Free Isabella Moon by Laura Benedict

just that she hadn’t had sex in all that time. Even before that, what had sex been to her? Physically pleasing, but Miles, the man with whom she’d spent so many years, so many intimate days and nights, had made it shameful in the end. And that relationship? Poison. She was a different person now. Reinvented. She knew it suited her, just as Caleb suited her.

     

    When they got to Gatchel’s diner, Kate found that she was hungry, particularly after her dinner of popcorn the previous night. She ordered a scrambled egg, toast, sausage, and juice. Caleb’s meal was a marvel to her: a stack of pancakes, two eggs, sausage, biscuits, and grits with gravy.
    “Are you sure you’re not still hungry?” she teased. “They might have to go to the grocery, but I’m sure they can get you something else.”
    “You wait,” he said. “I’m going to need all that energy later.”
    “Promises, promises,” Kate said.
    As it turned out, when they finally made it back to her cottage later that afternoon, he fell sound asleep on the couch minutes after he took his boots off. But before they left the diner, she convinced him to drive out to Janet’s house to see if anyone was working and what the progress was.
    It was only ten-thirty in the morning, and the temperature on the bank sign already read an unseasonable 65 degrees. When they got into the car, Kate asked Caleb to help her get the top down on her small blue convertible.
    “Pushing it a bit, aren’t we?” he said. “It’s not even April yet, hotshot.”
    “Oh, come on,” she said. “Live a little.”
    They headed west out of town into the lush part of the valley, where several of the old families had their farms. Miles of white fence wound up and down the rolling hills alongside the road. A few early foals ran alongside their mothers or chased one another gamely across the pastures, playing hide-and-seek behind the mares and small hillocks.
    Driving out to the new house one afternoon in Janet’s Range Rover, Janet had hinted that Kate would be welcome to keep a horse in the stables she was building—paying its board, of course—but Kate laughed and told Janet that she couldn’t imagine what would’ve given her the idea that she’d want to do such a thing.
    Janet had shrugged it off. “I don’t know,” she said. “You just seem like the horsey type.”
    It seemed unlikely to Kate that Janet would have noticed how her eyes moistened a bit as she looked out the passenger window of the Range Rover. She put it down to coincidence and Janet’s tendency to stereotype everyone she met. Funny, though, how often she seemed to be right, Kate thought. She’d loved to go horseback riding as a girl. Janet had a strange talent for knowing what people wanted, and it had helped her make a lot of money in insurance and real estate.
    “I wouldn’t mind living out here if it weren’t for snooty types,” Caleb said now. “What a pain.” He turned in his seat to follow the oncoming car that approached and zipped past them in the southbound lane. “That, honey, was how fast I was driving at dawn to get back to you this morning.”
    Kate smiled. “Paxton,” she said, “I understand that he pretty much always drives like that.”
    “If the guy weren’t such a snake, I’d admire his car,” Caleb said.
    “I like your truck just fine,” Kate said. She reached over and squeezed Caleb’s hand, then slid her hand playfully onto his jean-clad inner thigh. He leaned over and kissed her on her neck, which the wind passing through the convertible had exposed by blowing her hair out behind her. Caleb’s kiss and the fast-moving wind cleansed her thoughts of the funk that had settled over her in the past week. She wanted the way she felt this morning to last forever.

     

    Janet’s house was set far back from the road atop a small hill so that it seemed to tower over the green pastures around it. Kate drove slowly up the gravel road leading to what would soon be a