“ANDIE LEE, you don’t want to love me.”
She paled so fast it scared him.
But what scared him more was the chasm opening inside him. What had he done?
He’d just held heaven in his arms and then thrown it away. Love. She loved him. She’d said it and she meant it and it was true because he’d seen it in her eyes, felt it in her every touch, and known it in the core of his being by the way she wrapped herself around him and held him inside her as if she would never let him go.
The world was full of men who would kill for that kind of love. Who would kill for any kind of love.
And he was going to kill the love itself. He’d already done it.
“Do you want to say that again?” She sounded dangerous enough to kill him. “Are you telling me that you have spent ten years locked up in prison and come out to this—” she made a wide gesture with her long, graceful arm that included the earth and the sky and the makeshift bed they’d just slept on “—and you are intending, deliberately, to get sent back there?”
“I won’t get caught,” he said.
He sounded as foolish as Shane had, saying the same thing. But he had to say it aloud to counter her. Spoken words could make predictions come true.
“Now you say ‘Andie Lee, you don’t want to love me’? Now you say it, when you know I already do.” Her voice broke a little on the last word, but she recovered.
“After you make such sweet love to me that no woman could ever forget it—or get over it. After you make me crazy for you, Blue Bowman!”
The words thrilled him through while the scorn that was burning so hot in her eyes scorched him where he sat. He was a fool. Forty kinds of a fool. People just didn’t get this kind of love. Not one in ten thousand. In a hundred thousand.
Especially not after living the life he’d lived. He’d never known anyone who’d had a love like this.
Except for Rose, loving Gordon all her life.
Gordon. Who had to die for what he’d done to that good woman’s heart.
“I feel so betrayed,” Andie Lee cried. “All this time you’ve been Gordon’s son, and you never told me! I thought we were friends, Blue.”
She held him with a piercing look.
“You’ve been a fake all along, hiding behind your horsemanship, pretending to care about Shane and your colt and Micah and every two-year-old in the ketch pen when all you were here for was plotting murder. You could’ve just left me out of it, Blue. You didn’t have to make love to me and stomp all over my heart!”
“I haven’t been hiding,” he said. “I’ve been honest with you.”
Her eyes blazed. “Up to a point! Honest about your past sins, but not your future ones.”
She glared at him for a long minute.
“You’ve got to be kidding me, right? Gordon’s son? Plans to kill him?”
She shook her head no, her bright hair catching the sun and throwing it into his eyes.
“You can’t be serious, Blue. You can’t be truly meaning to do this.”
“He deserves to die. My mother loved him her whole life and he killed her. He made her want to run her car into a tree.”
“And I don’t suppose your being incarcerated for murder had anything to do with her feelings of depression?”
Her sarcasm cut him like the blade of a knife.
He tried to ignore it.
“He killed Dannie, too,” he said. “I told you he refused when my mother asked him to pay for her treatment. If he’d said yes he could’ve saved her.”
She waited, her fuming silence demanding more.
It did sound a little weak to his own ears, but that was because he was thinking of Andie Lee and how she was hearing it.
Killing that SOB has been your life’s purpose—your reason for living—for ten endless years, Bowman. You know it has to be done.
“That’s all that got me through prison,” he said. “Planning to kill him.”
“And now you’re out,” she snapped. “And free. And you just can’t wait to get back inside those walls and bars so they can throw away the key. What’ll get you through the next ten years in there? And this time it’ll be more than ten, I’ll bet you.”
It did sound like a stupid mistake he was about to make, instead of like one of the hard things of life that needed to be done.
But he didn’t know how to love her.
And he did know how to kill.
“I’m not going back in,” he said stubbornly.
Andie Lee acted as if he hadn’t said a word.
“We have just made love like this…”
She connected him, her, and the bed between them in one graceful sweep. The movement outlined the creamy curve of her breast against the blue sky in an image that would stay in his eye forever.
“…yet you’re choosing to go where there’s no love at all?”
“I don’t have a choice,” he said.
“Bullshit,” she said. “Then why’d you tell Shane that he had one?”
“This is different,” he said, getting to his feet, stomping into his boots. “Gordon could’ve saved Dannie and, at the same time, saved me ten years in hell. He could’ve saved Rose, but he didn’t. He was too damn selfish.”
It was a groove in his mind. In his bones. It was the only way he knew how to think.
“Killing him won’t bring them back.”
