Page 47 of Cowboy in Colorado

The third visit to Costa Rica is the clincher—Tina, Jeremy, and I take a tour of our third option together, the remote jungle location. There are some small, two-track roads to access the area, but the real access happens from the water. And as we make our approach in a locally captained motorboat, I know this is the place. The water is cerulean—not in any way the same shade as Will’s eyes—and the beach is a white crust between the surf and the jungle.

“Slow down, please?” I say to the captain.

He nods, and pulls back on the throttle. “Yes, yes. Slow go in, much better. No splash, see more beautiful thing.” He’s an old man, the captain, weathered and wise, calm and confident—he reminds me of Will’s father, actually. He points. “Monkeys, you see? Parrot.” Another gesture, this one at the water. “Many fish. Good wave for surf. You like this, very nice.”

We’re tooling along at a crawl, the waves rocking us. There’s no sound but the waves crashing in the distance, and the faint hoot of monkeys and the squawk of parrots.

The captain glances at me with one curious, speculative brown eye. “For sale?” he asks, pointing at the shoreline with the unlit stub of a cigar. “You buy? For big house?”

I shake my head. “I’m buying it, yes, but for a resort.”

He frowns. “Big hotel? Tourists, big road?” His tone is openly disapproving.

I shake my head. “No, not a big hotel, no roads.” I sweep my hand at the shore. “It’s going to look just like this. Maybe a dozen or twenty little cabins, built by locals. Some staff and resource buildings back in the jungle, but only what is needed.”

“No roads, how you get them here?” He guns the throttle and swings the tail end of the boat around, then cuts the power so we’re bobbing sideways, perpendicular to the shore perhaps a hundred yards off the shoreline.

I grin at him. “How many boats do you have, captain?”

He snorts. “No captain. Just Señor Rodriguez. One boat, only me.” He arches one thick, bushy eyebrow at me. “You want many boats?”

I shrug. “I don’t know for sure.” I give him an open, honest look. “What I know I do want this to be is an asset to Costa Rica, and an asset to the locals. Bring work, bring tourist dollars without an overload of excess humanity, or a drain on local resources. I don’t want to damage the jungle or pollute anything. A little resort, built and staffed by locals who would be paid a more than generous wage. They’d be ferried over here from a staging area in the closest workable marina—” I glance at him. “Where you dock your boat, for example.”

Señor Rodriguez nods, considering. “I have friends, they have boat like me. You pay us, we bring tourist. A few, two, three trips every day? Good money, not so much work.” He fingers a place where the metal side of the boat is rusting. “Maybe better we get new boat, huh?” His grin is sly.

I laugh. “I think we could work something out, you and your friends and me.” I consider. “Maybe not brand-new boats, butbetterboats.”

He nods. “Is good. Brand new no good. No parts, I can no fix.” He eyes me again, waves at the shoreline south of us. “Not so far from this, there is a farm, many—” He halts, musing. “English…maybe not so good.Caballo?Sí?” He mimes his hands like clopping horse hooves and clicks his tongue in a remarkable mimic of the sound. “Like this. Many many. Tourist like to ride thesecaballoon the beach. Good money.”

God, horses. Everything comes back to horses. I’d need someone who knows horses to tell me if the horses are good, and to negotiate, and train them, and find guides and stable hands, and this is something I know nothing about.

I know someone who does, but I’ll be damned if I’ll call him.

Ugh.

All my thoughts seem to find their way back to William Fucking Auden.

He grins at me, winking. “My lady, I take her to ride like this, on the beach?Celebracionfor day we make wedding to each other.Veinte años. We ridecaballoon the beach…” He wiggles his eyebrow. “Now, I have little boy,mi hijo.”

The inference is obvious, and I clear my throat. “Yes, I’ll keep that in mind, thank you. A wonderful idea.”

He nods, pleased.

Ride a horse on the beach with your wife, and she ends up pregnant on your twentieth anniversary. Nice.

But, truthfully, I know providing horses would add a huge additional income stream to the whole concept. It’s just…too damn close to a sore spot in my heart.

I tell myself to toughen up, that I’m being silly, that I’m holding on to something that clearly meant nothing, and shouldn’t mean anything to me. A night of good sex, and that’s it.

Good sex? Try life-altering.

I haven’t even had the courage to go to my favorite uptown club where I usually find my nightly boy-toys. I just can’t bring myself to go there mentally, because I know the second I get a guy naked, I’ll start mentally comparing him to Will, and he’ll come up short, and he won’t go down on me the way Will did, and he won’t feel the same inside me as Will did, and he just won’t cut it.

I haven’t even masturbated since I got back from Colorado.

What I have done is wake up sweaty and throbbing, fresh out of a dream where Will is crawling up the foot end of the bed, burrowing underneath a silk flat sheet, and kissing his way up my thighs, to my sex, where his talented tongue does delightful, sinful things to me—

And then I wake up, and no matter how I try, I can’t fall back asleep, because getting back to sleep would mean relieving the ache in my core, and that would mean letting myself use Will as fantasy fodder, and if I did that, I’d start down a slippery slope of thinking about Will, which would lead to missing him, which would lead to admitting that I’d fallen in love with his big sexy stupid self—