Unbreakable (33 page)

“What did Barrett want?” Boone finally asked, bringing him back to the present.

“He’s been in touch with New Mexico.”

“I came all the way to town for that?”

“He just wanted me to know. Guess it’ll be on the bill I’m gonna have to beg Faith to let me pay.”

Boone shifted in his saddle, reining Sunshine around and moving into Casper’s field of vision. “I’m not going anywhere. And I don’t want you walking away. She’s been happier these last few weeks than I’ve seen her in a very long time.”

That surprised him, coming from her brother, but it was good to hear in light of the hefty weight of change bearing down. Something told him he’d just taken a big step he’d never get back.

“It’s just…Stuff happened when she was younger,” Boone was saying. “Stuff that makes it hard for me not to want to beat the shit out of you because I know you and I don’t want her hurt.”

He nodded, stayed silent.

“She paid for your house, didn’t she?”

This time he couldn’t bring himself to do more than meet Boone’s gaze that was once again angry and ax-wielding mean.

“Fucking shit.”

“It’s for the party.”

“It’s not for the party. It’s for you.”

“She said—”

“I don’t give a goddamn crap what she said. Me and her…We were sharing the cost. Every bit of it. A split we could both afford. Or that I could afford since she can afford to buy the country club outright if she wants.” He wiped his wrist across his forehead, then tugged down his hat until his eyes were lost in the brim’s shadow. “She hasn’t once touched that money since it dropped into her account. Except maybe to move it into others. And yet for you—”

“It wasn’t for me.”

“Say that again and I rip your tongue out of your mouth.” The look the other man gave him guaranteed it would happen. “Did she tell you where she got it?”

This was harder for Casper to swallow. “Not exactly.”

“Don’t think you know what happened. And don’t you dare fucking judge her for getting herself mixed up with that sonuvabitch.” Boone flung a string of fucks and shits and damns into the air. “I didn’t say that. And it better not get back to her that I did.”

“I’m not about to say anything to her. And I’m not judging
her. Jesus. Why would I judge her? What right do I have to judge what anyone does?”

“What did I miss?” Dax asked, riding up beside them.

“Nothing,” Casper grumbled.

“Uh-uh. Something is going on.” He licked his finger, held up his arm. “Winds are definitely blowing mean.”

Boone grunted. “Asshole broke the rule.”

“What ru— Shit. No-sisters?” Dax looked from Boone to Casper and back. “What’re you gonna do about it?”

Boone looked into the distance. “He says he loves her.”

“Which part of him loves her?”

That earned Dax a whip across the back from Casper’s quirt.

“
Yeowch
. Shit. I get it. You love her. Question is, what’re
you
gonna do about it?”

That he did not know. He knew what he’d like to do, the kind of life he’d like to live with Faith in it. Hell, thanks to her, he already had the house with the white picket fence. But he couldn’t see the two of them having kids, bringing them up together, making a family.

What the hell did he know about making a family? He couldn’t even hold on to one fourteen-year-old boy.

“What I’m gonna do is look for Clay.” He glanced from one of the men who’d been more brother than friend to the other who might end up being both, a thought that added to the teeth in his gut eating him up like sausage. “You two coming? Or you gonna sit on your asses and wait for the grass to grow?”

N
EARLY TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
after discovering Clay gone, Casper headed back to town to see Faith. He owed her an apology for bolting this morning. It had been hard to look at her, sweet from the shower, when all he could see was her brother’s face, her brother’s anger and censure, and know she was saddling up to ride him down with the same.

The thought that he’d fucked things up beyond all repair had sent him to Barrett’s office in a blur. Then sent him to the ranch at a speed limit he’d never seen posted on any sign in the forty-eight contiguous states. He and Boone airing things, if not settling things, had let him put that worry to rest for the moment and allowed him to focus on Clay.

But the search for Clay had been a bust, and the worry was waking up. He hadn’t talked to Faith all day, but his phone was out again, and he’d put in so many miles on horseback he’d promised Remedy he could have tomorrow off. A good thing for
the both of them since he had an appointment with Dr. Pope. The other man would most likely give him a good reaming for getting back in the saddle so soon. But, hell, he’d had bulls do more damage.

