Finding Home (2 page)

Read Finding Home Online

Authors: Lois Greiman

BOOK: Finding Home
11.64Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
C
HAPTER
2
C
asie clawed for the door handle, but her skittering fingers couldn't work the latch. She twisted her neck to the right, ready to dodge out of her assailant's reach. But her intruder, it seemed, had his shoulder pressed against the passenger window and was staring at her in open-mouthed surprise.
She paused, managing to still her extremities, though her heart clattered with panic as she tried to make sense of the situation. Her right hand, she discovered, was grasping her keys like another might a stiletto.
“So . . .” The stranger's voice was low and edged with something that might have been animosity. On the other hand, it could very well have been amusement. “How's it going?”
She narrowed her eyes. Then, as exhausted neurons began to fire with steadier regularity, she tilted her head and tried to see past the brim of the intruder's cowboy hat. A slanted, too-familiar grin peeked out at her.
“Hey, Case,” he said and pushed up his Stetson to reveal dark coffee eyes.
Relief and irritation sluiced through her in equal measures. “Holy Hannah!” She was barely able to manage that much as she lifted her pseudoweapon toward her stuttering heart. “You scared the life out of me.”
Richard Colton Dickenson removed his hat, placed it on the left knee of his frayed jeans, and grinned. “Holy Hannah? Don't tell me you still haven't learned to cuss, Case.”
“I can cuss just . . .” She shook her head, finding the no-nonsense course she had vowed to follow. “I thought you were in Abilene or Las Vegas or hell . . . or something.”
He raised his brows. “Hell?”
“That last one was just a guess,” she said and reminded herself that she'd long ago outgrown her need to spar with battered bronc riders who had more balls than brains. “What are you doing
here?
”
He fiddled with the brim of his hat but didn't shift his gaze from hers. “Broke my arm in a bucking chute in Cheyenne,” he said and lifted his casted right from beneath his canvas jacket as proof. “Thought I'd come home to heal.”
Casie glanced down. His thumb looked swollen, his fingers painful, but she knew better than to care. “I
mean,
what are you doing in my truck?” she said.
He grinned a little, a sharp reminder of a hundred times he'd teased her to distraction. It wasn't easy getting Cassandra Carmichael riled. But Dickenson had a knack for it. In a high school class of sixty-four students, he was the only one who had mastered that particular feat. “Did I scare you?”
She would have liked to deny it, but she lied even worse than she swore. “You were lurking in my truck,” she reminded him. “Of course you scared me.”
“I don't lurk,” he said. “Hunker maybe. Hang out.” He chuckled. The sound was lower than she remembered. His eyes looked tired, his left cheek bruised, dark with a magenta hue in the overhead lights. “Maybe I loitered once in Reno.” He dropped his head against the cushion behind him and sighed. “I didn't mean to scare you.” His tone sounded fatigued and sincere, but she wasn't foolish enough to believe in his earnestness. That mistake tended to invite frogs down her back and sheep droppings in her Jell-O.
“Then maybe you shouldn't have hidden in my truck like a . . .” she began, then stopped abruptly as a new realization filtered in. Narrowing her eyes, she glanced at his off-kilter grin, his hat, his clay-colored canvas jacket. “That was you.”
He raised Indian-dark brows over eyes that perpetually looked amused. “What's that?”
“That was you in there with Toby what's-his-face.”
“Leach.” He nodded. “Yeah. I'm doing a little work for him.”
“For a killer buyer?”
He shook his head once. “Now don't go getting on your high horse, Case. The man's not Satan. He's just trying to make a living like everybody else.”
“Sure.” She tried to keep the emotion out of her tone. Unbridled emotion, Bradley said, caused more foolish decisions than ignorance and alcohol combined. Her fiancé also thought her parents had been a testimony to that truth. They'd been like fire and oil, her father stubborn and stoic, her mom hot-tempered, vivacious, and pretty. Casie was nothing like her mother. But her voice warbled a little when she spoke. “By slaughtering horses.”
“It's better than letting 'em starve to death,” Dickenson said, seeming leery of her tone. “And it's not like he's buying Secretariat. Dammit, I mean . . .” He jerked a thumb toward the auction barn. “What were you thinking in there?”
She remained perfectly still, refusing to be embarrassed by her purchase and shrugging to emphasize her cool demeanor. “Oh, I don't know, I was looking for something to run at the Cow Palace. Thought the gray looked the type.”
He stared at her a second, then snorted. “Hell, Case, she'll be lucky to cut it as a lawn ornament.”
Casie's careful temper prickled, but she smoothed it down. “She's a little rough around the edges, maybe.”
“Rough around the edges,” he said and grinned, cracking a dimple into his left cheek. “Head Case, that nag's rough clean through.”
The old nickname turned the prickles to barbed wired. “So what should we do, Dickey? Throw her away? Send her to slaughter? I mean, if she can't run or buck or . . .” She waved a hand. “She could at least be pretty, right?” Dickenson, she remembered, had dated every girl on the cheerleading squad while Casie had been fighting acne and playing piccolo in the marching band. “Otherwise she might as well be dead. She might as well be—”
“Hold your damned horses!” he said and lifted his injured right hand as if to forestall any further histrionics. “Simmer down.”
A thousand nasty rejoinders popped into her brain, but she pursed her lips, effectively holding them all at bay, and returned to the problem at hand. “Why are you in my truck?”
“Listen, I didn't mean to get you all hyped up. I just—”
“Why?” she asked. Her tone, she thought, was admirably steady. Bradley, who valued good sense above all else, would be proud.
Colton pushed the fingers of his left hand through blood bay hair and exhaled. “I need a ride home.”
