True Heart. Peggy Nicholson

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