Montana Mavericks, Books 1-4

by Diana Palmer

  “Trace,” he said, searching for the words he hadn’t been able to find in the past. “Don’t. Crying…it doesn’t do any good. It doesn’t change things.”

  But she was beyond hearing him. Her hat blew off, and her hair gleamed like new pennies in the noonday sun, reminding him of the young girl he’d fallen instantly in love with.

  She still didn’t make a sound, but stood there with her hands covering her face, as if to hide the grief…from him, he realized. She didn’t want him to see her cry.

  He knew he couldn’t walk away this time. He had to face the pain. He had to face it and deal with it…or damn her to the same emptiness he felt inside. She deserved more of life than that.

  Swallowing hard, he stepped close to her. He touched her hair and gently stroked it, then down her back. She didn’t jerk away.

  He felt the tremors that ran through her slender body like shock waves through metal. He’d never seen her cry, not like this, as if her heart were dying inside her.

  He felt a moment of panic as his own control slipped. The pressure that had been building inside rushed over him. He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, trying to fight the weakness of tears. Tears…what good did they do?

  And yet he knew they were needed…that Tracy needed them…. He had to help her, to save her from the dark hell that lived in his own soul….

  God help him, he thought, and didn’t know if it was a prayer for her or for himself.

  He took her into his arms, cradling her grief against his body, trying to absorb it, to control it with his will. When she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face against his neck, laving him with her own tears, he was lost.

  “Trace, oh, God, Trace,” he whispered, while blackness devoured him from the inside out.

  Her arms tightened around him. He felt her warmth, the tremors that racked her slender body. The pressure built inside until he could no longer control it. He pressed his face into her hair and held her as closely as he could.

  When the storm was over, she leaned into him as if exhausted by the silent weeping. For a while, she rested in his arms, and for those moments, a strange sense of peace washed over him.

  “I miss him,” she said again, quieter this time. It sounded like a final goodbye.

  He had to clear his throat to speak. “I know.”

  She leaned back against his arms and looked at him. Her lashes outlined her eyes in wet spikes as she gazed up at him. He saw the trembling of her fingers as she reached up.

  He held very still.

  With the gentlest of touches, she traced the wetness on his lower lashes. He returned her gaze without looking away.

  “You miss him, too,” she said, rubbing the moisture between her fingers until it was gone.

  “Yes.” To his own ears his voice seemed far off, a distant rumble in his chest. He cleared his throat.

  “Sometimes I wondered.”

  He dropped his arms and stepped back, too stunned to speak.

  “You never…” She spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “You were always so…silent, so controlled.”

  The wind shifted, and patterns of dappled light danced over them. He studied the patterns, looking for answers to the silent questions between them.

  The emptiness swirled uneasily inside him. It was no longer a haven from pain and hadn’t been since her return. He realized the peace he thought he’d found had been but an illusion.

  As for the control she spoke of, he’d lost that when she’d covered her face and wept. Even thinking about her pain caused a tightening in his chest.

  She dropped to her knees and plucked at some weeds among the grass blades. When she ran her fingers over the grass, he was reminded of how she’d once run her fingers through Thadd’s hair to smooth it into place. She’d loved their son…and so had he.

  He tried to find words to tell her how he’d felt. It was so damned hard to say it out loud.

  “You didn’t give me credit for loving him,” he finally said, remembering that last desperate year together and some of the hurtful things they’d said.

  She sat back on her heels and looked up at him. The sun lighted her hair into a glowing nimbus. Her eyes gleamed like green agates in her pale face. “What do you mean?”

  “You seemed to think only a mother could hurt, that only a mother could miss her child until each day took more effort than it was worth to continue living.” He paused and drew a deep, careful breath. “A father could never miss a child that much, hurt like that. Isn’t that what you thought?”

  “I never…Judd, I never thought that.” She lifted her hand as if she wanted to touch him, but she didn’t.

  “You never forgave me.” He gave a bitter snort and forced the words from a tight throat. “I can’t say that I blame you. I never forgave myself.”

  She did touch him then. Rising, she caught his face between her hands and made him look at her. “I never blamed you.” She said each word clearly and firmly. “Never.”

  “I was the one who laughed at your fears,” he reminded her, bringing it all out in the open. “I was the one who took him hunting and let him roam the woods.”

  For an eternity, he stared into her eyes. She held his gaze, letting him look into her soul. He saw the truth in her. Or maybe he needed it so badly he thought he saw her forgiveness.

  “Never,” she repeated.

  A light clicked on inside him, a dim one—the tiny flickering of a firefly seen through a storm—but it was there. He had needed to hear her say it. He’d needed her to forgive him….

  It was a startling thought. He drew back from it. He’d made a life for himself that was bearable. He didn’t need anything more. It was Tracy who’d needed comforting, not the other way around. Perhaps now that she’d faced this moment, she could get on with her life and find a future of happiness.

  For a second, hope flared in him. He tamped it down. Not him. He wanted it for Tracy, not himself. His life was okay like it was. Not exciting, but…safe.

  That is, it would be when she left again.

  He turned his head, and she let him go. He looked at the mountains until the mist cleared from his eyes.

