Prologue
“Come on, Sam. Papa says it’s time to go.” Dusty O’Donovan tugged at her brother’s sleeve. The Colorado heat made her sweat, and she pushed her red-gold hair out of her face.
“Geez, Dusty, can you give me a minute?”
“Yeah, twerp.” Chad McCray nodded. “We’re sealing our pact. We’re blood brothers now.” He held up his hand and a trickle of crimson oozed down his palm.
Dusty looked away, disgusted. She focused on the mountains. She loved the giant peaks, how they looked dark blue from here but turned miraculously green as Papa drove closer. She loved the pine trees that grew tall and skinny, trying to reach the sunlight through the thick evergreen brush. She loved the reddish-brown rock that made faces at her if she stared hard enough. Would there be mountains where they were going?
She turned back to pull on Sam’s sleeve again. Redness dribbled on her brother’s hand. Her mouth filled with saliva, and queasiness erupted in her throat.
She hated the sight of blood. Not because she was a baby. Heck, she carried snakes and lizards in her pockets. No, she hated it because blood was killing her mama. Bad blood. Something about the cells that were white, though Dusty didn’t understand that. She had seen her mama’s blood, and it was red, just like everyone else’s.
This white blood murderer had a name. Loo-kee-mee-uh.
“You all still hangin’ around?” Chad’s older brother Zach loped up. At thirteen, the black-haired boy was tall and lanky, all arms and legs. He looked funny. He sounded funny too. Especially when his voice did that crackly thing.
Then he glared at her with those eyes.
“Don’t, Zach.”
“I’m just teasin’, Gold Dust,” Zach said. “You don’t believe I can hurt you anymore, do you? Big girl like you ain’t gonna fall for that nonsense.”
“Course not.” Dusty looked away anyway. Zach’s eyes were creepy. One was dark brown and the other light blue. He had been teasing Dusty since she was a toddler, telling her his blue eye packed a laser that melted little girls’ brains.
She turned and grasped her brother’s arm. “Now, Sam.”
“All right, I’m comin’. Sheesh.” Sam looked sheepishly at Chad. “See ya around.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Come on, you two.” The oldest of the brothers, Dallas, walked toward them. “You all have chores to do.”
“Heck, you’re not our pa,” Chad said. “Sam’s leavin’ today.”
“Do I look like I care? Come on now.”
“I gotta go anyway,” Sam said. “Come on, Dust.”
When Sam grabbed her hand, Dusty looked back at the McCray brothers.
Zach, with his funny eyes, spoke. “Keep your chin up, Gold Dust. Everything’ll be all right.”
Dusty nodded and curled her small fingers into Sam’s larger ones. As they walked toward the small house that was the only home she had ever known, she stared up at her brother. His eyes seemed sunken in his face. He looked sad.
“I’m sorry you have to leave your best friend, Sam.”
“Ain’t nothin’.”
Dusty, young as she was, knew her ten-year-old brother would miss Chad McCray. Both were the same age, and they’d been inseparable for years.
“Come on, you two varmints,” Sean-Patrick O’Donovan said, as he helped Dusty’s mother, Mollie, into the white minivan. “Take a quick look through the house and see if we’ve missed anything, though I doubt it. Your mama here even swept the place.”
“I didn’t want to leave a dirty house, Sean,” Mollie said.
“Christ, honey, we’re leavin’. Who cares what the place looks like?”
“I do.”
“But you went and tired yourself out.”
“So what? I’ll have nothing to do but sleep in the car for the next eight hours.”
Dusty fixed her gaze on her blond-haired, blue-eyed mother, pale and weak, and wondered why sweeping the house was so important when she was obviously exhausted. Her mama, once so fresh and flushed, now had skin the color of the worn grey fence surrounding their small vegetable garden. Her arms, once firm and muscular as they held Dusty and rocked her to sleep, looked like thin tree branches, the skin hanging loosely.
Dusty stood silently while Sam entered the house and returned momentarily. “We got it all,” he said.
“Good. Now you two get in the van.”
Dusty scrambled into the backseat next to Sam, craned her head, and watched out the back window as the van curved out of the small driveway and up the private road leading out of McCray Landing. She took one last glance at the cozy little house, remembering her rosy-cheeked mama smiling and standing by the door, before she got sick. Then Dusty closed her eyes.
They were going to Montana to live with Mama’s family. That’s what Mama wanted. They no longer needed to stay near the big city of Denver, because Mama wasn’t going back to the hospital.
The doctors couldn’t help her anymore.
Chapter One
Seventeen years later
“He doesn’t look so tough,” Dusty said to Sam as she eyed El Diablo, the stud bull penned up outside the Western Stock Show grounds in Denver. She winced at the pungent aroma of dust and animals.
“No man’s been able to stay on him more than two seconds, Dust,” her brother said.
“He just needs a woman’s touch.” Dusty looked into the bull’s menacing eyes. Oh, he was mad all right, but she had no doubt she could calm him. The ranchers in Montana didn’t call her the Bull Whisperer for nothing.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure you should try it. Papa wouldn’t like it.”
“Papa’s dead, Sam, and you can’t tell me what to do.” She pierced her brother’s dark gaze with her own. “Besides, the purse for riding him would save our ranch, and you know it.”
“Hell, Dusty.” Sam shoved his hands in his denim pockets. “I plan to win a few purses bronc busting. You don’t need to worry about making money.”
“I want to make the money, Sam.”
“That’s silly.”
“No, it’s not.”