“Kaley, you’re not cut out for this life,” Tripp told her.

“It takes a tough heart. That’s why I want you to sell out to me. You’re better off without this.”

“Better off with—”

The same thing he’d said in his kiss-off letter nine years ago! You’ll be better off without me.

She jerked upright in his arms. “Who the hell are you to tell me that?”

His tender half smile faded to bewilderment. “Hey, I’m just trying to—”

She brought her hands to his chest and shoved, arching her back against his hold. “That’s right! You’re doing this all for my own good. Taking my ranch from me. You’re such a considerate guy!” She shoved him again, but still he held on. For just a moment there—oh, she was such a fool to feel safe and loved in his arms! Nothing but her old longings betraying her—just as they’d betrayed her the first time all those years ago. It isn’t me he gives a damn about! Tripp takes what he needs for himself, then tells you he’s done you a favor!

Well, not this time, Kaley vowed….

Dear Reader,

Have you ever dreamed about living in the perfect little town? Some place small and friendly enough that people know your face. Where the menfolk tip their Stetsons at you when they drive by. Where the women remember if you take after your mama’s side of the family or your daddy’s.

A town just big enough that a few inquiring strangers wander through every year, then are beguiled by its warmth and charm into staying. A town rich in beauty, with snow-capped mountains looming on the horizon, and cattle ranches spreading out all around, and a white church on a hilltop perfect for storybook weddings.

Trueheart, Colorado, first took shape in my mind with the book Don’t Mess With Texans, when my heroine, Susannah Mack, hid out from her vengeful ex-husband there. I couldn’t resist revisiting the place in The Baby Bargain, to help widowed ranch owner Dana Kershaw find a new soul mate while she doubled her family.

And now, in True Heart, we return for the third time, when Kaley Cotter comes back to have her baby, save the family ranch—and rediscover the love of her life.

So welcome to my town—or welcome back! Slide into a booth at Mo’s Truckstop and order a steakburger and fries to go with your story. Or maybe you’ll want to try the new café in Trueheart, where Michelle serves cassoulet to the ladies, and French chili to the men—and it’s all from the same pot.

As always, thanks for reading!

Peggy Nicholson

True Heart
Peggy Nicholson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Christina Canham, fearless on the foredeck,

fearless in the kitchen, frequently admirable,

perpetually amusing. Closest to a little sister

I’ll ever have. Chrisso, how I’ll miss our

Girls’ Nights Out. Sail on, kid, but don’t be a stranger.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

PROLOGUE

KALEY BOSWORTH DANCED straight out of the doctor’s office that afternoon and bought a double armload of sunflowers. And beeswax candles—every last tall, creamy-white fragrant candle that the florist had in stock. Fifty-seven, in all.

Now they stood in unlit readiness on the counters to either side of the door that led from her kitchen to the attached garage. From there they spread out over the other counters, the marble-topped central work island, the table in the breakfast nook. She’d even set candlesticks at the doorway to the butler’s pantry.

More candles beckoned the eye into the pass-through pantry, then on to the dining room, to its long, lace-covered mahogany table, where the remaining tapers stood in two silver candelabra. Between the candelabra on the table, she’d placed a cut-crystal punch bowl, filled to overflowing with the sunflowers, entwined with pink honeysuckle and roses from her own garden. Color and a blaze of light to match her mood.

The table was laid with their best sterling and china. Champagne stood iced in a wine bucket for Richard, along with a bottle of sparkling cider for herself.

All she needed was her husband to help her celebrate. Richard was only ninety minutes later than he’d said he’d be that morning—still well within his self-imposed margin of two hours, after which he’d usually phone to say that some case had delayed him and she shouldn’t wait supper.

But tonight he hadn’t called.

“So, any minute now,” Kaley half sang as she stood by a window in her darkened living room, hugging herself, bouncing on her toes with impatience as she peered down to the distant street corner.

Headlights knifed through the summer dusk with swift assurance. Streetlights rippled over a sleek, sliding shape—a dark blue convertible swung around the bend and arrowed straight for the house. “Yes!” Kaley snatched up a box of matches and ran for the back door.

She lit the first half-dozen candles, then, as their flames grew, she threw the light switch. She bit her lip as she heard the rumble of the garage door rising. Hurry! Another dozen candles leaped into flame, washing the walls in flickering gold. Hurry, hurry! She tossed a spent match in the sink, struck another, laughing breathlessly at her own foolishness—too many candles!

Yet, a thousand wouldn’t have been too many.

Fire touched wick after wick as the garage door rumbled down. She set the candles in the breakfast nook ablaze. A scent of warm wax and honey wafted upward—incense of thanks and joy.

Two dozen or more to go; she’d never finish in time! Kaley knelt to light the candles on the floor as the back door opened.

“Huh?” Richard Bosworth stopped short in the doorway. “Good God, Kaley.” He frowned. “What’s all this?”

“Oh, this…?” She twinkled up at him. “Guess you’d call it a celebration.” Touching a match to another candle, she shared a smiling secret with its kindling flame. Kindling, yes—exactly so. Such beauty! Such a miracle!

“Looks more like a three-alarm disaster waiting to happen. Candles on the floor? Is that really necessary?”

She felt her smile tighten ever so slightly and drew a slow breath. “Ran out of counter space.” She backed away into the pantry, lit the candles on the sideboards.

He dropped his briefcase on a chair and followed. “What am I missing? It’s not our anniversary. Nobody’s birthday.” He paused in the door to the dining room, taking in the flowers, the lavish table set for two, the blue velvet dress she wore. She lit the tapers in the first candelabrum. The flames struck his fair hair to ruddy gold, picked out the chiseled planes of his handsome face.

Showed her his lips thinning and his eyebrows drawing together.

“So?”

“So…” She looked up at him over the flames that mirrored her inward glow. “Something wonderful happened today.”

“Yes, I gathered that. What?”

If only, just this once, he’d go along with her mood. Especially this once. “I’ll tell you, but first, if you’d open that bottle?”

“Dom Perignon,” he noted, lifting the bottle from the ice. “Whatever your news, isn’t this a bit over budget?”

He’d treated himself to two cases the year before, when he’d made partner at his law firm. And now it was her turn to rejoice. “For this occasion? I don’t think so.”

“Your department head—what’s the old bat’s name? Henley? She decided to retire,” Richard guessed. “You’re next in line for the job.”

“I am, but this has nothing to do with teaching. Nothing like that.”

“Then tell me. You know how I hate surprises.” He covered the bottle’s cork with a napkin, drew it with a deft flick of his thumbs. The soft pop promised bubbles, but something somewhere, had gone flat.

She held the crystal flutes for him to fill, biting her lip as she studied his impatient frown. He did hate surprises, much as she loved them. Her fault, this. She should have told him the instant he walked in the door. Now she stood torn between blurting out her news and waiting for a happier moment, perhaps after his first glass?

“Come on, spit it out.” He lifted his flute. “What should I toast?”

Why was she worrying? Once he’d heard… At least, once he’d gotten used to the idea… She rallied her smile. “Kiss me first?”

“That bad?” Still, he kissed her—a wary, closemouthed kiss, precisely measured. “Tell me.”

“Well…” She took a breath. “You know I had an appointment this afternoon, with my gynecologist.”

His eyes swept from the candles, to the flowers, back to her radiant face. No one could ever say that Richard was slow. He shook his head. “No.”

“Yes! I told him I was a week late. That’s unusual for me, so he tested and—and—” Her words jumbled into breathless, pleading laughter. Come on, share this with me. All the worries and setbacks she’d suffered through at his side, all the ambitions she’d applauded, the triumphs she’d celebrated. She’d been there for Richard every step of the way, and now couldn’t he just—

“Shit.” He tipped his glass back and gulped, blew out a breath, then smacked the flute down on the table.

She stared at the champagne splash marks darkening the lace, she ought to get a cloth and dab them dry before they soaked through and marred the perfect, polished mahogany beneath.

“I’m pregnant, Richard. We are. And you know how long I’ve been wanting this. You said once you made partner—”

“You’re on the Pill! How could this have happened? Did you stop without telling me?”

“Of course not! I’d never—”

“So you forgot—skipped a couple. Of all the careless, idiotic things to—”

“I didn’t! I didn’t forget a one.” She set down her own glass untasted. “I had that awful earache—five weeks ago, remember? I couldn’t get an appointment soon enough with my GP, so I stopped by a walk-in clinic and the doctor prescribed tetracycline.”

“So?” Richard turned his back on her to pace down the length of the table, then swung on his heel to glare. “What’s that got to do with—”

“Some antibiotics interfere with contraception. I never knew that, and the doctor didn’t tell me.”

“I’ll sue him. And the pharmacist, too—negligence pure and simple. By God, they’re going to regret—”

“Oh, no.” Shaking her head, she met him halfway down the table—clamped her hands over the forearms he’d crossed on his chest. “No. Maybe they were careless, but we’re not suing anyone. Not when the results were just what we wanted anyway.”

“Who says—”

“You said! I wanted to start our family the year I finished college, but you said we should wait. That our condo wasn’t big enough, remember? You said it was no place to raise rugrats.” She shook him gently, smiling pleadingly up into his face, trying to spark some warmth in return. “Then when we moved to our house on Cottonwood I asked you again. And you didn’t tell me no, Richard. You just said we should wait. That you were so close to making partner, that you needed all your concentration and energy to focus on that. That if I’d only wait till you made it, we’d be rolling in bucks and you’d have more time to help me with midnight feedings.”

“I never—”

“You did! That’s exactly what you said… So I did. I waited again.”

He twisted away from her to resume pacing, yanking at the knot in his tie as if it was strangling him.

“Then once you made partner last year,” she said to his back, “you know I said it was time. And remember what you said? You said that now that you’d made partner, they’d want to see you perform.”

“That’s precisely right.” Richard ripped off his tie and dropped it onto a chair back, from which it slithered to the floor. “I’d made it to the big time, but that meant I had to bring in business if I wanted a place at the trough. It meant cultivating the right people, throwing the right kind of parties. I needed you beside me and I needed you to sparkle. It’s hard to wow anybody, babe, if you look like a little blimp.”

“So you asked me to give it another year,” Kaley agreed levelly. “Which I did. But now I’m pregnant and I’ve been waiting eight years. Now it’s my turn. Our turn for family—or what’s it all been for? What good is all this, without family to fill it?” She swept a hand to include the whole house, so much bigger and grander than anything she would have chosen.

Richard stood not listening to her but staring off at the far wall. “You said you took tetracycline…. A drug—a powerful drug, Kaley. Did you happen to ask your gynecologist about side effects?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. Oh, no. Please, please, don’t go there. “I…w-what do you mean?”

“You were on it at conception. What’s tetracycline do to a developing fetus? Did you ask him that?”

Yes, they’d gone over that. She swallowed around the jagged lump in her throat, clasped her hands before her and said huskily, “He said that the odds were g-good—much better than good—that our baby is developing normally. That no…no permanent damage had been done.”

“Ah!” Richard’s finger came up to jab the air between them. “That’s what he said, no damage? But will he guarantee it? No? No, of course he won’t! He’s not entirely a fool. He knows that if anything went wrong, I’d sue him for everything but the fillings in his back teeth—and he knows I’d win.”

“Richard, please.” Her knees were trembling; she was trembling all over. Kaley pulled out a chair from the table and sat. “Nobody could ever guarantee that—”

“Well, if he won’t guarantee a healthy baby, ask Dr. No Problem if he’ll agree to support it for the rest of its life if it’s hopelessly retarded.” He leaned down to look into her brimming eyes. “No? He won’t do that, either? Then why should I—should we—risk it, babe, if he won’t?”

“Because it’s ours!” Kaley cried.

CHAPTER ONE

One month later

FEARFUL OF FALLING ASLEEP at the wheel, Kaley opened the car window to the cold rushing air. Now she stretched her gritty eyes wide and said softly, “Kaley Cotter.”

No. That sounded apologetic, and she owed apologies to no man. “Kaley Cotter,” she proclaimed, lifting her chin. The night wind sucked her name through the open window, sent it spinning and tumbling across the desert behind her humming wheels.

“Cotter, Cotter, Cotter,” she chanted, squinting into the headlights of an oncoming truck, the first vehicle she’d encountered for twenty miles or more. “My name is Kaley Cotter.” Again. After eight years as Kaley Bosworth. It would take practice before it sounded right. Her car shuddered in the truck’s slipstream, then surged on through the dark.

