CHAPTER Nine
I clung to the mare’s neck, half out of the saddle as she scrambled down the indistinct path. Footing was practically non-existent. I felt my grip sliding with every jarring step. My left stirrup was gone, slapping freely against Hornet’s side. My foot clamped helplessly against her flank; though I knew such pressure would encourage her flight, I couldn’t help myself.
Fingernails snapped as I clawed at the saddle, trying to drag myself upright. My right hand still gripped the horn, but every sliding half-leap, half-step Hornet took loosened my grasp. I bit my lip and felt it tear, but the pain was hardly noticeable in all my fear.
One rein dangled freely, snagging on brush and branches as Hornet plunged on heedlessly. The other one was twisted around my right hand, and as I pulled myself upright I realized it was my only chance. I began to reel in the slack, like a fisherman playing a tarpon.
I called something to the mare, trying to stop her maddened flight. She slipped and slid, floundering in the loose shale and earth. My head snapped on my neck and I gritted my teeth, trying to ignore the wrenching of my spine. When at last the rein was taut I began to pull her into a circle.
The pitch of the mountain was steep, too steep for the trick to work perfectly. But it slowed her. She stumbled again, scrabbling across a granite outcrop, and I loosened my grip and pushed off.
I fell sideways, instinctively wrapping arms around my head and drawing up my legs. Something beneath me cracked; a dirtfall slid over my hands; a rock dug into my side. Then I was still.
Hornet crashed and scrambled her way down the mountainside. I lay very quietly for a moment, marveling at the fact I was still alive, then slowly unwound my limbs. Everything hurt, but nothing seemed to be broken.
I released a long, slow, hissing sigh and sat up. The sky was up and the ground down, so at least everything seemed to be in place. I tongued my split lip and felt the swelling, wiping gently at the blood that had spilled down my chin.
I heard him arrive at the edge of the trail. Slowly I looked up. For a moment all I could see was the shape: a man on horseback, hat pulled low; he stood in the stirrups as he peered down the hazardous trail.
“Kelly?” he called. “Kelly—”
I heard the hissing slide of dirt and rock as it spilled over the edge of the trail. Carefully I perched myself on a rounded portion of a large granite boulder and waited.
He muttered something and flung himself off Sunny. He embarked on a clumsy, sliding course down the mountainside, arms thrust outward for balance. Sunny waited at the top, peering down curiously as his rider departed; soon enough his attention turned to succulent grass edging the trail, and we were both forgotten.
Harper arrived rapidly, halting his noisy, graceless descent with a single braced leg. He winced, paled a little, and I realized the old injury interfered with more than rodeo.
“Kelly,” he said again, fearfully, and I saw in his face emotions I’d never thought to see from him.
For an odd moment all I desired was to reassure him, to say all the words that would erase the pain in his eyes and the strain of his face.
I backed away from the moment at once, taking refuge in lightness. What I had seen in myself was something I could not yet comprehend. Not this soon…
“I think I found the trail,” I said.
An expression I couldn’t name crossed his face, leaching it of character. “Kelly—”
I sat calmly on the boulder, aching in every bone, and yet more concerned with the inner me than the outer.
“What’s broken?” he asked harshly.
“Nothing.”
“You sure?”
“I think so.”
“Let me see.”
I stretched out both arms for his inspection. They were bent; unbroken. But scarred. The sleeves of my sweater had ridden up so that my forearms were bared.
He looked from my arms to my face. “How’s your head?”
“Attached.”
Some of his color was coming back. But not enough. “Stand up.”
“Can’t I just—”
“Stand up, dammit! I want to see if you can walk.”
I pushed myself off my rock, standing upright before him. I felt fine—for an instant—and then I blinked as the sky spun slowly around.
He sat me back down again on the rock. One hand pressed my head down against my knees. The hand remained on the back of my neck, fingers tangled in my hair. “Cry, if you want,” he said.
I laughed once, seeing nothing but the distorted close-up of my knees. “I’m scared, but not that scared. I’ll be okay.”
His fingers remained on my neck. They were hard and callused, tough like leather. He was right-handed; he had used the hand to hold himself aboard a spinning, bucking bull. To hold onto a bareback horse, and to grip the rein of a saddle-bronc. That much I knew.