“Somebody has to do the hard things,” he said. “Dannie and Rose deserve to be avenged. I have to give them justice.”
“The troubles of this world are nothing to them now,” she said. “And even if they were alive they wouldn’t want you to do this. Gordon is what he is and what he’s always been.”
“He’s the reason I’m alone in the world.”
“You don’t have to be alone in the world,” she said. It was a challenge.
“Andie Lee, I can’t love anybody.”
He reached for his shirt as he got to his feet.
“Have you ever?” Another challenge.
“Only my mother and sister. All that’s past for me.”
He threw the shirt on and looked down to button it. The relief of escaping her disdainful stare was almost physical.
“I never meant to make love with you again,” he said. “I didn’t mean to lead you on.”
“Go,” she said, in that low terrible voice. “Get out of my sight. Stay away from my son.”
She got up then, like a whirlwind, and stepped into her jeans.
“If you are going to throw away what we could have together so you can go back to hell, get out of my sight. Never come back.”
She snatched up her shirt off the grass as he turned away.
BLUE GOT BACK to Micah’s but it was the bay colt’s doing that brought him there. By the time he dismounted at the barn, he couldn’t remember one sight or sound since he left Andie Lee.
He couldn’t feel anything, either, except for a strange constriction in his chest and a sharp pain in his gut. Desperately, he looked around for something to do, something to channel his mind on to something else.
The chores were already done. He took care of the bay and then went to see Roanie. He caressed the soft muzzle and let the horse snuffle at his hand. Then he drooped his arm around the colt’s neck and laid his weary head against it.
Roanie tolerated him only for a moment, then he pulled away and moved restlessly around the stall. He kicked the wall.
“I thought you’d quit that,” Blue said. “I was thinking you were half-civilized by now.”
The horse pinned his ears and eyed Blue, curling his lip a little.
“You’re right,” Blue said. “I’m no better. People were thinking that about me, too.”
He felt the tug toward Andie Lee. Strong as ever. Stronger. Something in him wanted to go to her, stay with her, bury his face in her hair and wrap his arms around her. Hold on tight. Forever.
Give up this revenge. This killing.
But he couldn’t give it up. It was his purpose. It was all he had.
Roanie snorted and grabbed hold of the top of the wall with his teeth. Blue shushed at him and waved him away from it.
He jerked his thoughts away from his impossible dream.
“Don’t start taking up new bad habits,” he said. “You’re like me on that, too. You’ve got enough old bad ones.”
He would take the roan and go. Tonight. He was bound to see Andie Lee if he stayed on the place and besides, it was time. Past time. He had come here for a purpose. He wouldn’t even think about her anymore.
What a deal. He’d turned Shane around so he wasn’t breaking her heart anymore and then Blue had broken it himself. But she didn’t love him—she only thought she did. He wasn’t lovable. It was lust and she couldn’t tell the difference.
He would not think about her. Or try to imagine what the rest of his life would be like if he chose to change his plans and accept her love.
He would think about Gordon instead, and justice.
First thing he had to do was warn Gordon. He’d never feel right if he didn’t. It would go against his code.
His code was all he had.
BLUE REACHED for the horseshoe on the door knocker, then dropped his hand. What the hell was he doing? Come to warn a man for his life and knocking on the door? Might as well shake the old bastard up by proving he could surprise him.
He pulled open the screen and walked in onto the stone-floored entryway of the big house. The headquarters house of the Splendid Sky Ranch. The main house of the Wagontracks brand. The heavy oak door, standing wide, was branded at eye level with the two curving S’s.
“Gordon!”
The answer came instantly.
“In here!”
Of course he wasn’t surprising him. Gordon would’ve heard him drive up, since Micah’s truck wasn’t exactly a stealth bomber. Probably he’d even watched Blue get out of it—his voice and plenty of light were coming down a narrow hallway from a room fronting the porch.
Blue went in Gordon’s direction, glimpsing the old house surrounding him but not wanting to see it. Outside, the summer evening still held plenty of light, but inside it was almost dark. Some ancient photos in bowed-glass frames hung on the walls—probably Blue’s Campbell ancestors—and covering the wall all around the lighted door were some more recent pictures. Champion horses and prize cattle.
All of it might as well be on the moon, for all the time and inclination he had to look at them. Too late. It was all too late to do him any good.
Blue stepped into the lighted room.
