The McKettrick Legend: Sierra's HomecomingThe McKettrick Way (Hqn)

by Linda Lael Miller

  Her arms slipped around his shoulders.

  He wanted with everything in him to shove cards and crate aside, lay her down, then and there, and have her.

  Whoa, he told himself. Easy. Don’t scare her off.

  There were tears in her eyes when she drew back from his kiss, sniffled once, and blinked, as though surprised to find herself alone with him, in the eye of the storm.

  Like most men, Brad was always unsettled when a woman cried. He felt an urgent need to rectify whatever was wrong, and at the same time, knew he couldn’t.

  Meg swabbed at her cheeks with the back of one hand, straightened her proud McKettrick spine.

  “What’s the matter?” Brad asked.

  “Nothing,” Meg answered, averting her gaze.

  “You’re lying.”

  “Just hedging a little,” she said, trying hard to smile and falling short. “It was like the old days, that’s all. The kiss I mean. It brought up a lot of feelings.”

  “Would it help if I told you I felt the same way?”

  “Not really,” she said. A thoughtful look came into those fabulous, fathomless eyes of hers.

  Brad slid the crate to one side and leaned in close, filled with peculiar suspense. He had to know what was going on in her head. “What?”

  “Lots of people have sex,” she told him, “without anybody getting pregnant.”

  “The reverse is also true,” he felt honor-bound to say. “Far as I know, making love still causes babies.”

  “Making love,” Meg said, “is not necessarily the same thing as having sex.”

  Brad cleared his throat, still walking on figurative eggshells. “True,” he said very cautiously. Was she messing with him? Setting him up for a rebuff? Meg wasn’t a particularly vengeful person, at least as far as he knew, but he’d hurt her badly all those busy years ago. Maybe she wanted to get back at him a little.

  “What I have in mind,” she told him decisively, “is sex, as opposed to making love.” A pause. “Of course.”

  “Of course,” he agreed. Hope fluttered in his chest, like a bird flexing its wings and rising, wind borne, off a high tree branch. At the same time, he felt stung—Meg was making it clear that any intimacy they might enjoy during this brief time-out-of-time would be strictly for physical gratification. Frenetic coupling of bodies, an emotion-free zone.

  Since beggars couldn’t be choosers, he was willing to bargain, but the disturbing truth was, he wanted more from Meg than a noncommittal quickie. She wasn’t, after all, a groupie to be groped and taken in the back of some tour bus, then forgotten.

  She squinted at him, catching something in his expression. “This bothers you?” she asked.

  He tried to smile. “If you want to have sex, McKettrick, I’m definitely game. It’s just that—”

  “What?”

  “It might not be a good idea.” Was he crazy? Here was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, essentially offering herself to him—and he was leaning on the brake lever?

  “Okay,” she said, and she looked hurt, uncomfortable, suddenly shy.

  And that was his undoing. All his noble reluctance went right out the door.

  He pulled her onto his lap again.

  She hesitated, then wrapped both arms around his neck.

  “Are you sure?” he asked her quietly, gruffly. “We’re taking a chance here, Meg. We could conceive a child—”

  The idea filled him with desperate jubilation, strangely mingled with sorrow.

  “We could,” she agreed, her eyes shining, dark with sultry heat, despite the chill seeping in between the cracks in the plain board walls.

  He cupped her chin in his hand, made her look into his face. “Fair warning, McKettrick. If there’s a baby, I’m not going to be an anonymous father, content to cut a check once a month and go on about my business as if it had never happened.”

  She studied him. “You’re serious.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll take that chance,” she decided, after a few moments of deliberation.

  He kissed her again, deeply this time, and when their mouths parted, she looked as dazed as he felt. Once, during a rehearsal before a concert, he’d gotten a shock from an electric guitar with a frayed chord. The jolt he’d taken, kissing Meg just now, made the first experience seem tame.

  She was straddling him, and even through their jeans, the insides of her thighs, squeezing against his hips, seemed to sear his skin. She squirmed against his erection, making him groan.

  Never in his life had Brad wanted a bed as badly as he did at that moment. It wasn’t right to lay Meg down on a couple of sleeping bags, on that cold floor.

