Slowly, Tate released his hold on Libby. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Libby stared at him, nearly blinded by tears. Didn’t resist when Julie tugged her away, keeping to the edge of the crowd.
Paige caught up, double-stepping.
“What just happened here?” Julie asked moderately, when they were all in the car.
Before, the blast of cool hair from the vents on Julie’s dashboard had been a blessed relief; now, it made Libby hug herself and shiver. Her lower lip wobbled, and she couldn’t bring herself to look at her sister.
“I’m not sure,” Libby said brokenly, but only after Julie had put the Cadillac into Reverse, stepped on the gas and negotiated a series of complicated maneuvers, involving a lot of backing up, inching forward and backing up again. “Things just—got out of hand.”
“I’ll say,” Paige commented, from the back seat.
Fresh mortification washed over Libby. “Please tell me we weren’t yelling.”
“You weren’t yelling,” Julie said.
“Really? Or are you just saying that?”
Julie chuckled. “Honey, neither of you had to yell. The air crackled like it does before a good ole Texas lightning storm. From the looks of things, the two of you were either going to kill each other or make a baby on the spot.”
Libby slid down in the seat, horrified. “Oh, my God,” she moaned.
“McKettrick men,” Paige offered calmly, “can turn a sane woman crazy.”
Tate’s words came back to Libby. This is a wake.
“Isabel will never forgive me,” she said.
“Isabel,” Julie soothed, in her practical way, “was inside the house by the time hostilities broke out, lying down with a cold cloth over her eyes. And don’t look now, but sparks flying between you and the McKettricks’ number one son aren’t exactly breaking news around these parts.”
Libby’s embarrassment was now total. How would she face people after making such a scene? What had come over her?
She tried to retrace the conversation in her mind, to pinpoint exactly where she’d stepped on a land mine, but it was all a nonsensical jumble of he said/she said.
Except that Tate had basically accused her of being promiscuous.
Hadn’t he?
“This is it,” Libby decided aloud, as they bumped over the rutted dirt road leading back toward the highway. “I’m leaving town forever. I’ll change my name, dye my hair—”
Paige unhooked her seat belt and poked her head between the front seats. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Everybody makes a complete and utter fool of themselves now and then.”
“Gee,” Libby nearly snarled, “that was a comforting thing to say.”
“If it’s any consolation,” Paige pressed on, undaunted, “Tate looked as if he wished the ground would open up and swallow him.”
“It isn’t,” Libby replied.
“Let’s not bicker,” Julie interjected.
“We’re not bickering,” Paige bickered. “I was merely stating a fact. Playing the fool once in a while is only human.”
“Paige?” Julie said sweetly.
“What?”
“Shut the hell up.”
Paige sagged backward, fastened her seat belt back with a metallic snap, grumbling something under her breath.
“You never made a fool of yourself,” Libby accused her youngest sister, her gaze colliding with Paige’s in the rearview mirror. “Miss Perfect.”
Paige rolled her eyes. “You’ve got a short memory,” she shot back. “I tried to run Austin McKettrick over with a golf cart once, if you’ll recall.”
“Chased him right down Main Street,” Julie reminisced fondly. “Good thing he was so quick on his feet.”
“Shut up,” Paige said.
“That was my line,” Julie answered.
Libby began to laugh. Like the giggles she’d battled earlier, this laughter was more a release of tension than amusement Still, it had been funny, watching Austin sprint down the white line, sometimes backward, laughing at Paige as she swerved behind him at lawn-mower speed.
Austin had finally taken refuge on the courthouse steps, gasping for breath, and Paige had plainly intended to drive right up after him. Fortunately, she’d commandeered a golf cart instead of an army tank—the front wheels bumped hard against the bottom stair and then the engine died. Unfortunately, she’d nearly been arrested and would probably have gone to jail for attempted assault if Austin hadn’t refused to press charges.
“Okay,” Libby admitted, turning to look back at Paige, “there was that one lapse. But I’ve never seen you lose your temper, before or since, which makes me wonder if you’re an alien or something.”
