Austin

by Linda Lael Miller

  Happy tears stung her eyes. “Oh, Austin,” she whispered.

  “I love you,” he repeated, as though fearing he might lose his momentum if he didn’t keep right on talking. “And I’m asking you to marry me, and have our babies and live on this ranch with me from now on. Will you do it?”

  “Of course I will,” Paige answered softly. “I love you, too, Austin. And I can’t think of any better way to spend the rest of my life than with you.”

  Austin’s eyes widened—was it possible that he’d expected her to refuse?

  In the next moment, he confirmed that with, “You mean it?”

  “I mean it,” she said.

  A sort of joy suffused his face, and he let out a whoop of pure exultation. “Let’s go inside, then, and I’ll give you the ring.”

  Paige laughed—and cried. She put her hands on either side of his face and felt the first stubble of a new beard coming in. “There’s a ring?” she asked.

  Austin pretended indignation. “Well, of course there’s a ring, woman. What do you take me for?”

  “A man who needs to be made love to?”

  His eyes shone. “I reckon I fit that description,” he said. “But we’re going inside first. I just brought you in here because I’d been thinking about doing what I did all night long and I couldn’t wait any longer.”

  Just outside the door, Shep made a whiny sound.

  Austin grinned and helped Paige back to her feet. With his arm around her waist, she easily managed to move, hop-skippity, back to where they’d left her crutches.

  Shep, glad to be in human company again, trotted happily beside them.

  Down at the main gates, two sets of headlights indicated that Garrett and Julie and Tate and Libby, along with the three kids, were home.

  Austin and Paige were about halfway between the barn and the house when the deafening boom came, so loud it had a physical impact, nearly throwing them to the ground.

  “The oil field,” Austin gasped, both arms around Paige, as though to shield her from anything that might come at them, from any direction.

  Paige looked in that direction, saw what Austin had already seen.

  A tower of flame rose hundreds of feet into the air, and even from that distance, they could feel the heat.

  Paige pressed a hand to her mouth, trembling, clinging to Austin with both hands, her crutches forgotten on the ground.

  Tate and Garrett were out of their trucks within a moment of stopping, running toward them.

  “Are you all right?” Garrett yelled.

  At least, Paige thought it had been Garrett; in the darkness and confusion, she couldn’t tell.

  Austin didn’t answer his brother directly. He nodded to Libby, who bent to retrieve Paige’s crutches and hand them back to her.

  “Keep her here,” Austin said.

  Libby said she would.

  Sirens screamed in the distance, and the night had taken on a hellish orange tint.

  Tate, Garrett and Austin were gone all at once, racing away in Tate’s truck, with God only knew what kind of fate awaiting them.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE BLAZING OIL WELL was like the heat from a blast furnace, and for all their hurry, Austin knew they couldn’t get any closer.

  “Where the hell are the security people?” Garrett yelled. The fastest talker in the bunch, he was always the first to break a silence.

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?” Tate yelled back.

  Austin, shielding his eyes the way he would have done in bright sunlight, tried to see. By the looks of that fire, he figured the so-called security people would probably be dropping from the sky in charred chunks for the next hour or so.

  A movement off to his right caught his attention. Somebody was alive, he thought, and headed that way at a sprint, orbiting the edge of the blistering, throbbing heat.

  Tate and Garrett followed, though whether they’d seen something, too, or just wanted to stop him from getting hurt, he didn’t know.

  The flames cast an eerie glow ahead of him as he ran, as if to light his way. And the trail led straight to Cliff Pomeroy.

  Clothes blackened, hair singed away, but seemingly unharmed otherwise, Pomeroy was trying desperately to drag something—someone—to safety. He must have been farther away when the blast came.

  It was, Austin soon noticed, too late for Reese. Only a portion of his face remained; the rest of him was literally cooked. Austin figured he’d never forget the smell, and he gagged as he took hold of Cliff’s arm.

