Finding Home Read Free

said. “Hunker maybe. Hang out.” He chuckled. The sound was lower than she remembered. His eyes looked tired, his left cheek bruised, dark with a magenta hue in the overhead lights. “Maybe I loitered once in Reno.” He dropped his head against the cushion behind him and sighed. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” His tone sounded fatigued and sincere, but she wasn’t foolish enough to believe in his earnestness. That mistake tended to invite frogs down her back and sheep droppings in her Jell-O.
    â€œThen maybe you shouldn’t have hidden in my truck like a . . .” she began, then stopped abruptly as a new realization filtered in. Narrowing her eyes, she glanced at his off-kilter grin, his hat, his clay-colored canvas jacket. “That was you.”
    He raised Indian-dark brows over eyes that perpetually looked amused. “What’s that?”
    â€œThat was you in there with Toby what’s-his-face.”
    â€œLeach.” He nodded. “Yeah. I’m doing a little work for him.”
    â€œFor a killer buyer?”
    He shook his head once. “Now don’t go getting on your high horse, Case. The man’s not Satan. He’s just trying to make a living like everybody else.”
    â€œSure.” She tried to keep the emotion out of her tone. Unbridled emotion, Bradley said, caused more foolish decisions than ignorance and alcohol combined. Her fiancé also thought her parents had been a testimony to that truth. They’d been like fire and oil, her father stubborn and stoic, her mom hot-tempered, vivacious, and pretty. Casie was nothing like her mother. But her voice warbled a little when she spoke. “By slaughtering horses.”
    â€œIt’s better than letting ’em starve to death,” Dickenson said, seeming leery of her tone. “And it’s not like he’s buying Secretariat. Dammit, I mean . . .” He jerked a thumb toward the auction barn. “What were you thinking in there?”
    She remained perfectly still, refusing to be embarrassed by her purchase and shrugging to emphasize her cool demeanor. “Oh, I don’t know, I was looking for something to run at the Cow Palace. Thought the gray looked the type.”
    He stared at her a second, then snorted. “Hell, Case, she’ll be lucky to cut it as a lawn ornament.”
    Casie’s careful temper prickled, but she smoothed it down. “She’s a little rough around the edges, maybe.”
    â€œRough around the edges,” he said and grinned, cracking a dimple into his left cheek. “Head Case, that nag’s rough clean through.”
    The old nickname turned the prickles to barbed wired. “So what should we do, Dickey? Throw her away? Send her to slaughter? I mean, if she can’t run or buck or . . .” She waved a hand. “She could at least be pretty, right?” Dickenson, she remembered, had dated every girl on the cheerleading squad while Casie had been fighting acne and playing piccolo in the marching band. “Otherwise she might as well be dead. She might as well be—”
    â€œHold your damned horses!” he said and lifted his injured right hand as if to forestall any further histrionics. “Simmer down.”
    A thousand nasty rejoinders popped into her brain, but she pursed her lips, effectively holding them all at bay, and returned to the problem at hand. “Why are you in my truck?”
    â€œListen, I didn’t mean to get you all hyped up. I just—”
    â€œWhy?” she asked. Her tone, she thought, was admirably steady. Bradley, who valued good sense above all else, would be proud.
    Colton pushed the fingers of his left hand through blood bay hair and exhaled. “I need a ride home.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWe don’t live half a mile apart.” He grinned again. “I can walk from your house if you’re nervous about going all the way.”
    Rainwater was