And now he held my neck, gentling me as he would a fractious filly.
I sighed and let myself go limp against my knees as the tension and fear drained away. The fingers moved, shifting from neck to shoulders, until two hands massaged away the rigidity of my battered muscles.
“Easy,” he said gently. “I’m in no hurry to leave just yet; take your time.”
He was in no hurry. But was I? It was I who sat with his hands against my flesh, all unexpected. Or was it? There had been a tension of sorts between us almost from the beginning. And now it was being acknowledged.
I sat upright again and felt the hands pull away. And then one reached out to part my hair where it hung into my face. “What’s this?”
I thought he meant the old scar. Automatically I drew back, pulling my bangs down, and then I felt the wetness. Blood. Not much, but something had scraped me across the forehead and temple, slicing into the ridged flesh of the scar.
I laughed a little. Yet another to add to the collection. Harper took a clean bandanna from his back pocket and started to pat the blood away. I moved from the ministration. “Don’t bother.”
“Why? There’s dirt all over your face. This’ll do until we get back to the Lodge.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said resignedly. “One more scar won’t matter.”
“No,” he agreed, and I realized he was serious. I was not, and said so. Harper ignored me and patted the blood away, then returned the bandanna to his pocket. “You’ll do.”
I smiled. “Will I?”
“I think so.” Still he squatted next to me, his hands hanging limply over his knees. He did not touch me again, but he did not need to. “Cassie said you were behind the wheel when that actor died.”
“I was,” I said quietly.
“So now you’re carrying the guilt around like the Ancient Mariner and his albatross.”
“How poetic.” I sighed. “I suppose so. But it was my fault. If I hadn’t been driving, Tucker might still be alive.”
“Or you might both be dead, if he was as drunk as Walkerton said the night I overheard you.”
“Maybe,” I admitted, “but it doesn’t make it any easier. Guilt’s one of those things you can’t always rationalize out of your life.”
His eyes were steady on my face. “Do you ever think it might have been better if you had both died?”
I felt the old pain and guilt surge up to fill the cavity I’d managed to forget about. Oh yes. There were nights I lay awake wondering why Tucker had left me behind; wouldn’t I be happier with him? We’d been meant for each other, and I was here while he was not.
My throat cramped and I swallowed to loosen it. “So would you, sometimes, if you were in the same situation.”
“I was,” he said quietly. “Oh, maybe not exactly the same, but close enough. When the doctors told me my back was broken and that it might not heal right, that was bad enough. But when they told me I’d better not rodeo anymore, I was mad enough to hope I wouldn't walk again.” He picked at the dirt with a stick. “All I knew was that if I could stand up and walk out of that hospital, nothing could keep me from rodeo. It would be better to be paralyzed and have a damn good reason, than give it all up just because there was a chance.” He shook his head. “I can’t say it right. But it has to do with making a choice, and I didn’t want it made for me. ”
“But you did make it., You gave up rodeo.”
His mouth jerked. “For a woman. For my wife. She wanted a man who could walk, she said, not a has-been in a wheelchair. So I quit.” One shoulder hunched up in a shrug. “What she didn’t realize at the time was that even walking, I was still a has-been. No more glamor and glitter. No more attention for being the wife of a rodeo superstar.” The smile was very faint, self-deprecating. “And so I lost her anyway.”
I inhaled carefully. “When?”
He looked at the sky and squinted, marking off the time.
“Oh, I reckon it’s been a year, nine months and sixteen days. But I’m not counting.”
I wanted to laugh. He meant me to laugh, but I couldn’t. I just stared at him.
Harper looked at me. “People lose people. It happens. They die sometimes; sometimes they just leave. And it hurts like hell. But one day you’ll wake up and find out there’s no unwritten rule that says you have to grieve forever.”
I felt the tears well up in my eyes. They spilled over, but I did nothing to stop them. I let them fall, running down my face by my nose to drip off my chin and spread on the weave of my sweater. And then he reached out and locked his arms around me, drawing me against his chest.
“There’s no time limit on it,” he said gently into my hair. “It’ll always hurt. But you don’t have to cherish that hurt.”
