Meg didn’t say another word until Keegan set the copter down in the pasture behind her barn, the down draft making the long grass ripple like an ocean.
“Thanks for the ride,” she said tersely, waiting for the blades to slow so she could get out without having her head cut off. “I’d invite you in, but right now, I am seriously pissed off, and the less I see of any of my male relatives, you included, the better.”
Keegan cocked a thumb at her. “Got it,” he said. “And for the record, I don’t give a rat’s ass if you’re pissed off.”
Meg reached across and slugged him in the upper arm, hard, but she laughed a little as she did it. Shook her head. “Goodbye!” she yelled, tossing the headset into his lap.
Keegan signaled her to keep her head down, and watched as she pushed open the door of the copter and leaped to the ground.
Ducking, she headed for the house.
Angus was standing in the kitchen when she let herself in, looking apologetic.
“Thanks a heap for the help,” Meg said.
“There’s not much I can do with folks who can’t see or hear me,” Angus replied.
“I get all the luck,” Meg answered, pulling off her coat and flinging it in the direction of the hook beside the door.
Angus looked solemn. “You’ve got trouble,” he said.
Meg tensed, instantly alarmed. She’d ridden home from the mountaintop in relative comfort, but the trip would be dangerous on horse back, even for men who’d literally grown up in the saddle. “Jesse and Brad are okay, aren’t they?”
“They’ll be fine,” Angus assured her. “A couple of shots of good whiskey’ll fix ’em right up.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Do you have to be so damned cryptic?”
Angus’s grin was reminiscent of Keegan’s. “I’m not cryptic,” he said. “I can get around just fine.”
“Very funny.”
He chuckled.
Frazzled, Meg blurted, “First you tell me about your long-lost brother, and how some unknown McKettrick is about to show up. Then you say I’ve got trouble. Spill it, Angus!”
He sobered. “Jesse let the cat out of the bag. And that’s all I’m going to say.”
Meg froze. She had only one deep, dark secret, and Jesse couldn’t have let it slip because he didn’t know what it was.
Did he?
She put one hand to her mouth.
Angus patted her shoulder. “You’d better go out to the barn and feed the horses early. You might be too busy later on.”
Meg stared at her ancestor. “Angus McKettrick—”
He vanished.
Typical man.
Meg placed the promised call to Olivia O’Ballivan, got her voice mail and left a message. Next, she started a pot of coffee, then picked her coat up off the floor, put it back on and went out to tend to the live stock.
The work helped to ease her anxiety, but not all that much.
All the while, she was wondering if Jesse had found out about the baby somehow, if he’d told Brad.
You’ve got trouble, Angus had said, and the words echoed in her mind.
She finished her chores and returned to the house, shedding her coat again and washing her hands at the sink before pouring herself a mug of fresh coffee. She considered lacing it with a generous dollop of Jack Daniel’s, to get the chill out of her bones, then shoved the bottle back in the cupboard, unopened.
If Jesse and Brad didn’t get home, Keegan wouldn’t be the only one to go out looking for them.
She reached for the telephone, dialed Cheyenne’s cell number.
“I’m sorry,” Cheyenne said immediately, not bothering with a hello. “When I passed your message on to Jesse, about checking on your horses if you didn’t call before night fall, he wanted to know where you’d gone.” She paused. “And I told him.”
Meg pressed the back of one hand to her forehead and closed her eyes for a moment. If a certain pair of stubborn cowboys got lost in that blizzard, or if Jesse had, as Angus put it, “let the cat out of the bag,” the embarrassing scene at the line shack would be the least of her problems.
“There’s a big storm in the high country,” she said quietly, “and Jesse and Brad are on horse back. Let me know when Jesse gets back, will you?”
Cheyenne drew in an audible breath. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “They’re riding in a blizzard?”
“Jesse can handle it,” Meg said. “And so can Brad. Just the same, I’ll rest easier when I know they’re home.”
