McKettricks of Texas: Tate

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Only if you promise to take my turn babysitting Marva so I can—” Julie paused, cleared her throat “—leave town for a few days.”

  “We’re going somewhere?” Calvin asked, immediately excited. On a teacher’s salary, with the child support going into a college account, he and Julie didn’t take vacations.

  “Yes,” Julie answered, passing Libby an arch look. “If your aunt Libby will agree to look after Gramma while we’re gone, that is.”

  Calvin sagged with disappointment. “Nobody,” he said, “wants to spend any more time with Gramma than they have to.”

  “Calvin Remington,” Julie replied, without much sternness to her tone, “that was a terrible thing to say.”

  “You say it all the time.”

  “It’s still terrible, all right?” Julie turned to Libby. “Deal or no deal?”

  Agreeing would mean two weeks in a row on Marva-watch. But Libby needed those scones, if she didn’t want all her customers heading for Starbucks. “Deal,” she said, in dismal resignation.

  Julie grinned. “Great. See you in twenty minutes.”

  “Crap,” Libby muttered, when her sister and nephew had reached the sidewalk and she knew Calvin wouldn’t hear.

  Julie took half an hour to get back, not twenty minutes, and in the meantime there was a run on iced coffee, so Libby nearly missed the “ding” of the timer on the oven. She rescued the scones in the nick of time and sold the last one just as Julie waltzed in, all pleased with herself.

  “You’re going, aren’t you?” she asked, as soon as the customer and the scone were gone. “If Tate asks you out to dinner again, you’ll say ‘yes,’ not ‘maybe’?”

  “Maybe,” Libby said, annoyed. “And thanks a heap for sticking me with Marva for an extra week. I covered for you last month, remember, when you wanted to take your twelfth-grade drama class on that field trip to Dallas.”

  “They learned so much about Shakespeare,” Julie said.

  “And I came to understand the mysteries of matricide,” Libby said, cleaning the spigots on the espresso machine with a paper towel. “Are you seriously planning to leave town so you can avoid Gordon and the new bride?”

  “Yes,” Julie answered. “According to his e-mail, he sold his boat, or it sank or both and it went for salvage—I forget. That means good old Gordon is thinking of settling down, and I don’t want him asking for joint custody or something, just because he’s got a wife now.”

  “I understand where you’re coming from, Julie,” Libby said, after taking a few moments to prepare, “but you won’t be able to hide from Gordon forever—if he really wants to be part of Calvin’s life, he’ll find a way. And he has a right to at least see the little guy once in a while.”

  “Gordon Pruett is the most irresponsible man on the planet,” Julie reminded Libby, her eyes suspiciously bright and her voice shaking a little. “I can’t turn Calvin over to him every other weekend, or for whole summers or for holidays. For one thing, there’s the asthma.”

  A silence fell between them.

  Libby hadn’t witnessed one of Calvin’s asthma attacks recently, but when they happened, they were terrifying. Once, when he was still in diapers, he’d all but stopped breathing. Libby’s youngest sister, Paige, an RN, had jumped up and made sure he wasn’t choking, then grabbed him from his high chair at the Thanksgiving dinner table at a neighbor’s house, yelled for someone to call 911 and rushed to the shower, where she’d thrust the by-then-blue baby under an icy spray, drenching herself in the process, holding him there until his lungs were shocked into action.

  Libby could still hear his affronted, frightened shrieks, see him soaked and struggling to get to Julie, who bundled him in a towel and held him close, once he’d gotten his breath again, whispering to him, singing softly, desperate to calm him down.

  Paige had calmly turned on the hot water spigot in the shower then, and filled the bathroom with steam, and Julie had sat on the lid of the toilet, rocking a whimpering Calvin in her arms until the paramedics arrived.

  The toddler had spent nearly a week in the pediatric ward of a San Antonio hospital, Julie at his bedside around the clock, and it had taken Paige months to win back his trust. He was simply too little to understand that she’d saved his life.

