social circles, plus his business alliances with her father. He disdained her really or he wouldn’t use that tone with her.
And why shouldn’t he? She kept her mouth shut and did as she was told and in return he bought her anything she wanted and gave her plenty of money to support her horse habit. To him, she was only as good as her manicure.
Only as good as her last social performance. Like a rodeo cowboy who was only as good as his last ride.
Clea was barely out of sight of the resort when she began to really see. The mountains and the sky, cobalt and white meeting in sharp, clean edges. Gray gravel coming through the dirty scraped snow in front of the car. One tan deer bounding across the road into green trees that were as deep as a vertical dream. Yellow sun so bright it made her smile.
This world so huge and wild it filled her heart.
She smiled to herself. Right now, that day with Brock seemed a hundred years ago. Now here she was in Montana again and she was in the middle of the end. It wouldn’t be the end of the end with Brock until somehow he accepted the fact that Ariel belonged to her. Rightfully. Morally.
But when had Brock ever cared about right and wrong?
She took a deep breath and pushed the past and future from her mind. She let the land and the sky take her again. Then she realized she was getting close to her destination. She should begin to look for the sign where she would turn in on her road. There was one, wasn’t there? According to the realtor, there was.
Holding the wheel with one hand, she fished deep into her new chocolate-brown Gucci bag to find the map the man had faxed to her, then slowed while she looked at it. Yes. The sign would be on her right and it read Firecreek Mountain Road.
After two nights, each with no more than four or five hours of nervous dozing in the living quarters of the trailer—which she could never have done without the alarm system and the gun she’d bought when she took the course in home protec-tion—she’d gone right on through exhaustion and come out the other side. A sharp edge of excitement—and quite a bit of fear also, to be totally honest—had wound her up tight.
This was her new world, the one where she would become another person. She could only pray she was strong enough to do that.
These snow-topped mountains, this endless sky, that narrow road that wound up and up, following Fire Creek to its source, as the man had described it, they all were hers now. And she’d be theirs. She’d belong to them and to the log cabin and barn he’d told her were at the top of the first high ridge.
She would not belong to any people.
She drove more and more slowly, looking for the sign, determined not to miss it because if she passed it she’d be forced to find a good place to turn the trailer around. Just the thought of having to drive even one unnecessary mile was more than she could bear. Ariel needed to get out of the trailer. She’d been exercised at both nights’ roadside rest stops, but that wasn’t nearly enough.
A bed would be wonderful, but later. Right now, a shower and something homemade to eat, even if it was only a scrambled egg and toast.
If the realtor had brought in the food and supplies that she’d ordered.
Come to think of it, she hadn’t even checked on the cost for that service. She shouldn’t have asked for it at all. If she wanted to live for at least a year on the money she had, she had to learn to think differently. From now on she had to do everything for herself, including clean her own house. She had to make every penny count.
And every brain cell. Brock would be beside himself by now and he’d be looking for her. That was a given. She’d slept in the trailer to keep from leaving a trail at horse hotels or horse people’s places, so she had to make that sacrifice count, too. She’d ordered a new cell phone no one knew about. She’d brought hair dye—Sassy Black—to cover Ari’s white markings. Perhaps she should use it before anybody here saw the mare.
There it was. The sign, Firecreek Mountain Road.
And another one, fancier, that read, Wild Horses.
Right. The realtor was all excited about the wild horse sanctuary. He said that sometimes tourists could see bands of them and sometimes they couldn’t, but they could always buy T-shirts and mugs and photographs with photos of wild horses on them and spend the night at the local motels and eat at the cafés in the little town of Pine Lodge.
She only hoped she could get close enough to shoot some pictures of the wild horses for herself. But if they wouldn’t cooperate, she could understand—at the moment, she needed her own space with a longing that went to the bone.
However, it’d be something fun to try, a challenge. Taking pictures was her other comfort, besides horses. It soothed her somehow. After her mother died, it had made her feel secure, as if whatever subject she captured would be hers to hold in her hand forever.
Which made no sense at all, since during that time she’d clung to every picture of her mother she could find, yet her mother was irrevocably gone.
That was before she’d learned that nothing is forever.
She should’ve already known.
She took the turn carefully, mindful of the way the trailer was tracking because the gravel road wasn’t very wide and the last thing she needed right now was to hang a wheel off the end of the tin horn. Once she’d straightened out the rig and headed up the first rise on the winding road into the hills, Clea let herself believe it. She was here.
And Ariel was here.
Feeling even more efficient, Clea looked at her odometer so she could measure the last leg of the journey and turn in at the correct driveway.
Then she rolled down her window so she could smell this place. Sage, she knew that smell, and a hint of pine but the dry air carried other scents, too. It was such dry air and thinner than she was used to. A whole new world from the ground up.
A chuckle began deep inside, rolled up into her throat and came out as a short but sincere belly laugh.
“Hey, Brock,” she said into the enormous space that surrounded her. “Catch me if you can.”
She’d told him once or twice that she would love to live—which was true—in northern New Mexico. Live in an artists’ colony and do nothing but take pictures in that fabulous light, she had said. He might look for her there.
Or not. Half the time, he didn’t listen to a word she said.
She glanced to her left, down into the valley along the river that flashed in and out behind some trees. There was a small ranch house and barn and some other outbuildings. Who lived there? Would she ever meet them?
How far was it on up to her place? She looked at the faxed map again and checked her mileage one more time. Not far.
Here was another hill, another ridge that led on up toward the big mountains with their striped bluffs and trees with snow still on their tops. The first high ridge. That had to be it.
Clea was going into the next switchback when she saw him. She’d turned away from the glare of sunlight off the rearview mirror and there he was, an arm’s length inside the fence, riding down the slope on the right-hand side of the road.
