McKettrick's Luck

by Linda Lael Miller

  Oh, yes. There was an energy to that kind of trouble, and she’d felt it again, back there in that room behind the restaurant. It made the tiny hairs on her forearms stand up, and the bottom fall out of her stomach.

  Clutching the steering wheel, she closed her eyes.

  Swallowed the bile that rose, stinging, into the back of her throat.

  She hadn’t had to fake the throwing-up part.

  Sierra and Elaine and Janice had all scrambled into the restroom to find her heaving up her lunch. She’d taken the time to rinse her mouth and splash her face with cold water before herding them all outside, along with everyone in the restaurant.

  Then she’d dialed 911 on her cell phone.

  Feeling dizzy now, she leaned her head back against the top of the seat and tried to breathe slowly and deeply.

  Surely Jesse wasn’t so naive as to think those men were gone for good.

  They obviously believed he’d cheated them.

  They had a score to settle, and one small-town sheriff’s deputy wouldn’t scare them off.

  Cheyenne fought the need to hyperventilate.

  Jesse shouldn’t have refused Sierra’s offer to call Travis.

  Damn his stupid pride, anyhow.

  Damn his stupid McKettrick pride.

  Still shaking, Cheyenne turned the key in the ignition, shifted into Drive and drove out of Lucky’s parking lot. She cruised down Main Street, keeping to the speed limit, but at the edge of town, she gunned the engine.

  She raced past the turnoff that would have taken her home.

  After ten minutes or so, she spotted Jesse’s truck up ahead. Slowed down a little. Silly to hope he wouldn’t see her, recognize her car.

  Crazy, what she was doing.

  She wouldn’t be any use at all in a fight.

  Jesse rounded a bend, disappeared.

  Cheyenne sped up.

  Rounded the same bend.

  Jesse was parked alongside the road, leaning against the side of his truck, with his arms folded. He’d taken off the baseball cap, and his rumpled hair gleamed in the sunlight.

  Cheyenne considered sailing right on by, pretending she hadn’t been following him at all but just traveling the same road, purely by chance, but she knew the tactic wouldn’t work. So she pulled in behind the truck, shut off the car and got out.

  “What are you doing?” Jesse asked reasonably, as she approached.

  “Making sure you get home all right,” she answered, lifting her chin.

  He chuckled. Shook his head. “You’re protecting me?”

  She came a step closer. His beard was golden, like his hair. His eyes were the same color as the high-country sky arched over their heads.

  She couldn’t tell by his expression whether he was insulted or flattered. “Those guys are bad news, Jesse,” she said quietly. She was already in over her head, so she might as well start treading water. “The kind who don’t take kindly to losing.”

  “Nobody does,” Jesse said, watching her. “They’ll cool off, Cheyenne. Move on to the next game.”

  “Maybe,” she replied, remembering her dad facing down those flushed and cursing men on the side of the road, with a shotgun in his hands. She’d screamed when he’d fired it into the air, could still smell the gunpowder and see the flames shooting from the double barrels.

  “Suppose they turned up right now,” Jesse speculated, his tone gentle. “What would you do?”

  “I don’t know,” Cheyenne said, wanting to cry. “Something.”

  Suddenly Jesse reached out and hooked an arm loosely around her shoulders, pulled her against him. Propped his chin on the top of her head. “You know, don’t you,” he said, “what’ll happen if you follow me out to the ranch?”

  She buried her face in his T-shirt. Even after playing poker all night, in a smoky room, he smelled dangerously good. After a long, long time, she nodded.

  He held her a little more tightly. “Want to ride in the truck with me?”

  She pulled back, just far enough to look up at him. “I can’t leave the car here,” she said. After all, the vehicle didn’t belong to her. She was supposed to give it back. She didn’t follow the chain of thought any further than that because it would lead to Nigel.

  Right now, she was pretending her boss didn’t exist.

  Jesse nodded, walked her back to the driver’s side door, which was still standing open, and waited until she was inside.

  “Now’s your chance, Cheyenne,” he told her gravely. “You can turn around and head back to Indian Rock, and I’ll understand. There’ll be no hard feelings.”

