“No service,” she murmured.
“I know,” Brad said, smiling a little as he rose off the crate he’d been sitting on to add wood to the stove. Fortunately, there seemed to be an adequate supply of that. “I tried to call Olivia and let her know Ransom was still king of the hill a few minutes ago. Nothing.”
Another round of thunder rattled the roof, and out in the lean-to, the horses fussed in alarm.
“Be right back,” Brad said, heading for the door.
When he returned, he had a bedroll and Meg’s pitifully in sufficient blanket with him. And the horses were quiet.
“Just in case,” he said when Meg’s gaze landed, alarmed, on the over night gear. “It’s snowing pretty hard.”
Meg, feeling foolish for sitting on her backside while Brad had been tending to the horses and fetching their gear inside, stood to lift the lid off the coffeepot and peek inside. The water was about to boil, but it would be a few minutes before the grounds settled to the bottom and they could drink the stuff.
“Relax, Meg,” Brad said quietly. “There’s still a chance the snow will ease up before dark.”
At once tantalized and full of dread at the prospect of spending the night alone in a line shack with Brad O’Ballivan, Meg paced back and forth in front of the stove.
She knew what would happen if they stayed.
She’d known when she accepted Brad’s invitation. Known when she set out for Stone Creek Ranch before dawn.
And he probably had, too.
She shoved both hands into her hair and paced faster.
“Meg,” Brad said, sitting lei surely on his upended crate, “relax.”
“You knew,” she accused, stopping to shake a finger at him. “You knew we’d be stuck here!”
“So did you,” Brad replied, unruffled.
Meg went to the door, wrenched it open and looked out, oblivious to the cold. The snow was coming down so hard and so fast that she couldn’t see the pine trees towering less than a hundred yards from where she stood.
Attempting to travel under those conditions would be suicide.
Brad came and helped her shut the door again.
On the other side of the wall, in the lean-to, the horses made no sound.
Meg was standing too close to Brad, no question about it. But when she tried to move, she couldn’t.
They looked into each other’s eyes.
The very atmosphere zinged around them.
If Brad had kissed her then, she wouldn’t have had the will to do anything but kiss him right back, but he didn’t. “I’d better get some drinking water,” he said, turning away and reaching for a bucket. “While I can still find my way back from the pump.”
He went out.
Meg, needing something to do, pushed the coffeepot to the back of the stove so it wouldn’t boil over and then examined a few of the food packets, evidently designed for post-apocalyptic dinner parties. The expiration dates were fifty years in the future.
“Spa ghetti à la the Starship enterprise,” she muttered. There was Beef Welling ton, too, and even meat loaf. At least they wouldn’t starve.
Not right away, anyhow.
They’d starve slowly.
If they didn’t freeze to death first.
Meg tried her cell phone again.
Still no service.
It was just as well, she supposed. Cheyenne knew her approximate location. Jesse would feed her horses, and if her absence was protracted, he and Keegan and Rance were sure to come looking for her. In the meantime, though, there would be a lot of room for speculation about what might be going on up there in the high country. And Jesse wouldn’t miss a chance to tease her about it.
She was still holding the phone when Brad came in again, carrying a bucket full of water. He looked so cold that Meg almost went to put her arms around him.
Instead, she poured him a cup of hot coffee, still chewy with grounds, and handed it to him as soon as he’d set the bucket down.
“I don’t suppose there’s a generator,” she said because the shack was darkening, even though it wasn’t noon yet, and by night fall, she wouldn’t be able to see the proverbial hand in front of her face.
He favored her with a tilted grin. “Just a couple of battery-operated lamps and a few candles. We’ll want to conserve the batteries, of course.”
“Of course,” Meg said, and smiled determinedly, hoping that would distract Brad from the little quaver in her voice.
“We don’t have to make love,” Brad said, lingering by the stove and taking slow, appreciative sips from his coffee. “Just because we’re alone in a remote line shack during what may be the snow storm of the century.”