  “I think I’ll go now. I had to come.” She paused. “I wonder if we would have made it, all those years ago, if we’d cried in each other’s arms then.”

  Leaving him with this thought, she started along the path. He watched her, then knew he couldn’t let her leave, not just yet. There was something else he had to say.

  He picked up the trowel and empty flower pots, then spotted her hat. He retrieved it and hurried to catch up with her.

  At the chapel, he opened the gate, then closed it behind him. He saw her perusal of the sports car at the curb. “It’s nearly time for lunch,” he said. “There’s this place I know that serves the best fried shrimp in the state. You interested?”

  One hand went to her face as if checking for damages. Her eyes were a little red and her nose was pink, but she still looked beautiful. She glanced at her clothes. He could see the refusal forming before she spoke.

  “You look fine,” he told her, feeling stubborn about her joining him for some reason.

  “If you’re sure,” she said hesitantly.

  “We can stop by the house so you can freshen up,” he offered.

  “Your house?” The idea clearly startled her.

  “I meant the cottage.”

  “Oh.” She nodded.

  He unlocked the car, and they climbed in. At the house, he waited outside while she went in. In less than five minutes, she was back. He’d always liked that in her. She never kept a man waiting for hours while she preened in front of a mirror.

  Driving along the highway, soft music on the radio, he went over what he wanted to say to her, but it wasn’t until they were far up in the mountains that he spoke.

  “There was a time when you wanted to talk to me, but I walked out. I’ve wanted to tell you I’m sorry for that for a long time.” He swallowed as the
words balled in his throat. “It was just…I couldn’t talk then, not about Thadd.”

  She didn’t answer for a long time. “I understand,” she said at last in a voice that told him she did.

  Another load seemed to dissolve inside him. Funny, he hadn’t realized he was carrying around such a heavy conscience. A sigh of relief escaped him.

  “I knew you loved Thadd,” she continued. “It showed in a hundred ways each and every day. I knew you had strong feelings. It was just that you never shared them with me. I needed…well, it doesn’t matter now. We simply weren’t at the same place at the same time, were we?” she mused aloud.

  He suddenly wished they could go back to that day in the woods and start their lives over from that first meeting….

  Tracy examined the slope of the bluff from the site where she’d found the new bones the previous week. If any bones had been buried farther up the slope and recently dug up and dragged down here by an animal, why didn’t she see any signs of it?

  Why take the bones to another place after digging them up?

  Unless a bigger animal was in the vicinity and tried to take it, then the smaller one would head for cover with his prize.

  She stretched her weary back. She’d spent most of the morning bent over, studying the ground for a clue. Bones didn’t just appear from nowhere, unattached to the rest of the skeleton, without cause.

  If she were to consider erosion, then she’d have to look further for signs of it. She started hiking up the hill.

  A half hour later she emerged from the trees onto a grand escarpment of limestone that looked like the small end of a huge egg protruding from the ground. The limestone had cracked and buckled in several places, particularly along the tree line on the lower side of the slope.

  She climbed to the top of the egg and sat down. From there she commanded a magnificent view of the surrounding territory—the reservation on the north, the Kincaid place to the south, the mountains sweeping westward and northward, and finally, the ribbon of highway that led back to town.

  The air seemed cooler up here. When the sun dipped behind a cloud, she decided to eat her lunch.

  Swinging her fanny pack around to the front, she removed an energy bar and a banana. While she ate, she thought of her lunch with Judd on Sunday. Three days ago. She hadn’t seen him on Monday when she and Winona watched the Fourth of July fireworks at the fair, but he’d been at the office yesterday and today.

  Something had changed between them, she thought. She chewed a bite of energy bar and pondered the situation.

  Like the rain, the tears they’d shed had cleared the air between them. Old questions had been answered or at least laid to rest. By the time he dropped her by the cottage that afternoon, they had been almost easy with each other.

  Except for that smoldering hunger that wouldn’t go away no matter how hard they tried to ignore it.

  She swallowed, then sighed heavily. That hadn’t changed, but he had managed to crack a joke about it when a couple had put some money in an old-fashioned jukebox and started dancing.

  “If we danced to that, I’d have to arrest myself for indecent exposure,” he’d murmured, listening to the theme from a movie they’d once seen together.

  His disgruntled expression, as well as the complaint, had surprised her into laughing. Then he’d looked surprised that she’d found it amusing and had laughed, too.

  “Such is life,” she’d taunted.

  So it is, she thought, sobering as she replayed the day in her mind. She’d done that often in the past seventy-two hours. There had been something sweet and poignant between them on the drive back to town.

  At the cottage, she hadn’t invited him in. Instead, he’d walked her to the door, handed her the hat she’d worn earlier, tipped his head and left.

  But not before their eyes had met in a glance of mutual awareness. If he stayed much longer, they would end up making love. It was inevitable, like the ebb and flow of the tides. The forces of nature couldn’t be stopped by the mere efforts of humans.

  The worst part was she wasn’t sure she wanted to stop it.

