He thought about Cheyenne—had been thinking about her, on one level or another, ever since they’d parted in the Roadhouse parking lot.
Thought about her long legs and her expressive eyes, and the fullness of her mouth. She was good-looking, all right, and smart, too.
He wondered how far she’d go to persuade him to sell that five hundred acres she wanted.
The phone rang, nearly startling him out of his hide.
He scowled, set down his beer and picked up the receiver. “Yo,” he said. “This is Jesse.”
“Yo, yourself,” Sierra replied. She was set to marry Travis Reid, one of his closest friends, in a month. Jesse would be best man at the ceremony, and until tonight, when he’d run into Cheyenne, he’d wished Sierra wasn’t a blood relative so he could at least fantasize about taking her away from Travis.
“What’s up?” he asked and grinned. Most likely, if anything was up, it was Travis. The man had been at full mast ever since he’d first laid eyes on Sierra one day last winter.
“We’re having a prewedding party,” Sierra said. “Saturday night. Live music. A hayride and a barbecue. The whole works. Be there, and bring a date.”
“I’ve got a big tournament that night,” Jesse protested. “Cliffcastle Casino. No limit and plenty of tourists who think they know the game because they watch the World Poker Tour on TV.”
“Come on, Jesse. You spend too much time at the tables as it is. And don’t make me play the guilt card. As in, you’re the best man and this is part of the gig.”
“I wouldn’t think of making you play the guilt card,” Jesse said dryly, downing a big swig of beer. “Except that you just did.”
She laughed. “It could get worse. Liam’s counting on seeing you. Meg’s flying in from San Antonio, and Rance and Keegan have both cleared their schedules to come. Since it would be really crass of me to point out that that involves more than missing a poker tournament, I won’t.”
Jesse sighed. “Okay,” he said. “But I want something in return.”
“Like what?”
“Send over a ghost, will you? It’s way too quiet around here.”
CHAPTER THREE
CHEYENNE SHOWED UP at the ranch the next morning, as agreed, at nine o’clock sharp. Jesse had just turned all but two of the horses out to graze in the pastures beyond the corral gate. He’d saddled his black-and-white paint gelding, Minotaur, first, and was finishing up with Pardner when she pulled in.
Standing just outside the barn door, Jesse yanked the cinch tighter around the horse’s belly, grinned and shook his head slightly when Cheyenne stepped out of the car and he saw what she was wearing. A trim beige pantsuit, tailored at the waist, and stack-heeled shoes with tasteful brass buckles, shiny enough to signal a rider five miles away. She’d wound her hair into the same businesslike do at the back of her head—did she sleep with it up like that?—and he wondered idly how long it was, and how it would feel to let the strands slide between his fingers.
Smiling gamely, Cheyenne minced her way across the rutted barnyard toward him. Her gaze touched the horses warily and ricocheted off again, with a reverberation like the ping of a bullet, only soundless. “It’s a beautiful morning,” she said.
Jesse gave a partial nod, tugged at his hat brim before thinking better of the idea. Talk about tells. Why not just have a billboard put up? Cheyenne Bridges Intrigues Me. Sincerely, Jesse McKettrick. “Always is, out here. Year ’round.”
She drew an audible breath, that brave smile wobbling a little on her sensuous mouth, and huffed out an exhale. Adjusted the strap of that honking purse again. “Let’s go have a look at the land,” she said, jingling her keys in her right hand.
Jesse ran his gaze over her outfit, glanced toward Pardner and Minotaur, who were waiting patiently in full tack, reins dangling, tails switching. “That little car of yours,” he said, watching with amused enjoyment as realization dawned in her face, “will never make it onto the ridge. Nothing up there but old logging trails.”
She swallowed visibly, took in the horses again and shook her head. “You’re not suggesting we—ride?” The hesitation was so brief it might have gone unnoticed, if Jesse hadn’t had so much practice at picking out the very things other people tried to hide. “On horseback?”
He waited, arms folded. “That’s the usual purpose of saddling up,” he said. “Two people. Two horses. No special mental acuity required to figure it out.”
