“We’ll talk later,” Cheyenne said practically. “You’re probably driving.”
“Thanks, Chey,” Meg answered.
When she got to Stone Creek Ranch, Brad came out of the house to greet her. He was dressed for the trail in jeans, boots, a work shirt and a medium-weight leather coat.
Meg’s breath caught at the sight of him, and she was glad of the mechanics of parking and shutting off the Blazer, because it gave her a few moments to gather her composure.
Normally, she was unflappable.
She’d handled some of the toughest negotiations during her career with McKettrickCo, without so much as a flutter of nerves, but there was something about Brad that erased all the years she’d spent developing a thick skin and a poker face.
He opened the Blazer door before she was quite ready to face him.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“I had toast and coffee at home,” Meg answered.
“That’ll never hold you till lunch,” he said. “Come on inside. I’ve got some real food on the stove.”
“Okay,” Meg said, because short of sitting stubbornly in the car, she couldn’t think of a way to avoid accepting his invitation.
The O’Ballivan house, like the ones on the Triple M, was large and rustic, and it exuded a sense of rich history. The porch wrapped around the whole front of the structure, and the back door was on the side nearest the barn. Meg followed Brad up the porch steps in front and around to another entrance.
The kitchen was big, and except for the wooden floors, which looked venerable, the room showed no trace of the old days. The countertops were granite, the cup boards gleamed, and the appliances were ultramodern, as were the furnishings.
Meg felt strangely let down by the sheer glamour of the place. All the kitchens on the Triple M had been modernized, of course, but in all cases, the original wood-burning stoves had been incorporated, and the tables all dated back to Holt, Rafe, Kade and Jeb’s time, if not Angus’s.
If Brad noticed her reaction, he didn’t mention it. He dished up an omelet for her, and poured her a cup of coffee.
“You cook?” Meg teased, washing her hands at the gleaming stainless steel sink.
“I’m a fair hand in a kitchen,” Brad replied modestly. “Dig in. I’ll go saddle the horses while you eat.”
Meg nodded, sat down and tackled the omelet.
It was delicious, and so was the coffee, but she felt uncomfortable sitting alone in that kitchen, as fancy as it was. She kept wondering what Maddie O’Ballivan would think, if she could see it, or even Brad’s mother. Surely if things had been as difficult financially as Brad had let on the night before, at Jolene’s, the renovations were fairly recent.
Having eaten as much as she could, Meg rinsed her plate, stuck it into the dish washer, along with her fork and coffee cup, and hurried to the back door. Brad was out in front of the barn, the big paint ready to ride, tightening the cinch on Cinnamon’s saddle. He picked her rolled blanket up off the ground and tied it on behind.
“Not much gear,” he said. “Do you know how cold it gets up there?”
“I’ll be fine,” Meg said.
Brad merely shook his head. His own horse was restless, and the rifle was in evidence, too, looking ominous in the worn scabbard.
“That’s quite a kitchen,” Meg said as Brad gave her a leg up onto Cinnamon’s back.
“Big John said it was a waste of money,” Brad recalled, smiling to himself as he mounted up. “That was my granddad.”
Meg knew who Big John O’Ballivan was—every body in the county did—but she didn’t point that out. If Brad wanted to talk about his family, to pass the time, that was fine with Meg. She nudged Cinnamon to keep pace with Brad’s horse as they crossed a pasture, headed for the hills beyond.
“He raised you and your sisters, didn’t he?” she asked, though she knew that, too.
“Yes,” Brad said, and the set of his jaw reminded her of the way Angus’s had looked, when he told her about his estranged brother.
Meg’s curiosity spiked, but she didn’t indulge it. “I take it Willie’s still on the mend?”
Brad’s grin was as dazzling as the coming sunrise would be. “Olivia called just before you showed up,” he said with a nod. “Willie’s going to be fine. In a week or two, I’ll bring him home.”
Remembering the way Brad had handled the dog, with such gentleness and such strength, Meg felt a pinch in the center of her heart. “You plan on staying, then?”
