A Certain Kind of Hero (26 page)

Tate figured that auctioneer Cal Swick was likely stretching the truth pretty thin. These were probably the only ones Kenny'd ever managed to break out, despite all his big-scale horse-breeding plans. Kenny was a dreamer, but maybe Cal believed the reliable reports himself.

Saddle horses always sold better if somebody showed them under saddle, so Tate was glad to see that Amy had hired one of the kids who hung around the stock pens to ride her horses through for her. He remembered when he and Kenny used to compete for the same kind of job. They'd bet each other who could get his Saturday chores done first and beat the other one to the sale barn for the chance to earn a few bucks. People usually picked Tate over Kenny if they needed a rider. He'd been born looking the part.

The bidding wasn't going anywhere, so Tate decided to jump in and run the sorrel gelding up a few dollars. He pushed his hat back, gave a subtle nod and a hand signal, skipping over a few increments to make people take a second look. It worked the first time around, but by the time all four horses had gone through, the buyers had dropped the bid on him twice. He was satisfied. Five hundred was a damn good batting average. The only catch would be settling up in the sales office without letting Amy catch him. Then he would
go out to the pens and figure out what to do with two horses he didn't need.

He'd bought himself a bald-faced sorrel mare and a buckskin gelding. A five-and a six-year-old, from the looks of their teeth. Well fed, sound legs. He was checking the buckskin's hooves when the woman of the hour caught him red-handed.

“You paid way too much for that one.”

Her voice always got to him. Smooth and low for a woman's, it had a seductively smoky quality. He glanced up and connected immediately with earth-mother eyes peering at him between the fence rails. He straightened slowly.

“Hello, Amy.”

“It's not like you to wait until after you've paid your money to inspect the goods, Tate Harrison. That was always one of the differences between you and Ken.”

“I got here late.” He brushed his hands off on his denim-covered thighs, choosing to take the remark the way he took his whiskey. Perfectly straight. “But I can usually spot a good saddle horse in the ring pretty easy.”

“So I've heard. Ken swore by your horse sense.” She spoke the name so easily that she nearly put him at ease, too. But then she added, “Unfortunately, you took it with you when you left.”

He half expected her to take the high ground by climbing the fence and letting him know with another perfectly aimed barb just what the first one was supposed to mean. She didn't. She had all the advantages she needed right now. He was going to have to go to her and find out. “My leavin' didn't disappoint anybody around here too much,” he reminded her as he scaled the fence. “People are glad to see me 'bout every two, three years, and for a week or so I'm glad to see them.”

He swung one leg over the top rail and paused while she
turned her face up to him. He wasn't sure he wanted to get down. Kenny was dead, and, damn, she scared him. He was afraid he would say something stupid, maybe make her cry. The cold autumn air had brought color to her face, but the dark shadows under her eyes canceled out the illusion of rosy-cheeked vitality. It struck him that her black down-filled jacket looked big enough to go around her twice. Then he realized it was Kenny's jacket. Brand-new the last time he'd seen him.

Her eyes held his fast as he lowered his foothold halfway down the fence, then dropped to the ground. His arms hung awkwardly at his sides. He imagined putting them around her, the way he wanted to, but her eyes offered no hint of permission. He flexed his fingers. They were stiff from the cold.

“Why did you buy those horses?” she asked quietly. “You didn't really want them.”

“Why didn't you call me, Amy?” She glanced away. “Ed Shaeffer over at the bank always knows how to get hold of me in an emergency. He would have tracked me down if you'd just—”

“There was so much to do. There were so many details, so many—” She hugged herself, clutching the voluminous jacket around her. “There were many things I didn't handle as well as I should have. I was…” A faintly apologetic smile curved her mouth as she lifted her gaze to meet his again. “…quite unprepared.”

“I stopped in at the house on my way into town.” If he told her what he'd been through, maybe she would give him an answer that had something to do with
him
. “Stopped at the Jackalope. They talked about it like I already knew.”

