HER MOUTH WENT STILL beneath his. Even the fire went still.
He wondered at the warm softness, tasted the coffee and the 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 like she liked it.
Like she needed it.
She lifted her hand and laid it on his neck, sure and sweet, like she needed him.
What could a man like him have to offer a woman like her? Gordon had given her everything she wanted and that expectation was ingrained in her as a child, never mind a few wild young years in a rodeo trailer.
When she touched his lips with the very tip of her tongue, he let his meet it.
What he had remembered all those years had not been one thousandth of the reality. Memories fade over time—he’d known that but hadn’t realized how much.
She got up on her knees and reached to put her arms around his neck, leaning to him, asking to come into his arms. He wrapped them around her and pulled her onto his lap while they deepened the kiss.
Andie Lee settled into his crossed legs and laid her palm against his face, brushing her thumb like a feather across his cheek while she stroked the line of his jaw. He couldn’t remember when he’d last felt any caress, any at all. It cut through his body like the blade of a knife and into his mind.
He couldn’t let himself want it. He was free, but not for this. He had forgotten how much just a kiss could do to a man.
So he caught her wrist, held her hand against his chest, and kissed her harder for one more heartbeat, then took his mouth away.
She gasped and collapsed against him. The light of the moon was strong enough to make dark pools of her eyes and gold of her hair.
“Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t going to knock your hat off.”
He was still holding her wrist. He couldn’t seem to make his fingers open to let go.
“My hair,” he said. “Don’t touch it.”
Not yet. Not ever.
“Why not?”
“It’s my power. No one but me touches it.”
“Ever?”
“Only someone who walks in my soul,” he said.
She didn’t ask, just questioned him with her eyes.
“Lots of Indians have that tradition, not just Cherokee.”
“You’re Cherokee?”
“Less than half blood.”
“Less than half of anything doesn’t compute with you,” she said, sure as if she really knew him.
He let go of her wrist and used both arms to pull her closer, for just one instant.
She nestled against him like she needed a place to hide and he held her a little longer. She was no longer looking at him. She’d tucked her head under his chin and was staring out into the night.
“That’s a beautiful way to say it,” she said. “‘Walk in my soul.’ But it sets the bar too high. Who ever finds a soul mate? How many of you men find somebody who can touch your hair?”
He held her a little closer, just for one long breath.
“You’re asking the wrong man,” he said. “We’d better get some sleep, Andie Lee.”
“Yes,” she said, dryly, and turned to glance up at him with a little grin. “I need to rest my jaw.”
He opened his arms and she left him.
Once they lay in their bedrolls, it wasn’t long until her breathing evened out and slowed for sleep. She must be worn to a frazzle from her feelings alone, much less the long ride.
Anybody could tell by looking at her that she hadn’t been raised working in the saddle all day. Gordon had given her her every heart’s desire—she had grown up in a life of ease down at the big house while Blue had been starting colts for the public at the age of twelve and riding in the youth rodeos for money prizes.
Gordon hadn’t cared one whit about him or what his heart’s desires might be. Andie Lee had spent all her childhood in a life of luxury where she expected everything she wanted to be handed to her and he had scrabbled and risked his neck for everything his family needed, not wanted. The wants that he’d been able to satisfy had been few and far between.
The end result of those two, far-different childhoods meant that he and Andie Lee would always be on completely different paths of thinking and feeling and going about living life. It was like two horses trained to different purposes.
Blue stared up at the moon and stars. Tonight, up here on the mountain, every one of them looked close enough to put his hands on.
Andie Lee looked close, too, over there in her bedroll, and she had felt close in his arms. But she was every bit as far away as those stars. If he reached for one, the impossible distance between him and them would strike him like a lance to the heart.
His code was all he had left. It demanded that he see the truth and face it.
He was alone. His loneness lived all through him, in his flesh and bones and soul as deep as the stars and moon stood high above him. That would always be. He was a natural loner and most of the time it felt right to him.
Yet, tonight he wished it wasn’t so.
BLUE MUST HAVE SLEPT, but not very deep or very long, because when he woke with a startle he knew instantly where he was.
The moon rode high. The grass smelled fresh with dew. He could hear the creek running. Somewhere, far off, an owl hooted. But none of that was what had waked him.
He turned his head and saw Andie Lee’s bright hair against the dark of her bedroll.
Do you think Shane would shoot at me?
Both of them were clearly lit by the moon. He had no weapon and no idea where her gun was.
He listened. The owl again, then nothing but a light breeze in the limbs.
He sat up.
A pale ghost horse came walking. A spirit horse, materializing out of the dark, heading straight toward him. Its hooves made no sound on the thick grass.