  Now, he used an inhaler and Julie kept oxygen on hand, in their small cottage two blocks from the high school. Paige, living across the street from them in an old mansion converted to apartments, was on call 24/7 in case Calvin needed emergency intubation. Given that she usually worked four ten-hour shifts at a private clinic fifty miles from Blue River and the fire department EMTs were all volunteers, with little formal training, Paige had tried to show both Julie and Libby how to insert an oxygen tube, using a borrowed dummy.

  While Libby supposed she could do it if Calvin’s life were hanging in the balance, she was far from confident. It was the same with Julie.

  In frustration, Paige had finally recruited one of Blue River’s EMTs, a former Marine medic named Dennis Evans, and instructed her sisters to call him if Calvin had a serious asthma attack while she was too far away to help.

  Julie kept Dennis’s number on the front of her refrigerator, seven bright red, six-inch plastic digits with magnets on the back.

  So far, Calvin’s medications kept his condition under control, but Libby could certainly understand Julie’s vigilance. Whenever he went through a bad spell, Julie didn’t sleep, and dark circles formed under her eyes.

  “So,” Julie said now, returning to the main part of the shop after another batch of scones had been baked, and another rush of business had whisked the goodies out the door before they’d even cooled, “let’s talk about Tate.”

  “Let’s not,” Libby replied. She’d been a codependent fool to even think about accepting a date with him, considering that he’d probably begun the process of forgetting all about her as soon as she’d been forced to leave the university and come home to help look after her ailing father. She’d taken what courses she could at Blue River Junior College, which was really just a satellite of another school in San Antonio and had since closed due to lack of funding, but she’d only been marking time, and she knew it.

  “You really loved him, Lib,” Julie said gently, taking Calvin’s stool at the counter and studying Libby with thoughtful eyes.

  “That’s the whole point. I loved Tate McKettrick. He, on the other hand, loved a good time.” Libby sighed. She hated self-pity, and she was teetering on the precipice of it just then. She tried to smile and partly succeeded. “I guess it made sense that he’d be attracted to someone like Cheryl. She’s an attorney, and she was raised the way Tate and his brothers were—with every possible advantage. I didn’t even finish college. Tate and I don’t have a whole lot in common, when you think about it.”

  Julie frowned, bracing her elbows on the countertop, resting her chin in her palms. Her eyes took on a stormy, steel-blue color, edged in gray. “I really hope you’re not saying you aren’t good enough for Tate or anybody else, because I’m going to have to raise a fuss about it if you are.”

  Libby chuckled. “Julie Remington, making a scene,” she joked. “Why, I can’t even imagine such a thing.”

  Julie grinned, raised her beautiful hair off her neck with both hands to cool her neck, then let it fall again. “OK, so I might have been a bit of a drama queen in high school and college,” she confessed. “You’re just trying to distract me from the fact that I’m right. You think—you actually think—Tate threw you over for Cheryl because she fit into his world better than you would have.”

  Libby raised one eyebrow. “Isn’t that what happened?”

  “What happened,” Julie argued, “is this—Cheryl seduced Tate. Oil wells and big Texas ranches can be aphrodisiacs, you know. Maybe she intended all along to get pregnant and live like a Ewing out there on the Silver Spur.”

  “Oh, come on,” Libby retorted. “I might not admire the woman all that much, but it isn’t fair to put all the blam
e on her, and you damn well know it, Jules. It isn’t as if she used a date drug and had her way with Tate while he was unconscious. He could have stopped the whole thing if he’d wanted to—which he obviously didn’t.”

  “That was a while ago, Lib,” Julie said mildly, examining her manicure.

  “All right, so he was young,” Libby responded. “He was old enough to know better.”

  The front door of the shop swung open then, and Chief Brogan strolled in, sweating in his usually crisp tan uniform. He nodded to Julie, then swung his dark brown gaze to Libby.

  “Do I smell scones?” he asked.

  “Blueberry,” Julie confirmed, smiling.

  Brent Brogan, a fairly recent widower, was six feet tall with broad, powerful shoulders and a narrow waist. Tate had long ago dubbed him “Denzel,” since he bore such a strong resemblance to the actor, back in Denzel Washington’s younger years.

  His gaze swung in Julie’s direction, then back to Libby. “The usual,” he said. “Please.”

