Finding Stefanie (4 page)

Gideon’s hands, cold as they were, whitened on the steering wheel. His sweatshirt would make poor insulation tonight. He had given his jacket to Macey—she hadn’t thought beyond her backpack and shoes when she’d seen him drive up to the emergency foster shelter. She’d just grabbed Haley and run.

Haley had finally stopped crying when they hit the Montana border.

Things would change now, for all of them. He’d make them change.

“Where are we going?” Macey said or rather mumbled into the collar of his jacket. “I’m hungry.”

“I know that,” he snapped.

She flinched, then glared at him.

Gideon clenched his jaw, wishing that had come out differently. He wouldn’t be like their father—
wouldn’t.

“I’ll stop soon,” he said, now softer. He’d turned off the highway five miles back, following a sign for a town, hoping for a McDonald’s. But as he slowed, those hopes were dashed by the sight of the one-horse rinky-dink spot on the map they’d limped into. A couple of feed stores, a tire shop, a bar, and an old diner that looked like the throwaway back end of a train.

He pulled up just beyond the lights that splashed against the sidewalk. “Stay here,” he said, putting the car into park. “I’ll be right back.”

In the backseat, Haley sat up, her eyes huge. But still, she said nothing.

Macey, too, watched him.

“I’ll be right back,” he repeated.

Macey gave a stiff nod.

The aroma of hamburgers and french fries made Gideon’s empty stomach knot as he shut the door. A trail along the back of the diner led to a row of trash cans and a trailer home. He stood there, staring at the dark windows of the trailer, then at the diner.

Just one more time. Because he had to. Just . . .

He took a deep breath, then crept toward the trailer.

Small towns were easy—people here trusted each other, and he justified himself with the argument that people who left their doors open deserved a lesson on safety. He went inside and looked around.

The owner had milk. And bread and cheese, a jar of mayonnaise, and a box of cereal. All this he scooped into a plastic bag he found on the counter. Shadows pushed into the ancient trailer, over the fraying green sofa, the faux plants, the tattered La-Z-Boy in the corner.

Memory rushed at him, and for a second he was back at Meadow Park, watching television while his mother propped Haley on one hip and fried hot dogs on the stove. Macey was playing with her Barbie dolls on the kitchen table. In Gideon’s memory, his mother turned to him and smiled, and something caught in his chest, a vise so tight he couldn’t breathe.

Hurry.

He swept the memory away and went to the bedroom, ripping the blankets off the bed. Grabbing two pillows, he shoved everything under his arm.

He was in the car again in under five minutes, cramming everything into the backseat on top of Haley. Then he climbed in and pulled away, easy, as if his heart weren’t churning in his chest.

Macey’s face had gone hard. She turned away from him, staring out the window.

Gideon said nothing and kept driving, keeping an eye on the gas gauge. The town ended in less than thirty seconds, just past the trailer park, and he followed the road, winding back into the hills, the valleys, the cover he needed to build a new life for them.

He passed miles of barbed wire fencing and dirt driveways that led to tiny box homes with feeble light showing from the windows. He guessed the black humps against the darkening horizon had to be cows or maybe bulls. Here and there the tattered outline of trees edged a hill, boulders lumping in washes.

He would have missed the house entirely if it hadn’t been for Macey, who spotted the For Sale sign tangled in the barbed wire fence. She saw it flash against the headlights and said simply, “Hey.”

For one short summer he and Macey had made a game of living in vacant for-sale houses. It had been safer than roosting on the streets. Now an old, feeble hope stirred inside him. He turned in to the drive and threaded his way across the land, happening upon the dark compound of a ranch. His headlights skimmed open cattle pens, a vacant barn. The growth of weeds around the front steps evidenced that the house hadn’t been lived in for months.

Gideon pulled up and put the car in park but kept it running. “Stay here.”

Macey sat up, and for the first time he saw fear flash across her face. She nodded.

He got out, kept the car door open, and sneaked toward the house. The front step gave a predictable groan as he mounted it, and he stopped, his pulse rushing in his ears.

Nothing gave reply but the wind, needling through his sweatshirt and threadbare jeans.

