Nevertheless, Cade gave her a dark look and grunted like a bad-tempered camel. "At least yours took off in a straight line. Mine went sideways. Next thing I knew, my butt was bouncing through the cactus." He paused as if listening to the words he had just spoken, then grinned crookedly at her, in a way that made her heart feel fluttery and soft. "This is probably going to seem funny as hell to me someday, but right now it hurts too damn much to laugh."

Leila didn't feel like laughing, either. She realized that what she wanted more than anything in the world was to put her arms around him-or at least touch his face…stroke and soothe him. But she sensed that would be the last thing he would want from her now. Still, she could not resist asking, in a voice husky with concern, "Are you…in very much pain?"

Then, of course, being a man, he must try to be heroic and act as though he was not. "Oh, hell-I'll live. I guess I' ve been in worse shape." He paused in the middle of hobbling back to the path to tilt his head sideways. "Been awhile, though."

Leila gave a small gasp. "Do you mean that this has happened to you before?"

"No, no-" his laugh was dark rather than humorous "-I was thinking of the last time my dad tanned my backside with his belt. I guess I must have been twelve."

"You do not mean-he beat you?" Her tender heart was appalled. "But…that is terrible!"

He paused to look down at her. Her heart jumped nervously, then began to beat with a quick and painful rhythm. "Hey, what can I say?" he said softly. "He was a drunk. I guess I never told you that, huh."

No, Leila thought, precarious and wondering. Betsy did, but you didn 't. And little else about yourself, either. And she held her breath and prayed that he would not stop now.

He lifted his head to gaze beyond her. "Actually, he was a pretty decent guy when he wasn't drinking. Of course, he was drunk most of the time. Although to be honest, on that particular occasion-from his point of view, anyway-I probably deserved the licking."

"What did you do?" Her voice was hushed; she did not believe he could have done anything that would deserve a beating.

He gave a bark of laughter and his eyes came back to her. "Took my bike apart. Brand new-just got it for my birthday. Don't know what it cost, but it had to be expensive. I'd been begging for one for months, knowing my parents couldn't afford it." He shook his head; his eyes seemed to glow with remembering. "I couldn't believe it when I went out that morning and there it was." He paused, but Leila did not interrupt.

After a moment he drew a breath that seemed to hurt him, but inside, not where the cactus spines were. And when he tried to smile again, there was only the slightest flicker at the corners of his mouth. "Anyway, when my dad came home that evening, I had that bike in a million pieces. Had 'em all spread out on a blanket on the floor of the garage. I thought he was going to kill me. Darn near did. Then he rolled all those pieces into the blanket and threw 'em in the back of his truck and drove off. Last I ever saw of my bike." He drew the pain-filled breath again. "That hurt worse than the licking."

"But, why?" Leila dared to whisper. "Why did you do such a thing to this bike you wanted so much?"

He shrugged. "I just wanted to see how everything worked, find out how it all fit together. I was going to put it all back. It's just the way I am-the way I've always been." He frowned, looking past her again. "My mom understood that, but for some reason Dad…" After a moment he brought his eyes back to her, and the pain in them almost made her cry out in instinctive response. Because, as before, she knew this pain was not caused by the cactus spines, but by memories carried deep in his heart. "Anyway, my folks split up a couple months after that. For years I thought it was because of me. Silly, huh?" He gave his head a rueful scratch.

Then, in what even to Leila seemed an obvious attempt to escape these "unmanly" emotions, he gruffly muttered, "Where the hell's my hat?"

No, she thought, I do not think you are silly at all. I think you are a very strong and imposing man with a little boy inside you. A little boy who has been very much hurt. And I love that you have told me these things, even here in the middle of a cactus patch. I wish that you would not feel embarrassed that you have told me. And I wish that you would not stop.

But all she said out loud was, "There it is. Wait-I will get it." And she ran to scoop up his cowboy hat from the path. "Now it is my turn to rescue your hat," she said in a bumpy voice as she held it out to him, and as she did, touched his eyes with hers. And with that look, with all that was in her eyes, she was offering her compassionate woman's heart to the hurt little boy she had seen in his. Offering her newfound strength to him as she might have given her hand to a child.