“Some of us,” Julie remarked loftily, “have sense enough not to get involved with a McKettrick in the first place.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Paige scoffed. “I saw you shaking your finger beneath Garrett’s nose back there. If he wanted to get under your skin, he could—it’s a gift. They all have it.”
“Please,” Julie said, gliding up to a Stop sign pocked with bulletholes, a common sight in that part of Texas, and signaling a left turn before swinging that big pink boat out onto the asphalt to head for town. “Me and Garrett McKettrick? The man is a politician. You know what I think of that species.”
“He’s also good-looking in the extreme,” Libby pointed out.
“Not to mention McKettrick-rich,” Paige added.
“He’s a player,” Julie went on. “God knows how many women he’s stringing along.”
Again, Libby’s gaze connected with Paige’s in the rearview mirror.
“Uh-oh,” Paige said.
“I don’t care about looks,” Julie insisted. “Or money. Garrett McKettrick is definitely not my type.”
“What is your type?” Libby asked, glad to be talking about something besides the debacle with Tate, back there in the Ruizes’ orchard.
“I don’t have one,” Julie said. “I’ve resigned myself to being single. In fact, I like being single. Calvin and I are doing just fine on our own, thank you very much. The last thing we need is a man complicating our lives.”
“What about sex?” Paige asked. “Don’t you miss that?”
Libby began to feel overheated again. Why did sex have to come up in every conversation? She went months without thinking about the subject at all—much—and now it seemed to be in her face every time she turned around. What was up with that?
“You don’t have to be married,” Julie reminded her sisters, “to enjoy sex.”
“No,” Paige agreed, “but a man helps.”
Libby’s face flamed as her flesh prickled with remembered sensations: Tate’s mouth on her neck, on the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees, on her—well, everywhere.
“Don’t tell me you’re using a vibrator,” Paige said, like it was a crime or something. “You’re still young, Julie. You need a man.”
Julie’s neck was bright red. “Who said anything about a vibrator?” she snapped. “And how do you know I’m not having a wild, passionate affair? I do have some secrets from you two, after all.”
“No, you don’t,” Paige replied smugly. “If you were seeing someone, I’d know it, and so would everybody else in Blue River.”
Here it comes. Libby bit down on her lower lip, closed her eyes.
But Paige was on a roll. “That’s the problem with small towns,” she went on mercilessly. “When somebody goes to bed with somebody else—” here, she paused for effect “—word gets around in no time. Take Libby and Tate, for instance.”
Libby winced.
“Libby,” Julie said, sounding intrigued, as well as shocked, “you didn’t.”
“Oh, yes, she did,” Paige trilled, the triumphant little sister avenging a multitude of childhood slights.
Libby covered her face with both hands and groaned.
“Is this true?” Julie asked slowly.
Libby would gladly have violated a lif
etime of principles just then and lied like a pro, but she knew both her sisters would see right through it. They knew each other too well.
“Yes,” she said, after a very long time. “Yes, I slept with Tate McKettrick. Are you satisfied?”
“No,” Julie said succinctly. “But I’ll bet you were.”
CHAPTER NINE
AS FAR AS TATE was concerned, the house was just too damn big.
He knew Garrett and Austin were around, but they were keeping to themselves, and with the kids back at Cheryl’s place and Esperanza helping with the clean-up over at the Ruizes’, Tate might as well have been alone on the planet.
Except, of course, for Ambrose and Buford.
Most likely missing the twins, the pups had found his best work boots next to the back door and systematically chewed them to pieces.
With a pang, he thought of Crockett. As a pup, his old dog had had a penchant for chewing boots, too. And Charlie, one of Crockett’s many predecessors, had reduced a custom-made pair, Tate’s dad’s pride and joy, to shreds.
Tate recalled how scared he’d been. Another kid’s father had shot a dog for a far lesser crime, and even though Jim McKettrick, a strict but fair father, had never raised a hand to any of his sons or their mother, Tate had been sure his beloved dog was facing immediate execution.