He tried the door. The handle didn’t turn. But whoever owned the house had the same blind faith as the inhabitants in town, and the nearest window opened with the smallest effort. He climbed inside.

Gideon landed in a kitchen, barren except for a sink and empty counters, dark and smelling of cold, dust, and neglect. His tennis shoes scuffed on the floor as he went through the small house. An aged shag rug ran into the living room and back to three tiny bedrooms. Foolishly he tried the light, but of course, the electricity had been turned off.

Still, it would do. More than do.

He unlocked the front door and returned to the car. “We’ll stay here,” he said.

“For how long?” Macey asked, turning to look at Haley.

He followed her gaze, seeing the same question in Haley’s blue eyes. How many different beds had his seven-year-old sister slept in during the three years he’d been in jail?

“I don’t know. Let’s just get out and get warm.” He grabbed his loot from the trailer and led the way into the house. “Make Haley a bed,” he said to Macey, thrusting the blankets at her. He glanced at the fireplace. “I’m going to see what I can do to get us warm.”

Macey went into the dark family room, but Haley hung back, staring up at Gideon. She swallowed, and he had the strongest urge to bend down, put his arms around her, and tell her that it would be okay.

But despite their great luck—the bedding, the food, the car, the house, the absence of flashing red lights and sirens in their wake—and regardless of how much he begged and bargained and even sacrificed, Gideon wasn’t sure if fate would be that kind.

CHAPTER 2

“I
F WE DON’T
find a home for them soon, they’ll have to be destroyed.”

Stefanie barely heard Joe Bob—JB—Denton’s words, watching as twenty or so thin and sickly draft horses milled around the holding lot of the Billings fairgrounds. Last month she’d helmed the rescue of thirty-some horses discovered in a dilapidated corral behind an old trailer home on land tucked deep in Custer National Forest. A cross between draft and quarter horses, most of the animals had a chance of survival if they found the right owners.

She’d taken three of them. One carried the flu that had killed Sunny.

She should have quarantined them longer before bringing them home.

Negligent.
The word ramrodded through her brain even now as she watched JB’s weight shift from one worn boot to the other. He didn’t look at her, pulling his battered brown Stetson low over his eyes, hunkering into the wind with his dirty down jacket over his lean, work-toned frame in a posture that screamed hurt. Funny how
the recklessness of his bad-boy high school persona had drained from his eyes over the years, leaving only desperation.

She wondered if she bore a similar look.

However, desperation was a poor matchmaker, and Stefanie knew better than to be taken in by JB’s smile. Even if he did have a way of making a girl believe she might be lucky to be in his shadow, he also had a jealous streak as wide as Montana. She hadn’t given him so much as an encouraging smile lately, but even so, the cowboy seemed to think he had dibs on her—according to the scuttlebutt at Lolly’s Diner.

She probably would have never noticed JB’s occasional social drive-bys, the once-in-a-while phone calls—albeit for the purpose of rescuing abused horses—or conversations down at Lolly’s Diner in town if Rafe hadn’t announced his engagement to Katherine Breckenridge after taking home the gold buckle at last year’s GetRowdy bull riding championship.

Because although Stefanie hadn’t finished college, she could do the math. Her mother, at this age, had not only had three children but also had only fifteen more years ahead of her.

“I heard about Sunny,” JB said. “I’m sorry, Stef.”

She stared at the horses, letting the wind from the north skim off the sudden rush of tears over her loss. “Thank you.” She put just enough warmth in her voice to offer peace. Phillips was too small to keep avoiding someone in the canned foods aisle.

Of course, JB, being the cowboy who never quit, took that as a c’mon-over-for-dinner invitation. “So, I was thinking—”

“Forget it.” She’d vowed long ago that she’d steer clear of arrogant yet good-looking cowboys. Stefanie didn’t need—or want—a man whose ego needed daily feeding.

She did a mental assessment of the lot of horses, of their herd behavior. “I put an announcement about the horses on the Internet. We’ll find homes for them.”

JB followed her to her truck. “Tell your brother we’ll be out to help him with roundup.” He spat out chewing tobacco behind him. Nice. “And if he needs any extra hands . . .”

