Cowboys Don't Quit

by Anne McAllister

  Luke nodded. He swallowed, studying the tumbling white water, trying to psyche himself up. His head pounded, and his stomach was roiling worse than the river.

  "I want to do it," Keith said suddenly.

  Luke jerked his head around to see the determined set of his friend's jaw.

  Carl rolled his eyes. "Don't be an idiot. That's what Luke's here for. He's the stuntman. You're the star."

  Keith nodded. "Exactly. That's the point." And Luke could see him getting psyched up even as he spoke. "It's me that people want to see do it."

  "You just want Jill to see you do it," Carl said, with a wink at Luke.

  Luke didn't say anything.

  Keith grinned. "Well, that, too."

  "Garrison won't let you," Carl predicted. "No way he's going to let you."

  But surprisingly, Garrison, the director, was willing to listen to Keith's argument. He even agreed that shooting Keith in close-up as he scrambled into the canoe, then panning wide as he moved downstream, was a good idea.

  "No break, huh? Makes sense," he said, a speculative smile forming. "It's not too big a risk, is it?" He looked at Carl for confirmation.

  Keith scoffed. "Carl's more careful than my mother. Aren'tcha, Carl?"

  Carl scowled and muttered under his breath. But Keith kept talking and Garrison kept listening, while Luke stood by, wishing he was a million miles away, and didn't say a word.

  He knew what was going to happen. He'd seen it before. It wasn't just showing off for Jill, though Luke knew—and Keith knew—that was part of it. It was also that Keith was a fanatic about realism. If anything death-defying needed to be done for one of his parts, he wanted to do it. Carl always had the devil's own time arguing him out of it.

  He was doing his best this time.

  Finally Keith played his final card. "It will be a better movie. I can do it. I need to do it." He faced Garrison squarely. "I'll take full responsibility."

  Garrison beamed. "Well, in that case..."

  Carl muttered, but Garrison was convinced.

  Jill wasn't, Luke could tell. "Are you sure about this?" she asked, her gray eyes looked worriedly into Keith's.

  "'Course I'm sure." He brushed her lips with his. "Piece o' cake," he added. He took the flotation vest and began to put it on beneath his buckskin shirt.

  Luke watched for a moment, felt his fists clench, then deliberately loosened them. He turned to help Carl get the canoe ready, then waited while Carl saw that the last of the safety lines were rigged.

  Jill left Keith and followed Carl. "Are you sure there are enough? Is he safe?"

  "As safe as I can make him," Carl said grimly.

  Keith laughed and came after her, then kissed her again. "Don't worry about me. I'm the bread and butter around here. They won't let me drown!"

  "But—"

  "It's all right, Jilly," he insisted. "Better me than Luke here." He slanted a grin in Luke's direction. "He was partying a little too much last night."

  "I was not!"

  "Besides—" Keith grinned, "—don't you know, cowboys can't swim!"

  "I can so," Luke retorted.

  "Not like I can. Who was California all-state breast-stroke champ in high school?"

  Luke managed a smile at that. "Breast stroke?" He waggled his eyebrows. "You never told me that had anything to do with swimming."

  Keith laughed easily. "Hey, not in front of my lady." He touched Jill's cheek. "Relax, hon, I'll be fine. Besides, it'll be a dynamite shot, you'll see. And everybody will know that it's really me."

  "They won't care."

  "But I care."

  Luke saw their gazes catch and lock.

  Finally Jill tore her eyes away from Keith and found Luke's, her gaze beseeching. "Can't you stop him?"

  Can't you stop him?

  He'd asked himself that time and again.

  Could he have?

  He didn't know. Maybe—if he'd argued harder. Maybe if he had, he would have won. God knew he should have tried. The fact was, he hadn't.

  He'd kept his mouth shut and let Keith do the gag himself.

  He'd have done it, pounding headache and roiling stomach and all, if Keith hadn't stepped in.

  It was his job. But Keith was right about one thing, he wasn't a great swimmer. Not anywhere near as good as Keith. But if he did it right, he knew he wouldn't have to swim. He only had to launch the canoe, escape from the Indians who were shooting arrows at him and navigate the white water until he was around the bend in the river, where Carl's men were standing by to fish him out.

