“Is Hildie hurt?” Libby asked, sounding so worried that Tate looked up at her and felt his heart rush into his throat.
I love you, Libby, he wanted to say. Trust me with your heart, the way you trust me with your dog.
“Just tired, I think,” he said. “A little overheated, too, maybe.”
With that, Tate lifted the dog in both arms, careful to support her back, and managed to remount the gelding without dropping Hildie. The trick wasn’t quite so easy to pull off as it had been when he was a kid, forever sharing a horse’s back with one family dog or another.
Libby moved in close enough that their horses’ sides touched, and her smile lodged somewhere deep in Tate’s soul, a place beyond all reach until that day, and that woman.
“Thanks,” she said. Her blue eyes shone with light.
Tate centered himself and Hildie, scooting farther back in the saddle so she wouldn’t be jabbed by the horn and then reaching around to take hold of the reins again. “If I’d known all it would take for you to look at me like that was to ride double with your dog, Hildie and I would have been working the range together long before this.”
Libby smiled tentatively, then made a dismissive motion with one hand.
The girls waited until Libby and Tate caught up.
“Did Hildie get tired?” Ava asked.
“She’s not hurt, is she?” Audrey wanted to know.
Tate’s pride in his daughters was a swelling in his chest some of the time, a pinch in the wall of his heart or a catch in his breath—it varied. That day, it was a scalding sensation behind his eyes.
“No, Hildie’s not hurt,” he said, for Libby’s benefit, as well as the children’s. “She just needed a little help, that’s all.”
Audrey and Ava nodded sagely.
The Ruiz place—his place—was just ahead, gleaming in the curved embrace of the creek. The grass was green, and the round-topped oaks threw great patches of shade onto the ground.
Tate rode down to the creek and then right into the shallow part, making the girls shriek with delight.
Stranger bent his big head and drank, up to all four ankles in crystal-clear water, and Tate dismounted, set Hildie down gently on smooth pebbles that glittered like jewels.
Hildie shivered, gave a happy woof and drank thirstily before bounding up the creek bank like a pup, apparently refreshed and ready for adventure.
Tate slogged after the dog, pretending he was wetter than he was, and Hildie waited until he was within range to shake herself off with vigor, flinging water all over him.
Libby’s laughter, and that of his little girls, rang in the pure light of that summer morning, weaving together, ribbons of sound.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
VARIOUS CONTRACTORS’ trucks and vans encircled the former Ruiz house—painters, electricians, plumbers, drywallers and roofers plied their trades, swarming in and out. The ring of hammers and the shrill, devouring roar of power saws sliced the air, thick with summer heat.
Libby wondered how she could have failed to notice all that noise and activity. She’d been entirely transported, watching Tate ride his horse into the creek, balancing Hildie in his strong arms. Watching as he’d set the dog down in the water and grinned that one-of-a-kind patented grin of his as she drank—while, for the amusement of his small daughters, he’d pretended to be stunned and outraged when Hildie shook herself off and drenched him in the process.
The muscles on the insides of Libby’s thighs throbbed from even that short time in the saddle as she climbed down, pausing a moment on shaky legs, the balls of her feet tingling. She left the mare to graze with Tate’s horse and the two ponies.
“Looks like you’ve given up on landing a spot on the DIY Network,” Libby teased, nodding toward the house, wanting to touch Tate where sweat and creek water dampened the fabric of his shirt. Lord knows, you’ve got the looks for TV, though. I can see you with a tool belt slung low around your hips, like an Old West gunslinger’s gear, and breaking the hearts of female home-improvement enthusiasts everywhere.
Tate’s moist hair curled slightly around his ears and at the back of his neck. His smile was white, perfect and absolutely lethal, and the shadows of the leaves over their heads darkened his eyes, lightened them again.