The roan? He was asleep, dreaming the roan.
Blue’s throat locked on his breath.
Already it was within six or eight yards of his bed. It was his horse and it was real. Coming from the north, the direction of trouble.
Blue crossed his ankles and got to his bare feet in one motion, already reaching to touch the horse. The colt had been through no telling what kind of hell to get back to Blue.
Roanie carried his head low and a load on his back. He looked to be lame on the left front but he walked faster, anyway, when Blue stepped off into the wet, cool grass to go meet him.
The smell of blood stung the sharp air.
Moonlight poured over the sack with a stick in it that was tied to the saddle, but even with that much light it took Blue’s eyes and brain an instant or two to make sense of what he was seeing. A person’s rump and skinny back with…an arrow through it? Yes, that was the fletching and the shaft protruding from a body tied hanging facedown over the saddle like somebody dead in a Western movie.
The head and arms dangled in the shadows on the near side. Light-colored hair, skinny arms. Here was Shane.
The colt came up to him and stopped, immediately resting that leg. Murmuring to him, Blue stroked his neck and moved along his side until he could lift Shane’s head with his other hand. Blood ran from his nose, but not heavily. His cheeks were rubbed raw from hitting the rough old saddle leathers. His eyes were closed.
“Andie Lee!”
No way to break it to her gently. His fingers found the pulse in Shane’s neck. Weak and thready, but definitely moving there beneath the thin skin that was cold enough to be dead.
His face looked dead. The arrowhead had gone all the way through his thin body, back to front. That dark river running down the roan’s front leg was blood. Damn it to hell, the point had stabbed Blue’s horse with every step he’d taken.
He lifted Shane by the shoulders, thin and delicate as bird bones. The rope held the rest of his limp body hard to the saddle.
“Bring the knife, Andie Lee.”
“What? What is it?”
He glanced back and saw that she was awake now and scrambling to her feet.
“My horse and your boy. Shot up and cut up, but alive.”
She screamed. “Shot?”
“With a crossbow. And tied to the saddle. Bring me that knife.”
When the boy came to, if he did, he’d be in as much or more pain as the horse. Depending, of course, on how he’d medicated himself before getting into this new bit of trouble.
Blue supported the kid’s head with one hand and stroked the horse with the other. At least Shane would know why he was suffering but the horse never would.
He stepped back and aside so the moonlight would show him the shoulder of the colt.
It was chopped to a sickening, bloody pulp. He glimpsed raw muscle and bone.
Fury flared so hot from his gut he couldn’t think. Stupid, stupid waste. More waste, even more needless waste piled on top of the fried brain in this boy’s hollow head that he held in his hand.
Weak, goddamned, stupid drug-addicted worthless ungrateful piece-of-shit junkie kid.
Hours. There was dried and drying blood as well as fresh. Hour upon hour this good horse had suffered. Despite the pain, he had not tried to rub Shane off on a tree. He’d taken hundreds and hundreds of steps, thousands of steps—for the small tip of the arrow to do this much damage one jab at a time.
Goddamn all drug dealers to the lowest, hottest hell. If Shane hadn’t been high enough to be running around climbing out of windows and stealing guns and horses, none of this would’ve happened.
He reached over the saddle and felt the scabbard on the other side. Gordon’s rifle was still there.
“Here.” Andie Lee, barefoot and breathless, holding out the knife, ran to him, her eyes straining to see Shane. “How bad is he?”
She slipped her hand beneath Blue’s to take Shane’s head and shoulders.
“I’ve got you now, Shane,” she murmured. “Mom’s here. It’s gonna be okay, son. It’s okay. Hang on. Hang on, now.”
She found the pulse for herself as she threw one quick glance at Blue.
“An arrow? In the middle of the night?”
He shrugged as he worked on finding a place on the rope loose enough to slip the knife under.
“Could’ve been before dark. There’s dried blood beneath the fresh.”
She bent to look at the boy’s face and the arrowhead.
“Did he go to meet someone? Who? Do you suppose he met some new lowlife in jail and was going to meet him? Is this a drug deal gone bad? If Shane had a supply of drugs hidden with the knife…”
She straightened up and looked at Blue across the saddle.
“He was in a cell by himself,” she said. “But he could’ve talked to somebody in another one, I guess.”
“Could be anybody,” Blue said, bending over to cut the rope from around Shane’s ankles.
“Maybe campers, poachers, anybody who didn’t have permission from Gordon to be on his property,” Andie Lee said. “He’s known to be tough about that, and if they were doing something illegal…”
She stopped talking to concentrate on feeling Shane’s pulse in his wrist.