The transient life of a cowhand. Stefanie climbed into her pickup and drove out of the fairgrounds, east toward Phillips.

Nearly a month since Sunny had died, she had yet to find a new horse. Not that she was looking very hard. She’d never find a horse to fill that empty cavern. She’d done a magnificent job of setting up a barbed wire perimeter around her grief, and JB’s words had only dug that fencing into her heart. She pressed her hand to her chest through her flannel-lined canvas jacket.

She didn’t have time to grieve. Work had to get done. Calves birthed. Cattle fed. Horses checked for the flu. The pickup fixed. Bills paid. Stefanie let work consume her thoughts as she drove.
Vaccinate the new calves. Move the yearlings to the spring field. Start working on backing the new quarter horses.
Clean the house. Bring the trash to recycling.
Throw out my accumulation of entertainment magazines. . . .

She admitted that she might have a little obsession going. Ever since meeting Lincoln Cash last summer during those few days he’d been scouting locations for his new movie, she couldn’t walk past the grocery store magazine rack and not notice Lincoln’s name, not have it jump out at her in glaring black and red, not see issue after issue with pictures of Elise Fontaine wrapped around him.

What was it this week? Oh yeah: “Lincoln Cash Nearly Killed in Death-Defying Stunt.”

Nearly killed.

Stefanie probably had a bit of a teenage crush going for the actor. Not enough to sign up for his fan club, but seriously, what wasn’t to like? He was a pro at collecting fans. Wooing them with his dangerous smile, a three-day whisker growth, the blond hair that always seemed exactly the same length, right above his shirt collar. He looked like he’d walked off a movie set just in time to put an adolescent skip in her heartbeat.

For two whole hours they’d chatted during the Fourth of July rodeo, and he’d never taken his beautiful blue eyes off hers. He’d even asked about the Silver Buckle Ranch as though he might actually be interested in her and her ho-hum life—
“The truck died. I fixed a water line. We sold a bull.”
Still, it didn’t mean that she registered on his radar.

Besides, she’d already learned the lesson about falling for gorgeous men. Her heart still bore the scars she’d dragged home from freshman year of college. Sometimes she even saw Doug Carlisle on television, hawking his used cars, a salt-in-the-wounds reminder of her stupidity. She should have realized that the golden boy on campus wouldn’t fall for a down-on-the-ranch girl like her.

She glanced at the sky, the clouds bunching beyond the mountains, trapped behind the Bighorns.

Nearly killed
. Stefanie wondered how true the tabloid headlines were. Wondered if, indeed, Lincoln Cash had nearly died.

Okay, really, she had work to do. Or at least work to worry about.

The prairie land began to undulate in a rolling landscape of ravines, washes, and hills as she drove east. Overhead the sky evidenced the crisp day—the weather hadn’t quite decided if it would
surrender to spring. The last two nights had dipped into the thirties, and ice had crusted the puddles in the yard come sunrise. Of course, she’d spent most of the past month in the barn
.
She should probably put a cot out there
.

Stefanie rolled her shoulders, stretching her tired muscles. She hadn’t expected to take over the ranch—it had simply fallen to her years ago after Nick and Rafe left. Her father had leaned on her like a son, needing her to take over as his health failed. For a long, long time, his need for her had filled a gap in her, the lonely places that felt so raw they could double her over.

She’d thought Nick’s return would be a balm for those raw spots. Sometimes she wondered if it had only made them worse. Or maybe she realized that the empty places in her life weren’t going to be fixed by the triumphant return of the Noble boys to the Silver Buckle Ranch. No, those hollows went much, much deeper.

They would probably never be filled.

Oh, boy, when had she, a girl who had been a Christian most of her life, surrendered to despair? She flipped on the truck’s radio, trying to find reception to the local Christian station, and heard only static.

Fine. She hummed a few bars of her favorite song, filled it in with the first stanza, then finished off with the chorus: “‘Fill my cup, Lord, I lift it up, Lord! Come and quench this thirsting of my soul. . . .’”

She’d never been a great singer, but she could hold a tune in the shower and the cab of her own truck, and she bellowed it out now. “‘Bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more. Fill my cup, fill it up and make me whole!’”