“What?”
“We don't live half a mile apart.” He grinned again. “I can walk from your house if you're nervous about going all the way.”
Rainwater was dripping down her back from the ponytail she'd tucked through the hole in her cap, but she didn't bother to remedy that. Instead, she watched him narrowly, wary of double meanings. There were always double meanings with Colt Dickenson. “You need a ride home.”
He gave her a solemn nod, seeming to have his smile under control. “Yeah.”
“How'd you get here then?”
“Toby gave me a lift.”
“Why don't you just have him lift you on back?”
“He's got a trailer full of horses to take care of.” He did grin now, but cautiously, almost innocently. “You wanna buy them, too?”
She considered telling him to get out, to shut up, to drop dead for all she cared. But at twenty-eight years of age she was a little long in the tooth for such dramatics. “Put your seat belt on,” she ordered and started up Ol' Puke. Well into its third decade, the Chevy truck ran loud enough to rattle the fenders.
“I don't think it
has
a seat belt,” Dickenson said.
She scowled at him as she pulled out of the parking lot. He was pushing aside a tattered envelope and a single rawhide glove, searching in the groove between the seats for the device.
“Then just . . .” His forage through the detritus of her life was embarrassing. “Just don't die until you get out. Okay?”
“Hell, Case, I didn't think you cared,” he said.
She snorted and he chuckled. They rolled along in silence for most of three miles. In the darkness up ahead two bucks stood at the side of the road, antlers raised, red eyes gleaming. They remained frozen for a moment, then leaped away, breaking a hole in the darkness.
“I'm sorry about your dad.” His voice was quiet, devoid of humor for once.
She didn't look at him. “Thanks.”
“Heart attack, huh?”
“That's what the cardiologist said.”
“Was he sick beforehand?”
She shrugged. The movement felt stiff. “He never wanted to go to a doctor.”
“But everything seemed okay right up to the end?”
“Yes.” It was a bald-faced lie and surprisingly well delivered. She tightened her hands on the steering wheel and kept her gaze on the gravel road ahead. “I found him in the heifer pasture one morning.”
“So what brought you home in the first place?”
“Some of us visit our families now and then, Dickenson.” Guilt made her tone sharper than she'd intended.
“For nine months?”
How the devil did he know how long she'd been home? she wondered, but she kept her tone casual. “He needed a little help around the ranch. I'll be going back to Saint Paul as soon as I can get things straightened out here.”
“Things?”
“I'll have to sell the place.”
There was a moment of absolute silence, then, “You're selling the Lazy?”
“A girl can't . . .” She stopped herself before her father's words escaped into the ether, though she had no reason to believe they were wrong. “This isn't where I belong. Besides, I have to get back to work.”
From the corner of her eye she could see him watching her, but he didn't speak for a moment.
“I hear you're a secretary,” he said finally.
Maybe it was his tone that put her back up. Maybe it was the fact that she
was
a secretary. “Administrative assistant.”
“Oh, sorry, I thought you were a secretary.”
She felt her teeth grind. “You know, Dickie, not everything has to be a death-defying adventure.”
He stared at her for a second, then chuckled. “I suppose not. Anyway, I guess congratulations are in order.”
“Congratulations?” she said and turned toward him.
He raised one brow. “You're engaged, right?”
“Oh.” She felt herself blush and resented her fair Celtic roots all the way to her scalp. Growing up, she would have given her right hand to be Lakota or Cheyenne or Arikara. She could have even tolerated being Ponca, though that was Dickenson's maternal heritage. “Yes.”
“When's the big day?”
She concentrated on refraining from throttling the steering wheel. “We haven't set a date yet.” Bradley had insisted that when they got married they would have a
real
wedding. Her secretarial job had barely managed to pay his tuition, and now, after nine months at the Lazy, her savings were all but depleted.
“He must have heard about your temper, huh?”
She scowled at him and he laughed.
“Why haven't you set a date?”
“There's been a lot to take care of.”
“Like what?” he asked. Colt Dickenson had never considered being nosy a character flaw.
“Dad let things slide a little after Mom died,” she said and wondered if one could be struck dead for exaggeration. She vividly remembered the day she had discovered he had not opened a single letter since his wife's death two years before. Relatives had been ignored, neighbors had been snubbed, and bills had gone unpaid. The chaos that ensued was only matched by the guilt she felt for never having realized the situation earlier. And
that
guilt was only equaled by how bad she felt about her recent neglect of her fiancé.
But Dickenson only glanced out the side window, seemingly unaware of her glaring shortcomings. “That must have just about killed him right there.”
“What?”
“Your mom's death.” He shook his head and turned back toward her. “To tell the truth, I'm surprised he lived as long as he did once Kathy was gone.”
She glanced at him. Off in the distance, the Gradys' craggy shelterbelt could be seen as a black, jagged line against the late spring snow.
“He thought she walked on water.”
Casey opened her mouth to refute his statement. There had been dozens of times she'd been sure their marriage wouldn't last another hour. She'd been even surer it was lunacy to subject oneself to that brand of misery, but that was before she'd witnessed her father's broken life. Before she'd realized the “important papers” he warned her not to touch were nothing more than grocery lists and worthless doodles penned by her mother's artistic hand. “She was . . .” She swallowed, punting. “She was always so—”

Other books

Catch a Crooked Clown by Joan Lowery Nixon
All Through the Night by Davis Bunn
Guarding Sophie by Julie Brannagh
Blood Challenge by Eileen Wilks
Dark Summer Dawn by Sara Craven
First Rider's Call by Kristen Britain