Roughly two hours to go. She’d reach Four Corners, where the southwest border of Colorado touched the borders of three other states, by dawn. “Then home before eight,” she comforted herself. She could make it. “Kaley Cotter’s coming home.”

Where she should have stayed all along.

“Kaley Cotter and daughter are coming home,” she amended, one hand slipping off the wheel to cup her flat—still utterly flat—belly.

Or possibly Cotter and son.

But something told her this baby would be a girl. “Love you either way,” she murmured, lashes drifting lower. Boy or girl, healthy or damaged, her baby would be welcome.

As she would be welcome at the Cotter family ranch. “Home,” she half whispered, stroking her stomach, “is where, when you’ve got no place else to go, they have to take you in.”

Suddenly, her head dropped forward with a sickening jolt. She gasped and jerked upright just as the off wheel bit into the roadside gravel. The car swerved wildly, then straightened to the road.

“Whew!” Kaley shuddered, rubbed a hand along a thigh roughened with goose bumps, and shook her head to clear it. That had been closer than close! If there had been an oncoming car… “Not good.” Las Vegas, where she’d obtained her quickie divorce this afternoon, was five hundred miles behind her. She should have stopped in Page for the night, but like a wounded rabbit intent on reaching its own burrow, she’d found that no intermediate bolt-hole had looked safe enough. She’d sped past every possible motel until there was nothing left but rock and sand and stars and the pale road beckoning her eastward, home to Trueheart, then the ranch in the foothills above it.

KALEY MADE IT into Four Corners without further mishap, and pulled in at a truck stop for a cup of coffee to go.

Coffee. She frowned down at her stomach as she turned away from the cash register. She’d sworn that no matter how she craved it, she wouldn’t drink another cup for eight months. Her baby had taken enough abuse already in the first four weeks of life, without having to put up with her mother’s caffeine habit.

On the other hand, any sensible baby would agree that sharing one last cup of stale brew beat running off the road at seventy miles an hour any day. Last one, I promise you. Let’s just limp on home, then I swear I’ll never touch another—

“Um, excuse me?” A woman loomed at Kaley’s elbow as she stiff-armed the exit door. She was tall and blond, with a rueful smile. “I saw you pull in and I noticed you seem to be heading east and I was wondering if…”

THE BLONDE’S NAME was Michelle Something; Kaley hadn’t caught the last half. Her car radiator had sprung a leak, she’d explained, forty miles back down the reservation road, and rather than stop in the middle of nowhere, she’d crept on to the truck stop, pausing to let it cool off each time the needle on her temperature gauge kissed red. She didn’t dare push on to Trueheart, but she had a restaurant there, customers who’d be expecting their breakfast, so if Kaley would be so kind? She could send somebody back to collect her car once the morning rush was over.

Kaley was glad for the company. “I’ve been driving on snooze control for the past hour. Just talk to me and it’s you who’ll be doing the favor.”

“Where are you headed,” Michelle asked as they swung out onto the highway. “Durango?”

“No, Trueheart. At least, that’s where I turn north. The Cotter ranch.” It warmed Kaley just to say the words. Four generations of Cotters had held that patch of upland valley and now her baby would make the fifth. Heading home. Once she was home, she could face anything. Let go of the protective numbness that had carried her this far, and collapse.

“You’re a friend of Jim Cotter’s?” Michelle turned to prop one elbow on the dash.

“His sister,” Kaley admitted. “So you know him?”

“Two eggs over easy with a double order of hash browns, half a bottle of ketchup, and if I were a cradle robber…”

Kaley stole a glance at her smiling passenger. Elegant rather than cowgirl-pretty like Jim’s usual sweethearts, the blonde was perhaps five years older than his twenty-seven. But there was a certain level of…sophistication? Experience? Whatever, the cool, wry confidence beneath Michelle’s surface warmth made her seem half a generation older than Kaley’s younger brother.

“You’re a teacher over in Phoenix, I think he told me. Married to—um—a lawyer?” Michelle continued.

Kaley winced. “Was…” Might as well say it. There was no keeping your life private in a small town like Trueheart. Still, she hadn’t expected to have to fess up so soon, or to a stranger; had yet to shape her explanation or polish her delivery. Gray as the fading night, a wave of desolation washed over her. Richard was history now, a story to be told, not a man to wait up for, supper cooling on the table night after night. Not always a considerate man, maybe, but still, her man. Was.

“Oops!” Michelle said lightly, though a ready sympathy lurked under her humor. “Was a teacher? Or was married to a lawyer? I’m sorry, don’t answer that. Either way, it’s none of my biz. Me and my runaway mouth!”

“No, it’s okay. I was married, but that’s all over now. I passed through Las Vegas yesterday.”

“Wham, bam, we’ll be happy to stamp that paper for you, ma’am,” Michelle said, “God bless them. And good for you. Once you decide to yank the bandage off, it’s best to do it fast.”

“Yes…” Kaley supposed it was. In her case, it certainly was, once Richard had given his ultimatum.

Abort it, Kaley, and let’s forget about this. We don’t want a defective child.

Or any child at all, Richard. Why had it taken her so long to see that?

Because I didn’t want to see. I was happier blind, living in hope. But once Richard had made it clear that no matter how she pleaded or argued, there’d be no marriage counseling, no compromise and no reprieve, that it was his way or the highway, she’d had only one choice. She’d chosen the road home to Colorado.

“So is this a short visit, to regroup and decide what next, or…?”

Kaley shook her head decisively, her straight dark auburn hair swinging from shoulder to shoulder. “No, I’m home for good.” Never should have left. “I own half the ranch, though Jim’s the active partner and I’m the silent one.” Despite Richard’s complaints, she’d contributed half her salary as a high-school English teacher these past eight years to keep the ranch operating. Jim had supplied the manpower and all the daily decisions; she, the vital cash. That was the very least she could do if she wanted the ranch to stay in the family. Jim had had the hard part after their father passed away, running a five-thousand-acre spread with little help. Not like the old days, when a ranch was a family enterprise and families were extended and capable.

She’d always assumed that if they could hang on through just a few hard years, Jim would choose one of his local sweethearts, a mate with ranching in her veins, and they’d start raising their own brood of cowhands. And when at last she and Richard started a family, she’d have sons and daughters to contribute to the tribe. Sons and daughters who’d happily summer at the family spread, learning to ride and rope and round ’em up as had so many Cotters before them.

So much for blithe assumptions. So much for dreams. Kaley grimaced.

Finally she’d had to face the reality that her husband didn’t want children. Never had. Never would. As Richard pictured the universe, he was the sun, and she the adoring planet that spun around him. Any lesser satellites would be, at best, distractions; at worst, costly and tragic nuisances.

“I see,” murmured Michelle into the bleak silence. “Well, to be perfectly selfish, I’m glad. I think Jim could use the help. Whenever I’ve seen him this past summer, he’s been looking frazzled. That hand of his is an absolute sweetheart, but he reminds me of a pet tortoise a roommate of mine had years ago—sort of dried up and deliberate. I have a hard time picturing him getting his boot up into a stirrup, much less catching a calf.”

Kaley glanced at her in surprise. “You’ve met Whitey, too? How long have you lived in Trueheart?” She’d tried to make it back for two or three weeks every summer. Alone, since Richard always begged off. But these past two years, she’d been working on the master’s degree she needed to maintain her teaching accreditation and her schedule of classes had prevented her visiting. Haven’t been home since Dad’s funeral, she realized with a pang of guilt. A lot could change in eighteen months.

“Just over a year,” Michelle said. “I bought Simpson’s café down on Main Street. It’s Michelle’s Place now—best breakfast in southwest Colorado, if I do say so. Gourmet suppers on Friday and Saturday nights, with plans to expand to six nights if I can ever find a decent sous chef.”

“Just what the town needs,” Kaley said approvingly. “A serious restaurant. When I lived here, a hot date was steakburgers for two at Mo’s Truckstop out on the highway.”

“Still is, for the older crowd,” Michelle admitted. “And most of the truckers and cowboys. But some of the younger set are giving me a chance. Then there are the yuppie commuters moving up from Durango, plus the dudes and the tourists.”

Whenever Kaley and Jim spoke on the phone, Jim complained about the way southwestern Colorado was changing. Five-acre ranchettes replacing working cattle ranches. Outsiders moving in with money that the locals couldn’t hope to match. Values they didn’t want to match. Ideas of ways to “improve” a country that the natives liked just the way it was and always had been.

So far the cattlemen north of Trueheart were holding their own, with most of the changes confined to the town, Jim had reported. Suntop Ranch, the largest outfit in this part of the state, seemed to exert some sort of gravitational pull, holding the smaller ranches like Kaley and Jim’s Circle C safe in its orbit. So far.

Still, as the land folded itself into deeper and greener valleys, steeper ridges that lifted toward massive peaks, looming dark against a rosy sky, Kaley looked fearfully for signs of change. She ticked off each familiar landmark as she came to it with a sigh of relief. On her left the sign to the Ribbon River Dude Ranch—guests still Welcome. Then to her right, the turnoff to the private airport with its bluff overlooking the distant town, where courting couples parked on summer nights to “watch the planes take off.” Then they were coasting down the foothills into Trueheart, past Mo’s Truckstop, past the tiny Congregationalist church with its modest white steeple, where, once upon a time, so long ago it almost seemed like a fairy tale, Kaley had planned to be married.

And if Tripp McGraw had really wanted to marry me? She touched her stomach and tipped up her chin. Well, he hadn’t. And if he had, she wouldn’t be carrying this precious passenger. Much as they’d hurt at the time, things worked out for the best. Would do so again, she told herself firmly.

Michelle glanced at her watch as they turned onto Main Street. “Speaking of breakfast, I hope you’ll let me feed you a magnificent one. Eggs Benedict maybe? Or buckwheat pancakes with native berries?”

“Some other time I would love that,” Kaley assured her. “But I want to catch Jim before he rides out for the day, so…”

Michelle made a ticking sound with her tongue. “He doesn’t know you’re coming?”

“No.” Kaley had hoped till the last day—till the very last hour—that she and Richard could work things out. She’d have felt disloyal airing their differences—temporary differences, she’d been so sure—before her younger brother. Especially since Jim had never, in all these years, quite warmed to his brother-in-law. Why give him further reasons to disapprove, when what she wanted was a larger, happier family, not a family divided?

“No, I didn’t tell him, but it doesn’t matter.” There’d always be a place for her and hers at the ranch. A wave of weary gratitude washed over her as she braked the car before Michelle’s Place. She was luckier than so many single mothers. Because no matter how desperately lonely she’d been this past month, she wasn’t alone. She could count on her brother, count on her welcome, count on her bedroom being there, bed made and pillows fluffed, her favorite childhood books lined up on her shelves, her great-grandmother’s old pine wardrobe standing ready for her clothes. Whether she deserved it or not, she had a place in the world, reserved in her name. While such a sanctuary waited, she’d count herself among the lucky.

“Well, if it turns out you miss him,” said Michelle, opening her door before the car had stopped, “don’t hesitate to come back into town and let me feed you.”

“Thanks.” Though if she missed Jim, it was bread, butter and milk, then she’d crawl upstairs for a hot shower and a round-the-clock collapse.

Michelle gathered up her purse and overnight bag, swung her long legs out of the car, slammed the door and leaned back in the open window. “Thanks again, Kaley.” She glanced aside as a red pickup tooted its horn and turned into her parking lot. “And here comes Sam Kerner, riding point. I’m going to get no end of grief that there’s no coffee waiting.”

The local vet, a big-animal specialist. Likely as not, Sam was stopping in to Michelle’s on his way home from tending a sick cow. Kaley smiled wearily. Her landmarks were all holding true.

“And Sheriff Naley,” Michelle added as a gray pickup followed the red into her lot. “Kaley, if you ever want to just…talk. About anything at all? Breakups are tough—I should know. Anyway…” She shrugged and smiled her wide, rueful smile. “I live upstairs here and the coffeepot’s always on. Stop by any ol’ time.” She glanced back the way they’d come. “Oh, now, here comes a customer to die for. Do you know Tripp McGraw?”

