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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.