  Austin hadn’t needed the rumble under his feet to tell him that there was another explosion coming, with no telling how many more to follow. There were a total of seven wells on that stretch of land, and the pools of crude underground might well be interconnected.

  Nobody really knew how far the deposit extended, or in what directions. It was entirely possible that the house itself sat on top of a hundred dead dinosaurs, transformed into oil over millions of years; it might even reach as far as downtown Blue River or beyond.

  Tate and Garrett bolted out of the darkness, and both of them yanked a weeping, blathering Cliff into motion.

  “Goddammit,” Tate yelled at Austin. “Run!”

  They ran, made it a hundred yards or so before the next blast roared against their eardrums like the crack of doom. The impetus of the explosion sent them all sprawling, scrambling back to their feet, covering as much ground as they could before the next horrific boom, and the one after that.

  The four men took shelter in the shadow of another derrick, a thing reminiscent of a giant insect in the weird flashes of light and heat.

  “Cliff,” Tate choked out, crouching in front of the man, “talk to me!”

  The sirens were closer.

  Austin pictured Blue River’s antiquated fire engine rolling up, with a cartoonlike aplomb, and all the volunteers bumbling into each other, tripping over hoses. The image brought a smile to his face.

  A blaze like this one, if it could be put out at all, called for an elite team of specialists, firefighters trained to handle the hottest kind of fires—those fed by gas and oil.

  “We’ve got to go back and get Bobby!” Cliff wailed. “I lost sight of him before the well blew—”

  It was hard to tell if Cliff was hurt and, if so, how badly. Yes, his hair was gone and his clothes were in scorched tatters, but he didn’t seem to be in pain.

  Shock, maybe, Austin thought glumly.

  “Bobby’s gone,” Tate said bluntly but not without a certain understandable regret. “There was a security team out here, Cliff,” he pressed, in the next moment. “What happened to them?”

  “I figure Bobby must have shot one after he ran off and left me at the truck,” Cliff sobbed out, getting all tangled up in his own words. “The other guy, he took off for town for some reason, and we saw our chance—”

  “Bobby?” Garrett asked, his voice real quiet.

  “Bobby Reese,” Cliff said, between long, horrendous shudders he couldn’t seem to control. “He was my boy, my stepson—”

  “Why, Cliff?” Tate persisted. “Why would you and—Reese—do a thing like this?”

  Cliff, sitting on his haunches now, seemed to siphon some kind of strength right up from the ground, the way a good well drew oil. “We didn’t have any choice!” he all but bellowed. “This is your fault!” he shouted, as Brogan’s squad car and the ambulance pulled up, lights splitting the flaming night. “Shutting down perfectly good oil wells! You McKettricks, you’ve got all the money in the world—what does it matter to you if everybody else does without?”

  “You set this fire to pay us back for capping the wells?” Garrett asked, appalled.

  Austin waited, knowing there was more.

  “Your daddy and me, we were partners. We had a deal. And he just cut me out, left me high and dry!”

  “Cliff,” Tate reasoned, probably wasting his breath. “You must have made millions from that partnership. How much would have been enough?�
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  “You don’t understand,” Cliff went on. “I had obligations.”

  “You and Bobby,” Garrett said quietly. “The rustling operation and the slaughtered cattle—you were behind those things, too, weren’t you?”

  Cliff laughed. It was a horrible sound to hear, like a shriek of pure agony. “Charlie Bates and the others took the fall. I made sure they knew we’d get them, even in jail, if they sold us out.” He paused, looked from Tate to Garrett to Austin, taking them all in. Clearly, he’d transferred his hatred and resentment for Jim McKettrick to his sons. “By God,” he wrapped up, “I hope that oil burns until hell freezes over. I hope there’s a honeycomb of the stuff, running under this whole ranch, all of it burning—”

  Garrett let out a long sigh, shaking his head.

  The ground shook again, and there was another blast, but this time it was more sound than fury.

