True Heart

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.