Montana Blue
“I don’t own Shane just because I stopped him from running away,” Blue said. “He belongs to Andie Lee.”
Micah shook his head.
“She holds the papers on him,” he said. “But you’re the man with the juice when it comes to that boy.”
Blue snorted. “You’re smoking something besides tobacco,” he said.
Micah shook his head. “Nope.”
Amazingly enough, for another minute, he didn’t say a word. He just looked at Blue, his hands loose on the wheel while the old truck followed the road.
“I may never get another thing out of that colt,” Blue said. “As far as we are now may be as far as we go.”
Micah nodded and broke into a grin that made his eyes crinkle at the corners. “Sounds like plain old life to me,” he said.
He slapped Blue on the shoulder as if they had just come to an agreement and pulled the rig back from the edge of the Center’s gravel road.
“Yessir,” he said, speeding up a little, “from where I sit, looks like the best any of us can ever do is just go ahead and hook up and hope for the best.”
Hope for the best wasn’t going to cut it for Shane.
Blue raised his voice to carry over the rattling of the rig.
“What could I do for him, anyhow?”
“For starters, let him ride with you,” Micah said. “That roan colt could teach him as much as he’s teaching you and you could teach Shane more, too.”
Blue’s stomach tied into a hard knot.
“You heard Gordon,” he said. “The kid could be gone a long time—maybe he’ll use his influence to get him sent to reform school.”
“He’ll bring him home in a day or two,” Micah said. “Gordon aims to be the one that gets him off the dope for Andie Lee. Gordon likes to prove he can do what nobody else can.”
“The way he’s going about it, he’ll drive him to it instead.”
“How would you go about it?” Micah asked.
Blue sensed the trap. “I wouldn’t.”
“Horses heal a lot of wounds,” Micah said, completely undeterred. “Shane likes horses but he never has stayed with ’em because he likes them drugs more.”
He drove on out to the main ranch road, then stopped and looked both ways as if the traffic was terrible instead of nonexistent.
“You still want to go down to the arena?”
“No,” Blue said. “Let’s go see about using the fairgrounds.”
“That haulin’ is a waste,” Micah said. “And you won’t spite Gordon any by not usin’ his facilities, if spite’s what you’re after.”
Blue shrugged. “I’ll get my own rig soon.’ Til then, I’ll pay you mileage.”
“Gas money ain’t what I’m talkin’ about and you know it,” Micah said, wheeling out onto the road. “They’ll never let the boy off the place to go up there to ride with you.”
To find my dad.
Blue could still hear the crack in the boy’s voice. Shane had been lost in those same fatherless feelings Blue had felt at that age—although he had been too proud to ever try to go to his dad.
That had been Dannie, always wanting to go find Gordon. And then, when she had finally ridden all the way to Montana on the back of a drug dealer’s motorcycle, she had ended up dead before she ever saw the Splendid Sky.
Micah glanced in his rearview mirror.
“Looks like we’re leadin’ the parade,” he said.
Blue turned but the roan colt filled his vision.
“Who is it?”
“Patrolman with Shane. Follered by Gordon’s truck. Andie Lee’s talked him into bringing her to be with her boy as long as she can.”
The patrolman passed them. Shane still had his head down. But when the car pulled directly in front of them, he twisted around and looked back. Straight at Blue. Their eyes met.
I’m so scared. I don’t know what to do. What can I do?
Then Gordon’s truck passed them and whipped in between the trailer and the patrolman. Andie Lee sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, looking at Shane.
“Boys fifteen, sixteen, twenty years old think they’ve got the bit in their teeth,” Micah said. “They don’t know they can get hurt bad or die.”
Blue could remember how that felt, too. He’d been immortal. He could do anything.
And he had done a lot of it—he’d ridden the worst ones in all the rodeos, he’d fought the biggest bullies out behind the chutes, he’d driven the old trucks the fastest and dived off the highest bluff into the river. He’d danced with the wildest girls in the honky-tonks and made the best love to them in the grass.
But he had never fought the demon of drugs that had hold of Dannah. If he had gotten into dope back then, he might’ve proved to be mortal, too.