The look lasted for uncounted seconds, in a silence that seemed to shimmer with electricity, to rumble with tension like distant thunder.

Leila spoke at last, in a choked whisper. "We do not seem to have very good luck with hats, you and I."

And at that moment the rain came, rain such as Leila had never seen before. It fell with a great rushing sound, hard and heavy, straight down on their heads, as if someone had turned on a giant faucet in the sky. In seconds they were both drenched and gasping, and Leila's hat, which, unlike Cade's, was not meant to withstand all kinds of weather, had begun to wilt like a paper boat in a fountain.

"You sure don't," Cade shouted, and reached out to tip the sodden wreck of her hat backward and off of her head. "Look, why don't you go on-you know the way back to the ranch from here, don't you? Take the mare and go. I'll meet you back-"

"Are you crazy?' Leila shouted back through the curtain of rain, not even thinking that perhaps it was not the sort of thing a woman should say to her husband. "Do you think I would go away and leave you?"

"What, do you think I'm helpless?" Cade sputtered, looking very much like a stubborn donkey. "Go on- get in out of this!"

"Of course I do not think you are helpless. And I do not dissolve in water. This is only a little rain. So, we will walk home. It cannot be far."

Cade glared at her. The rain was already beginning to slacken at little, so he did not really have to shout at her the way he did. "Do you know that for a princess, you are awfully damn stubborn?"

"Yes," she said, flashing her dimples, "I suppose that I am." And she was surprised, because it was the first time all day that she had even remembered that she was a princess.


* * *

"Damn," Cade said gloomily, "I should have known." He flicked the light switch up and down again, with the same result. The power was out again. Naturally.

"It is not so very dark," Leila said as she slipped past him. "We can see quite well. It will not be night for several hours. By that time perhaps the electricity will be back on."

Cade made an ambiguous sound as he closed the door behind him. Then he stood for a moment and regarded her warily in the dim, shadowy light. He wasn't quite sure what to make of this new Leila, couldn't even decide in exactly what ways she was new. Her cheerfulness in the face of all the various discomforts and inconveniences he'd put her through was unexpected, maybe, except when he stopped to realize that he never really had heard her complain. Ever. Then there was the way she'd stood by him, out there in the cactus and the rain, when she could have been nice and cozy in a dry house. And he hadn't forgotten what had happened between them up there on the hilltop. God, no. But this "newness" didn't have anything to do with those things.

No…if he had to put a name to it, he'd probably call it self-confidence, though that commodity wasn't exactly new to her, either. She'd sure had no lack of it when he'd first met her. But this…whatever it was… was nothing like the unabashed cheekiness that had made her seem so young-and which he'd found so alluring-in the fairy-tale atmosphere of Tamir. He couldn't quite put his finger on why, but he knew this was different. And that his awareness of it, and her, was a vibrating knot of energy in the core of his body, like a miniature dynamo pumping out electrical impulses along all his nerves, keeping his senses charged to full capacity and tuned to her precise wavelength.

Those humming nerves made him cranky and snappish. "Yeah, well, it's gonna be tough to see to pull out these damn cactus spines," he growled, hunching his shoulders and heading for the kitchen like a man walking on eggs.

She pivoted as he passed her, then followed him. "How are you going to do that?"

"What, pull out the spines?" He was rummaging in the drawer where he kept the flashlights and other essentials, and didn't look at her. Though he could have gauged his distance from her as accurately as if he'd been equipped with his own personal GPS. "Only thing I know of that'll do the job is a pair of needlenose pliers. Like these right here." Having located his in the drawer, he brandished them at her.

"No, I mean, how are you going to do it?" She was regarding him calmly, all shades of black and gray in the murky light. "The cactus is in your back, is it not?" He glared at her, unable to think of a thing to say. She came toward him, and his skin shivered with goose bumps. "I think that you will need help to pull out these spines." And she had taken the pliers from his hand before he could stop her.

When she would have taken the flashlight as well, though, he jerked it away from her like an obstinate child. "No," he croaked. "No way. I'll manage. I'll…I'll use a mirror."