“Hop in,” Meggie said.
Lev joined his shirt in the back of the pickup. Sonny shifted into gear, but he didn’t get ten feet before a horn honked, loud and long, behind them at the pasture gate. Sonny put on the brakes. Meggie leaned farther out her window and looked back.
It was one of the Bravo pickups. That big old GMC that Nate’s grandfather Ross used to favor in the final years before he died. Meggie squinted, trying to see through the glare on the windshield to whoever was behind the wheel. But she couldn’t make out-the face.
She swung open her door. “I’ll be right back.” She sprinted toward the GMC. At the gate, she paused to slip the latch and slide through. As soon as she got past the glaring windshield and looked in the open window of the driver’s door, she saw the man behind the wheel.
Her poor heart started thundering so loud she felt sure all of Johnson County could hear it.
She froze a few feet from the door and put her hand to her throat. “What?” she asked. The word sounded as numb and dazed as she felt.
Nate hung an elbow out the driver’s door, looking perfectly casual, as if he drove out to her ranch in his granddaddy’s old pickup every day of the week. “Your cousin’s wife said I might find you here.”
She gaped at him. She had absolutely no idea what to say. Stalling, trying to get her wits back about her, she took off her hat, fiddled with the brim for a moment, then put it back on.
Nate looked past her “Who’s that?” He nodded at the pickup that still waited for her in the pasture beyond the gate.
She looked where he nodded. “Who?”
“That fool with his shirt off.” He sounded angry.
“That’s Lev. Lev Jarvis. He hired on to help out for a while.”
“Doing what?” His tone was nasty.
Meggie saw no point at all in replying to that, so she didn’t.
“Get in,” he said.
“Why?”
“We have to talk.”
She looked toward the other pickup again. “Now?”
“Now.”
Meggie considered. It wasn’t exactly the perfect time for a talk. Evening would have been better, after the day’s work was through. But hope had lit a fire inside her again. Why else would he show up here, but to tell her that he had changed his mind about her request?
She’d go insane waiting till evening to hear what he had to say.
“Well?”
“Wait here.” She turned and slid back through the gate.
“What’s going on?” Sonny asked when she reached the driver’s side of the cab.
“It’s Nate Bravo.” She knew she sounded breathless, but that was no big deal. After all, she had been running.
Sonny, who was tall, thin, sandy haired and pretty much like a brother to her, frowned at her through his open window. “Nate Bravo? What the hell’s he doing here?”
Guilt poked at her. Meggie had yet to say a word to Sonny about the will. As far as he knew, he and Farrah and their two kids had a place to live and work for as long as they wanted it. She’d already lied to him outright about the situation once, when she’d told him she had to go down to Cheyenne to see about a certain Black Angus bull—when in reality, she’d booked a flight to L.A. She hated to lie, but she wanted to have some kind of solution to the problem before she told him about it.
And just maybe, today, Nate would give her a solution.
“Meggie, what’s Nate Bravo doing here?” Sonny asked again.
She avoided the question. “I want to talk to him for a while. You and Lev go on over to the pond without me, okay?”
“You’re going off with Nate Bravo?” Sonny sounded thoroughly disapproving. Nate had always had a bad reputation. Apparently even Sonny, who had only lived in the area for the past few years, had heard the rumors about him, about how wild he’d been while growing up, and how he’d always sworn he would never settle down.
“Like I said, I need to talk to him. And I’m not sure how long it’s going to take. I’ll just have to catch up with you.”
Sonny was quiet for a moment, then he asked, “Is something going on that I should know about?”
Meggie forced a confident smile. “No. It’s nothing.” Guilt nudged her again. It was a lot more than nothing. But she certainly couldn’t be expected to explain it all now.
Sonny studied her face for a long moment before he nodded. “We’ll check the Deerling pasture after we’re through here.” He referred to the next pasture north. They called it the Deerling pasture because Meggie’s father had bought it from the Deerlings when old man Deerling died and his family had to sell it to pay the inheritance taxes. The Deerlings had sold out altogether not long after that and moved to Oregon. But they still had a pasture in Wyoming named after them.
“Go on.” Meggie slapped the door of the pickup. Sonny saluted her and shifted into gear again. She stood, watching, until the pickup crested the rise and disappeared on the other side.
Then she turned and ran back to where Nate waited for her.
Nate drove too fast. They bounced over the rutted dirt road as if one of the bad guys he chased for a living had turned the tables and come after him for a change. Meggie held on to the “chicken” handle over the door and didn’t say a word. Finally, he jerked the wheel to the side and pulled off into a patch of sage and buffalo grass. He switched off the engine and draped an arm over the top of the steering wheel.
He stared out the windshield at the rolling prairie that went on forever up ahead. “Have you made your offer to any other men?”
She looked straight ahead, too. “No.”
Actually, she had tried to make herself ask Barnaby Cotes. She’d run into him in town last week, and said yes when he invited her to dinner. But an evening with him had reminded her too thoroughly of all the ways he wasn’t Nate. And somehow, though she knew she must find a husband, she just hadn’t quite managed to make herself propose to Barnaby.