That same demon had hold of Shane.
Blue hadn’t been there for Dannah, not when she’d needed him the most. Because she wouldn’t let him. Would Shane let him?
If he could make a difference for Shane, it would be for Dannie’s sake. All he’d been able to do for her was avenge her death.
Andie Lee’s truck came in sight, its nose buried in the soft earth like an ostrich trying to hide its head in the sand.
Rose had been in such despair that she’d driven her car off the road, too. Into a tree.
If Shane went to prison, Andie Lee would share another great grief with Tanasi Rose. And if the boy got hold of another gun, he, too, could very well be in there for murder.
The roan whinnied and ran from one end of the twenty-foot trailer to the other. That rocked the truck and it pulled to one side. Blue turned to look through the back window just in time to see the colt brace himself and kick the side with a cracking blow.
“Onery sucker,” Micah said. “You’ll play hell trying to ride him out in public.”
“What was that saying of yours about all we can do is hook up and hope for the best?” Blue said.
“Huh,” Micah said, “I’m jist glad you remember what I tell you.”
“It’s not easy,” Blue said. “You talk so much it wears out my ears trying to sift for nuggets of wisdom.”
“Here’s another one,” Micah said. “Look off down there at that valley. Then let your eyes drift up and up over them mountains. You won’t ever see as handsome a place anywhere—not on this wicked old world, you won’t.”
Blue looked.
They drove on in silence. There, to the right, stood the old round pen, the house and the barn that belonged to Micah because he was the one who put them to use.
Straight ahead lay the highway.
The rig slowed on the uphill grade.
“Which way?” Micah said.
Blue threw him a slant-eyed look.
“Fairgrounds,” he said.
Micah drove all the way on out to the highway and turned toward town in silence. A miracle.
Blue was thankful for it. He pushed back his hat and leaned into the open window to feel the wind on his face. Ahead, the highway stretched empty.
But he kept seeing the patrolman’s car and Shane looking back at him.
They’ll never let the boy off the place to go ride with you.
Good. He didn’t want to get involved with the kid. And he hadn’t been free long enough yet to choose to do something he hated—like seeing Gordon humiliate Shane.
The irony of it struck him in a hard revelation. All Blue’s life he’d wanted Gordon to be his daddy, yet he’d probably been better off without him.
Micah slowed, then pulled off the road into a wide gravel parking lot filled with trucks and trailers of every kind and size, some empty, some full of bawling cattle. An auctioneer’s voice echoed from inside one of the barns.
Micah cut the motor and folded his arms on the wheel to wait.
“Secretary in the sale office is who you need to see.”
Blue got out and closed the door, his boot heels crunching on the gravel. But after he’d stepped away, he turned back.
“Micah. Does Gordon talk to Shane like that all the time?”
“Yep.”
Blue turned and looked off down the road.
Finally, he reached for the door handle.
“Aw, hell,” he said. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“DO YOU ALWAYS have to talk to Shane that way?”
Andie Lee turned on Gordon the minute he pulled his truck away from the police station. She shouldn’t. Shane was at Gordon’s mercy and Gordon tolerated no questioning, ever.
But she couldn’t pull together enough caution to stop herself. She wanted to punish him for telling Shane—and in front of half the world, too—that he had no father. She wanted to be rid of Gordon Campbell and never have to be indebted to him for another thing as long as she lived.
He took his time getting onto the road, then threw her the briefest of glances, one that slashed her with scorn.
“You mean do I always have to tell him the bare-assed truth?”
“No, I mean do you always have to deliberately humiliate him?”
“There’s the reason your kid’s in trouble today,” he said. “You.”
She turned cold all over, when she’d just been hot.
Pray God it wasn’t true. But of course, she had been afraid that it was, ever since the trouble started with Shane.
Surely, surely, since she’d tried so hard, she wasn’t as bad a parent as Gordon and Toni, her mother, had been.
“A boy needs somebody to grab him by the collar, yell at him, shake him and scare the shit out of him once in a while,” Gordon raved on, “that’s what makes a man out of him.”
“Destroying his pride makes a man out of him?”
