Her mouth went still beneath his.

He wondered at the warm softness, tasted coffee and sweetness and thought he’d done the wrong thing. She would pull away. She didn’t want this.

God knew, he was a man. He was just out of prison. He couldn’t handle this.

She tilted her head and moved her lips against his.

She did want it. He’d done the right thing. So right it obliterated all the ugliness he’d seen and heard in the cells. So right it made him feel free.

Her lips moved on his and she kissed him back as if she liked it.

As if she needed it.

She lifted her hand and laid it on his neck, sure and sweet, as if she needed him.

What could a man like him have to offer a woman like her?

He couldn’t let himself want it. He was free, but not for this. So he caught her wrist, kissed her harder for one more heartbeat, then took his mouth away.

MONTANA BLUE

Genell Dellin

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Paula Hamilton

and

Karen Crane,

my companions on this journey

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank:

God, for the story

My agent, Nancy Yost, and my editor, Abby Zidle, for their insights and their faith in Montana Blue

My friends Sheila Forbes, Jill Peale and Robin Miller for their heartfelt encouragement

And my family – my husband, Art, and son, David, daughter-in-law, Julie, and grandson, Gage; my sister Linda, her husband, Luke, and their son, Lance, and daughter, Lucie; Lance’s wife, Tamara, and daughter, Elizabeth; Lucie’s husband, Joel, and children, Gracie and Waylon Grady; my sister Bonnie, her husband, Gary, and their sons, Ben and Sam; and my uncle Arlen and aunt Clara – for so much love.

CHAPTER ONE

THEY TURNED HIM LOOSE on a dazzling, yellow-robed morning ten years to the month—June—since they’d locked him in. The breeze whipped down from the mountains with a wet-dirt smell and the sun struck his face with a strong, hot hand. A crater of need opened in the center of him, the need to rise to meet that life-giving sun, to wallow in its warmth and try to suck it all into the empty sack that was his skin.

“Here,” he said, and shoved the bundle of paints and brushes he carried at the last guard, “take this to your kids.”

For what he had to do, he sure as hell didn’t need them. Besides, they carried the stink of the place just as he did. First thing he’d do was get more clothes and a shower somewhere.

If he could bear to go inside four walls and a roof again.

He could. He could stand anything. He had already been through the worst.

He still could not believe he was free. His sudden release had left him no time to prepare, to adjust his mind to these new circumstances.

On the edge of the road, he stood still, struck blind by the brightness.

“Over here. Take you straight to the bus station in Deer Lodge.”

A couple of other men, also newly freed, hurried toward the battered bus, but Blue turned his back and started down the road. He might walk all the way to Bozeman, just to be touching the face of the Earth Mother.

How many miles would it take to join him to her again? His feet were so used to concrete he could barely feel the clumps of grass that made him stumble.

The bus passed and honked but he didn’t look up.

Maybe he’d find a waterfall to stand under, wash himself and these clothes at the same time. Live off the land for a week or two. Like he used to do in the Oklahoma hills. He could go into the national forest.

But he’d need a weapon to hunt meat or something to make into snares or fishing lines. He gulped the fresh air, over and over again, and set one foot in front of the other. Could he still survive in the woods?

Not unless he could learn to see in all this color, all this light—the greens of the grass and the leaves on the trees shimmered and blurred because he wasn’t used to such richness. For a minute he thought he was looking through tears.

Maybe, in order to get his balance again, he should buy an old truck and go hunt a job riding some young ranch horses or driving cattle to summer pasture. Just until he got his feet under him and made a plan.

He moved his mind away from that. The sight of the high mountains stirred his spirit like a feather on the wind. He was free, for the first time in ten years, and he’d better enjoy it while he could.

Blue walked on and on, letting his mind drift and his body feel. Letting his senses fill.

The whine of a motor started coming up behind him. He moved farther over on the shoulder so the vehicle could pass. It didn’t.

A chill touched him. Was it a prison van come to take him back? Had his release been some freak mistake?

He looked over his shoulder. An old, faded red pickup and battered stock trailer moving fast, apparently determined to run over him in spite of the fact the whole opposite lane was empty.

The long shadow of the rig captured him as it pulled alongside. The truck’s speed slowed, it drifted toward the shoulder of the road, slowed some more, and finally swerved off the pavement, rolling to a stop.

The open-topped trailer held a horse tied right behind the rusty cab, its head high and handsome.

Blue kept walking. Then he realized he should go to the other side of the road if he didn’t want the driver to talk to him and expect him to answer.

The horse drew his gaze again. It’d been a long time since he’d seen one in the flesh.

The door of the truck opened and, rattling, slammed closed. Blue stepped up onto the asphalt, ready to cross to the other side. That put him right in the line of sight of the driver, an old cowboy limping toward the trailer.

“Hey, buddy,” he called, “reckon you could help me out here?”

Blue didn’t answer. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the way was clear, and started to cross the road.

“Won’t take but a minute, pardner,” the old man said, “sure would be obliged to ya. I’d hate like sin to lose this here horse.”

Blue looked straight at him then. He’d stopped at the rear of the truck to lean on it. He was rubbing his hip and trying to straighten one of his legs.

Well, damn.

“I hit a bump and got skeered this here trailer was about to come off’n’ the ball,” the old guy said, with an apologetic grin, “and my artheritis is so bad today I cain’t hardly bend over to save my soul. Seein’ you hikin’ along back there was nothin’ short of a godsend.”

Didn’t he ever shut up?

Blue looked away, down the road, and started angling toward the other side. He wanted silence, he wanted to be alone. The old man’s troubles were none of his.

“Trailer come off the hitch, this horse would likely git killed,” the old chatterbox said. “Be a damnable shame. Never be another one like him.”

Blue glanced at the horse again, even though he didn’t intend to. The roan was looking at him.

Never be another one like me. Come on. See what you think if you call yourself a horseman.

Blue veered and walked toward him.

“Happened to me and a pardner of mine, oncet,” the man said, brightening considerably when he saw that Blue would help.

“Trailer come off on the down side of a hill and left the road going seventy-five mile an hour,” he went on in his rusty voice. “Passed us up on the right like we was standin’ still. Ol’ Skimpy stared and stared at it and finally he turned to me and said, ‘Well, damn it all to hell, Micah, looky there. That trailer and the horses in it looks just like ours.’”

He took off his hat and slapped it against his leg, laughing, and stuck out his hand to Blue.

“Micah Thompson’s the name,” he said.

Blue shook with him. His gnarled old grip was hard and strong. His faded brown eyes were sharp.

“Blue Bowman.”

“Good to meet you, Blue. And mighty good of you to give me a hand. Won’t slow you down for long and then you can get on your way.”

Blue stepped in between the truck and trailer, then over the hitch so they could both look at it at the same time. He bent to examine it and Micah stepped down on the bumper of the truck. He bounced it. The hitch didn’t come loose. Blue took hold of it and tried it, but it stayed the same.

A safety chain looped around the shaft. The battered bumper had the requisite two holes to thread it through.

“Why not use this?” he asked.

“Couldn’t bend over long enough to hook it up,” Micah said.

A sharp crack of sound rocked the rig. It jerked Blue’s back straight and his head around. Not a gunshot. The horse.

The same noise exploded the air again while the trailer shook some more. The horse glared at Blue with one wild eye.

Blue returned the stare. This was a direct challenge. Personal. He couldn’t help but grin.

“Thinks he’s King Kong,” Micah said.

The red roan kicked again, laid his ears back tighter, and twisted his head to snap at the rusted steel bar of the trailer.

“He might be right,” Blue said.

The good smell of horse filled up his nostrils. How strange for it to be real and not just a memory.

Micah laughed.

“We could run on down to my place and find out,” he said. “I’m betting you’re the man to settle him right down.”

The horse still had Blue nailed with one talking eye.

Come on. Try me. I’ll dust you, turn and strike you, too. Break your bones.

“What makes you think that?” Blue asked.

He felt Micah’s gaze steady on his face but he didn’t take his eyes off the horse. Beautiful head. Intelligent eye, but not a soft one. Savvy.

He’d be an interesting way to get horseback, especially for a man who hadn’t stepped up onto a horse in ten years.

Micah was still looking at Blue instead of the horse. Blue could feel his gaze on his skin. On the braid of his hair. He turned.

The old man’s heavy-lidded eyes were waiting for him, full of knowing, like an ancient turtle’s. They met his and held.

“You walk like a horseman,” he said.

Blue grunted his disbelief.

Thompson looked at him for another long moment, then he glanced at the horse and chuckled.

“This here colt’ll fly you over the mountain, Blue,” he said, “but when you get ’im broke and solid, he’ll last you for years. Make a hell of a usin’ horse and babies just like him, too.”

Blue’s heart thumped.

“You’re selling?”

The old cowboy twisted even more wrinkles into his long neck to turn and spit tobacco juice out of the other side of his mouth.

“Yep. I shore as hell cain’t break him.”

Blue locked eyes with the horse again.

“Two-year-old?”

Micah nodded.

“Yep. Ain’t never been rode—but not for lack of tryin’. Started him right after Christmas, with the rest of my string.”

As if to show how tough he was, the horse sat back on the rope and started pulling, hooves scrabbling.

“Here now! Here! Stop that, you big fool.”

Micah limped alongside the trailer and took hold to climb up on the fender, which made the horse lunge forward into the rattling bars. His rear feet slid up to his front ones and then, fast and impossible as a magician’s trick, he slipped his forefeet up between his body and the wall and managed to rear, going higher and higher, one leg on each side of the rope that tied his head up short.

“If he tries to come over the top he’ll break his neck,” Micah yelled. “Keep him in there ’til I can get another rope.”

But the colt had already started choking, eyes rolling. He twisted his head and his right forefoot slid off the top and lodged in between two of the beat-up bars of the trailer. He jerked sideways and wedged it in tighter.

“Forget the rope,” Blue called toward the truck, without taking his eyes off the colt. “Come here and hold his head.”

He broke out in a sweat. Suddenly he wanted this colt freed safely. It was the first time he’d let himself want anything for a long time.

Micah came back at a lurching run and Blue held out a cautioning hand without looking at him.

“Easy,” he said. “Easy, now.”

He was talking to all three of them, but mostly to himself.

The small, neat hoof had plunged through a wide space between the bent bars, but now the tender ankle was in a much narrower spot, held tight. Blue grunted comfort to the horse as he and Micah moved slowly toward him.

“It’ll take us both,” Blue said in a soothing tone. “Stand on the fender, hold his head, and get ready to grab the hoof. I’ll spread the bars.”

The colt trembled with fear so strong Blue could smell it. His eyes rolled white and his nostrils flared. They didn’t have long until he hurt himself bad. No, until he hanged himself.

“Got yourself in trouble, huh?” Blue murmured to him as he climbed up onto the fender. “Huh?”

He began a rhythmic “huh, huh, huh,” the old calming sound that mimicked a horse’s own talk, and set his feet as far apart as the space permitted. He glanced sideways as Micah stepped up there, too, and took hold of the halter.

The roan colt was on the sharp edge of panic. The air was filled with it.

Blue felt shaky inside. He hadn’t done anything—actually done anything remotely important in too long. But he had to do this now. He took hold of the two bars and put his back into separating them. It was a lot harder than he expected but when he pulled them apart and bent them out at the same time, he could make enough room. Micah grabbed the hoof and turned it, pushed it back into the trailer, gave it back into the roan’s control.

The colt dropped to the floor and stood, trembling.

Micah and Blue looked at him, then at each other. Micah grinned and Blue felt an answering grin lift the corners of his mouth. Micah let go of the halter and checked the tie knot. They stepped down to let the colt have a little space.

“Damned if he didn’t nearly hang his ornery self right here,” Micah said. “I allus say there ain’t no limit to what kind of a fix a hoss can git hisself into.”

Blue looked at the roan’s shiny hide glistening with the sweat of fear. He knew the feeling.

“Royally bred for a cutting horse,” Micah said, as they stood and watched the young horse get his wits back together again, “even if he’s too big for one and acts like a crazy no-name on top of that.”

“Maybe he never heard the old saying, ‘Blood will tell.’”

Micah Thompson didn’t answer. When Blue finally looked at him again, his eyes had taken on a glint of humor.

“It will tell sometimes, and then again it won’t,” Micah said, still studying him.

Then he added, “This sucker hates the sight of a cow.”

That made Blue’s smile widen and he laughed out loud. He hardly recognized the feeling or the sound.

The horse kicked then, and snorted at them as if they weren’t taking him seriously enough. Blue laughed again.

“God knows I’m too crippled up to fork the big bastard,” Micah Thompson said. “If’n I kin make a hundred or two on him, he’s down the road.”

He turned and started walking to the truck as if he expected Blue to go with him. With another look at the chastened colt, Blue followed.

“It’s not far to my place,” Micah said as he started around to the driver’s side. “Couple of hours as the crow flies. I’ve got a few more for sale, too, if you’re thinking you might want somethin’ different.”

Blue stopped.

“Or if you can ride, I could use some help with the whole bunch of twos,” Micah said. “That is, if you happen to need a job.”

He opened his door and got in behind the wheel. Blue hesitated only another second, then he walked to the passenger door and got into the old truck.

His hands were shaking just a little, so he spread them flat on his knees. In ten years he might’ve lost his balance and every trick he knew for staying on a rank one.

But he felt his lips curve again in the stupid grin. That roan devil behind him would make him remember how to ride or wish he never had tried. That horse would make him know he was alive again, at least for a little while.

He twisted in his seat and looked back. Horses had been living only in his dreams and his memory for so long and this one was real.

The roan was lifting his muzzle into the wind, real as the cracked glass of the window between them. Blue felt the blood rise in his veins.

The feel of a horse beneath him. That sweet challenge of swinging up onto a new one and finding out how to learn the secrets he had in his heart, what all he could do and would do with his four legs and thousand pounds of muscle and sinew. Bronc or ranch horse or cutter or anything else, Blue had never stepped on a new one without feeling that fierce, wild thrill.

