A waiter wafted over. “May I bring you something, madame?”
Madame? She was twenty-seven, not fifty-seven. “Cappuccino,” she said, deliberately leaving off her customary please. “Non-fat, extra espresso.”
The waiter, immune to her charms, tightened his mouth and executed a terse little bow.
Gay for sure, she decided wearily. Not that it mattered.
She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them again. Looked at her watch. Ten minutes to six. Sighing, Brandi took out her cell phone and called her neighbor and best friend, Geoffrey. Maybe she should introduce him to the waiter, she thought. They’d probably hit it off right away—except that Geoffrey was nice and the waiter was snooty.
“Hey, girlfriend,” Geoffrey said with his usual warmth.
“Shimmy needs a walk,” Brandi answered, as a tall, elegantly dressed man appeared, stopped to speak to the hostess and immediately turned to sweep the gathering with his gaze, which immediately stopped on her. “And I’m not going to make it home before class starts—again. Can you help me out? Please?”
“As if the world needed another lawyer,” Geoffrey teased as Brandi watched the stranger approach, weaving his way confidently between tables, his lithe frame dappled in the shadows of palm leaves. “Sure, sugarplum. I’ll take care of Shimmy. You just concentrate on torts and depositions or whatever it is you’re learning.”
“Thanks, Geoff,” Brandi replied. “Bye for now.”
“Use me and throw me away,” Geoffrey said.
Brandi laughed and hung up.
“Mr. Meerland?” she asked. He was looming over her table now, smelling of expensive cologne and money.
The man nodded. Smiled. His teeth were capped, and the tan was probably fake. “Ms. Bishop, I presume? May I join you?”
Brandi suppressed another sigh. Until she’d met Dan Simmons a few months ago, she’d measured every man she encountered against Jesse McKettrick. Handsome and smooth as he was, Nigel Meerland fell short either way. “I don’t have much time, Mr. Meerland,” she said.
He dragged back a chair, sat down and turned to the waiter, who was just mincing over with Brandi’s cappuccino. “I won’t keep you long,” Meerland promised her after putting in an order for a scotch, neat.
All Brandi knew about Nigel Meerland was that he ran a real-estate development company based in San Diego. He’d looked her up on the Internet, he’d explained when he’d called her at work, promising it would be “worth your while” to meet with him. She’d been about to refuse when he’d mentioned Jesse’s name, and something inside her had gone on red alert. Instinct told her this was something she needed to deal with. Beyond that, she was mystified.
“I have a class in forty-five minutes,” she said. “And traffic will be bad, since rush hour’s on.”
Meerland smiled easily. I’ve got all the time in the world, his manner said. “You sell shoes in the daytime and attend law school at night,” he commented. “Impressive. You’re obviously ambitious, and I like that in a person.”
Brandi’s internal warning system spiked to shrill. She scooted back in her chair, her spine stiffening. “What do you want, Mr. Meerland?” she asked.
“I understand you were briefly married to a man named Jesse McKettrick.”
Brandi frowned. She hadn’t touched her cappuccino, even though she really needed the caffeine. It was more than disquieting to realize just how much of her personal information and history was available to anybody with access to a computer.
“You’re a beautiful woman,” Meerland went on, when Brandi didn’t speak. “McKettrick was a fool to let you go.”
“The parting was mutual,” Brandi said. The guy was really beginning to creep her out. What if he was a serial killer or some kind of stalker?
The waiter brought Meerland’s scotch, presented it solicitously, and gave Brandi an irritated glance.
Meerland took a sip, his eyes smiling at Brandi over the rim of the glass. “Relax,” he said after swallowing. “I’m here to present you with a significant financial opportunity.”
Brandi pushed her chair back, tossed down a bill to cover the cost of her cappuccino. “You’re selling something, all right,” she said. “But I’m not buying.”
“Please hear me out,” Meerland wheedled.
Brandi remained seated, though she couldn’t have said why. “Make it quick,” she told him.