Gordon sat behind an enormous desk piled with papers and folders, a large calculator and assorted stacks of mail, some opened and some not. He tilted his chair back and looked up at Blue.
For a long minute they looked at each other. Gordon gave no sign that it was unusual for Blue to be here.
“Sit,” he said, pointing to a leather-covered chair angled into the corner.
Blue said, “This won’t take long.”
Gordon cocked his head and raked Blue up and down with his bright eyes. Then he let out a big sigh and leaned toward him, crossing his arms on the sheets of paper spread out in front of him.
“Spit it out.”
“I’m the son of Tanasi Rose Bowman. Remember her?”
Gordon kept on looking at him without a flicker of feeling.
“The woman who had two children for you before she was twenty,” Blue said. “And raised them alone, barely making ends meet. The one who called you ten years ago asking for help for your daughter and you turned her down.”
Still no response.
“She ran her old car into a tree shortly after that. The impact killed her.”
No reaction.
Blue tried to be just as dispassionate, but the old rage in him was rising fast.
“She loved you all her life, you son of a bitch, and you killed her. That’s as sure as if you’d had hold of the wheel.”
Gordon leaned back in his chair.
“Why tell me this now?” he asked.
“To warn you for your life. I’m not the kind to shoot you in the back. I’m leaving tonight, but not for long. I came here to the Splendid Sky to kill you, Gordon.”
He looked Blue over again as if he’d never seen him before. Then he threw back his head and laughed.
“Gonna put me out of my misery, huh?”
He flicked one of the piles of letters with his finger.
“One more batch of bills like this one, and I don’t much care if you do.”
“Fine.”
Blue turned to go.
He heard the squeak of the chair’s springs and the thump of heels on wood. He turned back, thinking Gordon was coming after him.
But the old man had fixed his boot heels on the desk, ankles crossed, and leaned the chair back as far as it would go.
“Sit down,” he said, slanting his knowing glance up at Blue. “Next time we meet there’ll be no time for talk. Let me tell you about your mother.”
Blue froze.
Of course Gordon had to get the last word. And he knew just which word would do it.
But he was right. There’d never be another chance to hear about the mysteries that had dogged Blue all of his life. Rose was dead and Gordon soon would be.
Blue turned around and sat down in the chair.
“What about my mother?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute,” Gordon said, lifting one cautionary finger. “First, I’m not afraid to die but I want to give you some things to think about while you’re gone to get ready to try me.”
Their eyes locked as they took each other’s measure now that this threat lay open between them.
“I hope to God I don’t kill you,” Gordon said. “But that’d be about my luck, since all I want now in this world is for you and this ranch to be my legacy, living on after I’m gone.”
Blue stared, trying to get his mind around those words. He couldn’t.
“I brought you here, you bozo,” Gordon said. “I vouched for you as a parolee and got you out of prison and sent Micah to pick you up.”
A million unnamable feelings rose in a choking cloud in Blue’s gut.
“Why?”
“Because I had to see if you’re man enough to run this ranch.”
“I wouldn’t take it,” he said. “I wouldn’t take a crumb from you if I was starving to death.”
“You’re not thinking right,” Gordon said. “Pretty soon you will be.”
He grinned.
“This is a hell of a note. I offer to give you the world on a string and you say you’re out to kill me—and not for the inheritance, either.”
Blue’s head felt light and strange. His brain whirled to try to process it all.
“Don’t be an ass. You never acknowledged that I existed for thirty-five years.”
“Age and the specter of death can change a man.”
“You called me a jailbird that day on the hill. How do you know I wouldn’t sell every damn inch of this place as fast as I could sign the papers?”
Gordon shrugged.
“I don’t. It’s a guess. A hunch. I hired people to check you out seven ways to Sunday when I got this idea. I know every detail about your life, both before and after you killed that bum. I’ve seen some of your paintings.”
Blue felt the floor fall away beneath him.
“You had no right.”
Gordon ignored that. “I bought some of ’em. A man who paints the land and the sky the way you do—and from memory, too—he’s gonna take care.”
“You don’t know squat about me.”
Gordon waved that away. “Maybe not. But I know me. I want to leave this ranch to a child of mine and you’re the only one left.”
“What about Andie Lee?”
“She’s my child, too, and she’ll be well taken care of but I already told her: no woman can run this ranch. Besides, you’re my blood.”