“This here’s a pretty day,” Micah said, pushing down hard on the gas pedal. “Reckon it’s good to see summer comin’ on again.”

Getting hooked up with this old man and trying this colt was all right. He had a job and a place to stay now, at least.

This was okay. He’d known a hundred men like Micah Thompson when he was a kid.

“He’s still a stud, you said?” he asked.

“Yep. Reckon that might account for his meanness. A couple of swipes of the knife and he’ll likely turn into a pussycat.”

Blue slanted a look at him. “Not entirely, I’d say.”

Micah gave an evil chuckle.

“Told you you was a horseman, didn’t I?”

I used to be. I don’t yet know what all I’ve lost. Or will lose again.

Micah began ranting on about the characteristics of a real horseman, giving examples from a long list of the best horsemen he had known down through the years. He was talking as much to himself as to Blue, so Blue tuned him out as the miles rolled past his window.

The power of the mountains began taking him over, filling him up with their fierceness, an excitement nearly as strong as the one that had come with his first glimpse of the roan. Great Spirit of the Earth and Sky, how had he lived ten years without being out among the hills and mountains, the trees and the plains, ten years without laying his hand on a horse’s warm flesh?

Or a woman’s. Ten years without the touch of a woman.

No mountains and no horses and no tenderness for that long time. It was a miracle he hadn’t died.

But he hadn’t. That meant he could do anything he had to do. He had already gone through the worst.

He stared out of the truck as if his head couldn’t turn. It couldn’t. He couldn’t get enough of looking.

Or of smelling the wind and hearing it. Or of tasting fresh air on his tongue and feeling the worn paint of the truck door smooth beneath his hand. He wanted to hang his head out the window and soak it all up through his pores. They drove on and on and the farther they traveled, the freer he felt.

The land was huge. The sky was enormous. The day he’d arrived in Montana, following Dannie and her scumbag boyfriend, that was what had struck him. The sky could be big in Oklahoma. The hills there could feel like they were going on and on forever in layers out to the edge of the earth and then lifting into the sky, but when a person hit Montana it was like God had opened up his hand and laid out all the freedom in the world for whoever was brave enough to take it.

Something deep within him, something too unformed to be a memory, awakened from sleeping in his bones. Tanasi Rose had returned to Oklahoma when he was nearly two years old and Dannie not yet born, but his spirit knew this place.

“Always good to see spring, ain’t it?” Micah said.

Blue didn’t answer. The sun shone with such a yellow power that his eyes watered in its glare. The breeze blew in through the open window and dried the sudden wetness on his cheeks.

Maybe he would take this gift of spring and not think about what else he had to do until later in the summer.

He turned away from the thought and looked back at the roan. The horse was staring off across the wide spaces, thinking of freedom, too.

The old truck slowed at last.

“This here’s our turnoff,” Micah said. “Be about three more miles to my place.”

He turned west onto gravel.

The road led them north and west, winding down, then up and over, each rise a little less than its drop on the other side. It crossed a cattle guard, then a creek, running fast and wide over rocks.

“Looky yonder,” Micah said, flicking one gnarled finger toward the windshield as they started uphill again. “Whitetails.”

Three deer, surprisingly close, bolted. They crossed the road and vanished in among some cedar trees before Blue could realize he’d actually seen them in the flesh, but still his blood thrilled from the glimpse of their wildness.

Micah mashed the brakes as they lurched downward to a low-water bridge over a deeper creek with steeper banks than the first, then gunned the old truck as it labored up the next rising hill. They topped it and picked up speed on the way down as if the rattling trailer pushed the truck to go faster.

Blue looked down into a wide, grassy valley with mountains on the horizon, with trees gathered together in long sweeps of woods, with grain fields and pastures.

With buildings enough to make a town.

Black-topped roads running in every direction made him think for a minute that it was a town. But it was a ranch headquarters, with barns and bunkhouses, pens and shops and sheds flung all over the place. A big house at the heart of it with flags flying in front must be the main house.

What a dream, set in a sweet, protected valley.

They kept on rolling down the hill while Blue stared, trying to put it all together with the falling-down rig Micah drove. The closer they came to the valley, the more it was clear that this was headquarters to a big operation, one that had been there for many a year, one that was prospering.

Micah sure seemed to be a broken-down cowboy without much in the way of possessions but appearances could deceive. Or maybe, more likely, he just worked here. Lived in the bunkhouse, maybe. He was too stove up to work.

The road took another bend to run along a ridge above the ranch, then began curving in easy switchbacks leading down into the valley. Through the pines, Blue saw a truck with a hay spike on the back driving away from one of the farthest barns. It looked like a toy in the distance.

“That there’s where I live,” Micah said, as his rig left the gravel road for the asphalt.

He was pointing to a log house and barn nestled onto a low knoll at the base of this west-facing hill. Before Blue could open his mouth to ask who lived in the big house, the sound of a diesel motor came chugging up the last little rise to meet them.

Micah glanced at the driver and slowed to a stop. The other truck stopped, too. It was new and white under the mud that had splattered up onto the doors. Nice truck. One ton flatbed with a crew cab.

The front door bore a brand painted in black and gold, two parallel serpentine lines, elongated versions of the letter S, with the word Wagontracks arching above them. The driver leaned out the window to glance at the roan.

“Micah,” he said, “what are you asking for that hayburner you’re hauling?”

Micah grinned and shook his head.

“Save your breath, Pickle. I’m sellin’ this one to somebody who can ride ’im.”

They talked some more but Blue was only dimly aware of the sound and took in none of their meaning. He was caught up in reading the words that formed a crescent below the Wagontracks brand.

Splendid Sky Ranch.

When the other truck had downshifted and gone growling on its way, Blue spoke, even though he had to push his breath past the pounding of his heart.

“Where’s the Splendid Sky?”

“You’re sittin’ on it, son,” Micah said. “That’s the headquarters right down there.”

CHAPTER TWO

MICAH DROVE ON.

“Yes sir,” he said, “this here’s the Splendid Sky Ranch. Gordon Campbell’s place is famous all over the West.”

He cocked his head and shot a sharp glance at Blue from under the brim of his hat.

“You ever heard of it?”

Blue met his gaze. He had to do it to prove he could conceal his shock and he did.

“Sure, everybody’s heard of the Wagontracks horses,” Micah said, “and I’ll tell you right now, there ain’t a line of ranch horses anywhere, including them famous ones in Oklahoma and Texas that can measure up to ours.”

Blue couldn’t even listen to him. How, in the name of all that was holy, had he ended up here so soon? He didn’t have his balance yet—hell, he wasn’t even used to trying to see in the sunshine.

“I started every horse in the Wagontracks cavvy for fifty year,” Micah said. “For the main ranch. How many head you reckon that amounts to?”

Blue’s gut clenched as he looked out his window at the main ranch. Gordon could be down there in the big headquarters house right now. Or out there in that pickup zipping down the paved, black road that led away from it. Or he could be that tiny man on top of the tiny horse way off riding across the pasture.

Micah answered his own question. “More’n a thousand head, and that guess is a little on the low side,” he said, pride lacing his voice. “Yessir, Blue, back then, I could ride ’em.”

The sound of his own name, a voice calling him Blue instead of Bowman, felt almost as warm as a friendly hand on his shoulder. He turned to look at the old man, who was staring through the windshield into the long distance.

“I was always limber as a cat and I could ride them sunfishin’ sumbitches all day long.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Blue said.

Either the words or the sincerity in them drew a flash of a glance from Micah, with some bright light in it that Blue couldn’t read.

“You got a good eye if you can see it now,” Micah said.

He used both hands to crank the wheel. The truck veered across the road and onto the gravel trail that followed the low ridge above the floor of the valley.

“Long time ago, when he seen he couldn’t run me off, Gordon gimme this cabin and barn. Said they was mine as long as I live.”

Blue looked at Micah’s place as they rattled up into the spot at the edge of the yard where the grass was worn away from years of parking the pickup. Everything there was made of logs a long time ago. Trees sheltered it all and the hill kept it from the north wind. In front of it, the whole West beckoned.

He tasted bitterness on his tongue.

Gordon could give a house and a barn to his wrangler but nothing to his family.

While Micah ground the gears and threw them into reverse, Blue looked again at the Splendid Sky—as much as a man could see of it at one time. There was the headquarters with the house his great-grandfather had built and all its many fine outbuildings dotted here and there, including plenty more nice houses provided for the help. Beneath it all was the land, rolling green and glittering down through the valley like a flung treasure.

This entire ranch should be theirs. His.

He had been robbed of his birthright.

If Gordon had married Tanasi Rose, if he had given his name to her and his children and raised them here, they would be here still. Dannah would never have become a junkie, Rose would never have killed herself, and Blue would not be a murderer.

His mother and Dannie would be alive.

His father had robbed him of them, too.

“You’ve heard of the Splendid Sky, then you’ve heard of Gordon Campbell,” the old man said.

The name spoken aloud rang strange in Blue’s ears, it had been so long silent in his mind.

“He ain’t well-liked, that’s nothing but the honest truth,” Micah said, “and I have to admit that he can be one high-handed son of a bitch. But I’ll say somethin’ for ol’ Gordon. He stands by his friends.”

Oh, yeah. And family. Don’t forget family.

Blue didn’t even want to hear the name again, it made him so bitter. But he said it anyway.

“Maybe you’re the only friend of Gordon Campbell.”

Micah chuckled.

“I reckon not,” he said, “there’s a few more, here and there.”

Blue found himself waiting for Micah to say who they might be, but he didn’t. Instead, he cranked the wheel around and started backing up to the gate of the round pen.

“We’ll run Roanie in there,” he said. “In a good mood, he’ll lead some but we ain’t takin’ no chances. I nearly got mashed to death in a trailer one time.”

He pulled forward, turned the wheel some more, and backed into exactly the right spot.

“Well, now, let’s get this roan ridgerunner unloaded ’fore he climbs the wall again and breaks his neck or one of them dainty legs of his,” he said, throwing open his door. “Then I’ll show you around the place.”

Blue wasn’t sure he wanted that. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to see except for this raunchy colt in all his glory. Anything else was questionable. He wanted to see how the colt moved, wanted to know his natural way of going, and beyond that, he couldn’t think.

He stepped down. Dainty was a good word for the way his own legs felt. They didn’t quite want to hold him up and he held on to the seat just for a minute. Feelings were his enemies—that had been so for ten years—and he couldn’t give in to them now.

Maybe he should’ve kept his paints. He’d poured his rage and loneliness into them and slapped it onto the canvas while he held himself completely separate from every person in the prison. That was how he had survived.

He needed to keep separate from Micah, too. It was a pity the old man had passed his prime but feeling sorry about Micah’s arthritis was what had brought him to the Splendid Sky on this first day out, and now here he was.

Of course, coming here was giving him a chance at a good horse—and it was putting Gordon in his sights. He had left prison wanting both those things, hadn’t he?

Both sides of the coin, that was what this world paid human beings for all the blood and sweat that they put into living. Turn over the good and a man could find the bad; turn over the bad and find the good.

He had already known that when he killed the pond-scum drug pusher who had led Dannah straight to her death. Or had he? Had he just now realized it, which meant it was the good side of the bad ten years in the pen?

He walked on back to the trailer, keeping step with Micah who was on the other side of it. Hell of a note. End up here at the Splendid Sky, first crack out of the box, when he’d imagined it all his life long.

Right now, he’d think about the horse. Nothing else.

He waited on the ground below the horse’s head until Micah had the gate open and had jammed the rusty pin of the trailer door up with his fist. The colt bared his teeth looking down at him.

Get up here. I’ll take a chunk out of you.

“Ready?” Micah said.

“Ready.”

Blue stepped onto the fender, pulled up on the strap of the halter, freed the tongue of the buckle from its hole and, therefore, the horse from the trailer. Roanie jerked his head away, clattered to the door and leapt out onto the ground of the round pen. Micah pushed the gate shut behind him and then the trailer door.

The two of them stood together and looked in between the logs of the old-time round pen. The colt reared high, came down with a snort and a fart and went ripping off around the circle again, pausing only to buck and rear some more when the notion struck him. After two of those circles, he settled down into a run and tore around the pen so fast he was a blur.

“How’d you get the halter on him?” Blue said.

“I got ’im halter broke,” Micah said. “Sort of. But I never could stay on him.”

He shook his head, took off his hat and put it back on again. Blue caught the smell of old felt and leather soaked with sweat.

“He’s a whole lot worse since I sent him over to the Little Creek Division boys,” Micah said. “Gordon oughtta fire every one of them out on his ass. But I found out I’d never be able to stay on him and I was hoping they could get him broke enough for me.”

Micah shook his head again, turned it, and spat on the ground.

“Gittin’ old is a hoary bitch,” he said. “Don’t do it.”

Blue gave a harsh laugh.

“I won’t,” he said.

And he probably wouldn’t, one way or the other.

He kept looking at the horse and feeling the old, mostly forgotten tug at his gut. The roan thundered by them again.

“Leave him,” Micah called over the noise. “You kin start on him tomorry.”

Tomorrow. Would he stay here? On the Splendid Sky?

Surely not. But maybe so. Hadn’t he been headed here anyhow?

He didn’t want to think about it. He turned away, went back to the trailer, stepped up onto the fender, and jerked the halter loose from the rail where it was tied.

He stepped down.

“I’m gonna have to try him now,” he said. “Open the gate for me.”

Micah did.

“This here pen’s built like all the old-time ones—with room for a man to roll out under the bottom log,” he said. “Git out if he takes after you. He never done that ’til he’d been to Little Creek.”

The warning pricked at Blue’s brain, but instead of thinking of himself facing the danger of a charging stud horse, he imagined Micah. The old guy had guts, crippled up as he was, to even try the colt.

Blue walked through the gate and toward the center of the pen. The roan colt blew by behind him, sticking close to the wall. He circled the pen twice more, then half again, slowing, slowing. He started trotting back and forth on the west side, his dappled hide shining in flashes as he went in and out of the sun. Then he came down to a walk.