“Vaguely. Well, guess I should let you get cooking.” Kaley revved the engine, lifted a hand in farewell as Michelle hastily straightened. “See you!” She had barely time to swing out from the curb before Tripp’s oncoming truck. It loomed up in her rearview mirror, its driver a dim, wide-shouldered shape beyond the glass. He was towing a horse trailer behind, she noted, as she accelerated and he slowed for his turn. But no—oh, no—he’d only slowed to wave to Michelle and now he was driving on.

He followed her for a block or two, and Kaley drove with hunched shoulders, hands clenching her wheel, though she was being silly. There was no way Tripp could know this car was hers. She’d been dodging him successfully for years.

Still, she averted her face as she made her turn north toward the mountains, and she let out a pent breath when he drove toward the east. “Whew!” she whispered, and drew in a shaky breath. Downhearted and tired as she was this morning, he would have been one local landmark too many.

CHAPTER TWO

KALEY DROVE the last ten miles to the ranch in a haze of exhaustion. The early sun shining in her eyes made her squint, and once her lashes drooped, conscious thought dissolved into drifting images, the present blurring with vivid memories of the past. A fine herd of Black Angus crosses on Suntop land—the Tankerslys always had the best. Five pronghorn antelope on a hill overlooking the highway. Buzzards riding an early morning thermal to the south—something dead over there, maybe? No snow on the peaks yet in August, but soon, soon. She hadn’t skied in years, used to love to, but maybe this year… With a baby coming on, Kaley? For a moment she’d actually forgotten!

On her left now was the road to the McGraw ranch. The McGraw brand was burned into the arching plank signboard: M Bar G. Brands… His should have been a comet, a shooting star…that way he used to touch his scarred cheek when he encountered someone unexpectedly, or when he was sad or uncertain… She’d caught his hand more than once, drawn it down to her lips and kissed it…

Her left front wheel dropped into a pothole in the road— Kaley yelped her surprise and took a firmer grip on the wheel.

Sunlight gave way to shadow as the road passed onto National Forest land. Aspens shivered in no breeze at all along the flashing creek, their leaves here and there already gleaming golden—getting late. Too late. Jim will have ridden out by now. But maybe Whitey would still be puttering around the kitchen. He’d have some harsh things to say about Richard; he’d never approved of her marrying a lawyer. Harsh things to say to her, too. Kaley smiled. Coming home.

“And here we are,” she informed her tiny passenger as a line of barbed wire slanted down the hill to define the border of Cotter land. She frowned—a post leaning badly there, hadn’t Jim noticed? At least now he’ll have some help. She ought to be able to ride and work till Christmas, anyway, as long as she was careful. She certainly meant to pull her weight—her lips curved in a rueful grin. Guess that’ll just get harder and harder, for a while. Still, though she was claiming sanctuary, she had no intention of being a burden.

At last she came to the private road to the ranch. The house wasn’t visible yet, but after her car topped the second low rise, she looked down into the valley and let out an audible sigh. Home at last!

IT WAS EIGHT BY THE CLOCK in her car when Kaley stepped out, stretched her aching limbs and trudged to the kitchen door. Suddenly she was just as glad Jim would likely not be home. She was too tired to explain anything. Tonight, after she’d slept, would be soon enough.

She entered via the back door and walked through the mudroom, then stopped in the kitchen doorway. “Jim!” Dressed, not in his usual Wranglers and boots, but in a pair of town-going trousers and, wonder of wonders, an ironed shirt. His hair not as shaggy as usual, but clipped close to his head.

“Kaley! You got my—” Her brother paused, frowning, to set the mug of coffee he’d been drinking on the counter. “You can’t have gotten it yet.”

“Gotten what?” She stood blinking stupidly, still waiting for the whoop and a hug that should be coming.

Jim made no move to close the gap between them. “My letter. But there’s no way, when I only mailed it yest—” The scowl on his tanned face deepened. “Whitey called you! Why, that old mule-headed, son of a—”

“Nobody called me. What’s going on?” She nodded at his clothes. “Somebody died?” A funeral. That could be the only explanation for such attire on a workday.

“No.” At last he moved toward her, to brush the skin under her lashes with one work-hardened fingertip. “You look done in, sis. Come sit down. Want a cup of coffee?” He guided her toward the kitchen table, swung a chair out for her.

She stared at the battered canvas duffel bag that rested on the floor beside it. Their father’s air force bag. It had survived Vietnam along with him, then come home to be bequeathed, years later, to his son.

The bag looked stuffed full. Her eyes skated along the scarred linoleum from the bag to Jim’s unbooted feet. “Jim, what’s— You sent me a letter about…what?”

“Here. Sit.” He pressed her into the chair, moved his bag out to the mudroom—as if she’d forget about it!—then busied himself, avoiding her searching gaze, fixing her a mug of coffee from the pot on the stove. “Guess you missed it. My letter’s probably hitting your mailbox today. But what are you doing here?”

Apparently she’d have to talk first. She let out a long-suffering sigh and propped her face in her hands. “That’s not my mailbox anymore, Jim. Not my address. I’ve left Richard. Divorced him yesterday in Vegas.”

The mug Jim had been offering her dropped from his fingers—smashed on the floor, hot coffee spattering their feet and ankles. He stood gaping, then closed his eyes, shook his head and said softly, fervently, “Crap… Crap, crap, tell me you’re joking!”

“No joke.” She could understand surprise—she was still in shock herself—but horror? “You never liked him anyway, so— Jim, what’s wrong?”

He crunched through the bits of pottery to yank out the chair opposite hers and collapse into it. “Crap.” He broke into bitter laughter, then stopped abruptly. “Who says Cotters never have any luck? It’s just that it’s all the wrong kind of—”

She smacked the table flat-handed. “Tell…me…what…was in that letter?” He lost that black smile; his dark eyebrows flew together, and she added hastily, “Please? What did you want to tell me?”

His eyes stopped flashing and dropped to the table. He reached for the sugar bowl, lifted the lid and clinked it aimlessly back into place. “Monday after next, Kaley, what date is that?”

“Hey, I’ve driven all night. I’m too tired for guessing games.”

“It’s my birthday. My twenty-eighth.”

She studied his face, the same dark-lashed, navy-blue eyes as her own, meeting hers half in pain, half in angry challenge. What was she missing here? “Yes. I’d forgotten.”

“I’ll be twenty-eight, Kaley.” He scowled when she still didn’t get it. “You can’t join the air force any older than that.”

“Oh…Jim!” He hadn’t mentioned that ambition in years, not since she went away to college. She’d assumed it was simply a teenager’s dream, long left behind. He’d grown up on their father’s tales of his flying adventures in the war. Hadn’t Jim noticed, as she had, how carefully those tales had been edited? Their father had told them of the good times—the wonderful friendships forged in wartime, the sun on snowy clouds like castles in the air, the feel of a jet answering as sweetly to the yoke as the best cutting horse to the rein, the thrill of night landings on an aircraft carrier in the open sea.

But Kaley had seen her father’s face when Jim had asked him what it was like to loose a clip of bombs on a peasant village—the instant change of subject and mood. Hadn’t Jim once stopped to think that their father had left that all behind as quick as he could? He hadn’t stayed in the service; he’d done his duty, then come straight home to Colorado, back to what mattered. “I didn’t realize,” she said carefully as Jim continued to glare his defiance. “I thought—”

“That I’d grown out of all that? Changed my mind, decided I’d rather punch cows the rest of my life than pilot a jet? You’ve always believed what you want to believe. Dad needed somebody and it wasn’t going to be you—you’d already run off to college and married your city slicker. So who did that leave holding the bag?”

“But Dad couldn’t do it alone.” The illness that had finally claimed him had sapped his strength for years before the end. “There was no way he could have kept the ranch going without your help.”

“I know that.” Jim rubbed a big hand tiredly up his face. “And I didn’t begrudge it while he was here. But he’s gone now, so what about my dreams?”

What could she say to that? “If I’d known you had any—” She stopped at his harsh laughter. “I mean any apart from ranching. But you didn’t tell me, Jim. I thought you loved it here.”

“You thought I felt the way you do,” he said flatly. “Just because I didn’t whine didn’t mean I was happy.”

She let out a slow breath. Another thing she hadn’t seen, just as she’d missed Richard’s true feelings about children. Was she that selfish and blind?

“I tried to make a go of it,” Jim continued, lifting the lid to the sugar bowl once more and dropping it, raising it and clinking it down again. “Tried hard since Dad was gone. I don’t want to lose this place any more than you do. But I don’t want to be chained to it, Kaley. Looking up when the jets fly over from Colorado Springs, wishing I was up there, not stuck down here with a jar full of pink-eye ointment and an irrigation ditch to muck out.”

She put her knuckles to her mouth and bit down, thinking hard. “Will it help any now that I’m back? That should free up some of your time. Maybe we could go halves on the chores…” At least, once her baby was delivered they could, if Jim would be patient that long. “If you took private flying lessons, maybe rented a plane?” But that could hardly be cheap and money had been tight around the ranch for years; they were just barely holding their own with her teaching salary added to the ranch’s profit… And now that she’d no longer be teaching… I’ll have to think. There had to be some way.

Jim shook his head. “I wish you’d gotten that letter. This was easier to say long distance.” He sucked in a deep breath and let it out on four simple words.

“I’ve already joined up.”

WHAT NOW, WHAT NOW, what now? Kaley wondered, scrubbing a hot washrag over her face. She’d had to excuse herself and go upstairs, as much to gain time to think as to freshen herself. What am I going to do now? If she’d had a day to think things out—even half a day—but in reality she had less than an hour. Jim was due at the induction center by noon.

He’d signed the papers and for the next four years, he belonged to the air force; she might as well ask them for one of their jets as for her brother back. He was as good as gone.

And he’d said they had more things to talk about. I’ll say! Kaley glanced down at her stomach, then grimaced. No, that wasn’t fair, to mention her baby now, when there was nothing he could do to help her. It would only make him feel guiltier when he felt bad enough already. Braced on the cool porcelain, she leaned over the sink, staring down into the darkness of the open drain, like the hole Alice fell down to Wonderland. She’d dropped into a whole new country. Not the safe and comforting one she’d been fleeing to, had counted on for the past miserable month.

It isn’t fair!

No. She sucked in a breath and held it. She was the one who hadn’t been fair, telling herself that Jim was satisfied with his life. Time to grow up, Kaley. Mothers really ought to be grown-ups. She touched her stomach for luck, squared her shoulders and went back downstairs.

Jim was sitting out on the back stoop, staring off toward the high country. She sat down beside him, their shoulders brushing, glanced at him and had to smile, he looked so miserable. “It’s not that bad, flyboy. I’ll manage.” Somehow. “Me and Whitey. You’ve done it for years. Now it’s my turn.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed painfully and he shook his head. “I haven’t told you the half of it yet. Wish I’d kept a copy of that damn letter to show you now.”

What could be worse than his leaving? “What else?” she said lightly.

“You remember after Dad died, when I told you we’d have to have more cash to keep going? That the books were in much worse shape than he’d let on. When I asked you for more money and you couldn’t let me have it?”

She nodded. “I’d just paid for my first semester on my master’s degree.” And she and Richard had just moved into a bigger, fancier house out in Scottsdale. Richard had set his heart on it, had said it projected the right kind of image for his new position in the firm, and they’d already put the money down when her father died.

She winced, remembering. “I felt awful about that. But you got a loan anyway, in the end, a third mortgage from the bank.”

Jim put his head down on his forearms, which were resting on his knees. “Not from the bank, Kaley. That’s not where I ended up getting the money.”

“But you said—”

“I lied, all right? The bank wouldn’t risk a third mortgage, what with the loans they hold on us already.”

She felt her heart stutter. “Where did you get it, then?” Jim had wanted a chunk—forty thousand.

“Borrowed it from Tripp McGraw.”

“Tripp.” Her hands felt cold—icy—and the day darkened. Someone was feeling very sick to her stomach. Kaley dropped her head between her knees and gulped air.

“Kaley?” Jim thumped her back. “Hey!”

“How could you?” Anyone in the whole wide world but Tripp McGraw! “How could you?”

“I could, ’cause he would, and we had to have that money to keep going. And that—this—is why I didn’t tell you. You didn’t want to know.”

“No, I didn’t. Don’t.” She’d closed the door on Tripp McGraw nine years ago, when he’d broken their engagement, and she’d never looked back. Hadn’t dared. The only way to happiness had been to pretend Tripp didn’t exist. Never had. “We have to pay him back immediately!”

