Wild Horses
“You saved me, you know. If you hadn’t done that, I’d probably be hiding out in Mexico with our brothers right now, doing God knows what.”
It would have broken her heart if he’d become like them. “You were always a good kid, Wade. You would have found your way even if I hadn’t stepped in.”
“But I wasn’t finding my way. I was stealing cars. The one I got caught with? It wasn’t the first.”
Tension crept up Nora’s neck, and all the aches from her fall last night started to throb. “I didn’t know. But I’m glad it was your last.”
“Me, too. Like I said, you saved me.”
She’d never heard her brother speak so emotionally. And it gave her the chance to say what she’d wanted to ever since he’d come home from war just weeks ago. “I’m proud of you, you know. So proud of what you did in Afghanistan. And of what you’re trying to do here, with the ranch.”
“It’s nothing.” His expression changed, snapped shut almost as clearly as if he’d slammed a door in her face. It happened every time she brought up the war.
“It’s not nothing! It takes guts to come back to Benson. I wouldn’t have—”
“Except I asked you to,” he finished. He looked straight at her then. “You know I really appreciate this, right? You’ve always been there for me, and here you are again.”
“I want to be here. I missed you while you were away. And, coincidentally, I’d just got the contract to do this plant study, so I was planning to be in the area anyway.” It was a lie—but just a small one. She’d found the job after Wade had asked her to come home. He didn’t need to know that.
He also didn’t need to know how worried she’d been—and still was. She’d read the news articles about combat veterans feeling lost once they got home. Ex-soldiers turning to drugs, becoming homeless or even committing suicide. And all her old protective instincts had kicked in. No way would she let any of that happen to Wade.
So here she was. And if this ranch was his dream, then she’d do anything she could to help it be a success. She’d even face Todd Williams tonight in a bar. Hopefully it would give her some closure—enough peace of mind that when she saw him around town it would simply be like seeing any other person she used to know.
Wade reached for the door handle. “And I think that’s enough heartfelt discussion for today. If my buddies in my platoon were here right now, they’d never let me live this conversation down.”
Nora laughed. “Well, just to make them really cringe... I love you.”
He didn’t actually cringe, but he winced a little. Then he smiled at her. “Back atcha, sis.”
“Come to the bar with me tonight?”
It was Wade’s turn to laugh. “You mean front row for the awkward show as you reunite with your ex? No thanks.”
Nora’s smile thinned. “Trust me, there will be no reuniting.”
“Good.” Wade elbowed her gently in the upper arm. “If he tries anything, kick his ass for me?”
She was tempted to tell Wade what Todd had done. That he’d stolen horses and almost killed her in the process. But it wasn’t Wade’s job to fight her battles. Resolve had her sitting up straighter. Yes. She would kick his ass. Maybe not with her fists, but certainly with her words. With her attitude. With all the fear and outrage that had kept her awake last night, haunted by the sounds of the horses’ hooves above her head. “Will do.”
“Excellent. Just don’t drink too much. And if you do, call me and I’ll come get you.”
“Thanks.” Nora didn’t mention that she no longer owned a cell phone, courtesy of Todd, the masked man. Anxiety had her breath catching. She’d witnessed a crime but hadn’t reported it. Didn’t that make her guilty, too?
But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to report it. She’d walked by the mustangs every workday for the past couple weeks and seen them listless under the hot sun. She’d been disturbed by their misery, but she’d done nothing. She might hate Todd’s methods, but she couldn’t fault his reasons.
The problem was, during all the years she’d raised Wade, she’d preached honesty. She’d made sure he understood how important it was to obey laws and rules and not participate in their family’s criminal lifestyle. How could she explain to him that she was choosing to overlook something illegal?
Frustration fueled her anger further. Todd Williams was pure trouble. It was telling that the moment he reentered her life, he put her in this kind of dilemma.
She shoved open her door and jumped out of the truck. Reaching into the back, she grabbed the rope they’d used to tie down the broken tools. “I’ll bring this back to the barn.”
“I’ll take it,” Wade offered. “Go get ready for your date.”