“You are not making me feel better.”
That grin again. It was saucy, but it had a wistful element. “Am I making you feel something?”
“Nothing discernible,” Meg lied. In truth, all her nerves felt super charged, and her body was remembering, against strict orders from her mind, the weight and warmth of Brad’s hands, caressing her bare skin.
“I used to be pretty good at it. Making you feel things, that is.”
“Brad,” Meg said, “don’t.”
“Okay,” he said.
Meg was relieved, but at the same time, she wished he hadn’t given up quite so easily.
“You wanted coffee,” Brad remarked. “Have some.”
Meg filled a cup for herself. Scooted her crate an inch or two farther from Brad’s and sat down.
The shadows deepened and the shack seemed to grow even smaller than it was, pressing her and Brad closer together. And then closer still.
“This,” Meg said, inspired by desperation, “would be a good time to talk about your second wife. Since we’ve been putting it off for a while.”
Brad chuckled, fished in his saddle bags, now lying on the floor at his feet, and brought out a deck of cards. “I was thinking more along the lines of gin rummy,” he said.
“What was her name again?”
“What was whose name?”
“Your second wife.”
“Oh, her.”
“Yeah, her.”
“Cynthia. Her name is Cynthia. And I don’t want to talk about her right now. Either we reminisce, or we play gin rummy, or—”
Meg squirmed. “Gin rummy,” she said decisively. “There is no reason at all to bring up the subject of sex.”
“Did I?”
“Did you what?”
“Did I bring up the subject of sex?”
“Not exactly,” Meg said, embarrassed.
Brad grinned. “We’ll get to that,” he said. “Sooner or later.”
Meg swallowed so much coffee in the next gulp that she nearly choked.
“There are somethings I’ve been wondering about,” Brad said easily, watching her over the rim of his metal coffee mug. His eyes smoldered with lazy blue heat.
Outside, the snow-thunder crashed again, but the horses didn’t react. They’d probably already settled down for the night, snug in their furry hides and their lean-to.
“I’m hungry,” Meg said, reaching for one of the food packets.
Brad went on as though she hadn’t spoken at all. “Do you still like to eat cereal with yogurt instead of milk?”
Meg swallowed. “Yes.”
“Do you still laugh in your sleep?”
“I—I suppose.”
“Do you still arch your back like a bucking horse when you climax?”
Meg’s face felt hotter than the old stove, which rocked a little with the heat inside it, crimson blazes glowing through the cracks. “What kind of question is that?”
“A personal one, I admit,” Brad said. He might have passed for a choirboy, so innocent was his expression, but his eyes gave him away. They had the old glint of easy confidence in them. He knew he could have her anyplace and anytime he wanted—he was just biding his time. “I’ll know soon enough, I guess.”
“No,” she said.
“No?” He ra
ised an eyebrow.
“No, I don’t arch my back when I—I don’t arch my back.”
“Hmm,” Brad said. “Why not?”
Because I don’t have sex, Meg almost answered, but in the last, teetering fraction of a second, she realized she didn’t want to admit that. Not to Brad, the man with all the notches on his bedpost.
“You haven’t been sleeping with anybody?” he asked.
“I didn’t say that,” Meg replied, keeping her distance, mainly because she wanted so much to take Brad’s coffee from his hand, set it aside, straddle his thighs and let him work his slow, thorough magic. Peeling away her outer garments, kissing and caressing everything he uncovered.
“Nobody who could make you arch your back?”
Meg was suffused with aching, needy misery. She’d been in fairly close proximity to Brad all morning, and managed to keep her perspective, but now they were alone in a remote shack, and he’d already begun to seduce her. Without so much as a kiss, or a touch of his hand. With Brad O’Ballivan, even gin rummy would qualify as foreplay.
“Some thing like that,” she said. It was a lame answer, and way too honest, but she’d figured if she tossed his ego a bone, the way she might have done to get past a junkyard dog, she’d get a chance to diffuse the in visible but almost palpable charge sparking between them.