He tossed her a thoughtful look. “I plan on staying,” he confirmed. “I told you that, didn’t I?”
You also told me we’d get married and you’d love me forever.
“You told me,” she said.
“Would this be a good time to tell you about my second wife?”
Meg considered, then shook her head, smiling a little. “Probably not.”
“Okay,” Brad said, “then how about my sisters?”
“Good idea.” Meg had known Olivia slightly, but there was a set of twins in the family, too. She’d never met them.
“Olivia has a thing for animals, as you can see. She needs to get married and channel some of that energy into having a family of her own, but she’s got a cussed streak and runs off every man who manages to get close to her. Ashley and Melissa—the twins—are fraternal. Ashley’s pretty down-home—she runs a bed-and-break fast in Stone Creek. Melissa’s clerking in a law office in Flag staff.”
“You’re close to them?”
“Yes,” Brad said, expelling a long breath. “And, no. Olivia resents my leaving home— I can’t seem to get it through her head that we wouldn’t have had a home if I hadn’t gone to Nashville. The twins are ten years younger than I am, and seem to see me more as a visiting celebrity than their big brother.”
“When Olivia needed help,” Meg reminded him, “she came to you. So maybe she doesn’t resent you as much as you think she does.” There was something really different about Olivia O’Ballivan, Meg thought, looking back over the night before, but she couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
“I hope you’re right,” Brad said. “It’s fine to love animals—I’m real fond of them myself. But Olivia carries it to a whole new place. So much so that there’s no room in her life for much of anything—or anybody—else.”
“She’s a veterinarian, Brad,” Meg said reasonably. “It’s natural that animals are her passion.”
“To the exclusion of everything else?” Brad asked.
“She’ll be fine,” Meg said. “When Olivia meets the right man, she’ll make room for him. Just wait and see.”
Brad looked unconvinced. He raised his chin and said, “If we’re going to find that horse, we’d better move a little faster.”
Meg nodded in agreement and Cinnamon fell in behind Brad’s gelding as they started the twisting, perilous climb up the mountainside.
CHAPTER FIVE
LOOKING FOR THAT WILD STALLION was a fool’s errand, and Brad knew it. As he’d told Meg, his primary reason for undertaking the quest was to keep Olivia from doing it. Now he wondered how many times, during his long absence, his little sister had climbed this mountain alone, at all hours of the day and night, and in all seasons of the year.
The thought made him shudder.
The country above Stone Creek was as rugged as it had ever been. Wolves, coyotes and even javelinas were plentiful, as were rattlesnakes. There were deep crevices in the red earth, some of them hidden by brush, and they’d swallowed many a hapless hiker. But the worst threat was probably the weather—at that elevation, blizzards could strike literally without warning, even in July and August. It was October now, and that only in creased the danger.
Meg, shivering in her too-light coat, rode along beside him without complaint. Being a McKettrick, he thought, with a sad smile turned entirely inward, she’d freeze to death before she’d admit she was cold.
Inviting her along had been a purely selfish act, and Brad regretted it. Too many th
ings could happen, most of them bad.
They’d been traveling for an hour or so when he stopped along side a creek to rest the horses. High banks on either side sheltered them from the wind, and Meg got a chance to warm up.
Brad opened his saddle bags and brought out a long-sleeved thermal shirt, extended it to Meg. She hesitated a moment—that damnable McKettrick pride again—then took the shirt and pulled it on, right over the top of her coat.
The effect was comically unglamorous.
“Where’s a Star bucks when you need one?” she joked.
Brad grinned. “There’s an old line shack up the trail a ways,” he told her. “Big John always kept it stocked with supplies, in case a hiker got stranded and needed shelter. It’s not Star bucks, but I’ll probably be able to rustle up a pot of coffee and some lunch. If you don’t mind the survivalist packaging.”
Meg’s relief was visible, though she wouldn’t have expressed it verbally, Brad knew. “We didn’t need to bring the blankets and other gear then,” she reasoned. “If there’s a line shack, I mean.”
