The Cowboy Read online

  “Lou Ann is fine, Mrs. Blackthorne,” Dusty said, leaning his armpits onto his crutches as he reached up to touch his hat brim in greeting.

  “I saw her waiting outside,” his mother said. She frowned at me pinned-up denim that covered Dusty’s stump, then added, “I guess you can’t drive.”

  “No, ma’am,” Dusty said.

  “Well, you mustn’t keep her waiting in this heat,” his mother said.

  “No, ma’am.”

  As Dusty headed for the door, Trace turned to his father and said, “I’ll meet you in the library as soon as I see Dusty out.”

  He followed Dusty down the front steps and out to me black Chevy Silverado parked in the shade of one of a dozen elegant magnolia trees that lined the circular drive. Lou Ann was waiting in the driver’s seat. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and the ravages of the past few months were visible in the new lines around her eyes and mouth. He watched as she anxiously followed Dusty’s progress around the extended cab pickup.

  “We’re all done,” Trace said, momentarily drawing her gaze in his direction. “I’ll let Dusty tell you the good news.”

  She glanced at Dusty, who was hopping toward the passenger’s seat after dropping his crutches in the bed of the truck. “What good news?” she asked Dusty.

  Dusty used his arms to lever himself onto the torn leather seat before he answered, “I’m going to manage a quarter horse breeding operation for Trace.”

  Trace felt guilty at the grateful look Lou Ann shot him. It hadn’t been charity. Dusty knew quarter horses—and more specifically, quarter horses bred for cutting—like a prairie dog knew its own hole.

  “Thank you, Trace,” she said, reaching out to cover his hand where it lay on the windowsill of the pickup.

  “Dusty’s the one doing me a favor,” Trace said, pulling his hand free and thumping the dented door of the Silverado with the flat of his hand. “But I’ll accept an invitation to supper, if you want to thank me anyway.”

  “You’ve got it,” Lou Ann said, her face looking years younger with the radiant smile she now wore.

  Trace waited until the Chevy had exited the paved circular drive and was heading down the road that led back ten miles to the entrance to Bitter Creek, before he turned and walked back to the house.

  He found his mother sitting at the desk in the library, pen in hand, while his father stood behind her, pointing to the places where she should sign.

  Blackjack looked up and said, “He give you any trouble?”

  “No.” Trace saw the fleeting look of censure flash across his father’s face when he left off the “sir” that should have followed his reply. The “sir” had been automatic when he was a boy, even through college. He hadn’t used it once since he’d come home.

  Blackjack was too smart to confront him over the matter head-on, because that might have given Trace the opening he needed to discuss the changes time had wrought—and to ask either for the authority to act without consulting his father or to be relieved of the duties he’d assumed, so he could leave.

  The quarter horse operation was a compromise, a way Trace could accomplish one of his own goals while still helping out his father until Blackjack was well enough to take over the ranch work himself—or willing to admit he never would. The need to employ Dusty was finally going to force the long-postponed confrontation between them.

  “Am I done?” his mother asked.

  Blackjack sorted through the papers and said, “One more.”

  Trace decided to make his move now, while his mother was here. After all, as the papers she was signing pointed out, his mother owned half of everything. If he could convince her to say yes to his proposal, Blackjack might go along to avoid an argument. His parents didn’t wrangle often, but when they did, the rafters rattled.

  “I’ve been thinking about buying a quarter horse stud and some good mares,” Trace said.

  Blackjack never looked up. “We have all we need, but I suppose we can afford a few more.”

  “I plan to breed them for cutting,” Trace said.

  His father straightened and focused his gaze on Trace. “That would require quite an investment of capital. If I’m not mistaken, the best two-year-old cutter went for about $80,000 at the NCHA Select Futurity Sale last year.”

  “You’re not mistaken.” Trace kept his body outwardly relaxed, but he could feel his pulse begin to pound. He resisted the urge to explain or defend his proposal, merely kept his eyes locked with his father’s.

  He watched the small frown lines form and ease along Blackjack’s forehead before his father’s hand settled on the back of his mother’s chair. “Too much risk. Too little reward,” he said.

  “I wasn’t asking for permission,” Trace replied. “I was stating a fact. I’m going to buy some quarter horse stock and start up a breeding operation.”

  “If you’re so interested in breeding something, how about marrying the eldest Creed girl and breeding me a few grandsons,” Blackjack retorted. “She’s been a widow damn near a year. Can’t believe you haven’t rushed her to the altar.”

  “I don’t love—”

  His father made a barking sound to cut him off. “Hell-fire and damnation. I didn’t love your mother, either, when I married her, but she brought me fifty thousand acres of good DeWitt grassland. That Creed girl can do the same for you. She’s next in line to inherit Three Oaks.”

  Trace glanced at his mother, expecting to see some reaction to his father’s callous admission. But her gaze was focused on the documents before her, as though she were oblivious to his verbal stab.

  He wondered why his father stayed married to his mother, since there seemed so little love between them, but he knew the answer without asking. Texas was a community property state. If his father couldn’t bear to share the responsibility of the ranch with his son, he would hate like hell giving up half of the wealth he’d accumulated during thirty-three years of marriage—and the land his mother had brought to the union—in a divorce.

