The McKettrick Legend: Sierra's HomecomingThe McKettrick Way (Hqn)

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Just a little shaken up, that’s all.”

  “How about some supper?”

  “They serve supper here? At Jolene’s?”

  Brad chuckled. “Down the road, at the Steak house. You can’t miss it—it’s right next to the sign that says Welcome To Stone Creek, Arizona, Home Of Brad O’Ballivan.”

  “Braggart,” Meg said, grateful that the conversation had taken a lighter turn.

  He grinned engagingly. “Stone Creek has always been the home of Brad O’Ballivan,” he said. “It just seems to mean more now than it did when I left that first time.”

  “You’ll be mobbed,” Meg warned.

  “The whole town could show up at the Steak house, and it wouldn’t be enough to make a mob.”

  “Okay,” Meg agreed. “But you’re buying.”

  Brad laughed. “Fair enough,” he said.

  Then he got up from his chair and summoned the bartender, who’d evidently been cooling his heels in a storeroom or office.

  The floor felt oddly spongy beneath Meg’s feet, and she was light-headed enough to wonder if there’d been some alcohol in that iced tea after all.

  The Steak house, unlike Jolene’s, was jumping. People called out to Brad when he came in, and young girls pointed and giggled, but most of them had been at the welcome party Ashley and Melissa had thrown for him on the ranch the night before, so some of the novelty of his being back in town had worn off.

  Meg drew some glances, though—all of them admiring, with varying degrees of curiosity mixed in. Even in jeans, boots and a plain woolen coat over a white blouse, she looked like what she was—a McKettrick with a trust fund and an impressive track record as a top-level executive. When McKettrickCo had gone public, Brad had been surprised when she didn’t turn up immediately as the CEO of some corporation. Instead, she’d come home to hibernate on the Triple M, and he wondered why.

  He wondered lots of things about Meg McKettrick.

  With luck, he’d have a chance to find out everything he wanted to know.

  Like whether she still laughed in her sleep and ate cereal with yogurt instead of milk and arched her back like a gymnast when she climaxed.

  Since the Steak house was no place to think about Meg having one of her noisy orgasms, Brad tried to put the image out of his mind. It merely shifted to another part of his anatomy.

  They were shown to a booth right away, and given menus and glasses of water with the obligatory slices of fresh lemon rafting on top of the ice.

  Brad ordered a steak, Meg a Caesar salad.

  The waitress went away, albeit reluctantly.

  “Okay,” Brad said, “it’s my turn to ask questions. Why did you quit working after you left McKettrickCo?”

  Meg smiled, but she looked a little flushed, and he could tell by her eyes that she was busy in there, sorting things and putting them in their proper places. “I didn’t need the money. And I’ve always wanted to live full-time on the Triple M, like Jesse and Rance and Keegan. When I spent summers there, as a child, the only way I could deal with leaving in the fall to go back to school was to promise myself that one day I’d come home to stay.”

  “You love it that much?” Given his own attachment to Stone Creek Ranch, Brad could understand, but at the same time, the knowledge troubled him a little, too. “What do you do all day?”

  Her mouth quirked in a way that made Brad want to kiss her. And do a few other things, too. “You sound like my mother,” she said. “I take care of the horses, ride sometimes—”

  He nodded. Waited.

  She didn’t finish the sentence.

  “You never married.” He hadn’t meant to say that. Hadn’t meant to let on that he’d kept track of her all these years, mostly on the Internet, but through his sisters, too.

  She shook her head. “Almost,” she said. “Once. It didn’t work out.”

  Brad leaned forward, intrigued and feeling pretty damn territorial, too. “Who was the unlucky guy? He must have been a real jackass.”

  “You,” she replied sweetly, and then laughed at the expression on his face.

  He started to speak, then gulped the words down, sure they’d come out sounding as stupid as the question he’d just asked.

  “I’ve dated a lot of men,” Meg said.

  The orgasm image returned, but this time, he wasn’t Meg’s partner. It was some other guy bringing her to one of her long, exquisite, clawing, shouting, bucking climaxes, not him. He frowned.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about my love life,” she suggested.