“You’re aware that your husband won some five million dollars in a poker championship last year and bought a significant tract of land with the proceeds?”
“Ex-husband,” Brandi clarified. “I saw the tournament on TV. What Jesse did with the money is his own business.”
Meerland rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Search though I might, I can’t seem to find a record of the divorce,” he said.
Brandi sat up straighter. She and Jesse were divorced. She’d signed the papers, and so had he. She had a copy at home, in her file cabinet. “What are you getting at?”
“My company desperately needs that land I just referred to. We’re offering almost double what Mr. McKettrick paid for it. He refuses to even consider the deal. If you take this to court—whether you’re divorced or not—you can probably claim as much as half his winnings. Or you can force him to sell the property he purchased, and collect your share of the proceeds.”
Brandi swallowed. She made good money, selling shoes on commission in an upscale department store, and whenever she was in a pinch, all she had to do was call Jesse and he’d transfer funds straight into her bank account. She’d kept a tally, intending to pay him back when she got out of law school.
Now, as the possibilities of what Meerland was suggesting crashed over her like a tsunami, she felt herself go pale.
“We’re talking about approximately four and a half million dollars here,” Meerland said, pressing his advantage. “That would be your share. If McKettrick sells us the land.”
“No,” she said. “No. I couldn’t do that to Jesse. Anyway, we are divorced, and I can prove it.” Not that she intended to prove anything to Nigel Meerland. She didn’t have to.
“Your marital status may not matter, if you get the right lawyer and the right judge.” Meerland turned his glass round and round with one hand, idly, frowning into the amber swirl of liquid. “I understand your dad got hurt at work,” he said. “He’ll be out of commission for a while. Bills are bound to accumulate. And you’re up to your eyeballs in student loans, aren’t you? So is your fiancé, the soon-to-be doctor. It takes a lot of money just to start a practice, what with the cost of malpractice insurance, for example—”
Brandi stood up, shaking. “I’ve heard enough,” she said. “I’m not for sale, and I’m not selling Jesse out to make a few bucks. Goodbye, Mr. Meerland, and thanks for nothing.”
Her dad drove an armored car for a security company, over in Phoenix, and six weeks ago he’d been shot in an attempted robbery. He’d need several surgeries to repair the shattered bones in his right leg. Brandi knew his disability payments would barely allow him to keep body and soul together—and he had a second wife, a mortgage and four kids. It would be nice to help him out.
Meerland fell into step beside her as she left the café by the outside gate.
“I hope I didn’t offend you,” he said mildly.
Brandi’s eyes burned and her stomach pitched. She’d never loved Jesse McKettrick, and he hadn’t loved her. She’d forgotten whose crazy idea it was to get married—though neither one of them normally drank to excess, they’d met in a club one night in Vegas and had gone on a bender together. Brandi had just been through a bad breakup, and Jesse had been having some kind of hassle with his family. They should have skipped the wedding entirely and gone straight to the sex, which had turned out to be nuclear. After a week locked away in a hotel suite on the Strip, practically swinging from the chandeliers, they’d discovered how little they shared in terms of common interests and long-term goals and had filed for a quickie divorce and gone their se
parate ways.
“Four and a half million dollars,” Meerland reiterated.
“No,” Brandi said. Her wheels were parked at the curb, an old wreck of a pickup truck, painfully out of place in Santa Monica, and she wished Meerland hadn’t seen it. Hoped it would start when she cranked up the engine so she could peel out.
“It would be so easy,” Meerland persisted. “Solve so many problems. Think of the start you and Dr. Dan could make with that much money. No debts. Maybe even private practice for both of you, right out of the chute. Smooth sailing.”
Everybody had a price, and for all her high regard for Jesse, who had been both generous and fair, for all her protests that she wasn’t for sale, Brandi was dangerously tempted.
She couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to make things easier for her dad, untangle her own financial snarl, and help Dan get established on top of that. She wouldn’t mind going straight into private practice herself, skipping all the hoops she’d have to jump through working her way up in someone else’s firm.