“It’s not a date!”
He took the rope from her hand, laughter making him look younger than he had in a while. “It’s my duty, as your brother, to tease you. Now go shower.”
She must really look bad if he was shooing her off to get cleaned up. “Thanks.” She turned and headed for the house.
Inside, she went straight to the bathroom. Caught in the mirror, her grim expression made her face look different. It belonged to someone older. Someone angrier. And dirtier. Grease coated her hands, and black finger marks were smeared across her forehead. Her jeans were more brown than blue and her T-shirt had a cobweb down one side. Not the look she’d envisioned for herself when she’d imagined seeing Todd again.
Staring at her reflection, she traced the vertical crease between her brows and the frown lines around her mouth, leaving trails of black grease behind. It looked like war paint. Which was fitting. Todd, the masked man, was unmasked, and he would get a lot more than a beer when he met her at the Dusty Saddle tonight.
CHAPTER FOUR
NORA STARED INTO her glass of mediocre white wine and considered finishing the rest of it in one gulp. Like some kind of medicine for her hurt pride. Todd was standing her up. Either that or he was extremely late. It didn’t matter, because now she was reminded of how often he’d been late for things toward the end of their relationship. It wasn’t a part of her past she cared to relive.
He’d always had a good excuse, rushing in from meeting with one environmental group or another, blaming his tardiness on an issue that had to be discussed. But the truth was, at the end of college, at the end of them, he’d loved his activism way more than her. She’d notice him during their dates glancing at his watch to make sure he was on time for his next event. Their time together must have seemed boring to him compared to all that political urgency.
It wasn’t that she didn’t support his causes. She wanted people to stop cutting down the rain forest, too. She wanted wars to end and endangered species to be saved and oil spills to be stopped. But she hadn’t felt the same need to devote her entire life to protesting those problems.
Plus, she’d had her own cause back then. Wade. Maybe it was just a small cause, but it had been hers for as long as she could remember. Wade was so bright, and he was her baby brother, and she’d spent her childhood keeping him safe. When she’d gone away to college she’d been sure that if she could just keep him on track and get him through high school, he’d be okay.
So she’d worked extra jobs and sent him the money. She’d paid for cell phones so they could talk daily. And during those conversations, she tried to override the negative influence of their dad and brothers. And when that hadn’t worked, she’d driven to Marker Ranch to take him with her when she’d started grad school.
Nora took one last gulp of her bad wine and stood up, pulling her jacket off the adjacent bar stool. She wasn’t that love-struck college girl anymore. She didn’t have any reason to wait around for Todd in a dive bar.
“Nora!” Todd strode across the stained floor, bringing the scent of fresh night air with him. He wore faded jeans and leather hiking boots, and a piece of straw clung to his hair. She reached up automatically and pulled it off, then jerked her hand back when she realized what she’d done.
“I’m sorry I’m late. One of my mares is foaling. I’ve got people with her now, but I had to wait for them to get there before I could leave.”
She set her coat back down, uncertain what to do now. It was, as usual, a reasonable excuse.
“Let me buy you a drink. Please don’t go. I would have called but I didn’t have your number...” His voice trailed off and she knew he was making the connection to the previous night. The look of discomfort on his face was almost funny.
“Plus you know that I don’t have a phone. Right?”
He was silent, staring. And then she saw it...the realization, creeping across his face in slow motion. He knew that she knew who he was. And what he’d done. His eyes went wide and his bronzed skin paled a shade. “Nora, I’m...”
“Sorry you chucked my phone into the desert? I went back this morning, but I couldn’t find it. You have a good arm.”
“You know it was me.” It came out heavily, with regret and maybe some relief.
“Yes.” She studied him, trying to picture the mask on his face. Now that she knew it was him, it was hard to imagine how she’d not seen it.
“I’ll get you a new phone. I promise. Tomorrow.” He gestured toward the bar. “Stay? Have a drink with me? We obviously have a few things to discuss.”