  She sighed again and ate the banana and drank a small can of juice. She tucked the debris in a plastic bag and stuck it in the pack. Standing, she twirled the pack to her backside to keep it out of the way and started back to work.

  Working around the limestone escarpment, she examined each nook and cranny of it, working in a spiral from the egglike top. Nothing in the cracks indicated a deeper opening underneath.

  Slowly she moved lower, coming to the trees at the bottom edge where she’d first ascended. It looked like the accumulation of dirt and leaves had been recently disturbed. There were signs of erosion due to runoff from the limestone.

  Finding a stick, she picked it up and poked at the buildup of leaves along an overhang. To her surprise, the stick went down a good ways.

  After pulling her blue shirt off, she laid it and the pack aside, then started work in earnest. Little tingles of excitement went off inside her. She’d felt them before…when she was about to make a find.

  She worked with a trowel and rock pick, carefully loosening the debris, then scraping it away. Sometimes it was hard not to rush right in, but she didn’t want to damage any pieces.

  Finally, she hit pay dirt…or rather, bone.

  A femur, the long bone of a thigh. Now if she could just find the pelvis, she’d know for sure whether it was male or female and the approximate age.

  She examined the femur before placing it beside her shirt and pack. From its thickness and length, it probably belonged to someone about five-ten to six feet. As she’d suspected from the thickness of the wrist bones, the skeleton was most likely that of a male.

  DNA tests could tell her for sure, but so could the pelvis. She worked swiftly, removing the debris and placing it aside, making sure she wasn’t overlooking any pieces. An hour passed.

  She wiped the sweat off her forehead and took a break. It was while she was resting that she heard a “Hello-o-o” from below.

  “Up here,” she shouted.

  A man came up through the woods. She recognized the broad shoulders and braids tied with leather strips before he emerged from the shadows under the trees a few yards away from her.

  “Jackson, hello,” she called to let him know where she was.

  He spotted her and came over. “You’ve found something?” he asked, a tone of excitement underscoring the statement as he viewed her work under the ledge.

  “Yes, a femur.” She retrieved it and held it so he could visually examine it.

  “Can you tell anything from it?”

  “Um, yes.” She became preoccupied with taking a closer look at the thick thigh bone. “I think it was a man, or a very tall, robust female. Young. There’s no sign of deterioration in the joint. He was most likely a cowboy, or somebody used to sitting astride.”

  “Wow,” Jackson said. “Anything else?”

  She got out a bag from her pack and wrapped the bone, then turned back to the dig. “Not yet, but I’m hoping. The body was apparently concealed under this ledge….” She considered for a moment, then added, “Or he might have crawled in there for protection.”

  “Maybe he fell from his horse,” Jackson suggested.

  “And it was storming—”

  “The wolves were after him—”

  “Right. His leg was broken—”

  “Could you tell that from the thigh bone? It looked okay to me.”

  She laughed. “No. I was just getting into the scenario.” Sitting on the ground, she went back to work.

  He dropped down on his haunches and peered under the shallow ledge. “Uncle Frank said to thank you for the reports you sent to the office. He was disappointed the bones weren’t ancestors and said to tell you that you had permission to do any tests necessary to identify them, including DNA matching. He asked me to phrase this delicately, so here goes—could you have made a mistake about the age of the bones?” he asked bluntly, then gr
inned.

  “You always did have a way with words,” she remarked dryly. “There’s no mistake. The bones aren’t fossilized, not even on the surface. They’re not old. You knew that.”

  “Yeah, but as an official of the tribe, I had to ask. Now that that’s out of the way, do you want to come to the house Friday night? Maggie and I are having a cookout.”

  She was curious about Jackson’s new wife. “I’d love to…if you promise me fry bread with honey.”

  “Pick up some honey from Winona and you’re on. I’ll do the fry bread myself.”

  “Your wife isn’t Cheyenne?” That surprised her, considering that Jackson had once been married to a white.

  “She’s a city Injun,” he explained. “She doesn’t know fry bread from buffalo chips.” He shook his head, as if wondering why he’d ever married such an ignorant woman.

  Tracy saw the warmth in his eyes when he spoke of his wife and suppressed a jab of envy. “I’m looking forward to meeting her. Now, enough socializing. My boss will fuss if he finds me talking instead of digging.”

  “I’ll help. Tell me what to do.”

  She glanced at his clothes. He wore old jeans and scuffed boots. His shirt had seen many washings. “Okay. Block off a square and take off one even layer at a time.”

  They worked companionably for an hour. She was reminded of her childhood days on the reservation. Jackson had been her best friend. They’d both loved it there and wanted to stay, but both of them had had to leave.

  Strange, the turns life could take. He’d left and married, apparently never to return, while she’d married and moved close by. Then he’d divorced and returned, apparently to stay. She’d divorced and left, meaning never to come back.

  Longing washed over her in a sudden deluge. She gripped her trowel and concentrated on digging until the emotion subsided.

  “Hey,” Jackson said. “Look.”

  She blinked away the memories and glanced over at his find. “The ilium! Don’t move it!” she ordered when he tried to lift it.

  He moved aside when she crowded in. Carefully, she dug out the debris around the bone. She lifted it out of the hole.