Dalton's Undoing

“I’ll know better after I tow the car out to the ranch and take a look at her but from my initial look, I’d estimate there was about fix or six hundred dollars’ damage,” he was saying. “The way I figure it, if he worked for me a couple afternoons a week after school and Saturday mornings, we should be clear in a few months. Is that okay with you?”

She looked at Dalton and then at Cole, his arms still crossed belligerently across his chest, as if everyone else in the room was responsible for his troubles but himself.

He disdained everything about Idaho and would probably consider being forced to work on a ranch every bit as much punishment as going to juvenile detention, she thought.

“Yes. That’s more than fair. Wouldn’t you agree, Cole?”

Her son glared at both of them—and while Jenny felt her own temper kindle in automatic response, Seth met his look with cool challenge and Cole quickly dropped his gaze.

“Whatever,” he muttered.

“Thank you,” Jenny said again, walking with him to the door. “As tomorrow is Saturday, I’ll drive him out to the Cold Creek in the morning. What time?”

“How does eight work for you?”

“We’ll be there. I’m very sorry again about this. I can’t imagine what he was thinking.”

His smile was slow and wide and made her insides feel as if she’d just done somersaults down a steep, grassy hill.

“He’s a teenage boy, so I’d guess he probably wasn’t thinking at all. See you in the morning.”

Jenny nodded, wondering why that prospect filled her with an odd mix of trepidation and anticipation.

Chapter Two

“This is totally lame,” her son muttered the next morning. “Why do I have to give up a whole Saturday?”

Jenny sighed and cast Cole an admonishing glance across the width of her little Toyota SUV. “You prefer the alternative? I can call Mr. Dalton right now and tell him to go ahead and file charges if that’s what you’d rather see happen here.”

Cole sliced her a glare that told her quite plainly he considered her totally lame, too, but he said nothing.

“I don’t think it’s fair, either,” Morgan piped up from the backseat. “Why does Cole always get to do the fun stuff? I want to help with the horses, too. Natalie says the Cold Creek horses are the prettiest, smartest horses anywhere. They’ve won all kinds of rodeo awards and they sell for tons of money. She said her uncle Seth knows more about horses than anybody else in the whole wide world.”

“Wow. The whole wide world?” Sarcasm dripped from Cole’s voice.

Morgan either didn’t pick up on it or decided to ignore it. Judging from past experience, Jenny was willing to bet on the latter. Her daughter tended to ignore anything that didn’t fit into her vision of the way the world ought to operate.

Even during her frequent hospital stays after bad asthma attacks, she always managed to focus on some silver lining, like a new friend or a particularly kind nurse.

“Yep,” she said eagerly now, with as much pride in Seth Dalton as she might have had if he were her uncle instead of her best friend’s. “People bring their horses to the Cold Creek from all over the place for him to train because he’s so good.”

“If he knows more than anyone else in the world, why is he stuck here in Buttlick, Idaho?”

Morgan’s enthusiasm faded into a frown. “Just because you don’t like it here, you don’t have to call it mean words.”

“I thought that was the name,” Cole said with a sneer. “Right next to Hairy Armpitville and across the holler from Cow’s Rectum.”

“That’s enough.” Jenny’s hands tightened on the steering wheel and she felt familiar stress weigh like a half-ton hay bale on her shoulders. She wasn’t at all sure she was going to survive her son’s adolescence.

“I hope you treat Mr. Dalton with more respect than you show me or your sister.”

“How can I not, since apparently the man knows more about horses than anybody in the whole wide world?” Cole muttered.

Who was this angry stranger in her son’s body? she wondered. Whatever happened to her sweet little man who used to love cuddling up with her at bedtime for stories and hugs? Who used to let her blow raspberries on his neck and would run to her classroom after school bubbling over with news of his day?

That sweet boy had been slipping away from her since the year he turned eleven, when Richard had moved out. Through the three ugly years since, he’d pulled deeper and deeper into himself, until now he only emerged on rare occasions.

This obviously wasn’t going to be one of them.

Somehow Cole had come to blame her for the separation and divorce. She wasn’t sure how or why she had come to bear that burden but the unfairness of it made her want to scream.

She, at least, had been faithful to her marriage vows. Though she hadn’t been perfect by any means and had long ago accepted her share of responsibility for the breakup of her marriage, in her heart she knew she had tried to be a good wife.

She had supported Richard through his last years of medical school, residency, internship. She had scrimped and saved throughout their twelve-year marriage to help pay off his student loans, had run the household virtually alone during that time as he worked to establish his career, had tried time and again to bridge the increasing chasm between them as he focused on his practice to the complete exclusion of his family.

She had tried. Not perfectly, she would admit, but she had wanted her marriage to work.

Richard had had other ideas, though. He went to Paris for a conference and met his Giselle and decided family and vows and twelve years of marriage didn’t stack up well against a twenty-year-old Frenchwoman with a tight body and pouty lips.

Jenny had long ago come to terms with Richard Boyer’s betrayal of her. But she would never forgive him for what his complete abandonment of his family had done to his children. Morgan had stopped crying herself to sleep some time ago and seemed to be adjusting, but Cole carried so much anger inside him he seethed with it.

Lucky her, she seemed to be the only outlet for his rage.

She tried to remember what the therapist she’d seen in Seattle had told her, that Cole only lashed out at her because she was a safe target. Her son knew she wouldn’t abandon him like his father, so he focused all the force of his rage toward her.

She still wasn’t sure she completely bought into that explanation. Even if she did, she wasn’t sure it would make his rebelliousness and unhappiness any more palatable.

With each mile marker, he seemed to sink further into gloom on the seat beside her.

A large timber arch across a gravel side road proudly bore the name of the Cold Creek Land & Cattle Company in cast-iron letters. She slowed the SUV and turned in.

“It won’t be so bad,” she said, fighting the completely juvenile urge to cross her fingers. “Who knows? You might even enjoy it.”

He rolled his eyes. “Cleaning up horse crap? Right. Can’t wait.”

She sighed, wondering if Seth Dalton had any clue what joy was in store for him today.

The ranch house was shielded from the main road by a long row of trees, which made the first sight of it all the more dramatic. It was perfect for the landscape here, a bold, impressive structure of rock and logs, with the massive peaks of the Tetons as a backdrop.

She’d always considered November a particularly lonely, unattractive month, without October’s swirling colors or December’s sparkling anticipation. In November, the trees were bleak and bare and everything seemed frost-dead and barren.

The Cold Creek seemed to be an exception. Oh, the gardens out front had been cut down, the beds prepared for winter, but the long rows of weathered fence line and the sheer impressiveness of the house and outbuildings gave a stark beauty to the scene.

Not sure quite where to go to find Seth Dalton, she slowed as she reached the house and then stopped altogether when she saw a figure emerge from an immense barn, carrying a bale of hay by the baling twine.

It wasn’t Seth, she realized, but his brother Wade, Natalie’s father.

The oldest Dalton brother had two children in her school—Natalie and her younger brother, Tanner. Natalie was a dear, though a little bossy, but Tanner had been in her office on more than one occasion for some mischief or other. He wasn’t malicious, just highly energetic.