“I'm sorry.” He looked away. “Really, Tate, I'm sorry. I thought about—” She laid her hand on his sleeve. “Many
times I thought about writing, but I kept putting it off, thinking someone must have told you by now.”

“I would have been back, soon as I heard. You would have seen me the same damn day.” He stared at her hand. “That's why you kept puttin' it off, isn't it?”

“Oh, no. Ken would have wanted you to be…” He looked at her expectantly, waiting for the charge of a dead man. “To take part in the service.”

“To help carry him to his grave? Damn right he would have. But I haven't been in touch since Christmas, and ol' Kenny, he usually—” The guilt was his. Always, it was his. “I should've known something was wrong.”

“Tate.” She slid her hand down his sleeve and slipped it in his. It felt good—warmer than his, and small but capable. “You come up with a list of regrets, and mine'll double yours. That's just the way it is. It was all over so quickly. So quickly, it left my head spinning.”

A fleet, flighty gesture parted the front of her jacket. Her pink shirt was too tight. Her belly was too big. He felt as though he'd just walked up to her bedroom window and seen her naked.

“You're…” He was about to say something totally inane, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. Gates were clattering inside the stock barn, and some guy was calling for lot forty-two. Tate glanced over his shoulder, unconsciously looking for somebody to tell him his eyes weren't lying. “Amy, you're pregnant.”

“You're very observant.”

“But they were saying over at—” He motioned westward, because suddenly he couldn't get the name of the bar out, or any other word that might offend her. The hand he held in his felt even slighter than it had at first, and he flexed his fingers
around it, gently reasserting his hold. “I mean, I heard that you were running the place yourself.”

“I'm not letting it go, Tate.” And she squeezed back, a secret gesture between two people who shared a loss, letting him know that she was worried about losing still more. “It's my home. Mine and Jody's and…”

“You can't—”

“I'm having a baby, not open-heart surgery.”

He allowed himself to get lost in the depths of her eyes, her brave words, her sturdiness. “You got any help?”

“I might be able to hire someone now, maybe part-time—” she smiled and gave a little nod toward the pen “—since I got a good price for those hay-burners.”

“How's the little guy doin'? Jody?” She nodded to confirm the name he remembered full well. Kenny had once confided that Tate had been his choice for the boy's godfather, but with him on the rodeo circuit and Amy insisting on having the ceremony “before the little guy went to college,” Tate had missed out on the honor.

Amy withdrew her hand, as though the mention of the boy's name had introduced a constraint against hand-holding. She stepped close to the pen and peeked between the rails again.

Tate followed her lead. “Must be tough for such a little fella,” he said quietly. “Old enough to know the difference, but not to really…”
Understand?
Who
was
old enough to understand?

“He was pretty mad at me today. He used to love to come to the horse sales with his dad. This is the first one I've been to since…since it happened.” She leaned her shoulder against the fence and hid her memories beneath lowered lashes. “I wouldn't let Jody come. He wouldn't understand.”

Tate stared into the pen. The mare was standing hipshot,
neck drooping, eyelids dropping to half-mast. The buckskin's perked ears rotated like radar as he blew thick clouds of mist through flaring nostrils. Whatever was up, the buckskin would be the first to know about it.

“The boy'll know they're gone,” Tate said.

“Not right away.” Amy sighed. “I didn't want him to watch them go through the ring.”

“That must've been hard for you, too.”

“Not at all. I'm glad to be rid of them.” He glanced at her for an explanation. None was forthcoming. “What will you do with those two?” she wondered.

“Haven't given it much thought,” he admitted. Then he smiled. “Just knew I couldn't pass 'em up.”

“That's what Ken Becker would've said. Not Tate Harrison.” He shrugged. She'd always thought she had them both pegged. “He missed you a lot, Tate,” she added gently. “You were the brother he never had.”

“He was—” He couldn't say that. He'd had a brother once, a long time ago. Jesse. But he'd grown up with Kenny. That, too, was beginning to seem like a long time ago. “He was the best friend I ever had. Guess I should've missed him more than I did.” He turned, leaned his back against the fence and looked up at the distant white clouds. “Guess I'm gonna start now.”

