Smoketree

by Jennifer Roberson

  I laughed once, seeing nothing but the distorted close-up of my knees. “I’m scared, but not that scared. I’ll be okay.”

  His fingers remained on my neck. They were hard and callused, tough like leather. He was right-handed; he had used the hand to hold himself aboard a spinning, bucking bull. To hold onto a bareback horse, and to grip the rein of a saddle-bronc. That much I knew.

  And now he held my neck, gentling me as he would a fractious filly.

  I sighed and let myself go limp against my knees as the tension and fear drained away. The fingers moved, shifting from neck to shoulders, until two hands massaged away the rigidity of my battered muscles.

  “Easy,” he said gently. “I’m in no hurry to leave just yet; take your time.”

  He was in no hurry. But was I? It was I who sat with his hands against my flesh, all unexpected. Or was it? There had been a tension of sorts between us almost from the beginning. And now it was being acknowledged.

  I sat upright again and felt the hands pull away. And then one reached out to part my hair where it hung into my face. “What’s this?”

  I thought he meant the old scar. Automatically I drew back, pulling my bangs down, and then I felt the wetness. Blood. Not much, but something had scraped me across the forehead and temple, slicing into the ridged flesh of the scar.

  I laughed a little. Yet another to add to the collection. Harper took a clean bandanna from his back pocket and started to pat the blood away. I moved from the ministration. “Don’t bother.”

  “Why? There’s dirt all over your face. This’ll do until we get back to the Lodge.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said resignedly. “One more scar won’t matter.”

  “No,” he agreed, and I realized he was serious. I was not, and said so. Harper ignored me and patted the blood away, then returned the bandanna to his pocket. “You’ll do.”

  I smiled. “Will I?”

  “I think so.” Still he squatted next to me, his hands hanging limply over his knees. He did not touch me again, but he did not need to. “Cassie said you were behind the wheel when that actor died.”

  “I was,” I said quietly.

  “So now you’re carrying the guilt around like the Ancient Mariner and his albatross.”

  “How poetic.” I sighed. “I suppose so. But it was my fault. If I hadn’t been driving, Tucker might still be alive.”

  “Or you might both be dead, if he was as drunk as Walkerton said the night I overheard you.”

  “Maybe,” I admitted, “but it doesn’t make it any easier. Guilt’s one of those things you can’t always rationalize out of your life.”

  His eyes were steady on my face. “Do you ever think it might have been better if you had both died?”

  I felt the old pain and guilt surge up to fill the cavity I’d managed to forget about. Oh yes. There were nights I lay awake wondering why Tucker had left me behind; wouldn’t I be happier with him? We’d been meant for each other, and I was here while he was not.

  My throat cramped and I swallowed to loosen it. “So would you, sometimes, if you were in the same situation.”

  “I was,” he said quietly. “Oh, maybe not exactly the same, but close enough. When the doctors told me my back was broken and that it might not heal right, that was bad enough. But when they told me I’d better not rodeo anymore, I was mad enough to hope I wouldn't walk again.” He picked at the dirt with a stick. “All I knew was that if I could stand up and walk out of that hospital, nothing could keep me from rodeo. It would be better to be paralyzed and have a damn good reason, than give it all up just because there was a chance.” He shook his head. “I can’t say it right. But it has to do with making a choice, and I didn’t want it made for me. ”

  “But you did make it., You gave up rodeo.”

  His mouth jerked. “For a woman. For my wife. She wanted a man who could walk, she said, not a has-been in a wheelchair. So I quit.” One shoulder hunched up in a shrug. “What she didn’t realize at the time was that even walking, I was still a has-been. No more glamor and glitter. No more attention for being the wife of a rodeo superstar.” The smile was very faint, self-deprecating. “And so I lost her anyway.”

  I inhaled carefully. “When?”

  He looked at the sky and squinted, marking off the time.

  “Oh, I reckon it’s been a year, nine months and sixteen days. But I’m not counting.”

  I wanted to laugh. He meant me to laugh, but I couldn’t. I just stared at him.