  He was offering her a way out, and she ought to take it. She knew that. She also knew she wouldn’t go back to Indian Rock, not before she’d spent the afternoon, and maybe the night, too, in Jesse McKettrick’s bed.

  It wasn’t too much to ask, after all the doing without, all the fear, all the hopeless waiting in card rooms, all the pain of watching Mitch struggle to recover from the accident and not being able to do anything about it.

  She didn’t answer Jesse. Just waited until he walked away, got back into his truck, started it up.

  She followed him along the winding road, leading ever upward, toward the house where McKettricks had lived and loved for almost a century and a half.

  She had no illusions.

  There would be no fairy-tale endings.

  She’d hate herself in the morning. Maybe even before then.

  But for one brief interlude in eternity, she was not going to be Cash Bridges’s daughter.

  She was not going to be Nigel Meerland’s hired gun.

  She was not going to be Ayanna’s support system.

  She was not going to be Mitch’s protector.

  She was going to be one thing, and one thing only.

  A woman.

  A flesh-and-blood woman, freely giving herself up to a flesh-and-blood man. And damn the consequences.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  JESSE WAS AS AWARE OF Cheyenne, as he traveled that familiar road, as he would have been if she were sitting next to him on the truck seat. He’d invited her to supper, and he sure as hell hoped she’d come, but the time lapse would have given her time to think things through.

  Now, there would be no interval, no space to change her mind.

  For his own sake, he was glad about that. For her sake—well, it might have been better if she’d taken the afternoon to chill out. Get some perspective.

  Despite the brief fiasco with Brandi after he’d won the big tournament, he wasn’t the marrying kind. Sure, he hated rattling around alone in the ranch house most of the time—that was the main reason he was always looking around for a game to jump into.

  But he wasn’t husband material, like Rance and Keegan were.

  He didn’t even have a damn job.

  Furthermore, he didn’t want one.

  He was fixated on Cheyenne, there was no denying that, but he knew himself. He was a one-trick pony, and that trick was winning at poker, not loving Cheyenne the way she deserved to be loved.

  The sex would be hot, a nuclear fusion, but even fusions cooled, in time.

  Ultimately, he’d get bored. Cheyenne’s bone-deep belief that no man could be trusted would be reinforced, and the whole thing would fade to a sad memory that haunted him whenever he slowed down enough to think.

  He glanced at the rearview mirror, half hoping that she wouldn’t be there.

  But she was.

  “Hell,” he muttered. Then he laughed and shoved a hand through his hair and swore again, exultant.

  CHEYENNE WAS ABOUT TO jump out of her skin. Desperate for a distraction, she switched on the radio, set to an oldies station.

  A girl-band version of Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” filled the car.

  She switched it off instantly, blushing.

  The hot flashes were back. Cheyenne rolled down the window.

  The wind blew her hair across her face in strands that stung like little whips, and she nea
rly went off the road before she got the window closed again.

  The whole universe seemed to throb around her, like one big, cosmic heart.

  Jesse turned in at the gate to his place. The house Jeb McKettrick had built for his bride, Chloe, loomed against the sky, looking like something out of an old western on TV.

  All wrong, Cheyenne thought, gnawing on her lower lip.

  There should have been stormy darkness, not sunshine. Lightning, not the sparkling leaves of cottonwood trees rippling in the breeze. There should have been bats flying around, and ragged curtains blowing past broken shutters. There should have been gargoyles, instead of sturdy, peeled log pillars supporting the roof of a long porch.

  Jesse parked close to the barn, and Cheyenne pulled in beside him, sat there shaking while he got out of the truck and came toward her.

  He rapped on the glass, grinning at her, when she didn’t move to roll down the window.

  Belatedly, she pushed the button.

  Now there was no barrier between them.

  “I’m going to check on the horses,” Jesse said practically. His voice was low and throaty, though, and his eyes searched her face. “You can head on inside, if you want to. Make yourself comfortable.”

  Make yourself comfortable.