“Well…” She wrapped her arms around herself again and they stood there for a long moment of silence, together but apart. One of the stockboys ran by, hollering at someone in the parking lot to wait up.

“How long will you be in town?” she finally asked. “You're welcome to come for supper, if you can find some time. You should see Jody now. He's…”

There it was, he thought. The obligatory invitation. “I'd wanna know more about what happened to Kenny,” Tate
warned her. “Would you be up to—” She hung her head. “That's okay. I understand. It's just that it's so hard for me to believe he's…gone.”

“Dead. There's no way to change that, and that's all there is to know.” She looked up, more fire in her eyes than he'd seen so far. “He's dead, Tate. It helps if you just say the word. It happened—” she snapped her fingers “—just like that. You can't believe how fast it happened, and you can't believe it happened until you've said the word. Until you've sold his horses. Until you've given most of his clothes away, and until you've slept…” She sighed, as if the sudden burst of emotion had worn her out. “I have to pick up Jody.”

No, he didn't want her to go. He laid a hand on her shoulder. “What can I do?”

“Do?”

“For you and Jody. What—”

“You've already done more than you needed to do.” She nodded toward the pen. “You've bought yourself one docile saddle horse and one mean outlaw. You'll have to figure out what you're going to do with
them
.”

She kissed his cheek before she walked away. Made him feel like a little boy. Like she'd already come through the fires of hell, and he was too green to notice there was any heat. Even so, he felt favored somehow. Excused. Blessed. Knighted. Kissed by the princess. It was his cue to rise to the occasion.

He would do it if he knew how.

He decided he would run the mare back through the ring and keep the high-lifed buckskin gelding. The buckskin was obviously the outlaw, which made them two of a kind.

 

Jody was still mad when Amy picked him up at his aunt Marianne's. Cousin Kitty had slammed his finger in the car
door, for one thing, and then Bill, Jr., had jerked the cherry sucker out of his mouth and made him bite his tongue. Marianne assured Amy that she'd checked him over both times and Jody wasn't really hurt. His tongue had hardly bled at all.

Then she'd asked Amy for the two-hundredth time about the possibility of having core samples taken on her land, “Just to see if it's worth pursuing.”

Amy wasn't interested in Ken's sister's latest scheme. The land Ken's father had left him belonged to her and Jody now. Marianne owned fifty percent of the mineral rights, which the attorney had explained was a technicality that would only become an issue if Amy decided either to sell the land or let people poke holes in it looking for something to mine. Neither proposition interested her, even though she knew one of Overo's poker clubs had a couple of betting pools going—one on her second child's birth date, and the other on the month in which she would file bankruptcy.

But Amy was not giving up. She was tired, and she was nearly broke, but she wouldn't be broken. Nobody was going to poke holes in Becker land or Becker dreams. Even if Ken's plans had frequently been farfetched, he'd been fond of saying that he could depend on Amy to get him turned around. Once he was headed in the right direction, he could make things happen. He could be hell on wheels, he would say. He'd spent much of their marriage spinning his wheels, but she'd known how and when to wedge her small shoulder under his axle and give him a push. He was a good man, a kind-hearted man and he had wonderful intentions. Amy's job was to find a kernel of feasibility in them and build on that.

So at least they had a ranch. It might not have been the kind of ranch Ken had envisioned, but they were raising livestock. They had a home. They had a family. Despite a few impulsive
choices, a few setbacks, a few fits and starts, they had come
this
far. Now it was up to her. It hadn't been easy without Ken, but there had been times when it hadn't been easy
with
him, either. Amy would manage, just as she had always managed. She would just have to work harder.

But she did need a little help. Now that she had some money, she needed manpower. A couple of months' worth, she figured. She could have given birth to a new baby, looked after a four-year-old and tended to her business in the summer, no sweat. But winter in Montana could throw a fast-frozen kink into anybody's works.