I sat silently in the curve of his arms, my mind opaque and blank. Inwardly I asked questions of myself, not the least of which was wondering what I was doing, but I knew. To Brandon, who had known Tucker, I could not entirely show the depths of my grief; the slow, cannibalistic pain that would not go. To Harper, who hadn’t known him at all and hardly knew me, I could. And it felt right.
I took a deep breath to make some comment, some suggestion for us to go, but he turned my head up and kissed me before I could say a word.
There was no time to protest. No time to pull away. No time, even, to make sense of the moment. And then, just as I made sense of it, he was shaking his head in disgust. “Hell,” he said, “I shouldn’t have done that. Oh Lord, you dumb cowboy, will you play right into their hands?” And then he stood up, pulling me up with him, and turned me toward the steep, treacherous trail. “Climb,” he said.
“Harper—”
“Just climb,” he said. “I’ll catch you if you fall.”
I did not fall. I climbed to the top of the trail, full of aches and pains, but I did not fall. I was too angry, too startled to think of falling down. A simple kiss was easy enough to understand-good heavens, I’d had the urge myself—but his reaction to it had knocked me for a loop. Whose hands did he think he was playing into? And why should there be any hands at all?
Sunny grazed contentedly at the edge of the trail, unconcerned with my inept climb. Harper caught him and led him over to me. I felt an irrational anger well up again, and I knew he was aware of it. There was a taut set to his mouth and the flesh around his eyes, as if he realized he’d behaved badly and yet did not entirely regret it. As if there had been a reason for it.
Harper mounted, freed his left foot from the stirrup and reached down to me. “Come on up.”
It hurt. He tugged me onto Sunny’s wide rump as I half-scrambled, half-mounted, and drooped there in exhaustion. My fingers curled around the edge of the seat of the saddle. My thighs, already aching, clamped onto the slippery rump. “Will you stay on?” he asked.
“I’m done falling off horses today,” I said briefly, trying to make myself comfortable. “What happened to the man?”
Harper gathered up the reins and nudged Sunny into a walk. “What man is that?”
“The man who scared Hornet into her plunge down the mountain. Didn’t you see him?” I smiled a little, though it came out grimmer than I’d intended. “Did you think I wanted to go down that trail?”
Harper stopped the horse and twisted to look into my face. We were very close. I could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes and the hollows defining his face. “What man?” he repeated quietly.
Wearily I pushed the hair away from my face. “He appeared out of nowhere. He told me to go home. Go home before I got hurt.”
“When?”
“Just before Hornet took off. He frightened her. I don’t think she’d have run, otherwise.”
He frowned. “Damn…”
“You didn’t see him?”
“Not a soul. ”
“What about the engine we heard?” I remembered that distinctly.
“Nothing.”
I stiffened on the horse. “Nothing!”
He prodded Sunny onward again with his boot heels, face averted as he turned back. “I found nothing. Or no one, at least. Some tracks, probably made by a four-wheel-drive. But no people.” He said nothing a moment. “Probably just a Forest Service vehicle.”
My bottom lip was swelling. I tongued it, tasted the salty, coppery taste of blood and wondered what he had thought just before he kissed me. And afterward, when he had sounded so annoyed. “The man I saw,” I told him clearly, “was definitely not a forest ranger. No uniform. No nothing. Just a warning.”
Harper’s shoulders looked solid as rock, and twice as stiff. He shook his head a little, but I couldn’t see his face. “Damn,” he said again. “That makes four.”
“Four what?”
“Four ‘accidents,’ for lack of a better word.”
I counted in my head, recalling Preacher’s brief disappearance, the barn fire, and my unexpected warning. “What’s the fourth?”
“Two horses were shot a few days before you came. Killed.”
“Harper—”
“Hang on, ” he interrupted conversationally, as if he’d forgotten what he had just said. “The trail gets rougher here.” Sunny’s rump bunched and dipped as he negotiated a twisting stair-step formation of rock and earth. I hurt badly enough already, and the motion of sleek horseflesh sliding beneath my jeans nearly unseated me entirely. I made a wild grab at Harper, caught him, and held on with both arms.
I felt his soft laughter. “About time,” he remarked.
I nearly let go. But it wasn’t worth it. I slumped, too tired to do the work myself, and let his comforting back hold me up. I wanted a drink, hot shower and bed. In that order.
