True Heart

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.