Brad opened his saddlebags and brought out a long-sleeved thermal shirt, extended it to Meg. She hesitated a moment— that damnable McKettrick pride again—then took the shirt and pulled it on, right over the top of her coat.
The effect was comically unglamorous.
"Where's a Starbucks when you need one?" she joked.
Brad grinned. 'There's an old line shack up the trail a ways," he told her. "Big John always kept it stocked with supplies, in case a hiker got stranded and needed shelter. It's not Starbucks, but I'll probably be able to rustle up a pot of coffee and some lunch. If you don't mind the survivalist packaging."
Meg's relief was visible, though she wouldn't have expressed it verbally, Brad knew. "We didn't need to bring the blankets and other gear then," she reasoned. "If there's a line shack, I mean."
"You've been living in the five-star lane for too long," Brad replied, but the jibe was a gentle one. "A while back, some hunters were trespassing on this land—Big John posted No Hunting signs years ago—and a snowstorm came up. They were found, dead of exposure, about fifty feet from the shack."
She shivered. "I remember," she said, and for a moment, her blue eyes looked almost haunted. The story had been a gruesome one, and she obviously did remember—all too clearly.
"We're not all that far from the ranch," Brad said. "It would probably be best if I took you back."
Meg's gaze widened, and grew more serious. "And you'd turn right around and come back up here to look fori Ransom?"
"Yes," Brad answered, resigned.
"Alone."
He nodded. Once, Big John would have made the journey with him. Now there was no one.
"I'm staying," Meg said and shifted slightly, as if planting her feet. "You invited me to come along, in case you've forgotten."
"I shouldn't have. If anything happened to you—"
"I'm a big girl, Brad," she interrupted.
He looked her over, and—as always—liked what he saw. Liked it so much that his throat tightened and he had a hard time swallowing so he could hold up his end of the conversation. "You probably weigh a hundred and thirty pounds wrapped in a blanket and dunked into a lake. And despite your illustrious heritage, you're no match for a pack of wolves, a sudden blizzard, or a chasm that reaches halfway to China."
"If you can do it," Meg said, "I can do it."
Brad shoved a hand through his hair, exasperated even though he knew it was his own fault that Meg was in danger. After all, he had asked her to come along, half hoping the two of them would end up sharing a sleeping bag.
What the hell had he been thinking?
The pertinent question, he decided, was what had he been thinking with—not his brain, certainly.
"We'd better get moving again," she told him, when he didn't speak. Before they'd left the ranch, he'd given her a pair of binoculars on a neck strap; now she pulled them out from under the donated undershirt, her coat, and whatever was beneath that. "We have a horse to find."
Brad nodded, cupped his hands to give her a leg up onto Cinnamon's back. She paused for a moment, deciding, before setting her left foot in the stirrup of his palms.
"This is a tall horse," she said, a little flushed.
"We should have named him Stilts instead of Cinnamon," Brad allowed, amused. Meg, like the rest of her cousins, had virtually grown up on horseback, as had he and Olivia and the twins. She'd interpret even the smallest courtesy—the offer of a boost, for instance—as an affront to her riding skills.
Forty-five minutes later, Meg, using the binoculars, spotted Ransom on the crest of a rocky rise.
"There he is!" she whispered, awed. "Wait till I tell Jesse he's real!"
After a few seconds, she lifted the binoculars off her neck by the strap and handed them across to Brad.
Brad drew in a breath, struck by the magnificence of the stallion, the defiance and barely restrained power. A moment or so passed before he thought to scan the horse for wounds. It was hard to tell, given the distance, even with binoculars, but Ransom wasn't limping, and Brad didn't see any blood. He could report to Olivia, in all honesty, that the object of her equine obsession was holding his own.
Before lowering the binoculars, Brad swept them across the top of that rise, and that was when he saw the two mares. He chuckled. Ransom had himself a harem, then.
He watched them a while, then gave the binoculars back to Meg, with a cheerful, "He has company."