Harper helped me down from his horse and half-led, half-pushed me into the Lodge. I protested feebly but was ignored as he escorted me to the couch before the fireplace and sat me down. There he fixed me a drink—brandy—and watched me take the first swallow. The liquid sloshed in the snifter as my hands insisted on shaking.
“Thanks for rescuing me,” I said on a sigh of exhaustion. The veil, which had been missing, dropped over his eyes once more. “Any time.”
“Maybe you’d better go see about finding Hornet.”
“I don’t doubt the mare’s here. Probably got home some time ago.”
“Then maybe you should go see if she’s okay.”
The moustache twitched. “Maybe I should.”
I stirred. “I’d like to know,” I told him. “How she is. She might have hurt herself.”
He watched me a moment longer. “I’m sorry,” he said obscurely, and was gone.
I sank back against the couch, letting my head tip back to rest against it. I knew the exhaustion was the aftermath of shock; the shakes would go away shortly, especially with the brandy flooding my system. I closed my eyes.
I heard the screen door stretch open again, wondering idly if Harper was back that soon, then heard the quiet footsteps on the wooden floor. Whoever it was didn’t wear boots. “Kelly!”
It was Brandon. I lifted my head and saw him cross the floor in about two strides. “I just heard. Are you all right?”
I displayed the brandy. “I will be.”
He stood over me a moment, rigid with concern, then carefully sat down beside me. A big hand reached out and steadied the glass. “The horse came back without you.”
An illogical bubble of laughter burst inside. “We simply decided to part company.” I smiled. “I’ll be fine, I promise.”
“You look a mess,” he said, not unkindly. “Not much like the Kelly Clayton most people know.”
His weight on the couch tipped me against his shoulder. It was not unpleasing, and he provided a big, safe headrest. “The Kelly Clayton most people know is not the real me,” I said, feeling drowsy. “Actually, I prefer dirt.” Then I straightened. “Brandon, we’d better go check on the horse. It wasn’t her fault. Come on.”
“She didn’t throw you?” he asked in surprise.
“No, and I didn’t fall off, either.” I scowled at him. “I jumped.”
Brandon took the brandy snifter from my hand. “If you’ve decided to start jumping off horses, you don’t need any more brandy. You need your head examined.”
“Oh, it’s a little banged up, but it’s in one piece.” I felt at the back of my skull. “Come on.”
We went down to the pens. Nathan was there, carefully examining Hornet’s legs. Her head drooped as if she felt as poorly as I did, and she nosed his shoulder as he bent over a foreleg. Harper was leaning against the rails, watching silently. “How is she?” I asked Nathan.
He raised his head, then straightened as he saw me. He gently set Hornet’s leg down and looked at me. I saw a mixture of things in his face: concern, detachment, weariness and something else. It took me a moment to recognize it, and when I did I caught my breath.
It was fear.
“The mare’s all right,” he said, wiping a forearm across his forehead. The gray hair was slightly mussed, as if he had been running rigid fingers through it. “She’s bruised—she’ll be a little gimpy for a few days—but she’ll do. What about you?”
I shrugged. “About the same. Nothing a little rest won’t cure.”
My reassurance didn’t ease the worry lines in his tired face.
“Do you recall anything that might have triggered the runaway?”
I glanced at Harper. “There was something,” I said steadily. “A man. He popped up out of nowhere an scared me half to death. It’s no wonder she shied.”
“Shying is not a runaway,” Nathan said grimly. “It would take more than that to set her off on a dead run like that, especially down the mountain.”
“She didn’t run then,” I admitted. “It was after the sound.”
“Sound?” He repeated sharply.
“A crack.” I shrugged. “Sort of like a firecracker. Or maybe a gunshot.” I brought myself up short.
Nathan’s face turned ashen, collapsing into a map of wrinkles. He aged ten years before my eyes. Numbly I felt him take my arm and lead me around to Hornet’s back end. He didn’t have to point it out.
Splashed across her palomino rump was a dark stain. Something had gouged out a piece of flesh, leaving a short furrow as if made from a glancing blow.
A bullet.
I looked at Harper, who had ridden into the trees with a rifle in his hands.
I looked at him and he said nothing at all.