McKettricks of Texas: Tate

by Linda Lael Miller

  While Hildie was outside, Libby changed into shorts, a sleeveless sweatshirt and flip-flops. She poured kibble in the dog’s empty bowl, refilled her water dish and pushed open the screen door.

  Hildie crunched happily away while Libby went outside, set her hands on her hips, and looked up at the gray sky. Texas had been in the grip of a drought for more than a decade, so any kind of precipitation was welcome, but her spirits dipped a little lower just the same.

  The only sure remedy for the blues, at least in Libby’s experience, was physical work—if it brought out a sweat and left her with achy muscles, so much the better. She hauled the mower out of the garage, considered the fact that it was made almost entirely of steel and put it back.

  Work therapy was one thing. Shock therapy, courtesy of a lightning bolt, was another.

  Hildie, finished with her supper, then scratched politely at the screen door from the inside.

  Libby smiled, mounted the porch steps and let the dog out.

  She was on her knees, pulling up weeds, when Hildie, lying under her favorite tree, out of the misty rain, rose to her haunches and gave an uncertain woof, more greeting than challenge.

  Something tickled Libby’s nose, so she ran a gloved hand across her face before turning around, expecting to see Julie, or Paige or even Marva.

  But it was Tate who stood watching her, a slight smile curving his mouth upward at one side. “Hey,” he said.

  Libby swallowed. If I filled a prescription for birth control pills, it’s my own business, she thought. “Hey,” she replied, feeling stupid.

  Tate hadn’t mentioned her prescription, had he? Most likely, Ellie hadn’t told Joe and therefore Joe couldn’t have told Tate. Ellie had been a mean gossip in high school, it was true, but that was years ago and besides, she’d found religion—and Joe—since then.

  “I tried to call,” he said, when the silence stretched. “But you didn’t pick up.”

  Libby hadn’t thought to check her voice mail when she came home from the Perk Up—she didn’t get that many calls. Paige and Julie usually just stopped by when they wanted to talk to her.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked, her face heated.

  Tate, wearing comfortable jeans, a T-shirt and old boots, crossed the grass and crouched beside her. “Well,” he drawled, “you can relax, for a start.”

  Libby fought an insane urge to weep, and that used up any energy she might have employed in talking. Anyway, she was too afraid she’d say something even stupider than What can I do for you?

  Gently, Tate used the backs of his fingers to wipe a smudge of dirt from Libby’s cheek. “I’ve missed you, Lib,” he said. “A lot.”

  She swallowed.

  One of his powerful shoulders moved in a partial shrug. That ghost-of-a-grin touched down on his mouth again, and she noticed that his eyelashes were spiky from the moisture in the air. “The last time we were together,” he reminded her, “things didn’t go all that well.”

  Libby stood up, telling herself it was because her knees were starting to cramp, and dusted her hands off against the damp fabric of her shorts.

  Tate stood, too. His dark hair curled a little in the light rain.

  It was all Libby could do not to bury her fingers in that hair. The thought made her flesh tingle, all over.

  She raised her chin a notch, remembering the minor spectacle the two of them had made, out there in Pablo’s orchard after the funeral.

  “I’ll apologize if you will,” she said.

  Tate laughed. “Deal,” he said. Then he sobered, and the blue of his eyes seemed to intensify. “I’m sorry.”

  Libby’s breath caught, just looking into those eyes. “Me, too.”

  If black holes were that color, she thought, the entire universe would have been sucked into oblivion long ago.

  “Maybe I could make it up to you with dinner,” Tate said.

  Libby blinked, pulled herself back from the blue precipice. Looked down at her muddy shorts and T-shirt. “I’d have to change clothes first,” she heard some foolish woman say.

  Tate grinned. “I was thinking of steaks at my place,” he told her. The grin rose to dance, mischievous, in his eyes. “We suspended the dress code years ago. In fact, we never really had one, unless you count Mom’s stubborn refusal to allow barn boots any farther than the back porch.”

