Читать книгу True Heart - Peggy Nicholson - Страница 12

AS TRIPP DROVE back from Durango the following evening, his mood was black—dark as the wall of thunder-heads that towered off to the west.

Feeling like this, maybe it was just as well he hadn’t connected with Kaley today. When he’d stopped by the Circle C this afternoon, he’d found only Whitelaw in residence. The old man had been gimping about the barn, using a rake for an improvised crutch, his scruffy Pekingese pattering underfoot, likely to trip him at any minute.

Kaley had gone to Durango, Whitey had told him when he’d asked.

Four days home and she was flitting off to the city already. It figured. What didn’t figure was why he’d been so…damn…angry ever since he’d learned of her divorce. Waste. What a crying waste! were the words echoing somewhere at the back of his mind. He’d always despised a waste of anything—time, effort, emotion.

But what, precisely, was wasted here? he wondered as his truck climbed out of the plains toward Trueheart.

Well, his time, for one thing; that was sure. After he’d spoken with Whitelaw, he’d driven to Durango. Told himself that he needed those tractor parts and shouldn’t put it off another day. But the John Deere dealer hadn’t stocked the crucial bearing, would have to order it special, so that errand had been entirely a loss. And he hadn’t caught even a glimpse of Kaley, though on his way out of town he’d swung through the parking lots of two of the larger grocery stores, where most Truehearters did their serious provisioning. The whole damn day just a waste of time.

The way his dreams lay in waste. Maybe it was just starting to hit him that the purchase had fallen through. That he’d sold Loner for nothing. Wasn’t that reason enough for a mood like a black wolf padding at his heels?

To the west, the setting sun reappeared, dropping into the slot between storm clouds and horizon. A red-orange light swept across the hills, bathing the land in ruddy gold, branding the undersides of the purple clouds with rose and ruby. Tripp sucked in a breath of sage-scented air. This—it was moments like this that made the struggle to hold the land, his way of life, worth whatever it cost. Till the sun puddled and sank below the horizon, Tripp simply drove and drank in the changing colors.

Finally, he gave a sigh that seemed to let something go, and reached for the headlight knob. Don’t give up, he told himself for the hundredth time over the past few days. This was a setback, but it wasn’t defeat—not by a long shot, it wasn’t.

Because there was no way Kaley could make a go of her ranch. All he had to do was make her see that.

The headlights of an approaching car gleamed like animal eyes in the dusk. Its windshield wipers were still switched on, he noticed as it shot past. It was raining somewhere up toward Trueheart, then. Good, they could always use rain. The longer the grass grew in the fall, the more graze there’d be for his herd in the first half of the winter. If he could put off feeding hay till after Christmas, he could keep his costs down, future profits up. Which was one more reason he needed the Cotter land. Kaley had acres and acres of irrigable meadows along her creek. If he could grow all he needed…was no longer at the mercy of the market price for good hay…

His truck mounted the first of the foothills. The road ahead gleamed black and shiny, though the shower that had drenched it had passed on already. He crested another rise and now Tripp saw taillights. Possibly Kaley returning from town? His foot came down hard on the gas.

But no, he realized when he’d closed the distance. This was one of those big sport utility vehicles. He recognized it as the one Rafe Montana had bought for his new wife, Dana, and her babies, when he made out its license plate: RbnRvr—the Ribbon River Dude Ranch, Dana’s ranch to the west of town. Tripp smiled and eased off the gas—just as the brake lights ahead flared and stayed on.

What the—? He stomped on his own brakes and swore—then groaned as the sport ute wobbled into a skid on the rain-slick asphalt. “Easy!” For a moment he thought the driver had the trouble in hand, but then she overcorrected. The sport ute’s right wheels dropped off the jagged edge of the pavement, slowed as they hit the gravel and low brush beyond—and the car swerved hard to the right and plunged off the road, bouncing and bounding into a pasture.

“Stay upright, stay upright!” Tripp prayed as he braked. And miraculously the vehicle did, coming at last to a jouncing halt sixty feet off the highway.

