Long Way Home

“Monte?” Jo Lena’s eyes were not deceiving her. It was Monte—all cleaned up and looking better than he ever had a right to.

“May I come in?” he asked.

“You’ll have to if you want to talk to me,” she snapped. “I was expecting the new buyer for this place.” She turned on her heel and headed back to the kitchen.

Monte’s boot heels sounded on the hardwood floor right behind her as she went into the kitchen. They were still uneven—he was still limping. But he seemed to be getting around much better. He sat down as she filled a mug of coffee.

It occurred to Jo Lena that he must’ve changed his mind about selling the horse. “So let’s talk about the horse.”

“We’ve said all we have to say.”

Had he come here to talk about them? About six years ago? About now?

“Then what do we have to talk about, Monte?”

“I’m the new buyer.”

GENA DALTON

wanted to be a professional writer since she learned to read at the age of four. However, she became a secondary school teacher and then a college professor/ dean of women instead, and began to write after she was married and a stay-at-home mother. She entered an essay contest that resulted in a newspaper publication, giving her confidence she could achieve her lifelong dream of becoming a “real writer.”

Gena lives in Oklahoma with her husband of twenty-four years. Now that their son is grown, their only companions are two dogs, two house cats, one barn cat and one cat who belongs to the neighbors but won’t go home.

She loves to hear from readers. She can be reached c/o Steeple Hill Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017.

Long Way Home

Gena Dalton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

But it was only right we should celebrate and

rejoice, because your brother here was dead and

has come to life; he was lost and is found.

—Luke 15:32

This book is for my friends,

Jill and Sheila

Dear Reader,

This story of Monte, the third McMahan brother and Bobbie Ann’s prodigal son, is one we can all relate to from our own experience. Who among us hasn’t felt separated from those we love by our choices and actions? At those times when we are farthest away, we all long to go home.

Monte takes the long way home, for he not only has stayed away for six years while rarely communicating with his mother, brothers and sisters, but he has also denied his yearning to see Jo Lena Speirs, the only woman he has ever loved. He believes he is past redemption, in God’s eyes and in Jo Lena’s, because of the death of her brother, Scotty. He bears a burning guilt that he has not been able to escape, even by traveling thousands of miles and putting himself in constant danger.

From the instant that Monte gets thrown from a bull and is hurt too badly to ride, he knows that he can no longer bear to be so alone. He sneaks onto the Rocking M, and dreads seeing anyone there, especially Jo Lena, but from the moment he arrives on the ranch, he knows that at last he has come home.

If you haven’t read the stories of Monte’s brothers, Jackson and Clint, please look for Stranger at the Crossroads and Midnight Faith, both also published by Steeple Hill. I would love to hear from you. You can reach me c/o Steeple Hill Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017.

All warm wishes,

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

Chapter One

For maybe half of his ride on the brindle bull, Monte McMahan believed.

That he could stay on for the whole eight seconds.

That he could score high enough to put him back in the running.

That his injured back had healed enough to let him keep going on down the rodeo road.

Then the wily old Brahma dropped his head, shook his ugly horns and spun hard to the right when he’d definitely been looking to the left ever since the first jump out of the chute.

Pain clamped on to Monte’s spine like a coyote’s teeth around a rabbit. It twisted the breath out of his lungs one second before it sucked the strength from his arms and legs and tore the rigging from his hand.

He flew through space with the bright lights sparkling and the dust shimmering across his vision. He couldn’t close his eyes. He would not. If he closed his eyes, he’d be giving up and if he gave up, he’d be dead when he hit the ground.

The impact made him believe he was. But then the pain exploded inside his head and took the place of his last gasp of precious air. He decided a man could live without breathing because a dead man wouldn’t be hurting.

A dead man wouldn’t be hearing the true concern in the announcer’s voice. Good old Butch, he was worried about Monte.

