Until last year. Fifteen months ago, to be exact.
Chase slipped the rainbow’s chain free from the mirror. He stuck it in the pocket on the duffel, stepped down from the cab and looked up and down the quiet country road.
Back the way he’d come lay the interstate. Chase preferred a more wandering sort of road, a road with more personality, some surprises along the way.
No, he couldn’t think of any reason to backtrack. The way he’d been headed, now, there were a dozen little towns spotting the countryside around San Antonio, clustered up as close and friendly as freckles on a redhead. Most of those tiny towns had a split identity these days, divided between their rural upbringing and their newer function as bedroom communities for the growing city at their center. There was bound to be one of those freckle-sized towns up the road a ways. He’d just walk until he came to it, or until someone took pity on his feet and gave him a lift.
Not that he had any idea in hell what he’d do when he got wherever he was going. He probably had enough cash on him for a tune-up. Not a new engine.
Chase put his good hat on his head and left the old one locked up in the truck, slung his tote over his shoulder and set off down the two-lane road.
He limped. He ignored that, just like he’d been doing for the past fifteen months.
The air was crisp, but hardly January cold. San Antonio was pretty far south, so far that the grass was still green. Good walking weather, he told himself.
Yeah, this was one of life’s better jokes, all right, he thought as his feet put a low hill between him and his pickup. A real zinger. Not that he was crazy about working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He’d done enough roughnecking from time to time, filling in between rodeos when he was starting out, to know what the work was like. But he needed something. A goal. Some kind of direction to aim at. He didn’t know exactly what he needed, but he sure as hell had to find out.
Chase had always played hard. Before he started shaving he’d understood that the only way to deal with life was to enjoy every moment you can and not take anything too seriously, because sure as anything, once you let something or someone matter too much, life pulled the rug out from under you. But ever since he’d left the circuit, he’d been playing too hard. Drinking too much and working too little. He’d started a slide down a smooth, steep shaft that led exactly nowhere.
When he woke up one morning with chunks of the night before missing, as well as most of the paycheck from his current two-bit job, he’d scared himself badly enough to take the job a friend of a friend offered him in Port Arthur.
Only now he wasn’t going to make it to Port Arthur.
Chase’s mouth drew into an unaccustomedly grim line. He’d just have to get himself straightened out some other way. He settled his tote on his other shoulder to get the weight off the side with the bad knee.
It took Chase less than a mile to decide that the road just didn’t look the same when you were hoofing it in cowboy boots with a burn knee.
Things could be worse, he told himself as he paused to stand, hip shot and thumb out, on the side of the highway as a big semi rumbled toward him. He could’ve broken down along one of those hundred-miles-of-nothing stretches back in Wyoming with freezing temperatures and snow for company. Around here, though, it wouldn’t be long before someone...
The semi thundered past in a rush of hot wind. Chase sighed, tugged down his hat and started walking again.
Not much traffic along this highway at one-fifteen in the afternoon.
Five minutes later, when the woman in the battered blue pickup slowed and pulled over, Chase knew his luck had finally taken a turn for the better. The woman who leaned out the window had thick arms, left bare in spite of the chilly air, with a rose tattoo on the left forearm.
She was the best thing Chase had seen all day.
As soon as the truck stopped, Chase started toward it at something like a trot in spite of his knee. A grin broke out across his face. “Hey, Rosie!” he yelled. “Have you finally decided to get rid of your old man and give me a try?”
The truck door opened, and a big woman leaned out. Her long ponytail was as red as Lady Clairol could make it, and the smile on her face puffed her cheeks out into twin moons. Her voice was as clear and pure as a church bell. “Chase McGuire, you idiot, what are you doing in Texas? Haven’t we passed a law against you or something? Come on, get in the truck, you fool.”
“That’s my Rosie,” Chase said, grinning like the fool she’d called him. He slung his tote in the back and climbed into the truck driven by the wife of an old rodeo buddy. “I can’t believe it. What are you doing around here? I thought you and Will had settled up in Oklahoma after he retired.”
“His ma isn’t doing so well. We packed up Joe—he’s the only one of the kids still at home—and came down to live with her last fall,” Rosie said, putting the gearshift through its paces with all the ease of a professional truck driver—which she had been, years ago. “She runs a couple hundred head just north of here and lives in Bita Creek. That’s Bita Creek you see dead ahead,” she added.
They were headed downhill at a steady seventy miles an hour toward a scattering of houses and buildings and trees—one of those freckle-sized towns Chase had counted on being nearby. He sorted through his recollections of Will Stafford, a man who’d been one of the best rodeo clowns in the business until stiffening joints and slowed reflexes made him retire. “I thought Will didn’t get along with his mom.”
“He don’t. And the old bat still hates my guts, too,” Rosie said cheerfully, slowing as they encountered the bar and gas station that signaled the outskirts of Bita Creek. “But what are you gonna do? She’s family.”
Chase nodded. He knew what she meant. If your family needed help, you helped. That’s all there was to it. Chase, of course, didn’t really need help. He was in a temporary bind, that was all. He could straighten this out just fine on his own, without calling Mike. Chase knew exactly how his big brother would react if he knew about Chase’s money problems.
No, Chase definitely wasn’t going to call on his family for help right now.
“You could’a knocked me down with a feather when I saw you strolling along the side of the road. What’s up? That your truck I saw broke down a couple miles back?”
Chase gave her a quick rundown of his recent past. He was good at making a story out of the banana peels life slipped under his feet, and Rosie laughed until she was wiping tears from her eyes. “Lordy,” she said, “you are one unlucky bastard, aren’t you? But don’t worry. Will knows lots of folks hereabouts, and anyone he don’t know, his ma does. He’ll find you some sort of job.” She reached over and patted his knee reassuringly.
Chase managed not to wince. Not that Rosie was the least bit rough. In spite of her manner and her build, she had gentle, almost dainty hands, as any number of wounded animals and banged-up kids over the years could testify. But even a normal pat hurt his knee right now, sore and swollen as it was from all his walking. That wasn’t Rosie’s fault. Somehow in telling Rosie about himself, Chase had neglected to mention the horse that had halfway crippled him last year.
“You know me, Rosie,” he said, with something close to his usual grin. “I never worry.”
Summer Callaway stood in the slanting light of the early morning sun in her bedroom. Twenty hours ago, the Bates’s sorrel gelding had tossed her on her left shoulder in the training pen, busting her collarbone and her budget, and plumb ruining her temper.
Summer considered herself a patient woman. She wasn’t a whiner, either. She just didn’t deal well with frustration.
Getting dressed