“Fine time to acknowledge that,” Blue said sarcastically. “No. Leave it to somebody else. Anybody.”
Gordon’s gaze bored into Blue. “Anybody else is gonna divide and sell to the goddamned California crowd or the developers. I’ve worked my guts out to hold on to what my dad and granddaddy left me and add to it. I poured my life into taking care of the land and breeding my lines of cattle and horses.”
All I want now in this world is for you and this ranch to be my legacy.
That was an acknowledgement from Gordon that Blue was his son. He listened to it again in his mind.
Too little, too late.
“Breeding a new line of cattle or horses, either one, that takes a man’s whole lifetime,” Gordon said.
“So does raising the children he bred in five minutes,” Blue said.
He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. It sounded like he was begging for attention.
“It’s not like I never did a damn thing,” Gordon said. “I built that rehab center over there out of remorse for Dannah.”
Fury touched the cold lump that had filled Blue in these last few minutes.
“Yeah,” he drawled sarcastically. “After you wouldn’t spend five grand for my mother to get help for her before it was too late.”
Gordon didn’t flinch.
“Why else would I build such a thing and have all those squirrelly strangers on my place?”
His voice was as level as his look.
“Part of the reason I told Rose I wouldn’t help her with Dannah is that it made me mad as hell to hear from her then after she wouldn’t let me come near her or you and Dannah your whole lives,” he said.
Blue stared at him. Disbelieving him.
“Her pride,” Gordon said. “Her goddamned pride. That’s why she left me. Left Montana. Said if she couldn’t be my wife, she wouldn’t have another thing to do with me and neither would her kids.”
Gordon glowered at Blue.
“It didn’t matter to her that I loved her best. It didn’t mean a thing that she was the love of my life and I was hers. She knew that and said so. But did that move her, once she got that beautiful Cherokee head set to leave me?”
He shook his head, staring into the distance as if reliving that moment.
“No. It did not. Not come hell or high water.”
He looked at Blue again. “She thought I wouldn’t divorce and marry her because she was Indian.”
“Was it?”
“No, goddamn it. I had a wife who’d have taken me for everything I had! And a young son. I wouldn’t do that to him and let his mother take him away from here.”
He squinted at Blue, as if to gauge his reaction, and waited.
“You married Andie Lee’s mother. Why not mine?”
“I didn’t have the guts to risk my heart again after it was buried up there on the side of the mountain under three tons of snow. Besides, your mother wouldn’t even talk to me. Or listen to me.”
His face hardened into a bitter mask and he stared into space.
“I told her when she left Montana that she’d have to live with the consequences of her decision.”
His eyes caught Blue’s again.
“So my pride—not just hers—killed her. But that’s always been my code: people have to live with the consequences of the decisions they make. That’s another reason I wouldn’t send money to Dannah.”
He held Blue’s gaze ruthlessly.
“It’s the same reason I left you in prison for so long. Now I’m sorry about that, too. You’re a good man.”
A lump sprang up in Blue’s throat, which was stupid. This whole tirade was probably a pack of lies Gordon had thought up to save his life.
“You’re a top hand, Blue. With the horses and with Shane. You could keep this ranch together and make it even greater,” Gordon went on. “He really stood up that day I took him to turn Jason in to the police. He’s the only reason they caught him so fast, and that’s all your doing.”
Blue said nothing.
“Pass the ranch down to your son and make it eight generations in the same family.”
That was the first compliment Gordon had ever given him. And the first time he’d ever spoken his name with respect. The sound struck Blue’s heart with a clear power like the toll of a bell.
All kinds of tantalizing pictures of the future flashed before Blue’s eyes. Which was also stupid. Gordon couldn’t be trusted as far as he could throw him.
“I’m proud you’re my son, Blue.”
Listen to him now. After thirty-five years.
The words twisted in Blue’s gut like the blade of a knife.
“Blood’s not all that makes a son,” he said. “You’re years too late.”
He held Gordon’s gaze just as ruthlessly as Gordon had done his.
“You’ve made this ranch a coffin for yourself, Gordon,” he said, “by being totally selfish every day of your life. You’ve never given five minutes’ thought to anybody else. The fact that you’re still mad at my mother for not spending her life as your mistress proves that. And your precious rehab center over there is nothing but a sop for your guilt.”
But truth be told, Rose’s death wasn’t all Gordon’s fault. Her only living child being locked up in a prison hadn’t helped her situation any.