“What about Barnaby Cotes?” Nate demanded.
She blinked and looked at him, wondering if he had read her mind. “Who told you I went out with Barnaby?”
He still didn’t look at her, but the side of his mouth twisted with irony. “I’m a detective, remember?”
She figured it out. “You called Edna.”
He grunted, still looking out the window. “Yeah. I called Edna.” He fisted his hand and tapped it on the steering wheel. “So. Did you tell Cotes? About the will? About what you need?”
“No, I did not.”
She kept looking at his profile, at his hawklike nose and his high cheekbones, at his straight black hair that he always left just long enough to make him look disreputable. His mother, Sharilyn Tickberry Bravo, was part Lakota Sioux. And the mark of his ancestors was strong in Nate’s face—on both sides. He had cheekbones like knife blades, a nose fit for a tribal chief and the Bravo mouth, which was a little bit full for a man. A mouth that looked like it was made to kiss a woman.
“Who knows about this, Meggie?” Nate demanded.
She kept her head high. “You, me and G. Vernon Bannister.”
“Who’s G. Vernon Bannister?”
“The lawyer who handled my father’s will.”
“No one else?”
“Why does it matter?”
He continued to stare out the bug-spattered windshield. Then at last he said, “I guess it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to know, that’s all.”
“Well, G. Vernon Bannister told me. And I told you. And that’s as far as it’s gone.”
“Fine.”
“And now it’s my turn to ask a question.”
“Ask.”
“Why are you here?”
He turned to look at her then. His dark eyes were hard and fathoms deep. “I changed my mind. I’ll marry you.”
Chapter Three
Meggie found she couldn’t speak.
But it didn’t matter, because Nate had more to say. “If the offer’s still open, I’ll accept your p
roposition pretty much as you laid it out a week ago—with a couple of conditions.”
She managed to croak, “Name them.”
He did. “You agree from the first that if I do give you the child you need, I’ll always be free to see him. He’ll also be allowed to come stay with me whenever I can make decent arrangements for his care.”
Meggie saw nothing wrong with that. “Agreed.”
He added, “And I won’t take any money from you, period.”
She couldn’t go along with that. It just didn’t seem fair. Even though he’d never said the words, she knew in her heart that Nate cared for her in his own independent way. He understood how much the Double-K meant to her. And in the end, he was coming through to help her keep it. She wanted to pay him back for that, somehow.
“Nate, really. It’s silly for you to be so stubborn about—”
“No money.”
“But you should be getting something out of—”
He glared at her. “No money.”
It was hot in the cab of that pickup. Meggie took off her hat and armed sweat from her forehead. “I’m not exactly in a position to argue with you.” She tossed her hat on the seat between them. “So you just go right ahead and cheat yourself.” Freed of the hat, her hair started falling down.
A hint of a grin came and went on Nate’s mouth. “Thanks. I will.”
Meggie twisted her hair tight again and anchored it more securely at the back of her head. She smoothed the last stray hairs into place.
She felt guilty, to be giving in on this issue. But the hard truth was, she needed that money. If everything went as she prayed it would, she’d have some hefty inheritance taxes to pay in two years. She didn’t want to end up like the Deerlings, with someone else’s pasture named after her. She wanted to keep her ranch. Now, with Nate’s help, she just might manage that.
“Okay, then. That’s settled,” she said. “You get no money.”
“Good enough.” He was grinning again.
She couldn’t help grinning right back. “So. Have I met all your terms?”
“You sure have.”
They stared at each other, across the seat of the cab. Only her hat lay between them. She could have moved it. Or they could have leaned across it, to share the kiss that would seal this strange marriage bargain. But they didn’t.
As Meggie gazed into those dark eyes, a memory came to her. Of the first time she ever saw him, the summer they were both fourteen—the summer Nate’s grandfather had brought him to live at the Rising Sun.
Nate had been nothing but trouble to his grandpa that first year. And the day Meggie met him was no exception. He’d stolen a Rising Sun pickup that day, a pickup not much different from the one he and Meggie sat in now. And he’d gone joyriding on the rutted dirt roads that crisscrossed his grandpa’s ranch.
Probably without even realizing it, he’d crossed over onto Double-K land. The muffler of the pickup must have been scraping the road ruts, setting off sparks. The sparks found dry grass.
Meggie had been lying just over a rise, next to Crystal Creek, naked, after a refreshing swim. Her favorite horse, a sorrel gelding she’d named Renegade, nipped the grass nearby. Renegade had lifted his head and sniffed the air. And then he’d let out a long, nervous whinny. Meggie looked up and saw the smoke—just a tiny trail of it. But on the prairie, a tiny wisp of smoke could become an inferno in no time at all.
She yanked on her underpants, her boots and her shirt, jumped into the saddle and took off. Over the rise, she rode up on a black-haired boy. He’d just managed to beat out the flames with an old blanket he must have found in the truck.
He looked up at her, his face smudged and his eyes wild—and then he burst out laughing. “You’re damn near naked!” he crowed.