  But even as he was thinking these disjointed thoughts, he was pulling her shirt up, slipping his hands beneath all that fabric, stroking her bare ribs.

  She shivered deliciously, closed her eyes, threw her head back.

  “Cold?” Brad asked, worried.

  “Anything but,” she murmured. “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely sure,” Meg said.

  He found the catch on her bra, opened it. Cupped both hands beneath her full, warm breasts.

  She moaned as he chafed her nipples gently, using the sides of his thumbs.

  And that was when they heard the deafening and unmistakable thwup-thwup-thwup of helicopter blades, directly above the roof of the line shack.

  Meg looked up, disbelieving. Jesse, Rance, or Keegan—or all three. Who else would take a chopper up in weather like that?

  Out in the lean-to, the horses whinnied in panic. The walls of the cabin shook as Meg jumped to her feet and righted her bra in almost the same motion. “Damn!” she sputtered furiously.

  “That had better not be Phil,” Brad said ominously. He was standing, too, his gaze fixed on the trembling ceiling.

  Meg smoothed her hair, straightened her clothes. “Phil?”

  “My manager,” Brad reminded her.

  “We should be so lucky,” Meg yelled, straining to be heard over the sound of the blades. “It’s my cousins!”

  They both went to the door and peered out, heedless of the blasting cold, made worse by the down draft from the chopper, Meg ducking under Brad’s left arm to see.

  Sure enough, the McKettrickCo helicopter, a relic of the corporation days, was settling to the ground, bouncing on its runners in the deepening snow.

  “I’ll be damned,” Brad said with a grin of what looked like rueful admiration, forcing the door shut against the icy wind. At the last second, Meg saw two figures moving toward them at a half crouch.

  “I’ll kill them,” Meg said.

  The door rattled on its hinges at the first knock.

  Meg stood back while Brad opened it again.

  Jesse came through first, followed by Keegan. They wore Western hats pulled low over their faces, leather coats thickly lined with sheep’s wool, and attitudes.

  “I tried to stop them,” Angus said, appearing at Meg’s elbow.

  “Good job,” Meg scoffed, under her breath, without moving her lips.

  Angus spread his hands. “They’re McKettricks,” he reminded her, as though that explained every mystery in the universe, from spontaneous human combustion to the Bermuda Triangle.

  “Are you crazy?” Meg demanded of her cousins, storming forward to stand toe-to-toe with Jesse, who was tight-jawed, casting suspicious glances at Brad. “You could have been killed, taking the copter up in a blizzard!”

  Brad, by contrast, hoisted the coffeepot off the stove, grinning wryly, and not entirely in a friendly way. “Coffee?” he asked.

  Jesse scowled at him.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Keegan said, pulling off his heavy leather gloves. He tossed Meg a sympathetic glance in the meantime, one that said, Don’t blame me. I’m just here to keep an eye on Jesse.

  Brad found another cup and, without bothering to wipe it out, filled it and handed it to Keegan. “It’s good to see you again,” he said with a sort of charged affability, but un
derlying his tone was an unspoken, Not.

  “I’ll just bet,” Jesse said, whipping off his hat. His dark blond hair looked rumpled, as though he’d been shoving a hand through it at regular intervals.

  “Jesse,” Keegan warned quietly.

  Meg stood nearly on tiptoe, her nose almost touching Jesse’s, her eyes narrowed to slits. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Jesse wasn’t about to back down, his stance made that clear, and neither was Meg. Classic McKettrick standoff.

  Keegan, used to the family dynamics, and the most diplomatic member of the current generation, eased an arm between them, holding his mug of hot coffee care fully in the other. “To your corners,” he said easily, forcing them both to take a step back.

  Jesse gave Brad a scathing look—once, they’d been friends—and turned to face Meg again. “I might ask you the same question,” he countered. “What the hell are you doing here? With him?”

  Brad cleared his throat, folded his arms. Waited. He looked amused—the expression in his eyes not withstanding.

  “That, Jesse McKettrick,” Meg seethed, “is my own business!”