Meg's face glowed. "They're beautiful," she whispered, as if afraid to startle the horses and send them fleeing, though they were well over a mile away, by Brad's estimation. "And Ransom. He knows we're here, Brad. It's almost as if he wanted to let us see that he's all right."
Brad raised his coat collar against a chilly breeze and wished he'd worn his hat. He'd considered it that morning, but it had seemed like an affectation, a way of asserting that he was still a cowboy, by his own standards if not those of the McKettricks. "He knows," he agreed finally, "but it's more likely that he's taunting us. Catch-me-if-you-can. That's what he'd say if he could talk."
Meg's entire face was glowing. In fact, Brad figured if he could strip all those clothes off her, that glow would come right through her skin and be enough to warm him until he died of old age.
"How about that coffee?" she said, grinning.
***
After seeing Brad's kitchen on Stone Creek Ranch, Meg had expected the "line shack" to be a fancy log A-frame with a Jacuzzi and Internet service. It was an actual shack, though, made of weathered board. There was a lean-to on one side, to shelter the horses, but no barn, with hay stored inside. Brad gave the animals grain from a sealed metal bin, and filled two water buckets for them from a rusty old pump outside.
Meg might have gone inside and started the fire, so they could brew the promised coffee, but she was mesmerized, watching Brad. It was as though the two of them had somehow gone back in time, back to when all the earlier McKettricks and O'Ballivans were still in the prime of their lives.
Once, there had been several shacks like that one on the Triple M, far from the barns and bunkhouses. Ranch hands, riding the far-flung fence lines, or just traveling overland for some reason, used to spend the night in them, take refuge there when the weather was bad. Eventually, those tiny buildings had become hazards, rather than havens, and they'd been knocked down and burned.
"Pretty decrepit," Brad said, leading the way into the shack.
Things skittered inside, and the smell of the place was faintly musty, but Brad soon had a good fire going in the ancient potbellied stove. There was no furniture at all, but shelves, made of old wooden crates stacked on top of each other, held cups, food in airtight silver packets, cans of coffee.
The whole place was about the size of Meg's downstairs powder room on the Triple M.
"I'd offer you a chair," Brad said, grinning, "but obviously there aren't any. Make yourself at home while I rinse out these cups at the pump and fill the coffeepot."
Meg examined the plank floor, sat down cross-legged, and reveled in the warmth beginning to emanate from the wood-burning stove. The shack, inadequate as it was, offered a welcome respite from the cold wind outside. The hunters Brad had mentioned probably wouldn't have died if they'd been able to reach it. She remembered the news story; the facts had been bitter and brutal.
Like Stone Creek Ranch, the Triple M was posted, and hunting wasn't allowed. Still, people trespassed constantly, and Rance, Keegan and Jesse enforced the boundaries— mostly in a peaceful way. Just the winter before, though, Jesse had caught two men running deer with snowmobiles on the high meadow above his house, and he'd scared them off with a rifle shot aimed at the sky. Later, he'd tracked the pair to a tavern in Indian Rock—strangers to the area, they'd laughed at his warning—and put both of them in the hospital. He might have killed them, in fact, if Keegan hadn't gotten wind of the fight and come to break it up, and even with his help, it took the local marshal, Wyatt Terp, his deputy, and half the clientele in the bar to
get Jesse off the second snow-mobiler. He'd already pulverized the first one.
There was talk about filing assault charges against Jesse, and later it was rumored that there might be lawsuits, but nothing ever came of either. Meg, along with everybody else in Indian Rock, doubted the snowmobilers would ever set foot in town again, let alone on the Triple M.
But there was always, as Keegan liked to say, a fresh supply of idiots.
Brad came in with the cups and the full coffeepot, shoving the door closed behind him with one shoulder. Again, Meg had a sense of having stepped right out of the twenty-first century and into the nineteenth.
Despite cracks between the board walls, the shack was warm.
Brad set the coffeepot on the stove, measured ground beans into it from a can, and left it to boil, cowboy-style. No basket, no filter.
Then he emptied two of the crates being used as cupboards and dragged them over in front of the stove, so he and Meg could sit on them.