“Stay out of this, Andie Lee. You came to me for help, so I’m helping you.”
He clamped his mouth shut in that tight, straight line she remembered so well. For Gordon, the subject was closed.
Well, he’d have to get used to the fact she was no longer a little girl who wanted his approval.
“Oh, right. You’ve got him to the point of kidnapping girls and trying to steal cars, and in only three weeks. I could never have accomplished that all by myself.”
He ignored her.
“And now you’ve left him in jail for the whole night.”
“More than one whole night,” he said. “Know that.”
Fear struck, all through her. She tried for a reasonable tone of voice.
“That’ll only make things worse, Gordon. Shane—”
He interrupted in his usual vicious way. “I got him in a cell by himself. You know that. I saw you hovering around with your ears flapping in the wind while I arranged it.”
She wished with all her being that she hadn’t asked him for help. If only she’d made the decision to sell her practice before she ever dialed his number! Then she could’ve had money to buy help for Shane. But the practice was her livelihood and the only asset she hadn’t already poured into this battle against addiction.
Her reasoning had been that her practice was as important to Shane’s future as it was to hers. So she had destroyed her considerable pride and broken her fifteen-year-old vow never to be at Gordon Campbell’s mercy again. For four days and nights, she had thought about it and agonized over it but in the end she had decided that any amount of pain would be worth the suffering if it could save Shane’s life and sanity.
She would do anything to save Shane. How could she even think about sacrificing this chance of help for him just to cling to her pride and the word of honor she had given to herself?
Gordon had the resources to help the one she loved. She would swallow her pride and call him.
And so she did.
It was still hard to believe that she had broken her vow. That vow, coming out of fury and fear and the unspeakable shocked hurt of a child betrayed by its mother—a feeling she had sworn at his birth Shane would never know—had held her upright while she lived in poverty as a teenaged, single mother. It had driven her to travel with Chase Lomax on the rodeo circuit, painting designs on leather chaps and shirts for a living while he tried to win the big prizes riding roughstock. Later, she waited tables to take care of her baby and pay her way through college and veterinary school.
That vow had pushed her to borrow a lot of money to set up her practice, even after Gordon had offered, at her mother’s funeral, to help her get started. That had been some kind of temporary sentimental aberration—not because he felt guilty or generous toward Andie Lee but because he’d felt suddenly lonely without Toni.
Theirs had been some kind of devil’s pact. They had fought like tigers all the years they’d been married but they never separated. They both thrived on the conflict, even though they both knew that it would come out, always, with Gordon on top.
Only one thing had ever brought them to agree. That was the idea that Andie Lee should date Trey Gebhardt, scion of another prominent family, a political family that could do Gordon some good at the national level. Trey had raped her on their third date and Shane had been the result.
Her mind drew back from the memory fast as a damp finger from a sizzling burner. Her life hadn’t turned out to be all that bad—not until Shane started going downhill. Before that, he had been her greatest joy.
One good thing was that she’d had Chase to help her—although not with money, because back then he’d had none, either—and she still loved him for being the only daddy Shane had ever known. And she loved him for loving her. He just hadn’t loved her enough to quit the rodeo life and make a real family, and she hadn’t loved him enough to keep going down the road with him.
Now she was a professional, accustomed to making life-and-death decisions and giving orders that were obeyed. She’d made another bad choice by asking for Gordon’s help, but she was a grown-up now and she wouldn’t let him push her around.
“I’m taking him away,” she said. “As soon as they let Shane go, I’m taking him someplace else.”
He pressed his foot harder on the accelerator.
“He’s staying here,” he said. “Either on the Splendid Sky or in jail.”
“This is all about your ego,” she said, “and we don’t have time for that. I’ve got to save him before it’s too late and that point’s coming closer by the minute.”
“Andie Lee,” he said, letting a full measure of disgust come into his voice, “I’ll take care of your boy. Go back to Texas and see to your practice before you end up losing it.”
He looked at her again and this time she couldn’t read one single trace of emotion in his blue eyes.
“You’ve put a lot of money and energy into veterinary school,” he said “You’d be losing that, too.”
