McKettricks of Texas: Tate

by Linda Lael Miller

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Tate said.

  “Tate, no, I—I’m fine, really.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “But—”

  He hung up.

  Slowly, Libby closed Paige’s phone.

  She hadn’t expected Tate to drop everything and come to her—had she? If not, why had she called him in the first place, going to the trouble to borrow a phone and ask Brent Brogan for the number?

  Damn. She didn’t want to wind up like Marva, needy and manipulative.

  Doing numbers on people.

  Her eyes stung.

  The automatic doors swung open, and one of the nurses stepped out, looked around. Seeing Libby, the woman smiled.

  She was fortyish, and Libby remembered her vaguely from the Perk Up. Yes. Double mocha with extra espresso and chocolate shavings.

  “Your mother would like to see you,” she said. “And maybe a doctor should have a look at those scratches on your hands.”

  Libby nodded, then shook her head. “I’m okay,” she said. “I just need to wash up.” Dropping Paige’s phone into her purse, she followed the nurse into the clinic, through the lobby and back to one of the exam rooms.

  Going straight to the sink, Libby washed her hands, saw that the scratches weren’t deep.

  Marva was alone, lying on a gurney. She wore a hospital gown, and a plain white blanket covered her legs.

  She was so still that, for one terrible moment, Libby thought her mother was dead.

  “Marva?”

  Marva turned her head, smiled. Stretched out a hand to Libby.

  “I don’t know what came over me,” Marva confided, her voice croaky and miserable. “Suddenly, I just had to drive again, and there was Julie’s car—”

  “Shh,” Libby said. “We can talk about it later, when we’re sure you’re all right.”

  Tears filled Marva’s eyes, rolled over her temples into her mussed-up hair. “I’m sorry, Libby,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Libby just stood there, with no idea how to respond, willing herself not to cry.

  Marva gazed up at her, squeezed her hand once, and let go.

  There was, it seemed, nothing more to say.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  TATE MUST HAVE HAD the pedal to the metal all the way in from the ranch, because he was waiting in the lobby when Libby left Marva’s exam room. Just seeing him was like a deep draught of cold well water after a long spell of thirst.

  Libby walked into his arms. He embraced her loosely, and she rested her forehead against the hard wall of his chest.

  “She’s sorry,” Libby told him, her voice muffled. “My mother is sorry.”

  Tate rocked her slightly, from side to side. “It’s okay, Lib,” he murmured. “Everything will be okay.”

  Why did people keep saying that? Everything would be okay for Paige, with her top-notch nursing skills and high-paying job. Everything would be okay for Julie, too, because she had Calvin and a career she loved. And everything would certainly be okay for Tate and all the other McKettricks, if only because they were McKettricks.

  Libby loved her sisters and was proud of their accomplishments.

  But she was tired of false reassurances.

  Her shop was gone.

  She had virtually no savings.

  And jobs weren’t exactly plentiful in Blue River.

  There had been lower points in her life, of course—when Marva left, so long ago, when her dad died, when, with no warning at all, she’d lost Tate.

  The pain of that most recent and totally unexpected loss seared through her, as fresh as if it had just happened. Libby knotted her fists and pushed pack from Tate.

  He paled slightly, under his rancher’s tan. “I drove by the shop on my way here,” he told her, his voice gravelly. “Libby, I can help—”

  “Stop,” Libby said. Realizing her hands were still bunched against Tate’s chest—she could feel the strong, steady thud-thud-thud of his heart—she splayed her fingers for a moment, drawing in the substance of him like a breath of the soul. And then she let both hands fall to her sides. “Don’t say what I think you’re about to say, Tate. I can’t take money from you.”

  Julie and Paige had returned, along with Calvin; Libby was aware of them, on the periphery of the haze that seemed to surround her and Tate.

  “Libby,” he said. “Listen to me. Please.”

  She shook her head. Stepped back a little farther.

  Both Paige and Julie had worked their way through college with the aid of scholarships and loans. They’d made something of themselves.

  Paige saved lives.

  Julie shaped young minds.