By his personal code, which was all Blue would ever have, he had to acknowledge that.
The phone on Gordon’s desk rang but he didn’t move.
“Now it’s you who’ll have to take the consequences of your decisions,” Blue said. “Going soft and sentimental in your old age won’t save your hateful hide.”
The phone kept ringing. Gordon picked up the receiver without taking his eyes from Blue’s. He listened for a second, then stood up and reached for his hat on the wall rack.
“Coming,” he barked. “Call Lupe to send her kids over here to ring the bell.”
He dropped the phone.
“Let’s go. Barn fire.”
They ran together, down the hall and out across the porch, talking in snatches of words.
“Which one?”
“Micah’s.”
The roan colt. Blue’s blood chilled, deep, like it hadn’t done for a long, long time. No way around it, he cared for that colt. A lot.
“Jason started it,” Gordon said, as they ran down the steps toward his truck. “He escaped. Same damn junkie friend of his smuggled him a knife. I’m gonna see to it that some heads roll over this.”
The smell of burning was already threading the air. Bittersweet. The sweet scent of burning wood mixed with the bitter odors of leather and hay and all the other things that were not made to burn. Blue looked back over his shoulder.
The worst of it was on the west end and the roan was stalled on the east end. Maybe he could get there in time.
Flames were eating the roof, sending the popping, crackling sound of their greed riding the wind even this far down into the valley.
“Damn him. Trying to get back at me by torching every barn on the place. Thank God Micah caught him at the first one.”
“Caught him? Or saw him?”
“Caught. He’s got ’im tied to the hitching post.”
The kids ran across the road as Blue and Gordon reached the new truck and threw themselves in. Gordon turned the key and the motor roared to life.
“Every barn on the place,” Gordon said, throwing it into reverse, talking loud over all the noise. “Stupid-ass kid. What would that accomplish? Nothing but suffering and dying for a bunch of innocent animals.”
That surprised Blue. Gordon talking about animals suffering and dying? Realizing that animals had feelings, too? Normally he didn’t seem to know other people had feelings.
Gordon backed around, shifted into drive, and stomped the gas pedal. Every move he made seemed slow, impossibly slow, to Blue.
Roanie must be going crazy with fear.
The wide-axled dually surged out onto the road as the bell began to ring. Up on the hill, flames were bursting higher and higher from the west end of the barn, reaching up against the sky like they were wanting to be part of the sunset.
“Vengeance,” Gordon growled. “Payback. As a rule, that’s damn cold comfort.”
The remark cut straight to Blue’s heart. Once he killed Gordon, would he feel satisfied? Would his mind and heart rest, feeling he’d righted the old wrongs? Or would that vengeance, too, be damn cold comfort?
Would he be on the run for the rest of his life, or locked on death row with no comfort to be found anywhere?
The truck shot up the road like an enormous bullet, but Blue still leaned forward, willing it to do more, trying to get there and get to his horse.
Nothing was worse than a fire in a horse barn. He’d only been around it once, but he’d never forget the screams of the horses and the smell of burning horseflesh. He clenched his fists and mashed his foot against the floorboard as if he were the one driving.
Andie Lee’s horses. He had to get them out, too. There was another heartbreak for her if he didn’t.
How could she even think she loved him? How could she think he was good enough for her to love?
She had to be mistaken. She’d said it’d been a long time for her, too, since she’d had a lover. She was mistaking that heavy, sultry desire they felt for love. It hit them like heat lightning every time they saw each other.
She was a giving kind of person and she just thought she loved him.
Where was she? Could she have been in the barn when this started?
Fear took him by the throat with both cold hands.
He had left her in the meadow and that hadn’t been all that long ago. Or had it? He’d lost all track of time.
No, it hadn’t, because the sunset still glowed.
He loved her.
He loved Andie Lee. That truth pierced Blue with a blade so sharp it sliced through the ten-year-old wall around his heart. He loved her. He didn’t mean to, he didn’t want to, but he did.
Even though he would’ve sworn that he could never love anybody, ever again. That he would never love anybody.
But his will had nothing whatever to do with it. His iron will was nothing but melting wax over the heat of his passion for Andie Lee.
It wouldn’t matter whether her love for him was real or not. He loved her. He couldn’t help it.
This must be the same way Rose had loved Gordon. She’d had no choice at all.