“My life’s over anyway if Shane goes down the tubes,” she said. “And there’s no way I can leave him here since your idea of taking care of him is to tell him he doesn’t have a daddy to do jack for him.”
“That’s the truth. He doesn’t.”
“And whose fault is that?” she asked, surprised at the depth of bitterness she heard in her voice.
Andie Lee, you’ll fool around and make him really mad and he’ll leave Shane in jail to spite you. He has all the power around here, and you know it. Take care.
But the words were already said and on the table and she would make him acknowledge them. She should have said them to him long ago.
“Yours,” he said. “It’s your fault he has no daddy. I gave you choices. I would’ve arranged for you to get rid of the baby or to marry Trey Gebhardt, either one.”
“Surely you can understand why neither was an acceptable choice,” she said dryly.
“Don’t cry to me,” he said. “All you had to do that night was stay out of the back seat and tell Trey no.”
That accusation stirred the old shame and frustration hidden deep inside her. She pushed it away. No time for that when Shane was hitting rock bottom.
But she couldn’t let it go.
“All I had to do was tell you and my mother no,” she said, “but I didn’t have the guts. I was a silly, seventeen-year-old girl who couldn’t help wanting to please her mother and the stepfather she’d always hoped would be her daddy.”
“Did we tell you to let the boy into your pants?”
She should never have brought this up. It was stirring the rage deep inside her. No way could she tamp it down and think about Shane at the same time.
“No,” she said. “You did not. I made my own choices and—now that I think about it, true to what you always preach—I’ve done a very responsible job of living with the consequences of those choices. The problem right now is that I made another bad choice in asking you for help.”
“You just said you always wanted me to be your daddy.”
“I did. A long time ago. When I was a silly kid whose real daddy had never been around much. A silly, lonesome kid who was eager to please.”
But all that was old news.
Shane was locked up in jail. Shane was skinny and weak and sweating for need of a fix. Shane was in misery and it was all her fault.
But his further misery would be Gordon’s fault. Gordon had had the power to bring him home in this truck with them right now.
“You didn’t have to leave him there overnight.”
Gordon wouldn’t look at her. He was driving like a bat out of hell.
“I got him a private cell.” He bit the words off like bullets.
“We’re not talking about the Marriott!” she cried. “He needs to be out of there.”
“He needs to stop and think about what he’s doing,” Gordon said. “Hard experiences teach hard lessons.”
“He’s defenseless! His arms aren’t as big around as your finger.”
“He’ll survive.”
Andie Lee stared out her window at the landscape hurtling past.
Shane hated her. Shane hated himself, too. She had to save him.
“I’ll call my cousin Boone,” she said. “He’s an attorney and he’ll get Shane out of there.”
“An army of attorneys can’t get him out of there, Andie Lee.”
Now Gordon’s voice was flat with the knowledge of a sure thing. He was king and he knew it.
“He will learn,” he said crisply, “or he will die. The only way human beings ever learn a damn thing is by taking the consequences of the choices they make.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Yeah. That’s your mantra, all right.”
“Right it is.”
Her lips parted and she started to say something else, then she thought better of it. There must be a way to work him if she’d stop and think.
She’d been going about this all wrong. She’d known that from the beginning because she’d known Gordon Campbell almost all her life. Since she was ten years old and her mother brought her to live in his house. That had been just like Toni: she’d met Gordon at the big cutting horse sale in Fort Worth in December and by April she was married to him and moving to Montana, turning Andie Lee’s life upside down.
Twenty-three years Andie Lee had known this man. And in all that time, she’d never seen anybody who’d directly faced him down and managed to win.
“Gordon,” she said, “you’ve been most generous to have Shane accepted into your center free of charge. But it isn’t helping him. I have to look for another treatment center that might fit him better.”
“Free of charge?” he said.
“No, I’m sure I couldn’t find that anywhere else. I’ll have to sell my practice.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s your livelihood.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t be asking you to support us. I can always work for somebody else. I can even go temporary and fill in for veterinarians on vacation. There are plenty of them in North Texas. “
“On a salary you’d never get his bills paid,” he said. “This drug-treatment business costs a freaking fortune.”
