Walk in Beauty by Barbara Samuel, Ruth Wind

the library when she was fourteen and read it three times—just that year. She’d lost count of how many more times she’d picked up the beloved book. “How could I forget?”
    Luke grinned, and his face was suddenly ten years younger. He’d often teased her about falling in love with him because she had loved Alessandro first.
    And in a small way, it was true. The first time she had seen Luke, hammering nails into the frame of her father’s new study, she had been riveted. As he worked in the heat of a California afternoon, his long black hair braided and dark skin shimmering with sweat, he’d been the most singularly attractive man she’d ever seen. His back was bare and long and dark, his arms strong and hard-muscled. A red bandanna tied around his forehead kept the hair from his eyes. She stared at him through her bedroom window, her stomach tight, unable to believe he was real. He paused, wiping a forearm across his brow. And then he looked up.
    Jessie, romantic and young, had thought with a painful pinch,
Oh, it’s Alessandro!
Her heart flipped when he gave her a slow, mocking, sexy smile.
    Much like the one he was giving her now. “What do you say?” he urged. “It’s a little more touristy these days, but the falls are still the same.”
    “Please, Mom?” Giselle said, folding her fingers into a prayer like petition.
    Jessie realized that she had already decided in favor of the idea, without giving much thought to the fact it would mean spending the day in Luke’s company, in places they had been before, places where they had once been happy. She wavered, suddenly afraid.
    Luke glanced up, sobering. “You don’t have to go if you’d rather hang around town or something. I can take her myself.”
    Right. She trusted him with his child, but not that much. “I’ll go,” she said. “But I want to stop by the hotel and change my clothes. I know how cold it can be up there.”
    Then, thinking of the sweaters and shawls she wore in place of coats, she sighed. Coats were too heavy and bulky for anything but the coldest days. She had not brought one with her. “I don’t suppose you have a spare jacket I could borrow?”
    “Sure.” He shook his head, smiling at Giselle. “You can’t get her to remember her coat, either?”
    Giselle rolled her eyes. “She’s stubborn.”
    Luke laughed. “Yep.”
    As they left the city behind, Luke found the tensions of the past twenty-four hours begin to bleed away. They rode in his truck, Giselle between them, bundled with scarves and mittens and layers until she resembled a roly-poly little bear. Tasha, the wolf mix, rode in the back of the truck, over which Luke had put a simple camper shell. A narrow road took them into the canyon, past picnic spots and hiking paths he knew intimately.
    Jessie pointed. “Look—chipmunk hill! Do they still live there?”
    “No. A few years ago there was some kind of fight over the water in the creek, and sometimes it was dry for long periods at a stretch. The chipmunks moved on. Some of the trees started to die, and finally the officials or whoever agreed to let a certain amount of water out of the reservoir at all times.”
    “How sad,” Jessie said.
    Luke gave her a smile. “People need to learn to use water like the Navajo.”
    “Couldn’t hurt.”
    Giselle lifted her head. “Daniel says everybody needs to learn how to live with the land like Indian people do.”
    “Is that right?” Luke nodded. “Does he still live on the reservation?”
    Jessie chuckled. “No way. He’d be miserable.”
    A minor pluck of annoyance pricked Luke’s chest at the fond intimacy of her tone. “Where does he live, then?”
    “Albuquerque,” Giselle offered. “Just a little ways from us. Sometimes I walk over there after school if Mom is busy.”
    Luke looked at her, wondering why he should be so bothered by that little tidbit of information. He hadn’t seen Daniel in fifteen years—why should Luke care if he lived close to