She directed him to the very bed Holt and Lorelei had shared as man and wife.
He laid her down on the deep, cushy mattress, a shadow figure rimmed in light from the hallway behind him. She couldn’t see his face, but she felt his gaze on her, gentle and hungry and so hot it seared her.
Afraid honor might get the better of him, Meg wriggled out of her sweat pants, pulled the top off over her head. Planning to sleep in the well-worn favorites, she hadn’t bothered to put on a bra and panties after her bath earlier. Now she was completely naked. Utterly vulnerable.
Brad made a low, barely audible sound, rested one knee on the mattress beside her.
“Hold me,” she whispered, and traces of an old song ran through her mind.
Help me make it through the night…
He stripped, maneuvered Meg so she was under the covers and joined her. The feel of him against her, solid and warm and all man, sent an electric rush of dizziness through her, pervading every cell.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and clung—she who never allowed herself to cling to anyone or anything except her own fierce pride.
A long, delicious time passed, without words, without caresses—only the holding.
The decision that there would be no foreplay was a tacit one.
The wanting was too great.
Brad nudged Meg’s legs apart gently, settled between them, his erection pressing against her lower belly like a length of steel, heated in a forge.
She moaned and arched her back slightly, seeking him.
He took her with a single long, slow, smooth stroke, nestling into her depths. Held himself still as she gasped in wordless welcome.
He kissed her eyelids.
She squirmed beneath him.
He kissed her cheek bones.
Craving friction, desperate for it, Meg tried to move her hips, but he had her pinned, heavily, delectably, to the bed.
She whimpered.
He nibbled at her earlobes, one and then the other.
She ran her hands urgently up and down his back.
He tasted her neck.
She pleaded.
He withdrew, thrust again, but slowly.
She said his name.
He plunged deep.
And Meg came apart in his arms, raising herself high. Clawing, now at his back, now at the bed clothes, surrendering with a long, continuous, keening moan.
The climax was ferocious, but it was only a prelude to what would follow, and knowing that only in creased Meg’s need. Her body merged with Brad’s, fused to it at the most elemental level, and the instant he began to move upon her she was lost again.
Even as she exploded, like a shattering star, she was aware of his phenomenal self-control, but when she reached her peak, he gave in. She reveled in the flex of his powerful body, the ragged, half groan, half shout of his release. Felt the warmth of his seed spilling inside her—and prayed it would take root.
Finally, he collapsed beside her, his face buried between her neck and the curve of her shoulder, his arms and legs still clenched around her, loosening by small, nearly imperceptible shivers.
Instinctively, Meg tilted her pelvis slightly backward, cradling the warmth.
A long while later, when both their breathing had returned to normal, or some semblance of that, Brad lifted his head. Touched his nose to hers. Started to speak, then thrust out a sigh, instead.
Meg threaded her fingers through his hair. Turned her head so she could kiss his chin.
“Guess you just earned another notch for the bedpost,” she said.
He chuckled. “Yeah,” he said. “Except this is your bed, McKettrick. You seduced me. I want that on record. Either way, since it’s obviously an antique, carving the thing up probably wouldn’t be the best idea.”
“We’re going to regret this in the morning, you know,” she told him.
“That’s then,” he murmured, nibbling at her neck again. “This is now.”
“Umm-hmm,” Meg said. She wanted now to last forever.
“I kept expecting a helicopter.”
Meg laughed. “Me, too.”
Brad lifted his head again, and in the moonlight she could see the smile in his eyes. “Know what?”
“What?”
“I’m glad it happened this way. In a real bed, and not the floor of some old line shack.” He kissed her, very lightly. “Although I would have settled for anything I could get.”
She pretended to slug him.
He laughed.
She felt him hardening against her, pressed against the outside of her right thigh. Stretching, he found the switch on the bedside lamp and turned it, spilling light over her. The glow of it seemed to seep into her skin, golden. Or was it the other way around? Was she the one shining, instead of the lamp?