Overhead, thunder rolled across the sky, loud as a freight train.
Meg stiffened. "Rain?"
"Snow," Brad said. "I saw a few flakes drift past while I was outside. Soon as we've warmed up a little and fortified ourselves with caffeine and some grub, we'd better make for the low-country."
Had there been any windows, Meg would have gotten up to look out of one of them. She could open the door a crack, but the thought of being buffeted by the rising wind stopped her.
By reflex, she scrambled to extract her cell phone from her coat pocket, flipped it open.
"No service," she murmured.
"I know," Brad said, smiling a little as he rose off the crate he'd been sitting on to add wood to the stove. Fortunately, there seemed to be an adequate supply of that. "I tried to call Olivia and let her know Ransom was still king of the hill a lew minutes ago. Nothing."
Another round of thunder rattled the roof, and out in the lean-to, the horses fussed in alarm.
"Be right back," Brad said, heading for the door.
When he returned, he had a bedroll and Meg's pitifully insufficient blanket with him. And the horses were quiet.
"Just in case," he said when Meg's gaze landed, alarmed, on the overnight gear. "It's snowing pretty hard."
Meg, feeling foolish for sitting on her backside while Brad had been tending to the horses and fetching their gear inside, stood to lift the lid off the coffeepot and peek inside. The water was about to boil, but it would be a few minutes before the grounds settled to the bottom and they could drink the stuff.
"Relax, Meg," Brad said quietly. "There's still a chance the snow will ease up before dark."
At once tantalized and full of dread at the prospect of spending the night alone in a line shack with Brad O'Ballivan, Meg paced back and forth in front of the stove.
She knew what would happen if they stayed.
She'd known when she accepted Brad's invitation. Known when she set out for Stone Creek Ranch before dawn.
And he probably had, too.
She shoved both hands into her hair and paced faster.
"Meg," Brad said, sitting leisurely on his upended crate, "relax."
"You knew," she accused, stopping to shake a finger at him. "You knew we'd be stuck here!"
"So did you," Brad replied, unruffled.
Meg went to the door, wrenched it open and looked out, oblivious to the cold. The snow was coming down so hard and so fast that she couldn't see the pine trees towering less than a hundred yards from where she stood.
Attempting to travel under those conditions would be suicide.
Brad came and helped her shut the door again.
On the other side of the wall, in the lean-to, the horses made no sound.
Meg was standing too close to Brad, no question about it. But when she tried to move, she couldn't.
They looked into each other's eyes.
The very atmosphere zinged around them.
If Brad had kissed her then, she wouldn't have had the will to do anything but kiss him right back, but he didn't. "I'd better get some drinking water," he said, turning away and reaching for a bucket. "While I can still find my way back from the pump."
He went out.
Meg, needing something to do, pushed the coffeepot to the back of the stove so it wouldn't boil over and then examined a few of the food packets, evidently designed for post-apocalyptic dinner parties. The expiration dates were fifty years in the future.
"Spaghetti à la the Starship Enterprise," she muttered. There was Beef Wellington, too, and even meat loaf. At least they wouldn't starve.
Not right away, anyhow.
They'd starve slowly.
If they didn't freeze to death first.
Meg tried her cell phone again.
Still no service.
It was just as well, she supposed. Cheyenne knew her approximate location. Jesse would feed her horses, and if her absence was protracted, he and Keegan and Rance were sure to come looking for her. In the meantime, though, there would be a lot of room for speculation about what might be going on up there in the high country. And Jesse wouldn't miss a chance to tease her about it.
She was still holding the phone when Brad came in again, carrying a bucket full of water. He looked so cold that Meg almost went to put her arms around him.
Instead, she poured him a cup of hot coffee, still chewy with grounds, and handed it to him as soon as he'd set the bucket down.
"I don't suppose there's a generator," she said because the shack was darkening, even though it wasn't noon yet, and by nightfall, she wouldn't be able to see the proverbial hand in front of her face.