After parking on the shoulder, Tripp leaped out and ran. Off to the south he saw another car coming and he begged it silently to stop. He could send its driver into Trueheart for help, if need be.

“Dana!” He swung open her door and flinched at the noise—two babies wailing their lungs out. “You okay?” She was twisted around to her right, peering into the back seat as she yanked frantically at her seat belt buckle. “Dana.” He patted her shoulder, even as his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the windshield.

It wasn’t cracked. Seemed that it ought to be cracked. His heart was thundering, the sound of the babies drilling straight through his brain. Tears and glass and a wreck in the rain. And nothing had ever been the same after. He wrenched his mind back to the present, where, thank God, no glass had been shattered. “Dana, honey, hey…”

Blinded by tears, she whirled around and clutched his shirt. “G-g-get me out of this! Please! Oh, sweetheart, hang on. Mommy’s coming!”

He doubted she even knew who he was. “Easy there, eaaasy…” He reached over her lap to unclip the seat belt. Not jammed at all. She was just in a tizzy. And maybe stunned, he realized, noting the disinflated air bag drooping from the steering wheel. That must have blown up in her face. Rafe is going to thank his lucky stars he replaced her old pickup. “Easy there,” Tripp soothed, helping her down out of the high seat, then holding her up as her knees buckled.

“How can I help?” asked a quiet voice at his elbow. He glanced aside to find Kaley standing there, her fine eyes wide with sympathy. So that had been her in the car behind them.

“Petra and Peter, please, somebody look at them!” Dana begged, trying to twist out of his grasp.

“Of course.” Kaley hurried around to the far side of the vehicle and leaned in from there, while Tripp opened the near door for Dana and lifted her in.

Strapped into car seats, both her babies were squalling wholeheartedly. Beneath the racket, the women’s crooning ran like a wordless melody, a song no man could sing. Peering past Dana’s shoulder, Tripp saw Petra—with blood dripping down her chin. His stomach lurched.

A woman weeping…the smell of blood…it wasn’t the pain of the glass in his face so much as the terrifying blindness, blood welling into his eyes… He staggered back from the open door and turned to lean against the car’s side, his stomach heaving. Scrubbing the back of his hand across his cheekbone, he closed his eyes—saw his mother’s tear-drenched face—and opened them wide again. Shook his head to clear the vision. That was then…this is now. He sucked in a breath and held it, blew it out, sucked in another and squared his shoulders. Forced himself back to the door. “How are they?”

“Just fine, I think,” Kaley almost sang with happy relief. “Shaken up a bit, but everybody looks just fine.”

“Petra’s bleeding,” he protested.

“Bit her lip,” Kaley agreed, but her smile reassured him.

“Mommy’s crying!” Petra announced to the world with a tearful grimace.

Dana let out a sobbing laugh and continued wiping the tail of her shirt across her daughter’s chin. “She is, sweetie. Yes, she is.” One hand cradling her toddler’s face, she leaned to study the baby Kaley was comforting. “You’re sure Peter’s all right?”

“His neck seems fine. He’s very alert. Truly just startled, I think.” Kaley smoothed the baby’s red-gold hair, reached for one of his waving hands and held it, her thumb stroking his tiny knuckles. “Aren’t you, Peter?”

At the sound of his own name spoken by a stranger, the baby stopped midsquall to gape at her—then scowled ferociously and started again.

“Lungs in great shape,” Tripp added wryly. “What happened, anyway, back there?”

“A coyote,” Dana said, brushing her short, dark hair off her brow with a forearm. “He just stood there in my headlights till the last second. I thought I could—” Tears brimming again, she shook her head. “I’m so stupid!”

“You braked for a coyote!” Lucky her husband was crazy in love with her. The manager of Suntop Ranch didn’t suffer fools lightly.

“Of course, she did.” Kaley flashed him a glance that said Back off!

He did, half grinning at her fierceness. Then he set himself to getting this show back on the road, while the women comforted the small fry. He walked around the vehicle, checking for damage, then went for his flashlight and crawled beneath to inspect the suspension.