Cheyenne didn’t answer for a long time. “I’ll call,” she promised, but she sounded distracted. No doubt she was thinking the same thing Meg was, that it had been reckless enough, flying into a snow storm in a helicopter. Taking a treacherous trail down off the mountain was even worse.
Meg spoke a few reassuring words, though they sounded hollow even to her, and she and Cheyenne said goodbye.
At loose ends, Meg took her coffee to the study at the front of the house and logged onto the computer. Ran a search on the name Josiah McKettrick, though her mind wasn’t on genealogical detective work, and she started over a dozen times.
In the kitchen, she heated a can of soup and ate it mechanically, never tasting a bite. After that, she read for a couple of hours, then she took a long, hot bath, put on clean sweats and padded down stairs again, thinking she’d watch some television. She was trying to focus on a rerun of Dog the Bounty Hunter when she heard a car door slam outside.
Boot heels thundered up the front steps.
And then a fist hammered at the heavy wooden door.
“Meg!” Brad yelled. “Open up! Now!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
BRAD LOOKED CRAZED, standing there on Meg’s doorstep. She moved to step out of his way, but before she could, he advanced on her, backing her into the entryway. Kicking the door shut behind him with a hard motion of one foot.
He hadn’t stopped to change clothes after the long, cold ride down out of the hills, and he was soaked to the skin. He’d lost his gloves some where, and there was a faintly bluish cast to his taut lips.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the baby?” he demanded, shaking an index finger under Meg’s nose when she collided with the wall behind her, next to Holt and Lorelei’s grandfather clock. The ponderous tick-tock seemed to reverberate through out the known universe.
Meg’s worst fears were confirmed in that moment. Jesse had known about her pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage—and he’d let it slip to Brad.
“Calm down,” she said, recovering a little.
Brad gripped her shoulders. If he’d been anyone other than exactly who he was, Meg might have feared for her safety. But this was Brad O’Ballivan. Sure, he’d crushed her heart, but he wasn’t going to hurt her physically, she knew that. It was one of the few absolutes.
“Was there a child?”
Meg bit her lower lip. She’d always known she’d have to tell him if they crossed paths again, but she hadn’t wanted it to be like this. “Yes,” she whispered, that one word scraping her throat raw.
“My baby?”
She felt a sting of indignation, hot as venom, but it passed quickly. “Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Meg straightened her spine, lifted her chin a notch. “You were in Nashville,” she said. “You didn’t write. You didn’t call. I guess I didn’t think you’d be interested.”
The blue fury in Brad’s eyes dulled visibly; he let go of her shoulders, but didn’t step back. She felt cornered, over shad owed—but still not threatened. Oddly, it was more like being shielded, even protected.
He shoved a hand through his hair. “How could I not be interested, Meg?” he rasped bleakly. “You were carrying our baby.”
Slowly, Meg put her palms to his cheeks. “I miscarried a few weeks after you left,” she said gently. “It wasn’t meant to be.”
Moisture glinted in h
is eyes, and that familiar muscle bunched just above his jawline. “Still—”
“Go upstairs and take a hot shower,” Meg told him. “I’ll fix you something to eat, and we’ll talk.”
Brad tensed again, then relaxed, though only slightly. Nodded.
“Travis left some clothes behind when he and Sierra moved to town,” she went on, when he didn’t speak. “I’ll get them for you.”
With that, she led the way up the stairs, along the hallway to the main bathroom. After pushing the door open and waiting for Brad to enter, she went on to the master bedroom, pulled an old pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt from a bureau drawer.
Brad was already in the shower when she returned, naked behind the steamy glass door, but clearly visible.
Swallowing a rush of lust, Meg set the folded garments on the lid of the toilet seat, placed a folded towel on top of them and slipped out.
She was cooking scram bled eggs when Brad came down the back stairs fifteen minutes later, barefoot, his hair towel-rumpled, wearing Travis’s clothes. Without comment, Meg poured a cup of fresh coffee and held it out to him.