“Folks, put your hands together for Monte McMahan,” he boomed. “He’s one tough Texas bull rider and he’s been ridin’ through the pain for a lot of months now. Y’all may’ve just had the privilege of seeing his last ride, right here in Houston tonight.”

The applause started, but it didn’t grow. It was hesitant, it died and the fear-filled hush fell over the arena again.

“He’s not moved a muscle since he hit,” Butch said. “Let’s hope Old Brindle hasn’t sent him back to the Rocking M for good. As you all know, Monte’s one of the fourth or fifth generation of McMahans from that famous ranch in the Hill Country.”

Good old Butch needed to get another line of patter. It was nobody’s business where Monte was from.

Faces, blurry and worried, bent over Monte.

“Boys, get that ambulance on out here,” Butch called. “And we need a big thank-you, friends and neighbors, for our brave bullfighting clowns. They’ve got Old Brindle outta here, now. There he is, joggin’ down the run, already lookin’ for his next victim.”

Monte cringed inside, in spite of the fact he couldn’t move a muscle. Victim. Butch coulda talked all night without calling him that.

Fool, maybe. That’d be more like it. And now he was a crippled fool.

No, he was not. He would not be.

Calling on the raw willpower that had carried him through many a scrape, he tried once, twice, then he caught his breath and he could force his arm to move. He lifted his hand. He waved to the crowd. Their noise returned, instantly surged into a roar.

He would come back. It might take him a little while, but he’d come back.

All the time the guys from the sports medicine trailer worked on him and examined him and then clamped the stabilizer around his neck and slid him onto the backboard, he held that thought.

Jo Lena Speirs sat her horse on top of the hill and let him blow. She loved this spot overlooking the entrance to the Rocking M. The river bridge glinted in the dying sunlight, far up the narrow highway, and the bluffs on the other side of it lifted green trees to the sky.

“This is getting to be our routine, isn’t it, Scooter?” she said, patting his sweaty neck. “Prayers at the old chapel, and then a nice run across the Rocking M before dark.”

Which, to be honest, was what was keeping her sane. Trying to be a mother without a husband, a business owner without employees and a daughter without siblings kept her busy every minute.

She’d already prayed this prayer at the chapel, but she said it again, her heart filled with gratitude.

“Bless Bobbie Ann, Lord. Bless her for offering this horse and this place of peace to me.”

An old truck and trailer slowed on the highway and turned off onto the Rocking M road. Idly, she watched it. Dexter Hawkins, Bobbie Ann’s old neighbor.

Strangely, Dexter didn’t follow the road toward the house. He pulled across the entrance and stopped. He must be having trouble. With a truck that old, anything could be wrong.

Jo Lena touched the cell phone she wore on her belt—Dexter, famous for his stinginess, certainly wouldn’t have one. She’d ride down there and offer to call for help.

But as she picked up her reins and started to turn, the passenger door to the truck opened. The instant the man stepped foot on the ground, even though he wore a battered hat pulled down, she knew him.

Monte. Monte McMahan. The only man she’d ever loved.

Even though he was stove up and stiff, she’d have known him by the way he moved. She’d have known him in a dust storm, in the dark or in a blizzard.

She’d have known him by the way her heart left her body.

Her eyes strained toward him painfully through the gathering dusk, hungrily watching him limp toward the back of the trailer. Her whole body had gone weak as water.

But the real trouble was her heart. It was pounding like hoofbeats at a gallop—except that her heart had really leapt out of her chest and left her far behind.

It had wrapped itself around Monte. He looked so sore and so completely defeated that she couldn’t stand it. Just the sight of him was breaking her apart all over again.

Dear Lord, You’re going to have to help me now. Please, please, help me remember everything Monte did wrong.

He had done her mightily wrong and she had done everything right. Her mind knew that. But there went her heart, anyway, welcoming him home as if her choice had been wrong and his had been right.

Yes. There went her heart.

And then, when he painfully held on to the trailer and pushed himself up onto the fender so he could crawl onto the horse, he wrenched her very soul. He took her hard-won peace that had been six years in the making.