“God,” Brad whispered, “you are beautiful.”
A tigress before, now Meg felt shy. Turned her head to one side, closed her eyes.
Brad caressed her breasts, her stomach and abdomen and the tops of her thighs; his touch so light, so gentle, that it made her breath catch in her throat.
“Look at me,” he said.
She met his eyes. “The light,” she protested weakly.
He slid his fingers between the moist curls at the juncture of her thighs. “So beautiful,” he said.
She gasped as he made slow, sweet circles, deliberately exciting her. “Brad—”
“What?”
She was conscious of the softness of her belly; knew her breasts weren’t as firm and high as he remembered. She wanted more of his lovemaking, and still more, but under the cover of darkness and finely woven sheets and the heirloom quilt Lorelei McKettrick had stitched with her own hands, so many years before. “The light.”
He made no move to flip the switch off again, but continued to stroke her, watching her responses. When he slipped his fingers inside her, found her G-spot and plied it expertly, she stopped worrying about the light and became a part of it.
While Meg slept, Brad slipped out of bed, pulled his borrowed clothes back on and retrieved his own from the bath room where he’d showered earlier. Sat on the edge of the big claw-foot bathtub to pull on his socks and boots, still damp from his ride down the mountainside with Jesse.
Down stairs, he found the old-fashioned thermostat and turned it up. Dusty heat whooshed from the vents. In the kitchen he switched on the lights, filled and set the coffeemaker. Maybe these small courtesies would make up for his leaving before Meg woke up.
He found a pencil and a memo pad over by the phone, planning to scribble a note, but nothing suitable came to mind, at least not right away.
“Thanks” would be in appropriate.
“Goodbye” sounded too blunt.
Only a jerk would write “See you around.”
“I’ll call you later”? Too cavalier.
Finally, he settled on “Horses to feed.”
Four of his songs had won Grammies, and all he could come up with was “horses to feed”? He was slipping.
He paused, stood looking up at the ceiling for a few moments, wanting nothing so much as to go back upstairs, crawl in bed with Meg again and make love to her.
Again.
But she’d said they were going to have regrets in the morning, and he didn’t want to see those regrets on her face. The two of them would make bumbling excuses, never quite meeting each other’s eyes.
And Brad knew he couldn’t handle that.
So he left.
Meg stood in her warm kitchen, bundled in a terry cloth bathrobe and surrounded by the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, peering at the note Brad had left.
Horses to feed.
“The man’s a poet,” she said out loud.
“Do you think it took?” Angus asked.
Meg whirled to find him standing just behind her, almost at her elbow. “You scared me!” she accused, one hand pressed to her heart, which felt as though it might scramble up her esophagus to the back of her throat.
“Sorry,” Angus said, though there was nothing the least bit contrite about his tone or his expression.
“Do I think what took?” Meg had barely sputtered the words when the awful realization struck her: Angus was asking if she thought she’d gotten pregnant, which meant—
Oh, God.
“Tell me you weren’t here!”
“What do you take me for?” Angus snapped. “Of course I wasn’t!”
Meg swallowed. Flushed to the roots of her hair. “But you knew—”
“I saw that singing cowboy leave just before sunup,” came the taciturn reply. Now Angus was blushing, too. “Wasn’t too hard to guess the rest.”
“Will you stop calling him ‘that singing cowboy’? He has a name. It’s Brad O’Ballivan.”
“I know that,” Angus said. “But he’s a fair hand with a horse, and he croons a decent tune. To my way of thinking, that makes him a singing cowboy.”
Meg gave him a look, padded to the refrigerator, jerked open the door and rummaged around for something that might constitute break fast. She’d cooked the last of the eggs for Brad, and the remaining choices were severely limited. Three green olives floating in a jar, some withered cheese, the arthritic remains of last week’s takeout pizza and a carton of baking soda.
“Food doesn’t just appear in an icebox, you know,” Angus announced. “In my day, you had to hunt it down, or grow it in a garden, or harvest it from a field.”