He knew Blue was there but he wouldn’t even glance in his direction.

Blue walked toward him. His fingers tightened around the halter strap as he coiled the rope. Sweat broke out across his back. How could he have sense or skill enough to connect with a terrified horse on this day?

In this place?

But he knew how to go about trying it, and that was all he did know.

The roan stood still and turned his hindquarters to Blue.

On the outside of the pen, Micah was pacing Blue.

“What all has this horse gone through?” Blue called.

“I ain’t sure. Them Little Creek bastards say sell ’im to the rodeo.”

“So,” Blue said, watching the colt refuse to look at him, “how come you still have him?”

“I know different,” Micah said, and the swift certainty in his tone made Blue smile a little. “That bunch of no-counts couldn’t tell a good horse from a mountain goat in the bright light of the Judgment Morning.”

Blue glanced at him, then back at the roan. The old man was something else. You had to hand it to him.

“So you’re hell-bent on dragging somebody in here that can ride him?”

“I reckon you’re that somebody,” Micah said, with a satisfied chuckle.

A troubled horse would spend a great deal of energy avoiding even eye contact with a human being, and this one was surely troubled. Much more so, without a doubt, than if he’d never been tried by anyone but Micah.

Micah read that thought in Blue’s head from outside the pen.

“I hate I ever sent him over there,” he said.

“Water under the bridge,” Blue said.

He bit his tongue. What was this? Keep it up and he’d be as big a chatterbox as Micah. Although, truth to tell, he probably needed to learn to talk again he’d been silent so long.

The prick of pity he’d felt for Micah being too old to ride this colt wasn’t excuse enough to try to please him by fixing the horse. He would help this horse for the horse’s sake. He was trying to see if he wanted to buy him, that was all.

When he got close enough, still holding on to the end of the rope, he threw the halter onto the ground behind the horse. Instead of shifting his feet away from it and moving forward as Blue hoped, the roan kicked at it.

Blue took in a deep breath and then another, forcing them out through his mouth, trying to blow the tension out of him so the horse wouldn’t feel it. He reeled the halter back in and threw it again.

The roan started backing up, fast as thought, straight toward Blue, kicking, kicking higher as he came. Blue got out of his way and he kicked the fence with a blow that rang through the air. That settled him down a little bit. He whirled to put his head to the fence again and his butt to Blue.

Blue threw the halter. The colt kicked at it again.

Blue pulled the halter to him and threw it again. The colt kicked.

They did that over and over, until Blue lost track of time and of everything except the fact that this horse was so troubled and so defensive that he did not make one forward movement. Until he did, Blue was not going to quit.

Life narrowed down to that one fact and the sun on his back. Time vanished.

Horses knew no time. All they knew was rhythm, the rhythm of the days, and the waxing and waning of the moon. All Blue knew was the look of this horse and the motion of his own arm, the twist of his wrist.

Throw, reel in, throw, reel in.

The breeze picked up and blew on his skin through the sweat in his shirt. The horse’s shadow shifted to a different angle. A hawk flew over and tilted its wings into the wind. Blue and the roan colt kept at it.

It took a long time. Dimly, Blue realized that the afternoon was passing faster and later he saw that Micah was perched on the top log of the pen, over by the gate, but he and the roan didn’t let that bother them. The colt quit kicking but he didn’t move forward.

Blue changed to his left arm to spell the right one, but he did not let up. Finally, the colt took one forward step. One. And that was all.

At first, Blue wondered if he had imagined it, but no. The kicking had stopped. He switched back to his right arm and threw the halter. Reeled it in. Threw it again.

It took a while. The sun was definitely dropping lower in the west when he reeled the halter in again, threw it again, and the horse took three or four steps forward, one more, a few more and then, like held water flowing over a dam, Blue was driving him around the corral.

The roan let himself be driven but he didn’t acknowledge Blue in any other way.

Blue didn’t care. If they did nothing but this today, it would be a great victory. He let the rising excitement inside him come a little higher and he stayed with the colt.

The roan chose a deliberate pace and stayed with it, and the energy driving the world became the lub-dub, lub-dub sounds of his hooves on the ground. Blue’s heart fell into that same beat.

The smell of the horse, the fragrance of manure and stirring dirt, the faraway cry of a bird he couldn’t name all filled the old round pen. Still, Blue could see nothing but the horse. The horse and the hope for him to leave his fear behind.

Finally, he let him stop.

He tried to walk up to him, but the roan would have none of that. He reared and offered to strike.

Don’t come any closer, man. Keep your distance.

Blue drove him some more. He caused the horse to move and then set his own movements in harmony with him. Slowly, finally, their lone dances began to form a bond between them. Both of them relaxed into the rhythm. They stayed the same distance apart—the roan seemed comfortable with exactly that amount of space—and they moved together.

At last, the roan began to acknowledge Blue with his ears, his eyes, and his arched rib cage curving away from him. Blue smiled so wide it felt like he hadn’t used those muscles for years. He took a deep breath and moved, this time farther away from the roan.

The colt followed him. The skin on Blue’s arms turned to gooseflesh, as if the animal had already come close enough to blow his breath down the back of his neck.

The farther he went, the more the horse closed the gap between them. He had hooked on. Blue made himself take another deep breath. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears.

He walked toward the middle of the pen. The roan stayed with him. He stopped. The horse came closer, then he stopped, too, ears pricked, watching Blue.

The colt stood still and let him walk up to him.

The old thrill rose in Blue’s blood and, with it, memories of other days, other places, other horses. They galloped back to him, flooding through his mind. So many horses and so many days and weeks and months and years without any of them in the flesh.

He still had trouble believing that this was real. It was.

And now was the test of this invisible connection. Now was the time to make it physical, to make it so it would be true and lasting.

Murmuring to the colt, Blue laid a hand on him. He started rubbing him along the top of his neck. He watched both ends of the horse at once and he knew that he could keep touching this colt only if he did it in a way that was fitting to the roan.

That way was going to be very, very carefully. A wrong move could get him a kick in the belly or a hoof upside his head, but if he listened to what the horse had to say to him, that wouldn’t happen. He pinched along the roots of the colt’s mane as another horse would nibble him, and used the coiled lead rope to rub him, too.

The roan said it felt good. Very, very good. He let his head drop and his eyelids droop. Blue rubbed his back and his flanks and went back to his neck again.

One more time, then he let the halter and rope fall to the ground. He laid his hand on the sweaty withers and let his weight lean on the colt while he held his other hand out for the horse to take in his scent. Slowly, the colt swung his muzzle around, snorting lightly, scattering drops of moisture into Blue’s palm like fresh rain.

They settled there. Their breathing fell into an identical, untroubled pattern, in and out. With their warm flesh and blood pressed together, the thunder power living under the hide of the horse flowed through Blue—into his arm and through his heart down into the Mother Earth beneath his feet.

MICAH HELD to the old cowboy custom of eating in silence and that was a relief to Blue. He was able to pick at his food and drink the hot coffee but he couldn’t think about anything except the colt and he sure as hell didn’t know what to say. He really didn’t want to ever talk about it, even if he knew how.

He’d held himself apart, kept himself isolated, breathed and thought and eaten and stayed alone for ten long years, and an outlaw horse had breached the wall. Being connected to another living being, human or horse or dog, was something so new now that he could barely recall how to deal with it.

As soon as they pushed back from the table and started clearing away, Micah’s flood of words started again just like somebody had turned on a faucet.

“Tell you the truth,” he said, as he limped to the sink with his plate and the skillet, “I ain’t never seen nobody git his hands on a horse by throwing a halter at him all day.”

He cackled in delight, shaking his head.

“Them boys over at Little Creek wouldn’t believe it if they seen it with their own eyes. I’m near eighty years old and I never seen nothing like it.”

“I can’t take credit for the horsemanship,” Blue said. “Buck Brannaman gave a demonstration in Tulsa one time when I was a teenaged kid. He worked ’em horseback, too.”

He set his plate on the counter by the sink and carried the remains of the loaf of bread in its plastic sack to the battered cupboard where Micah got it. It all felt strange. A kitchen was a foreign country to him now.

“I heard that name,” Micah said. “They say he’s a hell of a hand with a horse.”

“He is.”

Blue glanced around the room after he closed the antique cupboard. He slid his fingertips over its punched tin door as if he were reading Braille.

Any part of a home was unknown to him now. This one smelled rich and ripe with age, with the ghosts of long-dead wood fires drifting out of the chimney and the gleam of low lamplight in the front room.

It recalled Auntie Cheyosie’s cabin way back in the woods in Oklahoma. Way back in another life. Way back when Tanasi Rose was alive. She had taken him with her to see the wise old woman many times during his childhood.

Rose wouldn’t have killed herself, maybe, if Auntie Cheyosie had still been alive. Or if Dannie had been.

But he had been.

Yeah, Bowman, but you might as well have been dead. What comfort were you to her, locked up in a cage a thousand miles away?

“I’m gonna wrangle these here dishes,” Micah said suddenly, “you go on in yonder and clean up.”

Blue glanced at him. The old man’s sharp gaze met his. What had Micah seen on his face?

Micah set the skillet down with a thump.

“Here,” he said, “I’ll show you the room and what’s in it. There’s duds you can wear instead of them sweaty ones.”

He limped past Blue and gestured for him to follow.

“We’ve had ever’ size of hired hand in the world pass through here one time or another and I reckon half of ’em left somethin’ behind. Boots, hats, coats, warbags, you name it, we got it.”

Blue crossed the hallway behind him and Micah led the way into a room with two windows, a bed, a chest of drawers, and a closet with the door standing open. Assorted clothes hung on hangers and a jumble of boots covered the floor.

“Help yourself,” Micah said. “Gordon’s known for running ’em off pronto if they give any lip or if they ain’t up to working fourteen hours a day seven days a week with a smile on their face for a wetback’s wage. If they leave somethin’ behind, ain’t no way they come back after it when he told ’em never set foot on the ranch again.”

“Nice guy,” Blue said.

Micah chuckled.

“Oncet in a great while,” he said. “Oncet in a high lonesome blue moon, you might say.”

He limped to one of the windows and banged on the sides of it with his fists to loosen it in the frame.

“You ain’t workin’ for Gordon, remember that,” he said. “I got my own operation here.”

He wrenched at the bottom of the window with both hands and then slid it up. The fresh, cold night poured in.

“Air this room out a little bit,” the old man said.

Two windows. One open. Doors open all the way to the front porch.

If he couldn’t sleep inside the walls, he could sleep outside—blankets were piled on the bed. He was tired. Tireder physically than he had been for years. It felt good.

But before sleep he needed the feel of hot water sluicing down his back and the smell of clean clothes—not prison clothes—in his nostrils.

“Bathroom down the hall,” Micah said, and limped past him to the door. “Holler if you need anything.”

“Right. Thanks.”

The old man stopped and made a quick turn of his stiff body so he could see Blue.

“You’ve got him now and he’s gonna make you a mount that won’t quit,” he said. “You done a helluva job today.”

His voice held traces of envy and regret. But mostly happiness, satisfaction.

“Thanks,” Blue said. “It took a while. You didn’t have to stay out there all that time.”

The old man’s bushy eyebrows lifted.

“Never know when I might could lend a hand,” he said, with a shrug.

That touched Blue. Nobody had been concerned about his safety for a long, long time.

Micah hesitated, then he said, “Whenever you want, we can get horseback and take him to a bigger pen.”

We.

“That’ll work,” Blue said. “If you furnish the horses.”

Micah grinned.

“Get some sleep,” he said. “Don’t worry, this is your deal. I won’t get in your way, son.”

Blue returned the grin as Micah left him.

Blue thought about the old man while he unbuttoned his shirt.

Son. We.

Being robbed of a ranch—even this ranch—was nothing. Not compared to being robbed of a father.

CHAPTER THREE

BLUE WOKE in the middle of the night in a cold fit of fear. He sat up, hands fisted, until the memory drifted up out of his sleep. He had turned over without hitting the wall and it had scared him awake.

A bright fall of moonlight poured in through the window. The sturdy old room lay peaceful around him.

A real bed, standing on legs, instead of a bunk hanging from the wall. Real quilts, instead of a scratchy blanket. Micah’s house.

The whole of yesterday came flooding back to him.

The Splendid Sky. He was on the Splendid Sky for the first time in his life. He had thought about how that would be since he was old enough to imagine anything—how the land and the house would look and how his father would act. When Blue was really little, in most versions of that daydream, Gordon would explain that he had inadvertently lost track of Rose and her children, and rejoice at finding them again.

Blue hadn’t been very old when he’d trashed that little fantasy.

He stared into the curtain of moonlight. Gordon was out there now. Within striking distance.

Blue reached for the clothes Micah had given him and dressed. Loath to risk waking the old man, he ducked out through the window, crossed the porch on the balls of his feet, and stepped off into the space and the brightness.

The night was all space, calling to him like a talking drum. It pumped power into his veins, it set a steady beat going in his blood like the need to dance. Dances and women and horses. Those had made him feel so alive, sometimes he’d thought his heart would burst with the joy of breathing, of being. Until now, he had forgotten completely how that felt.

But he might have a chance to come back to it. The inside of his body hurt as if his heart and all his organs were almost gone to atrophy and the night had begun forcing life back into them. He had horses again, and if luck and God stayed with him as they had in bringing him here, he would have dances and women in his life once more. Maybe even joy.

When Gordon was gone from the face of Mother Earth, then he would feel joy.

He crossed the yard through the shadows of tree limbs floating on the grass. The breeze ruffled his still-damp hair across his shoulders. It sent such a cool freshness into him that he gasped a quick, shivery breath.

Last night he’d been buried alive. Tonight he could fly. Last night he had only memories of moonlight and starlight. Tonight he could fill his eyes with them and rub them into his skin.

Tonight he could look down right at the place where Gordon Campbell slept. He could bail off this hillside and run all the way to the main house and confront him with his sins right now. He savored the thought. But first, he had to plan. He was not going back inside for killing someone who needed to be killed.