By the time he’d concluded that the car was roadworthy, the whimpering within had faded to the odd hiccup and an occasional piping comment from Petra. “The car bucked. Like Tobasco bucks with Daddy. I don’t want it to do that, Mommy!”

Tripp laughed under his breath and leaned back in the door. “Ready to roll, Dana? I’m driving you wherever you want to go.” Though it didn’t look to him as if anybody needed a doctor.

She swung around and smiled shakily. “Home, of course, but, Tripp, you don’t have to—”

“Yes, I do. Do you want to sit up front or back here?” He knew the answer already.

A FEW MINUTES LATER the sport ute bumped out of the pasture and lunged up onto the pavement, bouncing on its heavy springs.

“Stop that!” Petra commanded from the back seat.

“Yes, ma’am!” Tripp had to smile. Not quite three and she was bossing men already. “That was the worst of it. Smooth riding from here.”

In his mirror, he could see Kaley’s headlights switch on, then she pulled out behind them. He’d tried to tell her that Rafe could drive him back to his truck, but Kaley wouldn’t hear of it. “Dana will want him at home,” she’d told him in an undertone—then reached up to wipe a fingertip below his lashes.

“What’s that for?” he’d demanded, stung by her touch. Nine years since she’d touched him.

“Just…something on your face.” She’d headed off to her car.

Something on his face, you could say that—the mark of that day, never to be erased. When he returned to school that fall, the other boys had called him Scarface—till he’d inflicted a few scars of his own. As full of bewildered rage as he’d been all that first year after his mother left, the fights had been welcome.

“My mouth hurts,” Petra announced.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” Dana murmured in the darkness behind him. “It’s all Mommy’s fault. I never should have tried to…”

That wreck twenty-five years ago had been his fault. Also on this road, farther along toward Durango. Maybe that was why this was hitting him so hard. On the way into town, in the midst of a rainstorm, he’d spotted an antelope bounding alongside the car. Reaching blindly behind, he’d grabbed his mother’s elbow to show her. At eight, he damn sure should have known better.

At least he’d been the one who’d paid, smashing the windshield with his face when the car swerved into a ditch. His mother had only been shaken, though he could close his eyes and still hear her weeping.

Weeping for him, he supposed, and what in the space of a heartbeat he’d become. Because before that day she’d always called him “my handsome,” in her honeyed Southern drawl. Her teasing endearment had embarrassed him, even while it made him feel special. He couldn’t remember her saying it even once after that in the two months before she’d vanished from his life.

From his father’s life. From his brother Mac’s life, who’d only been five at the time—too young to lose his mother. Tripp had changed all that, grabbing her elbow.

THAT WAS A TEAR ON TRIPP’S CHEEK, Kaley thought while she followed the sport ute through Trueheart, then out again, heading west. She’d seen the tracks of more tears, and his thick lashes had dried in spikes. Crying? Tripp? Why?

Not for Dana, who’d been more frightened than hurt, Kaley guessed.

Because this wreck reminded him of his own? She tried to recall what he’d told her that summer night while they’d lain on a blanket out under the stars, her head pillowed on his arm. It had been a halting story, and not one he’d volunteered. She’d had to coax it out of him, word by reluctant word. And she wasn’t sure she’d gotten it all, before he’d rolled up to one elbow and applied his own form of persuasion, to his own ends.

His mother hadn’t wanted to take him along, she remembered that much. But when Tripp had pleaded, she’d finally given in, saying she’d drop him at a movie matinee while she did her shopping. Kaley remembered finding it odd that his mother would leave an eight-year-old alone in the city.

They’d never made it that far. Tripp had jogged her elbow and the car had skidded, much the way Dana’s did tonight. Except with far worse consequences. “That’s how I got my ugly mug,” he’d said matter-of-factly, then smiled at her storm of protest.

Surely he was just being modest, she remembered thinking. A scar like that might have troubled him as a child, but now that he’d grown to glorious manhood? When she was seventeen to his twenty-three he’d seemed such a man. Her first man, reducing all boyfriends that had come before to posing children. Surely her man realized how beautiful he was, inside and out. She’d lost the rest of that night, trying to show him.