She climbed into the truck, slammed the door and fired up the engine.
Thank God, the motor roared to life.
Thank God, no parts fell off.
Brandi sped away. Half a mile from the restaurant, she pulled into a parking lot, fumbled for her telephone and called Dan.
FIRST THING SATURDAY MORNING, Cheyenne called the local equipment-rental place and ordered a tiller. Ayanna had already gone to work, and Cheyenne and Mitch were sharing an awkward breakfast—they’d barely spoken since yesterday’s argument—when the wonder machine was delivered.
Wearing a pair of her mother’s jeans and an old T-shirt she’d found in a bureau drawer, Cheyenne went outside to watch as the small tractor was unloaded from a flatbed truck. She’d cleared away the twisted coils of barbed wire and the old tires the day before, so she was good to go.
“Big job,” the deliveryman said, assessing the half acre of weeds surrounding them. “For a C-note, you can leave the driving to me.”
“Just show me how to run this thing,” Cheyenne answered, after considering the proposition for a few moments. A hundred dollars was a hundred dollars, and since Nigel might pull the plug on her paycheck at any time, considering how precarious his financial situation was, she wasn’t inclined to be extravagant.
The fellow shrugged. “Okay,” he said doubtfully.
The screen door slammed, and Cheyenne looked back to see Mitch coming down the ramp in his wheelchair.
“Just turn this key,” the deliveryman told Cheyenne. He pointed out the brake pedal, with exaggerated care, glanced at Mitch and shoved a clipboard into Cheyenne’s hands. “Sign here,” he told her. “I’ll come back for the tractor sometime this afternoon. If you’re not going to be around, leave the key under the seat.”
Cheyenne nodded, signed, and waited until the man got back into his truck and left before turning to Mitch.
He’d wheeled himself up on the other side of the tractor.
“Does this thing have a hand brake?” he asked. Cheyenne knew by his distracted tone that he was thinking aloud, rather than expecting an answer from her.
She answered anyway. “I don’t know.” She could start the machine and shut it off. The tilling blade was already attached, and there was a slide lever on the dash that probably raised and lowered it.
“It does!” Mitch cried, exultant, and before Cheyenne could react to that, her brother had hoisted himself out of the wheelchair and onto the seat of the small tractor. Granted, it was fairly low, but she’d never imagined he had that much upper-body strength.
The pit of her stomach quivered. “Mitch—”
He glared her into silence. Turned the key and fired up the engine. “I can do this,” he told her, and just like that, he was moving.
Cheyenne looked on, shading her eyes from the sun with one hand, as her brother began mowing under more than a decade’s worth of weeds. Like a farmer who had been tilling fields for years, he started at the outside of the yard and worked his way inward in ever-narrowing circles.
The smell of freshly turned earth awakened an old, half-forgotten joy in Cheyenne. She remembered working in the vegetable garden out behind the house, with Gram and Ayanna, planting tomatoes and corn that grew so tall, from a small child’s perspective, anyway, that it blocked out the sky.
It would be nice to have a garden, she reflected, with uncharacteristic whimsy. To sit on the back porch and listen to the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of a sprinkler, flinging droplets of shimmering water over green and growing things.
At a gesture from Mitch, she moved the wheelchair out of his way. A smile broke over her face as she watched him pass.
And then two things happened simultaneously.
Jesse McKettrick drove in, and the tractor overturned, pitching Mitch onto the ground.
Cheyenne raced toward her brother.
Jesse got there first and shut off the tractor.
“You okay, buddy?” he asked with another of his easy grins, crouching at Mitch’s side, opposite Cheyenne, who’d dropped to her knees.
Mitch nodded uncertainly. “There must have been a hole, hidden in the grass,” he said, sounding dazed. “I didn’t see it.”
“It could happen to anybody,” Jesse told him, but he was looking straight into Cheyenne’s eyes. Silently warning her not to panic.
She put a hand to her chest, trying not to hyperventilate. “You’re sure you’re not hurt?”