“You’ve been living in the five-star lane for too long,” Brad replied, but the jibe was a gentle one. “A while back, some hunters were trespassing on this land—Big John posted No Hunting signs years ago—and a snow storm came up. They were found, dead of exposure, about fifty feet from the shack.”
She shivered. “I remember,” she said, and for a moment, her blue eyes looked almost haunted. The story had been a gruesome one, and she obviously did remember—all too clearly.
“We’re not all that far from the ranch,” Brad said. “It would probably be best if I took you back.”
Meg’s gaze widened, and grew more serious. “And you’d turn right around and come back up here to look for Ransom?”
“Yes,” Brad answered, resigned.
“Alone.”
He nodded. Once, Big John would have made the journey with him. Now there was no one.
“I’m staying,” Meg said and shifted slightly, as if planting her feet. “You invited me to come along, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I shouldn’t have. If anything happened to you—”
“I’m a big girl, Brad,” she interrupted.
He looked her over, and—as always—liked what he saw. Liked it so much that his throat tightened and he had a hard time swallowing so he could hold up his end of the conversation. “You probably weigh a hundred and thirty pounds wrapped in a blanket and dunked into a lake. And despite your illustrious heritage, you’re no match for a pack of wolves, a sudden blizzard, or a chasm that reaches halfway to China.”
“If you can do it,” Meg said, “I can do it.”
Brad shoved a hand through his hair, exasperated even though he knew it was his own fault that Meg was in danger. After all, he had asked her to come along, half hoping the two of them would end up sharing a sleeping bag.
What the hell had he been thinking?
The pertinent question, he decided, was what had he been thinking with—not his brain, certainly.
“We’d better get moving again,” she told him, when he didn’t speak. Before they’d left the ranch, he’d given her a pair of binoculars on a neck strap; now she pulled them out from under the donated under shirt, her coat, and whatever was beneath that. “We have a horse to find.”
Brad nodded, cupped his hands to give her a leg up onto Cinnamon’s back. She paused for a moment, deciding, before setting her left foot in the stirrup of his palms.
“This is a tall horse,” she said, a little flushed.
“We should have named him Stilts instead of Cinnamon,” Brad allowed, amused. Meg, like the rest of her cousins, had virtually grown up on horse back, as had he and Olivia and the twins. She’d interpret even the smallest courtesy—the offer of a boost, for instance—as an affront to her riding skills.
Forty-five minutes later, Meg, using the binoculars, spotted Ransom on the crest of a rocky rise.
“There he is!” she whispered, awed. “Wait till I tell Jesse he’s real!”
After a few seconds, she lifted the binoculars off her neck by the strap and handed them across to Brad.
Brad drew in a breath, struck by the magnificence of the stallion, the defiance and barely restrained power. A moment or so passed before he thought to scan the horse for wounds. It was hard to tell, given the distance, even with binoculars, but Ransom wasn’t limping, and Brad didn’t see any blood. He could report to Olivia, in all honesty, that the object of her equine obsession was holding his own.
Before lowering the binoculars, Brad swept them across the top of that rise, and that was when he saw the two mares. He chuckled. Ransom had himself a harem, then.
He watched them a while, then gave the binoculars back to Meg, with a cheerful, “He has company.”
Meg’s face glowed. “They’re beautiful,” she whispered, as if afraid to startle the horses and send them fleeing, though they were well over a mile away, by Brad’s estimation. “And Ransom. He knows we’re here, Brad. It’s almost as if he wanted to let us see that he’s all right.”
Brad raised his coat collar against a chilly breeze and wished he’d worn his hat. He’d considered it that morning, but it had seemed like an affectation, a way of asserting that he was still a cowboy, by his own standards if not those of the McKettricks. “He knows,” he agreed finally, “but it’s more likely that he’s taunting us. Catch-me-if-you-can. That’s what he’d say if he could talk.”
Meg’s entire face was glowing. In fact, Brad figured if he could strip all those clothes off her, that glow would come right through her skin and be enough to warm him until he died of old age.