“I came across one of Maddie’s diaries a few years ago,” Brad said, still stripping her with his eyes. Maddie, of course, was his ancestress—Sam O’Ballivan’s wife. “She mentioned this line shack several times. She and Sam spent a night here, once, and conceived a child.”
That statement should have quelled Meg’s passion—unlike Sam and Maddie, she and Brad weren’t married, weren’t in love. She wasn’t using any form of birth control, since there hadn’t been a man in her life for nearly a year, and intuition told her that for all Brad’s preparations, Brad hadn’t brought any condoms along.
Yet, the mention of a baby opened a gash of yearning within Meg, a great, jagged tearing so deep and so dark and so raw that she nearly doubled over with the pain of it.
“Are you all right?” Brad asked, on his feet quickly, taking her elbows in his hands, looking down into her face.
She said nothing. She couldn’t have spoken for anything, not in that precise moment.
“What?” Brad prompted, looking worried.
She couldn’t tell him that she’d wanted a baby so badly she’d made arrangements with a fertility specialist on several occasions, always losing her courage at the last moment. That she’d almost reached the point of sleeping with strangers, hoping to get pregnant.
In the end, she hadn’t been able to go through with that, either.
She’d never known her own father. Oh, she’d lacked for nothing, being a McKettrick. Nothing except the merest acquaintance with the man who’d sired her. He was so anonymous, in fact, that Eve had occasionally referred to him, not knowing Meg was listening, as “the sperm donor.”
She wanted more for her own son or daughter. Granted, the baby’s father didn’t have to be involved in their day-today life, or pay child support, or much of anything else. But he had to have a face and a name, so Meg could show her child a photograph, at some point in time, and say, “This is your daddy.”
“Meg?” Brad’s hands tightened a little on her elbows.
“Panic attack,” she managed to gasp.
He pressed her down onto one of the crates, ladled some water from the bucket he’d braved the elements to fill at the pump outside, and held it to her lips.
She sipped.
“Do you need to take a pill or something?”
Meg shook her head.
He dragged the second crate closer, and sat facing her, so their knees touched. “Since when do you get panic attacks?” he asked.
Tears stung Meg’s eyes. She rocked a little, hugging her self, and Brad steadied the ladle in her hands, raised it to her mouth again.
She sipped, more slowly this time, and Brad set it aside when she was finished.
“Meg,” he repeated. “The panic attacks?”
It only happens when I suddenly realize I want to have a certain man’s baby more than I want anything in the world. And when that certain man turns out to be you.
“It’s a freak thing,” she said. “I’ve never had one before.”
Brad raised an eyebrow—he’d always been perceptive. It was one of the qualities that made him a good song writer, for example. “I mentioned that Sam and Maddie conceived a child in this line shack, and you started hyperventilating.” He leaned forward a little, took both Meg’s hands gently in his. “I remember how much you wanted kids when we were together,” he mused. “And now your sister is having a baby.”
Meg’s heart wedged itself into her windpipe. She’d wanted a baby, all right. And she’d conceived one, with Brad, and miscarried soon after he left for Nashville. Not even her mother had known.
She nodded.
Brad stroked the side of her cheek with the backs of his fingers, offering her comfort. She’d never told him about the pregnancy—she’d been saving the news for their wedding night—but now she knew she would have no choice, if they got involved again.
“I’m not jealous of Sierra,” she said, anxious to make that clear. “I’m happy for her and Travis.”
“I know,” Brad said. He drew her from her crate onto his lap; she straddled his thighs. But beyond that, the gesture wasn’t sexual. He simply held her, one hand gently pressing her head to his shoulder.
After a little deep breathing, in order to calm herself, Meg straightened and gazed into Brad’s face.
“Suppose we had sex,” she said softly. Tentatively. “And I conceived a child. How would you react?”