Sometime later, she’d learned the rest—that his mother had left his father two months after Tripp’s accident. Had run off with her sons’ pediatrician in Durango. They’d moved to New Orleans and she’d never looked back.

And Tripp’s father had never recovered, never looked for another woman. Only for comfort in the bottle.

Kaley bit her lip as she frowned in thought. And somehow, someway, she’d gotten half a notion that Tripp blamed himself for his family’s dissolution. Though that was crazy. How could an eight-year-old be to blame?

But I bet I know one thing—where his mom meant to go while she stashed her son at the matinee. If anyone should be blaming herself for what had happened…

Yet, maybe she had shouldered the blame. Maybe in the end, Mrs. McGraw hadn’t so much run to her lover as fled from her guilt, emblazoned on her small son’s cheek for all the world to see. Every time she’d looked at his poor little face, it must have stabbed her to the heart.

WHEN THEY REACHED the Ribbon River Dude Ranch, Kaley stayed in her car while Tripp and Dana unbuckled the children from their seats. A tall, dark man walked out the back door of the Victorian farmhouse onto the wide deck, called a question, then came down the steps at a bound.

Standing with his big hands on Dana’s shoulders, he listened to her for a moment, then swept her and their baby into a fierce embrace. Tripp stood by, examining the stars for the first minute of that hug. Then he shrugged and carried Petra, still babbling and waving her chubby hands, to the screen door, where he passed her to the gangly, teenage boy who’d made an appearance. Returning, Tripp patted Dana’s shoulder in passing, said something with a grin to the man who still held her and came on to Kaley’s car.

“Reckon Rafe’ll forgive her the coyote,” he said, straight-faced, as he dropped into his seat next to Kaley.

So Dana was one of the lucky ones, Kaley mused as she drove the long gravel road out to the highway. She felt more than a passing twinge of envy. Not once in the past eight years had she been hugged like that.

And before Richard? Her eyes flicked to her companion. That had been different. That had been all about sex. They’d been young and greedy and couldn’t get enough of each other. But their romance had been nothing to build a life on, nothing to last.

Or it would have lasted.

TRIPP DIDN’T SPEAK till they could see the lights of Trueheart twinkling in the distance. “Can I buy you a burger at Mo’s? I’m ’bout ready to gnaw my boots.”

The last time she’d eaten at Mo’s Truckstop had been with Tripp, nine years ago, on her spring break from college. Lingering over coffee, hands clasped across the table, they’d planned their modest wedding, which was scheduled for June. By then Tripp would be done with spring roundup, and she’d have completed her freshman year at Oberlin.

Marriage had seemed so easy and right as they’d sat there. So…so attainable. All they had to do was hang on for three more lonely months, then happiness was theirs. Kaley cleared her throat and managed to find a level voice. “Mo’s sounds good.”

INSIDE THE TRUCK STOP, Tripp chose the same booth they’d always taken—their booth, Kaley had thought of it, way back when. Afraid to meet his eyes and find the memories lurking there, she ducked her head over the dog-eared menu.

“Steakburger with fries?” Tripp asked quietly. What she—both of them—had always ordered.

But she was a different person now, a believer in easy and right no longer. Life wasn’t that simple. “Something lighter, I think. Maybe a grilled breast of chicken if Mo—” But no, Mo was still holding the high-cholesterol line. Nothing on his menu but cow or deep-fried.

“Go back to the city,” Tripp jeered, halfway between teasing and something sharper. “You’ll find a yuppie sandwich on every corner.”

Wish on. “I’m here to stay, Tripp.” She looked him straight in the eye, and ordered a steakburger when the waitress came.

They called a tacit truce over Mo’s meltingly tender strip steaks, sticking to small, safe topics while they ate. Kaley explained that Whitey had refused to consult a doctor, so she’d gone to Durango for crutches.

She wanted to know how Tripp had made it down from the high country so soon. She hadn’t expected to see him back for a day or so yet, but she learned that he’d ridden only halfway. He’d trailered his packhorses up and back through Suntop land, a shortcut Rafe Montana permitted his closest neighbors.