Cheyenne shifted on the soles of her fancy shoes. They’d work in a boardroom, those shoes, but on the Triple M, they were almost laughable. “I wasn’t expecting to ride a horse.”
“I can see that,” Jesse observed. “You do realize that those five hundred acres you’re so anxious to bulldoze, pave and cover with condos are pretty rugged, and not a little remote?”
“Of course I do,” she said, faltering now. “I’ve done weeks of research. I know my business, Mr. McKettrick.”
“It’s Jesse,” he corrected. “And what kind of ‘research’ did you do, exactly? Maybe you dredged up some plat maps online? Checked out the access to power and the water situation?” He waited a beat to let his meaning sink in, then gave the suit another once-over. “At least you had sense enough to wear pants,” he added charitably.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Do you even own a pair of jeans?”
“I don’t wear jeans when I’m working,” she retorted. Her tone was moderate, but if she’d been a porcupine, her quills would have been bristling.
“I guess that lets boots out, too, then.”
She paused before answering, and looked so flustered that Jesse began to feel a little sorry for her. “I guess it does,” she said, and her shoulders slackened so that she had to grab the purse and resituate it before the strap slid down her arm.
“Come on inside,” he said, indicating the house with a half turn of his head. “Mom’s about your size. You can borrow some of her stuff.”
Cheyenne stood so still that she might have sprouted roots. Jesse could imagine them, reaching deep into the ground, winding around slabs of bedrock and the petrified roots of trees so ancient that they’d left no trace of their existence aboveground. “I don’t know—”
Jesse decided it was time to up the ante by a chip or two. “Are you scared, Ms. Bridges?”
Her mouth twitched at one corner, and Jesse waited to see if she was just irritated or trying not to smile. It was the latter; a small grin flitted onto her lips and then flew away. “Yes,” she said, with a forthrightness that made Jesse wish he hadn’t teased her, let alone set her up for the challenge she was facing now.
“Pardner’s a rocking horse,” he told her. “You could sit under his belly, blow a police whistle, grab his tail in both hands and pull it between his hind legs, and he wouldn’t move a muscle.”
She bit her lip. Jesse saw her eyes widen as she assessed Minotaur, then looked hopefully toward Pardner. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?” she asked when her gaze swung in Jesse’s direction again and locked on in a way that made the pit of his stomach give out like a trapdoor opening over a bottomless chasm. It happened so fast that he found himself scrabbling for an internal handhold, but he couldn’t seem to get a grip.
“No,” he said, but it wasn’t because he was being stubborn. Things had gone too far, and she couldn’t walk away now without leaving some of her self-respect behind. All he could do was make it as easy as possible. “Knowing the land isn’t a drive-by kind of thing, Cheyenne. You gotta be there, if it’s going to speak to you.”
“Maybe you could just give the plans a glance and I could come back another day—”
He put up a hand. “Whoa,” he said. “I could let you off the hook here, but you wouldn’t like me for it in the long run, and you’d think even less of yourself.”
She paused, looked ruefully down at her clothes. Huffed out a sigh. “Just look at the blueprints, Jesse. I’m not prepared—”
Jesse dug in his heels. He
sensed that this was a pivotal moment for both of them, far more important than it seemed on the surface. There was something archetypal going on here, though damned if he could have said what it was, for all those psychology classes he’d taken in college. “As if you’d come back out here, tomorrow or the next day, decked out to ride, and ask for the tour,” he said. He narrowed his eyes. “If you think I’m going to unroll those plans of yours on the kitchen table, see the error of my ways, and ask you where to sign, you’re in need of a reality check.”
She chewed on that one for a while, and Jesse knew if she hadn’t wanted that land half as badly as she did, she’d have told him what to do with both horses and possibly the barn, turned on one polished heel, stomped back to her car and left him standing there in the proverbial cloud of dust.
“All right,” she said. The words might as well have been hitched to a winch and hauled out of her.
“All right, what?”
Cheyenne sighed. “All right, I’ll borrow your mother’s clothes and ride that wretched horse,” she told him. “But if I get my neck broken, it will be on your conscience.”