Mitch grinned. Now that the initial shock was past, he seemed almost proud of the spill he’d taken. “No,” he said. “I think I’m okay, but I can’t feel the lower half of my body. For all I know, I’ve broken both legs.”
“Better get you checked out,” Jesse said calmly. “Okay to move you, or do you want an ambulance?”
“No ambulance,” Mitch said.
At that, Jesse slipped both arms under Mitch, lifted him and carried him to his truck.
Cheyenne, still stricken, got to her feet and hurried after them. Opened the door on the passenger side, so Jesse could set Mitch on the seat.
“I’ll get my purse,” she said.
Mitch snapped his seat belt into place and tilted his head back, closed his eyes. Was he in pain? Pretending, perhaps for her sake, that he wasn’t?
“Take a breath,” Jesse told her. “There’s no emergency here.”
How did he know that? Cheyenne, feeling both exasperated and grateful that he was there to help, dashed into the house, got her bag and ran out again.
Jesse’s truck had an extended cab, and he was holding one of the back doors open for her when she returned.
“I hope this doesn’t mean I can’t ride that horse,” Mitch said as she buckled herself in.
“Forget the damn horse,” she said. “And I shouldn’t have let you near that tractor!”
Jesse, about to climb behind the wheel, paused with one foot on the running board and gave her another quelling look.
She swallowed, defiant and chagrined at the same time, and felt heat surge into her face.
“I’m probably all right,” Mitch said, and turned in the front seat to look back at her. “Anyhow, if one of us had to take a header off a tractor, I’d rather it was me than you.”
Jesse got into the truck, started the engine and drove out of the yard as calmly as if they were going for a drive, instead of heading for the hospital.
Did Indian Rock even have a hospital? Cheyenne knew there hadn’t been when she’d lived there before, but maybe one had been added.
“Want me to call your mom?” Jesse asked quietly. Clearly, he was addressing Mitch, not Cheyenne.
She opened her mouth to answer, just the same, then closed it again.
“No,” Mitch said. “She just started her new job, and I don’t want to get her upset for no reason.”
“No reason?” Cheyenne echoed. “You fell off a tractor—”
“Chill,” Mitch told her.
Five minutes later, they pulled up i
n front of the local clinic.
Jesse looked back at Cheyenne. “Wait here,” he said and got out of the truck to sprint across the ambulance bay.
A gray-haired doctor came outside almost immediately, followed by two nurses pushing a gurney. Jesse brought up the rear.
With a gentle smile, the physician opened Mitch’s door, assessed him with wise, gentle eyes, the color of old blue jeans. His face was rugged, etched deep with character lines.
“I’m Dr. Krischan,” he said to Mitch, before sparing Cheyenne a brief, kindly glance. “I hear you got bucked off a tractor.”
“I don’t think I’m hurt,” Mitch said.
Cheyenne’s heart pinched. Mitch had been through so much. What had possessed her to let him get on that monstrous piece of equipment? She should have known something like this would happen….
“Let’s just make sure,” Dr. Krischan said.
He and the nurses helped Mitch out of the car and placed him carefully on the stretcher. By then, Cheyenne was standing beside Jesse, and when he reached out and took her hand, she didn’t pull away, even though that was her first inclination.
Inside, Mitch was whisked off to an examination room while Cheyenne filled out the necessary forms. She’d been through the medical maze so many times, she knew the information by heart.
When that was done, though, she was at a loss.
There was nothing to do now but wait.
“Maybe I should call Mom after all,” she told Jesse.
He shook his head, led her to a chair, sat her down and brought her a bottle of water from a nearby vending machine. Took a seat next to her. “Mitch doesn’t want her to worry, remember?”
“She’s his mother,” Cheyenne fretted.
“And he’s a grown man.”
“He’s only nineteen.”
“A grown man,” Jesse repeated.
Cheyenne heaved a frustrated sigh. “Thank you, Jesse. For being there. For helping.”
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