“That’s what I suggested in my letter. We’ll have to sell. To him, if we don’t find a higher bidder. He’ll deduct his loan from the purchase price and—”

“Are you out of your mind?” Kaley pushed herself upright to stare at him. “Sell the ranch?” Four generations had struggled to hold this land, and now Jim was going to trade it for an airborne toy? A shiny toy that was only his on loan from the government?

“Yes, sell it, why the hell not?” Jim stalked off the steps and wheeled back again, eyes blazing. “You don’t want it—you’re an English teacher, not a cowgirl now! I’m supposed to hang on to your dreams for you if you won’t do it yourself? You call that fair?”

Slowly, Kaley shook her head. “No…” She put one hand to her stomach, the other to her cheek and found it wet—knuckled the tears away and tried to smile.

“So what exactly do we owe Tripp, and when is it due?”

CHAPTER THREE

WATCHING LONER WALK INTO the buyer’s trailer had been harder than Tripp would have thought possible.

“Loads well,” Huckins noted with satisfaction as the stallion followed his man up the ramp, ears pricked, dark intelligent eyes taking in the new conveyance with his usual bold curiosity.

“Yep.” All my horses load well. That the Californian should be surprised wasn’t the best of signs. A horse that feared the ramp—well, that said more about the animal’s handler than it did about the horse. Should have insisted he ride him before I agreed to sell. Watching Huckins in the saddle, Tripp would have known for sure if he deserved the stallion. If he had the patience, and the know-how, and the appreciation that he ought.

For Pete’s sake, McGraw, that’s just a damn horse! Not your virgin daughter.

Smartest, fastest, finest cutting horse he’d ever owned. With more cow sense than a twenty-year-old bull. Tripp had bred him himself, begun gentling him within an hour of his foaling. Loner and he had had the best kind of understanding.

The back gate of the trailer was swung shut with a careless bang. Tripp winced inwardly and set his back teeth. I owed him that much, to watch Huckins ride.

Too late now. He brushed his thumb across his shirt pocket, and the folded check rustled softly. Cold comfort at this moment. He’d never dreamed this would hurt so much. Never dreamed he’d need to do it.

Huckins had first phoned him months ago after Loner had ranked a close second for the National Cutting Horse Association World Champion of the year. The Californian had offered a truly astonishing sum should Tripp ever care to sell.

Back then, selling Loner had been unimaginable. Downright laughable. The chunky buckskin was going to be Tripp’s foundation sire for a line of cutting horses the likes of which had never been seen before. McGraw horses that would spin on a dime and give you eleven cents change. A line of cutters that would bring the ranch a second source of income, to offset the sickening swoops in the cattle market.

Instead, here he was, cashing Loner in like a forgotten check he’d found in the back of his wallet. Because there was one thing in the world Tripp needed more than the country’s finest cutting horse, and that was land.

Tripp swallowed and found his throat aching. “Well…” He held out his hand. “You’ve got a long drive ahead of you.”

“Don’t worry about him, McGraw. I’ll treat him well. Like the prince he is.”

You do or you’ll find me on your doorstep! “Sure.” Tripp turned on his boot heel and walked. Land, he reminded himself, trying to drown out the sound of Huckins’s pickup starting up behind him. Land—that magical, crucial word. No, make it two words. Enough land.

Maybe he’d stop by Cotter’s, before he went home, cheer himself up. Plant his feet on the land Loner had bought him.

JIM WEDGED his duffel bag onto the floorboard of his truck and closed the door. Walked around to the driver’s side, and stood, fingering the handle. “I hate to leave you like this. It isn’t right.”

“Can’t see you’ve got much choice.” And by now Kaley was swaying with fatigue and shock. She just wanted him gone so she could crawl up to bed. Sleep first, figure it out later, she told herself. “Stop worrying. I’ll be all right.” Somehow. She shuffled forward and hugged him fiercely. “Now, go knock ’em dead, flyboy. Make me and Dad and Whitey proud.”

She waved till his pickup had topped the first rise, then her shoulders slumped and her smile flattened to a trembling line.

Closing her eyes, she stood, hearing the quiet creep in around her. Each time she returned, she marveled how quiet it was out here. It had never mattered when, come suppertime, there’d be family at the table. One hand crept to her stomach, then she turned and went inside.

AFTER SHE’D USED UP all the hot water showering, Kaley wrapped herself in a white terry-cloth bathrobe, the one she’d taken from her mother’s closet after her death. It had been Kaley’s for years now, since she was fourteen. Had accompanied her to college, then out to Arizona. But Richard had never liked it, so on one of her visits she’d left it here, where it belonged. One more raggedy, comforting landmark waiting for her return.

Lying on her bed, she bit the sleeve, her nose brushing its fuzzy nap. Oh, Mama, what now? To come home—and find it yanked out from beneath her feet just when she needed it the most! Tears trickled down her cheeks. She flung her forearm across her eyes, mopping up the flow, shutting out the awful day. Sleep now, figure it out later.

SHE LAY ON HER BED, listening to the approaching engine—a shiny black hearse idling into the backyard. Whitey sat behind the wheel, with her father riding shotgun—same way they’d always driven the ranch truck. They’d come to tell her about her mother’s fall. “Too sassy,” Whitey said. “That was always her problem. If she could have saddled a locomotive, she’d have tried to ride it.”

Her father nodded bleakly.

“We thought we’d take your baby, too,” said a man dressed in a doctor’s green surgical scrubs and mask, coming in the kitchen door behind them. “That’ll save a second trip.”

“Aaah!” Kaley sat up, heart lurching, breath coming in terrified pants. “Oh…” She stared around her old bedroom. Horrible dream, somehow worse for its silliness. She pulled in a shuddering breath and tried to hold it. Let it out in a gasp. Couldn’t have been asleep for long—the angle of sunlight slanting across the windowsill had barely changed. “Only a dream,” she muttered, rubbing her stomach.

A bad-luck dream.

No! No, not at all. Simply foolishness—nothing but exhaustion and stress.

Knock-knock.

“Whitey?” She swung her legs off the bed and stood—wobbled and caught hold of the footpost.

Knock-knock-knock!

Whitey, of course. Jim had told her he’d been staying in town all this week at his widowed sister’s. They’d had an awful fight when Jim had decided to sell out. After she’d slept, Kaley had intended to drive down and find the old man, tell him to come back, stop worrying, everything would be fine. So he’d saved her the trouble. And this was the reason for her nightmare; she’d woven the sound of his approaching truck into her dreams.

The knock came a third time as she reached the bottom of the stairs. What’s he knocking for? Whitey owned the kitchen—owned them all and the ranch, too, by right of seniority and survivorship. He’d been her grandfather’s hired hand and best friend. Knocking ’cause he’s on his high horse—he’s still mad, she realized, crossing the mudroom. But not with her. She opened the door with a big smile. “Hey, you—”

Not Whitey. Her gaze collided with a chest that was younger, broader, harder, that blocked most of the doorway. With a big fist poised in the act of knocking. Her widening eyes lifted to a face she hadn’t seen close up for nine years.

Tripp.

His hand unfisted and rose on to his face. He touched his scarred cheekbone with his knuckles, then his hand whipped aside, aborting the motion.

That scar like a comet, a shooting star, which he hated and she’d loved. A radiating tracery of fine white lines, starkly vivid now against his reddening face.

Reddening because he knew that she knew the why of that gesture. It was a holdover from childhood, a reflexive attempt to shield his face from the eyes of a stranger, from the eyes of someone he didn’t trust. A sign of surprise and dismay.

I thought I cured you of that.

His hand came to rest on the doorjamb alongside her head. She’d forgotten how much taller he was than she. She’d always loved that about him, his size and strength. “I thought you were Whitey.” Belatedly she realized she was standing there in nothing but her old bathrobe, its coarse fabric stinging skin that had suddenly gone achingly, wincingly, alive.

“Kaley.” Her name came out in a croak, and Tripp shook his head—more wonder than denial. His hazel eyes drifted down over her, were veiled by dark lashes as his gaze dropped to her naked feet.

Under the pressure of that gaze, she stepped back, her hands moving to her belt, instinctively tugging it tighter. She felt her own cheeks go hot. Damn, she’d wanted time to nerve herself for a meeting with him! And she’d gone to bed with wet hair—it must be a mess.

“What are you doing here?” he asked as his eyes traveled back to her face.

He had no right to look at her this way. He’d willingly, ruthlessly, wastefully forfeited that right nine years ago. “Not selling to you, that’s what.” Jim shouldn’t have borrowed from you, and you should have had the decency not to loan! But that was all in the unmentionable past and would stay there. “I’m not selling to anybody,” she amended.

“You’re—? But—” Another wave of ruddy color swept his face. “Now wait a minute!” He advanced into the room and she retreated the way she’d have dodged back from a hot stove—then frowned. She was in no mood to be pushed around in her own kitchen.

“Your brother and I have an understanding,” Tripp growled, reaching for her arm.

She retreated another step. “He didn’t check with me, Tripp.”

“He said you didn’t care. That you’d be delighted to sell. That he had full power of attorney.”

“He does, but he was wrong—dead wrong. I’m not selling.”

Tripp had gone so pale the scar had vanished on his cheek. He caught her shoulders as if to shake her—she narrowed her eyes at him and tipped up her chin. Don’t you dare!

Instantly he let her go. “I sold my—” He tried again for a level tone. “I sold a stallion this morning, Kaley, to raise money for the down payment on this ranch.”

“This ranch isn’t for sale.”

“I can’t get him back.”

“I’m sorry, Tripp, but what am I supposed to do? Give up my home, instead?”

“Yes! It’s not your home anymore. You don’t need it, can’t keep it the way it should be kept, and I can. You damn sure should sell it!”

“Well, I won’t.”

Eyes locked, they glared at each other as if the first to blink would lose all. He’d been twenty-four the last time she’d faced him. Nine years of Colorado weather, the hard, outdoor life of a rancher, had burned the last hint of boyhood out of him, leaving him fined down to taut muscle and hard bone. Unsmiling. Once he would have seen the humor of them facing off like a couple of cursing cats. No more.

Just as her eyelashes shivered, he spun away, looked wildly around the kitchen as if in search of something to smash or punch, then swung back again. “Did Jim explain this to you? This didn’t happen overnight. I bailed him out May before last—loaned him forty thousand for six months.”

“Yes, he told me.” Not two hours ago. Jim had borrowed Tripp’s money and used it to buy early calves in the spring, meaning to fatten them and sell them in the fall. His hope had been to make a big enough profit that he could afford to hire a manager for the ranch, leaving him free to enlist in the air force. “I risked big, yeah, Kaley, but the payoff could have been terrific!”

Could have been. If the price of beef hadn’t dropped through the basement. Had Jim sold at that point, he’d have ended up worse off than he started, by the time he reckoned in feed, labor and overhead. Better to hold the calves till the following fall and pray their price would rise.

“But he couldn’t pay me off come roundup,” Tripp continued. “So I let the loan ride for another year.”

“That was very…considerate of you,” she admitted.

“Considerate! What were my choices? Calling my loan and ruining your brother, since he hadn’t a hope in heaven of paying? Or doing without money I could have used myself for another year?”

He’d been extremely generous—or extremely crafty. Ruthlessly foresighted. Because Tripp hadn’t simply let the loan ride—he’d forced Jim to sign a further contract. “You may have done without your money for a year, but it bought you a first option on our land.” An option to buy, if ever Jim decided to sell. Tripp had an unbreakable right of first offer, first refusal.

“You’re blaming me for that?” He advanced on her till he stood towering over her. “What was I supposed to do, Kaley—give your brother a free ride for your sake? For auld, sweet lang syne?” His hand rose until the tip of his callused thumb touched the corner of her mouth, then his thumb stroked up across her cheekbone and feathered away. “You think it meant that much to me? Forty thousand dollars’ worth?”

The taunt stung like a lash. His touch burned—it wasn’t a caress but an insult. He was using his bulk to intimidate her. She hit out blindly, fighting for space. “Or to me?” Do you think you meant that much to me?

“Hey, if I ever thought that, you set me straight a long, long time ago,” he jeered softly. “How long did it take you to find a new man?”

As if she’d been the one who hadn’t cared? Who’d broken the faith. She threw the answer back in his face. “Two months!” Richard had found her in Europe two months after Tripp’s letter had broken their engagement, leaving her stranded and heartbroken in a strange land. Two months, though it had been another ten before she’d agreed to marry.