Blue cut the last section of rope and pulled at one end of it.
“If he slides, I’ll catch him,” he said, but Shane lay as if glued to the saddle.
“Careful,” she said, helping to lift him. “Don’t disturb the arrow at all.”
“It’s rocked up and down with every step this horse has taken for God only knows how long,” Blue said, spitting the hard words out from between his teeth. “The damage is done.”
“Believe me,” she snapped, “there can always be more damage done.”
Blue lifted the knotted reins from the saddle horn and threw them over Roanie’s head to ground-tie the colt, although he doubted the poor horse would want to take another step.
“Let me have him,” he said.
Andie Lee leaned over the saddle and kept Shane’s head supported until Blue gathered the limp body into his arms. He held him out away from his body so as not to bump against the arrow as he carried him.
“Hurry,” she said, barely breathing the word.
The boy felt too far gone for hurry to do him a bit of good.
Anger surged in Blue. Damn it, here he was again, saddled with an impossible responsibility.
All he had to do now was get a desperate mother, a wounded kid and a lame horse down the mountain before the boy died on them. How many rough, steep miles were they from any real help?
Andie Lee ran ahead and pulled her bedroll closer to the fire as she headed to her pack for her medical bag and the flashlight.
Shane hardly weighed as much as a sack of feed. Who would guess he could do, and did, as much damage as a three-hundred pound gorilla every time he got a chance?
“Lay him there and we’ll get him warm,” Andie Lee called, looking back over her shoulder. “On his right side.”
When Blue bent over the bedroll with Shane, she came toward them, saying, “Careful, careful. Slow and easy.”
Blue dropped to his haunches and followed her orders.
She knelt to look the boy over, opening her medicine bag without glancing at it. Lightly, she touched his chest near the arrow.
“Yes, the blood on his shirt’s been there awhile,” she muttered.
She adjusted the light and looked at the situation some more, then lifted Shane’s lids and looked into his eyes.
“I don’t know what all’s in his system,” she said.
Then she turned to look at Blue with worry all over her face but her jaw set against it.
“Your bedroll,” she said. “Blue, will you bring it? We need to cover him.”
Blue brought the blankets to her and then went to add more wood and stir up the fire.
“We need heat,” she said, “but I hate to draw attention. Do you suppose whoever did this is still after him?”
“No,” Blue said. “Not if they left him alive and tied him to the saddle.”
She lifted her head and stared into the distance for a minute.
“Right,” she said, nodding. “That almost makes it seem like it might’ve been an accident and they wanted the horse to take him home.”
“Or just didn’t want him found anywhere near the place where they were.”
She thought about that, too.
Then she said, talking to herself more than to him, “I can’t worry about that now. Blue, I’ve got a quilted brown Carhartt over there in my pack. Would you get it so I can prop Shane up with it?”
He got it for her and watched her roll it up and wedge it into the small of Shane’s back.
“That’ll keep him from falling over backwards,” she said. “We’ll have to use something else in the front.”
Quickly, still kneeling beside her boy, she pulled a cell phone from her jeans pocket and turned it on. Staring at it, she shook her head. She turned it to another angle in the light as if that might show her something different.
“Damn it,” she muttered, punching in numbers anyway, and held it to her ear.
“No hope,” she said, stuffing it back into her pocket. “No service. We’ll have to get back to the head of the shortcut to use it. I checked that out on the way up here.”
“We need one of Gordon’s radios.”
“Nobody in the vehicles this time of night,” she said.
She looked at the sky.
“I hope and pray we can get him out of here alive,” she said. “It’s a good thing there are two of us—I’m so glad I don’t have to try to get him onto a horse by myself. How long is it ’til first light?”
She didn’t expect an answer. She wore a watch on her arm. She dropped to her knees beside Shane and reached for her bag.
“Damn it” was right.
Blue went to get the roan horse.
It’s a good thing there are two of us.
The connection he’d felt when they kissed tugged at him. He pushed it away.
He should’ve stayed at the ranch and let Micah come with her, let the roan horse take his chances. If he had, he would’ve missed the kiss, too, and that would’ve been for the best.
Andie Lee didn’t need him, Blue Bowman. There was nothing personal between them.
She had needed to kiss him in the same way she needed him to lift her boy onto a horse and get him safely to a doctor.
In the way of any human being seeking comfort from another.
In the way of a woman needing a man. Any man.
Well, what was wrong with that? Hadn’t he kissed her only because it’d been so long since he’d been near any woman?