  What had she done? Started a doomed coffee shop—one that had barely brought in survival wages even in the best of times—right there in the old hometown.

  She’d loved one man her whole life—Tate McKettrick—and he’d betrayed her. While she’d forgiven Tate, she knew she’d never forgive herself if the same thing happened all over again.

  Tate’s hands still rested lightly on her shoulders.

  He couldn’t have known what she was thinking—that maybe it was time for her to leave Blue River, leave Texas. Go someplace entirely new, where she might be able to get some perspective. Come up with some goals.

  No, he couldn’t have known, but he looked as though he did.

  The truth? Libby Remington had had only one goal, one dream, ever, and it was hopelessly old-fashioned. Politically incorrect to the nth degree.

  All Libby had ever wanted was to marry Tate, love him and be loved in return, to bear and raise his children. To get old with him, and have flocks of grandbabies.

  It would all be easier, she supposed, if Tate weren’t rich—if he really were just a foreman on a big ranch, a hired hand with a steady paycheck, a simple three-bedroom house beside a creek and a good truck to drive. Instead, he was a multi-multi-millionaire, with his choice of beautiful women—supermodels, movie stars and professional women of all sorts. Doctors. Lawyers. Indian chiefs.

  What did he want with her?

  Sex?

  Their lovemaking had been transcendental for Libby, but Tate was a man—to him, sex was sex. He probably took it where he could get it—and God knew, she had no compunction about giving it to him.

  “Is Marva all right?” Julie asked, hovering a few feet away and wringing her hands.

  Libby saw herself and Tate through Julie’s eyes, standing almost toe-to-toe, as though he’d been comforting her in the aftermath of bad news.

  “We haven’t heard anything yet, Jules,” Libby said, hugging her sister.

  Julie hugged her back, sniffled.

  Libby’s eyes roamed, stopped on her nephew. Calvin was on the other side of the lobby, admiring the colorful fish in the clinic’s fish tank. Paige stood beside the little boy, but she was watching her sisters and Tate, not the bright, flashing population of the large saltwater tank.

  “Look, Aunt Paige,” Calvin crowed, pointing a chubby finger at one of the fish and almost certainly leaving a smudge on the glass. “That one is transparent—I can see his guts!” He bent closer, and even though his back was to Libby, she knew when he adjusted his glasses. “And that one has a red line inside it, like a thermometer.”

  The mood lightened a little.

  Julie stepped back out of Libby’s embrace, and her gaze moved between Libby and Tate. She smiled slightly, turned and joined Calvin next to the fish tank.

  Paige approached Libby. “May I have my cell phone back, please?” she asked. “It might be a long night, and I think the time has come to order pizza.”

  “Pizza!” Calvin whooped, overjoyed.

  In spite of the stress and frustration and a host of other emotions, Libby laughed. She dug through her purse, found Paige’s phone and handed it to her sister.

  “Just tell me what kind of pizza you want,” Tate said. “I’ll go pick it up.”

  Calvin materialized immediately. It was almost
as if he’d teleported himself from the fish tank across the lobby to where they stood. “Are you going to the Pizza Shack, Mr. McKettrick? Can I go with you? Where are your kids? Do you have any boys, or just girls?”

  Tate crouched, so he could look Calvin straight in the eye. “Your mom and your aunts are kind of worried right now,” he said seriously. “I think they need a man around, so maybe you ought to stay here.”

  Calvin’s glasses had wriggled down his freckled nose, and he replaced them with the usual thrust of his right index finger. He threw his shoulders back a little, and raised his chin. “They’re all pretty good at taking care of themselves,” he told Tate. “And you didn’t answer my other questions.”

  Tate’s mouth quirked up at one corner. “My daughters—Audrey and Ava—are at home. And, no, I don’t have any boys.” As he stood up again, he caught Libby’s gaze. “Yet,” he added quietly.

  She felt the usual achy heat, and rose above it as best she could.

  The man was an addiction, and she was thoroughly hooked.

  Ready to leave town to get away from him one moment, charmed out of her socks the next.

  As if getting charmed out of her socks was any part of the problem.