“How about that coffee?” she said, grinning.
After seeing Brad’s kitchen on Stone Creek Ranch, Meg had expected the “line shack” to be a fancy log A-frame with a Jacuzzi and internet service. It was an actual shack, though, made of weathered board. There was a lean-to on one side, to shelter the horses, but no barn, with hay stored inside. Brad gave the animals grain from a sealed metal bin, and filled two water buckets for them from a rusty old pump outside.
Meg might have gone inside and started the fire, so they could brew the promised coffee, but she was mesmerized, watching Brad. It was as though the two of them had somehow gone back in time, back to when all the earlier McKettricks and O’Ballivans were still in the prime of their lives.
Once, there had been several shacks like that one on the Triple M, far from the barns and bunk houses. Ranch hands, riding the far-flung fence lines, or just traveling overland for some reason, used to spend the night in them, take refuge there when the weather was bad. Eventually, those tiny buildings had become hazards, rather than havens, and they’d been knocked down and burned.
“Pretty decrepit,” Brad said, leading the way into the shack.
Things skittered inside, and the smell of the place was faintly musty, but Brad soon had a good fire going in the ancient potbellied stove. There was no furniture at all, but shelves, made of old wooden crates stacked on top of each other, held cups, food in airtight silver packets, cans of coffee.
The whole place was about the size of Meg’s down stairs powder room on the Triple M.
“I’d offer you a chair,” Brad said, grinning, “but obviously there aren’t any. Make yourself at home while I rinse out these cups at the pump and fill the coffeepot.”
Meg examined the plank floor, sat down cross-legged, and reveled in the warmth beginning to emanate from the wood-burning stove. The shack, inadequate as it was, offered a welcome respite from the cold wind outside. The hunters Brad had mentioned probably wouldn’t have died if they’d been able to reach it. She remembered the news story; the facts had been bitter and brutal.
Like Stone Creek Ranch, the Triple M was posted, and hunting wasn’t allowed. Still, people trespassed constantly, and Rance, Keegan and Jesse enforced the boundaries—mostly in a peaceful way. Just the winter before, though, Jesse had caught two men running deer with snowmobile
s on the high meadow above his house, and he’d scared them off with a rifle shot aimed at the sky. Later, he’d tracked the pair to a tavern in Indian Rock—strangers to the area, they’d laughed at his warning—and put both of them in the hospital. He might have killed them, in fact, if Keegan hadn’t gotten wind of the fight and come to break it up, and even with his help, it took the local marshal, Wyatt Terp, his deputy, and half the clientele in the bar to get Jesse off the second snowmobiler. He’d already pulverized the first one.
There was talk about filing assault charges against Jesse, and later it was rumored that there might be lawsuits, but nothing ever came of either. Meg, along with every body else in Indian Rock, doubted the snowmobilers would ever set foot in town again, let alone on the Triple M.
But there was always, as Keegan liked to say, a fresh supply of idiots.
Brad came in with the cups and the full coffeepot, shoving the door closed behind him with one shoulder. Again, Meg had a sense of having stepped right out of the twenty-first century and into the nineteenth.
Despite cracks between the board walls, the shack was warm.
Brad set the coffeepot on the stove, measured ground beans into it from a can, and left it to boil, cowboy-style. No basket, no filter.
Then he emptied two of the crates being used as cupboards and dragged them over in front of the stove, so he and Meg could sit on them.
Overhead, thunder rolled across the sky, loud as a freight train.
Meg stiffened. “Rain?”
“Snow,” Brad said. “I saw a few flakes drift past while I was outside. Soon as we’ve warmed up a little and fortified our selves with caffeine and some grub, we’d better make for the low-country.”
Had there been any windows, Meg would have gotten up to look out of one of them. She could open the door a crack, but the thought of being buffeted by the rising wind stopped her.
By reflex, she scram bled to extract her cell phone from her coat pocket, flipped it open.
The McKettrick Legend: Sierra's HomecomingThe McKettrick Way (Hqn) Page 29