True Heart

“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.