  “I have the regulation car seats in my truck,” Tate told Julie. “And we wouldn’t be gone long.”

  “Please, Mom,” Calvin pleaded. “I need a male role model. I spend way too much time around women. Mrs. Oakland said so.”

  Julie flushed to her ears. “Mrs. Oakland said that, did she?”

  “Maybe it was Justin’s mom,” Calvin faltered.

  “You’re sure he wouldn’t be any trouble?” Julie asked Tate.

  “I’m sure,” Tate said. This time, he didn’t look at Libby. She might have vaporized, for all the notice he seemed to take of her.

  “I’ll call in the order,” Paige put in, cell phone in hand. “The usual?” she asked her sisters.

  Libby merely nodded, wanting Tate McKettrick out of her space so she could think straight, but Julie, the thoughtful one, had the good manners to ask if he’d prefer something other than thick-crust Hawaiian with extra cheese.

  He said he’d already eaten.

  “Do I get to go or not, Mom?” Calvin demanded.

  “Go,” Julie relented, and though she was smiling, Libby glimpsed pain in her sister’s eyes.

  Calvin let out a yippee that made the receptionist look up from her desk behind the glass window and smile.

  The little boy fairly skipped out of the clinic, but he stayed close to Tate, as if to prove to anyone concerned that he meant to behave himself and follow all the rules.

  Paige finished placing the pizza order, closed her phone, and dropped it into her purse. “You really ought to grab that one,” she said, nodding in Tate’s direction and simultaneously elbowing Libby lightly in the ribs. “He’s obviously a good father.”

  Before Libby had to reply, Dr. Burt Renton appeared, a weary smile creasing his familiar face. The physician, a widower with no children, had been born and raised in Blue River, and returned home as soon as his training was finished to open an office on Main Street. After thirty years in practice, he’d tried to retire, but all that idleness, as he called it, “wasn’t good for my character.” He’d been working part time at the clinic since it had opened for business nearly a decade before.

  Julie, Paige and Libby all hurried toward him, stood in a tight little semicircle at the edge of his personal space, waiting.

  “I ran a CT scan, the usual blood tests and took x-rays,” Dr. Burt told them kindly. “Your mother is shaken up, but with a few days of rest and some pampering, she’ll be fine. “

  Libby backed up a step. Maybe it was the word pampering.

  Julie and Paige looked at her curiously.

  Julie was the first to get the message. Her face softened, and Libby could have hugged her for the understanding in her eyes.

  “Marva can stay with Calvin and me,” Julie volunteered.

  Guilt nudged Libby back into the half circle of sisters. She was the firstborn, and, as such, she had certain responsibilities. Marva was, for all her shortcomings, her mother, too.

  She opened her mouth to say she’d look after Marva for as long as necessary, but the words wouldn’t come out.

  “I’d like Marva to stay here overnight,” Dr. Burt was saying, “just to be on the safe side. That way, the nurses can keep an eye on her.”

  “Tell them to hide their car keys,” Paige quipped, but she was watching Libby, still curious, maybe even a little worried.

  Dr. Burt chuckled at that, but his eyes were solemn. “She feels very bad about that. Says she doesn’t know what came over her.”

  In her mind, Libby saw her mother’s tear-filled eyes again, heard her voice.

  I’m so sorry.

  “No one was hurt,” Julie said. “That’s the important thing.”

  “You can look in on Marva if you’d like. She’s been sedated, though, so she’ll probably drift off to sleep pretty soon.” Dr. Burt pointed toward the corridor on the right, where the two large in-patient rooms were. “She has Unit B all to herself.”

  Julie and Paige started for the corridor immediately.

  Libby remained where she was.

  “I saw her earlier,” she said when Dr. Burt glanced at her.

  A few minutes later, Tate and Calvin returned with several huge pizza boxes and, with Libby’s help, arranged the feast on the low-slung coffee table in the small waiting room. Calvin had scored a stack of paper napkins six inches high.

