Mystic Cowboy: Men of the White Sandy, Book 1 by Sarah Anderson Page B

you are in that picture? The one in the gallery?”
    “Oh, that.” Now it was his turn for his face to get hot. He never felt less like his brand image than at this exact moment. “Yeah. That’s me as a commodity. Jonathan Runs Fast. Serious Artist.”
    She stilled, but just for a second before her chest was rubbing against his. She was laughing. “Which piece of you did I overpay in commissions for?”
    Yeah, she owned a piece of him. No doubt, she considered it leverage of some sort. “The piece that waits for the first day of summer sun to come set the world free from the spring rains.” He’d thought of that bag from his spring spot, up higher in the hills, where he could look down on the prairie and watch the world wake up. “But don’t worry. I’ll get that piece back next spring.”
    “ Jonathan . I think I like Rebel better,” she murmured as she touched his reddening cheek.
    God, he wanted to kiss her, but that would be pushing it right now. She’d get mad and flustered and accuse him of changing the subject again. “By the time I married her, I’d given away so many pieces that I didn’t have much left.” The emptiness had clawed away at him until his dreams were filled with nothing but grass and river, wind and sky. “I needed to come home, come back to this land and remember what it meant to be a Lakota again. What it meant to be a real Indian again.”
    “Did she come with you?”
    “For about three days. Then she left. And I never did.” For eight months, Anna had treated him like he was the Indian, the noble savage she was personally educating. And then she’d see Albert’s shack, seen the wasteland that was his home, and in a heartbeat, everything had changed. The noble devotion had sunk under the weight of disgust. Horror. Sheer shock that he would even consider coming home to a bunch of Indians too drunk to do anything but drink some more. Which is how the other half of the white world treated him. A thing to be feared. A thing to be contained. A thing.
    The divorce had been quick and uncontested. He’d signed the papers by mail.
    Her hand was back on his chest, like she was checking his heartbeat. “Did she ever see this place?”
    “No.” This place stayed pure, unfouled. And now Madeline was here. “The only people who come here are people looking for a medicine man.”
    “Really?” Suddenly, she was leaning up against him, her mouth as close to his ear as she could get and stay covered by the water. “I came here looking for you .”
    Her voice trickled down his neck, down his chest, until its warmth overpowered the cold water. “You found me.”
    While he looked down at her, hoping to kiss those lips, to finally taste that mouth, she was grinning at him. She was toying with him. Maybe he had a little of that coming his way.
    “But you wear cowboy boots now, not moccasins or loafers.”
    Don’t push it. But he didn’t know how much longer he could not push it, because she was pushing him. He laughed. It felt good. “True. Visions are always open to interpretation, you know.”
    She stretched out, her skin moving under his until he was afraid he would have to let her go, just to keep from touching her in all the wrong, right ways. “You have visions too?”
    Her body—her body was begging him to come on in, the water was fine. But her brain was still tap-dancing around things, like it was some sort of test he had to pass. She was going to drive him mad.
    “I had to learn how to see them. It took a lot of practice. I have to be patient and completely still.”
    Now she laughed, throwing her arms wide into the water. If he looked down... Mad. He was absolutely mad. For her.
    “How much practice?”
    He wasn’t looking, but he couldn’t help touching. He moved his hands over her ribs, half-stroking, half-tickling. And she responded by splashing him.
    “Years,” he said, finding a belly button that was a surprising outie. His fingers moved over it with something