Jesse indulged in a slow grin. He’d liked Cheyenne all along, but now he respected her, too, and that gave a new dimension to the whole exchange. She’d been brave enough to admit she was scared, and now she was stepping past that to stay in the game. “Nothing like that’s going to happen,” he assured her. “I know you’re a greenhorn, and I wouldn’t put you on a knot-head horse.”
With that, he led the way inside. While she waited in the kitchen, he scouted up some of his mother’s old jeans, a pair of well-worn boots and a flannel shirt. When he returned, she was looking out the window over the sink, apparently studying the schoolhouse.
“Is it really a one-room school?” she asked when he stepped up beside her and placed the pile of gear in her arms.
He nodded. “The blackboard’s still there, and a few of the desks,” he said. “It’s pretty much the way it was when old Jeb built it for his bride back in the 1880s.”
She looked up at him, her eyes wide and solemnly wistful. “Could I see it?”
“Sure,” he answered, frowning. “Why the sad look, Cheyenne?”
She tried to smile, but the operation wasn’t a success. Shrugged both shoulders and tightened her hold on the change of clothes. “Did I look sad? I’m not, really. I was just wondering what it would be like to have a history like you McKettricks do.”
“Everybody has a history,” he said, knowing she’d lied when she’d said she wasn’t sad.
“Do they?” she asked softly. “I never knew my dad’s parents. My maternal grandmother died when I was thirteen. Nobody tells stories. Nobody wrote anything down, or took a lot of pictures. We have a few, but I couldn’t identify more than two or three of the people in them. It’s as if we all just popped up out of nowhere.”
In that moment, Jesse wanted to kiss Cheyenne Bridges in a way he’d never wanted to kiss another woman. He settled for touching the tip of one finger to her nose because she was still as skittish as the deer he’d imagined when he’d first seen her again, behind Lucky’s, and he didn’t want to send her springing for the tall timber.
“Ready to ride?” he asked.
“I’m never going to be any readier,” she replied.
He gave her directions to the nearest bathroom, and she set out, walking straight-shouldered and stalwart, like somebody who’d been framed for a crime arriving at the prison, about to put on an orange jumpsuit with a number on the back and take her chances with the population.
THE JEANS WERE A LITTLE BAGGY, but the boots fit. Cheyenne folded her trousers, blazer and silk camisole neatly and set them on a counter. Arranged her favorite shoes neatly alongside. Looked into the mirror above the old-fashioned pedestal sink.
“You can do this,” she told herself out loud. “You have to do this.” She turned her head, looked at herself from one side, then the other. “And by the way, your hair looks ridiculous, pinned up like that.”
“Nothing for it,” her reflection answered.
She got lost twice, trying to find her way back to the kitchen, where Jesse was waiting, leaning back against the counter in front of the sink, arms folded, head cocked to one side. His gaze swept over her, and nerves tripped under the whole surface of her skin, dinging like one of Mitch’s computer games racking up points, headed for tilt.
“That’s more like it,” Jesse drawled. He seemed so at ease that Cheyenne, suffering by contrast, yearned to make him uncomfortable.
She couldn’t afford to do that, of course, so she quashed the impulse—for the moment. She’d take it out on Nigel later, over the telephone, when she reported that she’d risked life and limb for his damnable condominium development by getting on the back of a horse and trekking off into the freaking wilderness like a contestant on some TV survival show. Provided she didn’t end up in the intensive care unit before she got the chance to call him, anyway.
What she didn’t allow herself to think about was the bonus, and all it would mean to her, her mother and Mitch.
“Take it easy,” Jesse said, more gently than before. She had no defense against tenderness, and consciously raised her invisible force field. With the next breath, he made the whole effort unnecessary. “I told you—Pardner’s a good horse, and he’s used to kids and craven cowards.”
“I am not a coward,” Cheyenne replied tersely. “‘Craven’ or otherwise.”
Jesse grinned, thrust himself away from the counter and ambled toward the back door. There, he paused and gave her another lingering glance. “You’re obviously not a kid, either. My mistake.”