“Well,” Brad said after pondering the idea with an expression of wistful amusement on his face, “I guess that would depend on a couple of things.” He kissed her neck, lightly. Nibbled briefly at her earlobe.
A hot shudder went through Meg. “Like what?”
“Like whether we were going to raise the baby together or not,” Brad replied, still nibbling. When Meg stiffened slightly, he drew back to look into her face again. “What?”
“I was sort of thinking I could just be a single mother,” Meg said.
She was off Brad’s thighs and plunked down on her crate again so quickly that it almost took her breath away.
“And my part would be what?” he demanded. “Keep my distance? Go on about my business? What, Meg?”
“You have your career—”
“I don’t have my career. That part of my life is over. I’ve told you that.”
“You’re young, Brad. You’re very talented. It’s inevitable that you’ll want to sing again.”
“I don’t have to be in a concert hall or a recording studio to sing,” he said tersely. “I mean to live on Stone Creek Ranch for good, and any child of mine is going to grow up there.”
Meg stood her ground. After all, she was a McKettrick. “Any child of mine is going to grow up on the Triple M.”
“Then I guess we’d better not make a baby,” Brad replied. He got up off the crate, went to the stove and refilled his coffee cup.
“Look,” Meg said more gently, “we can just let the subject drop. I’m sorry I brought it up at all—I just got a little emotional there for a moment and—”
Brad didn’t answer.
They were stuck in a cabin together, at least over night, and maybe longer. They had to get along, or they’d both go crazy.
She retrieved the pack of cards from the floor, where Brad had set them earlier. “Bet I can take you, O’Ballivan,” she said, waggling the box from side to side. “Gin rummy, five-card stud, go fish—name your poison.”
He laughed, and the tension was broken—the overt kind, anyway. There was an under ground river of the stuff, coursing silently beneath their feet. “Go fish?”
“Lately, I’ve played a lot of cards—with my nephew, Liam. That’s his favorite.”
>
Brad chose rummy. Set a third crate between them for a table top. “You think you can take me, huh?” he challenged. And the look in his eyes, as he dealt the first hand, said he planned on doing the taking—and the cards didn’t have a thing to do with it.
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS A WONDER TO BRAD that he could sit there in the middle of that line shack, playing gin rummy with Meg McKettrick, when practically all he’d thought about since coming home to Stone Creek was bedding down with her. She’d practically invited him to father her baby, too.
Whatever his reservations might be where her insistence on raising the child alone was concerned, and on the Triple M to boot, he sure wouldn’t have minded the process of conceiving it.
So why wasn’t he on top of her at that very moment?
He studied his cards solemnly—Meg was going to win this hand, as she had the last half dozen—and pondered the situation. The wind howled around the shack like a million shrieking banshees determined to drive them both out into the freezing cold, making the walls shake. And the light was going, too, even though it wasn’t noon yet.
“Play,” Meg said impatiently, a spark of mischievous triumph—and something else—dancing in her eyes.
“If I didn’t know better,” Brad said ruefully, “I’d think you’d stacked the deck. You’re going to lay down all your cards and set me again, aren’t you?”
She grinned, looking at him coyly over the fan of cards. Even batting her eye lashes. “There’s only one way to find out,” she teased.
A cowboy’s geisha, Brad thought. Later, when he was alone at the ranch, he’d tinker around with the idea, maybe make a song out of it. He might have retired from recording and life on the road, but he knew he’d always make music.
Resigned, he drew a card from the stack, couldn’t use it, and tossed it away.
Meg’s whole being seemed to twinkle as she took his discard, incorporated it into a grand-slam of a run and went out with a flourish, spreading the cards across the top of the crate.
“McKettrick luck,” she said, beaming.
On impulse, Brad put down his cards, leaned across the crate between them and kissed Meg lightly on the mouth. She tensed at first, then responded, giving a little groan when he used his tongue.
The McKettrick Legend: Sierra's HomecomingThe McKettrick Way (Hqn) Page 30