  “I can’t go like this,” Libby said, still serious. “I’m all muddy and—and sweaty.”

  Tate chuckled. “All right,” he said, “if you’re going to insist, may I suggest that yellow dress? The one you wore the other night?”

  Libby’s cheeks burned again. Right. The yellow dress he’d said he could see through—the one she’d been so eager to get out of, after making such a big, damn deal about how it was too soon to make love.

  And now she had a packet of birth control pills in her medicine cabinet.

  Libby pretended she hadn’t heard his suggestion and started for the house.

  He chuckled.

  Hildie, the traitor, hung back so she could walk with Tate.

  While Tate waited in the kitchen with the dog, Libby headed for the bathroom. A glance at herself in the mirror over the sink made her shake her head.

  A streak of good Texas garden dirt ran the length of her right cheek, and her hair, caught up in the customary ponytail, would frizz like crazy when she turned it loose.

  She started the shower running, adjusting the faucets until she got just the right temperature—tepid, with the merest hint of a chill. She used a lot of conditioner after shampooing, hoping her hair wouldn’t do its fright-wig thing.

  Finished with her shower in record time, Libby dried off, pulled on her faded pink cotton robe, and collected clean jeans, fresh underwear, and a long-sleeved black and white T-shirt from her room.

  Although she felt strangely rushed, she took the time to blow-dry her hair and even applied some mascara, though she skipped the lip gloss.

  Just because she had birth control pills in her medicine cabinet didn’t mean she wanted to go sending “Seduce me” messages to Tate McKettrick by making her mouth all shiny and inviting.

  Of course, if Tate hadn’t been in the picture, she wouldn’t have called Doc Pollack and then endured Ellie Newton’s studied indifference to get the prescription in the first place.

  Gripping the edges of the sink, Libby looked at her steam-blurred image in the mirror.

  “You’re asking for trouble, Libby Remington,” she told herself.

  Then she opened the bathroom door and stepped into the hallway.

  Mustn’t keep trouble waiting.

  TATE LOADED HILDIE INTO the back seat of his truck, but although he’d opened the front passenger-side door for Libby, he stood back instead of helping her aboard, just so he could watch that sweet little ass in action, under the perfectly fitted jeans, as she made the climb.

  Hot damn. A silent groan reverberated through him.

  “Are the girls at the ranch?” Libby asked, once she was settled and he was behind the wheel. Hildie leaned between the seats and licked Tate’s right ear just as he turned the key in the ignition.

  He laughed, not at the question but at the dog, and immediately drew a confused glance from Libby.

  “No,” he said, as Hildie rested her muzzle on his shoulder and gave a contented little sigh. If only all females were so docile. “Audrey and Ava are in New York with their mother for a couple of days. Cheryl’s folks moved into an assisted-living place in Connecticut a few months back, and she’s putting their apartment on the market.”

  Libby offered no comment, only a nod. She shifted uncomfortably in the seat—and Tate figured she’d probably been counting on having the kids around as a sort of buffer.

  Esperanza, Garrett and Austin were all at the main house, as it happened, but Tate wasn’t taking Libby to the mansion. Where they were going, it would be just the two of them—and the old dog drooling on his shirt as he drove toward the outskirts of town.

&nbs
p; “Are we going to talk?” Tate asked, when they’d traveled several miles in silence.

  She smiled softly. “Do we need to?”

  Damn. He wanted to pull over to the side of the road, right then and there, take Libby Remington into his arms and kiss her senseless.

  “Probably,” he said hoarsely.

  “About—?”

  “Things,” Tate said, thrown by the scent of her, the warmth of her, the softness he could sense from three feet away, no touching necessary. Highly desirable, but not necessary.

  “Things like—?”

  “Like where we’re headed, you and I,” Tate said.

  Libby’s smile was faint and a little saucy. “I assumed, since you’re behind the wheel, that you had our destination all figured out.”

  “That isn’t what I mean,” Tate said, mildly irritated, “and you know it.”

