LITMIR.BIZ

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was hitting rock bottom.

      But she couldn’t let it go.

      “All I had to do was tell you and my mother no,” she said, “but I didn’t have the guts. I was a silly, seventeen-year-old girl who couldn’t help wanting to please her mother and the stepfather she’d always hoped would be her daddy.”

      “Did we tell you to let the boy into your pants?”

      She should never have brought this up. It was stirring the rage deep inside her. No way could she tamp it down and think about Shane at the same time.

      “No,” she said. “You did not. I made my own choices and—now that I think about it, true to what you always preach—I’ve done a very responsible job of living with the consequences of those choices. The problem right now is that I made another bad choice in asking you for help.”

      “You just said you always wanted me to be your daddy.”

      “I did. A long time ago. When I was a silly kid whose real daddy had never been around much. A silly, lonesome kid who was eager to please.”

      But all that was old news.

      Shane was locked up in jail. Shane was skinny and weak and sweating for need of a fix. Shane was in misery and it was all her fault.

      But his further misery would be Gordon’s fault. Gordon had had the power to bring him home in this truck with them right now.

      “You didn’t have to leave him there overnight.”

      Gordon wouldn’t look at her. He was driving like a bat out of hell.

      “I got him a private cell.” He bit the words off like bullets.

      “We’re not talking about the Marriott!” she cried. “He needs to be out of there.”

      “He needs to stop and think about what he’s doing,” Gordon said. “Hard experiences teach hard lessons.”

      “He’s defenseless! His arms aren’t as big around as your finger.”

      “He’ll survive.”

      Andie Lee stared out her window at the landscape hurtling past.

      Shane hated her. Shane hated himself, too. She had to save him.

      “I’ll call my cousin Boone,” she said. “He’s an attorney and he’ll get Shane out of there.”

      “An army of attorneys can’t get him out of there, Andie Lee.”

      Now Gordon’s voice was flat with the knowledge of a sure thing. He was king and he knew it.

      “He will learn,” he said crisply, “or he will die. The only way human beings ever learn a damn thing is by taking the consequences of the choices they make.”

      “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Yeah. That’s your mantra, all right.”

      “Right it is.”

      Her lips parted and she started to say something else, then she thought better of it. There must be a way to work him if she’d stop and think.

      She’d been going about this all wrong. She’d known that from the beginning because she’d known Gordon Campbell almost all her life. Since she was ten years old and her mother brought her to live in his house. That had been just like Toni: she’d met Gordon at the big cutting horse sale in Fort Worth in December and by April she was married to him and moving to Montana, turning Andie Lee’s life upside down.

      Twenty-three years Andie Lee had known this man. And in all that time, she’d never seen anybody who’d directly faced him down and managed to win.

      “Gordon,” she said, “you’ve been most generous to have Shane accepted into your center free of charge. But it isn’t helping him. I have to look for another treatment center that might fit him better.”

      “Free of charge?” he said.

      “No, I’m sure I couldn’t find that anywhere else. I’ll have to sell my practice.”

      “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s your livelihood.”

      “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t be asking you to support us. I can always work for somebody else. I can even go temporary and fill in for veterinarians on vacation. There are plenty of them in North Texas. “

      “On a salary you’d never get his bills paid,” he said. “This drug-treatment business costs a freaking fortune.”

      “Tell me about it,” she said wryly. “It just about broke me before I ever called you.”

      “And it’s a damned good thing you did, no matter what you say.”

      He actually sounded almost hurt that she’d said that.

      “Get over it, Gordon,” she said. “You’re not God and you can’t have power over everything. Face the fact that you hired a snake of a loser to run your rehab center and it’s doing more harm than good. I made a mistake bringing Shane here.”

      “I fired the goddamned loser snake of an SOB, didn’t I?” he growled.

      He drove even faster. Why not? He wasn’t God, but around here, he was king. Speed limits didn’t apply.

      “It won’t take two weeks to get the whole program turned around,” he said. “I’m on it.”

      “I’m out of here,” she said. “If you won’t do it tonight, go back tomorrow and get Shane out on bail. We’ll leave Montana and be out of your hair.”

      “Forget it,” he said, in that tone of unbreakable ice she’d also known since the age of ten. “The kid stays where he is until I come back and get him. When I do, I’ll sober him up.”

      “As if you know how to do that.”

      “I can find somebody who does,” he said. “And I’m going to add some ideas of mine to their program.”

      “Sounds like a winner.”

      “Come on, Andie Lee, cut the sarcasm. Don’t I always do what I say I will?”

      “A combination of a world-class employment agency, plenty of money, and some good, hard, rancher’s common sense will do the trick, huh?”

      “Guaranteed. Every time.”

      “So which one of those did you leave out last time? When you hired Jason?”

      “Will you shut up about Jason? What I left out was work for those kids.”

      He clamped his jaw shut tight as a vise.

      “I cannot believe it’s come to this,” she said. “I can’t even think. I’m so scared and so mad at Shane I cannot even think.”

      “Leave it to me. Quit your worrying.”

      “As if I could.”

      “You were right about one thing,” he said.

      She jerked around to stare at him. That was a rare statement, coming from Gordon. He skewered her with his hard blue eyes.

      “It is my ego,” he said. “You won’t find another rehab center on the face of the earth where the owner’s got his ass on the line for your kid to sober up.”

      Andie Lee couldn’t say a word.

      “He’ll be gone some day,” Gordon said. “Sober or stoned or dead, he’ll be gone. You’re gonna have to make yourself another life. You’ve worked too hard to throw your practice away.”

      That was one thing Gordon respected. Hard work.

      “It’s no skin off your back. I’d never ask you for help.”

      “You never have,” he said, his eyes boring into her again. “Except

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