Dawn was coming in the air. He felt it as he walked across Micah’s road and headed for the edge of the west-facing bluff. Far away, down the valley, a cow bawled. Another one answered. Then, from still farther away drifted the lingering, lonesome howl of a coyote.

Gooseflesh popped up on his arms. Twice blessed by the wild ones—by the sight of the deer and the sound of this coyote—he didn’t know how he’d survived so long shut up inside. The beat of his heart quickened again.

He was here, through no plan of his own, so it was meant to be. He was here in the perfect place to find out Gordon’s habits and the best way to get to him. The perfect place to do what he had to do.

Here where he should’ve lived all his life. Where, if that had happened, his mother and sister would be at this very moment. Alive and beautiful.

Here in this enormous land that smelled of pine trees and sweet grass and snow on the mountains and dust and horse from the pen where he’d left the roan. He walked to the edge of the bluff and looked down. The moonlight glinted off a long body of water on the west side of the valley. All over the east side, man-made lights shone like harsh imitations of stars. The arms of the mountains formed a cradle to keep it all safe.

Had his mother ever seen this? Had Gordon ever brought his young lover to this spot on the bluff to look down on his kingdom?

Had she been happy while she was with Gordon? Had loving him made her happy? When she was a seventeen-year-old on her first job, falling in love with her boss?

Even if it did at the time, why didn’t she quit loving him later, when she was so alone and unhappy? She could’ve stopped if she’d tried. Over the years, she could’ve married—and loved—any one of a half-dozen good men.

Blue pushed away the old grief and guilt and stared down into the valley at the scattering of steady-burning farm lights standing guard over every building. Security lights.

Gordon was in there behind them. Feeling secure.

For a long time, Blue stood watching, memorizing as much as he could see while the stars faded and the moon began to set. As soon as he could ride the roan outside a pen, he would take him up along the ridge that crossed the road from the highway. That lowest crest circled to the west and south from Micah’s place to form the rim of the valley. He would learn the lay of it and every road and trail into and out of the headquarters.

He would gather some gear in case he had to run into the mountains and some cash money in case he didn’t. He would have Micah take him up on the highway and into town one of these days soon and leave him for a while so he could start pricing things. He hadn’t bought anything in so long he didn’t remember how to make a deal.

He turned and started back to Micah’s. The rising sun was painting the sky pink. The wind reached out to blow his hair back from his face. It was going to be a fine, free day, and a man could never tell how many of those he would be given.

He watched the streaks in the sky go from pink to red, then to orange and purple and blue. This dawn made all of the colors, every color, seem like a separate wonder. His fingers itched to paint. He needed to buy more supplies.

Yes, he’d have a chance to paint a little bit before he took care of Gordon.

And he wanted time to get the colt going well, whether he got to keep him or had to sell him. Whichever way that went, he would need the most he could get out of the horse, in either money or performance.

He stopped and stood quiet for a while, watching the sky’s glory dissolve until the tints were as faint as a watercolor, then he walked on toward the barn, thinking about how much Micah might ask for the roan. The few thousand dollars he’d earned off the paintings he’d sold from prison over the years would be enough, he hoped, to buy the roan and a rig of some kind.

Of course, Micah would pay him something for the job riding the colts.

Blue glanced into the round pen as he passed. The colt was standing near the water bucket, eyes closed in a doze.

“Rest up,” Blue muttered. “I’ll be with you after breakfast.”

He took another long draught of morning air off the mountains. Crisp and fresh enough to crackle in his lungs, it carried the promise of a whole new life.

It gave him a fleeting thought of roaming with the colt through the mountains that were turning to purple crystal in the rising light. Roaming, not running. Wandering with no one on the back trail trying to hunt him down.

But when he stepped into the barn and stood in the midst of its aromas of manure and horse and hay and sweet feed all mixed with the smells of aged wood and oiled leather, he wanted not to run or roam. What he wanted was to have no reason to leave and, instead, every reason to stay in a place that felt this much like a home.

Micah kept his barn clean and neat and the horses in it were all hanging their heads over the stall doors looking at Blue with trusting, gentle eyes. They talked to him.

Where is it? The morning feed? Are you here to feed us and turn us out?

The peace. For a minute, Blue could feel it like a hand on his shoulder. There was nothing better than an old barn and animals depending on him to center a man.

But there was no peace for him. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

If not, so be it. Rose and Dannie never knew peace.

He went to pull a bale of hay down from the stack. There was a lot of satisfaction in feeding hungry animals. He reached for the wire cutters Micah had stuck by the handle into the cross-timber supporting the wall, and snipped the baling wire. While he broke off flakes and carried them to the stalls, he looked over the horses and kept his mind on them. There was a cute sorrel mare with a wide blaze and a tall gray gelding with black points. Last night, Micah said they both belonged to a friend of his.

The stalls across the aisle held a stocky gelding that Micah said had been his best mount for fifteen years and a young filly who’d been easier for him to start than the roan. She bore a vague resemblance to him. Half sister, maybe, since she had some gentle blood from somewhere.

He liked his roan colt better, though.

That thought made him grin but it also bothered him some. He hadn’t even bought him yet, but he must be getting attached to the ornery rascal.

Once they all had fresh hay and water, Blue stopped at the sorrel mare and, murmuring to her, started scratching her nose. Her neighbor, the gray, stuck his head out, too, and reached over to nudge Blue on the shoulder.

“Demanding your share of the attention, hmm, buddy?” Blue said, petting him with his other hand. “I’m thinking Micah’s friend has spoiled you both.”

They made him laugh, both of them, with their signs of pleasure as he pinched along the toplines of their manes and rubbed their polls. The mare had a sweet spot behind one ear that made her moan when Blue caressed it. She curled her top lip and let the bottom one tremble.

Blue petted them for a long time, not letting himself think, only being. Being with friendly horses, exchanging breaths with them, letting the feel of them comfort his hands. The sun poured into the barn and streamed down the aisle to paint all of them warm and yellow-gold.

GETTING UP and getting outside right before dawn, greeting the morning and the mountains and the horses, became a habit with Blue, if four days in a row could be called a habit. Micah usually slept until daylight and had breakfast ready when Blue went back to the house. After they ate, Blue helped clean up the dishes and then they both went on to their hard day’s work—Blue with the roan and the toughest of the twos, and Micah with the ones he’d been able to start on his own. The comfort of the routine was already beginning to ease into Blue’s bones.

This morning, he puttered around the barn as if it belonged to him, rearranging the saddles in the tack room and spreading fresh bedding in the stalls. He had fed Micah’s friend’s horses and they and the roan were about finished with their hay. It was time to get to work.

He knew that but instead of leaving the barn, he fell into a mindless reverie, sweeping out the aisle and feeling the sun on his back through the wide-flung doors. Finally, he roused himself.

“All right,” he said, petting the sorrel and then the gray, “I need to get on that ornery roan and you two need to be outside. Ready?”

He turned to take their halters from the wall.

His gaze swept across the west door of the barn and he froze.

From the corner of his eye, he’d caught a glimpse of movement, he would swear it, at the edge of the opening. But he waited and no one stepped into his line of sight.

The hackles lifted on his neck. He kept watching the doorway.

Micah was still in the house, as far as he knew. If not, he certainly wouldn’t come to the barn and look in without saying something. That old man liked to talk too much for that. Besides, he wouldn’t be sneaking around on his own place.

Maybe it was an animal. Blue crossed the aisle to the opposite side of the door with two silent strides.

He listened. Nothing.

He took a step forward and looked out. No one.

But when he turned to look toward the house out the east end of the barn aisle, he saw him.

Gordon.

Blue knew it the way a horse knew a storm was coming. He knew it, even though all he could see was his back as he strode toward the house.

Walking away, Gordon gave off the feeling that he was advancing instead. He wore ordinary clothes. A battered Resistol, faded jeans, and a plain white shirt made him look like a thousand other men, but every line of his substantial body gave that the lie. Tall, broad-shouldered, with hair as white as his shirt curling at his neck, he walked with a rare authority. The way his feet touched the ground told anybody with eyes to see that these acres belonged to him.

It was an easy arrogance he wore, simple as his clothes, one that never expected to be challenged.

Blue’s gut stretched, then tightened like a guitar string. His hands were trembling. Gordon had looked in on him as he would a horse in a stall, and had walked away without a word.

Which was one step up from the way he’d treated him his whole life.

It wasn’t until Gordon had reached the porch, walked up on it and shouted for Micah that Blue realized how shaken he was and how tangled his thinking. Gordon didn’t know him. Gordon had no clue that his son was there.

Or that now it was Blue watching him.

THE ROAN COLT KICKED the trailer just as they were pulling out of the yard with him. Kicked it so hard it sounded like the metal split in two.

Micah shook his head and flashed a grin at Blue.

“Just like old times,” he said.

Blue moved on over against the door and sat sideways so he could look through the back window at the colt.

“Aw, now, cut us some slack,” he said. “We’ve not had our hauling lesson yet.”

“That’s what you get for babyin’ him along,” Micah said. “Seven or eight days of playin’ games and pettin’ and such carryings on. That’s liable to ruin any horse. Why don’t you just tote him around on a pillow?”

“Yeah,” Blue said. “Reckon I ought to tie his nose to his tail or whatever it was that the Little Creek boys did to him. That’s the way to get control of this outlaw.”

“On second thought, take your time,” Micah said.

Blue chuckled, too, as the old rig straightened out on the gravel road and headed for the asphalt one that ran between the highway and the valley. Then his stomach clutched.

He might see Gordon today. Face to face. The big indoor arena wasn’t very far from the main house. It was Gordon’s arena.

It galled him to use anything of Gordon’s. Yet it had occurred to him that he was entitled, after all—as the son and heir.

Yeah. Right.

“Micah,” he said, “do we pay a fee to use the indoor? You said your operation’s separate from Gordon’s.”

Micah shot him a narrow-eyed glance while he shifted gears.

“It is,” he said. “But I done paid that rent. Years ago. Workin’ for nothin’ but grub and bed them first coupla years and short pay for five or six more.”

“That’s you,” Blue said. “This is my horse.”

Micah shrugged. “Then you can pay the same way,” he said.

“Hell’ll freeze over before I work for Gordon.”

Micah gave him a look. “I meant pay me.”

“With which? Working for only grub and bed? Or short pay?”

The old man grinned and mashed his foot down on the accelerator.

“Ain’t my cookin’ worth every dusty, bone-jarring minute of every ride?”

Blue squinted back at him. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

Micah raised one scraggly eyebrow. “Think about my biscuits,” he said. “They’re better’n any canned biscuit you ever did eat.”

“Canned biscuits don’t set the bar too high,” Blue said.

“Stubborn man,” Micah muttered to himself. “Hardheaded as a mule.”

He shook his head sorrowfully, then turned and fixed Blue with one of his piercing looks.

“Why’re you in a fret about using that arena?”

“No way will I be beholden to Gordon.”

“How come?”

“I don’t like him.”

“How do you know that? You ain’t even met the man.”

“I despised him the minute I laid eyes on him.”

“You didn’t even know who that was the minute you seen him. Not ’til I told you.”

“I knew him. Who else would step up on your porch and holler for you like you’d damn well better appear right then and be all ears when you got there?”

Micah clicked his teeth and looked out across the valley. “Sounds like prejudging to me. Or jumping to conclusions, I’d say.”

“I knew I didn’t like him the same way you’d know a horse you didn’t like.”

“Lotsa times, a man has to get close to a horse to know that.”

“If there’s gonna be any question at all about me bringing my horse into that arena, I’d rather haul out to the fairgrounds,” Blue said. “I saw we passed them that day on the way in.”

“Look, son,” Micah said. “You can set your mind to rest. Every horse in my barn and in my pastures is my deal. I ain’t started a horse for Gordon for right at ten years and he ain’t got a dime in anything I own.”

He gunned the motor and pushed it up to sixty, but when they got close to turning onto the road that ran out to the highway, he sucked in his breath and started pumping the brakes. “Hey, what the hell?”

Blue turned toward the noise of another vehicle coming. Another pickup, a big white one, was roaring downhill into the valley.

Micah got their rig stopped just before the dually reached the intersection. It swerved to the right as it passed them, as if they were still moving into its path.

Blue caught a glimpse of long blond hair beneath a cowboy hat and a woman’s slender hand on the wheel, then all he could see was the rear end of the truck fishtailing. Ahead of it, he saw why.

A fawn, with the doe too far ahead, flashed across the road in a blur of tan and white and away into the trees in the blink of an eye, the truck missing it by a hair. The woman ran off the asphalt onto the shoulder of the road and corrected too fast back up over the edge of the pavement.

“That’s Andie Lee,” Micah said. “God damn it, that girl’s gonna kill herself to save a fawn and I’ll have to set right here and see it.”

The big pickup spun around in a full circle twice, ran astraddle of the right-hand edge of the pavement for a hundred yards or so and then left the road for good, headed south in its original direction. The woman managed to run it down the ditch awhile, then it took a jump or two and hit a bank of earth, slowed, finally jarred to a stop, lurched, lifted on one side and rocked as it threatened to roll. Finally, it landed and stayed upright on all six tires.

Micah started shifting gears. “Maybe she ain’t hurt, after all,” he said.

He didn’t take his eyes from the white truck as he sawed on the steering wheel, gunned the motor and started toward it.

Blue stared at it, too, hoping that the woman wasn’t hurt—for her own sake but also, selfishly, for his. He didn’t need to get involved in anybody’s upset. He didn’t even want any contact with anybody but the roan and Micah.

They plunged downhill as fast as Micah could push his old rig, but the woman was faster and she opened the driver’s door before they could get there. She half jumped, half fell from the running board down to the ground, a distance of about three feet since the truck was angled high on the left.

She had lost the hat and her golden hair caught the light from the sun. Her legs were long and slender in jeans and boots. Clinging to the door for only a second to get her balance, she looked to see them approaching, pushed her loose hair out of her face, and started climbing up the side of the ditch to meet them on the road.

Micah slowed, Blue opened the door, and she got in before they even came to a stop. Her eyes met his for one direct instant, as if to see who he was. Or whether he could help her.