  But Keith had pulled rank. "I'm the boss, remember," he said, then grinned. "C'mon, Carl, let's do it!"

  Luke helped finish rigging the safety lines, then tossed a neon-colored volleyball into the current half a dozen times so they could figure out the best angles. Then it was Keith's turn.

  "Outta my way, man," Keith said. He winked at Jill and headed up the draw, leaving Luke standing beside her on the riverbank. She glanced at Luke, then turned her gaze back to the river.

  So did Luke. He edged away.

  The scene went like clockwork—Keith's mad scramble down the draw, shoving off the canoe and leaping into it, his desperate paddling as the Indians swarmed after him, only to halt at the river's edge as the canoe shot away into the surging water, past the first set of rocks, over the rapids, downriver.

  And then, suddenly, the canoe slewed sideways against the rocks. It plunged, tipped and flipped Keith into the water.

  "Keith!" Jill swallowed her scream, pressing her hand to her mouth, watching frantically, waiting for him to surface. And when he didn't immediately, she turned to Luke, horrified, looking to him for help.

  Luke shook his head and took a step back. "He'll be fine," he said gruffly. "He's got a vest. He'll be up in a sec. Just got to get his bearings."

  This was Keith, after all. Keith, the all-state swimmer. Keith the champ. Keith who could do damn near everything Luke could do in the way of stunts—and when it came to water, could do them better. He was only showing off, trying to prove that it was a good thing he was doing it, not Luke.

  "Don't worry," he said to Jill.

  But when seconds turned into a minute, then two, and there was still no sign of Keith's dark head, his own determined calm disintegrated. Panic bubbled up.

  He started toward the river, first walking, then running, then wading frantically out into the water, with Jill stumbling along behind him.

  "Keith! Damn it, Keith!" He stumbled through the water, lost his footing, fell, scrambled up again. "Keith!"

  Then Carl was beside him, too, looking feverishly around, muttering. "Damn him. If this is a joke..."

  Luke knew what he meant. It wouldn't have been beyond him. He looked up onto the shore, hoping now that it was. Hoping to see Keith, irrepressible as ever, sitting on a rock laughing at them.

  He saw instead Jill's white, stricken face. He turned back to the river and plunged in.

  He didn't find Keith.

  Carl didn't find Keith.

  Neither did the grip downstream who pulled out the canoe half an hour later. Nor any of the hundreds of searchers who scoured the river for the rest of the day and evening.

  They didn't find his body until the following morning a mile downriver.

  Luke had to go and identify him.

  "We know who it is," the coroner apologized. "It was just a technicality."

  It wasn't a technicality to Luke, not when he had to stand there and stare down into the dark, still, silent face of his friend. His ears rang. His throat closed. He felt himself start to shake.

  "One of his boots was badly scraped," the coroner was saying matter-of-factly as he consulted the report. "We figure that's what held him down. It must have got stuck between two submerged rocks and he couldn't get out."

  Luke wasn't looking at the boot. He was looking at the bloody, raw tips of Keith's fingers—mute testimony to his friend's desperate, futile struggle to free himself.

 
But if seeing Keith was hard, being the one to tell Jillian what she already knew was worse.

  And worst of all was hearing from her lips what he already knew himself.

  She didn't say anything for a moment, just stared into the distance. And then, in a low, toneless voice, she spoke. "He was doing your job," she said, and her gaze shifted so that she looked squarely at him, her eyes brimming with pain and unshed tears. "You were supposed to be out there, not him."

  She wasn't telling him anything he hadn't already told himself. And all the guilt he'd had over the feelings he'd tried so long to hide was nothing compared to this.

  No, they hadn't spoken at Keith's funeral.

  What else had there been to say?

  What was there to say now? Luke wondered as he rode slowly down toward his camp.

  He tugged off his hat and raked a hand through damp hair, trying to muster what strength he had left. God knew he'd need it.

  She was every bit as beautiful and as desirable as she'd ever been. And she had every right to hate his nuts.