“Fast work, hotshot.”

She’d had enough. “You want fast? Let’s see how fast you can get out of my kitchen—off my land!”

His head rocked back an inch as if she’d slapped him; a muscle ticked beneath his scar. He didn’t budge.

If he didn’t back off, give her room to breathe, she’d go wild. She prodded his chest with a forefinger. “I said…out!”

He looked for a moment as though he’d explode—then his anger sucked inward. “Big words.” He brushed her hand aside. “You order your husband around like that? Wear the pants in your family, do you, cowgirl?”

“I don’t!” She shook her head, but she couldn’t deny something had gone wrong with her marriage. Or had never been right.

“Wear spurs when you ride him? Mexican rowels?”

From out of nowhere the image arose of her on top—sobbing, laughing, rising and falling like a rider on a bronc, while Tripp’s big hands cupped her, caressed her, guided her, clamped her to him as he arched—no eight-second ride that one. Walled off in the back of her mind for nine years, the image hadn’t been softened or fuzzed by review. It was as vivid as if they’d made the memory only last night. Her body throbbed and tightened; her nipples rose against her robe’s coarse fabric. “Out!” she whispered, eyes watering with the heat of her blush. Tired as she was, she was no match for him. Not for him and her memories, too.

He shook his head. “We have to talk this through, Kaley.”

Her voice cracked with startled laughter. “You call this talk? And whatever it is, no, we don’t. Not this minute. I haven’t slept in two days, Tripp.” Damn. Pleading for mercy. Where was her pride?

Somehow her weakness reached him, where resistance had not. His eyes narrowed, focused on her face in a different way—seeing her in the present, perhaps, instead of the past? He opened his mouth on a question, then shut it again and nodded. “All…right. That’s fair enough.”

When had he ever been fair? But ask that, and she’d launch them straight into round two. She didn’t want to fight; she wanted to creep upstairs and collapse.

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” he added, when she didn’t speak.

Not if I see you first! She turned her back on him and stood hugging herself, tears of sheer exhaustion springing to her eyes.

Behind her, she heard him let out a deep breath, almost a sigh. Then his boots moved lightly to the door, and it closed behind him.

Still she stood, too tired to move. His engine muttered off toward the ridge…died away to…nothing.

The silence crept back and embraced her.

CHAPTER FOUR

“EEEASY, SUNNY. ’Atta boy,” Kaley murmured, backing the little chestnut down the trailer ramp. When his hooves reached solid ground, she rubbed his warm red shoulder while he snorted and shook his shaggy head. “Good fella.” The chunky quarter horse was the most docile ride of Jim’s string. On this, her third day home, Kaley was still taking it slow, working up to her brother’s hard cases. She tightened the gelding’s saddle cinch, then tied him to a tree at the side of the unpaved turnaround that marked the end of the logging road and trailhead to Sumner’s Peak.

Five miles up-mountain, on the far side of the forested ridge, lay Sumner line camp, headquarters for the Cotter cattle’s summer range. She’d chosen to drive an extra seventy miles round this spur of the mountains, bringing the trailer as close to the camp as she could, rather than ride the direct route from the southeast, which would have meant a trek of some thirty miles as the crow flies. Her thighs weren’t up to that yet. Neither did she care to stop overnight in the line cabin, as that longer ride would have required.

Just find Whitey and bring him home; that would be sufficient unto this day. She collected her hat and Levi’s jacket from the ranch truck’s cab, then turned to her mount. What the old man must be feeling, to have retreated as far as the line camp! He was seventy-two this year. Too old to wake up and find himself without a home.

“Not a good feeling,” she informed the chestnut as she swung her leg over the saddle and urged him toward a gap in the trees. Her heart ached for the old man. She knew precisely how he felt.

Yesterday she’d gone looking for Whitey in Trueheart. A day late, but after her disastrous encounter with Tripp, she’d slept the clock ’round, and woken at noon.

By the time she’d eaten lunch, then yawned her way into town, it had been nearly three. Then she’d lost another hour at Emma Connelly’s, eating homemade cherry pie and listening to the old woman’s complaints.

Whitey’s elder sister had been widowed for twenty-three years. Time enough to decide that she knew precisely what shelf of the refrigerator the butter belonged on, and exactly in what order she cared to read the sections of the Durango Herald. At seventy-six, Emma figured she was old enough to know that a grown man ought to make his own bed, ought to close a box of crackers once he was done with it. And as for her brother’s nasty spit jar for his tobacco chaws? Or that mangy old dog of his?

Whitey had been eating Sunday dinner with his sister as long as Kaley could remember. But apparently sibling affection and forbearance stretched only so far. Emma had never imagined herself saddled with her brother full-time, any more than Whitey had pictured ending his days without a job, cooped up in town.

By the fourth day of his self-imposed exile he’d retreated from Emma’s guest bedroom to an army cot in her drafty garage. Three days later there’d been the final blowup—something about Whitey’s attempt to do a load of his own laundry, Emma’s unimpeachable, but roundly ignored, advice about never mixing blue jeans with white shirts and red bandannas—and Whitey had packed his duffel, growled something about the line camp and stalked out. Emma doubted she’d see him before the snow flew, if then, stubborn old coot.

Considering that she’d had tears in her eyes when she’d said this, Kaley couldn’t find it in her heart to blame the woman. Because even in good times, Whitey was best taken with a large dose of wide-open spaces. Given the claustrophobic confines of a spinster-fussy cottage festooned with crocheted lace doilies and silk flower arrangements, and considering what must be his present mood of black despair, Kaley was sure he’d have tried a saint, much less his loving sister.

Kaley only hoped that he wasn’t driving the cowboy up at Sumner camp half-crazy, too. Adam Dubois. Kaley had never met the man. He was a stranger Jim had hired in the spring, and who knew how patient he’d be with an unexpected guest, especially when that guest was an elderly, endlessly opinionated cowboy. Line camp men took jobs in the high country for a reason. As a breed, they tended to be loners, happiest without company.

And even if—faint hope—all was bachelor bliss above, Whitey was too old for these remote and rugged mountains. He needed his own soft bed in the little house Kaley’s grandfather had built for him forty years ago out back of the barn. Needed a propane heater at night, a hot bath when he wanted one, decent meals and proximity to somebody who cared for him.

So here she was. Kaley ducked under a low-hanging branch and tightened her knees; the chestnut surged uphill, ear tips almost touching with alert interest, hooves clopping softly on the dirt trail. It was nearly noon now, though she’d left the ranch at dawn. Assuming that she’d find Whitey in camp, rather than have to hunt him down out on the mountainside, still they’d be driving bad roads home in the dark.

Of course there was one advantage to this. She’d miss Tripp again.

She’d managed to duck him all yesterday. He’d come by once while she was in Trueheart and left her a note on the back door. Just four brusque words: We’ve got to talk.

Then he’d returned after supper. She’d seen him from the slope of Cougar Rock Pasture, where she’d walked out to admire the sunset. Standing motionless under the trees, she’d watched Tripp hammer on her back door, then open it. She’d clenched her hands to fists at that. Thinks he owns the place already? They would have to talk.

He’d emerged in a minute, apparently satisfied that she wasn’t hiding within, to stand glaring around the property.

He’d stalked to the barn, no doubt figuring she was feeding the horses or chickens, then moments later he’d reappeared, a tall, unmistakably masculine shape in the gathering dusk, broad of shoulder, narrow of hip, turning slowly on his long horseman’s legs, staring out across the darkened pastures and slopes that he meant to own.

She should have gone down to him. No use making things any rougher between them than they already were. Not when, thanks to her brother, Tripp had her dead to rights.

She couldn’t bring herself to smile and do it. Not yet.

She needed time to get the bitter pill down and keep it down. Bitterness piled on top of old bitterness, but still, there it was. Thanks to Jim she owed him. Owed him big-time. All the wishing in the world wouldn’t change that, any more than it had changed his mind nine years ago.

Tomorrow she’d have to face him and work something out.

But that was tomorrow, and today was today, Kaley reminded herself, squaring her shoulders. Today the sky was a color of high-altitude cobalt that Phoenix, with its streams of glittering, smog-belching traffic, would never match. Breathing deep, the cool air fragrant with pine, she tipped her head back to watch a black dot against the blue—a golden eagle, wheeling high above the granite pass toward which Sunny was climbing. She smoothed her palm round and round the top of her saddle horn, and laughed aloud. Oh, I’m home all right! However uncertain and terrifying her future, the present was sweet as wine. Kaley Cotter and daughter are home again.

THE LINE CAMP STOOD in an alpine meadow, starred with late-blooming asters and goldenrod, encircled by the shivering gold of turning aspens. A one-room log cabin built by Kaley’s great-grandfather and added onto by every generation of Cotter since—a lean-to here for feed and tack, a shed for wood there, a rough pole corral that fenced in a small vegetable garden, keeping the crops safe from marauding cattle, if not the rabbits and deer.

Three horses lazed at the far end of the pasture, in the shade of the trees. They lifted their heads and whinnied as Sunny trotted down the slope toward the cabin, then went back to their grazing. The line man would have five horses in his string, at least, Kaley figured. If two were missing, then he was out prowling the meadows. And Whitey must be, too, on a borrowed mount, since he’d driven his rattle-trap pickup to the trailhead and left it there.

She tied off Sunny and knocked on the screen door. “’Lo the house!”

Something stirred beyond the sun-spangled, rusty mesh.

“Anybody home?” When nobody answered, Kaley opened the door.

Lying in a bunk against the far wall, Whitey heaved himself to his elbows and blinked. “Kaley?” He swiped a gnarled hand across his unshaven face. “Kaley-girl?”

She crossed the bare, dusty boards in four strides. In all the years she’d known him, Whitey had never slept past seven. “Whitey, what’s wrong?” She knelt beside him and touched his bristly cheek, then cupped a palm to his forehead. “You’re sick?”

“Had a wreck yesterday. Nothin’ t’speak of.”

A wreck was cowboy for a fall. One to speak of. Minor spills didn’t count. “You’re okay?” She checked the urge to whip off the dingy blanket that covered him and see for herself.

“Banged up m’damn knee.”

“Good one or bad one?” A cow had crushed his right knee between a gate and a fence post years ago. He limped badly at the best of times.

His snort was a rueful laugh. “M’good one’s not so good now.” He touched her shoulder, the shy touch of a child. “What’re you doin’ here, girl?”

“Come to bring you home. We’re not selling the ranch, Whitey. Not if I can help it.” She patted his hand, then stood hastily as his eyes glistened. He’d never survive her seeing him cry. With her own eyes brimming, she turned briskly on her heel. “Where’s Chang?”

She spotted the circular heap of frizzy white-and-copper hair, coiled in a battered easy chair that was pulled up to the wood-burning stove. Trust Chang to claim the best seat in the house. “Hey, Chang.” She stooped beside the ancient Pekingese and warily offered her knuckles for his identification.

A wavering growl issued from somewhere within the furry mound, and one brown goggle eye cracked open to regard her with weary malevolence. “Let’s go home, old guy.” The mountains were no place for a short-legged lapdog. “Mellowed a bit, hasn’t he?” she observed when he didn’t lunge for her. Oh, she’d stayed away too long! Even Chang had changed.

“Just losing his teeth and too dang proud to gum you,” Whitey grunted. From the shuffling and groaning behind her, he was struggling into his jeans.

“The hand here—Dubois?” she asked without turning. “Any chance he’ll be stopping back by for lunch?”

“That Cajun? He never shows before dark.”

Meaning that Whitey’s presence was probably proving a strain. Kaley’s eyes wandered to the bunk on the opposite wall from Whitey’s. A book on dinosaurs, of all things, rested on a Mexican blanket tucked to drum-tight perfection. “Too bad. I wanted to meet him.”

She’d be needing at least two dependable hands to help with fall roundup. Jim had said Dubois could be trusted, but Kaley preferred to see for herself. Some cowboys had problems taking orders from women. If that was going to be an issue, she needed to know sooner rather than later.

She scratched Chang’s tasseled ear and stood. “Guess I’ll go catch you a ride.” She supposed they could leave Dubois a note, telling him to collect Whitey’s mount, which they’d tie off at the trailhead. “Any preferences?”

Whitey grunted. “Shot my preference yesterday. That grullo your dad used t’ride. Ol’ fool stepped smack in a badger hole.”