Eight years old at the time, he’d left home with Charlie, the two of them headed overland in the general direction of Oklahoma, going by the compass he’d gotten for Christmas. He was lugging the dog’s plastic food bowl and a rolled-up sleeping bag and not much else, with no specific destination in mind.
His dad caught up to them on horseback about an hour into the journey, probably tipped off by one of the ranch hands. On a busy spread like the Silver Spur, it was hard for a kid to get away with much of anything since somebody was always watching, ready to run off at the mouth at the first opportunity.
“Where you headed?” Jim had asked, almost casually, pulling his well-worn hat down low over his eyes and shifting easily in the saddle. His big chestnut gelding snorted, peeved at being reined in when he’d rather be punching cattle.
Tears had welled up in Tate’s eyes; all those years later, he could feel the burn of them, a sort of dry, scalding sensation. “Me and Charlie figured we ought to leave,” he’d answered, dropping his head for a moment before meeting Jim’s steady gaze. “Charlie went and chewed up your good boots—the ones Mom had made for your birthday, with our brand and the Alamo and the flag of the Republic on them.”
Jim had taken off his hat then, run the sleeve of his sweat-stained chambray shirt across his face and leaned forward a little, resting one forearm on the saddle horn. “I see,” he’d said quietly, before putting the hat back on. “And you reckoned that lighting out on your own was the best course of action?”
Tate had swallowed hard. Now, he was going to be in trouble for running away, he guessed, on top of Charlie taking a bullet in the head out behind the barn. Having no answer at hand, he’d simply looked up at his father and waited forlornly for the collapse of the known universe.
Jim had sighed, swung one leg over the gelding’s neck, and jumped to the ground. Approaching Tate and the dog, he’d crouched to ruffle Charlie’s mismatched ears, one a grayish-brown, one white. A stray who’d shown up at the ranch one day with his ribs showing and his multicolored coat full of burrs, Charlie wasn’t much to look at, but except for boot-chewing, he pretty much behaved himself.
“Look at me, boy,” Jim had said, his voice gentle.
Tate had met his father’s fierce blue gaze. “You gonna shoot Charlie, Dad?” he’d asked.
“Now why in the devil would I do a thing like that?”
“That’s what Ryan Williams’s dad did when their dog wrecked the new carpet.”
“Well, son,” Jim had drawled reasonably, still sitting on his haunches, “I’m not Ryan Williams’s dad, now am I? I’m yours.”
Tate’s heartbeat had quickened, and he’d almost flung himself into his father’s arms before he remembered that he was eight years old and too big for that kind of stuff. “I guess I’m still in trouble, though?”
Jim had looked away, probably to hide a grin. “I guess you are,” he’d answered presently. “Running away from home is a dangerous thing to do, Tate. Your mother is half frantic, calling all over the countryside looking for you.”
“How about Charlie? Is he in any trouble?”
Jim had chuckled then. Stood up tall, with the sun behind him. “Charlie’s in the clear. Dogs chew things up sometimes, because they don’t know any better. You, on the other hand, don’t have that excuse. You do know better. You’re going to have to do extra chores for a month, and you can forget that school field trip to Six Flags next week, because you won’t be going along.”
Tate had merely nodded, too relieved that Charlie was going to be all right to care about staying behind when everybody else in the whole school went to Six Flags. He knew he’d care plenty when the time came, though.
His dad had laid a hand on his right shoulder. “Let’s go on home now,” he said, “before your mother calls in the FBI.”
Tate had ridden back to the ranch house in front of Jim, clutching the dog bowl and the sleeping bag, Charlie trotting cheerfully alongside the horse.
Back in the present, Tate crouched the way his father had done that day. Ruffled one dog’s ears, then the other’s. “You’re a pair to draw to,” he said. “And this’ll teach me to leave my boots by the back door when I come in from the range.”
After that, he took the mutts outside.
They headed straight for the castle, sniffing the ground, probably trying to track Audrey and Ava.