“Tell me about it,” she said wryly. “It just about broke me before I ever called you.”
“And it’s a damned good thing you did, no matter what you say.”
He actually sounded almost hurt that she’d said that.
“Get over it, Gordon,” she said. “You’re not God and you can’t have power over everything. Face the fact that you hired a snake of a loser to run your rehab center and it’s doing more harm than good. I made a mistake bringing Shane here.”
“I fired the goddamned loser snake of an SOB, didn’t I?” he growled.
He drove even faster. Why not? He wasn’t God, but around here, he was king. Speed limits didn’t apply.
“It won’t take two weeks to get the whole program turned around,” he said. “I’m on it.”
“I’m out of here,” she said. “If you won’t do it tonight, go back tomorrow and get Shane out on bail. We’ll leave Montana and be out of your hair.”
“Forget it,” he said, in that tone of unbreakable ice she’d also known since the age of ten. “The kid stays where he is until I come back and get him. When I do, I’ll sober him up.”
“As if you know how to do that.”
“I can find somebody who does,” he said. “And I’m going to add some ideas of mine to their program.”
“Sounds like a winner.”
“Come on, Andie Lee, cut the sarcasm. Don’t I always do what I say I will?”
“A combination of a world-class employment agency, plenty of money, and some good, hard, rancher’s common sense will do the trick, huh?”
“Guaranteed. Every time.”
“So which one of those did you leave out last time? When you hired Jason?”
“Will you shut up about Jason? What I left out was work for those kids.”
He clamped his jaw shut tight as a vise.
“I cannot believe it’s come to this,” she said. “I can’t even think. I’m so scared and so mad at Shane I cannot even think.”
“Leave it to me. Quit your worrying.”
“As if I could.”
“You were right about one thing,” he said.
She jerked around to stare at him. That was a rare statement, coming from Gordon. He skewered her with his hard blue eyes.
“It is my ego,” he said. “You won’t find another rehab center on the face of the earth where the owner’s got his ass on the line for your kid to sober up.”
Andie Lee couldn’t say a word.
“He’ll be gone some day,” Gordon said. “Sober or stoned or dead, he’ll be gone. You’re gonna have to make yourself another life. You’ve worked too hard to throw your practice away.”
That was one thing Gordon respected. Hard work.
“It’s no skin off your back. I’d never ask you for help.”
“You never have,” he said, his eyes boring into her again. “Except for this once. You know I refuse to fail at anything I do. Cut me some slack and I’ll save your boy.”
He went back to staring through the windshield, one big brown hand resting easy on the steering wheel of the speeding truck as if he could rule the world with one hand tied behind him. Andie Lee couldn’t stop looking at his chiseled profile.
The man had no earthly clue of how monumental this problem was. He didn’t know the size of the dragon he was promising to slay. The most aggravating thing about Gordon Campbell was his arrogance.
“You might,” she said, “if Micah’s new wrangler stays around to catch him for you.”
He turned, slowly, and gave her a long, straight look that she couldn’t read.
Then he laughed. Gordon didn’t laugh often and when he did, it was always a shock to her.
“You sound like Toni,” he said.
Oh, great. On top of everything else, she was turning into her mother.
But maybe she always had been like Toni—selfish and driven. Maybe she should never have spent all those endless hours and untold amounts of energy on veterinary school instead of pouring them out on the growing Shane.
Gordon had a point, though. Gordon always reached his goals and Gordon always got his way. Shane’s recovery was a point of honor with him now. This wasn’t something Gordon could will into being, but he would put more effort than any stranger would into trying to get the right help for Shane. He would hire a proven professional to replace Jason and he would spare no expense.
It didn’t matter whether his motives were selfish or not. If anyone on earth could do it, Gordon could make things happen so that Shane would recover—if Shane would cooperate.
Gordon was a busy, busy man. He wouldn’t be around Shane all that much to talk down to him.
And she had been half-serious in her sarcastic remark. Micah’s new hired hand might be good for Shane—if their paths could ever cross again. She could arrange that, maybe, with Micah’s help.