Kaley winced. Hence Whitey’s wreck and his taking to his bed. More sadness than jarred bones, she’d bet—one more connection with her father gone forever. Apart from which, nothing hurt worse than to shoot a good horse. “I’m sorry.”

“Huh! No sorrier than he was.”

RIDING ACROSS the flowery pasture, Kaley held a coffee can of grain balanced on her thigh. She reined in Sunny and rattled the oats against the tin. “Who wants to work today?”

A couple of glossy equine heads lifted from the grass, but she had no takers. The sun-burned black grabbed a green mouthful, turned a casual quarter turn as he grabbed another bite, till, apparently without intention, he ended facing toward the trees. He glanced back at her over his rump, chewing insolently, ready to bolt. And the others looked as if they’d take their cue from him. “Come on, you bum.” She rattled the oats seductively.

“Which one do you want?” called a masculine voice behind her.

Her thighs clamped together in startlement and Sunny jumped, then steadied as she reined him in again and looked over her shoulder. To find Tripp, his big white-faced bay carrying him down the meadow at a half trot. He was building a loop in his catch rope already. “The paint,” she said, her voice steadier than her heartbeat. Think of the devil and here he came riding!

Ears pricked in fascination, the brown and white-patched mare watched Tripp’s advance till it dawned on her she’d been singled out. She snorted and spun away—straight into the path of his lazily descending loop. She flinched as it tightened around her neck, then stopped dead and blew out a disgusted breath.

“Thanks,” Kaley said as Tripp reeled her in. “What are you doing here?”

He nodded back toward the cabin, where two packhorses now stood in hipshot patience by the corral. “Dubois is about out of salt blocks. And I wanted to see for myself how the grass is holding.”

“Neighborly of you,” she couldn’t resist saying—though it wasn’t. He was acting as owner already. So he hadn’t believed her when she’d told him she wasn’t selling. Or if he had, he meant to ride right over her.

His mouth tightened at her tone. She found her gaze snared by its well-carved shape, the bottom lip full and almost sensuous, the upper lip stern to the point of harshness. The nerves at her nape quivered and stung as the memory came, unwilled as it was vivid—the rasp of his afternoon beard across her shuddering skin, the furnace warmth of his breath at her ear. She looked away.

“Not exactly,” he replied evenly. “Jim and I split Dubois’s time and wages. He works for both of us.”

“Oh.” Another thing Jim had forgotten or omitted to tell her in their short while together. Kaley felt her temper kick up a notch. So Jim hadn’t even been able to pay a full-time line man? No more putting it off. Tonight she’d have to sit down with the ranch accounts.

“And you,” Tripp said as they turned their mounts toward the cabin. “What brings you here?”

She told him about Whitey. “He ended up here,” she said with a dark, accusing glance. “Forty years with my family and this is what it’s come to. Who knows what he meant to do when the snows came?”

Tripp opened his mouth to tell her that he’d intended all along to take Whitey on, make him welcome. Because she was right. You didn’t turn away a man who’d worked his whole life for your family, any more than you sent your old saddle horse to the cannery. Loyalty bound both, hired hand and rancher. And the whole point of this way of life was that, hard as it was, there was always room and grass enough for one more.

He’d made it plain to Jim Cotter that Whitelaw had a job and a home, but he’d been remiss not seeking out the old man himself first thing. He’d been too preoccupied this past week with arranging Loner’s sale, with double-checking his forecast of the fall profits as he prepared for the purchase of the Circle C. Tripp felt a muscle tick in his jaw. If there was one thing he hated, it was to realize he’d left something undone that he should have done.

And here it was Kaley, of all people, pointing out his blunder. “I…” He clamped his jaw on his explanation and shrugged. Coming now, it would only sound like an excuse. Talk was cheap and action all. He’d failed to act in time.

He glanced at her bitterly, then when he found that she rode with face averted, he gazed with greedy abandon. Kaley. She didn’t look a day older than the last time he’d kissed her, in the spring of that terrible year when she’d come home from college for Easter. Or if she’d changed, it was—impossible as it seemed—for the better. The long, reddish-brown hair that had once hung like a silk shawl to her waist, now swung enticingly at her shoulders. And last time he’d held her in his arms, she’d been angular as a yearling colt. Now she looked curvier—still slender, yet somehow softer. Soft—he remembered drawing his nose across her cheek, soft as a foal’s velvety muzzle. He could still feel the creamy smoothness of her breast cupped in his palm. Don’t go there, he warned himself harshly. She’s another man’s woman.

A woman he’d put behind him years ago. Only fools looked back.

“We have to talk,” he reminded her as they reached the cabin. “I came looking for you yesterday.” Then again this morning. When he’d stopped by the Circle C and found her car gone, he’d wondered if perhaps he’d dreamed their whole encounter.

Or at least misunderstood. It had crossed his mind, on not finding her for the third time, that maybe she’d dropped by the ranch to say farewell to Jim and to a way of life. If bad luck hadn’t sent Tripp stumbling into her path, maybe she’d have cried a few tears and gone her way.

Instead, he’d shown his ugly mug at the worst possible moment. Her refusal to sell had been a spur-of-the-moment token protest against bitter reality. A gut-level, reflexive denial that Tripp could well understand. He’d sooner part with an arm than an acre of his own land.

But given two nights to think it over, maybe her defiance had faded to pained acceptance. So she’d fled back to her husband in Phoenix, leaving Tripp shaken but whole, winner by default.

So much for hopes and dreams!

“We do have to talk,” Kaley agreed. “But first I’ve got to get Whitey home. Maybe to a doctor.”

She’d been too long in the city if she thought she’d drag Whitelaw to a sawbones. Short of major blood loss or compound fracture, his generation of cowpokes tended themselves and kept on working. City girl, go back where you belong. “I’ll help you get him a-horseback,” Tripp said bleakly.

She looked for a moment as if she meant to refuse him, then she nodded and slipped off the chestnut. “Let me see if he’s ready.”

SHE’D NEVER HAVE MANAGED without him, that was sure, Kaley realized a short while later as she watched Tripp lift the old man into the paint’s saddle. “All right now?” Tripp asked, stepping back from the mare.

“Right as rain,” Whitey growled, looking more than a little flustered.

Kaley bit down on a worried smile. If she knew Whitey, it was his helplessness that was irking the old man, not the pain. Though that had to be considerable. His left knee was puffed to the size of a cantaloupe.

“Where’s that damn Chang?” he added.

“Coming.” Kaley slipped back into the cabin and brought the pannier she’d padded with a blanket over to the easy chair. “Be nice now, you, if that’s possible.” She clamped her hands around the dog’s fat middle and lifted him, wriggling and snarling, into the basket and shut its lid. “You’re lucky a coyote didn’t gobble you up, up here.” Or maybe the dog was too mean to be eaten.

Tripp’s face was carefully blank as he took the basket from her arms and fastened it behind Whitey’s saddle, to counterbalance the one that held his clothes. The paint’s ears swiveled backward in alarm, but they didn’t flatten to her head. Embarrassment rendered Whitey speechless. With a grudging nod of thanks to Tripp, he set off toward the pass, his right hand absently patting the pannier’s lid.

“Well…” Kaley untied and mounted. She’d left a note for Dubois along with the brownies she’d baked for him the night before. Meeting him would have to wait for another day. “Thank you, Tripp.”

But he was swinging astride his big bay. “He’s heavier than he looks,” he warned her, nodding at the distant rider, who’d almost reached the top of the meadow. “You’ll need help getting him off again.”

Nodding grimly, she touched spurs to Sunny’s ribs and shot away. Thunder of hooves on the grass, and Tripp was loping alongside her in seconds. She should know better than to hope to lose him so easily. He rode like a centaur, plus his gelding had two hands on Sunny and a stride to match.

Where the trail entered the trees, they reined back to a walk. Resigning herself to his presence, Kaley tugged her Stetson lower on her forehead to shield her eyes. Still, like sunlight on her cheek, she could feel him looking.

“How did an old hardcase like him end up with a useless lapdog?” Tripp wondered. “He ever married?”

She had to smile at the thought. “Not in fifty years, and I think that ended badly. No, he found Chang about eight years ago out on the highway. Had a busted shoulder. All we could figure is he’d leaned too far from a car window and tumbled out, and his owner didn’t notice and drove on. Whitey always says he should have shot him.”

“Uh-huh,” Tripp said dryly.

“Well, he chases cats on command.” Trying to explain the inexplicable, Kaley laughed under her breath.

“That’s useful.”

She’d forgotten how he’d say one thing and mean quite the opposite. All the humor he could pack into a word or two. “Besides, everybody needs somebody to love.” Laughter fading, she trailed two fingertips across her stomach.

“Do they?” His voice had lost its warmth.

Don’t they? She certainly had. Did. Her fingers twitched toward her stomach again; she flattened them, instead, on her leg. But take her companion now—apparently he hadn’t felt the need. Nine years and Tripp still hadn’t bothered to find a lasting love of his own.

Or had he? She felt as if she’d have known somehow, but really, how would she? Jim had been only eighteen when she and Tripp parted. Still, in all the years since, he’d known better than to mention Tripp’s doings to her.

From the corner of her eye she could see Tripp’s elk-hide boot resting lightly in his stirrup, the long, muscular length of his calf and thigh. Hard to imagine he hadn’t had his pick of the ladies in the years since he’d dumped her. Tripp wasn’t film star–handsome as Richard was, and the regularity of his features was forever marred. But the scar that he hated added so much character. Edge. And he had something better than glossy perfection—an aura of strength and presence that a woman couldn’t ignore. He wasn’t an image, handsome or otherwise, he was a…a force. A man in motion, striding through life.

“When does school start in Phoenix?” he asked, reining his bay closer to Sunny as the trail narrowed.

Their knees brushed and she drew in a feathering breath. So even if she hadn’t heard about him over the years, he’d made it his business to learn about her—that she taught school. “It started this week.”

“They gave you time off to say goodbye?”

She shook her head. “I’ve quit, Tripp.” And now the trail was narrow enough to give her an excuse. She drew back on the reins and Sunny slowed to fall in behind the bay.

Tripp glanced back, frowning, then wheeled his mount across the path.

She halted with Sunny’s nose almost touching Tripp’s knee. Funny, but she felt as if she’d been trotting alongside the horses, her breath was coming that fast. Here it comes.

“Decided to be a housewife, instead,” he hazarded, voice stonily neutral, eyes narrowed. “Reckon a lawyer earns enough for two and then some.”

“He does,” she agreed defiantly. Not that Richard hadn’t spent it just as fast as it came in. On sleek cars, a twenty-thousand-dollar Ducati motorcycle that he had no time to ride, a gym full of shiny weight machines for his exercise room, custom-fitted golf clubs, a collection of antique handguns. Boy toys. But try to explain that to Tripp, who hadn’t been a boy since his early teens. By then his father had pretty well slid into the bottle, and it was Tripp who’d called the shots at the M Bar G.

“Reckon he can support a wife at home, and a manager for a hobby-horse ranch, as well.”

“He could,” she allowed. Tripp was probing closer and closer to the heart of the matter.

“So who’re you hiring? Whitelaw’s too old for the job.”

Closer. She remembered playing blindman’s buff with him one night in the barn, up in the hayloft. Standing with a half-terrified giggle frozen in her throat while his arms swept the hay-sweet dark, coming closer and closer. The trembling in his fingertips when they found her at last, tracing the shape of her face…her mouth…her body…as if he’d never touched her before, never touched a woman in all his life. Then her lashes shivering against his lips…her knees turning to butter…

“Who, Kaley?”

She blinked and sat taller in the saddle. “I’ll manage my own place.”

His incredulous smile died stillborn. His dark eyebrows drew together. “And commute to Phoenix on weekends? Reckon you do wear the pants in your house.”

Reckon I do, at that. She met his gaze squarely. “My house—my home—is here now, Tripp. I’m divorced.”

His head rocked back half an inch; his eyes narrowed to slits. Reacting to something sensed in his rider but not visible, the bay threw up his head and snorted, dancing in place.

“So that’s it.” Tripp’s face was wiped clean of all expression, but the starburst scar on his cheekbone faded as he paled. “Why?”

“Why what?” He was mad, she realized as the bay pinned back its ears, half rearing to Tripp’s shortened rein. Blazingly mad. But then, so was she. Who was he to demand an explanation?