She called him a fool. An idiot. A jerk. And then she started laughing, too. It was good, to laugh like that with someone. She and her father lived alone at the ranch, except for the hired hands that came and went. Jason Kane wasn’t much of a talker, so Meggie sometimes found herself tongue-tied in company.
But she didn’t feel tongue-tied with this boy. She sensed a kinship with him. She just knew that here was a friend. And she suspected that he knew it, too.
“Wait here,” she told him when the laughter finally faded. “I’ll go put my clothes on.”
When she returned, he was still there. She gave him a hand up and he rode behind her, back to the creek again. He slid down from Renegade and knelt at the bank to wash the soot from his face and to drink long and deep. She dismounted, too, and joined him. They ended up splashing each other, laughing some more.
And then, for at least an hour, they sat there, on the bank, in the shade of the cottonwoods, with the cottonwood fluff like fairy dust blowing in the incessant wind.
He told her who he was. And that his dad had died a few months before—of blood poisoning from not bothering to get himself a tetanus shot after some tough character had bitten him in a bar fight. Once they put his dad in the ground, Nate’s mom had dumped him on his grandfather. Nate said he hated his grandfather, who was always looking at him sideways and shaking his head. Nate just knew that Ross Bravo wondered why he’d let someone like Nate come and live at his precious ranch. Nate also hated Edna Heller, who had decided to civilize him. And he couldn’t stand his cousin Cash, who was perfect. And he despised his cousin Zach, who did everything right.
Meggie listened and nodded. She’d seen in Nate’s eyes that he didn’t really hate the Bravos and Edna. In time, he would realize he was one of them, too. And then things would be all right for him at the Rising Sun.
When they parted, Nate promised to meet her for a swim the next day. But he didn’t show up. Ross grounded him, for stealing the pickup. Meggie didn’t see him for weeks. But it didn’t matter. They were friends.
Their friendship lasted for two years. Until they both started to grow up. Nate’s shoulders broadened and he put on muscle. Meggie began to fill out, too. And boys started looking at her the way men looked at women. But Meggie had no interest in just any boy. Her eyes turned to Nate, and she saw more than a friend. At the same time, Nate started dating the girls a guy only went out with for one reason—and avoiding Meggie whenever they met, as if he didn’t even know her anymore.
Meggie always thought of that period as the first time he broke her heart. The second time occurred a few years later, on that Fourth of July night, when she’d finally worked up the courage to tell him of her love—and he had scorned her.
Now, in the sweltering cab of Ross Bravo’s old pickup, Meggie couldn’t help wondering if she had just set herself up for heartbreak number three.
Nate began laying out alternatives for the wedding. “We could fly to Reno right away, I guess. Or I suppose we could go into the clinic in town tomorrow, get the blood tests and then get married at the county courthouse as soon as the results come in.”
All at once, another problem occurred to her. A very delicate problem. One she’d promised herself she would face when she came to it. “Nate?”
“Yeah?”
“Um, there’s something more I think we really should consider.”
“What?”
“What if one of us...can’t have children?”
He let out a long breath, then he picked up her hat from between them on the seat. He smoothed dual creases in the crown. “I have a suggestion.”
“I’m listening.”
“There’s only so much you can do here. And then you just have to let nature take its course.” He held out her hat
She took it, put it on her head. “You’re right. I know. But...”
“But what?” He sounded grim.
“Well, I think we should be realistic here. I need a baby. And I want to be as sure as I can be, going into this, that it’s going to work.”
“Get to the point Meggie.”
“The point is...”
He stared at her, one of those hard, dark, unreadable stares of his.
She made herself say it. “Um, would you be willing to take a few tests?”
For a moment, he went on staring at her. Then he swore crudely under his breath. “You don’t ask much, do you, Meggie May?”
She turned her body toward him, hoisted a leg up on the seat and rested her hand on the ankle of her boot. “Let’s be frank, okay?”
He squinted at her disbelievingly. Then, with a snort, he shoved open his door, braced it with a boot and muttered, “It’s hotter than the south end of hell in here.”
Wisely, she refrained from pointing out that he was the one who had chosen the cab of a truck in the middle of the prairie at midday in July to have this conversation. “Nate. Is there any possibility at all that you might want to... stay married to me, after this is all over and done?”
He was staring out the windshield again. Slowly, he faced her. “None.”
She told herself that didn’t hurt. “Okay. Then there’s really no sense in putting ourselves through this if I’m infertile or you can’t...father a child. Please. We’re better off knowing where we stand.”
He shook his head. “A few tests. You want me to take a few tests....”
Two days later, they drove to Billings together in Nate’s rental car. Meggie had arranged appointments for them at a fertility clinic there. They sat in the waiting room for an hour, filling out forms.
Then they went in for an interview with the doctor.
Meggie explained their situation. They’d come to the clinic for a little assurance—in advance. They wanted to get married, but having children was a high priority for both of them. If there were any barriers to conception, Meggie hoped the doctor might discover them. “So we’ll know where we stand on this right from the first,” she said.
Marriage By Necessity Page 3