BLUE HELD THE HORSE and watched the boy while Andie Lee gave the roan a shot of Banamine and flushed the wound with water. He listened for possible bow-shooters in the woods because, no matter what he’d said to Andie Lee, lowlifes who would shoot a kid in the back were hard to predict.
They both watched the sky, waiting for the moon to set and the sun to rise. Willing the light to come.
She’d quit talking, except for what was necessary, and had gone tight-lipped and scared. Not his problem. Not his business. All he could do was try to take her son down the mountain alive.
After that, they were on their own. He was fighting such a fury at the boy and worry for the horse that it was almost too much to keep inside. It hurt Blue to look at Shane in this condition, and it made him sick to think that the foolish kid might not live through this latest escapade of his, but damn it all to hell, he could hardly contain his anger at him. The roan colt was an innocent victim of all Shane’s insanity. Not only was he suffering, but he might always be lame. He might even have to be put down.
“The pack saddle’s best for Shane,” he said. “The high crossties will hold him better. We can pad the seat.”
She jerked her head up.
“Tie him on? We can’t do that.”
“You’re the one who said not to disturb the arrow.”
“I won’t,” she said. “I’m not as big as you are and I can sit at an angle.”
“He’ll still have to be tied. You’re not strong enough to hold his weight all day long.”
“Yes, I am,” she said.
She worked on the roan some more, then threw her things back into her box and stood up to look at Blue.
“If Shane was lashed on to a separate horse that spooked and got away from us, I’d never get over it,” she said. “His head would be smashed into a tree limb in a heartbeat. No.”
Her flat tone fired his anger and he welcomed it.
“Well, then, if you don’t trust my decisions, make your own,” he said.
She turned, fast, and looked at him. “Shane didn’t mean for your horse to get hurt. Look at him. He couldn’t protect him if he was unconscious!”
“He wasn’t unconscious when he took him,” Blue said. “Just crazy from whatever drugs he was pumping into his system.”
The look on her face made him wish he’d kept his mouth shut. But she might as well face the truth. Her little plan to have Blue and the horses save her child accomplished nothing but the ruination of a good horse.
“Time to break camp,” he said.
They put food and water for the day into their canteens and saddlebags, wrapped the rest of the packs, and saddled the packhorse first, arranging the burdens evenly but not nearly so neatly as Micah had done.
Andie Lee went to get Shane ready. Blue banked the fire and covered it with ashes.
First light was creeping silently in over the grass as he saddled the riding horses. He brought Andie Lee’s horse to her.
“Get on,” he said. “I’ll hand him up.”
She mounted, then shifted to sit behind the seat. She helped steady Shane’s shoulders as Blue set him on the horse.
“Let’s wedge him in with the blankets and that jacket,” she said, and, as Blue gave them to her, she arranged them in the saddle with Shane one at a time until she got it all the way she wanted it.
They left the Sevenmile camp before good daylight, riding single file with the packhorse tied to Andie Lee’s saddle and the roan to Blue’s. At least he had his horse back alive. For now.
He didn’t see how he could come out of this sound. If a bad infection set in, he might not come out of it at all.
With one horse carrying double and the roan horse lame, it was slow going. Blue tried to push the worries out of his mind and concentrate on what had to be done. He watched the way ahead, looking for overhanging limbs and rocks that would slide, warning Andie Lee when he found them. She was game, he had to hand her that. She never once called for a rest until they reached a spot where she thought her cell phone might work. It didn’t.
He made them stop a couple of times, to give the roan a breather, but not for long. The kid still hadn’t made a sound and every time Blue glanced back, Shane’s head was lolling worse. Andie Lee was trying to steady it with one hand, hold him upright with the other, and still not hit the protruding arrow or let it hit her.
The first day he’d been in prison had been the longest he could ever endure. That had been his judgment for a long, long time but as the years stretched on and on, he’d decided that he might’ve been wrong. Somehow, the very sameness had made some of the later prison days seem nearly eternal.
Now this free day seemed to be a contender. He hadn’t carried such a burden since he’d tried so hard to fix Dannie for Rose.
He remembered his rule about regrets and pulled his mind back from the past. He looked at the roan horse, who was his present—at least for a little while—and more regrets attacked him. He couldn’t think about it. He could not, would not, let himself think what might happen.
He had to keep his focus on the present, on the moment, and on the good instead of the bad. He had this marvelous country to ride in. He was free. Before sundown, he’d be free of this damaged, pitiful boy and his mother, too.
“Stay with us, Roanie,” he said. “We’re on the cutoff. Won’t be long now.”
It was, though. He judged the way ahead, he glanced back to make sure they were both still on top of the gray horse, he gauged the roan’s strength. Over and over again.