  “We came,” Keegan inter ceded, still unruffled but, in his own way, as watchful as Jesse was, “because Cheyenne told us you were up here on horse back. When we got word of the blizzard, we were worried.”

  Meg threw her arms out, slapped them back against her sides. “Obviously, I’m all right,” she said. “Safe and sound.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Jesse said, taking Brad’s measure again.

  A muscle bunched in Brad’s jaw, but he didn’t speak.

  “Get your stuff, if you have any,” Jesse told Meg. “We’re leaving.” He turned to Brad again, added reluctantly, “You’d better come with us. This storm is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

  “Can’t leave the horses,” Brad said.

  Meg was annoyed. Her cousins had landed a helicopter in front of the line shack, in the middle of a blinding white-out, determined to carry her out bodily if they had to, and all he could think about was the horses?

  “I’ll stay and ride out with you,” Jesse told Brad. Whatever his issues with Brad might be, he was a rancher, born and bred. And a rancher never left a horse stranded, whether it was his own or someone else’s, if he had any choice in the matter. His blue eyes sliced to Meg’s face. “Keegan will get you back to the Triple M.”

  “Suppose I don’t want to go?”

  “Better decide,” Keegan put in. “This storm is picking up steam as we speak. Another fifteen or twenty minutes, and the four of us will be bunking in here until spring.”

  Meg searched Jesse’s face, glanced at Brad.

  He wasn’t going to express an opinion one way or the other, apparently, and that galled her. She knew it wasn’t cowardice—Brad had never been afraid of a brawl, with her rowdy cousins or anybody else. Which probably meant he was relieved to get out of a sticky situation.

  Color flared in her cheeks.

  “I’ll get my coat,” she said, glaring at Brad. Still hoping he’d stop her, send Jesse and Keegan packing.

  But he didn’t.

  She scram bled into her coat with jamming motions of her fists, and got stuck in the lining of one sleeve.

  “Call Olivia,” Brad said, watching her struggle, one corner of his mouth tilted slightly upward in a bemused smile. “Let her know I’m okay.”

  Meg nodded once, angrily, and let Keegan shuffle her out into the impossible cold to the waiting helicopter.

  “Smooth,” Brad remarked, studying Jesse, shutting the door behind Meg and Keegan and offering a brief, silent prayer for their safety. Flying in this weather was a major risk, but if anybody was up to the job, it was Keegan. His father had been a pilot, and all three of the McKettrick boys were as skilled at the controls of a plane or a copter as they were on the back of a horse.

  A little of the air went out of Jesse, but not much. “We’d better ride,” he said, “if we’re going to make it out of here before dark.”

  “What’d you think I was going to do, Jesse?” Brad asked evenly, reaching for the poker, opening the stove door to bank the fire. “Rape her?”

  Jesse thrust a hand through his hair. “It wasn’t that,” he said, but grudgingly. “Until we spotted the smoke from the line shack chimney, we thought the two of you might still be out there some place, in a whole lot of trouble.”

  “You couldn’t have just turned the copter toward the Triple M and left well enough alone?” He hadn’t shown it in front of Meg, but Brad was about an inch off Jesse. Meg wasn’t a kid, and if she’d needed protection, he would have provided it.

  Jesse’s eyes shot blue fire. “Maybe Meg’s ready to forget what you did to her, but I’m not,” he said. “She put on a good show back then, but inside, she was a ship wreck. Especially after the miscarriage.”

  For Brad, the whole world came to a screeching, spark-throwing stop in the space of an instant.

  “What miscarriage?”

  “Uh-oh,” Jesse said.

  It was literally all Brad could do not to get Jesse by the lapels and drag an answer out of him. He even took a step toward the door, meaning to stop Meg from leaving, but the copter was already lifting off, shaking the shack, setting the horses to fretting again.

  “There—was—a baby?”

  “Let’s go get those horses ready for a hard ride,” Jesse said, averting his gaze. Clearly, he’d assumed Meg had told Brad about the child. Now Jesse was the picture of regret.

  “Tell me,” Brad pressed.