They were gray, storm-cloud eyes with a sure purpose. That was clear even through the fear and relief.

“Girl, you are mighty lucky,” Micah said. “I thought you was a goner for sure. Scared me half to death.”

“Baby,” she said, gasping for air. “Couldn’t bear to hit it.”

She pointed down the road while she dragged in enough breath to talk more. “Go, Micah,” she said. “Shane’s in trouble again.”

Her voice was a little bit low, with a catch in it.

Micah blurted, “Damn,” and stepped on the gas.

Blue reached behind her, with the truck already moving again, and slammed the door closed. The woman’s slender body fell into the curve of his arm. That was such an unfamiliar sensation it roused his instinct to really hold her. That and the fact that she was shaking. Her back pressed against his taut bicep, but she didn’t seem aware of him.

“He got drugs again?” Micah asked.

Sympathy twinged in Blue. She cared about somebody like Dannie.

“He’s got a gun and he’s holding his girlfriend hostage. We’ve reached a whole new low.”

Now her voice sounded cold as a rock on the bottom of the river. Anger. It was anger that had her trembling.

“That stupid-ass Jason is no di-rector at all,” Micah said.

The woman bent over and slammed her thighs with her fists. Her hair fell forward and pooled in Blue’s lap, then she raised her head and it whipped past his face.

It smelled like flowers. That and the woman-scent of her skin went all through him. Fragrance from another universe.

She arched her back, twisted up to fish something out of her pocket, dropped back down and scraped her hair away from her face with both hands. She pulled it all together and fastened it flat against her neck with a heavy silver clip.

“I have such a rage in me I could wreck the world,” she said, slamming her fists on her thighs again.

Micah shot her a sideways glance.

“You done wrecked your truck,” he said. “Ain’t that enough?”

She shook her head and stared straight ahead with her lips pressed together. Too near tears now to talk, probably.

Or not. With her hair out of the way Blue could see the pure line of her jaw. Hard and determined.

Blue moved his arm and braced his hand against the door frame to hold himself away from her, trying to give her some room and still keep his legs out of the stick shift but they were all three jammed together in the narrow old cab and there was no space to put between them. Her thigh trembled against his.

“What the hell else am I supposed to do?” she cried. “What can I do?”

“Honey, you’re doin’ all you can,” Micah said. “It’s like a man who’s a slave to whiskey.”

She whipped her head around to look at him and leaned across Blue to get even closer as if Micah had to see her lips to hear her.

“I can’t come this far and fail,” she said. “I can’t. I won’t. I’ve given everything I’ve got to this fight for two years and I’m not quitting now. What else can I do?”

Her face was so close to Blue’s her breath was warm on his chin. He could see that she was not wearing one speck of makeup and she was beautiful.

He also could see that her eyes were full of tears but she wouldn’t let them spill out. He admired that.

Like her jawline, her cheekbones showed strong underneath her light tan. Her eyelashes were long and thick, much darker than her hair, and the wing of her brow made a perfect arch that he wanted to trace with his fingertip.

“Who called you?” Micah asked.

“Tracie. She said it all started about two hours ago. Gordon told her not to call me but she couldn’t bear it—she thought I had a right to know.”

Andie Lee’s breath came more easily now.

“I just went to the post office,” she said. “I can’t even go to town for two hours without getting a call that he’s in trouble again. Micah, I want to throttle him. I have worked twenty-four/seven for years for his sake and he has no more gratitude or appreciation or consideration for me than my hateful cat does.”

Micah drove faster. The trailer lurched along behind them with the roan standing quiet for once. Blue wished he would act up just to draw her attention away from all this pain.

“Shane and the girl may only want a little time together,” Micah said, trying to soothe her.

“Not if Lisa’s begging for help and Jason’s calling the highway patrol in here.”

The words snapped off her tongue.

“Then let the highway patrol handle it,” Micah said.

She flashed him a look that would melt metal.

“They—and wise Gordon—have been trying to handle it for over an hour.”

Blue took a quick glance at her face. Evidently she didn’t think much of Gordon.

“I’m his mother,” she said, with that same natural dignity that held back her tears. “They should let me talk to him.”

That shocked Blue. His mother? How old was she, anyway? This Shane must be a teenager or nearly so if he was taking girls hostage at gunpoint.

If he’d thought about it, he would’ve guessed she was in her twenties. He sneaked another look while she leaned across him toward Micah again.

“They should let me talk to him. Gordon’s been trying to do it himself, since they don’t have a professional negotiator in here yet. Tracie said he’s so furious with Jason for calling in the law that he’s about to strangle him.”

She could be thirty, maybe. There were tiny crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes.

Micah drove faster. They careened around a turn that led off to the west long before they got near the main headquarters.

“What kind of gun is it?” Micah asked. “Where in hell did he get it?”

“A handgun, a twenty-two,” she said. “Where and how he got it, I don’t have a clue. I know the counselors can’t watch them every second, but they could do better than this.”

Now the whole length of her leg lay smooth and warm against Blue’s.

“He’s a big boy and nobody can control him, honey,” Micah said.

Andie Lee jerked away from him and leaned forward in a sudden movement as if to make the truck go faster. She stared through the windshield into the distance.

Blue felt a chill. The line of her body reminded him of Rose’s long ago, yearning into the dark from their tiny front porch in Tahlequah, willing her darling Dannah to appear out of the night.

CHAPTER FOUR

“I TOLD GORDON instead of building that goddamn rehab center he oughtta put them boys to work,” Micah said. “That’ll cure ’em. Let ’em buck hay bales when it’s a hundred in the shade and then load ’em up again and haul ’em out on the ice and bust ’em for the cows when it’s twenty below and they’ll be too tired to go looking for dope or guns.”

Andie Lee didn’t answer.

Taking advantage of her silence to try to distract her, Micah said, “This here’s Blue Bowman, Andie. Blue, Andie Lee Hart, Gordon’s daughter.”

Blue took a breath that dragged her flowery woman-smell deeper into him. Gordon had a daughter? A daughter other than Dannie? Another daughter—one he was helping in her time of trouble.

It fit. She looked like a rich rancher’s daughter. She had that air of position and privilege. Her jeans were faded Wranglers and her boots were broken-in and battered, but there was nothing ordinary about her. The boots were fine and custom-made. That silver clip. Shiny hair, silky-looking skin.

Then it hit him as they both turned at the same time to look each other full in the face. This woman was his half sister.

“Stepdaughter,” she said, quick and hard. “Gordon’s not my father.”

She looked deep into his eyes to make sure that he got it. Then she gave him the barest nod and turned away to begin boring a hole with her gaze through the windshield again.

“I just hope they don’t shoot him, Micah,” she said, too quietly.

“They won’t,” he said. “You’re gonna talk him into giving up.”

Stepdaughter.

So. Gordon must’ve divorced the first wife he’d had back when he’d refused to marry Rose.

“Shane’s never done anything violent before,” Andie Lee said. “Never. You know that, Micah, as well as I do.”

“And he ain’t yet,” Micah said, with a forced calm in his voice.

He did drive even faster, however. Too fast around a curve in the winding road. The roan kicked the trailer again—so hard it rocked the old truck and Micah cursed, just under his breath.

They headed downhill again, toward another cluster of ranch buildings. A sign beside the road came into view.

GORDON CAMPBELL RECOVERY CENTER

Blue ran his eye over the neat, low buildings—bunkhouses, cottages, barns and pens—all built to seem rustic but they were fairly new. Good lord. Gordon was trying to work his way into heaven.

Did he build all this just because Andie Lee’s son had a drug problem?

“Shane’s in the recreation hall,” Andie Lee said, pointing it out.

Then she added sarcastically, “Naturally, he’s not in a classroom or a barn.”

“That’s what I mean— They want to straighten these kids out, they got to learn ’em what work is,” Micah said.

But now his voice sounded shaky. Micah was worried. Micah really cared for Andie Lee and her son so they must be worth liking.

They started driving past the first building, one with Gordon’s name on it.

“Tracie said Shane and the girl are in the game room,” Andie Lee said. “It’s on the back of the office.”

“I’m going with you,” Micah said.

She gave him a quick smile, the first smile Blue had ever seen on her.

“Park over there,” she said, pointing. “I want to surprise them and get in before they try to keep me out.”

Micah pulled into a paved area that held another patrol car and several more vehicles, mostly pickup trucks, and parked his rig parallel to one of the landscapings of bushes and small trees. He turned the key off and opened his door.

Andie Lee was out of the truck and around the front of it, reaching for his arm by the time he could get his stiff limbs out from behind the wheel, and they took off at a hobbling run up the little hill toward the rec hall. Blue watched them go.

So. Gordon’s stepgrandson was dealing drugs and holding girls hostage. Sins of the fathers visited, as usual, upon the children and the children’s children—because, judging from the way Andie Lee said Gordon wasn’t her father, he hadn’t tried to be a daddy to her, either.

He and Dannah weren’t the only ones. There had been other children Gordon had neglected. Knowing that made him angry for her, too.

The roan stamped and nickered. Blue looked around just in time to see him sit down and halfheartedly twist on his tie rope. That’d be trouble nobody needed right now.

Blue opened the door and got out.

“No sense in choking yourself again,” he said as he walked up to the trailer. “That will get you nowhere, buddy. You know that.”

The colt did it again.

“Aw, come on,” Blue crooned. “You’ll have to get over this hating to be tied. But later. I’m not set up for that lesson today.”

Still talking to the horse, he stepped up onto the running board near the roan’s head. The colt rolled an eye at him and listened as if he understood every word. But the stubborn look in his eye didn’t change any and that made Blue chuckle as he untied the rope and let it drop.

A sharp scream tore the air. The roan, loose in the trailer now, threw up his head and listened.

A second scream, this one closer. Blue leaned out backward to look toward the rec hall.

“No! Sha-a-ne! Stop!”

A girl’s high voice, terrified. For an instant he couldn’t see her and then he did, her face bobbing out from behind the boy running toward him, brandishing a handgun over his head with one hand while he dragged the girl along with the other. Blue’s pulse leaped, his gaze fixed on the gun. Somebody could get killed right here, right now. For no reason.

Farther back, four or five men were jostling out through the doorway of the recreation building, rushing past Andie Lee and Micah who were both white-faced and wide-eyed. All of them were chasing after the kids.

Except for Gordon. Within the commotion, Blue saw him walk up to Andie Lee and take her arm.

“Hey! Stop! Stop where you are!” somebody yelled.

It was the man at the head of the pack, the other one besides Gordon who wasn’t dressed in a law-enforcement uniform. Unlike Gordon, though, the front-runner wasn’t dressed for the ranch—he wore slacks and a loose-fitting shirt.

Andie Lee’s Shane kept barreling toward Blue. His eyes, wilder than the roan’s, strained toward the vehicles parked down by the cedar trees. He actually thought he could take one of them and get out of here, that determination was in every line of his tall, coltish body.

Blue flattened himself against the side of the trailer, murmuring to the horse, who, in spite of the girl’s continued screams had become surprisingly calm. For Roanie. All he did was stand there and paw the floor.

“Turn loose of the girl and the law’ll go easier on you!” yelled one of the men who was chasing Shane.

Blue leaned out far enough to see where they were. The kid had his mouth open now as if to reply but instead he was using his breath to keep running. He had lowered the gun and was waving it back and forth in front of him, ready to aim at any second. When he reached the nose of Micah’s battered truck, not slowing, jerking the girl around like a puppet, Blue got ready.

Shane passed the bed of the truck.

Blue stepped down into his path.

“What’s your hurry, son?” he said.

Shocked, eyes rolling white, Shane slowed and tried to swerve away.

Blue grabbed the gun.

Shane came after it. The girl slammed into his back and they stumbled into Blue with Shane’s long, skinny arm still reaching for the weapon. Blue stuck it into the back of his own waistband and took hold of the boy.

The kid was wasted. His upper arm was nothing but a stick of bone, yet he was nearly as tall as Blue. He was just like Dannie when she’d lost so much weight her skull showed through her face.

The clutch of breathless men swarmed all over them. They separated the two kids, surrounded each one, and took the boy from Blue. Gordon parted the crowd as he brought Andie Lee to her son.

With her face pale as milk, she took the boy’s arm in both her hands as if to pull it away from the lawman who was cuffing his wrists behind his back. She was saying something to him but Shane ignored her completely.

“Thanks a lot, man!”

It took a second for Blue to realize that he was the target of the sarcastic remark, shouted over the buzz of voices and the girl’s loud sobs. The hateful, fearful look in the kid’s eyes was fixed on him.

“You’re right to thank me,” Blue said. “Kidnapping might be a charge even your grandpa can’t fix.”

“He’s not my grandpa! And I don’t want him to fix anything—I want him to throw me out. Then Andie Lee couldn’t keep me here.”

He turned the poison glare onto his mother. She stared back, anger tightening her face over the worry. She let go of him. Then he lifted his chin defiantly and moved his eyes to Gordon.

“You stupid little shit,” Gordon said. “You ought to be horsewhipped.”

Shane, even though he was trembling, didn’t look away from Gordon’s piercing blue glare.

“I’ll take that weapon,” one of the lawmen said, as he stepped up to Blue.

Blue took the gun in his hand, broke it open, and tilted it, but no rounds fell out into his palm. He spun the chamber. Nothing. The old gun was well oiled and in good condition but it wasn’t loaded.

Blue offered it and the lawman took it to perform the same ritual all over again.

“Empty!” Andie Lee cried. “Shane, you mean you used an empty gun to make Jason call out the highway patrol?”

“You want me to kill somebody? Shoot up the place?”

He looked away from Gordon to sneer at her. His curled lip reminded Blue of the roan colt.

“You don’t want me to embarrass Gordon, right? That’s more important than Jason listening to lies about me and me being falsely accused and deserted by my girl, right?”

He turned his malevolent stare on the weeping girl, who lifted her face from her hands to stare back.