It wasn’t just that he was physically hurt. Or that it killed her to see the hopeless set to his shoulders.

It was simply that he was Monte and she loved him.

She’d thought the fire was long since cold, but there were embers hidden in the ashes. She still loved him.

Dear Lord, give me strength. With Your help, I can handle that. What I can’t handle is getting involved with him again.

But that, too, was a forlorn hope. At that instant she recognized the horse he was riding at that painfully slow walk.

The mare was heavier—maybe pregnant—and scruffier, but she knew her, too, by the way she moved. It was Quick Way Annie, favorite friend of her childhood. The horse she’d been trying to find.

Her mind raced in circles. Had Monte heard, somehow, that she was searching for Annie? Had he bought her for Jo Lena, maybe to apologize, to try to make amends for leaving her without a word of goodbye?

All breath left her body. Monte had brought back her long-lost mare. He intended to get involved with her.

Monte gritted his teeth against the slight jarring of the mare’s soft steps and gripped her mane to stay on. His body ached to fall forward and stretch out along her neck, but riding that way would hurt even more. He’d just have to hold on.

He tried to get his mind off his pain.

Soon as he rested up a little, he had to get back in shape. Why, Dexter, old and slow as he was, had had the mare out of the trailer before Monte could even get to the door.

And he’d be in the back room at Hugo’s playing dominoes with the rest of the old men if he didn’t watch it. However, right now, with the pain pounding him like a hammer on an anvil, that sounded pretty good. Maybe he should’ve stayed in the hospital until the doctor let him out.

He was stiff as starched jeans and hurting like crazy. All he wanted was to crawl into a cool, dark place, ease his wreck of a body down and sleep for a week.

He jerked his mind away from that. Not yet. Not yet. He’d be horribly sore tomorrow if he slept out on the damp ground. If only he could avoid seeing anyone tonight.

Dexter never had been much of a talker. He’d been a neighbor to the Rocking M since before Monte was born, but he’d not be likely to call Bobbie Ann or Clint tonight to tell them about Monte being home.

Of course, sometime tomorrow they’d hear by the grapevine that he was back in the Hill Country. By then, he might be able to handle it, but not now.

Tonight all he wanted was to get into a bed of some kind, unheard and unseen.

A prodigal son needed to face one thing at a time when he returned, and for today this prodigal had already dealt with old friends and neighbors at the Bandera Cutting Horse Sale, the surprising sight of Jo Lena’s old mare, Quick Way Annie, on the auction block, and the shock of the feelings roused in him by being even this close to home.

Tears stung his eyes. The arched sign with the Rocking M brand in the middle had torn at him, but this familiar long, curving road with the pecan grove on his left and the bluffs rising to the right ripped away all his defenses. He was home.

For the first time in six years, with dusk falling around him, he was home.

Here he was, the great Monte McMahan, four-time champion of the Professional Bull Riding circuit, sneaking into his lair to recuperate from these injuries that had taken his life away.

Unsure of his welcome from his brothers, loaded with guilt at the sorrow he’d caused his mother and sisters, he was home.

Well, if he had to, he could camp out by the river and eat fish. Anything. Anything but more motels and more greasy spoon diners. Those he could not face anymore.

At the last curve before he could see the main house, he reined the mare off the road. They cut across behind the indoor arena and Manuel’s house, headed for the river. Everything was quiet. Evening feeding was done, everybody had gone to supper.

The thought of food repelled Monte’s stomach, which was sick from the pain. The mare didn’t need to be fed, either, since she was used to being on pasture, the seller had said. He would put her in that five-acre lot behind the old bunkhouse and put himself inside it, assuming there were no hired hands staying there.

A door slammed somewhere and the faint sound of voices floated from the direction of the main barn on the still evening air, but no one saw him and he and Annie plodded on through the shadows of the trees to the river. Its murmuring soothed him a little as they moved upstream, passed behind the guest house and then saw that the old bunkhouse stood dark. At its back door, he dropped the bag to the ground, eased one leg over and carefully dismounted, his teeth clenched against the pain of the landing.