  Yeah. Right.

  “Do you need any help?” Cheyenne heard herself ask, as though it were an ordinary day. As though she weren’t about to make the most spectacular mistake of her very unspectacular life. “With the horses, I mean?”

  He shook his head. “I won’t be long.”

  Cheyenne nodded, watched until he’d disappeared into the barn.

  The car was running. The gas tank was full.

  She could still turn around, drive back to town and forget she’d ever been stupid enough to let things go this far.

  Instead, she shut off the engine, dropped the keys into her bag and got out of the car.

  The back door was unlocked, and the kitchen was even bigger than she remembered. Bigger, in fact, than the house she and Mitch andAyanna lived in.

  She’d never been any farther inside than the bathroom, down the corridor, where she’d changed clothes to ride up to the ridge with Jesse only a couple of days before.

  Now she was going to see more of the place.

  She swallowed.

  Like, for instance, Jesse’s bedroom.

  What would it be like?

  He nearly knocked her over with the door when he came in behind her.

  “Look around if you want to,” he said, apparently amused to find her rooted to a spot just beyond the threshold. “I’m hitting the shower.”

  It all sounded so ordinary.

  Look around if you want to.

  I’m hitting the shower.

  What should she do?

  Bolt for town?

  She obviously didn’t intend to do that.

  Find his bedroom, then? Strip off her clothes, lie down and wait to be taken?

  She shook her head, mortified by the image. She’d been ambushed by her own senses. Ambushed and hog-tied.

  Jesse bent his head to look at her curiously.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  Liar.

  Jesse grinned. Brushed her cheek lightly with the backs of his fingers. “You could always join me in the shower,” he ventured.

  Curiously, the remark broke the tension. She laughed. “I think I’ll explore instead.”

  He spread his hands. “Mi casa es su casa,” he said. My house is your house. And then he left her standing there, disappearing through an archway on the far side of the room.

  Cheyenne stayed where she was for a few more moments, then worked up the nerve to take the tour.

  Following the route Jesse had taken, she found herself in a massive, rustic dining room, with floor-to-ceiling windows on one end, overlooking the grassy pasture, a stand of cottonwoods, the winding creek and the distant tree-lined ridge she and Jesse had ridden to.

  The table was plain and heavy, made of some dark wood, and at least twelve feet long by Cheyenne’s best guess. There was a matching china cabinet, crammed with antique dishes, and a stone fireplace took up the entire wall opposite the windows.

  Above the mantel hung a huge, framed oil portrait of a handsome, fair-haired man in his mid-thirties, looking ingenuously miserable in the garb of a nineteenth-century gentleman. Beside him stood a knockout redhead, in a blue gown trimmed with froths of lace at the high neckline and the sleeves. Mischief danced in her eyes.

  Jeb and Chloe McKettrick, the original owners of this house.

  Looking up at them, Cheyenne was suddenly thunderstruck by the resemblance between Jeb and Jesse. Dress Jesse up like a Victorian dandy, in a tight collar and a waistcoat, and he could pose for a duplicate portrait, with no one the wiser.

  Chloe, Cheyenne reflected, with a strange, seismic sadness, looked nothing like her. The first Mrs. McKettrick—at least the first to be mistress of this castle of timber and stone—had fair skin, wide, intelligent eyes and fiery hair, indicating a Celtic heritage. Cheyenne was part Apache, and it showed.

  Pocahontas, Nigel called her.

  Not a good time to think about Nigel, she decided, turning away from the portrait to continue the expedition. Next, she stepped into a living room the size of most high-school gymnasiums, but it wasn’t the dimensions that made her breath catch on a gasp.

  It was the view. Another entire wall of windows, three times the length of the one in the dining room, looked out over miles of ranch land. At night, the lights of Indian Rock would be clearly visible, a shimmering sparkle tucked into a valley on the far horizon.

  Cheyenne stood spellbound for a long time. The big house was so quiet that she could almost hear her own heartbeat.

  Presently, she turned from the windows, took in the rest of the room. Another fireplace, with a modern portrait hung over the mantel, this one done by a photographer rather than a painter.