  He rode up almost to where she stood, but he didn't dismount. It wasn't polite not to. He knew that. He also knew he needed every advantage he could get. "Jillian." His voice sounded rusty to his ears.

  She looked up at him, and he feared for a moment that she might manage a smile. He was grateful when her lips stopped short of it.

  "Luke."

  He swallowed, waiting, expecting her to say why she'd come, but she didn't. She just looked at him. He felt like pond scum. Like cow dung. So he did what he'd always done when he'd been around her before—he resorted to sarcasm.

  "Don't tell me," he said gruffly, "you were in the neighborhood."

  Then he turned his horse and swung off, managing to keep his back to her the whole time. He walked his horse toward the pasture where he kept his mounts, hoping against hope that she would somehow vanish if he pretended she wasn't there.

  She followed him. "I've been looking for you."

  He didn't ask why. Instead he got a comb out of the saddlebag, loosened the cinch from his horse, then eased off the saddle and put it over the fence. He moved with the same focused deliberation he used when he was trying to forget the dream. The same deliberation he used to remind himself that this woman was off-limits. He laid the saddle blanket over the saddle, then took off the bridle, put on a halter and began to brush down his horse.

  Jill was so close he could almost feel the heat of her breath against his sweat-soaked shirt. He inched away.

  "You haven't been exactly easy to find."

  "Didn't intend to be." He didn't look at her. He kept currying the horse, as if he did it every night. He reckoned the animal must be amazed at the attention.

  "No one knew where you went."

  "Somebody did," he pointed out. "You're here."

  "A last shot. And it was pure luck."

  "Is that what it is?" he said bitterly.

  "I think so." Her voice was quiet.

  "How were you so lucky?" He twisted the word. He couldn't help it.

  "I decided to come back to where you and Keith met in the first place. And, well, I ran into a friend of yours."

  Luke had thought his friends would have known better than to betray his whereabouts. "Who?"

  "Paco."

  Luke smothered a groan. "I might've known."

  "He's a lovely little boy," Jill said quickly, defen-sively almost.

  "He makes Machiavelli look like Little Bo-Peep."

  She ventured a laugh and tossed a lock of hair away from her face. "He's delightful. A regular charmer." She was smiling, but as Luke turned, her smile faded. "He knows every movie Keith ever made."

  His jaw tightened. "I know." He brushed past her and opened the gate so the horse could go into the pasture. Then he replaced the rungs of the gate before he turned back to ask roughly, "So, why were you looking? What do you want?"

  "To... apologize."

  "Apologize?" He stared at her, dumbfounded.

  She nodded. "Apologize," she repeated firmly. "For what I said to you—to you...that day. The day I...the day you—"

  "I know which day!" Did she think he'd ever forget?

  "And I know I just made it worse for you. I wanted to say I'm sorry. I was...overwrought."

  "You were right."

  "No."

  He jammed his hands into his pockets and stared out into the distance. "Yes. If I'd been doing my job, Keith wouldn't be dead."

  "Keith liked to do his own stunts. It was his choice."

  "That's no excuse. I should've told him—"

  "Telling Keith never did any good at all, and you know it. Keith could talk his way around anyone. Even you," she added, giving him a level look. "You'd have had to knock him down and tie him up to have kept him out of that canoe."

  "Then I should have," Luke said stubbornly. He kicked at the dirt with the toe of his scuffed boot. "Look," he said finally, "It was nice of you to drop by and apologize...." He still couldn't quite say the word with equanimity. "I appreciate it. Now it's gettin' late. It's gonna be dark before long and if you're gonna get down to the road before nightfall, you'd better get movin'."

  "Luke—"

  But he didn't want to hear any more. Couldn't listen to any more. He and Jillian Crane had never talked to each other. They didn't need to start now.

  "Come on. I'll see you down." He whistled at the horses and they trotted his way, the bay gelding eagerly nosing his shirt pocket for the sugar he knew Luke kept there.

  Aware that she was watching, he frowned and pushed the bay's head away, got nosed again and finally gave in and fed him a sugar cube. Then he slipped the halter over his head and led him out of the pasture.