  Harper looked at me. “People lose people. It happens. They die sometimes; sometimes they just leave. And it hurts like hell. But one day you’ll wake up and find out there’s no unwritten rule that says you have to grieve forever.”

  I felt the tears well up in my eyes. They spilled over, but I did nothing to stop them. I let them fall, running down my face by my nose to drip off my chin and spread on the weave of my sweater. And then he reached out and locked his arms around me, drawing me against his chest.

  “There’s no time limit on it,” he said gently into my hair. “It’ll always hurt. But you don’t have to cherish that hurt.”

  I sat silently in the curve of his arms, my mind opaque and blank. Inwardly I asked questions of myself, not the least of which was wondering what I was doing, but I knew. To Brandon, who had known Tucker, I could not entirely show the depths of my grief; the slow, cannibalistic pain that would not go. To Harper, who hadn’t known him at all and hardly knew me, I could. And it felt right.

  I took a deep breath to make some comment, some suggestion for us to go, but he turned my head up and kissed me before I could say a word.

  There was no time to protest. No time to pull away. No time, even, to make sense of the moment. And then, just as I made sense of it, he was shaking his head in disgust. “Hell,” he said, “I shouldn’t have done that. Oh Lord, you dumb cowboy, will you play right into their hands?” And then he stood up, pulling me up with him, and turned me toward the steep, treacherous trail. “Climb,” he said.

  “Harper—”

  “Just climb,” he said. “I’ll catch you if you fall.”

  I did not fall. I climbed to the top of the trail, full of aches and pains, but I did not fall. I was too angry, too startled to think of falling down. A simple kiss was easy enough to understand-good heavens, I’d had the urge myself—but his reaction to it had knocked me for a loop. Whose hands did he think he was playing into? And why should there be any hands at all?

  Sunny grazed contentedly at the edge of the trail, unconcerned with my inept climb. Harper caught him and led him over to me. I felt an irrational anger well up again, and I knew he was aware of it. There was a taut set to his mouth and the flesh around his eyes, as if he realized he’d behaved badly and yet did not entirely regret it. As if there had been a reason for it.

  Harper mounted, freed his left foot from the stirrup and reached down to me. “Come on up.”

  It hurt. He tugged me onto Sunny’s wide rump as I half-scrambled, half-mounted, and drooped there in exhaustion. My fingers curled around the edge of the seat of the saddle. My thighs, already aching, clamped onto the slippery rump. “Will you stay on?” he asked.

  “I’m done falling off horses today,” I said briefly, trying to make myself comfortable. “What happened to the man?”

  Harper gathered up the reins and nudged Sunny into a walk. “What man is that?”

  “The man who scared Hornet into her plunge down the mountain. Didn’t you see him?” I smiled a little, though it came out grimmer than I’d intended. “Did you think I wanted to go down that trail?”

  Harper stopped the horse and twisted to look into my face. We were very close. I could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes and the hollows defining his face. “What man?” he repeated quietly.

  Wearily I pushed the hair away from my face. “He appeared out of nowhere. He told me to go home. Go home before I got hurt.”

  “When?”

  “Just before Horn
et took off. He frightened her. I don’t think she’d have run, otherwise.”

  He frowned. “Damn…”

  “You didn’t see him?”

  “Not a soul. ”

  “What about the engine we heard?” I remembered that distinctly.

  “Nothing.”

  I stiffened on the horse. “Nothing!”

  He prodded Sunny onward again with his boot heels, face averted as he turned back. “I found nothing. Or no one, at least. Some tracks, probably made by a four-wheel-drive. But no people.” He said nothing a moment. “Probably just a Forest Service vehicle.”

  My bottom lip was swelling. I tongued it, tasted the salty, coppery taste of blood and wondered what he had thought just before he kissed me. And afterward, when he had sounded so annoyed. “The man I saw,” I told him clearly, “was definitely not a forest ranger. No uniform. No nothing. Just a warning.”

  Harper’s shoulders looked solid as rock, and twice as stiff. He shook his head a little, but I couldn’t see his face. “Damn,” he said again. “That makes four.”

