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Blue reached behind her, with the truck already moving again, and slammed the door closed. The woman’s slender body fell into the curve of his arm. That was such an unfamiliar sensation it roused his instinct to really hold her. That and the fact that she was shaking. Her back pressed against his taut bicep, but she didn’t seem aware of him.
“He got drugs again?” Micah asked.
Sympathy twinged in Blue. She cared about somebody like Dannie.
“He’s got a gun and he’s holding his girlfriend hostage. We’ve reached a whole new low.”
Now her voice sounded cold as a rock on the bottom of the river. Anger. It was anger that had her trembling.
“That stupid-ass Jason is no di-rector at all,” Micah said.
The woman bent over and slammed her thighs with her fists. Her hair fell forward and pooled in Blue’s lap, then she raised her head and it whipped past his face.
It smelled like flowers. That and the woman-scent of her skin went all through him. Fragrance from another universe.
She arched her back, twisted up to fish something out of her pocket, dropped back down and scraped her hair away from her face with both hands. She pulled it all together and fastened it flat against her neck with a heavy silver clip.
“I have such a rage in me I could wreck the world,” she said, slamming her fists on her thighs again.
Micah shot her a sideways glance.
“You done wrecked your truck,” he said. “Ain’t that enough?”
She shook her head and stared straight ahead with her lips pressed together. Too near tears now to talk, probably.
Or not. With her hair out of the way Blue could see the pure line of her jaw. Hard and determined.
Blue moved his arm and braced his hand against the door frame to hold himself away from her, trying to give her some room and still keep his legs out of the stick shift but they were all three jammed together in the narrow old cab and there was no space to put between them. Her thigh trembled against his.
“What the hell else am I supposed to do?” she cried. “What can I do?”
“Honey, you’re doin’ all you can,” Micah said. “It’s like a man who’s a slave to whiskey.”
She whipped her head around to look at him and leaned across Blue to get even closer as if Micah had to see her lips to hear her.
“I can’t come this far and fail,” she said. “I can’t. I won’t. I’ve given everything I’ve got to this fight for two years and I’m not quitting now. What else can I do?”
Her face was so close to Blue’s her breath was warm on his chin. He could see that she was not wearing one speck of makeup and she was beautiful.
He also could see that her eyes were full of tears but she wouldn’t let them spill out. He admired that.
Like her jawline, her cheekbones showed strong underneath her light tan. Her eyelashes were long and thick, much darker than her hair, and the wing of her brow made a perfect arch that he wanted to trace with his fingertip.
“Who called you?” Micah asked.
“Tracie. She said it all started about two hours ago. Gordon told her not to call me but she couldn’t bear it—she thought I had a right to know.”
Andie Lee’s breath came more easily now.
“I just went to the post office,” she said. “I can’t even go to town for two hours without getting a call that he’s in trouble again. Micah, I want to throttle him. I have worked twenty-four/seven for years for his sake and he has no more gratitude or appreciation or consideration for me than my hateful cat does.”
Micah drove faster. The trailer lurched along behind them with the roan standing quiet for once. Blue wished he would act up just to draw her attention away from all this pain.
“Shane and the girl may only want a little time together,” Micah said, trying to soothe her.
“Not if Lisa’s begging for help and Jason’s calling the highway patrol in here.”
The words snapped off her tongue.
“Then let the highway patrol handle it,” Micah said.
She flashed him a look that would melt metal.
“They—and wise Gordon—have been trying to handle it for over an hour.”
Blue took a quick glance at her face. Evidently she didn’t think much of Gordon.
“I’m his mother,” she said, with that same natural dignity that held back her tears. “They should let me talk to him.”
That shocked Blue. His mother? How old was she, anyway? This Shane must be a teenager or nearly so if he was taking girls hostage at gunpoint.
If he’d thought about it, he would’ve guessed she was in her twenties. He sneaked another look while she leaned across him toward Micah again.
“They should let me talk to him. Gordon’s been trying to do it himself, since they don’t have a professional negotiator in here yet. Tracie said he’s so furious with Jason for calling in the law that he’s about to strangle him.”
She could be thirty, maybe. There were tiny crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes.
Micah drove faster. They careened around a turn that led off to the west long before they got near the main headquarters.
“What kind of gun is it?” Micah asked. “Where in hell did he get it?”
“A handgun, a twenty-two,” she said. “Where and how he got it, I don’t have a clue. I know the counselors can’t watch them every second, but they could do better than this.”
Now the whole length of her leg lay smooth and warm against Blue’s.
“He’s a big boy and nobody can control him, honey,” Micah said.
Andie Lee jerked away from him and leaned forward in a sudden movement as if to make the truck go faster. She stared through the windshield into the distance.
Blue felt a chill. The line of her body reminded him of Rose’s long ago, yearning into the dark from their tiny front porch in Tahlequah, willing her darling Dannah to appear out of the night.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I TOLD GORDON instead of building that goddamn rehab center he oughtta put them boys to work,” Micah said. “That’ll cure ’em. Let ’em buck hay bales when it’s a hundred in the shade and then load ’em up again and haul ’em out on the ice and bust ’em for the cows when it’s twenty below and they’ll be too tired to go looking for dope or guns.”
Andie Lee didn’t answer.
Taking advantage of her silence to try to distract her, Micah said, “This here’s Blue Bowman, Andie. Blue, Andie Lee Hart, Gordon’s daughter.”
Blue took a breath that dragged her flowery woman-smell deeper into him. Gordon had a daughter? A daughter other than Dannie? Another daughter—one he was helping in her time of trouble.