  The child’s face was luminous with delight. “Tate said we could get cold drinks out of the vending machine here,” he said importantly. “And I get to ride horses on the Silver Spur whenever I want and go fishing in the creek as long as my mom approves and there’s at least one grown-up with me.”

  “Wow,” Libby said softly, ruffling her nephew’s sweaty hair.

  Over the pile of pizza boxes, her gaze connected with Tate’s.

  “That’s a lot of food,” she said.

  Calvin jumped right in with an answer. “Tate said the people who work here might want to eat, too,” he said, before helping himself to a slice, breaking off a long strand of cheese with a karate chop.

  Tate grinned, watching him.

  “Tate used to have a dog named Crockett,” Calvin went on, with his mouth partially full. “Crockett rode with him everywhere—they were buddies.”

  Libby’s throat tightened. “Crockett was a good dog,” she said, remembering.

  She heard Julie and Paige approaching the waiting room, talking in low, hurried voices.

  Tate didn’t look at Libby; his gaze had turned toward the doorway, and he stood as her sisters entered.

  “I thought I smelled pizza!” Julie said, leaning down to give her son a quick squeeze.

  “Do you think Grandma would like some?” Calvin asked. His face was smeared with tomato sauce by then, and what was probably a piece of pineapple had gotten stuck in his hair.

  “She’s asleep,” Paige told her nephew brightly.

  Julie and Paige used a bottle of hand sanitizer from Julie’s purse, helped themselves to napkins and pizza, and began to eat.

  Tate didn’t touch the food, and neither did Libby, until Paige finally plopped a slice onto a napkin and forced it into her hands.

  Tate got up and left the room to let the staff know there was pizza aplenty and they were welcome to join the party. The invitation brought a fairly steady stream of hungry people in scrubs, but Tate didn’t come back.

  Having eaten all she could get down—a little less than half of the portion Paige had given her—Libby excused herself and left the waiting room.

  She could see Tate through the plate glass door at the front of the clinic, talking on his cell phone. His expression was serious, he was pacing and he kept thrusting a hand through his hair.

  Libby hurried away, headed for the restroom, not wanting him to see her and think she’d been looking for him. Ev
en though that was exactly what she’d been doing.

  Once she’d washed her hands, stinging mildly now, from the scratches she’d gotten digging Marva out, splashed her face with cold water and grinned humorlessly into the mirror, to make sure there was no pizza detritus stuck between her teeth, she straightened her spine and marched back to the lobby.

  Now that Marva had been examined and was resting comfortably, according to Dr. Burt, there was no point in sticking around. She’d go home, attend to the ever-patient Hildie, and then she’d switch on the TV set and stare mindlessly at the screen until she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore.

  She could start thinking about the rest of her life tomorrow—or the day after that.

  Or she could just pack a bag, gas up the Impala, load Hildie and her kibble and bowls into the back seat and strike out for parts unknown.

  Yes, sir, she could go out there and accomplish something.

  What that something would be, she had no idea.

  Which was why she didn’t want to think just yet.

  “I guess I’ll go on home now,” she announced to her sisters and nephew and a couple of x-ray technicians, from the doorway of the waiting room. “Hildie will be waiting for me.”

  “Sure,” Julie said uncertainly, leaning a little, to look past Libby. “Did Tate leave? I didn’t get a chance to repay him for the pizza, or even say thank you.”

  Libby shrugged one shoulder. “He was outside a little while ago,” she answered as casually as she could. “Talking to someone on his cell phone. Maybe something came up out at the ranch.”

  “Marva will be at our place after she’s released,” Julie told Libby. “In case you want to stop by and see her or anything.”

  Libby merely nodded, promising nothing.

  She wanted to get away from the clinic.

  She wanted this day to be over.

  She waved a farewell to her family and the x-ray guys, turned and ran directly into Tate.

  He steadied her by gripping her upper arms. If he hadn’t, she would have fallen.

  Libby pulled free, went around him.

  He followed her through the automatic door and outside without speaking, or touching her.

  It was dark and sultry, and the sky was splattered from horizon to horizon with enormous stars. Like the sunset earlier, the sight made Libby’s breath catch.