“You’re an asshole, Shane Hart,” she screamed. “I hate you. In your dreams I’m your girl—and don’t you ever say that again!”

That hurt him but he covered it quickly.

“Shut up, stupid Lisa,” he said. “All I wanted you for was a hostage, don’t you know that?”

“Fine. And now you don’t have one anymore.”

“It’s all your fault, anyhow,” he said. “You started this with your lies.”

“They weren’t lies! I saw you, I heard you, I bought from you!”

“Lisa the liar,” he said scornfully.

It came out weak, though, because his voice broke on the last word. He was so young, Blue thought. Fifteen, maybe.

“What were you thinking, son? Where were you headed when you ran out of there?”

It was the lawman who had hold of his arm.

“To find my dad.”

He’d managed to recover his hateful tone, but it was sheer bravado. He wouldn’t even turn to see who had hold of him. His eyes filled with the panic of knowing he was trapped.

He lifted his head and stared his challenge at Blue again.

“It’s all your fault,” he said. “If you’d minded your own business I’d be on the road, headed to my dad right now.”

The look in Shane’s gray eyes was so raw Blue couldn’t look away. The wings of his collarbone stuck up through his T-shirt, sharp enough to poke through his skin.

“My dad would b-break your face if he was here,” he said to Blue.

“You don’t have a dad to do jack for you, boy,” Gordon boomed, scornful of Shane’s fantasy. “You haven’t noticed that yet?”

Andie Lee gasped. Shane flinched as if from a blow.

Gordon held him with a terrible glare.

“If you did have a daddy you’d be nothing but a disgrace to his name,” Gordon said. “It’s your mother who’s killing herself trying to help you.”

“Shut up!” Shane yelled, his voice panicky.

But Gordon was relentless.

“You haven’t got the sense God gave a wooden goose. Look at you—fooling with that stinking dope again, stealing guns and kidnapping girls like some little outlaw wanna-be.”

Gordon took a threatening step toward the boy.

“And telling me to shut up is another piece of stupidity. If you ever show disrespect like that to me again, I’ll hang your hide on the fence just like any other coyote’s.”

That took the sand out of Shane. His jaw sagged and tears sprang into his eyes. Helpless, he pulled at his hands anyway, but all he could do was stand there with his face naked in front of the world.

Blue stepped up closer, set himself between the kid and Gordon and all the rest of them. Gordon was one cold bastard.

The boy held his own, kept on trying to stare Blue down until his eyes were so full of tears he had to blink them away.

He was tough enough, though, that he never let them fall.

That gave him strength. He got a handle on himself and the tears went away but his gaze stayed on Blue’s.

Don’t get in my way again. I hate you. You can’t stop me next time. Nobody can stop me next time.

Those eyes held another message, too, though.

I’m scared. I’m caught and I’m handcuffed and I’m scared.

Not half as scared as he would be at the end of the road he was taking.

Gordon pushed in between them.

“You could be in jail for weeks—for years, maybe,” he said. “I’m gonna leave you there. I’m gonna decide when you get out. I’m gonna decide when and if you come back here. Think about it.”

“You think about this,” Shane said, his voice strengthening with each word. “Chase Lomax is my dad and he’d do anything for me. Insult him again and it’ll be the last time you insult anybody.”

Andie Lee cried out and grabbed his arm again. She talked to him some more. In a low tone that held a whole world of fury and sorrow.

Blue stepped away. He couldn’t bear to hear it.

Gordon made a gesture to the highway patrolman, who took Shane and started toward the patrol car. Andie Lee stuck right with them and so did Gordon, talking in a low voice to the lawman.

Shane’s shoulders sagged and he hung his head so far down he couldn’t see ahead of him while he walked. The guy in the slacks and silk shirt followed and touched Shane’s shoulder.

Shane threw his head up like a spooked deer and twisted toward him. “Jason,” he said, his voice louder than before. “Thanks for nothing, dude.”

“Get back,” the lawman said, motioning Jason away, keeping Shane moving.

Andie Lee kept her shoulders straight and her spine stiff, yet the way she looked at her wayward son reminded Blue of Rose again. Money didn’t always make a difference, after all. Not after the addiction took hold.

“Shane. Man. When you get back, we’ll talk about it,” Jason called. “We can adjust your…rewards, Shane. In your treatment program. And I’ll…”

The other three went on toward the patrol car, but Gordon turned and started back for Jason, his sardonic voice lashing out like a whip.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, Jason. You’re gone, too. Hit the road.”

Jason’s head turned around fast. He stared at Gordon and backed up a couple of steps.

“Mr. Campbell, it isn’t my fault that Shane…”

Gordon grabbed hold of his collar at the back of his neck and shoved him forward into a stumbling stagger.

“Make tracks off this place and don’t ever let me see you again,” he yelled. “If you can’t keep drugs out of here you can’t get these kids off of ’em.”

He pointed at the office building with GORDON CAMPBELL TREATMENT CENTER written above the door.

“Get your stuff and get out. Ten minutes.”

Jason flushed bright red. He whirled around to face Gordon but he didn’t stop moving, walking backwards, glaring and pouting like a kid. He looked nearly as young as Shane, but Blue judged him to be in his late twenties, maybe.

Only six or eight years younger than Blue, but it might as well be a hundred—one glance and a man could see that Jason’d had it soft all his life.

“You’re just angry,” he said, “because I called the police. That’s it, isn’t it, Mr. Campbell? You want to be the law and the judge and the jury all by yourself. But kidnapping and threatening someone with a gun is a serious matter, one for the authorities, and—”

“On this ranch I am the goddamned law,” Gordon roared. “And no judge or jury on earth can save your job, so shut your trap and do what I tell you, boy, before I stick my boot up your worthless ass and kick you into the next county.”

Jason was scared but he was as stubborn as Gordon. He, too, was accustomed to being the boss. He’d probably grown up a spoiled brat.

“There’s no need for you to use abusive language,” he said, his eyes blazing, his cheeks even redder with fury and embarrassment. “I’m afraid I’ll have to report this to the board and…”

Gordon went after him.

“I’ve been paying you big bucks and this kid’s still an addict, just like he was the first day you saw him,” Gordon yelled, pointing at Shane. “You’re worthless. Not get the hell out of here while you’re still able to walk.”

Jason turned around, fast, and started toward his office at a jog trot. Finally, everybody else moved, too.

The lawman opened the door to the back seat of his car and didn’t even bother to put his hand on Shane’s head, it was already bent so low. Shane got in and Andie Lee moved as if to get into the front seat, but the highway patrolman shook his head and Gordon went to talk to her. The other authorities started back up the hill to the recreation center.

Micah turned and walked slowly to Blue, heavily favoring his bad knee.

Once there, he stood looking back at Andie Lee. Blue looked at her, too.

She stood with her hand on the door handle, still trying to get a grip on the situation by talking to the patrolman across the top of his car. Gordon, scornful and fierce, was bent over to look in at Shane and berate him again.

“Damn shame,” Micah said. “It’s nothin’ but a goddamn shame. Andie Lee was the sweetest girl ever lived and she’s growed up to be a good, hardworking woman. She don’t deserve such hell.”

“Not many people do,” Blue said.

“No, and them that does don’t seem to catch it,” Micah said. “Leastways, not on this earth.”

Blue stared at Gordon. “Once in awhile they do,” he said.

“I figure we orter help each other through the rough patches,” Micah said. “No tellin’ when we’ll hit one of our own.”

Blue whipped his head around. Micah had him locked in his sharp sights.

“Helpin’ somebody else can take a man’s mind off his own trouble.”

“What’re you talking about?” Blue said. “I can’t help Andie Lee, if that’s what you mean.”

He tasted her name on his tongue.

“You can help that boy,” Micah said. “You seen that look he give you, and don’t try to tell me you didn’t. Shane has some respect for you when he don’t have none for nobody else.”

“You heard him,” Blue said. “He hates my guts for getting in his way.”

“Yeah, but he admires you for it, too,” Micah said. “Ever’body else chasin’ around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off and you put the kibosh on the whole deal in a heartbeat. He’s glad you done it, he just won’t admit it.”

Blue turned toward the truck.

Micah came along behind him. Blue could hear his boot-heel scrape against the dirt.

“Your horse is loose,” Micah said. “You know that?”

“I untied him to keep him from hanging himself again,” Blue said. He strode to the truck, jerked open the door, got in and slammed it shut.

Micah stopped at his window. “You’d do that fer a horse but not fer a boy?”

Blue ignored him.

Micah went around and got in on the driver’s side. He closed his door, reached for the key and fired up the old truck. Then he just sat there.

The roan kicked the tailgate of the trailer hard enough to knock it down.

“The horse is mine,” Blue said.

“Because you’re the one can handle him,” Micah said.

“Because I paid money for him.”

“No,” the old man said, shaking his head to lament Blue’s willful blindness, “it’s because you can bring him along to be all the horse he’s made to be. You’re the one he can connect with, so he is your horse.”

Blue turned and glared at him.

Micah met his look with one just as unyielding, shifted gears, and put the truck in motion.

“Ownership,” Micah said. “It’s a funny deal. Is it who holds the papers or who’s got the know-how to put a thing to use? Gordon holds the papers on this ranch. He uses a lot of it and he’s a top hand at breeding and raising cattle and horses and feed. Lots of jobs connected with them things he can do better than any other man on this place.”

He swung the truck around to head back to the road, pausing in his sermon only long enough to spit out the window.

“But there’s parts of this ranch Gordon don’t even know how to use. So who’s the real owners then? Jemmy in the machine shop. Toby in the show barn. Me in my wranglin’ pen and my garden spot.”

“I don’t own Shane just because I stopped him from running away,” Blue said. “He belongs to Andie Lee.”

Micah shook his head.

“She holds the papers on him,” he said. “But you’re the man with the juice when it comes to that boy.”

Blue snorted. “You’re smoking something besides tobacco,” he said.

Micah shook his head. “Nope.”

Amazingly enough, for another minute, he didn’t say a word. He just looked at Blue, his hands loose on the wheel while the old truck followed the road.

“I may never get another thing out of that colt,” Blue said. “As far as we are now may be as far as we go.”

Micah nodded and broke into a grin that made his eyes crinkle at the corners. “Sounds like plain old life to me,” he said.

He slapped Blue on the shoulder as if they had just come to an agreement and pulled the rig back from the edge of the Center’s gravel road.

“Yessir,” he said, speeding up a little, “from where I sit, looks like the best any of us can ever do is just go ahead and hook up and hope for the best.”

Hope for the best wasn’t going to cut it for Shane.

Blue raised his voice to carry over the rattling of the rig.

“What could I do for him, anyhow?”

“For starters, let him ride with you,” Micah said. “That roan colt could teach him as much as he’s teaching you and you could teach Shane more, too.”

Blue’s stomach tied into a hard knot.

“You heard Gordon,” he said. “The kid could be gone a long time—maybe he’ll use his influence to get him sent to reform school.”

“He’ll bring him home in a day or two,” Micah said. “Gordon aims to be the one that gets him off the dope for Andie Lee. Gordon likes to prove he can do what nobody else can.”

“The way he’s going about it, he’ll drive him to it instead.”

“How would you go about it?” Micah asked.

Blue sensed the trap. “I wouldn’t.”

“Horses heal a lot of wounds,” Micah said, completely undeterred. “Shane likes horses but he never has stayed with ’em because he likes them drugs more.”

He drove on out to the main ranch road, then stopped and looked both ways as if the traffic was terrible instead of nonexistent.

“You still want to go down to the arena?”

“No,” Blue said. “Let’s go see about using the fairgrounds.”

“That haulin’ is a waste,” Micah said. “And you won’t spite Gordon any by not usin’ his facilities, if spite’s what you’re after.”

Blue shrugged. “I’ll get my own rig soon.’ Til then, I’ll pay you mileage.”

“Gas money ain’t what I’m talkin’ about and you know it,” Micah said, wheeling out onto the road. “They’ll never let the boy off the place to go up there to ride with you.”

To find my dad.

Blue could still hear the crack in the boy’s voice. Shane had been lost in those same fatherless feelings Blue had felt at that age—although he had been too proud to ever try to go to his dad.

That had been Dannie, always wanting to go find Gordon. And then, when she had finally ridden all the way to Montana on the back of a drug dealer’s motorcycle, she had ended up dead before she ever saw the Splendid Sky.

Micah glanced in his rearview mirror.

“Looks like we’re leadin’ the parade,” he said.

Blue turned but the roan colt filled his vision.

“Who is it?”

“Patrolman with Shane. Follered by Gordon’s truck. Andie Lee’s talked him into bringing her to be with her boy as long as she can.”

The patrolman passed them. Shane still had his head down. But when the car pulled directly in front of them, he twisted around and looked back. Straight at Blue. Their eyes met.

I’m so scared. I don’t know what to do. What can I do?

Then Gordon’s truck passed them and whipped in between the trailer and the patrolman. Andie Lee sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, looking at Shane.

“Boys fifteen, sixteen, twenty years old think they’ve got the bit in their teeth,” Micah said. “They don’t know they can get hurt bad or die.”

Blue could remember how that felt, too. He’d been immortal. He could do anything.

And he had done a lot of it—he’d ridden the worst ones in all the rodeos, he’d fought the biggest bullies out behind the chutes, he’d driven the old trucks the fastest and dived off the highest bluff into the river. He’d danced with the wildest girls in the honky-tonks and made the best love to them in the grass.

But he had never fought the demon of drugs that had hold of Dannah. If he had gotten into dope back then, he might’ve proved to be mortal, too.

That same demon had hold of Shane.

Blue hadn’t been there for Dannah, not when she’d needed him the most. Because she wouldn’t let him. Would Shane let him?

If he could make a difference for Shane, it would be for Dannie’s sake. All he’d been able to do for her was avenge her death.

Andie Lee’s truck came in sight, its nose buried in the soft earth like an ostrich trying to hide its head in the sand.

Rose had been in such despair that she’d driven her car off the road, too. Into a tree.

If Shane went to prison, Andie Lee would share another great grief with Tanasi Rose. And if the boy got hold of another gun, he, too, could very well be in there for murder.