It was tempting to leave. To leave him uncomfortable and wondering what she’d do next. But unfinished business would leave her uncomfortable, too. “Only if you order me something way better than this wine.”
He winced. “Ugh. I forgot that you like wine. This is not the place to drink it. How about something a little more foolproof? Beer?”
“Vodka.” She needed something stiffer than beer to face him. He looked so damn good and she was so angry. “And tonic.” She waited while he ordered for both of them.
“So,” he said, putting a few dollars of tip on the bar and picking up the drinks. “Maybe we should head over to a quiet corner?”
“Why, so we can discuss your criminal activity discreetly?” She wanted to shout it, but instead tossed the words quietly over her shoulder as she led the way to a booth tucked against the back wall and sat down on the scarred wooden bench. Todd took a seat on the other side of the table and slid her vodka toward her. She took a sip and waited. He’d asked her here—no way was she making it easy for him.
“I guess it could be considered criminal. I’m sorry about your phone. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Anger, hot and self-righteous, was almost soothing in its purity. “Really? You almost killed me out there and you want to keep talking about the phone?”
“Well, it’s a start.” His eyes were deer-in-headlights wide.
“I was huddled behind a rock, with the horses jumping over me inches from my head! I thought that was it. That I was going to die. And you want to talk about my phone?”
“No... I just... I’m just sorry, Nora.”
He looked so totally miserable that she felt a grim satisfaction. Enough to soften a little. “What were you thinking?”
He reached for her hand but she yanked it back.
“It never occurred to us...to me...that anyone would be walking out there after dark. I can’t apologize enough. We only wanted to help the horses. When I realized I’d put you in danger, I regretted the entire thing.”
“You knew it was me.” She’d wondered if that was why he’d looked more worried than surprised in his shop today.
“I recognized your voice, but at first I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t think straight.” He took a long pull of his beer but never took his eyes off her. He was still wary. Probably wondering if she’d tell the authorities what she knew.
“Do you usually go around grabbing strange women in the middle of the night?”
“No! Never.” He flushed red, right over his cheekbones.
“You’re lucky I didn’t just have a heart attack on the spot. First I almost got killed, then a masked man grabbed me in the dark... It’s every woman’s nightmare.” Her voice shook a little and she cursed the emotion welling in her chest. She wasn’t here to cry. It was better to attack. “You were an idiot to follow me across the parking lot like that. A complete idiot.”
“I didn’t think about how scary it would be for you. All I could think was that I didn’t want you to call the sheriff.”
“Well, I can’t say as I’m surprised. You always put your causes before anything else.”
He looked at her intently. “You’re talking about the rain forest. After college.”
Nora hid her blush in a long swallow of the icy vodka. How could she have referred to the past like that? How could it still matter? “Well, you always were preoccupied with causes.”
“I guess you’re right.” He picked up the cap from his beer bottle and rolled it in a slow circle on the tabletop. “How did you know it was me last night?”
“I didn’t. Not last night. Your voice sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it. But when you walked away through the gravel... Your steps were uneven. And then today at the shop...” She wasn’t sure how to mention his disability.
“You saw me limping.” He finally met her eyes. His were dark green in the dim light. “I’m so sorry, Nora. I can’t believe that after all these years, we ran into each other like this. And that I put you in danger...and scared you. I don’t know how to make it up to you.”
“I’ll just add it to the list of things you can’t fix.” The words were out before she’d thought them through. Before she realized she was digging her embarrassing hole even deeper.
“You know, you chose not to go with me,” he said softly. “I wanted you to come to Brazil. You turned me down.”
She hadn’t had a choice, but to be fair, she’d never really explained that to him. “I’m just cynical when it comes to you, I guess.”
“I probably deserve that.” He didn’t have to elaborate. All the old angst hung between them like a line of limp, damp laundry. It was depressing. She didn’t want to argue anymore.
“How’d it happen?” She changed the subject, nodding her head toward his leg, which extended straight out in front of him under the table.
“A run-in with a bulldozer.”
It wasn’t at all what she’d expected. “A bulldozer?”