“You’re enjoying this,” she accused, following him outside into the warm spring morning. She’d been going for a lighthearted tone, but it came out sounding a little hollow and mildly confrontational.
He crossed to the horses, took the brute he called Pardner by the reins. “All aboard,” he said.
Cheyenne walked steadily toward the man and the horse because she knew if she stopped, she might not get herself moving again.
“You’ve never been in the saddle before?” Jesse asked, marveling, when she got close to him and that beast. “How’d you manage that, growing up in Indian Rock just like I did?”
They’d shared a zip code and gone to the same schools, Cheyenne reflected. Beyond those similarities, they might as well have been raised on different planets. Unable to completely hide her irritation, whatever the cost of it might be, she gave Jesse a look as she put a foot in the stirrup and grabbed the saddle horn in both hands. “I guess I was so busy with debutante balls and tea at the country club,” she quipped, “that I never got around to riding to the hounds or playing polo.”
Jesse laughed. Then he put a hand under her backside and hoisted her unceremoniously onto the horse in one smooth but startlingly powerful motion.
She landed with a thump that echoed from her tailbone to the top of her spine.
“You can let go of the horn,” he said. “Pardner will stand there like a monument in the park until I get on Minotaur and take off.”
Cheyenne released her two-handed death grip, finger by finger. “You won’t make him run?”
Jesse laid a worn leather strap in her left palm, closed her hand around it, then ducked under Pardner’s head to do the same on the other side. “Hold the reins loosely,” he instructed, “like this. He’ll stop at a light tug, so don’t yank. That’ll hurt him.”
Cheyenne nodded nervously. The creature probably weighed as much as a Volkswagen, and if either of them got hurt, odds on, it would be her. Just the same, she didn’t want to cause him any pain.
She was in good shape, but the insides of her thighs were already beginning to ache. She wondered if it would be ethical to put a gallon or two of Ben-Gay on her expense account so she could dip herself in the stuff when she got home.
“You’re okay?” Jesse asked after a few beats.
She bit down hard on her lower lip and nodded o
nce, briskly.
He smiled, laid a hand lightly to her thigh, and turned to mount his horse with the easy grace of a movie cowboy. If Nigel had been there, armed with his seemingly endless supply of clichés, he probably would have remarked that Jesse McKettrick looked as though he’d been born on horseback, or that he and the animal might have been a single entity.
Jesse nudged his horse’s sides with the heels of his boots, and it began to walk away.
“No spurs?” Cheyenne asked, drawing on celluloid references, which constituted the extent of her knowledge of cowboys. It was an inane conversation, but Pardner was moving, and she had to talk to keep herself calm.
Jesse frowned as though she’d suggested stabbing the poor critter with a pitchfork. “No spurs on the Triple M,” he said. “Ever.”
Cheyenne clutched the reins, her hands sweating, and waited for her heart to squirm back down out of her throat and resume its normal beat. The ride wasn’t so bad, really—just a sort of rolling jostle.
As long as an impromptu Kentucky Derby didn’t break out, she might just survive this episode. Anyway, it was a refreshing change from shuffling paperwork, juggling calls from Nigel and constantly meeting with prospective investors.
Reaching a pasture gate, Jesse leaned from the saddle of his gelding to free the latch. The fences, Cheyenne noted, now that she wasn’t hyperventilating anymore, were split-rail as far as she could see. The wood was weathered, possibly as old as the historic schoolhouse Jesse had promised to show her when they got back, and yet the poles stood straight.
Just as there were no spurs on the Triple M, she concluded, there appeared to be no barbed wire, either. Considering the size of the spread—the local joke was that the place was measured in counties rather than acres—that was no small feat.
Cheyenne rode through the gate, waited while Jesse shut it again.
“I don’t see any barbwire,” she said.
“You won’t,” Jesse answered, adjusting his hat so the brim came down low over his eyes. “There isn’t any. Horses manage to tear themselves up enough as it is, without rusty spikes ripping into their hide.”
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