“Why did you leave him—or did you?”

No, he left me just as you did! Because in spirit, if not in the flesh, it was Richard who’d walked out on their vows—rejected her child and therefore her. But she’d sooner rip out her heart and hand it over than admit that now she was a two-time loser! Touching her spurs to Sunny’s flanks, Kaley drove him past the bay. Branches flailed her hunched shoulders. Her hat flipped back and cartwheeled away.

Let him fetch it or let it lie! She urged the chestnut to a tight lope and held him there, huffing and puffing, till she reached the pass, where Whitey and the paint stood waiting.

By the time Tripp joined them at the trailhead and handed over her hat, his temper had vanished behind a wall of ice-cold, courteous calm. And the more she pondered it, on the drive home, the less Kaley could make sense of his response. Perhaps she’d imagined it.

Because how could Tripp be mad, when she was the one who’d been injured?

CHAPTER FIVE

AS TRIPP DROVE back from Durango the following evening, his mood was black—dark as the wall of thunder-heads that towered off to the west.

Feeling like this, maybe it was just as well he hadn’t connected with Kaley today. When he’d stopped by the Circle C this afternoon, he’d found only Whitelaw in residence. The old man had been gimping about the barn, using a rake for an improvised crutch, his scruffy Pekingese pattering underfoot, likely to trip him at any minute.

Kaley had gone to Durango, Whitey had told him when he’d asked.

Four days home and she was flitting off to the city already. It figured. What didn’t figure was why he’d been so…damn…angry ever since he’d learned of her divorce. Waste. What a crying waste! were the words echoing somewhere at the back of his mind. He’d always despised a waste of anything—time, effort, emotion.

But what, precisely, was wasted here? he wondered as his truck climbed out of the plains toward Trueheart.

Well, his time, for one thing; that was sure. After he’d spoken with Whitelaw, he’d driven to Durango. Told himself that he needed those tractor parts and shouldn’t put it off another day. But the John Deere dealer hadn’t stocked the crucial bearing, would have to order it special, so that errand had been entirely a loss. And he hadn’t caught even a glimpse of Kaley, though on his way out of town he’d swung through the parking lots of two of the larger grocery stores, where most Truehearters did their serious provisioning. The whole damn day just a waste of time.

The way his dreams lay in waste. Maybe it was just starting to hit him that the purchase had fallen through. That he’d sold Loner for nothing. Wasn’t that reason enough for a mood like a black wolf padding at his heels?

To the west, the setting sun reappeared, dropping into the slot between storm clouds and horizon. A red-orange light swept across the hills, bathing the land in ruddy gold, branding the undersides of the purple clouds with rose and ruby. Tripp sucked in a breath of sage-scented air. This—it was moments like this that made the struggle to hold the land, his way of life, worth whatever it cost. Till the sun puddled and sank below the horizon, Tripp simply drove and drank in the changing colors.

Finally, he gave a sigh that seemed to let something go, and reached for the headlight knob. Don’t give up, he told himself for the hundredth time over the past few days. This was a setback, but it wasn’t defeat—not by a long shot, it wasn’t.

Because there was no way Kaley could make a go of her ranch. All he had to do was make her see that.

The headlights of an approaching car gleamed like animal eyes in the dusk. Its windshield wipers were still switched on, he noticed as it shot past. It was raining somewhere up toward Trueheart, then. Good, they could always use rain. The longer the grass grew in the fall, the more graze there’d be for his herd in the first half of the winter. If he could put off feeding hay till after Christmas, he could keep his costs down, future profits up. Which was one more reason he needed the Cotter land. Kaley had acres and acres of irrigable meadows along her creek. If he could grow all he needed…was no longer at the mercy of the market price for good hay…

His truck mounted the first of the foothills. The road ahead gleamed black and shiny, though the shower that had drenched it had passed on already. He crested another rise and now Tripp saw taillights. Possibly Kaley returning from town? His foot came down hard on the gas.

But no, he realized when he’d closed the distance. This was one of those big sport utility vehicles. He recognized it as the one Rafe Montana had bought for his new wife, Dana, and her babies, when he made out its license plate: RbnRvr—the Ribbon River Dude Ranch, Dana’s ranch to the west of town. Tripp smiled and eased off the gas—just as the brake lights ahead flared and stayed on.

What the—? He stomped on his own brakes and swore—then groaned as the sport ute wobbled into a skid on the rain-slick asphalt. “Easy!” For a moment he thought the driver had the trouble in hand, but then she overcorrected. The sport ute’s right wheels dropped off the jagged edge of the pavement, slowed as they hit the gravel and low brush beyond—and the car swerved hard to the right and plunged off the road, bouncing and bounding into a pasture.

“Stay upright, stay upright!” Tripp prayed as he braked. And miraculously the vehicle did, coming at last to a jouncing halt sixty feet off the highway.

After parking on the shoulder, Tripp leaped out and ran. Off to the south he saw another car coming and he begged it silently to stop. He could send its driver into Trueheart for help, if need be.

“Dana!” He swung open her door and flinched at the noise—two babies wailing their lungs out. “You okay?” She was twisted around to her right, peering into the back seat as she yanked frantically at her seat belt buckle. “Dana.” He patted her shoulder, even as his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the windshield.

It wasn’t cracked. Seemed that it ought to be cracked. His heart was thundering, the sound of the babies drilling straight through his brain. Tears and glass and a wreck in the rain. And nothing had ever been the same after. He wrenched his mind back to the present, where, thank God, no glass had been shattered. “Dana, honey, hey…”

Blinded by tears, she whirled around and clutched his shirt. “G-g-get me out of this! Please! Oh, sweetheart, hang on. Mommy’s coming!”

He doubted she even knew who he was. “Easy there, eaaasy…” He reached over her lap to unclip the seat belt. Not jammed at all. She was just in a tizzy. And maybe stunned, he realized, noting the disinflated air bag drooping from the steering wheel. That must have blown up in her face. Rafe is going to thank his lucky stars he replaced her old pickup. “Easy there,” Tripp soothed, helping her down out of the high seat, then holding her up as her knees buckled.

“How can I help?” asked a quiet voice at his elbow. He glanced aside to find Kaley standing there, her fine eyes wide with sympathy. So that had been her in the car behind them.

“Petra and Peter, please, somebody look at them!” Dana begged, trying to twist out of his grasp.

“Of course.” Kaley hurried around to the far side of the vehicle and leaned in from there, while Tripp opened the near door for Dana and lifted her in.

Strapped into car seats, both her babies were squalling wholeheartedly. Beneath the racket, the women’s crooning ran like a wordless melody, a song no man could sing. Peering past Dana’s shoulder, Tripp saw Petra—with blood dripping down her chin. His stomach lurched.

A woman weeping…the smell of blood…it wasn’t the pain of the glass in his face so much as the terrifying blindness, blood welling into his eyes… He staggered back from the open door and turned to lean against the car’s side, his stomach heaving. Scrubbing the back of his hand across his cheekbone, he closed his eyes—saw his mother’s tear-drenched face—and opened them wide again. Shook his head to clear the vision. That was then…this is now. He sucked in a breath and held it, blew it out, sucked in another and squared his shoulders. Forced himself back to the door. “How are they?”

“Just fine, I think,” Kaley almost sang with happy relief. “Shaken up a bit, but everybody looks just fine.”

“Petra’s bleeding,” he protested.

“Bit her lip,” Kaley agreed, but her smile reassured him.

“Mommy’s crying!” Petra announced to the world with a tearful grimace.

Dana let out a sobbing laugh and continued wiping the tail of her shirt across her daughter’s chin. “She is, sweetie. Yes, she is.” One hand cradling her toddler’s face, she leaned to study the baby Kaley was comforting. “You’re sure Peter’s all right?”

“His neck seems fine. He’s very alert. Truly just startled, I think.” Kaley smoothed the baby’s red-gold hair, reached for one of his waving hands and held it, her thumb stroking his tiny knuckles. “Aren’t you, Peter?”

At the sound of his own name spoken by a stranger, the baby stopped midsquall to gape at her—then scowled ferociously and started again.

“Lungs in great shape,” Tripp added wryly. “What happened, anyway, back there?”

“A coyote,” Dana said, brushing her short, dark hair off her brow with a forearm. “He just stood there in my headlights till the last second. I thought I could—” Tears brimming again, she shook her head. “I’m so stupid!”

“You braked for a coyote!” Lucky her husband was crazy in love with her. The manager of Suntop Ranch didn’t suffer fools lightly.

“Of course, she did.” Kaley flashed him a glance that said Back off!

He did, half grinning at her fierceness. Then he set himself to getting this show back on the road, while the women comforted the small fry. He walked around the vehicle, checking for damage, then went for his flashlight and crawled beneath to inspect the suspension.

By the time he’d concluded that the car was roadworthy, the whimpering within had faded to the odd hiccup and an occasional piping comment from Petra. “The car bucked. Like Tobasco bucks with Daddy. I don’t want it to do that, Mommy!”

Tripp laughed under his breath and leaned back in the door. “Ready to roll, Dana? I’m driving you wherever you want to go.” Though it didn’t look to him as if anybody needed a doctor.

She swung around and smiled shakily. “Home, of course, but, Tripp, you don’t have to—”

“Yes, I do. Do you want to sit up front or back here?” He knew the answer already.

A FEW MINUTES LATER the sport ute bumped out of the pasture and lunged up onto the pavement, bouncing on its heavy springs.

“Stop that!” Petra commanded from the back seat.

“Yes, ma’am!” Tripp had to smile. Not quite three and she was bossing men already. “That was the worst of it. Smooth riding from here.”

In his mirror, he could see Kaley’s headlights switch on, then she pulled out behind them. He’d tried to tell her that Rafe could drive him back to his truck, but Kaley wouldn’t hear of it. “Dana will want him at home,” she’d told him in an undertone—then reached up to wipe a fingertip below his lashes.

“What’s that for?” he’d demanded, stung by her touch. Nine years since she’d touched him.

“Just…something on your face.” She’d headed off to her car.

Something on his face, you could say that—the mark of that day, never to be erased. When he returned to school that fall, the other boys had called him Scarface—till he’d inflicted a few scars of his own. As full of bewildered rage as he’d been all that first year after his mother left, the fights had been welcome.

“My mouth hurts,” Petra announced.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” Dana murmured in the darkness behind him. “It’s all Mommy’s fault. I never should have tried to…”

That wreck twenty-five years ago had been his fault. Also on this road, farther along toward Durango. Maybe that was why this was hitting him so hard. On the way into town, in the midst of a rainstorm, he’d spotted an antelope bounding alongside the car. Reaching blindly behind, he’d grabbed his mother’s elbow to show her. At eight, he damn sure should have known better.

At least he’d been the one who’d paid, smashing the windshield with his face when the car swerved into a ditch. His mother had only been shaken, though he could close his eyes and still hear her weeping.

Weeping for him, he supposed, and what in the space of a heartbeat he’d become. Because before that day she’d always called him “my handsome,” in her honeyed Southern drawl. Her teasing endearment had embarrassed him, even while it made him feel special. He couldn’t remember her saying it even once after that in the two months before she’d vanished from his life.

From his father’s life. From his brother Mac’s life, who’d only been five at the time—too young to lose his mother. Tripp had changed all that, grabbing her elbow.

THAT WAS A TEAR ON TRIPP’S CHEEK, Kaley thought while she followed the sport ute through Trueheart, then out again, heading west. She’d seen the tracks of more tears, and his thick lashes had dried in spikes. Crying? Tripp? Why?

Not for Dana, who’d been more frightened than hurt, Kaley guessed.

Because this wreck reminded him of his own? She tried to recall what he’d told her that summer night while they’d lain on a blanket out under the stars, her head pillowed on his arm. It had been a halting story, and not one he’d volunteered. She’d had to coax it out of him, word by reluctant word. And she wasn’t sure she’d gotten it all, before he’d rolled up to one elbow and applied his own form of persuasion, to his own ends.

His mother hadn’t wanted to take him along, she remembered that much. But when Tripp had pleaded, she’d finally given in, saying she’d drop him at a movie matinee while she did her shopping. Kaley remembered finding it odd that his mother would leave an eight-year-old alone in the city.

They’d never made it that far. Tripp had jogged her elbow and the car had skidded, much the way Dana’s did tonight. Except with far worse consequences. “That’s how I got my ugly mug,” he’d said matter-of-factly, then smiled at her storm of protest.