She asked after Tripp’s brother, and learned that Mac was working for a rodeo stock contractor out of Laramie, serving as a pickup man in the bronc events, also doing his own share of bull riding.

Riding those horned freight trains—now that sounded like Mac McGraw, macho from his boot heels to his eyebrows. He was devil-may-care, where his big brother was the steady one. The caring one, she’d once thought.

Tripp asked how she’d liked teaching high-school English, so she tossed off a few war stories—the laughable times and the ones where you wanted to tear out your hair in frustration. The kids were the very best of the bargain. All the hurdles the bureaucrats placed between you and actual teaching—that was the worst of it.

“Are you thinking about teaching in Trueheart?” he asked after he’d ordered coffee and she’d wistfully passed.

She stifled a stinging retort, remembering how he’d protested when she went away to college in Ohio, where Oberlin College had offered her a full scholarship. How hard she’d had to work to persuade him that this was a good thing, the smart thing, her getting her B.A. and certification to teach. Because once she was certified, he could run his ranch and she could help him, but if beef prices kept dropping, she’d be able to teach in Trueheart or Cortez or Durango and carry them over the rough spots.

All the same, Tripp had hated her running off to the city. Had said she’d never be satisfied with ranching life after that. Yet now here he was asking, as if he’d thought up the idea himself!

“I’ve considered it,” she said slowly, swallowing her resentment. Teaching had been part of her plan when she’d thought that Jim was still in the picture. Her baby would be born in April. Then, assuming that her daughter was healthy, that the antibiotic hadn’t…harmed her, by the following September the baby would be old enough to do without her mother for eight hours a day, if an outside job proved to be necessary. Kaley didn’t like it, knew she’d hate leaving her baby, but it was no more than most single mothers had to do.

Tripp leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “That’s what you should do, Kaley, if you want to stay in Colorado. Take a teaching job here—or even better in Durango. Or Boulder. It’d be more like what you’re used to, a real city.”

Kaley shook her head. She was done with cities. When she’d settled for a shallow life in the city with a shallow man was when her life had taken its wrong turn. Besides, her plan didn’t work anymore now that Jim had flown away. She couldn’t both manage her ranch and teach.

“You should do that,” Tripp insisted, his callused fingertips whitening on the tabletop. “I’m offering the appraised value on your land. It’s fair—Jim hired the appraiser himself. You should take your half of the money and buy a nice little house in Durango or Denver or—”

“Or maybe Miami,” she cut in. “Or how about Spain? Would that be far enough for you?” As his eyebrows drew together, she shook her head. “Get used to it, Tripp. I’m not selling.” So much for truces!

“You’re not selling. Yeah, that’s big talk,” he snapped. “But the question is, can you keep? You understand I can call your loan anytime after shipping day? That it’s all due—the forty thou plus interest, all in one balloon payment?”

If Tripp insisted on full payback, there was no way she could keep the ranch—she was as good as sunk. Bad enough to be at anyone’s mercy, but to be at this man’s? How much mercy had he shown her the last time? “Jim walked right into that one, didn’t he?” she said bitterly. “He’s always too impatient to read the fine print.”

Tripp’s face darkened; his scar went pale. “You’re saying I tricked your brother? Pulled a fast one?”

Whoa, girl! Her temper had grabbed the bit and run right away with her. But this wasn’t the cynical city, where slick moves were a given. This was Trueheart, where the Code of the West still held. Where a man would fight for his honor and his good name, sometimes to the death. She drew a breath, sighed it out, and shook her head slowly. No, her brother had been a fool, but he’d needed no help in that, or received any. “No, Tripp, I’m…not saying that. Don’t believe it.”

When still he waited with narrowed eyes, she added reluctantly, “Sorry. I’m sorry…I know you’re just looking out for yourself. But then, so am I. I want to keep the ranch in my family.” Below the edge of the table, she touched her stomach for luck. “Is that so hard to understand?”

“Wanting’s one thing, Kaley,” Tripp said bleakly. “Everyone wants. But doing?” He stood up from the table. “That’s another.”