“I was down in Brazil on that rain forest project. They were going to clear-cut a whole new area near where we were working. No one was paying any attention to the science we were doing. I got fed up and I joined some locals in a protest to try to stop it. I lay down in front of a bulldozer. The driver saw me, but he just kept coming.”
“And you just stayed there.” He shrugged and she stared at him in disbelief. “You were always stubborn, but that’s taking it to a new level!”
There was regret in his wry smile. “I figured he’d stop at the last minute.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Nope. Went right over my leg as I tried to scramble out of the way.” He took another drink and looked out over the bar instead of at her. “Scariest game of chicken I ever played.”
She tried to picture what it would be like, to have a bulldozer coming toward her, intent on murder. To feel it crush you. She shivered.
“The locals carried me on a stretcher for a couple hours to the nearest village,” he continued “Then I was put in the back of a truck for the ride to the hospital.
“It took hours to get there—I honestly didn’t think I’d make it. I passed out from the pain. When I woke up in the hospital, they’d pieced my leg together. Then I came back to the states and convalesced at my parents’ house for a few months, listening to them tell me all the ways I’d disappointed them.”
“I’m sorry you got hurt.” Even in her bleakest moments she’d never wished him this kind of pain.
“Me, too. I had a lot of time to lie in bed and wish I’d never taken that job. That I’d stayed in the States. With you.”
The words she’d wanted to hear for so long, right there between them on the table. Now that they’d been said, Nora realized that no matter how many times she’d imagined him saying them, she’d never imagined her answer. She stared at him, but he was still looking out over the bar, lost in memory. Maybe he didn’t even realize what he’d said. The gulp she took of her vodka went down with a burn and she coughed.
The sound seemed to bring Todd back to the present. If he was self-conscious about his confession, he masked it with a smile. “On the upside, I got a pretty big settlement. Turned out the guy who drove that bulldozer worked for one of the world’s biggest timber companies. I had money to buy my ranch and my machine shop. Plus, now I can predict the weather with my leg.” He took a swallow of beer, grinned, and the cocky college boy she’d loved was suddenly right there in front of her.
She couldn’t help but smile back. “So you’re the guy I call when I want to know if rain is coming?”
“So far I’ve been right ninety-seven percent of the time. I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet.”
She laughed outright. “Why am I not surprised by that? Geek.”
He laughed softly and she had to look away. He was too familiar, still so beautiful, with a smile that lit his whole face, slashed dimples in his cheeks and added a spark of delight to his eyes.
“Some things don’t change.” He lifted his bottle in her direction. “To old friends.” But the way he held her gaze, just a little too long, told her he was thinking about more. About what they’d been and how they’d been. About afternoons tangled up in his bed and nights sitting on his roof, watching the stars, reading poetry out loud by flashlight. He was remembering how crazy in love they’d been, so that it seemed the stars they watched were wheeling overhead in a private show just for them. He was remembering, suddenly, the utter magic of it all. The magic she’d never been able to forget.
“To old friends,” she answered, watching him clink his bottle to her glass. The sound was oddly festive, and very much at odds with the worry in her heart.
CHAPTER FIVE
NORA TOOK A gulp of her vodka. Todd’s toast was to old friends, and old was the key word here. A reminder that her memories of him should stay in the past where she’d buried them. Just because Todd was handing her a shovel didn’t mean she had to start digging them back out.
Luckily, remembering what was wrong wasn’t that difficult. All she had to do was touch the bruises on her hip. Or take a deep breath and feel the pinch under her ribs. She peppered her question with just a little sarcasm. “So are wild horses your new cause?”
“I guess they are. Not the cause I moved out here for, though. I was hired to manage a campaign to prevent fracking in this area. But when that project was over, I was burned-out. I mean, we’d stopped the destruction here for now, but they’re still tearing up the rest of the earth for natural gas. It just felt futile. I bought the shop and figured I’d just be a mechanic and spend my free time in the mountains.”
“So what happened?”
“I went hiking in the scrub one day and saw a herd of wild horses running. A stallion, mares, even a few foals. They were incredible. After that I started going out there in all my spare time to watch them. It was so peaceful, you know? I got really into taking photos of them.
