True Heart

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.