Montana Red

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The two of them worked together for the ten days Brock was in Houston and she had had the den finished when he got home. For fifteen or twenty minutes, everything was wonderful.

She opened the door. He stepped inside, dropped his briefcase, swept her up in his arms and kissed her senseless. When he let her go, he still kept his arm around her waist to hold her against him.

But it fell away in a hurry when she led him into the den to show him his big surprise.

“You can’t be serious.” His voice held an edge that sliced away her happiness in a heartbeat. “This looks like crap, Clea. What the hell were you thinking?”

Her lips parted but no sound came out.

Which was fine. She didn’t need to say a word, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she did because Brock wouldn’t have heard it.

He kept talking as he walked around the room. He flicked a finger derisively against a lampshade, then picked up a hundred-year-old Navajo basket and sent it spinning across the room to land on the floor in front of the door.

“Don’t tell me you paid good money for this. Did you hire somebody to buy all this trash or did you pick it out? Either way, it stinks.”

“I like it.”

“You didn’t even ask me,” he said. “I thought you knew better, Clea. You’ve gotta run anything that costs more than…well, let’s say a couple thousand…by me. Don’t make that mistake again.”

That night had been the real end of her marriage. She’d wasted another four years of her life on it because she didn’t want to admit it was dead.

Because then what would she do? What could she do?

It had taken her four years to work up the courage to get the hell out.

Clea noticed she was breathing hard and getting a headache, so she pushed the memories away and headed for the barn. She had more than enough reason to keep her mind in the present and she was strong-minded enough to do that.

Brock was behind her, and by the time he found her again she’d be stronger still. By then, she’d know what to do.

When she had Ariel all settled in, she finally called it a day.

Starving and weary to the bone, she showered, dressed in sweats and went downstairs to make an omelet. Pretty soon she had to cook something besides eggs, but she really didn’t know how to make very many other dishes. That’d be another thing she could do if she were snowed in—she could learn to cook.

She grabbed a notepad to begin a list for her first trip to town, wrote cookbook, then crossed it out. There were, no doubt, a million recipes with directions on the Internet, free.

Think before you spend. Save the money. Pay for the damage to Jake’s truck. You can’t be free if you owe somebody.

Then she chopped tomato and onion, sliced ham and shredded cheese. She toasted bread in hot butter in another skillet while the eggs were cooking.

Feeling like a pioneer cowgirl who’d never heard the word calories, she put it all on a speckled tin plate and carried it with a mug of hot coffee out to the deck to watch the sunset. There was no table, no outdoor furniture at all, so she sat on the steps and leaned back against the banister post.

The air had begun to chill. It felt cool and crisp in her lungs and it smelled like pine and sage and many, many other scents she couldn’t name. As she ate, the sky burst into flame. The clouds burned. The mountains reflected the fire and threw purple mist into it while they drew it down, little by little, to extinguish it at last in the dark, mysterious shapes of the valleys.

Only when the sun had dropped completely out of sight and the light it left behind dwindled to one thin streak of the palest salmon color, did Clea come to herself. Her plate and cup sat empty on the floor of the deck and her arms and legs were covered with goose bumps underneath her sweats.

She pulled up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. Tears hovered behind her eyes but she wouldn’t let them fall. She wasn’t a crier. If she ever started, she might never stop. Besides, this truth went too deep for tears.

She couldn’t go back.

Forget that she wouldn’t go back to Texas because she wanted—needed—freedom and a new life. The operative word was couldn’t.

She had burned her bridges when she took Ariel. Not just with Brock, but with Daddy, too. No, she’d done it even earlier. When she’d “had the unmitigated gall and ingratitude” as Daddy had put it, to leave Brock and “rock the boat.”

And she’d put the cherry on top when she’d told Daddy she wasn’t going to let him take over her life again where Brock had left off.

She could not go back.

This truth wasn’t new, yet it was. She’d known it. She had known this since the minute the word divorce had left her mouth, but she hadn’t known it in the visceral way she knew it now.

Maybe Jake had been right. Maybe she’d followed him into the barn, not to see the foal but in an attempt to attach herself to him somehow. As a protector or something.

It didn’t matter. She would learn to protect herself.

She would learn to do everything for herself. Including think.

That silly stunt she’d pulled this morning would have to be her last. She could’ve wrecked both trailers for no reason except trying to one-up a man she should’ve listened to. She could have thrown away all the money she had instead of half—or whatever it would cost her to fix the truck. That had been nothing but selfish, petty behavior.

Which was a kind of luxury. One she could no longer afford any more than she could afford more fluffy bath towels or new shoes like the ones that had bothered Jake so much today.

She would learn to protect herself and to think and to survive. Because the other truth she’d seen written in flames on the Montana sky told her that she didn’t want to go back.

Her true heart was here. All she had to do was find it.

JAKE RODE up into Clea’s yard yelling, “Hello, the house! Clea, it’s Jake.”

The young horse he was on didn’t like yelling, so began gathering himself to buck.

Jake pulled his head up and started him going in a circle.

“Clea! It’s Jake Hawthorne!”

Still no answer. Damn. She was probably in there right now loading her shotgun.

He got the colt straightened out and went around to the back of the house. Maybe she was out on the deck.

As he rounded the corner, he heard a horse. Hooves thundering.

The big black mare. Coming around the far corner of the barn lot at a hard lope with Clea on her back. Then he saw the jumps set up—homemade ones made out of hay bales and barrels and some rickety-looking sawhorses with a pole set across them.

Clea was up on the balls of her feet in the stirrups, her neat butt a little bit off the saddle, leaning forward at the hip, getting ready for the first jump. Her face was what held his eye, though; she looked even farther gone in her concentration than she had been with the wild foal.

She had her head up, looking ahead, her whole body focused on what she was doing. The next instant she and the mare were rising into the air and flowing over the stack of bales like one huge bird. Beautiful. More than beautiful. His heart lifted with them. They landed, headed for the next jump.

The mare tried to veer then, her ears back, wanting to go off to one side, and Jake’s breath caught. Too late. They were already committed, going too fast to stop.

He couldn’t tell or even look to see what Clea did, but she held the mare to the course and leaned forward, ready for the jump. If the mare refused it, no way could Clea stay on and they were nearly there, nearly there and then they flowed upward again, over the barrels.

One more to go and the instant message in the air was that Clea was determined to jump it and the mare was not. She pinned her ears hard and switched her tail but Clea didn’t give her an inch of room. Straight, straight to the pole across the sawhorses and then up and over it.

Jake let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He rode on up to the fence. Clea passed him without giving any indication she knew he was there, rode around the jumps in one huge circle, headed for the first one and then put her horse over all of them again.

Pretty damned impressive. He would never have thought Clea had it in her.

This time, her blue eyes took him in as she loped—can-tered, he supposed—the mare around the pen once more. Then she trotted up to him, pulling off the helmet she wore, patting her horse’s neck while she smiled at Jake.