He knew what she was doing. Made the knot in his gut soften slightly. He swiped his eyes again, then wrapped his arms around her as well, holding her gentle as a springtime prayer of thanksgiving. “It was large and relatively flat.” He laid his cheek against the top of her head, her hair soft. He breathed in the beguiling scent of her, fragrant, womanly, and totally unique. As she filled his lungs, the thundering of his heart slowed to a gentle trot. “The rock was far enough away from the ranch that my thoughts were my own. The trailer and all its troubles receded and became a batch of fairy lights twinkling in the distance. I’d lie on it, cool and smooth, solid under my back. I’d look at the night sky and the millions and millions of stars and feel, for a moment, clean again. Sometimes I’d go there in the day, too. When school was out and my chores were done. It was a good place to read uninterrupted. Or to watch ants crawl across to obtain a few cracker crumbs. A good place to dream grandly as the clouds and the sun traveled across the wide-open sky.”

They stayed there like that, arms around each other, listening to the sounds of the desert, the whip of the wind, the beating of each other’s hearts.

“And then what happened?” she asked. “With the fire. Was everyone okay?”

He’d known it was coming. Had dreaded it. And yet now that it was on him, it was just one more segment of the story. “I was the only one who made it out.” He heard her sharp intake of breath, felt her arms tighten slightly around him.

“The only one?”

“Mm-hm.”

“God. That must have been tough.”

It had been. “They tracked my mom down, but she didn’t want me, so I was put in foster care.”

“Oh, Mick.” There was sorrow in her voice. He absorbed it by osmosis through all points of contact. Chest. Torso. Arms. Cheek.

“Wasn’t so bad.” It was. “Gave me drive and a determination to carve out a better life.”

“And you have.”

Mick laughed, the sound dry, almost bitter. “In some ways yes, in some ways no. In many ways I’m still trapped in the skin of that ragamuffin kid that ran away. I should have stayed. Should have shaken everyone awake. Should have dragged people out.”

Sarah pulled back. She looked him dead-on. There was a ferocity to her expression that he’d never seen before. “And you were how old? Ten, I believe you said. How were you going to manage that? Hm?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “It was a raging fire.”

“You don’t know that.”