True Heart

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.