The roan whinnied and ran from one end of the twenty-foot trailer to the other. That rocked the truck and it pulled to one side. Blue turned to look through the back window just in time to see the colt brace himself and kick the side with a cracking blow.

“Onery sucker,” Micah said. “You’ll play hell trying to ride him out in public.”

“What was that saying of yours about all we can do is hook up and hope for the best?” Blue said.

“Huh,” Micah said, “I’m jist glad you remember what I tell you.”

“It’s not easy,” Blue said. “You talk so much it wears out my ears trying to sift for nuggets of wisdom.”

“Here’s another one,” Micah said. “Look off down there at that valley. Then let your eyes drift up and up over them mountains. You won’t ever see as handsome a place anywhere—not on this wicked old world, you won’t.”

Blue looked.

They drove on in silence. There, to the right, stood the old round pen, the house and the barn that belonged to Micah because he was the one who put them to use.

Straight ahead lay the highway.

The rig slowed on the uphill grade.

“Which way?” Micah said.

Blue threw him a slant-eyed look.

“Fairgrounds,” he said.

Micah drove all the way on out to the highway and turned toward town in silence. A miracle.

Blue was thankful for it. He pushed back his hat and leaned into the open window to feel the wind on his face. Ahead, the highway stretched empty.

But he kept seeing the patrolman’s car and Shane looking back at him.

They’ll never let the boy off the place to go ride with you.

Good. He didn’t want to get involved with the kid. And he hadn’t been free long enough yet to choose to do something he hated—like seeing Gordon humiliate Shane.

The irony of it struck him in a hard revelation. All Blue’s life he’d wanted Gordon to be his daddy, yet he’d probably been better off without him.

Micah slowed, then pulled off the road into a wide gravel parking lot filled with trucks and trailers of every kind and size, some empty, some full of bawling cattle. An auctioneer’s voice echoed from inside one of the barns.

Micah cut the motor and folded his arms on the wheel to wait.

“Secretary in the sale office is who you need to see.”

Blue got out and closed the door, his boot heels crunching on the gravel. But after he’d stepped away, he turned back.

“Micah. Does Gordon talk to Shane like that all the time?”

“Yep.”

Blue turned and looked off down the road.

Finally, he reached for the door handle.

“Aw, hell,” he said. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“DO YOU ALWAYS have to talk to Shane that way?”

Andie Lee turned on Gordon the minute he pulled his truck away from the police station. She shouldn’t. Shane was at Gordon’s mercy and Gordon tolerated no questioning, ever.

But she couldn’t pull together enough caution to stop herself. She wanted to punish him for telling Shane—and in front of half the world, too—that he had no father. She wanted to be rid of Gordon Campbell and never have to be indebted to him for another thing as long as she lived.

He took his time getting onto the road, then threw her the briefest of glances, one that slashed her with scorn.

“You mean do I always have to tell him the bare-assed truth?”

“No, I mean do you always have to deliberately humiliate him?”

“There’s the reason your kid’s in trouble today,” he said. “You.”

She turned cold all over, when she’d just been hot.

Pray God it wasn’t true. But of course, she had been afraid that it was, ever since the trouble started with Shane.

Surely, surely, since she’d tried so hard, she wasn’t as bad a parent as Gordon and Toni, her mother, had been.

“A boy needs somebody to grab him by the collar, yell at him, shake him and scare the shit out of him once in a while,” Gordon raved on, “that’s what makes a man out of him.”

“Destroying his pride makes a man out of him?”

“Stay out of this, Andie Lee. You came to me for help, so I’m helping you.”

He clamped his mouth shut in that tight, straight line she remembered so well. For Gordon, the subject was closed.

Well, he’d have to get used to the fact she was no longer a little girl who wanted his approval.

“Oh, right. You’ve got him to the point of kidnapping girls and trying to steal cars, and in only three weeks. I could never have accomplished that all by myself.”

He ignored her.

“And now you’ve left him in jail for the whole night.”

“More than one whole night,” he said. “Know that.”

Fear struck, all through her. She tried for a reasonable tone of voice.

“That’ll only make things worse, Gordon. Shane—”

He interrupted in his usual vicious way. “I got him in a cell by himself. You know that. I saw you hovering around with your ears flapping in the wind while I arranged it.”

She wished with all her being that she hadn’t asked him for help. If only she’d made the decision to sell her practice before she ever dialed his number! Then she could’ve had money to buy help for Shane. But the practice was her livelihood and the only asset she hadn’t already poured into this battle against addiction.

Her reasoning had been that her practice was as important to Shane’s future as it was to hers. So she had destroyed her considerable pride and broken her fifteen-year-old vow never to be at Gordon Campbell’s mercy again. For four days and nights, she had thought about it and agonized over it but in the end she had decided that any amount of pain would be worth the suffering if it could save Shane’s life and sanity.

She would do anything to save Shane. How could she even think about sacrificing this chance of help for him just to cling to her pride and the word of honor she had given to herself?

Gordon had the resources to help the one she loved. She would swallow her pride and call him.

And so she did.

It was still hard to believe that she had broken her vow. That vow, coming out of fury and fear and the unspeakable shocked hurt of a child betrayed by its mother—a feeling she had sworn at his birth Shane would never know—had held her upright while she lived in poverty as a teenaged, single mother. It had driven her to travel with Chase Lomax on the rodeo circuit, painting designs on leather chaps and shirts for a living while he tried to win the big prizes riding roughstock. Later, she waited tables to take care of her baby and pay her way through college and veterinary school.

That vow had pushed her to borrow a lot of money to set up her practice, even after Gordon had offered, at her mother’s funeral, to help her get started. That had been some kind of temporary sentimental aberration—not because he felt guilty or generous toward Andie Lee but because he’d felt suddenly lonely without Toni.

Theirs had been some kind of devil’s pact. They had fought like tigers all the years they’d been married but they never separated. They both thrived on the conflict, even though they both knew that it would come out, always, with Gordon on top.

Only one thing had ever brought them to agree. That was the idea that Andie Lee should date Trey Gebhardt, scion of another prominent family, a political family that could do Gordon some good at the national level. Trey had raped her on their third date and Shane had been the result.

Her mind drew back from the memory fast as a damp finger from a sizzling burner. Her life hadn’t turned out to be all that bad—not until Shane started going downhill. Before that, he had been her greatest joy.

One good thing was that she’d had Chase to help her—although not with money, because back then he’d had none, either—and she still loved him for being the only daddy Shane had ever known. And she loved him for loving her. He just hadn’t loved her enough to quit the rodeo life and make a real family, and she hadn’t loved him enough to keep going down the road with him.

Now she was a professional, accustomed to making life-and-death decisions and giving orders that were obeyed. She’d made another bad choice by asking for Gordon’s help, but she was a grown-up now and she wouldn’t let him push her around.

“I’m taking him away,” she said. “As soon as they let Shane go, I’m taking him someplace else.”

He pressed his foot harder on the accelerator.

“He’s staying here,” he said. “Either on the Splendid Sky or in jail.”

“This is all about your ego,” she said, “and we don’t have time for that. I’ve got to save him before it’s too late and that point’s coming closer by the minute.”

“Andie Lee,” he said, letting a full measure of disgust come into his voice, “I’ll take care of your boy. Go back to Texas and see to your practice before you end up losing it.”

He looked at her again and this time she couldn’t read one single trace of emotion in his blue eyes.

“You’ve put a lot of money and energy into veterinary school,” he said “You’d be losing that, too.”

“My life’s over anyway if Shane goes down the tubes,” she said. “And there’s no way I can leave him here since your idea of taking care of him is to tell him he doesn’t have a daddy to do jack for him.”

“That’s the truth. He doesn’t.”

“And whose fault is that?” she asked, surprised at the depth of bitterness she heard in her voice.

Andie Lee, you’ll fool around and make him really mad and he’ll leave Shane in jail to spite you. He has all the power around here, and you know it. Take care.

But the words were already said and on the table and she would make him acknowledge them. She should have said them to him long ago.

“Yours,” he said. “It’s your fault he has no daddy. I gave you choices. I would’ve arranged for you to get rid of the baby or to marry Trey Gebhardt, either one.”

“Surely you can understand why neither was an acceptable choice,” she said dryly.

“Don’t cry to me,” he said. “All you had to do that night was stay out of the back seat and tell Trey no.”

That accusation stirred the old shame and frustration hidden deep inside her. She pushed it away. No time for that when Shane was hitting rock bottom.

But she couldn’t let it go.

“All I had to do was tell you and my mother no,” she said, “but I didn’t have the guts. I was a silly, seventeen-year-old girl who couldn’t help wanting to please her mother and the stepfather she’d always hoped would be her daddy.”

“Did we tell you to let the boy into your pants?”

She should never have brought this up. It was stirring the rage deep inside her. No way could she tamp it down and think about Shane at the same time.

“No,” she said. “You did not. I made my own choices and—now that I think about it, true to what you always preach—I’ve done a very responsible job of living with the consequences of those choices. The problem right now is that I made another bad choice in asking you for help.”

“You just said you always wanted me to be your daddy.”

“I did. A long time ago. When I was a silly kid whose real daddy had never been around much. A silly, lonesome kid who was eager to please.”

But all that was old news.

Shane was locked up in jail. Shane was skinny and weak and sweating for need of a fix. Shane was in misery and it was all her fault.

But his further misery would be Gordon’s fault. Gordon had had the power to bring him home in this truck with them right now.

“You didn’t have to leave him there overnight.”

Gordon wouldn’t look at her. He was driving like a bat out of hell.

“I got him a private cell.” He bit the words off like bullets.

“We’re not talking about the Marriott!” she cried. “He needs to be out of there.”

“He needs to stop and think about what he’s doing,” Gordon said. “Hard experiences teach hard lessons.”

“He’s defenseless! His arms aren’t as big around as your finger.”

“He’ll survive.”

Andie Lee stared out her window at the landscape hurtling past.

Shane hated her. Shane hated himself, too. She had to save him.

“I’ll call my cousin Boone,” she said. “He’s an attorney and he’ll get Shane out of there.”

“An army of attorneys can’t get him out of there, Andie Lee.”

Now Gordon’s voice was flat with the knowledge of a sure thing. He was king and he knew it.

“He will learn,” he said crisply, “or he will die. The only way human beings ever learn a damn thing is by taking the consequences of the choices they make.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Yeah. That’s your mantra, all right.”

“Right it is.”

Her lips parted and she started to say something else, then she thought better of it. There must be a way to work him if she’d stop and think.

She’d been going about this all wrong. She’d known that from the beginning because she’d known Gordon Campbell almost all her life. Since she was ten years old and her mother brought her to live in his house. That had been just like Toni: she’d met Gordon at the big cutting horse sale in Fort Worth in December and by April she was married to him and moving to Montana, turning Andie Lee’s life upside down.

Twenty-three years Andie Lee had known this man. And in all that time, she’d never seen anybody who’d directly faced him down and managed to win.

“Gordon,” she said, “you’ve been most generous to have Shane accepted into your center free of charge. But it isn’t helping him. I have to look for another treatment center that might fit him better.”

“Free of charge?” he said.

“No, I’m sure I couldn’t find that anywhere else. I’ll have to sell my practice.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s your livelihood.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t be asking you to support us. I can always work for somebody else. I can even go temporary and fill in for veterinarians on vacation. There are plenty of them in North Texas. “

“On a salary you’d never get his bills paid,” he said. “This drug-treatment business costs a freaking fortune.”

“Tell me about it,” she said wryly. “It just about broke me before I ever called you.”

“And it’s a damned good thing you did, no matter what you say.”

He actually sounded almost hurt that she’d said that.

“Get over it, Gordon,” she said. “You’re not God and you can’t have power over everything. Face the fact that you hired a snake of a loser to run your rehab center and it’s doing more harm than good. I made a mistake bringing Shane here.”

“I fired the goddamned loser snake of an SOB, didn’t I?” he growled.

He drove even faster. Why not? He wasn’t God, but around here, he was king. Speed limits didn’t apply.

“It won’t take two weeks to get the whole program turned around,” he said. “I’m on it.”

“I’m out of here,” she said. “If you won’t do it tonight, go back tomorrow and get Shane out on bail. We’ll leave Montana and be out of your hair.”

“Forget it,” he said, in that tone of unbreakable ice she’d also known since the age of ten. “The kid stays where he is until I come back and get him. When I do, I’ll sober him up.”

“As if you know how to do that.”

“I can find somebody who does,” he said. “And I’m going to add some ideas of mine to their program.”

“Sounds like a winner.”

“Come on, Andie Lee, cut the sarcasm. Don’t I always do what I say I will?”

“A combination of a world-class employment agency, plenty of money, and some good, hard, rancher’s common sense will do the trick, huh?”

“Guaranteed. Every time.”

“So which one of those did you leave out last time? When you hired Jason?”

“Will you shut up about Jason? What I left out was work for those kids.”

He clamped his jaw shut tight as a vise.

“I cannot believe it’s come to this,” she said. “I can’t even think. I’m so scared and so mad at Shane I cannot even think.”

“Leave it to me. Quit your worrying.”

“As if I could.”

“You were right about one thing,” he said.

She jerked around to stare at him. That was a rare statement, coming from Gordon. He skewered her with his hard blue eyes.

“It is my ego,” he said. “You won’t find another rehab center on the face of the earth where the owner’s got his ass on the line for your kid to sober up.”

Andie Lee couldn’t say a word.

“He’ll be gone some day,” Gordon said. “Sober or stoned or dead, he’ll be gone. You’re gonna have to make yourself another life. You’ve worked too hard to throw your practice away.”

That was one thing Gordon respected. Hard work.

“It’s no skin off your back. I’d never ask you for help.”

“You never have,” he said, his eyes boring into her again. “Except for this once. You know I refuse to fail at anything I do. Cut me some slack and I’ll save your boy.”

He went back to staring through the windshield, one big brown hand resting easy on the steering wheel of the speeding truck as if he could rule the world with one hand tied behind him. Andie Lee couldn’t stop looking at his chiseled profile.