  “Where are we going, Tate?” Libby asked, with exaggerated patience, of the smart-ass variety. There was an under-current of excitement there, too, unless he missed his guess.

  “On one level,” Tate replied, “I’d say we’re on our way to a soft spot in some tall grass.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her blush, and took some satisfaction in that. “On another level—the long-range one—everything depends on you, Libby.”

  Libby turned in her seat, her eyes flashing a little. He could see her nipples jutting against the inside of her blouse, so he figured she was up for the proposed tumble in the grass.

  All right by him.

  “Now, why would everything depend on me?” she asked, her eyes wide.

  Tate didn’t give her an answer until he’d brought the truck to a stop at the edge of the yard that had been Pablo and Isabel’s for so long.

  “You’re the one with all the forgiving to do, Lib,” he said, gripping the steering wheel and staring straight ahead through the windshield. The lumber and other building supplies he’d been buying and hauling out from town all week waited, moist from the drizzling rain.

  Libby turned slightly in the seat, gently eased Hildie back, off his shoulder. “Tate McKettrick,” she said, “look at me.”

  He did. A big lump rose in his throat. He wanted her physically, but there was so much more to it than that.

  “If you’re talking about that fling with Cheryl,” Libby told him, “I forgave you for that a long time ago.”

  Tate raised his hand to her cheek, brushed it lightly with the backs of his knuckles. “Maybe you believe that,” he said, “but I’m not sure I do.”

  Her eyes widened again, and patches of pale pink pulsed in her cheeks, then faded. “If you could go back in time,” she asked, after several long moments, “what would you change, Tate? Can you even imagine a world without your children in it?”

  Tate unhooked Libby’s seat belt, laid his hands on either side of her face so she wouldn’t look away before she heard him out. “No,” he said gruffly, “but if I had the kind of power we’re talking about here, you and I would have conceived the twins. They’d be ours, together.”

  She turned her head, and her lips moved, light as the flick of a moth’s wings, against his palm.

  Fire shot up Tate’s arm, set his heart ablaze, spread to his groin and hit a flash point. He barely contained the groan that rose from somewhere in the very center of his being.

  Libby met his gaze again. Held it. “Do you know what would have made it impossible to forgive you, Tate? If you’d denied those little girls, or bought your way out of the situation somehow—a lot of men in your position would have done that—but you took all the fallout. You did right by your children, and I’m pretty sure you tried to do right by Cheryl—”

  In the back, Hildie whimpered, wanting out.

  Tate shut off the engine, but made no move to get out of the truck and lower Hildie to the ground. “What about you, Lib?” he asked miserably. “I sure as hell didn’t do right by you, now did I?”

  She reached across, touched his arm. “I’m a big girl now,” she said. “I’m over it.”

  “Over it enough to trust me?”

  She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Until you give me reason not to,” she said.

  Hildie began to carry on in earnest.

  Tate got out of the truck, opened the back door and two-armed the chubby old dog out of the vehicle and onto the ground.

  Libby got out, too, and stood at the edge of the Ruizes’ lawn, looking toward the house. Tate watched as she shook her head in response to some private thought.

  “I guess you heard,” he ventured, after a while, “that Isabel decided to take the boys and go live with her sister.” He was distracted, still thinking about how she’d said she’d trust him until he gave her a reason to stop.

  Libby Remington was an amazing woman.

  Libby turned her head to look at him again, nodded. “She didn’t waste much time getting out of here,” she observed, and there was a deliberately noncommittal note in her voice that diverted some of Tate’s attention from the riot she’d caused in his senses.

  He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his jeans and tilted his head to one side. Hildie squatted a few feet away, then came back to stand between him and Libby, tail wagging, tongue lolling, eyes hopeful that a good time would be had by all, dogs included.

  “I told Isabel she was welcome to stay here on the Spur for as long as she wanted,” Tate said quietly, “but she decided to leave right away. Nico said she saw Pablo everywhere she looked, and that was too painful.”