He favored her with a tilted grin. "Just a couple of battery-operated lamps and a few candles. We'll want to conserve the batteries, of course."
"Of course," Meg said, and smiled determinedly, hoping that would distract Brad from the little quaver in her voice.
"We don't have to make love," Brad said, lingering by the stove and taking slow, appreciative sips from his coffee. "Just because we're alone, in a remote line shack during what may he the snowstorm of the century."
"You are not making me feel better."
That grin again. It was saucy, but it had a wistful element. "Am I making you feel something?"
"Nothing discernible," Meg lied. In truth, all her nerves felt supercharged, and her body was remembering, against strict orders from her mind, the weight and warmth of Brad's hands, caressing her bare skin.
"I used to be pretty good at it. Making you feel things, that is."
"Brad," Meg said, "don't."
"Okay," he said.
Meg was relieved, but at the same time, she wished he hadn't given up quite so easily.
"You wanted coffee," Brad remarked. "Have some."
Meg filled a cup for herself. Scooted her crate an inch or two farther from Brad's and sat down.
The shadows deepened and the shack seemed to grow even smaller than it was, pressing her and Brad closer together. And then closer still.
"This," Meg said, inspired by desperation, "would be a good time to talk about your second wife. Since we've been putting it off for a while."
Brad chuckled, fished in his saddlebags, now lying on the floor at his feet, and brought out a deck of cards. "I was thinking more along the lines of gin rummy," he said.
"What was her name again?"
"What was whose name?"
"Your second wife."
"Oh, her."
"Yeah, her."
"Cynthia. Her name is Cynthia. And I don't want to talk about her right now. Either we reminisce, or we play gin rummy, or—"
Meg squirmed. "Gin rummy," she said decisively. 'There is no reason at all to bring up the subject of sex."
"Did I?"
"Did you what?"
"Did I bring up the subject of sex?"
"Not exactly," Meg said, embarrassed.
Brad grinned. "We'll get to that," he said. "Sooner or later."
Meg swallowed so much coffee in the
next gulp that she nearly choked.
"There are some things I've been wondering about," Brad said easily, watching her over the rim of his metal coffee mug. His eyes smoldered with lazy blue heat.
Outside, the snow-thunder crashed again, but the horses didn't react. They'd probably already settled down for the night, snug in their furry hides and their lean-to.
"I'm hungry," Meg said, reaching for one of the food packets.
Brad went on as though she hadn't spoken at all. "Do you still like to eat cereal with yogurt instead of milk?"
Meg swallowed. "Yes."
"Do you still laugh in your sleep?"
"I—I suppose."
"Do you still arch your back like a bucking horse when you climax?"
Meg's face felt hotter than the old stove, which rocked a little with the heat inside it, crimson blazes glowing through the cracks. "What kind of question is that?"
"A personal one, I admit," Brad said. He might have passed for a choirboy, so innocent was his expression, but his eyes gave him away. They had the old glint of easy confidence in them. He knew he could have her anyplace and anytime he wanted— he was just biding his time. "I'll know soon enough, I guess."
"No," she said.
"No?" He raised an eyebrow.
"No, I don't arch my back when I—I don't arch my back."
"Hmmmm," Brad said. "Why not?"
Because I don't have sex, Meg almost answered, but in the last, teetering fraction of a second, she realized she didn't want to admit that. Not to Brad, the man with all the notches on his bedpost.
"You haven't been sleeping with anybody?" he asked.
"I didn't say that," Meg replied, keeping her distance, mainly because she wanted so much to take Brad's coffee from his hand, set it aside, straddle his thighs and let him work his slow, thorough magic. Peeling away her outer garments, kissing and caressing everything he uncovered.
"Nobody who could make you arch your back?"
Meg was suffused with aching, needy misery. She'd been in fairly close proximity to Brad all morning, and managed to keep her perspective, but now they were alone in a remote shack, and he'd already begun to seduce her. Without so much as a kiss, or a touch of his hand. With Brad O'Ballivan, even gin rummy would qualify as foreplay.
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