The word her people used for a debt that could never fully be repaid, and so was better simply carried forward as gratitude instead. Levi butchered every one of them at first, his tongue clumsy around sounds his own upbringing had never trained it to make, and Diani corrected him each time with a patience that never once curdled into mockery, though she laughed plenty along the way. He taught her in trade a handful of the rougher cattleman's English he'd grown up with, words no proper school teacher would have approved of, and delighted openly in how quickly and precisely she learned to use them at exactly the moments that would fluster him most. It became, without either of them naming it so plainly, its own private language built from both their worlds at once, spoken nowhere else and understood by no one else. And Levi came to think of it, turning the thought over on his long rides home, as about as close to a promise as two careful people could make, without yet putting the word to it out loud.
It was on an evening in early autumn, the two of them settled on the flat rock above the same spring, where she'd first named the thing he needed a woman like her for, that Levi finally gave voice to what he'd been carrying unspoken for the better part of a year. He didn't dress it up with a speech. He simply reached over slow and certain, the same way he'd once reached for the branches, pinning her beneath that fallen tree. I've been riding two days each way to bring you flower and rope. We both know a man doesn't do that for flower and rope.
Diani didn't pull her hand back. She turned it over instead, so their palms met properly and studied their two joined hands a long quiet moment before lifting her eyes to his. "No," she agreed softly. "He doesn't. " Neither one put the word love to it out loud that evening. "Not yet, but neither needed to.
It had already settled into the space between their joined hands, plain and undeniable, as the spring running cold beside them. " Diani came south to Levi's own ranch for the first time that same spring, riding in beside him openly in broad daylight, rather than meeting only in the canyon where no settler eyes could find them. And Levi understood, watching her take in the modest house and the leaning barn and the dry stretch of range he'd built up alone across three lonely years, that she had chosen deliberately to be seen. She walked his fence lines with him and named plants along the wash he'd ridden past a thousand times without ever once learning what they were called or what they were good for. She met his nearest neighbors, the Hendricks family, 2 mi east, and old Ruth Hendrix, who had buried a husband and outlived two hard winters alone on that same stretch of range, took one long look at Diani steady hands, and her level, unflinching gaze, and pronounced her within the hour. Entirely too sensible a woman to be wasted on a man as stubborn as Levi Callaway.