  "Shut the gate," he said over his shoulder and moved to saddle the horse.

  She did. "Am I forgiven?"

  He kept moving. "Of course.",

  "I didn't mean to hurt you. I—"

  Luke wheeled around. "Look, what you said, I de-served. If you want me to forgive you, fine. You're forgiven. But it doesn't change a damn thing!"

  "Because you haven't forgiven yourself," she said quietly.

  "No, I haven't. You're right about that." His hands clenched against the saddle. He bent his head. He would never be able to forgive himself as long as he lived.

  "You ought to, Luke," she said gently.

  "I don't think so."

  "Yes, you should. And you should stop hiding out up here and—"

  "I'm not hiding out!"

  "No one knew where you were."

  "Paco did, obviously. So do most of the people in town."

  "But they wouldn't tell me. Did you ask them not to?"

  He shrugged irritably. "Didn't want to be bothered. Not that I reckon a lot of people would want to know," he added gruffly.

  "I did. Carl would."

  "No." Next to Jill, the last person he wanted to see was Carl, the man who had hired Luke in the first place and who had come to be the closest thing to a father Luke had had in years. He'd done a lot of growing up under Carl's watchful, yet tolerant eye.

  He didn't want to see the look in Carl's eyes now.

  "Really, Luke—"

  "No! And you'd damned well better not tell him where I am. Now come on. It's gettin' dark. You don't want to be trekking down the mountain in the dark."

  "I could stay."

  "The hell you could!" He looked at her, furious.

  "We shared a house...before."

  Luke's jaw tightened and his fury grew as he remembered those two weekends when Keith had sent him with 1 ill up to his house in Big Bear in the hopes that the paparazzi would follow them and give him some space.

  "A little bit of obscurity, privacy, heaven," Keith had said when he'd asked Luke to do it.

  Heaven, yes. But in its own way, hell, too. Luke remembered only too well what had happened the last time they were there—those few brief moments when desire had defeated him, when he'd forgotten who she was, who he was, how wrong anything
between them would be.

  Anger and guilt swamped him even now. "Is that what this is all about? You looking to pick up where we left off, maybe? Are you horny, honey?"

  She slapped his face.

  They stared at each other. Then Luke raised a hand to touch his stinging cheek, while she pressed her fingers against her mouth and looked at him, stricken. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

  He turned away. "You shouldn't be. You should have done it then."

  And he strode quickly down to where she'd left her horse. It was Jimmy Kline's sorrel. He wondered how she'd managed that. But then Jillian had always had a way about her, a way that had made most of the world fall at her feet—especially, he thought savagely, grown men who should damn well have known better.

  "How'd you get Kline's horse?" he demanded.

  "Paco introduced us. They were a little less eager to let me know where you were," she admitted. "But Paco convinced them."

  "I'll bet," he said grimly. Well, the deed was done. Now he just wanted her gone. "At least you knew enough to loosen the cinch," he grunted.

  "Jimmy told me to."

  "Good ol' Jimmy," he said under his breath. He turned to her. "Get on." He swung easily into the bay's saddle. "Let's go." He started down the trail without looking back, wanting to get far enough ahead so they wouldn't have to talk.

  But Jill caught up with him. "I didn't just come to apologize. And I didn't come for what else you implied," she said flatly. "I came because I need your help. I'm working on a book. A biography. Of Keith."

  He didn't even look at her. He just kept riding, giving no sign that he'd even heard, wishing he hadn't. It didn't stop her.

  "I've been working on it for the past year," she con-tinued. "I've got almost all the interviewing done. I've talked to everyone who ever meant anything to Keith. Teachers, friends, relatives, directors, producers, other actors. Everyone, that is, except..." She didn't have to finish.

  "No." God, no.

  "I know you think it would be painful to talk about it," she said urgently. "All right, it is painful. But it also helps, Luke, believe me." She urged the sorrel forward until she rode beside him. "I didn't want to do it, either. But it gave me some perspective."

  "I've got all the perspective I need." It was over. Past. And he couldn't talk about it. Couldn't relive it. Especially not with her. He'd never survive.