He probably did it more times than he threw the halter at Roanie that first day.
He did it until they came within sight of the open valley below and Andie Lee hollered for him to stop.
Blue turned to see her put the cell phone to her ear again. As he watched, she threw up her head, eyes shining, and started talking into it, one hand holding on to Shane’s shoulder. In a minute, she was done.
“I got Micah!” she said, as she dropped the phone into the pocket of her vest. “He’s calling the rescue helicopter to meet us on top of Butte Hill. Then he’ll bring the truck and trailer up there by the logging road so your roan colt doesn’t have to walk so far.”
“Give me directions,” Blue said.
“Take the left in the fork up ahead,” she said. “It’s less than a mile.”
From then on, things happened fast. From the fork, it was more than a mile, but not a lot more to the small butte that rose above the valley. It was a natural landing pad—open tabletop hilltop ringed by trees on the mountainside.
They could see headquarters from there, in a much smaller version than from Micah’s hill, and, as they rode out onto the top of the butte, they thought they saw the old man driving up the road with his truck and trailer to come to meet them.
They talked about it like two yearning little kids.
“I don’t know,” Blue said. “It’s been a while since you called. Micah would’ve left sooner, I’m thinking.”
“It’s taken him a while to make the arrangements,” she said. “And besides, why get here before we could?”
Something inside Blue let go and his tension eased a little bit. Help was coming.
But something even deeper in his gut tightened still more. Hurt. Shane had really hurt Blue and it wasn’t all about the horse. He hardened his jaw and his heart. He wasn’t going to give anybody that power over him, ever again. Yet this time, it was already done.
He made himself look at the still, silent boy.
“At least we got him here alive,” he said.
Now, if the emergency crew would hurry, he’d be able to hand him off to them still breathing. That’d be one point in the column opposite all Blue’s failures.
Yet the very fact that they were here was another one on the minus side, wasn’t it?
“It’s a road with a lot of switchbacks,” Andie Lee said. “It’ll take Micah a while.”
Blue got down and held Shane in the saddle while she slid off the gray’s rump and took one of the bedrolls with her to lay Shane on. When it was ready, she came back and helped Blue take him off the horse.
Once the boy was stretched out on the ground, Andie Lee started checking him out all over again.
“Doesn’t seem any worse for the ride,” she said. “Everything’s about the same. Oh, Blue, his pulse is so weak! It’s steady, though.”
On her knees, she twisted around to look at Blue and the roan.
“Do you suppose he’s in a coma for life?” she asked, her voice cracking.
Blue shook his head.
“Not in my line of work,” he said. “You’ll have some expert help here any minute.”
“Any hour,” she said, turning back to look at her unmoving son. “They fly out of Helena.”
Blue couldn’t bear to look at either one of them. The boy did look dead and Andie Lee looked like she could believe he was.
“Is the horse bleeding again?” she asked.
She started to get up and go to him, but she couldn’t leave the boy. Somehow that one tiny hesitating motion made his heart hurt for her. That pity eased his anger a little.
“Some,” he said.
“Well, it has to heal from the inside out,” she said. “It’ll have to be flushed and cleaned every day to prevent infection and he’ll need to be hand-walked. Of course, keep him stalled.”
She looked down at Shane.
“I’ll take care of Roanie when I’m there, but you’ll have to do it while Shane’s in the hospital, which may be quite a while.”
Blue realized that he knew her well enough to read the message underneath the words.
She was hoping he’d have a long stay. Instead of one just long enough to put a tag on his toe.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “You can’t heal him, anyway.”
“Shane didn’t mean…” she said, but her voice trailed off.
Blue saw in her eyes that she knew that the old “Sorry, I was too drunk to know what I was doing,” excuse was all she had.
He would’ve said that but he didn’t want to be as mean as Gordon.
They looked at each other while the rattling, banging sounds of Micah’s rig began to float through the air.
“You were right,” she said. “That wasn’t Micah we saw.”
“No,” he said.
“Before he gets here and starts doing all the talking, I want to say how grateful I am to you,” she said.
He didn’t even want to hear it. He clenched his teeth together so he wouldn’t yell at her about how completely unnecessary every bit of this pain and trouble was.
“Anybody would’ve done the same,” he said.
“No,” she said, “because not just anybody’s unbroke two-year-old would’ve done what yours did.”
He looked at her.
“I’ll always be grateful that you’re the horseman you are. I’ll never forget it.”
Well. Damn. He wasn’t just any horseman but he was just any man. One she might think back and remember once every ten years or so.
That thought made him mad at himself. Why should he care what she thought of him or whether she would ever remember him?
He didn’t.