Gordon took the corner at full speed, slammed the truck across the ditch into Micah’s place and blasted on to the other end of the yard.
“No sense taking a chance on burning up this truck,” he muttered.
He cut the motor. They both fell out of the cab and started for the barn at a run.
Smoke was gathering and drifting in clouds everywhere—over and above and around a few people. Ashes blew in the wind and the fire whipped higher.
Dimly, Blue glimpsed Shane, struggling to hold Andie Lee’s big gray horse and lead it away from the barn. It kept trying to go back to the stall that still felt like a refuge from the chaos. From the corner of his eye, he saw a couple of hands trying to hook up a hose to the outside faucet at the house.
But still he didn’t see Andie Lee.
Then he did. Andie Lee. A wash of relief went through him as he ran.
She was struggling out through the east door to safety, leading a plunging horse with each hand, digging in her heels for balance, fighting to hold them both and keep them from turning back. She kept turning her head to see Micah, who was following her with two heads of his own. Flames leapt and danced deep in the barn aisle behind them—Blue saw them when the smoke cleared away for an instant. Then it was back again like a thick curtain.
Andie Lee kept coming through the smoke toward him, brave and strong and completely determined with her jaw set to show it. The smoke stains on her face and the sparks of fire in her hair only made her more beautiful when she broke through into the clear again.
He loved her.
He ran on. Toward her.
“We couldn’t…lead Roanie,” she yelled, gasping for fresh air. “I’m sor…sorry, Blue. All I…could do…get his…halter on.”
“I’ll get him,” Gordon yelled, and rushed past Blue into the burning barn.
That took Blue’s eyes away from her, and he went after him. Gordon was an old man and the roan wouldn’t like him, to boot. No way could he handle the colt.
It was an inferno in there. The lack of good air shocked Blue breathless. He wished for a wild rag or a handkerchief, for water, and then he slipped out of fantasy and into the chaos of reality.
The roan screamed and reared, clawing at the sides of his stall, but he wasn’t on fire. Yet.
Burning pieces of the rafters were falling everywhere and the far end of the barn was in a blazing roar. The wind was picking up and whipping flames into walls in front of it. The rafters were on fire, the tack room was a memory and the stacked hay was next.
Gordon was too fast for him—he ran in through the door of Roanie’s stall before Blue could get there. Andie Lee and Micah must’ve left it open on the off-chance that the horse would run out when the fire got closer.
No such luck. The roan colt had been tamed too much: now he trusted the safety of his stall the same way he trusted Blue.
Gordon reached for the halter. Andie Lee hadn’t been able to buckle it completely, but the tongue through the hole looked good enough to hold.
The roan jumped back, rearing to strike.
“Gordon! Get out!”
The horse was squealing, slamming himself against the wall, rear hooves slipping in the shavings. He struck at Gordon, missed him by a hair, came down on all fours and lunged at him, knocking him down with his shoulder. Then, instead of letting his momentum carry him on and out into the aisle to Blue, he whirled back.
Blue went in, slowly, so as not to panic him more, wanting to talk to him, needing to soothe him. Instead, he had to keep his mouth shut and his breathing shallow. The fire, cracking and popping, starting to roar, was making too much noise for the roan to hear him, anyhow.
He took his eyes off the colt to look at Gordon, intending to signal him to lie still. No need. His head had hit the hard oak post at the door of the stall. He lay with eyes closed, unmoving.
Damn. Now Blue had to get them both out.
He reached out slowly and laid one hand with a reassuring pat on the roan’s sweaty rump. The colt was dripping now—from the heat, but from nerves, too. He whirled again, narrowly missing Gordon, and then he recognized Blue. He lowered his head enough to let Blue take hold of the halter.
With every nerve in his body screaming for hurry, Blue made himself keep moving slowly, steadily. He led the horse forward, chanting inside his head, easy, easy.
He walked close in beside the roan’s shoulder and got him around Gordon in spite of the horse spooking two or three times at the man on the ground and offering to paw him. Blue got him to the door and through it, although Roanie was jumping around and swinging his rear from side to side, first on one hind foot, then the other, bumping into the wall, nearly hitting Blue, nearly stomping Gordon’s frozen frame.
In the aisle, Blue looked back. Gordon still hadn’t moved.
Well, he couldn’t possibly lift him with one arm to carry him out and he sure as hell wasn’t going to turn loose of the roan. If he did, he’d never be able to catch him again. He might run straight into the flames.