He wasn’t going to let Summerlin’s Arabian—

He cut off the thought, squinting down the road, looking at the familiar figure jogging toward him. His heart dropped from his chest to his stomach, then it jumped into his throat before it settled back where it belonged. He braked to a stop, let the dust settle, and rolled down his window just as Clay reached him.

“Where the
hell
have you been—” But it was all he got out. Clay’s face was a mess. His clothes were a mess, smeared with dirt and what could be blood and smelling like animal shit. And he was without Kevin. He was without Kevin. Shit. Casper shifted into park, shoved open his door, climbed down with his gut churning. “Clay?”

“I need help,” the boy said, his throat working.

“What’s wrong?”

“If you’re going to turn me in, I’ll split,” he said, tears rolling down his cheeks, those same tears dousing the front of Casper’s shirt as the boy buried his face against him.

Casper’s arms came around him without any thought at all. “Clay, what’s wrong?”

“It’s Kevin,” he said, backing up and doubling over, his hands on his knees as he fought to catch his breath. “He got in the way of a bull. It tossed him.”

“Jesus, Clay. What were you doing in a pasture? And whose pasture? Where?”

“I figured going cross-country would take you longer to find us. And I don’t know whose.” He stopped, his whole body shaking with his effort to breathe. “We took off after we got back to the ranch. Then laid low for a while.”

Well, that was for sure. Okay, think.
Think.
“What did the bull look like?”

Clay straightened, waved a hand. “He was big, monster muscles, kinda white.”

That sounded like Philip Hart’s Charolais. One of the bulls Casper had wrecked on had been a big, mean Charolais. “Where’s Kevin now?”

“I had to wait till it was safe to get to him. I moved him into a ditch. I couldn’t carry him any further.” His voice broke, broke again, and the rest of the words flowed out with his sobs. “I think I was hurting him.”

“C’mon,” Casper said, his own voice tight, his throat choking up even tighter, his arm fastened around the boy’s shoulder as he walked him to the far side of the truck. “Get in. Tell me where he is. I’ll radio up to Mal’s, let him know we’re coming.”

“What’s Mal’s?”

“Mal runs an animal shelter. Doc Neal, the vet, he’s up there every day. No place Kevin could get better care.”

“He’d stay there? I want to be with him. He’ll be scared if I’m not there.”

“Considering you’re in a bit of trouble, that’s probably not going to happen.” When Clay didn’t say anything to that, Casper put the truck in gear and went on. “What were you thinking, running like that? Not even leaving a note?”

“I didn’t want to get you busted,” he said, his head in his hands, shaking. “When no one knew I was here things were okay. But with the cop and the lawyer and everyone poking around…I didn’t want a bunch of crap to fall on you for not turning me in when you found me.”

Casper didn’t even know what to say. This boy had lit off with his dog, heading over terrain fit for jackrabbits and rattlesnakes, barely fit for the cattle who grazed it, to keep Casper out
of the law’s crosshairs? How in the
hell
would he be able to send the boy back into the system now?

Clay gave a desperate sort of laugh. “We made it across two states just fine, and I can’t even get outta Crow Hill without something happening to Kevin. God, I can’t believe I was so stupid. I’m going to end up in jail because I was so stupid.”

“You’re not stupid. And no one’s pressing charges. You know that.” He didn’t say anything about jail because that was beyond him to know.

“For the things I took, yeah. But I didn’t have a license.”

“True, and that’ll bring you some consequences.”

“And I’m a runaway. And a ward of the state.”

At least the boy knew the lay of the land. “That part, too.”

Clay kept his gaze averted, his head on the passenger window as the road whizzed beneath them. “He’s going to send me back, isn’t he? The sheriff?”

“No. Not yet, anyway.” Casper thought about Kevin alone and frightened and bleeding, and gunned the accelerator. “He doesn’t know where to send you, though I’ll bet he’s been searching through bulletins all day.”

“So I get to stay on the ranch?”

“For now, yes.”

“I wish I could stay forever.”

He didn’t want to get the boy’s hopes up, but seeing him like this…“I’m doing my best to keep you here as long as I can. I’m not going to let you go back to the situation you came from. Not without a fight.”

“You’d do that for me?”

Casper nodded, silent.

“I don’t even think my mother would’ve done that for me.”

