The Cowboy's Call

Chapter 9

She was asleep. Her soft head of hair snuggled gently into the crook of his arm, her breath coming in tender sighs from parted lips, and her body folded tightly in his arms, she looked like an angel newly fallen from the golden heavens. Lance tucked the intoxicating if not delinquent thoughts that ran rampant through his head away, and slowly ascended the grand staircase, wincing at every errant creak erupting from the belligerent wood.

The stairs ended in a crossroads of two sweeping hallways wandering off into both directions. Hoping and praying he might choose, by some heavenly direction, the right one, he pivoted to the right and followed the spacious hallway down.

Delicately woven carpets littered the floor down to the end of the hall, causing Lance to wince at his own mud-caked boots trodding slowly across their intricate threads. He closed his eyes and prayed his boots held onto the earth long enough for it to divest itself back into its native soil when he returned to the place of its origination.

His gaze roamed the fine, gentile vases that sprang up on either side of the walkway like Lillies through a gentle, rolling knoll. He eyed the sullen knight, leering down at him from delicate oil paint strokes, his lance held stolidly in front of him. Lance felt out of place. From his long, awkward stride covering far too much space with its lulling tilt, all the way up to his angular nose made crooked by some perfectly aimed punch at an establishment he didn't even dare think of in this home of elegance and all of its gentle graces. One he was only worthy to look on at with longing that filled his soul in a way that felt foreign and intoxicatingly enticing.

Yet, like the daisy suckling at the sweet air of a Montana spring or the wild sunflowers turning their faces towards the sun, its golden head just beginning to peak over the jagged clefts of the mountains, he knew were he belonged. In the wild open air, his sun-bleached hair caught up in her deft, careless fingers, his skin burnt beneath the unforgiving heat of the burning orb in the sky. Still, somehow, he felt a painful ache in his heart begin to swell beneath an unnamed longing that filled his soul. All the while knowing a sea of unforgiving, harsh realities crashed and reeled in the space between.

From the moonlight seeping through the window at the far end of the hall, Lance could make out a king's ransom worth of tapestries and paintings gracing the walls of the mansion. A wild seascape adorned one wall, its livid depths drawing his eyes into the haunting waters, their swells and falls leaving him aching to taste the salty tang of its water against his tongue and feel the cold, unrelenting chill of the water bite him to life.

A little farther on a tender scene of moss and flower swept into the distance, like the gentle flow of a windswept dress, its creases and folds dancing hypnotically across hill and through gully. A few sheep dotted the horizon, their bronzed shepherd standing stoically upon a rock, gazing out into the vast expanse, his eyes searching, yet strangely calm.

With every new mural, a lust began to take hold of him. A lust for something more, something just out of reach. The trimmed edges of a monastery, regal and stern, gazing out upon the German countryside; the rippling meadows of a Scottish moorland, taunting and mocking him in their lulling beauty; the tender, bewitching smile of a woodland nymph floating in ethereal stillness among a sea of amaryllis, fireflies flitting among her gentle swaths of golden locks that seemed not so much to fall over her pearly-white skin but to waft around those piercing, laughing grey eyes.

As if walking out of the hazy mist of a dream, Lance came to the end of the hall, two doors barricaded him on either side. They were oaken, looming, and obverse to the idea of providing Lance with any clue as to the door that would not lead to a screaming woman pounding him soundly with the sole of a frosted pink slipper.

Drawing in a trembling breath, he unlatched the door to his left. It fell open with barely a squeak. Letting out a cautious exhale, he stepped through the doorway.