  “Maybe not,” Brad agreed.

  “Not that I exactly have one.”

  Brad felt immeasurably better. “That makes two of us.”

  Meg looked unconvinced. Even squirmed a little on the vinyl seat.

  “What?” Brad prompted, enjoying the play of emotions on her face. He and Meg weren’t on good terms—too soon for that—but it was a hopeful sign that she’d met him at Jolene’s and then agreed to supper on top of it.

  “I saw that article in People magazine. ‘The Cowboy with the Most Notches on His Bedpost,’ I think it was called?”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about our love lives. And would you mind keeping your voice down?”

  “We agreed not to talk about mine, if I remember correctly, which, as I told you, is nonexistent. And to avoid the subject of your second wife—at least, for now.”

  “There have been women,” Brad said. “But that bedpost thing was all Phil’s idea. Publicity stuff.”

  The food arrived.

  “Not that I care if you carve notches on your bedpost,” Meg said decisively, once the waitress had left again.

  “Right,” Brad replied, serious on the outside, grinning on the inside.

  “Where is this Phil person from, anyway?” Meg asked, mildly disgruntled, her fork poised in midair over her salad. “Seems to me he has a pretty skewed idea on the whole cowboy mystique. Rehab. Trashing hotel rooms. The notch thing.”

  “There’s a ‘cowboy mystique’?”

  “You know there is. Honor, integrity, courage—those are the things being a cowboy is all about.”

  Brad sighed. Meg was a stickler for detail; good thing she hadn’t gone to law school, like she’d once planned. She probably would have represented his second ex-wife in the divorce and stripped his stock portfolio clean. “I tried. Phil works freestyle, and he sure knew how to pack the concert halls.”

  Meg pointed the fork at him. “You packed the concert halls, Brad. You and your music.”

  “You like my music?” It was a shy question; he hadn’t quite dared to ask if she liked him as well. He knew too well what the answer might be.

  “It’s…nice,” she said.

  Nice? Half a dozen Grammies and CMT awards, weeks at number one on every chart that mattered, and she thought his music was “nice”?

  Whatever she thought, Brad finally concluded, that was all she was going to give up, and he had to be satisfied with it.

  For now.

  He started on the steak, but he hadn’t eaten more than two bites when there was a fuss at the entrance to the restaurant and Livie came storming in, striding right to his table.

  Sparing a nod for Meg, Brad’s sister turned immediately to him. “He’s hurt,” she said. Her clothes were covered with straw and a few things that would have upset the health department, being that she was in a place where food was being served to the general public.

  “Who’s hurt?” Brad asked calmly, sliding out of the booth to stand.

  “Ransom,” she answered, near tears. “He got himself cut up in a tangle of rusty barbed wire. I’d spotted him with binoculars, but before I could get there to help, he’d torn free and headed for the hills. He’s hurt bad, and I’m not going to be able to get to him in the Suburban—we need to saddle up and go after him.”

  “Liv,” Brad said care fully, “it’s dark out.”

  “He’s bleeding, and probably weak. The wolves could take him d
own!” At the thought of that, Livie’s eyes glistened with moisture. “If you won’t help, I’ll go by myself.”

  Distractedly, Brad pulled out his wallet and threw down the money for the dinner he and Meg hadn’t gotten a chance to finish.

  Meg was on her feet, the salad forgotten. “Count me in, Olivia,” she said. “That is, if you’ve got an extra horse and some gear. I could go back out to the Triple M for Banshee, but by the time I hitched up the trailer, loaded him and gathered the tack—”

  “You can ride Cinnamon,” Olivia told Meg, after sizing her up as to whether she’d be a help or a hindrance on the trail. “It’ll be cold and dark up there in the high country,” she added. “Could be a long, uncomfortable night.”

  “No room service?” Meg quipped.

  Livie spared her a smile, but when she turned to Brad again, her blue eyes were full of obstinate challenge. “Are you going or not—cowboy?”

  “Hell, yes, I’m going,” Brad said. Riding a horse was a thing you never forgot how to do, but it had been a while since he’d been in the saddle, and that meant he’d be groaning-sore before this adventure was over. “What about the stock on the Triple M, Meg? Who’s going to feed your horses, if this takes all night?”