When Annie was safe in the fenced lot with grass and water, he walked stiffly to the bunkhouse, opened the back door and dragged his gear bag inside. He flipped a switch on the wall of the old, added-on bathroom and used the light to find a bunk. The place was bare. All the mattresses were rolled and tied.

He went to the closest one, took out his pocketknife, cut the twine and waited for the mattress to unwind and fall flat on the wooden bed frame. That was the last of his strength.

Miraculously, he managed not to fall. He sat down on the side of the bunk, eased himself back until he lay full length and fell asleep with his boots on.

Bobbie Ann finally gave up her fight for sleep and got out of bed at five the next morning. Something was happening or going to happen with Monte—she’d known that since early yesterday.

True, he’d been on her mind constantly since he got hurt again and every sportscaster on every PBR telecast had to speculate about whether or not he’d ever be able to ride again, but this was different. This was even different from that wild, clawing need that had tormented her—the need to go to Houston, to find his hospital room, to take him in her arms and beg him to come home and let his mother take care of him.

She hadn’t done that because it would make Monte do just the opposite. If pushed, Monte would go to Brazil before he came home. So she had only called him and had kept her voice under control. Prayer and only prayer had given her the strength to do that.

Only prayer had sustained her since yesterday when the hospital operator had told her he was no longer there.

The phone rang as she was padding barefoot to the closet. She knew as she ran to get it that it was about Monte.

And it was. It was Jo Lena, the girl who used to love him, speaking in her husky voice, made even more husky by sleep. Jo Lena, the girl who could’ve made his life so different if he had let her love him.

“Bobbie Ann? Have you seen Monte yet?”

The phone froze to her ear.

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s what I thought. He’s on the ranch somewhere. When he didn’t let Dexter drive him to the house, I figured he wanted to lay low for a while.”

Quickly, Jo Lena told her what she’d seen and what she’d found out from a friend who’d seen Monte make the high bid for Annie at the Bandera sale. To which he had apparently hitchhiked from Houston.

“I would’ve told you last night, Bobbie Ann, but I was so…shook up, myself. And I knew he was too tired to face anybody.”

Bobbie Ann brushed her hair back from her face with a hand that trembled.

“I did try to call him yesterday and the hospital people said he was gone.”

Her voice was trembling, too, and she couldn’t seem to stop it.

“Is it all right if I come over there this morning?” Jo Lena said.

“Of course! Anytime!”

“Please don’t misunderstand,” Jo Lena said. “It’s the horse I’m interested in. I want her back. I wouldn’t trust Monte as far as I could throw him.”

The quick, sharp hope died, the hope Bobbie Ann hadn’t even realized had been born until then.

“Sweetie, I understand,” she said. “You have every right to feel that way.”

They hung up, with no need to say any more.

Immediately, Bobbie Ann went through the house, the apartment in the barn and the guest house, seeing with the quickest glances that everything was undisturbed. She didn’t see an extra horse anywhere. Only when she was headed back to the house, ready to call Manuel and tell him to go look for a campsite, did she think of the old bunkhouse.

She ran across the dew-laden grass, knowing in her heart what she would find. So, when she got there, she opened the door as quietly as the pink sun was rising on the new day.

Monte lay sprawled on his back on the bare, striped-ticking mattress, one arm outflung above his head, the way he’d always slept as a child. His face was empty in sleep but the sunlight showed lines in his forehead, crow’s feet beside his eyes and creases at his mouth. In fact, he was frowning a little bit—probably from a dream.

His open pocketknife lay where it had fallen from his dangling fingers to the floor.

Bobbie Ann sighed. Thirty-one years old and worn to a nub. Hard living and soul-racking pain had made her darling son old before his time.

But had they made him any wiser?

He was a feast for her eyes, though, no matter what.

He was home!

At least for this moment. Well, this moment was the only one she knew she had to live.