  That didn’t explain why his mother stayed with his father. Trace had asked her, after his parents’ most recent shouting match, why she didn’t divorce Blackjack. Her answer had surprised him.

  “I love him. I always have.”

  He understood all too well the pain of loving someone who didn’t love you back. Which was why he had no intention of marrying Callie Creed Monroe.

  “You’d do well to hog-tie that little filly before some other cowboy figures out what a prize she is and steals her out from under your nose,” his father said. “I’d give my left nut to see Jesse Creed’s face the day my son married his daughter.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Imagine the bitter bile of knowing a Blackthorne will own Three Oaks when he’s gone,” Blackjack continued. “That parcel of Creed land smack-dab in the middle of my ranch has been like a stone in my boot for as long as I can remember. I’ll be damned glad to get rid of the irritation once and for all.”

  During the course of his father’s speech, Trace was remembering the first time Blackjack had suggested he court and marry Callie Creed. He’d been a senior in high school, Callie a freshman. At the time, Blackjack had been enraged at having been thwarted yet again in his attempt to buy Three Oaks from Jesse Creed. During an angry tirade, he’d suggested that if Trace got Callie pregnant, her father would have to let them marry. Then, when Jesse died, Trace and Callie would inherit Three Oaks.

  The result of his father’s suggestion had been to make Trace keep his distance from Callie Creed. He wasn’t about to be forced into marrying some girl just so his father could spite her father. Besides, at eighteen, he was determined to run his own life, free of his father’s meddling.

  But because of that tirade, he’d taken his first good look at Callie Creed. Although they’d gone to school together their whole lives, he’d never paid much attention to her, because she was four years younger. But once he’d let himself look, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Perhaps because he’
d forbidden himself any contact with her, she became even more attractive to him.

  He spent his entire senior year resisting the urge to ask her out on a date. He refused to give his father the satisfaction of thinking he’d been manipulated into it. He went away to college without ever speaking to Callie Creed, without running his fingers through her tawny hair, without looking deep into her sky-blue eyes or kissing her bowed, pouty lips.

  Four years later, she’d asked him for directions to the LBJ Library, looking lost and scared and more lovely than any female had a right to look. He’d fallen hard and fast. And she’d left him high and dry.

  “I’m not marrying Callie Creed Monroe,” he said in a hard voice. “I’m starting a quarter horse breeding program.”

  “The hell you are!” his father retorted.

  His mother looked up at Trace, then over her shoulder at his father, as though she’d just noticed the antagonism between them. “Please don’t argue,” she said.

  His father patted his mother on the shoulder. “We’re just having a friendly discussion, Eve.”

  “I could hear you all the way in the kitchen.”

  All three of them turned to find his sister standing in the open doorway to the library.

  “Get out and close the door behind you,” Blackjack said.

  Summer strolled in, leaving the door opened wide. Her naturally curly blond hair was falling out of a ponytail, and her tailored Western shirt showed signs of having been nuzzled by a grass-eating horse. She wore skin-tight jeans that made Trace wonder how she could get her leg up over the saddle and scuffed boots that had to be almost as old as she was.

  “You can’t keep ordering Trace around, Daddy, without giving him a chance to do anything on his own,” Summer said.

  “Thanks, Summer. But I can fight my own battles,” Trace said, both exasperated and touched by her interference.

  “It sounded to me like you were losing,” she pointed out with a grin, as she crossed the room toward their father. She seemed utterly confident of Blackjack’s acceptance of her presence, despite his order to get out. Sure enough, as her arm slid around Blackjack’s waist, his arm circled her shoulders. She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek, then grinned and said, “You know I’m right, Daddy.”

  Blackjack made a grunting sound in his throat, but he didn’t contradict her.

  No wonder his sister was such a brat, Trace thought. She had their father wrapped around her little finger.

  “Why can’t Trace start a quarter horse operation?” Summer asked, her candid hazel eyes focused up at Blackjack.

  “He wouldn’t know a good cutting horse from a nag,” Blackjack said. “How can he hope to breed a winner?”

  Trace bit his tongue rather than defend himself.

  Summer winked at Trace, then said, “Well, Daddy, there’s one sure way to settle the matter.”

  “What’s that?” Blackjack asked.

  “I’d be willing to bet you Trace can pick a horse that makes it into the top ten at the Open finals of the Futurity in Fort Worth.”

  Blackjack laughed. “There must be a thousand horses entered in that competition.”

  “More like twelve hundred,” Summer said with a grin. “And my bet is still on the table.”

  “What are the stakes?” her father asked, his eyes narrowed.

  “If Trace’s horse finishes in the top ten, you fund whatever operation he wants here at Bitter Creek.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Blackjack asked.

  “You don’t have to fund the operation,” Summer said with a shrug.

  The fact that his father was playing this sort of game with his sister convinced Trace that it wasn’t the idea of a breeding operation Blackjack objected to, so much as the fact that it was Trace who’d come up with it.

  “The stakes aren’t high enough,” Blackjack said.