  “They’re good till morning,” Meg answered. “If I’m not back by then, I’ll ask Jesse or Rance or Keegan to check on them.”

  Livie led the caravan in her Suburban, with Brad following in his truck, and Meg right behind, in the Blazer. He was worried about Ransom, and about Livie’s obsession with the animal, but there was one bright spot in the whole thing.

  He was going to get to spend the night with Meg McKettrick, albeit on the hard, half-frozen ground, and the least he could do, as a gentleman, was share his sleeping bag—and his body warmth.

  “Right smart of you to go along,” Angus commented, appearing in the passenger seat of Meg’s rig. “There might be some hope for you yet.”

  Meg answered without moving her mouth, just in case Brad happened to glance into his rearview mirror and catch her talking to nobody. “I thought you were giving me some elbow room on this one,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” Angus replied. “If you go to bed down with him or something like that, I’ll skedaddle.”

  “I’m not going to ‘bed down’ with Brad O’Ballivan.”

  Angus sighed. Adjusted his sweat-stained cowboy hat. Since he usually didn’t wear one, Meg read it as a sign bad weather was on its way. “Might be a good thing if you did. Only way to snag some men.”

  “I will not dignify that remark with a reply,” Meg said, flooring the gas pedal to keep up with Brad, now that they were out on the open road, where the speed limit was higher. She’d never actually been to Stone Creek Ranch, but she knew where it was. Knew all about King’s Ransom, too. Her cousin Jesse, practically a horse-whisperer, claimed the animal was nothing more than a legend, pieced together around a hundred camp fires, over as many years, after all the lesser tales had been told.

  Meg wanted to see for herself.

  Wanted to help Olivia, whom she’d always liked but barely knew.

  Spending the night on a mountain with Brad O’Ballivan didn’t enter into the decision at all. Much.

  “Is he real?” she asked. “The horse, I mean?”

  Angus adjusted his hat again. “Sure he is,” he said, his voice quiet, but gruff. Some times a look came into his eyes, a sort of hunger for the old days and the old ways.

  “Is there anything you can do to help us find him?”

  Angus shook his head. “You’ve got to do that your selves, you and the singing cowboy and the girl.”

  “Olivia is not a girl. She’s a grown woman and a veterinarian.”

  “She’s a snippet,” Angus said. “But there’s fire in her. That O’Ballivan blood runs hot as coffee brewed on a cookstove in hell. She needs a man, though. The knot in her lasso is way too tight.”

  “I hope that reference wasn’t sexual,” Meg said stiffly, “because I do not need to be carrying on that type of conversation with my dead multi-great grandfather.”

  “It makes me feel old when you talk about me like I helped Moses carry the commandments down off the mountain,” Angus complained. “I was young once, you know. Sired four strapping sons and a daughter by three different women—Ellie, Georgia and Concepcion. And I’m not dead, neither. Just…different.”

  Olivia had stopped suddenly for a gate up ahead, and Meg nearly rear-ended Brad before she got the Blazer reined in.

  “Different as in dead,” Meg said, watching through the wind shield, in the glow of her head lights, as Brad got out of his truck and strode back to speak to her, leaving the driver’s-side door gaping behind him.

  He didn’t look angry—just earnest.

  “If you want to ride with me,” he said when Meg had buzzed down her window, “fine. But if you’re planning to drive this rig up into the bed of my truck, you might want to wait until I park it in a hole and lower the tailgate.”

  “Sorry,” Meg said after making a face.

  Brad shook his head and went back to his truck. By then, Olivia had the gate open, and he drove ahead onto an unpaved road winding upward between the juniper and Joshua trees clinging to the red dirt of the hillside.

  “What was that about?” Meg mused, following Brad and Olivia’s vehicles through the gap and not really addressing Angus, who answered, nonetheless.

  “Guess he’s prideful about the paint on that fancy jitney of his,” he said. “Didn’t want you denting up his buggy.”

  Meg didn’t comment. Angus was full of the nineteenth-century equivalent of “woman driver” stories, and she didn’t care to hear any of them.

