True Heart. Peggy Nicholson

them and sell them in the fall. His hope had been to make a big enough profit that he could afford to hire a manager for the ranch, leaving him free to enlist in the air force. “I risked big, yeah, Kaley, but the payoff could have been terrific!”

      Could have been. If the price of beef hadn’t dropped through the basement. Had Jim sold at that point, he’d have ended up worse off than he started, by the time he reckoned in feed, labor and overhead. Better to hold the calves till the following fall and pray their price would rise.

      “But he couldn’t pay me off come roundup,” Tripp continued. “So I let the loan ride for another year.”

      “That was very…considerate of you,” she admitted.

      “Considerate! What were my choices? Calling my loan and ruining your brother, since he hadn’t a hope in heaven of paying? Or doing without money I could have used myself for another year?”

      He’d been extremely generous—or extremely crafty. Ruthlessly foresighted. Because Tripp hadn’t simply let the loan ride—he’d forced Jim to sign a further contract. “You may have done without your money for a year, but it bought you a first option on our land.” An option to buy, if ever Jim decided to sell. Tripp had an unbreakable right of first offer, first refusal.

      “You’re blaming me for that?” He advanced on her till he stood towering over her. “What was I supposed to do, Kaley—give your brother a free ride for your sake? For auld, sweet lang syne?” His hand rose until the tip of his callused thumb touched the corner of her mouth, then his thumb stroked up across her cheekbone and feathered away. “You think it meant that much to me? Forty thousand dollars’ worth?”

      The taunt stung like a lash. His touch burned—it wasn’t a caress but an insult. He was using his bulk to intimidate her. She hit out blindly, fighting for space. “Or to me?” Do you think you meant that much to me?

      “Hey, if I ever thought that, you set me straight a long, long time ago,” he jeered softly. “How long did it take you to find a new man?”

      As if she’d been the one who hadn’t cared? Who’d broken the faith. She threw the answer back in his face. “Two months!” Richard had found her in Europe two months after Tripp’s letter had broken their engagement, leaving her stranded and heartbroken in a strange land. Two months, though it had been another ten before she’d agreed to marry.

      “Fast work, hotshot.”

      She’d had enough. “You want fast? Let’s see how fast you can get out of my kitchen—off my land!”

      His head rocked back an inch as if she’d slapped him; a muscle ticked beneath his scar. He didn’t budge.

      If he didn’t back off, give her room to breathe, she’d go wild. She prodded his chest with a forefinger. “I said…out!”

      He looked for a moment as though he’d explode—then his anger sucked inward. “Big words.” He brushed her hand aside. “You order your husband around like that? Wear the pants in your family, do you, cowgirl?”

      “I don’t!” She shook her head, but she couldn’t deny something had gone wrong with her marriage. Or had never been right.

      “Wear spurs when you ride him? Mexican rowels?”

      From out of nowhere the image arose of her on top—sobbing, laughing, rising and falling like a rider on a bronc, while Tripp’s big hands cupped her, caressed her, guided her, clamped her to him as he arched—no eight-second ride that one. Walled off in the back of her mind for nine years, the image hadn’t been softened or fuzzed by review. It was as vivid as if they’d made the memory only last night. Her body throbbed and tightened; her nipples rose against her robe’s coarse fabric. “Out!” she whispered, eyes watering with the heat of her blush. Tired as she was, she was no match for him. Not for him and her memories, too.

      He shook his head. “We have to talk this through, Kaley.”

      Her voice cracked with startled laughter. “You call this talk? And whatever it is, no, we don’t. Not this minute. I haven’t slept in two days, Tripp.” Damn. Pleading for mercy. Where was her pride?

      Somehow her weakness reached him, where resistance had not. His eyes narrowed, focused on her face in a different way—seeing her in the present, perhaps, instead of the past? He opened his mouth on a question, then shut it again and nodded. “All…right. That’s fair enough.”

      When had he ever been fair? But ask that, and she’d launch them straight into round two. She didn’t want to fight; she wanted to creep upstairs and collapse.

      “Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” he added, when she didn’t speak.

      Not if I see you first! She turned her back on him and stood hugging herself, tears of sheer exhaustion springing to her eyes.

      Behind her, she heard him let out a deep breath, almost a sigh. Then his boots moved lightly to the door, and it closed behind him.

      Still she stood, too tired to move. His engine muttered off toward the ridge…died away to…nothing.

      The silence crept back and embraced her.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      “EEEASY, SUNNY. ’Atta boy,” Kaley murmured, backing the little chestnut down the trailer ramp. When his hooves reached solid ground, she rubbed his warm red shoulder while he snorted and shook his shaggy head. “Good fella.” The chunky quarter horse was the most docile ride of Jim’s string. On this, her third day home, Kaley was still taking it slow, working up to her brother’s hard cases. She tightened the gelding’s saddle cinch, then tied him to a tree at the side of the unpaved turnaround that marked the end of the logging road and trailhead to Sumner’s Peak.

      Five miles up-mountain, on the far side of the forested ridge, lay Sumner line camp, headquarters for the Cotter cattle’s summer range. She’d chosen to drive an extra seventy miles round this spur of the mountains, bringing the trailer as close to the camp as she could, rather than ride the direct route from the southeast, which would have meant a trek of some thirty miles as the crow flies. Her thighs weren’t up to that yet. Neither did she care to stop overnight in the line cabin, as that longer ride would have required.

      Just find Whitey and bring him home; that would be sufficient unto this day. She collected her hat and Levi’s jacket from the ranch truck’s cab, then turned to her mount. What the old man must be feeling, to have retreated as far as the line camp! He was seventy-two this year. Too old to wake up and find himself without a home.

      “Not a good feeling,” she informed the chestnut as she swung her leg over the saddle and urged him toward a gap in the trees. Her heart ached for the old man. She knew precisely how he felt.

      Yesterday she’d gone looking for Whitey in Trueheart. A day late, but after her disastrous encounter with Tripp, she’d slept the clock ’round, and woken at noon.

      By the time she’d eaten lunch, then yawned her way into town, it had been nearly three. Then she’d lost another hour at Emma Connelly’s, eating homemade cherry pie and listening to the old woman’s complaints.

      Whitey’s elder sister had been widowed for twenty-three years. Time enough to decide that she knew precisely what shelf of the refrigerator the butter belonged on, and exactly in what order she cared to read the sections of the Durango Herald. At seventy-six, Emma figured she was old enough to know that a grown man ought to make his own bed, ought to close a box of crackers once he was done with it. And as for her brother’s nasty spit jar for his tobacco chaws? Or that mangy old dog of his?

      Whitey had been eating Sunday dinner with his sister as long as Kaley could remember. But apparently sibling affection and forbearance stretched only so far. Emma had never imagined herself saddled with her brother full-time, any more than Whitey had pictured ending his days without a job, cooped up in town.

      By the fourth day of his self-imposed exile he’d retreated from Emma’s guest bedroom to an army cot