  “Four what?”

  “Four ‘accidents,’ for lack of a better word.”

  I counted in my head, recalling Preacher’s brief disappearance, the barn fire, and my unexpected warning. “What’s the fourth?”

  “Two horses were shot a few days before you came. Killed.”

  “Harper—”

  “Hang on, ” he interrupted conversationally, as if he’d forgotten what he had just said. “The trail gets rougher here.” Sunny’s rump bunched and dipped as he negotiated a twisting stair-step formation of rock and earth. I hurt badly enough already, and the motion of sleek horseflesh sliding beneath my jeans nearly unseated me entirely. I made a wild grab at Harper, caught him, and held on with both arms.

  I felt his soft laughter. “About time,” he remarked.

  I nearly let go. But it wasn’t worth it. I slumped, too tired to do the work myself, and let his comforting back hold me up. I wanted a drink, hot shower and bed. In that order.

  Harper helped me down from his horse and half-led, half-pushed me into the Lodge. I protested feebly but was ignored as he escorted me to the couch before the fireplace and sat me down. There he fixed me a drink—brandy—and watched me take the first swallow. The liquid sloshed in the snifter as my hands insisted on shaking.

  “Thanks for rescuing me,” I said on a sigh of exhaustion. The veil, which had been missing, dropped over his eyes once more. “Any time.”

  “Maybe you’d better go see about finding Hornet.”

  “I don’t doubt the mare’s here. Probably got home some time ago.”

  “Then maybe you should go see if she’s okay.”

  The moustache twitched. “Maybe I should.”

  I stirred. “I’d like to know,” I told him. “How she is. She might have hurt herself.”

  He watched me a moment longer. “I’m sorry,” he said obscurely, and was gone.

  I sank back against the couch, letting my head tip back to rest against it. I knew the exhaustion was the aftermath of shock; the shakes would go away shortly, especially with the brandy flooding my system. I closed my eyes.

  I heard the screen door stretch open again, wondering idly if Harper was back that soon, then heard the quiet footsteps on the wooden floor. Whoever it was didn’t wear boots. “Kelly!”

  It was Brandon. I lifted my head and saw him cross the floor in about two strides. “I just heard. Are you all right?”

  I displayed the brandy. “I will be.”

  He stood over me a moment, rigid with concern, then carefully sat down beside me. A big hand reached out and steadied the glass. “The horse came back without you.”

  An illogical bubble of laughter burst inside. “We simply decided to part company.” I smiled. “I’ll be fine, I promise.”

  “You look a mess,” he said, not unkindly. “Not much like the Kelly Clayton most people know.”

  His weight on the couch tipped me against his shoulder. It was not unpleasing, and he provided a big, safe headrest. “The Kelly Clayton most people know is not the real me,” I said, feeling drowsy. “Actually, I prefer dirt.” Then I straightened. “Brandon, we’d better go check on the horse. It wasn’t her fault. Come on.”

  “She didn’t throw you?” he asked in surprise.

  “No, and I didn’t fall off, either.” I scowled at him. “I jumped.”

  Brandon took the brandy snifter from my hand. “If you’ve decided to start jumping off horses, you don’t need any more brandy. You need your head examined.”

  “Oh, it’s a little banged up, but it’s in one piece.” I felt at the back of my skull. “Come on.”

  We went down to the pens. Nathan was there, carefully examining Hornet’s legs. Her head drooped as if she felt as poorly as I did, and she nosed his shoulder as he bent over a foreleg. Harper was leaning against the rails, watching silently. “How is she?” I asked Nathan.

  He raised his head, then straightened as he saw me. He gently set Hornet’s leg down and looked at me. I saw a mixture of things in his face: concern, detachment, weariness and something else. It took me a moment to recognize it, and when I did I caught my breath.

  It was fear.

  “The mare’s all right,” he said, wiping a forearm across his forehead. The gray hair was slightly mussed, as if he had been running rigid fingers through it. “She’s bruised—she’ll be a little gimpy for a few days—but she’ll do. What about you?”