  Libby considered that, nodded. Hildie went off, found a short, crooked stick in the grass, brought it to Libby, and dropped it at her feet.

  With a smile, Libby bent, picked up the stick and tossed it a little way.

  Hildie trundled awkwardly after it. Brought it back.

  “Why the impromptu dinner invitation, Tate?” Libby asked mildly. “And what’s with all the lumber and shingles and bags of cement?”

  Tate bent, picked up Hildie’s stick, and threw it a little farther than Libby had. While the dog searched through the wild grass that grew beyond the edge of the lawn, Tate held out a hand to Libby.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll explain while I show you around.”

  Libby hesitated, then took his hand. Hildie had found the stick, clasping it between her teeth, but she seemed to be done playing fetch for the time being.

  Tate took care not to crush Libby’s fingers as he led her up the front steps and into the house. The sexual charge that had arced between them on the drive out of town had gone underground, though Tate knew it would reassert itself sooner rather than later.

  He watched Libby as she looked around, waited for the dog to waddle in, then quietly shut the door.

  Over the few days since Isabel and Pablo’s relatively few possessions had been loaded into a rented truck and hauled away, Tate had removed the old flooring and knocked out several walls. Sheets of drywall waited to be nailed in place once the new framing was in.

  Libby’s expression was curious and a little pensive when she looked at him. “I still don’t understand,” she said. “All this—?”

  Tate put a hand to the small of her back and steered her toward the kitchen. It was the only room in the house he hadn’t torn apart—yet.

  “I’m planning on living here, Libby,” he said, and his heart beat a little faster, because her reaction to that news was vitally important to him. “Maybe not for good—but for a while.”

  “Why?” she asked reasonably, folding her arms. The last light of day flowed in through the window behind her, and to Tate, she looked almost luminous, like a figure in stained glass.

  “I’m not sure I can explain,” he answered, reaching out to flip a switch so the single bulb dangling from the middle of the ceiling illuminated the kitchen. “I want to see what it’s like to live in a regular-size house. Drive to a job every day. Actually work for a living.”

  Libby smiled faintly at that. She did live in a “regular-size house,” and she certainly ma
de her own way in the world. “I wouldn’t know about commuting,” she quipped, “but working for a living is overrated, in my opinion.”

  Tate shoved a hand through his hair, more nervous than he’d expected to be. He’d planned this evening carefully, right down to the steaks marinating in the refrigerator and the coals heating in the portable barbecue grill out back and the good red wine tucked away in one of the cupboards. It had made so much sense during those night hours spent prying up carpeting and stripping walls to the insulation and framework.

  Libby came to him, laid her palms to his chest.

  The gesture was probably meant to be comforting, but she might as well have hit him with a couple of defibulator paddles, given the effect her touch had on him.

  “Tate?” Libby urged.

  He sighed. He’d meant to ask Libby to move in with him, come and live in that modest house by the bend in the creek as soon as the remodeling was done; but now he realized what a half-assed, harebrained idea it was. Libby wasn’t ready for that kind of constant intimacy, and he wasn’t, either.

  The twins barely knew Libby, and of course the reverse was true, as well. He would make any sacrifice for his children, but he couldn’t expect Libby to feel the same way.

  “Give me a minute,” he finally said, his voice hoarse, “to pull my foot out of my mouth.”

  She moved closer, frowning, then slipped her arms loosely around his waist. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  A reasonable question, Tate thought. “I wish I knew,” he said.

  Libby rested her head against his chest for a few moments, as though she were listening to his heartbeat, and the smell of her hair made him feel light-headed—it was as though all the oxygen had suddenly been sucked out of the room.

  Finally, she looked up at him, and her eyes were at once tender and curious. “You’re serious about living here, aren’t you?” she asked.

  Tate nodded. Maybe she’d hate the idea—that would be a problem for sure. And maybe she wouldn’t give a damn—which would be even worse.

  “And for some reason,” Libby went on, “my opinion matters to you.”