He took it, after a moment’s hesitation, and sipped cautiously.
Meg was relieved to see that the hot shower had restored his normal color. Before, he’d been ominously pale.
“Sit down,” she said quietly.
He pulled out Holt’s chair and sat, watching her as she turned to the stove again. Even with her back turned to him, she could feel his gaze boring into the space between her shoulder blades.
“What happened?” he asked, after a few moments.
She looked back at him briefly before scraping the eggs onto a waiting plate. Didn’t speak.
“The miscarriage,” he prompted grimly. “What made it happen?”
With a pang, Meg realized he thought it might have been his fault somehow, her losing their baby. Because he’d gone to Nashville, or because of the fight they’d had before he left.
She’d suffered her own share of guilt over the years, wondering if she could have done something differently, prevented the tragedy. She didn’t want Brad to go through the same agony.
“There was no specific incident,” she said softly. “I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t. It happens, Brad. And it’s not always possible to know why.”
Brad absorbed that, took another sip of his coffee. “You should have told me.”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” Meg said. “Not even my mother.”
“Then how did Jesse know?”
Now that she’d had time to think, the answer was obvious. Jesse had been the one to take her to the hospital that long-ago night. She’d told him it was just a bad case of cramps, but he’d either put two and two together on his own or over heard the nurses and doctors talking.
“He was with me,” she said.
“He was, and I wasn’t,” Brad answered.
She set the plate of scram bled eggs in front of him, along with two slices of buttered toast and some silver ware. “It wouldn’t have changed anything,” she said. “Your being there, I mean. I’d still have lost the baby, Brad.”
He closed his eyes briefly, like someone taking a hard punch to the solar plexus, determined not to fight back.
“You should have told me,” he insisted.
She gave the plate a little push toward him and, reluctantly, he picked up his fork, began to eat. “We’ve been over that,” she said, sitting down on the bench next to the table, angled to face Brad. “What good would it have done?”
“I could have—helped.”
“How?”
He sighed. “You went through it alone. That isn’t right.”
“Lots of things aren’t ‘right’ in this world,” Meg reasoned quietly. “A person just has to—cope.”
“The McKettrick way,” Brad said without ad mi ration. “Some people would call that being bull headed, not coping.”
She propped an elbow on the tabletop, cupped her chin in her hand, and watched as he continued to down the scram bled eggs. “I’d do the same thing all over again,” she confessed. “It was hard, but I toughed it out.”
“Alone.”
“Alone,” Meg agreed.
“It must have been a lot worse than ‘hard.’ You were only nineteen.”
“So were you,” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell your mother?”
Meg didn’t have to reflect on that one. From the day Hank Breslin had snatched Sierra and vanished, Eve had been hit by problem after problem—a serious accident, in which she’d been severely injured, subsequent addictions to painkillers and alcohol, all the challenges of steering McKettrickCo through a lot of corporate white water.
“She’d been through enough,” she replied simply. Brad’s question had been rhetorical—he’d known the McKettrick history all along.
“She’d have strung me up by my thumbs,” Brad said. And though he tried to smile, he didn’t quite make it. He was still in shock.
“Probably,” Meg said.
He’d finished the food, shoved his plate away. “Where do we go from here?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe nowhere.”
He moved to take her hand, but withdrew just short of touching her. Scraped back his chair to stand and carry the remains of his meal to the sink. Set the plate and silver ware down with a thunk.
“Was our baby a boy or a girl?” he asked gruffly, standing with his back to her.
She saw the tension in his broad shoulders as he awaited her answer. “I didn’t ask,” she said. “I guess I didn’t want to know. And it was probably too early to tell, anyway. I was only a few weeks into the pregnancy.”
He turned, at last, to face her, but kept his distance, leaning back against the counter, folding his arms. “Do you ever think about what it would be like if he or she had survived?”