  I shrugged. “About the same. Nothing a little rest won’t cure.”

  My reassurance didn’t ease the worry lines in his tired face.

  “Do you recall anything that might have triggered the runaway?”

  I glanced at Harper. “There was something,” I said steadily. “A man. He popped up out of nowhere an scared me half to death. It’s no wonder she shied.”

  “Shying is not a runaway,” Nathan said grimly. “It would take more than that to set her off on a dead run like that, especially down the mountain.”

  “She didn’t run then,” I admitted. “It was after the sound.”

  “Sound?” He repeated sharply.

  “A crack.” I shrugged. “Sort of like a firecracker. Or maybe a gunshot.” I brought myself up short.

  Nathan’s face turned ashen, collapsing into a map of wrinkles. He aged ten years before my eyes. Numbly I felt him take my arm and lead me around to Hornet’s back end. He didn’t have to point it out.

  Splashed across her palomino rump was a dark stain. Something had gouged out a piece of flesh, leaving a short furrow as if made from a glancing blow.

  A bullet.

  I looked at Harper, who had ridden into the trees with a rifle in his hands.

  I looked at him and he said nothing at all.

  Chapter Ten

  It is a hard thing to realize someone might have reason to shoot at you; it is even harder to realize it has happened. But it took little debate with my emotions, because my intellect recognized the truth.

  Harper might have cut the fence himself, earlier, providing a reason for his retreat into the pines. He had carefully ordered me to a specific spot in the trail. The stranger had been there, waiting to give me a scare, one designed to get me off-guard, vulnerable to a rifle shot that would panic my horse into a dangerous plunge down the mountain. He had even chosen the horse.

  But it was all so damned impossible.

  A knock at the door interrupted my thoughts. Slowly I dragged myself from the bed, tightened the belt of my terry-cloth robe and moved to the door. The hot shower had worked some of the soreness from my body, but I was stiff, bruised and scraped in dozens of places.

  I opened the door a crack, hoping to discourage the unwanted visitor.

  “Kelly,” said Brandon quietly.

  I swung the door wider. It was dark now, past dinner—which I had skipped—and the illumination from the light beside my door splashed across his face and brought his gray eyes into sharp, welcome relief.


  “I wanted to check on you, ” he said. “The way you took off after you saw the horse—”

  “I know.” I interrupted, ducking the issue. I gestured him inside and stepped out of his way. “It was rude of me, but I had to get away. There were too many things I wanted to think about. Plus I needed a shower.” I ran a hand through my damp hair as Brandon entered.

  I closed the door tightly as he took a seat in the padded leather armchair. I stayed where I was, leaning against the door, and waited.

  “You are all right.” It was half-question, half-observation.

  “I’m fine. Stiff and sore, but generally okay. And scared.” He looked around the cabin slowly, as if searching for something. He found it. My bags, set out in the middle of the floor, open and empty, but obviously waiting for something.

  Brandon’s eyes came back to me. “You’re leaving.”

  “I think it might be a good idea.”

  “It was an accident,” he said quietly. “I don’t mean to downplay what happened—I’m sure it was very frightening—but it isn’t reason enough to leave.”

  I looked at him levelly. “Someone took a shot at me today.” He stood up. He walked across the room and put both hands on my arms, near the shoulders, and slowly walked me to the bed, where he sat me down. I felt like a puppet in his hands, arms and legs awry and joints too stiff to move without help. But I sat down as he sat me down, and looked up into his kind face.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m not dismissing the possibility, or the seriousness. Only the intent.”

  “Brandon, if you had been in my place—”

  “If I had been in your place, I’d have been scared too, and angry. I’d want to find the man responsible. But it doesn’t mean I’d jump to the conclusion that I was the target.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “You were on horseback. You presented an excellent target. Anyone who is any sort of marksman at all can hit that big a target, especially with a rifle.”

  “What are you saying?” It came out curtly, and yet I meant it.

  “It’s an easy shot, Kelly,” he said gently. “Had this person been shooting at you, you’d very likely be dead.”