Tate missed his daughters sorely as he watched their dogs searching for them. Even when he was a kid, broken homes were common, but he and his brothers had grown up under one roof, with parents who loved them and each other, and until the split with Cheryl, the concept had been foreign to him.
Now, he was all too familiar with it.
The dogs returned to him, tails wagging, taking their failure to scare up the twins in their stride. He wished he could accept the kids’ absence as philosophically as the pups had.
When Garrett’s black sports car zoomed backward out of the garage, Tate was so startled that he almost left his hide in a pool on the ground and stepped out of it like a pair of dirty jeans.
Seeing him, accurately reading the glower taking shape on his face like clouds gathering to dump a ground-pocking rain, Garrett winced. Rolled down his window.
“Sorry,” he told Tate, with a sheepish grin.
Maybe if it hadn’t been for Pablo’s funeral and the way he’d blown things with Libby in the orchard and the kids being gone from home again, Tate would have held his temper. As things stood, though, his brother’s careless mistake pushed him one step over the line.
Rounding the ridiculously expensive car, he slammed both fists down onto the shiny hood and glowered hard at Garrett through the bug-specked windshield.
“Hey!” Garrett protested, shoving open the driver’s side door and piling out, face flushed, eyes flashing. “What the hell—”
Tate advanced on Garrett, seething. Gripped him by the front of his white dress shirt and hurled him back against the car. “Did you even glance in your rearview mirror before you shot out of that garage like a goddamm bullet?” he yelled. “What if one of the kids had been behind you, or one of these dogs?”
Garrett paled at the mention of possibilities he obviously hadn’t considered.
Tate let his hands fall to his sides, stepped back out of his brother’s space.
A few awkward beats of silence passed.
“You all right?” Garrett asked at last, his voice hoarse.
Tate looked away, didn’t answer because anything he said would only make bad matters worse.
“Tate?” Garrett pressed, never one to leave well enough alone.
Tate met Garrett’s gaze, held it steadily, still holding h
is tongue.
“Look,” Garrett said, “I’ll be more careful after this. It’s been one hell of a day for all of us, and I guess I just wasn’t thinking.”
“You think this was a bad day?” Tate said, after grinding his back molars together for a second or so. “That wouldn’t begin to cover it if you’d killed somebody just now.”
Garrett surveyed him. “I said I was sorry, Tate,” he replied evenly. “I said I wouldn’t make the same mistake a second time. What more do you want—a strip of my ornery McKettrick hide?”
“I’ll have a lot more than a strip of your hide if you ever do a damn fool thing like that again.”
Garrett sighed and straightened his shoulders, and Tate could almost see the politician in him coming to the fore. Trouble was, Garrett wasn’t a politician, he was a rancher, though it looked like he was going to be the last one to figure that out. “Can we start over, here? Before we wind up rolling around in the dirt the way we did when we were kids?”
Tate thrust out a breath. Allowed himself a semblance of a smile at the memory of all those barnyard brawls. Their mother had broken up more than one by spraying her three sons with a garden hose. Their dad’s method had been more direct: he’d simply waded into the middle of the fray, got them by the scruff and sent them tumbling in three different directions.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start over.”
Garrett grinned. Then he got into his car, drove it into the garage and backed out again, covering about an inch per hour.
Watching Tate, he raised both eyebrows as if to say, Satisfied?
“Where were you headed in such a hurry, anyhow?” Tate asked.
“The senator,” Garrett said, the grin gone, “is having an emergency.”
“The senator,” Tate replied, “is always having an emergency. What is it now? Did the press catch him naked in a hot tub with three bimbos again?”
“That,” Garrett replied, stiff with indignation, “is not what happened.”
“Right,” Tate scoffed. It was a wonder to him how Garrett’s famously incompetent boss and so-called mentor kept getting reelected to the U.S. Senate.
“You know what you are, Tate?” Garrett countered, scowling. “You’re a sore loser. You voted for the opposition, they lost by a landslide and now you’re raking up muck. I’m surprised at you.”
McKettricks of Texas: Tate Page 15