  Cheyenne recognized Jesse’s parents, his stunningly beautiful sisters. She saved Jesse for last—a small, mischievous boy, eight or nine years old, captured forever at one moment in his charmed life. His hair was lighter, tumbling over one eye, and the familiar, born-to-make-trouble grin was already evident.

  “I was always a good-lookin’ devil,” the real, grown-up Jesse drawled, making Cheyenne pull in a startled breath and whirl to find him standing only a few feet behind her.

  He’d shaved. His hair was damp, and he’d pulled on clean jeans and a whiteT-shirt. His feet were bare.

  “Can I get you something? Some of that fizzy water you like?”

  Cheyenne found her voice. “Uh—no—thanks. This is a beautiful house.”

  “It’s big,” Jesse allowed.

  “Do you ever get lonely here, all by yourself?” Now what had made her ask a dumb question like that? Most likely, he had a parade of women streaming in and out. His family probably came and went, too.

  “Yeah,” Jesse said, surprising her. “Sometimes.”

  Cheyenne began to panic.

  What was she supposed to do now?

  What was she supposed to say?

  Jesse approached, took her hand, raised it to his mouth. Brushed the knuckles with a light pass of his lips.

  Cheyenne shivered, but not because she was cold.

  “I’d like to brush my teeth,” she said, and then wished the hardwood floor would part so she could fall through and vanish forever.

  “This way,” Jesse said, smiling at her burning face. Still holding her hand, he led her through yet another archway and down a short, wide corridor with museum-quality Western art framed on either side.

  Russells. Remingtons.

  Originals.

  Beyond was a huge master suite. The bed was round, and encircled by more towering windows. The ceiling must have been eighteen feet high, and it was painted, Sistine Chapel–style, with scenes of cattle stampeding beneath a dark sky sundered by lightning. Cowboys rode among the panicked beasts, on horseback,
waving their hats. “Bathroom’s over there,” Jesse said, pointing. “You’ll find the necessary supplies in the top left-hand drawer.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cheyenne said, wandering in that direction, still checking out the stampede. “You could sell tickets to this place.”

  Jesse laughed.

  The bath, of course, looked like something out of a sultan’s palace—if that sultan happened to be part cowboy. Like the bed, the room was round, with a hotel-size hot tub taking center stage. The brass faucets gleamed, and the dome-shaped roof was made of glass.

  Cheyenne found the stash of packaged toothbrushes, helped herself to a new tube of paste, and scrubbed her teeth. She’d thrown up back at Lucky’s, but that wasn’t something she wanted to share with Jesse—especially when the man was about to make love to her.

  She rinsed the brush, set it aside on the marble counter. The sink came equipped with a little sprayer, so she gave it a spritz.

  When she returned to the bedroom, Jesse was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the round bed. A gas fire leaped on the hearth, and the curtains had been drawn. Shadows danced over the stampeding cattle in the modern fresco overhead.

  Cheyenne stopped, drawn to Jesse, but intimidated, too.

  “This is your parents’ room,” she said, voicing only one of several misgivings.

  “Used to be,” Jesse answered. He patted the bed beside him. “Come and sit down, Cheyenne. I’m not going to jump your bones. Nothing will happen unless and until you’re ready.”

  She was both unnerved and reassured, looking up at the painted ceiling again and simultaneously indulging her earlier yearning to take off her shoes. The chill of the stone floor was deliciously sensual. “Doesn’t it make you dizzy?” she asked. “Looking up at those cattle running around and around in circles, I mean?”

  Jesse chuckled, stretched out on the bed with his hands cupped behind his head. “I guess I never thought of it that way,” he said lazily.

  Slowly, she approached the bed, crawled onto it, stretched out next to Jesse to look up at the ghost-riders in the sky. It felt strangely natural to lie down beside him. Not scary at all.

  In fact, she thought she might drift off to sleep.

  Jesse rolled onto his side, facing her. She waited for him to rest a hand on her cheek or her hip, maybe even her breast, but he didn’t touch her.