  “You’ll have to talk to Meg,” Jesse answered, putting his hat on again and squaring his shoulders to go back out into the cold and around to the lean-to. “I’ve already said more than I should have.”

  “It was mine?”

  Jesse reddened. Yanked up the collar of his heavy coat. “Of course it was yours,” he said indignantly. “Meg’s not the type to play that kind of game.”

  Brad put on his own coat and yanked on some gloves. He felt strangely apart from himself, as though his spirit had somehow gotten out of step with his body.

  Meg had been pregnant when he caught that bus to Nashville.

  He knew in his bones it was true.

  If he’d been anything but a stupid, ambitious kid, he’d have known it then. By the fragile light in her eyes. By the way she’d touched his arm, as if to get his attention so she could say something important, then drawn back, trembling a little.

  He’d still have gone to Nashville—he’d had to, to save Stone Creek from the bankers and developers. But he’d have sent for Meg first thing, swallowed his pride whole if he had to, or thumbed it back to Arizona to be with her.

  Tentatively, Jesse laid a hand on Brad’s shoulder. Withdrew it again.

  After securing the line shack as best they could, they left, made their way to the fitful horses, saddled them in silence.

  The roar of the copter’s engine and the whipping of the blades made conversation impossible, without a headset, and Meg refused to put hers on.

  Keegan concentrated on working the controls, keeping a close watch on the instrument panel. The blizzard had intensified; they were literally flying blind.

  Presently, though, visibility in creased, and Meg relaxed a little.

  Keegan must have been watching her out of the corner of his eye, because he reached over and patted her lightly on the arm. Picked up the second headset and nudged her until she took it, put on the ear phones, adjusted the mic.

  “I can’t believe you did this,” she said.

  Keegan grinned. His voice echoed through the headset. “Rule number one,” he said. “Never leave another McKettrick stuck in a blizzard.”

  Meg huffed out a sigh. “I was perfectly all right!”

  “Maybe,” Keegan replied, banking to the north west, in the direction of the Triple M. “But we didn’t have any way of knowing that. Switch on your cell phone. You’ll find we left at least half a dozen messages on yo
ur voice mail, trying to find out if you were okay.”

  “What if they don’t make it out of that storm?” Meg fretted. Before, she’d just been furious. Now, with a little perspective, she was suddenly assailed by worries, on all sides. The fear was worse than the anger. “What if the horses get lost?”

  “Brad knows the trail,” Keegan assured her, “and Jesse could ride out of hell if he had to. If they don’t show up in a few hours, I’ll come back looking for them.”

  “You’re not invincible, you know,” Meg said tersely. “Even if you are a McKettrick.”

  “I’ll do what I have to do,” he told her. “Are you and Brad—well—back on?”

  “That is patently none of your affair.”

  Keegan’s grin was damnably endearing. “When has that ever stopped me?”

  “No,” Meg said, beaten. “We are not ‘back on.’ I was just helping him look for Ransom, that’s all.”

  “Ransom? The stallion?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s real?”

  “I’ve seen him with my own eyes.”

  “You decided to go chasing a wild horse in the middle of a blizzard?”

  “It wasn’t snowing when we left Stone Creek Ranch,” Meg said, feeling defensive.

  “Know what I think?”

  “No, but I’m afraid you’re going to tell me.”

  Keegan’s grin widened, took on a wicked aspect. “You wanted to sleep with Brad. He wanted to sleep with you. And I use the word sleep advisedly. Both of you knew snow’s a real possibility in the high country, year ’round. And there’s the old line shack, handy as hell.”

  “So none of your business. And who do you think you are, Dr. Phil?”

  Keegan chuckled, shook his head once. “It probably won’t help,” he told her, “but if we’d known we were interrupting a tryst, we’d have stayed clear.”

  “We were playing gin rummy.”

  “Whatever.”

  Meg folded her arms and wriggled deeper into the cold leather seat. “Keegan, I don’t have to convince you. And I definitely don’t have to explain.”

  “You’re absolutely right. You don’t.”

  By then, they were out of the snow, gliding through a golden autumn afternoon. They passed over the town of Stone Creek, continued in the direction of Indian Rock.