  Brogan stumbled over to him, guided by the glare and by a flashlight, looking incongruous in his uptown suit. He was accompanied by several deputies, some men from town and Dr. Joe Colwin.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Brogan yelled over the whooshing growl, “I’d think the devil himself split the ground clear from hell to the surface!”

  Joe glanced at Austin, nodded grimly, and supervised while the paramedics loaded Cliff onto a stretcher, as carefully as they could, and the deputies searched the fringes of the heat for more casualties.

  They found the murdered security agent and what was left of Bobby Reese.

  The Blue River fire engine came, too, but the spectacle was bleak. Austin couldn’t imagine how he’d ever thought it could be funny.

  After the ambulance had gone, taking Cliff with it, and the coroner had arrived to collect the remains of the two dead men, there wasn’t much point in hanging around. Tate made a few calls and arranged for a firefighting team to come out from Dallas.

  Back at the main house, the women were waiting up, though the kids and the dogs had all settled down for the night.

  Libby and Julie had made a mountain of sandwiches, rightly anticipating that a crowd would gather, and Paige had fired up two industrial-sized coffee pots usually reserved for roundup, when there were always a lot of extra people on the ranch helping out.

  “Look at you,” Paige said, taking in Austin’s soot-covered clothes. Her eyes filled with tears. “Are you all right?”

  Austin smiled and touched his mouth to hers lightly, but with a charge of private electricity that arched between them. “I am now,” he answered. “I am now.”

  Paige let her forehead rest against his chest, heedless of the sweat and the dirt and even the other people milling and talking in that large room, and silently thanked God that he and Tate and Garrett had all come back safely, this time.

  They led dangerous lives, all three of these McKettrick men, just as their forebears had, and loving them meant accepting that, and making the most of every moment they got to spend together. It meant celebrating every heartbeat, every breath, sharing every joy and every sorrow—for as long as forever lasted.

  “Is this what it’s going to be like, Austin McKettrick, being married to you?” she asked in a whisper.

  His grin was a white slash in his filthy face. “Probably,” he said.

  “What happened?” she asked after swallowing a couple of times. Wild surges of emotion kept welling up inside her, overflowing in tears and making it hard to talk.

  Standing very close to her, Austin told Paige what he knew. At that point, it wasn’t much.

  Folks stayed around—many still in their good clothes because they’d been to see the play at the high school earlier in the night—eating sandwiches and drinking coffee and swapping stories about wells that had caught fire and burned for months, or even years.

  Just after dawn, two bits of news arrived at nearly the same moment. Tate got a call on his cell phone, telling him that the firefighting team had arrived from Dallas and were busy setting up operations over at the oil field. And Chief Brent Brogan arrived in person, showered and wearing a freshly pressed uniform, though he didn’t look to Paige as though he’d had any more sleep than the rest of them, to announce that Cliff Pomeroy had died during the night.

  It hadn’t been Cliff’s burns that killed him, though—those had proved to be fairly minor. After arriving at the clinic in Blue River by ambulance, he’d been cleaned up and treated, and the doctors, Joe Colwin included, had conferred and decided to keep him overnight, for observation, instead of letting him go to jail. He’d asked for rice pudding and calmly given a full confession to the chief, who was guarding the prisoner. He smiled when he talked about shooting down those cattle, just to spite the McKettricks. Reese had been the one to put a bullet in Austin that night, but Cliff took the credit for making the anonymous call to report that someone might be hurt.

  Over half an hour or so, Cliff had supplied a lot of information, and he’d named names. Thanks to the state police, a number of the suspects had already been rounded up.

  Around 3:30, Cliff had seized his chest with both hands, suffering what turned out to be a massive coronary, and Brogan had shouted for help. A medical team fought to save Cliff’s life, but there was no bringing him back.

  The task of waking old Doc Pomeroy with the news that his only son was dead had fallen to Chief Brogan, that being the nature of his job. Brogan had driven directly to the ranch after speaking with Doc, not to carry word of Cliff’s passing, but because the older man had asked him to let “somebody out there know” that he wouldn’t be able to stop by that morning, the way he’d planned, to look in on the dog and the little mare.