“Yes, and you probably walked ten miles to and from school,” Meg said irritably, “uphill both ways.”
She was starving. She’d have to hit the drive-through in town, then pick up some groceries. All that before her lunch with Cheyenne.
“I never went to school,” Angus replied seriously, not getting the joke. “My ma taught me to read from the Good Book. I learned the rest on my own.”
Meg sighed as an answer, shoved the splayed fingers of one hand through her tangled hair. Although she’d been disappointed at first to wake up and find Brad gone, now she was glad he couldn’t see her. She looked like—well—a woman who had been having howling, sweaty-sheet sex half the night.
She started for the stairs.
“Make yourself at home,” she told Angus, wondering if he’d catch the irony in her tone. For him, “home” was the Great Beyond, or the main ranch house down by the creek.
When she came down again half an hour later, showered and dressed in jeans and a light weight blue sweater, he was sitting in Holt’s chair, waiting for her.
“You ever think about wearing a dress or a skirt?” he asked, frowning.
Meg let that pass. “I’ve got some errands to run. See you later.”
The telephone rang.
Brad?
She checked the caller ID panel.
Her mother.
“Voice mail will pick up,” she told Angus.
“Answer it,” Angus said sternly.
Meg reached for the receiver. “Hello, Mom. I was just on my way out the door—”
“You’d better sit down,” Eve told her.
The pit of Meg’s stomach pitched. “Why? Mom, is Sierra all right? Nothing’s happened to Liam—”
“Both of them are fine. It’s nothing like that.”
Meg let out her breath. Leaned against the kitchen counter for support. “What, then?”
“Your father contacted me this morning. He wants to see you.”
Meg’s knees almost gave out. She’d never met her father, never spoken to him on the telephone or received so much as a birthday or Christmas card from him. She wasn’t even sure what his name was—he used so many aliases.
“Meg?”
“I’m here,” Meg said. “I don’t want to see him.”
“I knew I should have talked to you in person,” Eve sighed. “But I was so alarmed—”
“Mother, did you hear what I just said? I don’t want to see my father.”
“He claims he’s dying.”
“Well, I’m sincerely sorry to hear that, but I still don’t want anything to do with him.”
“Meg—”
“I mean it, Mother. He’s been a nonentity in my life. What could he possibly have to say to me now, after all this time?”
“I don’t know,” Eve replied.
“And if he wanted to talk to me, why did he call you?” The moment the question left her mouth, Meg wished she hadn’t asked it.
“I think he’s afraid.”
“But he wasn’t afraid of you?”
“He’s past that, I think,” Eve said. She’d been down right secretive on the subject of Meg’s father from the first. Now, suddenly, she seemed to be urging Meg to make contact with him. What was going on? “Listen, why don’t you stop by the hotel, and I’ll make you some break fast. We’ll talk.”
“Mom—”
“Blue berry pancakes. Maple-cured bacon. Your favorites.”
“All right,” Meg said, because as shaken as she was, she could have eaten the proverbial horse. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Good,” Eve replied, a little smugly, Meg thought. She was used to getting her way. After all, for almost thirty years, when Eve McKettrick said “jump,” every body reached for a vaulting pole.
“Are you going to ride shotgun?” Meg asked Angus after she’d hung up.
“I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” Angus said with relish.
Less than half an hour later, Meg was knocking on the front door of her mother’s hotel suite.
When it opened, a man stood looking down at her, his expression uncertain and at the same time hopeful. She saw her own features reflected in the shape of his face, the set of his shoulders, the curve of his mouth.
“Hello, Meg,” said her long-lost father.
CHAPTER EIGHT
AFTER THE HORSES HAD BEEN FED, Brad turned them out to pasture for the day and made his way not into the big, lonely house, but to the copse of trees where Big John was buried. The old man’s simple marker looked pain fully new, amid the chipped and moss-covered stone crosses marking the graves of other, earlier O’Ballivans and Black stones.