Rocks kicked up against the chassis of the truck as Stefanie
turned off the highway onto the dirt road that led to the back way to the Silver Buckle, past the Kincaid place. But the words of the song lingered, sinking into her thoughts. Why, if she was a Christian, did life sometimes seem so empty? Why did she still have such hollow places?

Why, when she seemed to have everything she’d ever needed—her ranch, her brothers—did she feel so lost?

“I have learned how to be content with whatever I have.”
The words of Paul—she must have read them recently—filled her thoughts. Stefanie raised her eyes toward her land, to a horizon already hued with purple twilight, dark wisps of clouds. “Lord, help me learn how to be content. Please fill these empty places. . . .”

Those weren’t clouds. As she focused, she saw a trail of black, a glow of orange tufting just over the hills.

The Kincaid place couldn’t be on fire, could it? She hadn’t checked it recently—especially since the land had stood vacant for nearly a year. She knew John had sold it, although the new owners had yet to arrive. The sky was clear, and she hadn’t seen any lightning. She scooped up her cell phone and glared at the no-signal display on her screen.

Slowing at the gate to the Big K, she got out and opened it to let her truck through. She floored her pickup over the ruts and rocks of the two-lane field trail. The orange glow pressed against the encroaching darkness, the black smoke a halo of doom. She topped the ridge on the back side of the property, and for a second, her breath left her. The front half of the house was on fire, the flames moving quickly toward the back. Good thing there weren’t any people living there. The place would be engulfed in moments.

She stopped and picked up her phone again. It registered an
analog signal, and she hit the first entry on her contacts list—the number to Lolly’s Diner, which was closer to emergency central than the local dispatch. A voice answered—Stefanie assumed it could only be the new owner of the diner.

“Missy! There’s a fire at the Big K! Round up the volunteers!” Stefanie hung up and pressed her speed dial to the Silver Buckle. Her sister-in-law, Piper, answered and Stefanie repeated herself.

Then she floored the truck down the hill. She might not save the house, but she could at least be a good neighbor and save the barn for the new owner.

Lincoln had nearly died in Dex’s crazy stunt. He should have known better, should have paid attention to his face-plant outside his trailer.

The one his press agent had creatively attributed to fatigue.

And the one that had driven Lincoln, finally, to the doctor.

But like a fool, did Lincoln listen to the diagnosis, pay attention to the flashing red lights put out by his body? No. Instead he’d heard the cheers of fans, the reputation that demanded he do each and every stunt, and climbed into his shiny Aston Martin and proceeded to nearly kill himself. Every movie with Dex included a scene where Lincoln had to bail out of a moving vehicle—the Ditch and Roll. The stunt had become Dex’s movie hallmark. Until a few weeks ago, Lincoln could do it in his sleep.

This time, his hands hadn’t reacted in time to open the door, and he’d driven right off the pier into the surf and nearly drowned.

Which had finally embedded the truth soundly into Lincoln’s brain.

Apparently the doctor
hadn’t
been trying to scare him, and over the last month, dread had grown in his throat, so thick it threatened to choke him. Every time Lincoln went to sign an autograph, every time he walked the red carpet, every interview where he lost his train of thought, he waited for the truth to splash across the headlines: “The Invincible Lincoln Cash Has Multiple Sclerosis.”

Life just wasn’t fair. Lincoln hadn’t dreamed that the last movie he’d ever make would be a shallow thriller about a cocky ex–race car driver.

Not his last. No. Yet as he drove north in his new Ford Super Duty 250, out of Wyoming and into eastern Montana, Lincoln knew he’d cheated death for the last time.

If he hoped to have any sort of future, he had to escape, hide, and regroup. And Dex’s idea of doing it on his ranch in Montana seemed the best of his options. No way was Lincoln going to check himself into a spa, thank you.

In the deepest places of his heart, the places he didn’t share with the media or Barbara Walters or even the Actors Studio, Lincoln Cash had hoped to be more than a movie star. Yes, he had the adoration of fans around the globe, but what he really hoped for, really wanted, was . . . respect. The kind of career that made interviewers pause, made fans look at more than his smile, his physique.