  Summer shot a look at Trace that warned him he’d better win, then said, “All right. If Trace’s horse doesn’t make it into the top ten, you don’t fund the operation and I’ll go back to college and get my degree.”

  Trace watched his father eye Summer speculatively. “If I thought you really meant that—”

  “I do,” Summer interrupted.

  “If I agree to this bargain of yours, I’m going to hold you to it,” Blackjack warned.

  “You know I’d never welsh on a bet, Daddy. You’ve taught me better than that.”

  Trace watched as his immovable rock of a father let himself be shifted like a handful of pebbles by his only daughter’s irresistible charm.

  “What do you say, Daddy? Is it a deal?”

  “Deal!” Blackjack said, reaching out to shake her hand.

  “Wait a minute,” Trace said. “How the hell am I supposed to come up with a horse that can finish in the top ten at the Futurity barely five months before the event? And why should I have to?”

  Blackjack turned to Trace and said, “I’m giving you a chance to have things your way. Take it or leave it.”

  Trace hesitated, shot a look at his sister, then stuck out his hand. “I’ll take it.”

  Chapter 2

  CALLIE CREED MONROE COULD COUNT ON ONE hand the number of regrets she’d accumulated in twenty-eight years of living. Ever since that first gigantic leap off a cliff without looking to see where she’d land, Callie had lived a reasoned, cautious, carefully considered existence. But she deeply regretted not branding the four registered quarter horses that had been stolen from Three Oaks the night before.

  It was bad enough losing the horses, because her family lived on a knotted shoestring, and this disaster had broken it for about the last time. But to Callie’s horror and dismay, Owen Blackthorne had shown up at the horse barn at dawn, wearing a badge, asking questions, and giving her father answers he didn’t want to hear.

  “What the hell do you mean you can’t find them if they weren’t branded,” her father was ranting. “I’ve got color photos of every damned one of them!”

  Callie had to give Owen credit. He’d remained patient and even-tempered despite Jesse’s abusive harangue. But she was convinced the rippling tension between the two men had less to do with her father’s fury over the stolen horses, than with the fact that her eldest brother Sam lived in a wheelchair, and Owen Blackthorne had put him there.

  “I understand your frustration,” Owen said. “We can post the photos at slaughterhouses around the state—”

  “Slaughterhouses?” Callie interrupted, appalled at the thought of her beautiful quarter horses being turned into dog food, or worse, being served at some European dinner table, where horse meat was a delicacy. “Those two-year-olds are worth tens of thousands of dollars each at auction.”

  “It’s possible they might be sold at a small auction somewhere,” Owen conceded. “The truth is, horse thieves don’t normally take that risk. It’s a damned shame you didn’t brand them.”

  Callie felt the weight of blame on her shoulders. The four fillies had been born and raised at Three Oaks. She had meant to have them freeze-branded, which allowed the hair to grow back in a lighter color instead of leaving a scar. But over the past hectic year since Nolan had died, so many things that weren’t absolutely necessary had fallen through the cracks. And she had believed, with good reason, that the fillies were safe from thieves.

  Three Oaks was a virtual island, 65,000 acres of rich Creed grassland completely surrounded by 745,000 acres of fenced Blackthorne property. There were plenty of roads crisscrossing Three Oaks, but there was only one way in or out, a single easement that wound across Bitter Creek Ranch, through at least a dozen gates, to the world beyond. Callie had made the terrible mistake of assuming no horse thief would dare to steal livestock from Three Oaks, when he could be so easily apprehended on the way in or out.

  Her father must have had the same idea, because his eyes narrowed as he said, “The only person who could get a horse trailer in or out of here without being detected is someone able to move freely over Blackthorne land. I
may not be able to pin this on your father, but I know he’s responsible.”

  “My father doesn’t need four more horses,” Owen said.

  Callie could see her father was incensed by Owen’s implication that what was everything to the Creeds was a pittance to the Blackthornes.

  “Blackjack has been trying to force me into selling Three Oaks ever since I stole the woman he loved from under his nose,” her father snarled. “He can try every dirty trick in the book, but I’ll never let him break me. I’ll give this place to charity before I’ll sign it over to him!”

  “Are you accusing my father of stealing your stock?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time one of you Blackthornes hit below the belt!”

  Owen’s body visibly tautened at the jibe. He opened his mouth to speak, then clamped his jaw tight without replying. Callie knew there were no words to defend what he’d done. Too many people had seen the cheap shot he’d taken on the football field that had put Sam in a wheelchair.

  She remembered how miserable—and defiant—Owen had looked as he walked down the hall at the hospital and stood before her father, chin up, shoulders squared, to apologize.

  “It was an accident, Mr. Creed,” he’d said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Sorry won’t bring my boy’s legs back!” her father had shot back.

  “If there’s anything I can do to help—”

  “You can keep your Blackthorne charity!” her father had shouted. “And get the hell out of here!”

  The one time Owen had come to the house after Sam was home from the hospital, her father had met him at the kitchen door with a double-pump shotgun. Now her father was being asked to put his trust in a man he despised.

  “Why the hell did you come here, if you don’t intend to help?” her father demanded.

  “I’m here to do my job,” Owen said.

  “Get off my property. Get out! Go!”