Brad had meant to visit the small private cemetery first thing, but between one thing and another, he hadn’t managed it until now.
Standing there, in the shade of trees already shedding gold and crimson and rust-colored leaves, he moved to take off his hat, remembered that he wasn’t wearing one and crouched to brush a scattering of fallen foliage from the now-sunken mound.
About time you showed up, he heard Big John O’Ballivan’s booming voice observe, echoing through the channels of his mind.
Brad gave a lopsided, rueful grin. His eyes smarted, so he blinked a couple of times. “I’m here, old man,” he answered hoarsely. “And I mean to stay. Look after the girls and the place. That ought to make you happy.”
There was no reply from his grandfather, not even in his head.
But Brad felt like talking, so he did.
“I’m seeing Meg McKettrick again,” he said. “Turns out I got her pregnant, back when we were kids, and she lost the baby. I never knew about it until yesterday.”
Had Big John been there in the flesh, there’d have been a lecture coming. Brad would have welcomed that, even though the old man could peel off a strip of hide when he was riled.
One more reason why you should have stayed here and attended to business, Big John would have said. And that would have been just the warm-up.
“You never understood,” Brad went on, just as if the old man had spoken. “We were going to lose Stone Creek Ranch. Maybe you weren’t able to face that, but I had to. Everything Sam and Maddie and the ones who came after did to hold on to this place would have been for nothing.”
The McKettricks would have stepped in if he’d asked for help, Brad knew that. Meg herself, probably her mother, too. Contrary as that Triple M bunch was, they’d bailed more than one neighbor out of financial trouble, saved dozens of smaller farms and ranches when beef prices b
ottomed out and things got tough. Even after all this time, though, the thought of going to them with his hat in his hands made the back of Brad’s throat scald.
Although the ground was hard, wet and cold, he sat, cross-legged, gazing upon his grandfather’s grave through a misty haze. He’d paid a high price for his pride, big, fancy career not with standing.
He’d lost the years he might have spent with Meg, the other children that might have come along. He hadn’t been around when Big John needed him, and his sisters, though they were all educated, independent women, had been mere girls when he left. Sure, Big John had loved and protected them, in his gruff way, but that didn’t excuse his absence. He should have been their big brother.
Caught up in these thoughts, and all the emotions they engendered, Brad heard the approaching rig, but didn’t look around. Heard the engine shut off, the door slam.
“Hey,” Olivia said softly from just behind him.
“Hey,” he replied, not ready to look back and meet his sister’s gaze.
“Willie’s better. I’ve got him in the truck.”
Brad blinked again. “That’s good,” he said. “Guess I’d better go to town and get him some dog food and stuff.”
“I brought everything he needs,” Livie said, her voice quiet. She came and sat down beside Brad. “Missing Big John?”
“Every day,” Brad admitted. Their mother had hit the road when the twins were barely walking, and their dad had died a year later, herding spooked cattle in a lightning storm. Big John had stepped up to raise four young grand-children with out a word of complaint.
“Me, too,” Livie replied softly. “You ever wonder where our mom ended up?”
Brad knew where Della O’Ballivan was—living in a trailer park outside of Independence, Missouri, with the latest in a long line of drunken boy friends—but he’d never shared that information with his sisters. The story, brought to him by the private detective he’d hired on the proceeds from his first hit record, wasn’t a pretty one.
“No,” he said in all honesty. “I never wonder.” He’d gone to see Della, once he’d learned her whereabouts. She’d been sloshed and more interested in his stardom, and how it might benefit her, than getting to know him. Ironically, she’d refused the help he had offered—immediate ad mission to one of the best treatment centers in the world—standing there in a tattered house coat and scruffy slippers, with lipstick stains in the deep smoker’s lines surrounding her mouth. She hadn’t even asked about her daughters or the husband she’d left behind.
The McKettrick Legend: Sierra's HomecomingThe McKettrick Way (Hqn) Page 33