  “Sure, Chief,” Libby said, with nervous good cheer, and started the mocha with a triple shot of espresso he ordered every day at about the same time.

  Brent approached the counter, braced his big hands against it, and watched Libby with unnerving thoroughness as she worked. “I would have sworn I saw that Impala of yours rolling down the alley last night,” he said affably, “with the headlights out. Did you get the exhaust fixed yet?”

  “That was my car you saw,” Julie hastened to say.

  It was a good thing Calvin wasn’t around, because that was a whopper and he’d have been sure to point that out right away. Julie’s car was a pink Cadillac that had been somebody’s Mary Kay prize back in the mid-’80s. Even in a dark alley, it wouldn’t be mistaken for an Impala, especially not by a trained observer like Brent Brogan.

  Libby gave her sister a look. Sighed and rubbed her suddenly sweaty palms down her jean-covered thighs. “I had an appointment at the auto-repair shop,” she told Brent, “but then a pipe blew in the kitchen and I had to call a plumber and, well, you know what plumbers cost.”

  Brent slanted a glance at Julie, who blushed that freckles-on-pink way only true redheads can, and once again turned his attention back to Libby. “So it was you?”

  “Yes,” Libby said, straightening her shoulders. “And if you give me a ticket, I won’t be able to afford to have the repairs done for another month.”

  The timer bell chimed.

  Julie rushed to take the latest batch of scones out of the oven.

  “I’m going to give you one more warning, Libby,” Brent said quietly, raising an index finger. “Count it. One. If I catch you driving that environmental disaster again, without a sticker proving it meets the legal standards, I am so going to throw the book at you. Is—that—understood?”

  Libby set his drink on the counter with a thump. “Yes, sir,” she said tightly. “That is understood.” She raised her chin a notch. “How am I supposed to get the car to the shop if I can’t drive it?”

  Brent smiled. “I’d make an exception in that case, I guess.”

  Libby made up her mind to put the repair charges on the credit card she’d just paid off, though it would set her back.

  Julie looked toward the street, smiled and consulted an imaginary watch. “Well, will you look at that,” she said. “It’s time to pick Calvin up at playschool.”

  The pit of Libby’s stomach jittered. She followed her sister’s gaze and saw Tate walking toward the door, looking beyond good in worn jeans, scuffed boots and a white T-shirt that showed off his biceps and tanned forearms.

  Scanning the street, she saw no sign of his truck, the sleek luxury car he sometimes drove or his twin daughters.

  Libby felt as though she’d been forced, scrambling for balance, onto a drooping piano wire stretched across Niagara Falls. It was barely noon—Tate had suggested dinner, hadn’t he, not lunch?

  Either way, she reflected, trying to calm her nerves with common sense, she’d said “Maybe,” not “Yes.”

  Tate reached the door, opened it and walked in. His grin was as white as his shirt, and even from behind the register, Libby could see the comb ridges in his hair.

  He greeted Brent with a half salute. “Denzel,” he said.

  Brent smiled. “Throw those blueberry scones into a bag for me,” he said, though whether he was addressing Julia or Libby was unclear, because he was watching Tate. “I’d better buy them up before McKettrick beats me to the draw.”

  Tate was looking at Libby. His blue gaze smoldered that day, but she knew from experience that fire could turn to ice in a heartbeat.

  “You had any more trouble with those rustlers?” Brent asked.

  Libby ducked into the kitchen, nearly causing a sister-jam in the doorway because Julie had the same idea at the same time.

  “Rustlers?” Libby asked, troubled.

  “Not recently,” Tate told his friend. Looking down into Libby’s face, he added, “Rustling’s a now-and-again kind of thing. Not as dangerous as it looks in the old movies.”

  Julie squirmed to get past Libby and leave to pick Calvin up at the community center.

  “If you don’t come straight back here,” Libby warned her sister, momentarily distracted and keeping her voice low, “I’m only taking over with Marva for half of next week.”

  “Relax,” Julie answered, turning back and grabbing a paper bag and tongs to fill the chief’s scone order. “I’ll bake all afternoon, and bring you a big batch of scones and doughnuts in the morning. My oven is better than this one, and I really do have to fetch Calvin.”