Thank You, Lord.

She leaned against the doorjamb, hugged her joy to her and watched him sleep.

Jo Lena Speirs leaned against the doorjamb, watching the baby sleep. No… Lily Rae. She had to quit calling her “the baby,” had to quit even thinking of her as “the baby.” Good heavens, the child would be five years old in the fall and she’d be going to kindergarten.

That old, familiar feeling clutched the pit of her stomach. Lily Rae was growing up, fast. Someday she, too, would leave her, the way Monte had done.

No, not the same way. Lily Rae would surely tell her goodbye.

The hurt stabbed her through to the bone, just as it had done on that day six years ago. She closed her eyes against it.

Dear Lord, please take this hurt away. Please help me know that what I feel for him now is sympathy and Christian love, not the kind of love I used to have for him. Give me Your strength and help me feel nothing at all when I see him today.

Jo Lena opened her eyes, shook her head and tried to banish the memories. What had happened to her vow not to give Monte any more power over her? Just because he was back in the Hill Country was no reason to backslide into thinking about him all the time.

If she’d married Monte, she would’ve only been settling just as she would have been if she’d married any of the other half-dozen men who had asked her over the years. She didn’t need a husband. She had her faith in God, her child, her friends, her home, her work, her horses, and she didn’t need anything else.

Except Quick Way Annie. She would get that taken care of today and then she would avoid Monte. The Rocking M was a huge place. She could ride Scooter and Lily Rae could ride Annie and sometimes Bobbie Ann would ride with them. Annie would be perfect for Lily Rae. Nothing like a seasoned, settled mount for a child to learn on.

It took all her self-control not to cross the room and wake the child up. She couldn’t wait for Lily Rae to see her horse.

Monte had had a lot of nerve, anyhow, to even think of buying that mare. Whatever he intended to do with her.

Monte woke in a haze of hurting. His right arm lay above his head and a direct line of fiery pain ran from it down into his back. Every other part of his body either ached, agonized or tortured him.

The pills the doctor had given him in the hospital had worn off long ago and he had no prescription, since he’d snuck away on his own. He would have to tough it out except for the over-the-counter stuff he always carried in his gear bag for the usual aches and pains from bull riding.

For one long moment, he dreaded moving and creating greater pain, then, without stopping, he lowered his arm and began to try to sit up. He wouldn’t think about it; he wouldn’t let the pain into his mind.

It flowed in anyway, but he got to his feet in spite of it and staggered to his bag and to the bathroom. Ten minutes later, his face and hair wet by hasty ablutions performed while unable to bend over the sink, he stepped outside. He stood on the stoop and squinted in the sunlight.

Time to go up to the house. Time to face the music. Time to see his mom. He’d feel guilty at the sight of her, but she’d welcome him anyway.

Carefully, he stepped down onto the grass.

“Mommy, Mommy, look at me!”

The trilling cry of a child’s voice stopped him. It was close, within a stone’s throw. None of his siblings had a child, did they? A wave of disorientation swept through him.

Did they? How long had he been gone, anyhow?

He turned around and saw a golden-haired little girl, maybe four or five years old, standing on the bottom railing of the old wooden fence, leaning over, offering a handful of grass to Annie, who was ambling over to investigate it.

“She likes me already!”

Probably the child of one of the hired hands.

“I see you,” a woman said. “Be sure to hold your hand flat and don’t let her get your fingers by mistake.”

Jo Lena. It wasn’t some woman, it was Jo Lena. The irresistibly husky voice was unmistakable.

Well. Chalk one up to the Hill Country grapevine. He’d expected word to get around, but not this fast—not Jo Lena Speirs on his doorstep first thing in the morning.

His breath stopped as she walked into his view.

Hair the color of honey, hair that felt like silk in his hands, hanging down her back in one thick braid. Hair pulled back from her beautiful face, tanned just a little from the sun. She was too fair to go without a hat, but today she wasn’t wearing one.