All the time, she thought.
“No,” she lied.
“Right,” he said, clearly not believing her.
“I’m—I’m sorry, Brad. That you had to find out from someone else, I mean.”
“But not for deceiving me in the first place?”
Meg bristled. “I didn’t deceive you.”
“What do you call it?”
“You were gone. You had things to do. If I’d dragged you back here, you wouldn’t have gotten your big chance. You would have hated me for that.”
At last, he crossed to her, took her chin in his hand. “I couldn’t hate you, Meg,” he said gravely, choking a little on the words. “Not ever.”
For a few moments, they just stared at each other in silence.
Brad was the first to speak again. “I’d better get back to the ranch.” Another rueful attempt at a grin. “It’s been a bitch of a day.”
“Stay,” Meg heard herself say. She wasn’t thinking of leading Brad to her bed—not exclusively of that, anyhow. He’d just ridden miles through a blizzard on horse back, he’d taken a chill in the process, and the knowledge that he’d fathered a child was pain fully new.
He was silent, perhaps at a loss.
“You shouldn’t be alone,” Meg said. And neither should I.
She knew what would happen if he stayed, of course. And she knew it was likely to be a mistake. They’d become strangers to each other over the years apart, living such different lives. It was too soon to run where angels feared to tread.
But she needed him that night, needed him to hold her, if nothing else.
And his need was just as great.
He grinned, though wanly. “How do we know your cousins won’t land on the roof in a helicopter?” he asked.
“We don’t,” Meg said, and sighed. “They meant well, you know.”
“Sure they did,” he agreed wryly. “They were out to save your virtue.”
Meg stood, went to Brad, slipped her arms around his middle. It seemed such a natural thing to do, and yet, at the same time, it was a breathtaking risk. “Stay,” she said again.
/> He held her a little closer, propped his chin on top of her head. Stroked the length of her back with his hands. “Those who don’t learn from history,” he said, “are condemned to repeat it.”
Meg rested her head against his shoulder, breathed in the scent of him. Felt herself softening against the hard heat of his body.
And the telephone rang.
“It might be important,” Brad said, setting Meg away from him a little, when she didn’t jump to answer.
She picked up without checking the ID panel. “Hello.”
“Jesse’s home,” Cheyenne said, honoring her earlier promise to let Meg know when he returned. “He’s half-frozen. I poured a hot toddy down him and put him to bed.”
“Thanks for calling, Chey,” Meg replied.
“You’re all right?” Cheyenne asked shyly.
Wondering how much Jesse had told his wife when he got home, Meg replied that she was fine.
“He told me he and Keegan barged in on you and Brad, up in the mountains some where,” Cheyenne went on. “I’m sorry, Meg. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, but I heard a report of the blizzard on the radio and I—well—I guess I panicked a little.”
“Everything’s all right, Cheyenne. Really.”
“He’s there, isn’t he? Brad, I mean. He’s with you, right now.”
“Since I’d rather not have a midnight visit from my cousins,” Meg said, “I’m admitting nothing.”
Cheyenne giggled. “My lips are zipped. Want to have lunch tomorrow?”
“That sounds good,” Meg answered, smiling. Brad was standing behind her by then, sliding his hands under the front of her sweat shirt, stopping just short of her bare breasts. She fought to keep her voice even, her breathing normal. “Good night, Cheyenne.”
“I’ll meet you in town, at Lucky’s Bar and Grill at noon,” Cheyenne said. “Call me if you’re still in bed or anything like that, and we’ll reschedule.”
Brad tweaked lightly at Meg’s nipples; she swallowed a gasp of pleasure. “See you there,” she replied, and hung up quickly.
Brad turned Meg around, gave her a knee-melting kiss and then swept her up into his arms. Carried her to the back stairs.
The McKettrick Legend: Sierra's HomecomingThe McKettrick Way (Hqn) Page 32