  They topped a rise, Olivia still in the lead, and dipped down into what was probably a broad valley, given what little Meg knew about the landscape on Stone Creek Ranch. Lights glimmered off to the right, revealing a good-size house and a barn.

  Meg was about to ask if Angus had ever visited the ranch when he suddenly vanished.

  She shut off the Blazer, got out and followed Brad and Olivia toward the barn. She wished it hadn’t been so dark—it would have been interesting to see the place in the daylight.

  Inside the barn, which was as big as any of the ones on the Triple M and boasted all the modern conveniences, Olivia and Brad were already saddling horses.

  “That’s Cinnamon over there,” Olivia said with a nod to a tall chestnut in the stall across the wide breeze way from the one she was standing in, busily preparing a palomino to ride. “His gear’s in the tack room, third saddle rack on the right.”

  Meg didn’t hesitate, as she suspected Olivia had expected her to do, but found the tack room and Cinnamon’s gear, and lugged it back to his stall. Brad and his sister were already mounted and waiting at the end of the breeze way when Meg led the gelding out, however.

  “Need a boost?” Brad asked, in a teasing drawl, saddle leather creaking as he shifted to step down from the big paint he was riding and help Meg mount up.

  Cinnamon was a big fella, taller by several hands than any of the horses in Meg’s barn, but she’d been riding since she was in diapers, and she didn’t need a boost from a “singing cowboy,” as Angus described Brad.

  “I can do it,” she replied, straining to grip the saddle horn and get a foot into the high stirrup. It was going to be a stretch.

  In the next instant, she felt two strong hands pushing on her backside, hoisting her easily onto Cinnamon’s broad back.

  Thanks, Angus, she said silently.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IT WAS A PURELY CRAZY thing to do, setting out on horseback, in the dark, for the high plains and meadows and secret canyons of Stone Creek Ranch, in search of a legendary stallion determined not to be found. It had been way too long since she’d done anything like it, Meg reflected, as she rode behind Olivia and Brad, on the borrowed horse called Cinnamon.

  Olivia had brought a few veterinary supplies along, packed in saddle bags, and while Meg
was sure Ransom, wounded or not, would elude them, she couldn’t help admiring the kind of commitment it took to set out on the journey anyway. Olivia O’Ballivan was a woman with a cause and for that, Meg envied her a little.

  The moon was three-quarters full, and lit their way, but the trail grew steadily narrower as they climbed, and the mountainside was steep and rocky. One misstep on the part of a distracted horse and both animal and rider would plunge hundreds of feet into an abyss of shadow, to their very certain and very painful deaths.

  When the trail widened into what appeared, in the thin wash of moonlight, to be a clearing, Meg let out her breath, sat a little less tensely in the saddle, loosened her grip on Cinnamon’s reins. Brad drew up his own mount to wait for her, while Olivia and her horse shot forward, intent on their mission.

  “Do you think we’ll find him?” Meg asked. “Ransom, I mean?”

  “No,” Brad answered, unequivocally. “But Livie was bound to try. I came to look out for her.”

  Meg hadn’t noticed the rifle in the scabbard fixed to Brad’s saddle before, back at the O’Ballivan barn, but it stood out in sharp relief now, the polished wooden stock glowing in a silvery flash of moonlight. He must have seen her eyes widen; he patted the scabbard as he met her gaze.

  “You’re expecting to shoot something?” Meg ventured. She’d been around guns all her life—they were plentiful on the Triple M—but that didn’t mean she liked them.

  “Only if I have to,” Brad said, casting a glance in the direction Olivia had gone. He nudged his horse into motion, and Cinnamon automatically kept pace, the two geldings moving at an easy trot.

  “What would constitute having to?” Meg asked.

  “Wolves,” Brad answered.

  Meg was familiar with the wolf controversy—environmentalists and animal activists on the one side, ranchers on the other. She wanted to know where Brad stood on the subject. He was well-known for his love of all things finned, feathered and furry—but that might have been part of his care fully constructed persona, like the notched bedpost and the trashed hotel rooms.