  Doc had sad business to attend to.

  After that, people began to leave the house, saying their quiet goodbyes, offering help if it should be needed, talking among themselves about what might be done to help ole Doc through the hard days ahead.

  Tate, exhausted, insisted on driving over to the oil fields to see what was happening with the fire, promising Libby he wouldn’t be gone long. Garrett and Austin went with him.

  The head of the firefighting team spoke frankly. They could probably contain the blaze, but it would take time and cost plenty.

  No surprises there, Austin thought wearily.

  Home looked as good as it ever had, when they got back. Maybe better, because Paige was inside that sprawling house, waiting for him. Libby was waiting for Tate, and Julie for Garrett.

  The three brothers parted ways in the kitchen, tired, saddened, but grateful, too, and in need of the sweet solace they knew awaited them, in the arms of their women.

  Austin took a long shower, washed away as much of the dirt and sweat and sadness as he could. When he stepped out, Paige was waiting, and she handed him a bath towel.

  With a sigh, Austin wrapped the towel around his waist without bothering to dry off. He was a great believer in evaporation.

  “I still want to ride that horse,” Paige said.

  “As soon as you’re out of that cast,” Austin replied, too tired to grin full out, but too amused not to try. “You can ride the horse that threw you.” He sighed, cupped her face in one hand. “Woman,” he added, “you are a piece of work.”

  “But you love me,” she said. She was pretty perky for somebody who had been up all night long.

  He leaned in. “I definitely love you,” he murmured, tasting her mouth.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” Paige said.

  Austin chuckled. “Sleep?” he echoed. “Sure. Eventually.”

  She tried to look stern. “You must be exhausted.”

  “And you aren’t?”

  “I’m just glad you’re back, safe and sound,” she replied. She stretched to kiss his mouth. “Come on, cowboy. You and I are going to hit the hay.”

  He chuckled. “I’m there,” he told her.

  THEIR LOVEMAKING WAS SLOW and quiet, a soothing dance of two tired bodies, and Paige gave herself up to it completely, well aware that she might so easily have lost Austin that night,
just as Libby could have lost Tate, and Julie, Garrett.

  Afterward, Austin sank into a deep sleep, and Paige lay on her side, propped up on one elbow, and simply watched him for a long, long time.

  She memorized the strong line of his jaw, his cheekbones and those eyelashes, wasted on a man. His mouth intrigued and invited her, even in repose.

  With a sigh, she shimmied down into the softness of the sheets, a delicious juxtaposition to the hard length of his frame.

  She awakened much later, but very suddenly, aware only that something was different.

  She opened her eyes and sat up, in a mild panic, but Austin was there, fully dressed and sitting in the rocking chair, watching her with a smile crooking up the side of his mouth. Shep, as always, was nearby, ears perked, alert and eager.

  “We were interrupted last night,” Austin said. “I wasn’t through proposing.”

  Paige laughed, so full of joy and well-being that she couldn’t help herself. “Well,” she purred, remembering how thoroughly he’d satisfied her, both in the barn and in the very bed where she was now, “you could have fooled me.”

  He took a small velvet box from the pocket of his shirt, moved to sit on the mattress beside her.

  Paige’s breath caught and her eyes burned, and the only sound she could make in that moment was a little strangled, “Oh.”

  Austin raised the lid of the box, revealing an exquisite diamond ring in an antique setting. “Clay McKettrick put this ring on his bride’s finger when she agreed to marry him, way back when they founded this ranch and this family.” He paused, cleared his throat. “You could probably do a lot better than me, Paige Remington, but you’ll never meet a man who loves you more than I do. If you throw in with me, I’ll spend the rest of my life proving you made the right decision.”

  Paige put a hand to her throat, waited for her heart to resume its normal rate again. Her vision blurred, and a tear slipped down her cheek. “Oh, Austin, I love you so much—”