Free Taking Back Tara (Ranch Lovers Romance) by Eve Paludan Page A

face completely. The ugliest black terry bathrobe
he’d ever seen hung on a hook on the closet door.
    “Son of a
bitch! She’s gone completely loco and is channeling Johnny Cash.”

 
    ***

 
    “Come out, come
out wherever you are. Beauty, it’s your harmless old Beast come around on a
welfare check,” Zane called inside her empty barn from the back of his blue
roan gelding that exactly matched his Stetson. Her Dodge Ram dually truck was
in the barn and the keys hung from the dusty ignition. He frowned.
    A great horned
owl slipped down from the shadows and near-grazed his shoulder. Blue, his
bomb-proof horse only flicked his ears a mite, but stood quietly. The owl
slipped out the open barn door, as soundlessly as Zane’s exhaled breath as he
listened for Tara to reply. She did not.
    Tara’s
horse was gone, the last livestock that she hadn’t sold in her grand plan to
sell everything so she could leave the state and go God knows where with her
scarred face that he hadn’t seen since before it was ruined in the fire that
took Hugh, the snake she’d up and left him for.
    Zane dismounted
and tried to find hoof prints leading out from the barn but the pouring rain
had obliterated any tracks that Lucky might have left.
    Zane threw
Blue’s reins over a hitching post and he walked a short distance away, up a
hill, so’s he could see down into the valley. Then he tried to recall Ty and
Fly, who both used to be his dogs, but had followed Tara
when she’d left him. Zane whistled short piercing pips through his teeth, as
high pitched as he could make them and shouted down into the valley, “Fly,
here! Ty, here!” just like in the old days. He whistled as loud as he could and
called the dogs until his throat felt raw.
    There was no
use searching thousands of acres for her if he could get one of the dogs on
recall and let himself be led to her. Unaccustomed to speaking as he was, the
shouting made his throat feel uncomfortably strained. A fear grew in his bowels
and his lower belly that something bad had happened to Tara.
    He decided to
ride her property in an ever-expanding spiral, to cover every inch he could
instead of a linear search.
    Blue clopped
his hooves obediently through the muck as Zane used his knees to steer. Every
minute or so, he whistled the bursts of shrieking pips through his teeth and
called for Fly only, who was better at recall than Ty, who was older and
slightly deaf.
    Zane had just
started up the ridge trail in his expanding spiral when he saw a furry
black-and-white bullet leaping above the buffalo grass like an orca breaching
above a shimmering green sea. Closer and closer he came and soon Zane heard his
excited bark.
    “Fly!” he
called, his heart no gladder than Fly’s as the border collie leaped right into
his arms, licked his face, whined, and beat the hell out of Zane with his
uncropped tail. Blue blew air through his lips and turned his head to greet
Fly, who gave his old friend a shy lick. Blue neighed.
    “Good boy, Fly! Good boy!” Zane stroked him and hugged
him for a moment. “Enough of old home week. Fly, where’s Tara?
Take me to Tara . Tara ! ”
    Fly’s ears
pricked up and he leaped back down to the ground, ran circles around Blue and
began to herd him. Zane let Blue have his head and Fly whined every time Zane
said Tara’s name. It took awhile to get there. Fly
herded Blue up hills, then down the same hills, but progressing just the same.
Fly was working now and he had the blue ribbons to prove it.
    For just a
short while, the rain quite and the clouds broke, lighting up the sky in a
spectacular orange sunset.
    Zane found Tara
laying in a crumpled heap under a blue spruce, sheltered and huddled under her
filthy rain slicker and half covered with a mud-crusted saddle blanket. Ty
barked happily upon seeing Zane, but didn’t leave her side. She saw him
dismount and pulled a black neckerchief over the lower half of her face, bandit
style. It didn’t escape Zane that she