It fit. She looked like a rich rancher’s daughter. She had that air of position and privilege. Her jeans were faded Wranglers and her boots were broken-in and battered, but there was nothing ordinary about her. The boots were fine and custom-made. That silver clip. Shiny hair, silky-looking skin.
Then it hit him as they both turned at the same time to look each other full in the face. This woman was his half sister.
“Stepdaughter,” she said, quick and hard. “Gordon’s not my father.”
She looked deep into his eyes to make sure that he got it. Then she gave him the barest nod and turned away to begin boring a hole with her gaze through the windshield again.
“I just hope they don’t shoot him, Micah,” she said, too quietly.
“They won’t,” he said. “You’re gonna talk him into giving up.”
Stepdaughter.
So. Gordon must’ve divorced the first wife he’d had back when he’d refused to marry Rose.
“Shane’s never done anything violent before,” Andie Lee said. “Never. You know that, Micah, as well as I do.”
“And he ain’t yet,” Micah said, with a forced calm in his voice.
He did drive even faster, however. Too fast around a curve in the winding road. The roan kicked the trailer again—so hard it rocked the old truck and Micah cursed, just under his breath.
They headed downhill again, toward another cluster of ranch buildings. A sign beside the road came into view.
GORDON CAMPBELL RECOVERY CENTER
Blue ran his eye over the neat, low buildings—bunkhouses, cottages, barns and pens—all built to seem rustic but they were fairly new. Good lord. Gordon was trying to work his way into heaven.
Did he build all this just because Andie Lee’s son had a drug problem?
“Shane’s in the recreation hall,” Andie Lee said, pointing it out.
Then she added sarcastically, “Naturally, he’s not in a classroom or a barn.”
“That’s what I mean— They want to straighten these kids out, they got to learn ’em what work is,” Micah said.
But now his voice sounded shaky. Micah was worried. Micah really cared for Andie Lee and her son so they must be worth liking.
They started driving past the first building, one with Gordon’s name on it.
“Tracie said Shane and the girl are in the game room,” Andie Lee said. “It’s on the back of the office.”
“I’m going with you,” Micah said.
She gave him a quick smile, the first smile Blue had ever seen on her.
“Park over there,” she said, pointing. “I want to surprise them and get in before they try to keep me out.”
Micah pulled into a paved area that held another patrol car and several more vehicles, mostly pickup trucks, and parked his rig parallel to one of the landscapings of bushes and small trees. He turned the key off and opened his door.
Andie Lee was out of the truck and around the front of it, reaching for his arm by the time he could get his stiff limbs out from behind the wheel, and they took off at a hobbling run up the little hill toward the rec hall. Blue watched them go.
So. Gordon’s stepgrandson was dealing drugs and holding girls hostage. Sins of the fathers visited, as usual, upon the children and the children’s children—because, judging from the way Andie Lee said Gordon wasn’t her father, he hadn’t tried to be a daddy to her, either.
He and Dannah weren’t the only ones. There had been other children Gordon had neglected. Knowing that made him angry for her, too.
The roan stamped and nickered. Blue looked around just in time to see him sit down and halfheartedly twist on his tie rope. That’d be trouble nobody needed right now.
Blue opened the door and got out.
“No sense in choking yourself again,” he said as he walked up to the trailer. “That will get you nowhere, buddy. You know that.”
The colt did it again.
“Aw, come on,” Blue crooned. “You’ll have to get over this hating to be tied. But later. I’m not set up for that lesson today.”
Still talking to the horse, he stepped up onto the running board near the roan’s head. The colt rolled an eye at him and listened as if he understood every word. But the stubborn look in his eye didn’t change any and that made Blue chuckle as he untied the rope and let it drop.
A sharp scream tore the air. The roan, loose in the trailer now, threw up his head and listened.
A second scream, this one closer. Blue leaned out backward to look toward the rec hall.
“No! Sha-a-ne! Stop!”
A girl’s high voice, terrified. For an instant he couldn’t see her and then he did, her face bobbing out from behind the boy running toward him, brandishing a handgun over his head with one hand while he dragged the girl along with the other. Blue’s pulse leaped, his gaze fixed on the gun. Somebody could get killed right here, right now. For no reason.
Farther back, four or five men were jostling out through the doorway of the recreation building, rushing past Andie Lee and Micah who were both white-faced and wide-eyed. All of them were chasing after the kids.
Except for Gordon. Within the commotion, Blue saw him walk up to Andie Lee and take her arm.
“Hey! Stop! Stop where you are!” somebody yelled.
It was the man at the head of the pack, the other one besides Gordon who wasn’t dressed in a law-enforcement uniform. Unlike Gordon, though, the front-runner wasn’t dressed for the ranch—he wore slacks and a loose-fitting shirt.
Andie Lee’s Shane kept barreling toward Blue. His eyes, wilder than the roan’s, strained toward the vehicles parked down by the cedar trees. He actually thought he could take one of them and get out of here, that determination was in every line of his tall, coltish body.
Blue flattened himself against the side of the trailer, murmuring to the horse, who, in spite of the girl’s continued screams had become surprisingly calm. For Roanie. All he did was stand there and paw the floor.
“Turn loose of the girl and the law’ll go easier on you!” yelled one of the men who was chasing Shane.
Blue leaned out far enough to see where they were. The kid had his mouth open now as if to reply but instead he was using his breath to keep running. He had lowered the gun and was waving it back and forth in front of him, ready to aim at any second. When he reached the nose of Micah’s battered truck, not slowing, jerking the girl around like a puppet, Blue got ready.
Shane passed the bed of the truck.
Blue stepped down into his path.
“What’s your hurry, son?” he said.