The man had no earthly clue of how monumental this problem was. He didn’t know the size of the dragon he was promising to slay. The most aggravating thing about Gordon Campbell was his arrogance.

“You might,” she said, “if Micah’s new wrangler stays around to catch him for you.”

He turned, slowly, and gave her a long, straight look that she couldn’t read.

Then he laughed. Gordon didn’t laugh often and when he did, it was always a shock to her.

“You sound like Toni,” he said.

Oh, great. On top of everything else, she was turning into her mother.

But maybe she always had been like Toni—selfish and driven. Maybe she should never have spent all those endless hours and untold amounts of energy on veterinary school instead of pouring them out on the growing Shane.

Gordon had a point, though. Gordon always reached his goals and Gordon always got his way. Shane’s recovery was a point of honor with him now. This wasn’t something Gordon could will into being, but he would put more effort than any stranger would into trying to get the right help for Shane. He would hire a proven professional to replace Jason and he would spare no expense.

It didn’t matter whether his motives were selfish or not. If anyone on earth could do it, Gordon could make things happen so that Shane would recover—if Shane would cooperate.

Gordon was a busy, busy man. He wouldn’t be around Shane all that much to talk down to him.

And she had been half-serious in her sarcastic remark. Micah’s new hired hand might be good for Shane—if their paths could ever cross again. She could arrange that, maybe, with Micah’s help.

What a thought! She didn’t know one thing about the big, blue-eyed Native American with the braid and the muscular shoulders. He could be an axe murderer for all she knew. Truly, she was desperate.

Micah’s instinct for trustworthiness in human beings was usually faultless. Even though he’d been hiring a horse wrangler, not a friend or counselor for Shane, when he brought Blue to the ranch, he wouldn’t want a bad man living in his house or working with his horses.

He had a power, Blue did. She’d felt it this morning, sitting beside him, even with her whole concentration on Shane.

THE ROAN WAS both disrespectful and scared all over again. Whoever said that a horse, like a person, is different every day and therein lies his charm, sure knew what he was talking about. However, at the moment, nothing about Roanie brought the word charm to mind. He was thoroughly pissed after his trip to the fairgrounds.

When Blue walked up to the fence, the horse gave him that “Go to hell” look of his. Then he turned his hindquarters to him and stood all sulled up, looking out across the valley.

He’d been hauled way more than he liked, so he’d kicked all the way back to the ranch and fought the leadrope coming out of the trailer. Blue had left him alone in the tree-shaded pasture to relax for a while. But Blue hadn’t been able to relax, either.

Even while he was riding some of the other horses, all he’d wanted was to get back to the roan. That was a bad sign. It was less dangerous to get attached to a horse than to people, that was for sure, but Blue needed to keep his emotions clear and his mind clear so he could truly be free and focused. An attachment to anything would get in his way.

Probably, though, it wasn’t attachment that drew him to the colt. It was the fact that he owned him now. And the fact that he was the most challenging horse he’d ever known.

He couldn’t let himself get attached to Shane, either. He’d only given in to Micah’s pleas about the boy because if, on some off chance he could help him, it’d be doing something positive in memory of Dannah. If. So what if the boy did offer Blue some slight respect as compared to none at all for anyone else? That wasn’t much to build on in a fight with an enemy as strong as addiction.

He wouldn’t let the boy get him any more tangled up with Micah, or with Andie Lee or Gordon, either. One thing always led to another.

The aggravating thoughts wouldn’t leave him alone. They were still buzzing in him right now, after they’d stirred him up so much that he skipped lunch and the break and kept working. They’d made him feel just as sour as the colt looked.

Blue waited a little while to clear his mind and his mood, then he opened the gate and went in. As he closed it again, Roanie kicked out, so Blue took his time. The colt knew him, yes, but he didn’t fully trust him and he might not for a long time. He had a suspicious attitude that was partly natural to him and partly manufactured by the boys over at Little Creek.

Rhythmically, slowly, Blue moved to approach and then retreat, approach and retreat so the prey animal instincts in the horse wouldn’t signal alarm. From a horse’s point of view, anything that comes at him in a straight line is behaving as a predator would.

Roanie was making it perfectly clear that he didn’t intend to be touched again. Blue started thinking of something to use as an extension of his arm. He found a thin tree limb about three feet long and, holding it down by his side, started working his way to Roanie again. When he finally got close, he stood back the full length of it so the horse wouldn’t feel crowded.

“I’ll just scratch your back a little,” he told him as he took hold of the leadrope with his free hand. “Remember how you like that? Remember how you like for me to rub you with the halter? With my rope?”

He began to scratch him with the limb. Slowly, gently, along his back, over his croup, down to the hock, then up again and along the base of his mane.

Blue watched the horse carefully and concentrated on the best spots again and again. Soon, Roanie admitted that Blue meant no harm. He let his head drop lower and allowed Blue to touch him everywhere he wanted.

Blue replaced the stick with his hand. He could feel through his palm and through every one of his fingers that the colt was really beginning to relax, so he rubbed him all over several times.

Then he concentrated on massaging his legs. He moved the touch on down below the knees and caressed the tendons where the legs were the most sensitive, too sensitive for the stick.

“All I want to do today is pick up your feet,” he told the horse. “That’s all. Then I’ll let you be.”

Gradually, finally, Blue closed everything else out of his mind and they both relaxed into the companionship they were beginning to build. He didn’t know how much time passed but, at last, the roan let him pick up all four of his feet.

Blue whistled as he patted the sleek, warm neck again and again, then he moved to the horse’s head, unfastened the halter he’d left on him all day, and slipped it off.

The roan rolled his eye at him and moved away at a brisk trot. Blue backed up against the fence, hooked one heel in it and leaned back to watch him as he lifted into a lope. He moved so smoothly through the shade and the sunlight that he reminded Blue of water flowing, turning his speckled hide to one liquid color. Red.

In Cherokee lore, red was the color of victory, of success.

The color blue meant failure, disappointment, or unsatisfied desire.

He’d had ten unsatisfied and lonely years to wonder if his mother knew that he would fail her and disappoint her when she named him Blue.

What made him think there was even a chance that he would help Shane after he’d failed Rose and Dannah so completely?

FOR THE SAKE OF positive thinking, Andie Lee went for a long, hard run late that afternoon, trying to clear her head of the negative thoughts that had lived there for so long. While she ran, she reviewed the whole day in her mind, hoping to banish those images forever once she got back to the house.

She hadn’t realized, through these last weeks, that she’d fallen into such a habit of despair until she and Gordon drove into the yard at the main house and he said, “I’ll take care of the Center. And of Shane. Forget him for a week and go find something that’ll make you smile.”

Surprised, she’d leaned back against her door and watched him as he parked and turned off the motor.

“What’s different, Gordon?”

He looked at her. “What are you talking about?”

“You never cared if I smiled before now. You never insisted on helping me with anything until now. What’s the deal?”

He shrugged. “Things change.”

As he threw open his door and got out, he said, “I’ve got a truckload of money sunk in that drug rehab center. Why wouldn’t I want it to produce results?”

She got out and they walked toward the house.

“The question is why did you build it? It’s not something you’d do.”

He shot her a look.

“How do you know? You don’t know squat about me.”

“I know some,” she said. “Or I should say, I did know some about who you used to be. Any kid who wants a parent’s love knows more about that parent than either of them realizes.”

He shook his head.

“You always did read too much,” he said. “You’ve let your imagination run wild.”

With that, he went straight to his office and closed the door.

She went up to her old room and looked at herself in the mirror. It hurt her to look at herself. She looked horrid. She looked exhausted and haggard and old and wrinkled and sad, sad, sad.

She forced a smile. It hurt her muscles. It looked fake. It looked so false that it still hurt her to look at herself.

How could she help Shane to believe in hope for recovery if she looked so hopeless?

She felt like crawling into bed, pulling the covers over her head, and never coming out to be seen again. The thought was scarily tempting.

She stared at her image.

“You’ve never given up,” she told it. “Don’t start now.”

Gordon was in control of Shane. Gordon was talking to her—a little—and listening to her. A little. She wanted some influence over what Gordon did to Shane.

The work, for example. He was finally going to take Micah’s advice and find a director who’d put the inmates to work. She wanted Shane to be with horses because they had great healing power.

Certainly more than hauling hay or digging ditches would have.

So she’d put on her shorts and running shoes and hit the road that ran across the valley to the river. Once there, she walked for a while and then sat for a while and made herself think, for once, about something besides Shane. It was an exercise in will that made her brain feel as stiff as her face had done when she forced a smile.

She looked into the water and tried to see her plans for the future, the ones she’d had two years ago when the nightmare began. Before her every thought had been fixed on Shane and his problems.

Right now, her dreams of buying a cabin in Wyoming where she would go to rest and read and think and learn to paint landscapes—in other words, to actually discover who she was and what she wanted for the rest of her life, since she’d never had a minute free to figure that out since she was seventeen—were hopeless.

Her profession was one she loved, but other than that, what did she want to do? Gordon was right. Someday Shane would be gone. What would be the most important thing to her then?

Her savings had vanished like snow in the sun, along with all the money she’d raised by selling the few luxuries in her life: her show horse and saddle and her sporty little car. Gordon was right about that, too. She couldn’t recover financially if she sold her practice.

She couldn’t let Shane’s troubles take everything else away from her because the stronger she was for herself, the greater the chances she could help him. She’d made the right decision. She’d hang on to her practice, stay here and deal with Gordon the best way she could.

He really was different toward her, and she thought about that. In the past, he would’ve exploded and then chewed her up and spit her out for questioning him and arguing with him on the way back from the jail.

He would’ve been furious at her asking him why he built the Center.

As far as she’d observed, he was still his old hair-trigger self with everybody else. Did he pity her so much that he was trying to be kind to her? Act like a father to her twenty years too late because she was such a lousy mother?

No. Negative thoughts. She was doing, and had done, the best she knew how. That was all anyone could do.

She got up and started slowly jogging back toward the house. No negativity. It was self-fulfilling.

Only positive thoughts. This was the turning point. Shane had hit rock bottom this morning and his only direction now was up.

She would hold that thought.

The houses, barns, pens, arenas, all passed by in a blur. For the first time in what seemed a lifetime, she was comfortable in her body and her mind. For these few minutes. Her blood was pumping warm in her veins and hope was growing in her heart.

When she got back to the house, Gordon’s truck was gone. Andie Lee pounded up the stairs, pretending she had more energy left than she had thought. In her childhood room, she stripped and stood in the shower for the longest time, willing the hot water to wash away the traces of tension left in her muscles and her mind.

Tonight, for the first time in a long time, she’d have a chance of getting some sleep.

She was standing at the window drying her hair when the big white truck came rolling into the glow of the dusk-activated yard light. Gordon got out and slammed the door behind him, but she never heard him come into the house.

When her hair was only damp, she pulled on some soft pants and a T-shirt, stuck her feet into some flip-flops and went down the stairs. All the rooms were still dark except for the lamps they always left on in the huge old living area. She walked out onto the porch. He was standing down on the north end of it, one foot propped on the railing, staring out into the night, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t turn around.

“I guess you know that stuff’ll kill you,” she said.

After a heartbeat he answered. “Somethin’ will.”

She walked halfway to him and sat down in the swing.

“Hmm,” she said, “I thought you considered yourself immortal, Gordon.”

He gave his little bark of a laugh, set his foot on the floor, and turned around.

He looked at her. In the faint lamp glow that came through the window she couldn’t see his eyes.

“That was before the doc said cancer.”

She gasped. “What? You have…”

“Turns out he was wrong,” he said. “Even the experts can’t win ’em all.”

He walked to one of the leather rocking chairs, turned it to face her, and sat. He rocked it slowly back and forth.

“Made me think, though,” he said. “What’ll happen to the Wagontracks when I’m gone?”

The question stunned her. Gordon had never talked to her about anything personal before. He never talked to anyone like this. Not even Micah, as far as she knew.

“I’m thinking that would depend on your choice of an heir,” she said.

He gave a bitter chuckle.

“Just think, Andie. I’m the sixth generation Campbell in Montana, counting the first one who came directly from Scotland. Six generations. We’ve kept this ranch together through droughts and blizzards, Indian wars and rock-bottom cattle markets. Kept it together and added to it, Andie Lee.”

“You’re a famous breeder who believes the bloodline is everything,” she said, “and there’s no seventh-generation Campbell to carry it on.”

He grunted and took another drag on the cigarette.

“Ironic, isn’t it?”

She nodded.

“The bloodline is everything,” he said. “Besides, a woman could never manage this ranch in a million years of trying.”

Anger flashed through her amazement to flare in her voice.

“That’s not what I meant. I don’t want anything from you,” she said. “I wish I’d never asked you to help us this time, but here we are.”

“That’s why I’m helping you now,” he said. “You put yourself through college and took care of a baby and graduated veterinary school and wouldn’t take money when your mother offered it. I respect that kind of guts.”

“Then respect my need to see Shane in the morning.”

“No. A week with nobody fawning over him will work wonders.”

“A week! You said overnight! I never thought you’d leave him so long! That’s way too long…”

“It’ll help make a man out of him. Every boy needs a time as a kid when he’s scared shitless and has nobody to depend on but himself.”

“You justify everything you do,” she snapped. “You could justify torture or rustling or murder for your own purposes. You’ve always done that!”

He shrugged and deliberately crossed one leg over his knee to put out his cigarette on the sole of his boot.

He had said a week when they first got back. When he’d told her to forget Shane for a week and find something to make her smile. She just hadn’t really heard it then.

“So. You can’t resist being the great dictator. I ought to leave here.”

“I thought we settled that, Andie.”

“I never said so. You always assume that when you make a decree everybody else agrees.”

“Because I’m always right,” he said. “Now calm down and go on up to bed. Get some sleep. The week’ll be gone before you know it.”

She wanted nothing more than to leave him, but she sat stubbornly in her place and pushed the swing into motion with her toe.

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