Thank you, Grandpa," she said to the darkening woods. "I guess you were trying to show me after all. I just didn't want to hear what you had to say."

Hope wasn't lost, she told herself. There were still options. She would be happy eventually, living on the Circle B or in St. Louis, because her heart was with Cody and her home was wherever he was. Maybe they would be able to sell the farm to someone nice, who would let her come over here sometimes, and sit beside the spring like she used to ...

Her head jerked up at a sudden rustle in the woods.

All her earlier bravado deserted her, and now her head was full of thoughts of bears, mountain lions, enraged deer ...

Crystal groped for something to use as a weapon. The only thing that came to hand was a rock, but she picked it up anyway—

—then relaxed when Cody stepped out of the woods.

"Crystal?" He relaxed, too, when he saw her. "You weren't back at the house. I figured I'd find you up here. It's getting dark."

"I know. Thanks for coming to find me." She dropped the rock, and pointed to the disturbed leaves and the underlying inscription. "I'm glad you did. Come here, I want to show you something."

Cody read the inscription on the rock, squinting to make out the letters in the dusk. "Treasure springs ... wait. The spring—"

"The spring is the treasure. All this time we've been looking for something that doesn't exist. Or, I guess I should say, we already found it, we just didn't know."

"Oh, honey." He pulled her into his arms. "I'm sorry."

"I'm not," Crystal said into his shoulder, slightly muffled. "Like you pointed out, the farm wouldn't even be here if not for the spring. It really is a treasure. Just ... not the kind I hoped for."

But she still wanted to cry. All that work. She'd fallen so completely in love with the farm in just two weeks. She wanted to spend the rest of her life here.

Cody stroked her hair, and she relaxed into his arms and reminded herself that as long as she had him, things would work out, somehow.

"Are you leaving tomorrow?" he murmured against her hair.

"Yes, but only for a little while. I just have to go back to St. Louis, talk to Mom, start the proceedings to sell the farm—"

"You're selling it?" He sounded as crushed as she felt.

He loves it here, too.

"I have to. There's no other option. We need that money. But ... once I get things settled with Mom and get my stuff packed up, I'm coming back."

She felt something pass through him, some powerful emotion, partly from the way he tensed and then sagged very slightly against her, and partly in a way that went beyond normal senses, through the bond they shared. "You're coming back?"

"Of course I'm coming back!" She tipped her head back to look up at him. The sky was still deep blue, with the first stars of evening emerging above the mountains, but it was almost dark under the trees; she couldn't make out his expression. "Cody, I understand how much it means to you, living here. When I let you bite me, I knew what it meant. I don't expect you to move to the city for me. I can live on the Circle B, if your alpha will have me."

"Alec. Yeah." Cody laughed softly and pressed his face to her hair. "There's one conversation I've been ducking. I kept telling myself there was no point in talking to him until I knew what, exactly, I was asking for—whether I'd be telling him I was leaving the ranch, or bringing my mate back with me ..."

"Well, now you know." She pressed herself against him, as if she could burrow into him, and told herself that she would be happy on the Circle B, even if it didn't feel like hers in the same way the farm did. It would come to feel like home, in time.

"Maybe—" Cody began.

"Shhh. Let's not talk about that tonight. All I want to do is go back down to the farmhouse, and make a nice meal; there are those steaks in the freezer that you brought over from the Circle B, and we need to use them up before I go. Let's just have a pleasant evening, and ... stay with me tonight."

"Always," he whispered, brushing his callused fingertips across the side of her face. "Always."