“ ‘I’m hoping it didn’t touch you,” he said.
The tone of his voice made her raise her right arm slowly to see where his eyes were fixed. There was a tear in her shirt — two tears, actually, close together and parallel, near the firm swell of her breast. Simon knelt beside her and opened one of the rents with steady impersonal fingers. He saw golden skin, softly rounded, unmarked.
“Another half-inch would probably have done it,” he said. “You’re going to make me believe you haven’t got any nerves.”
She met his eyes with sober directness.
“I just didn’t want to be sloppy about saying thank you.”
That was when it seemed so natural to kiss her.
He stood up abruptly.
“Hold on a minute and I’ll get your horse,” he said.
He led the palomino up the slope first, to a more level stretch of firmer ground. Then he went back for the pinto which by some other miracle seemed to have also avoided rolling over or breaking a leg. He stroked the animal’s nose and talked to it until he had calmed it down enough to struggle back up the incline with the reins in his hand.
Beside Jean Morland again, he gave her his other hand and got her to her feet. She stumbled at once, almost into his arms, as another patch of loose surface slid from under her, but as he steadied her, somehow, he was not looking at her but over her shoulder at the ground behind her, where the weathered surface was freshly scarred and churned up by the varied scuffles of feet and hoofs. Then, quietly, he bent and picked up a broken chunk of red rock and squeezed it into his pocket before he gave her his hand again and helped her up on to where the palomino was waiting.