Damn Gordon, anyhow. He should’ve had more sense than to rush into the stall like that. He knew the roan’s reputation in normal times, and any horse would go wild in a fire.
But Gordon always thought his own reputation was bigger than anybody’s, outlaw horses included. He was the horseman of all time, Gordon was, to his own thinking.
He was the rancher and breeder of all time, too. With a large legacy and no one to leave it to.
Blue pushed the horse’s shoulder, heading him toward the door. He’d take the roan out and come back for Gordon.
Or not.
That thought fell into his head like the devil’s own plan.
Why should he save him? Why, when Blue’s own life was devoted to taking Gordon’s? His whole purpose in living was to see this man dead.
The roan jerked his rear around and went up on his front legs to kick the stall across the aisle. Blue had to grab the halter with both hands. The horse pulled sideways, eyes rolling, dragging Blue around in a circle.
Just in time to see one of the rafters burn in two and fall with a huge cracking sound, onto the hay. Wildfire.
It would be in this end of the barn in seconds. No time. He had run out of time.
The west wind freshened in one huge lifting push, driving the fire in the roof toward him faster and faster. A piece of burning wood fell onto Blue’s shoulder.
He knocked it off and glanced at Gordon as another piece fell onto his chest.
No one would ever know. No one would ever fault Blue if he came out with the horse, thinking Gordon was right behind him.
All he had to do was let Gordon die. He didn’t even have to kill him.
His purpose would be accomplished and, at the same time, he could forget about making plans for murder and maybe being shot at by Gordon in self-defense.
He could lose the worries about getting caught and getting life. Or death.
Gordon would be dead, Rose and Dannie would be avenged, and Blue would be truly free at last. He could make a life with Andie Lee.
She loved him. He loved her.
All he had to do was get out of here alive.
But that was the coward’s way to go. If he took that path, he would never respect himself again. He wouldn’t deserve Andie Lee.
His code would be ashes, and all the times he had made himself adhere to it would be worthless.
Because she loved him and he loved her, he had to do the right thing.
Choose love over hate.
He urged the horse closer to the stall door, maneuvered his own body to where he could hold on to the halter and bend to grab Gordon’s shirt collar. The fire roared and reached for them all.
No way could he hold on to the roan and pick Gordon up. All he could do was to drag him.
Blue jerked him out of the stall and started for the door, desperate for a good breath, praying that neither of his arms would be pulled out of its socket. The roan could do it with one good lunge.
Sparks flew in a swirling tornado, the flames whipped at them from behind. His lungs were seared, his back was burning, and all three of their lives would be gone in another minute. Gordon’s shirt was on fire.
The roan panicked more and more the farther they got from his stall and he got harder to hold. Gordon got heavier and more awkward to drag.
All Blue had to do was uncurl his fingers and let him drop. Then he could run out with the roan.
He was risking the life of a fine horse. He was risking his own life. He was risking Andie Lee’s happiness and his own, all in order to save the son of a bitch Blue had been vowing for ten years to kill.
He tried to let go but his brain refused to send the signal to his hand. Both of his hands, all of his fingers, stayed curved like claws, holding on, holding stubbornly on while his legs kept driving on, his eyes pouring and blind in the smoke.
It was decided. They would all three get out together or none of them would. He’d get them out. Or die trying.
After a lifetime of flames chasing him and the world burning around him, he plunged out into the fresher air. Not clean, full of smoke, but fresher. By far. He gasped, gulped in a big lungful that nearly choked him.
Shane appeared out of nowhere at the roan’s head with a leadrope in his hand. A bunch of men ran to grab Gordon, tearing Blue’s fingers loose and carrying him away toward the stock tank while one of them slapped at the burning shirt with his cap.
Blue and Shane looked at each other while Shane clasped the lead to Roanie’s halter. Neither could speak aloud and be heard.
You’re a good kid, Shane.
Thanks, Blue.
Blue forced his hand open and it fell from the halter.
Then Shane was leading the horse away and Andie Lee was all Blue could see. Running toward him.
He opened his arms. She ran into them and threw her own around his neck.
He folded her so close not even smoke could come between them and pressed his face to the top of her head. She thrust her fingers into his hair.
Walk in my soul.
He was alive.
She loved him. He loved her.
Free. He was free. He was home free.
He was home.