“Yep,” he drawled, with a shrug of shoulders made strong and broad first by heredity, and then by loading and unloading bales of hay and sacks of feed, by shoveling out stalls and carrying sweet old dogs who couldn’t or wouldn’t walk another step. “I admit it. I ran a white flag up the pole and sent for reinforcements. At the rate I was going, I figured the kids and I would be moving in here next year sometime, or the year after that. I want us to be living under this roof before Audrey and Ava start school in the fall.”
“Can we go fishing, Daddy?” Ava asked, tugging at his sleeve. “Those poles you bought us are on the back porch, right?”
“Right,” Tate said. “Dig the worms first.”
The girls rushed off to do his bidding, and Ambrose and Buford followed, leaping and bounding through the grass. Hildie, bless her heart, was content to lie down in the shady grass under a nearby tree, keeping Libby in sight and staying clear of the grazing horses.
“Why?” Libby asked quietly.
“Why?” Tate echoed, eyes dancing. “Why should the kids dig worms before they go fishing?”
Libby smiled and shook her head. “Why do you want to live in this house when you have a perfectly good mega-mansion?”
Tate shoved a hand through his hair, turned to watch as his daughters knelt in the middle of the large garden plot, between rows of cabbage, an old coffee can nearby, the pair of them digging for earthworms with their bare hands.
They’d be ring-in-the-bathtub filthy when they got back to the ranch house—the way little kids should be. When he and his brothers were small, their mother used to joke about hosing them down in the yard before letting them set foot on her clean floors.
He smiled at the recollection.
The pups, never far away from the twins, day or night, sniffed curiously at the ground, tails wagging, and Ambrose lifted his leg against a cornstalk.
“My reason for wanting to live here hasn’t changed since we talked about it before,” Tate answered, at some length.
Libby tilted her head to one side. Her expression was friendly, but skeptical, too. “You claim you want to see how ‘regular’ people live,” she said. “I’m not convinced, Tate. Even if you moved into a tent, or a crate under a viaduct, you still wouldn’t be an ordinary guy. You’d be a McKettrick.”
“There’s so much pride attached to that,” Tate said, still watching his daughters and their dogs in the near distance. They were sun-splashed, and their chatter rang in the weighted air like the distant toll of country church bells. “Being a McKettrick, I mean. These days, it mostly means having money.” He turned to face Libby, and because the light changed, she couldn’t read his eyes. “Once, it meant something more, Lib. Something better.”
She waited, listening with her heart, as well as with her ears.
“When Clay McKettrick took over the original hundred acres that became this ranch,” he said huskily, “Blue River was a wide spot on a dusty cattle trail, and nobody had a clue there was oil here. Probably wouldn’t have cared much if they had known—cars being few and far between, especially four hundred miles up the backside of no place.” Tate paused, as if remembering. As if he’d been there, back in the early twentieth century. The McKettricks tended to know all about their kin, living and dead—it was just the way they were. “Clay started with the help of the woman he loved and the strength in his back. Part of the Arizona bunch—old Angus was his grandfather and Clay was the youngest of Jeb and Chloe’s brood—he could have stayed right there on the Triple M and nobody would have thought the worse of him for it. But he wanted to do something on his own, and he did, Libby. He did.”
Libby debated for a moment before moving closer to him. There were too many people around for any display o
f affection, so standing a little nearer and letting her upper arm touch his under the dappling shadows of the oak leaves overhead had to do.
“There are those who start things,” she said, quietly, “and those who carry them on. Clay founded this ranch, and generations of McKettricks kept it going, made it grow. You’re part of that, Tate—so are your brothers. How is that a bad thing?”
Tate watched the sparkling creek water, most likely pondering what she’d said, though he didn’t reply.
Libby turned her eyes toward the garden—some of it had already been tilled under, and a lot of the produce had already been removed, probably given away. Ava and Audrey were high-stepping toward them, the partially rusted coffee can in hand, no doubt with worms squirming in the bottom. Ambrose and Buford kept pace, and the old house was a beehive of activity.
“Tate?” Libby prompted gently. “What’s wrong with the other house? What do you hope to prove by moving into this one?”