“And then one day, while I was watching them, a couple helicopters showed up. It was a roundup, and they chased the herd, flying behind them, really close to the ground. The horses were panicked, falling down, getting hurt. The foals got left behind, separated from their mothers, terrified and exhausted. It wasn’t right.”
She nodded, a lump in her throat, picturing the horrifying scene he described.
“I loved those horses, and I was a witness to their suffering,” he continued. “I knew I had to try to help. So I started adopting them from the government auctions. And I convinced this local horse trainer to teach me how to work with them.”
“It’s so strange to think of you on a horse,” she told him. “You were such a city boy.”
He smiled, tracing a water mark on the table with a callused index finger. “I sure was. But I learned pretty quick. It felt kind of natural to work with them. And once they were trained, I sold them as riding horses.”
“And you still do it?”
“I’ve trained and sold over two dozen mustangs now, but it’s not enough. The Department of Range Management just rounds up more. There are only a certain number of people who want to adopt a mustang, no matter how well trained it is. And my ranch is getting pretty full. I can’t adopt many more.”
“What happens if no one adopts them?”
“They spend their days in government holding facilities. Like the DRM station we were at last night. In dusty corrals, packed together, separated from their family groups, scared and miserable.”
“That’s awful,” Nora said.
“They have thousands of horses in these holding facilities. Most of them are forced to live in terrible conditions. Yet they continue to round up more.”
Nora felt sick, imagining all those miserable, frightened horses lost in government limbo. But she’d been frightened, too. She remembered the hooves, and huddling by the rock that had saved her life. “So you stole them.”
“Moved them,” he corrected. “We’ve tried everything else—talking with the manager at the DRM station, a big letter-writing campaign, getting animal welfare organizations involved. But the government spins its wheels and the horses pay the price in a slow, painful death from the heat. So we got them to some land where they can be safe. And free.”
“I just don’t get it.” She was casting around in her mind for solutions. As if she could, tonight, solve a problem he’d apparently been working on for a while now. “There has to be a way to help them, legally.”
“If there is, I couldn’t find it. And even if the DRM makes better rules eventually, these horses would still suffer. I’m truly sorry that you got caught up in our plan. But can you understand that sometimes you have to do a little bad to make something good happen?”
“In theory.” It was all she could say to reassure him. How many times had she listened to her dad’s excuses for his criminal behavior? There was always someone who wouldn’t give him a break, a deal that was too good to be true—one excuse after another for stealing, and conning and dealing.
“Will you keep my secret?” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. Negotiating now for his safety. For her silence.
“That you’re a horse thief?”
“Or a horse liberator,” he smiled faintly.
“Semantics.” She couldn’t let him off the hook.
Todd studied her for a moment, as if pondering how to respond. “We always had this thing, you know. This banter. This way of talking. I’ve missed it.”
She stared at him, trying to figure out if he was serious or if he was only trying to make her feel special so she’d keep quiet about the horses. “We’re bantering? I’m pretty sure we’re disagreeing.”
But he was right. They did have a connection. And she’d loved it. Because she was usually shy and serious, and for some reason he was the only person she’d been witty with. The only person who’d brought that out in her.
“Maybe it can still be our thing.”
Warning sirens, flashing lights and stop signs filled her mind. He was throwing out these offers of connection like candy. But he was a stranger to her now. “Whoa, cowboy, there is no our. No thing.”
“If you say so.”
The cocky demeanor really did suit him. But he was wielding it like a hypnotist with a watch. “I know why you’re doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Reminiscing. Reminding me about all the good stuff in our relationship—a relationship that you happily walked away from.”
“You could have come with me,” he said softly, leaning back, looking at her squarely. “I wanted you to.”
“And I couldn’t.” Her stomach was in knots, her brain almost hurting from trying to figure out his motive. “Please don’t bring up all this old stuff. Don’t use our past to get what you want now. I won’t say anything about last night.”
He looked relieved. “Thank you.”