  Libby blocked Julie’s way out of the kitchen and leaned in close. “What am I supposed to do if Brent leaves and Tate is still here?” she demanded.

  Julie raised both eyebrows. “Talk to the man? Maybe offer him coffee—or a quickie in the storeroom?” She grinned, full of mischief. “That’s about the only thing I miss about Gordon Pruett. Stand-up sex with a thirty-three percent chance of getting caught.”

  Libby blushed, but then she had to laugh. “I am not offering Tate McKettrick stand-up sex in the storeroom!” she said.

  “Now, that’s a damn pity,” Tate said.

  Libby whirled around, saw him standing in the doorway leading into the main part of the shop, arms folded, grin wicked, one muscular shoulder braced against the framework. Color suffused Libby’s face, so hot it hurt.

  Julie fled, giggling, with the bag of scones in one hand, forcing Tate to step aside, though he resumed his damnably sexy stance as soon as she’d passed.

  “Well,” he remarked, after giving a philosophical sigh, “I stopped by to repeat my offer to buy you dinner, since the girls are over at the vet’s with Ambrose and Buford and therefore temporarily occupied, but if you want to have sex in a storeroom or anyplace else, Lib, I’m game.”

  “Ambrose and Buford?” Libby asked numbly.

  “The dogs,” Tate explained, his eyes twinkling. “They’re getting checkups—‘wellness exams,’ they call them now—and shots.”

  “Oh,” Libby said, at a loss.

  “Could we get back to the subject of sex?” Tate teased.

  “No,” she said, half laughing. “We most certainly can’t.”

  He straightened, walked toward her, in that ambling, easy way he had, cupped her face in his hands. She loved the warmth of his touch, the restrained strength, the roughness of work-calloused flesh.

  His were the hands of a rancher.

  “Dinner?” he asked.

  “Are you going to kiss me?” she countered.

  He smiled. “Depends on your answer.”

  “If I say ‘no,’ what happens?”

  “You wouldn’t do a darn fool thing like that, now would you?” he asked, in a honeyed drawl. Although his body shifted, his hands remained where they were. “Turn down a free meal, and a tour of a plastic castle? Miss out on a perfectly good chance to see how Ambrose and Buford are adjusting to ranch life?”

  He mean
t to “buy” dinner at his place, then. The knowledge was both a relief and a whole new reason to panic.

  “Will Audrey and Ava be there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Garrett?”

  “No. Sorry. He had to get back to Austin.”

  “Pressing political business?”

  Tate chuckled. “Probably a hot date,” he said. “Plus, he’s afraid I’m going to kill him in his sleep for giving my kids a goddamn castle for their sixth birthday.”

  “Hmm,” Libby mused.

  “Well?” Tate prompted.

  “I have a question,” Libby said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why now? Why ask me out now, Tate—after all this time?”

  He looked thoughtful, and a few moments passed before he answered, his voice quiet. “I guess it took me this long to work up my courage.” He swallowed hard, met her gaze in a deliberate way. “Nobody would blame you if you told me to go straight to hell, Libby. Not after what I did.”

  She took that in. Finally, she said, “Okay.”

  “Is that an okay-yes, or an okay-go-take-a-flying-leap?”

  Libby had to smile. “I guess it’s an okay-one-dinner-is-no-big-deal,” she answered. “We are still talking about dinner, right?”

  Tate chuckled. God, he smelled good, like fresh air and newly cut grass distilled to their essences. And she’d missed bantering with him like this. “Yes, we’re still talking about dinner.”

  “Then, yes,” Libby said, feeling dizzy. After all, she’d promised Calvin she’d undo her lie if she got the chance, and here it was.

  “Right answer,” Tate murmured, and then he kissed her.

  The world, perhaps even the whole universe, rocked wildly and dissolved, leaving Libby drifting in the aftermath, not standing in her shabby little coffee-shop kitchen.

  Tate deepened the kiss, used his tongue. Oh, he was an expert tongue man, all right. Another thing she’d forgotten—or tried to forget.

  Libby moaned a little, swayed on her feet.

  Tate drew back. His hands dropped from her cheeks to her shoulders, steadying her.