Surely he was just being modest, she remembered thinking. A scar like that might have troubled him as a child, but now that he’d grown to glorious manhood? When she was seventeen to his twenty-three he’d seemed such a man. Her first man, reducing all boyfriends that had come before to posing children. Surely her man realized how beautiful he was, inside and out. She’d lost the rest of that night, trying to show him.

Sometime later, she’d learned the rest—that his mother had left his father two months after Tripp’s accident. Had run off with her sons’ pediatrician in Durango. They’d moved to New Orleans and she’d never looked back.

And Tripp’s father had never recovered, never looked for another woman. Only for comfort in the bottle.

Kaley bit her lip as she frowned in thought. And somehow, someway, she’d gotten half a notion that Tripp blamed himself for his family’s dissolution. Though that was crazy. How could an eight-year-old be to blame?

But I bet I know one thing—where his mom meant to go while she stashed her son at the matinee. If anyone should be blaming herself for what had happened…

Yet, maybe she had shouldered the blame. Maybe in the end, Mrs. McGraw hadn’t so much run to her lover as fled from her guilt, emblazoned on her small son’s cheek for all the world to see. Every time she’d looked at his poor little face, it must have stabbed her to the heart.

WHEN THEY REACHED the Ribbon River Dude Ranch, Kaley stayed in her car while Tripp and Dana unbuckled the children from their seats. A tall, dark man walked out the back door of the Victorian farmhouse onto the wide deck, called a question, then came down the steps at a bound.

Standing with his big hands on Dana’s shoulders, he listened to her for a moment, then swept her and their baby into a fierce embrace. Tripp stood by, examining the stars for the first minute of that hug. Then he shrugged and carried Petra, still babbling and waving her chubby hands, to the screen door, where he passed her to the gangly, teenage boy who’d made an appearance. Returning, Tripp patted Dana’s shoulder in passing, said something with a grin to the man who still held her and came on to Kaley’s car.

“Reckon Rafe’ll forgive her the coyote,” he said, straight-faced, as he dropped into his seat next to Kaley.

So Dana was one of the lucky ones, Kaley mused as she drove the long gravel road out to the highway. She felt more than a passing twinge of envy. Not once in the past eight years had she been hugged like that.

And before Richard? Her eyes flicked to her companion. That had been different. That had been all about sex. They’d been young and greedy and couldn’t get enough of each other. But their romance had been nothing to build a life on, nothing to last.

Or it would have lasted.

TRIPP DIDN’T SPEAK till they could see the lights of Trueheart twinkling in the distance. “Can I buy you a burger at Mo’s? I’m ’bout ready to gnaw my boots.”

The last time she’d eaten at Mo’s Truckstop had been with Tripp, nine years ago, on her spring break from college. Lingering over coffee, hands clasped across the table, they’d planned their modest wedding, which was scheduled for June. By then Tripp would be done with spring roundup, and she’d have completed her freshman year at Oberlin.

Marriage had seemed so easy and right as they’d sat there. So…so attainable. All they had to do was hang on for three more lonely months, then happiness was theirs. Kaley cleared her throat and managed to find a level voice. “Mo’s sounds good.”

INSIDE THE TRUCK STOP, Tripp chose the same booth they’d always taken—their booth, Kaley had thought of it, way back when. Afraid to meet his eyes and find the memories lurking there, she ducked her head over the dog-eared menu.

“Steakburger with fries?” Tripp asked quietly. What she—both of them—had always ordered.

But she was a different person now, a believer in easy and right no longer. Life wasn’t that simple. “Something lighter, I think. Maybe a grilled breast of chicken if Mo—” But no, Mo was still holding the high-cholesterol line. Nothing on his menu but cow or deep-fried.

“Go back to the city,” Tripp jeered, halfway between teasing and something sharper. “You’ll find a yuppie sandwich on every corner.”

Wish on. “I’m here to stay, Tripp.” She looked him straight in the eye, and ordered a steakburger when the waitress came.

They called a tacit truce over Mo’s meltingly tender strip steaks, sticking to small, safe topics while they ate. Kaley explained that Whitey had refused to consult a doctor, so she’d gone to Durango for crutches.

She wanted to know how Tripp had made it down from the high country so soon. She hadn’t expected to see him back for a day or so yet, but she learned that he’d ridden only halfway. He’d trailered his packhorses up and back through Suntop land, a shortcut Rafe Montana permitted his closest neighbors.

She asked after Tripp’s brother, and learned that Mac was working for a rodeo stock contractor out of Laramie, serving as a pickup man in the bronc events, also doing his own share of bull riding.

Riding those horned freight trains—now that sounded like Mac McGraw, macho from his boot heels to his eyebrows. He was devil-may-care, where his big brother was the steady one. The caring one, she’d once thought.

Tripp asked how she’d liked teaching high-school English, so she tossed off a few war stories—the laughable times and the ones where you wanted to tear out your hair in frustration. The kids were the very best of the bargain. All the hurdles the bureaucrats placed between you and actual teaching—that was the worst of it.

“Are you thinking about teaching in Trueheart?” he asked after he’d ordered coffee and she’d wistfully passed.

She stifled a stinging retort, remembering how he’d protested when she went away to college in Ohio, where Oberlin College had offered her a full scholarship. How hard she’d had to work to persuade him that this was a good thing, the smart thing, her getting her B.A. and certification to teach. Because once she was certified, he could run his ranch and she could help him, but if beef prices kept dropping, she’d be able to teach in Trueheart or Cortez or Durango and carry them over the rough spots.

All the same, Tripp had hated her running off to the city. Had said she’d never be satisfied with ranching life after that. Yet now here he was asking, as if he’d thought up the idea himself!

“I’ve considered it,” she said slowly, swallowing her resentment. Teaching had been part of her plan when she’d thought that Jim was still in the picture. Her baby would be born in April. Then, assuming that her daughter was healthy, that the antibiotic hadn’t…harmed her, by the following September the baby would be old enough to do without her mother for eight hours a day, if an outside job proved to be necessary. Kaley didn’t like it, knew she’d hate leaving her baby, but it was no more than most single mothers had to do.

Tripp leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “That’s what you should do, Kaley, if you want to stay in Colorado. Take a teaching job here—or even better in Durango. Or Boulder. It’d be more like what you’re used to, a real city.”

Kaley shook her head. She was done with cities. When she’d settled for a shallow life in the city with a shallow man was when her life had taken its wrong turn. Besides, her plan didn’t work anymore now that Jim had flown away. She couldn’t both manage her ranch and teach.

“You should do that,” Tripp insisted, his callused fingertips whitening on the tabletop. “I’m offering the appraised value on your land. It’s fair—Jim hired the appraiser himself. You should take your half of the money and buy a nice little house in Durango or Denver or—”

“Or maybe Miami,” she cut in. “Or how about Spain? Would that be far enough for you?” As his eyebrows drew together, she shook her head. “Get used to it, Tripp. I’m not selling.” So much for truces!

“You’re not selling. Yeah, that’s big talk,” he snapped. “But the question is, can you keep? You understand I can call your loan anytime after shipping day? That it’s all due—the forty thou plus interest, all in one balloon payment?”

If Tripp insisted on full payback, there was no way she could keep the ranch—she was as good as sunk. Bad enough to be at anyone’s mercy, but to be at this man’s? How much mercy had he shown her the last time? “Jim walked right into that one, didn’t he?” she said bitterly. “He’s always too impatient to read the fine print.”

Tripp’s face darkened; his scar went pale. “You’re saying I tricked your brother? Pulled a fast one?”

Whoa, girl! Her temper had grabbed the bit and run right away with her. But this wasn’t the cynical city, where slick moves were a given. This was Trueheart, where the Code of the West still held. Where a man would fight for his honor and his good name, sometimes to the death. She drew a breath, sighed it out, and shook her head slowly. No, her brother had been a fool, but he’d needed no help in that, or received any. “No, Tripp, I’m…not saying that. Don’t believe it.”

When still he waited with narrowed eyes, she added reluctantly, “Sorry. I’m sorry…I know you’re just looking out for yourself. But then, so am I. I want to keep the ranch in my family.” Below the edge of the table, she touched her stomach for luck. “Is that so hard to understand?”

“Wanting’s one thing, Kaley,” Tripp said bleakly. “Everyone wants. But doing?” He stood up from the table. “That’s another.”

CHAPTER SIX

THEY DROVE halfway back to his truck before either of them ventured to speak again. At last Tripp cleared his throat and said huskily, “Look, I know this isn’t easy, but you need to face it. There’s no way you can make a go of this. I reckon you’ve forgotten, how hard ranching is.”

“I ranched for almost eighteen years till I went off to college,” she reminded him.

“You worked with a father, a brother and a younger Whitey to help you. Now it’s you and a lame old man. You won’t last out the winter.”

“I will!” she insisted, staring down the tunnel of her headlights. “I know it won’t be easy, but I will.” She had no place else on earth to go. No place she wanted to be.

“Kaley, you’ll quit.”

Her hands clenched till they ached on the wheel. “You’re calling me a quitter?”

“Aren’t you?” he taunted. “Who walked out on who back there in Phoenix?”

She had half a mind to pull over and order him out. Let him hoof it the rest of the way to his truck.

“Why did you leave him?” Tripp probed her silence. “Or did you?”

She shot him a seething glance. He’d maneuvered her as neatly as a cutting horse splits a calf out of the herd. Left her nothing but two bad choices. She could let him brand her a quitter, a woman who’d walked out on her marriage—or she could admit that, yes, once again, she’d failed to hold her man’s love. “It’s none of your business, you know.”

“Yeah?” His harsh laughter goaded her. “Sounds like he left you!”

And so Richard had, in his heart. By rejecting her baby, he’d rejected her. All she’d saved from the disaster was her pride. “He didn’t,” she said flatly. “I reached the decision. I walked out the door. I drove to Vegas and got the divorce. Here I am.” The truth, as far as it went.

“But why?” Tripp demanded.

No way was she telling him about the baby! He thought—now—that she wouldn’t last till Christmas? What would he think if he knew she’d be five months pregnant by then? In six weeks, come calf-shipping day, Tripp could call in his loan, by the terms of the contract. Somehow she had to persuade him to let it ride for another year. And fat chance he’d do that if he considered her a wounded duck.

“Why did you leave, Kaley?” Tripp insisted. “Did he cheat on you?”

“No.” Even to save her pride, she couldn’t say that.

Tripp drew a sharp breath. “Did he…beat you?”

“No!” And Tripp apparently didn’t mean to stop till he had his answer. So she’d have to brazen it out. Brush him off. “He was selfish,” she said lightly. “Okay? Raised as an only child by a doting single mom, and I guess it warped him. Richard always had to choose the channel when we watched TV.”

“TV,” Tripp repeated, incredulous. “You call that a reason?”

“Not good enough?” she asked flippantly. “Well, he was prettier than me and he knew it. I got tired of that.” I was the one who was supposed to admire, always, always. I wonder if he even saw me, except as his mirror.

“Yeah, that’s grounds for divorce, all right.”

“And he was picky,” she plunged on recklessly. “Wanted his eggs fried ten seconds over easy, but if you let them cook for twenty or if you broke the yolk…” And his custom-made shirts had to be ironed just so, or there’d be sulks and tantrums. He’d paid more for his haircuts than she had for hers. And as for the possibility of having a daughter who might be less than perfect? Unthinkable! He’d sooner abort her than take that chance. “Definitely picky,” she muttered.

“Yeah, I can see you two had big problems,” Tripp said with quiet savagery.

He’d asked; she’d answered. If he didn’t like it… Her smile was diamond bright and just as hard. “Hey, what do you care? Sometimes things just…don’t…work out.” And there, up ahead—oh, joy—was his truck. The end to this inquisition was in sight.

Tripp put a hand to his door handle—looked as if he was as ready to part company as she was. “I care, Kaley, because you came back to Trueheart and wrecked my plans. And you’re wrecking them all for nothing! Six months from now you’ll be tired of playing rancher and you’ll be gone again.”

“No…I won’t.” She jammed on the brakes, stopping with her headlights glaring into the blind eyes of Tripp’s pickup.

“Right.” He swung his legs out onto the road, then called back through the door’s closing gap, “Hey, and thanks for the ride, cowgirl!”