“As much as I liked your mother, I’m beginning to think she wasn’t much of one.” Though he couldn’t imagine her not
fighting for her boy. Then again, had he even known the real her? “Neither was mine, which kinda makes me an expert on recognizing the type.”

“Sucks, doesn’t it?”

“It does, but I had friends whose folks knew what I was going through and showed me how to keep my head up.” Those dinners and breakfasts at the Mitchells rose like a port in a storm. “I want to do that for you. Even if things don’t go our way in the end, I don’t want you getting into worse shit and blaming your mom. You’re old enough to know what’s right and what’s wrong.”

“I didn’t mean to blame her, that day in the jail. I knew she did drugs, and there were a
lot
of guys. But she was always happy, like a kid. I kinda figured I was an accident, but at least she didn’t toss me in the trash or something. I guess she did her best.” He sniffed, wiped his eyes on his hoodie’s grubby sleeve, turned to look at the window. “I miss her.”

Casper reached a hand along the back of the seat and squeezed the boy’s shoulder. Saying anything wouldn’t have helped. This was Clay needing to work things out for himself, something Casper understood well. Except Casper making sense of his own shitty past had only begun recently, and his working things out fell to Faith. Without her…

Without her he’d be nothing, nowhere. He would’ve bucked under the weight of the house, the added burden of Clay, the suffocating obligation of the ranch drowning him. He needed her to know that. He needed to tell her what it had meant to him for her to find those papers, to be there while he’d burned them, even if he’d walked out of the room, and walked out on her for fear of breaking down…

Twenty minutes later, they found Kevin where Clay had left him, still conscious, his white fur matted brick red in a big circle
on one side. He lifted his head when he saw them, but dropped it just as quickly, though he did give a few solid wags of his tail.

Casper swallowed hard, taking in the situation. Moving the dog was going to hurt him, and he didn’t want either himself or Clay to get bit. A muzzle would be good, but might scare the dog more. Knowing where Philip Hart pastured his bull, it was hard to believe how far Clay had managed to carry the mutt. Kevin was not a light dog.

For sure they needed a stretcher of some kind. He did a mental inventory of the supplies in his truck, then whipped off his T-shirt, laid it out the length of Kevin’s spine. “We’ll move him onto the shirt then use it to carry him to the truck. Go on and let the tailgate down.”

While Clay took care of that part, Casper did his best to set the dog at ease, stroking his silky ears, rubbing a knuckle between his eyes, scratching the top of his head. “Hang in there, boy,” he whispered, leaning close so Kevin could look into his eyes.

“Okay,” Clay said, breathless. “Now what?”

Casper stood, squatted over the dog. “I’ll lift his hips. You slide the shirt under him. Smooth it out the best you can. Then we’ll do the same on this end. But you stay on that side of his teeth.”

“He won’t bite me. He’s never bitten me.”

First time for everything, kid.
“He knows you’re there. His tail’s telling you. Now, one, two, three…”

“C
LAY’S BACK
,” C
ASPER
said the second Faith picked up the phone.

“Casper?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I’m using the phone up at New Dawn.”

“The animal shelter? No wonder I didn’t recognize the number. What’re you doing there?”

“Kevin’s hurt. We brought him here.” He looked out the window of Mal Breckenridge’s small office to where the shelter’s owner and Doc Neal were moving Kevin on a canvas litter from the back of his truck. “That’s why Clay came back. Kevin had a run-in with Philip Hart’s big Charolais bull.”

“What? Wait a minute. Back up. I’m totally lost here.”

Casper boosted a hip onto the corner of the cluttered desk, dragging the phone with him. He didn’t blame her for not being able to keep up with his adrenaline-fueled ramblings. His head was a mess. He took a deep breath and started again. “Hi. How are you?”

“I’m fine. Better than fine hearing Clay’s all right. He is all right, isn’t he?”

“Tired and scared and out of his mind worried about his dog.”

“Just like you’ve been out of yours worried about him.”

“Yeah. This parenting thing’s not for sissies,” he said, rubbing the tightness from his neck. “Even if it’s a temporary thing.”

“It’s good to hear you sounding so relieved,” she said, and he heard the smile in her voice.

He closed his eyes, pictured her mouth, thought about holding her close. Breathing in her sweet scent. “It was so weird. I was on my way to see you and looked up and there he was.”