He looked at her sharply, but then everything seemed to ease. His jaw and shoulders relaxed visibly. “There’s nothing wrong with the main ranch house,” he said quietly. “It has a long history. The memories are mostly happy ones. But it’s big, Libby. Even when the kids are there, well, it’s as if we were all staying in a hotel or something—on vacation all the time, and never just hanging out around home.”
Libby nodded. She did understand.
Tate went on, his eyes fond and solemn as he watched his daughters, who’d stopped to argue over which one of them was going to carry the can of worms. His mouth crooked up in a semblance of a grin as they pulled it one way and then the other.
“Maybe we’ll stay here for good,” Tate went on, “and maybe we won’t. But my daughters will at least have a sense of how normal people live.”
“Would you ever leave the ranch, Tate?” Libby asked; for her, it was a bold question. “Would you ever leave and not come back?”
He looked at her closely then. “Nope,” he said, with certainty. “I’m Texas born and bred. It’s as if this dirt and this sky and these people are in my cells, Lib. What about you?”
Libby raised her shoulders, lowered them again. Sighed. “Sometimes I wonder who I’d be, away from here.”
Tate squinted, as though to see her better, and he would surely have pursued the subject except that one of the twins let out a shrill shriek before he could say anything.
Shaking his head, Tate strode in their direction to settle the dispute over the worms.
“Hold it!” he said, holding up both hands.
Libby smiled, reminded of her dad. He’d been the peacemaker, the one who mediated little-girl arguments over whose barrette was whose, whose turn it was to bring in the newspaper or wash the dishes or weed the garden or sweep the kitchen floor.
Her dad had never raised his voice, as far back as she could remember. He’d certainly never lifted a hand to any one of them in anger, though he’d wiped away a great many tears and treated a million skinned elbows and scraped knees.
Who was Libby Remington, really?
Her father’s daughter, and Marva’s.
Julie and Paige’s big sister, and Calvin’s aunt.
Hildie’s mistress, and a friend of animals everywhere.
The owner of the Perk Up Coffee Shop, now passed on into the realm of legend.
And most certainly the naive girl Tate McKettrick had dumped for somebody else.
She was over that last part—being dumped, anyway—she’d grown safely into a woman, and if there was one thing she’d learned in the process, it was that life was rarely easy, rarely simple, and often painful.
And it was worth all of that, to be here, now, doing nothing on a sunny summer day.
Libby watched as Tate dropped to his haunches, facing his daughters, after taking the can and peering inside.
Libby couldn’t hear his words, but she saw the white flash of his grin, and knew he was working that McKettrick magic of his. She could imagine him saying what fine specimens those worms were, that he’d never seen better ones, that they were sure to catch the biggest trout in the creek.
The little girls listened with such earnest trust in their faces that Libby’s eyes smarted. With a surreptitious swipe of one hand, she wiped them away, gave a delicate sniffle.
Straightening, Tate kept the rusty worm can, caught Libby’s eye and winked, then gestured toward the house and said something more to the children. They raced around back, giggling again, the yellow dogs trotting behind them, baying like hounds on the hunt.
On his way back to where Libby stood, Tate stopped to speak with the plumber, and then the man loading a battered wooden tool chest, the old-fashioned kind, into the back of his van.
Libby knew all the men, of course, knew their wives and their children, their mothers and fathers, and in some cases, their grandparents, too. She realized, standing there, how silly it was to think she could have hidden her relationship with Tate, even briefly.
As he said, everybody knew they were “getting it on.”
He came toward her now, grinning and carrying the worm can.
As she watched him moving nearer and nearer, Libby’s heart swelled and then somersaulted in her chest, a big, slow and graceful motion, like that of some sea creature frolicking in deep waters.
Bold as you please, Tate leaned in and kissed her. It wasn’t just a peck, either. There was tongue involved.
She gasped, breathless and unsteady on her feet, when he drew back. “Trout for supper,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” Libby asked, confused.
Tate held up the worm can. “Audrey and Ava are fetching the fishing poles even as we speak,” he said. “Here’s the agenda: we catch a few trout. The guys knock off early, gather up their gear and leave. There’s a fish fry. We all stuff ourselves and I catch the horses and saddle them up again, and we all ride back to the main house. The dogs and the kids are exhausted—bound to sleep like rocks. Esperanza cleans them up and puts them to bed. I tend to the horses. Then you and I take a shower together—this time I remember to lock the bedroom door—and I make love to you until all the kinks are worked out of that perfect little body of yours.”
Libby’s knees went weak. “All the—?”
“Kinks,” Tate finished for her. “It might take some doing,” he added seriously.
She thought about it.
A sweet, hot shiver of anticipation went through her.
Then she grinned, rose onto her tiptoes and kissed the cleft in his chin. “Sounds good to me,” she said.
TATE WAS HAPPIER THAN he’d been in a long time; it almost scared him.
Needing something physical to do, at least until his emotions settled down a little, he spoke to the contractors, asked them to take the rest of the day off.
Then he unsaddled the horses, took off their bridles, too.
They’d stay close, he knew, because the grass was sweet and plentiful, the creek was nearby and the trees provided shade.
After that, Tate just allowed himself to marvel at what a lucky bastard he really was, and forget the oil shares and the money. His kids were healthy, and they were here, with him, with Libby.
Sunlight gilded his baby girls like full-body halos. Their voices, their laughter, their concern for worms and fishes, as well as dogs and horses—all those things roosted in Tate’s heart, flapped their wings and settled in to stay.
The land, the trees, the sky seemed to go on forever.
And in the center of all this magic was Libby, as sturdy and practical and down-home as a sunflower, sprung up in some unlikely place, but at the same time, as dazzling as crystals glittering on fresh snow.
She helped Audrey and Ava to bait their hooks and cast their lines into the creek—and made sure they didn’t snag each other in the process. She laughed a lot, and they liked being close to her, leaning into her sides when she wrapped an arm around each of them and squeezed.
“You know how to fish?” Audrey had marveled at the beginni
ng, obviously surprised. Her eyes glowed as she looked up at Libby, and so did Ava’s. She seemed to fascinate them.
She certainly fascinated him, though in a different way.
As simply as Libby lived, as ordinary as she seemed to think she was, there was a sense of mystery about her, of depths and heights, an interior landscape, a planet, maybe even a universe, waiting to be explored.
That was Libby.
“You bet I know how to fish,” she had beamed, answering Audrey’s question. “My dad used to take my sisters and me camping whenever he could, and if we wanted trout or bass for supper, we had to catch it.”
The afternoon progressed, slowed down with the heat. Tate and Libby wound up sitting side by side on the creek bank, their knees drawn up and their heels dug in and each of them with their arms around one of the twins, showing them when to let out the line, when to reel it in.
In the end, there was no fish fry, though.
They threw back everything they caught.
The kids wanted mac-and-cheese, anyway. The boxed kind was Tate’s culinary specialty; when he felt like swanking it up, he added wieners.
He’d give Esperanza the night off, he decided—maybe she’d like to go to the movies or visit a friend.
By the time the mosquitoes were out and drilling for blood, Audrey and Ava were finally starting to run down. Hunger made them cranky, and they began to bicker.
“Seems like they’ve had all the fun they can stand,” Tate told Libby.
She nodded, grinned up at him. Her eyes looked dreamy; the quiet afternoon had been good for her.
If Tate had his way, the night would be even better.
For a while, it looked as though that was actually going to happen.
Once the kids had stowed their fishing poles, everyone checked out the progress the contractors had made on the house. The twins’ room was coming together, and so was the bathroom they would share. The kitchen and the master bedroom both had a ways to go.
Tate decided he might get back into the home-improvement groove after all. Delegate some of his duties as foreman—not that he was real clear yet on what those duties actually were.
McKettricks of Texas: Tate Page 28