by James, Ranay
She had worked the night shift the previous night at the twenty-four hour coffee house and was just crawling into bed when Robert called her with the news. How he knew she did not have travel money had never crossed her mind until just then. The ticket he arranged to be waiting for her at the airport had been a Godsend. Having to make the arrangements for Kyle’s funeral long distance and a crazy connection flight to Dallas by way of Atlanta, had not given her a chance to slow down. She was running on over thirty hours without sleep.
Chapter 3
“Katie?”
The deep male voice washed over her barely penetrating the heavy fog of sleep.
“Katie Bug?”
“Kyle?” she asked through the haze not having the energy to open her eyes at being called by her childhood nickname.
It was the gentle squeeze of her shoulder that woke her fully.
“Robert?” He was squatting down at eye level, and she automatically threw her arms around his neck. “It is good to see you.”
She hugged him, genuinely happy to see him after all the years. She would have recognized him anywhere. His gray-blue eyes and rich brown hair had always been a combination her young heart had fainted over. Now was not much different as she felt her heart leap. The marked difference, she noted, was the smart, fashionable, rimless glasses and the peppering of gray at his temples.
Time marches on, she supposed, for everyone.
However, at thirty-nine he was still drop dead gorgeous with features that were not quite as strong as most of the McKinnon men. Yet no one would ever mistake him for anything other than a man’s man. Robert was the proverbial tall, dark, and handsome cliché encased in a pair of freshly pressed jeans. He most definitely was a man in his prime with sex and virility plastered all over him.
And probably married with 2.5 kids, a dog, and the mandatory minivan, she thought.
“What are you doing here?” She looked at her watch, not really surprised to see her brother’s longtime friend. She was just surprised to see him at this hour. Rubbing her eyes she sat up, swinging her legs back over the edge of the swing, having no recollection of ever lying down.
“I was taking the shortcut across the pasture when I saw the lights still on and the front door open. I was concerned given what happened with Kyle,” he offered taking in the changes little Katie had gone through since last seeing her.
“I must have dropped off. I’ve not had a great deal of rest for obvious reasons. I’m sorry, forgive my manners. Please, have a seat,” she said pointing to the white, antique wicker chair diagonal to her. “May I offer you something to drink? I’m not sure what is in the fridge.” She stood to go into the house.
“No, thank you. I’m fine. Please, sit back down.” Robert had not intended to stay, but took the seat offered anyway. “I’m sorry about Kyle. He was a good man, Katie.”
Silently she nodded her head accepting his condolences giving her a moment to collect her thoughts.
“I go by Katherine these days, and yes, he was a good man. He was more than just a stepbrother to me, Robert.”
Robert smiled sympathetically. “I know. He was heartbroken when your mother took you. He loved you very much and felt responsible for you. Did you know she called the law on him several times when he tried to see you in New York?”
She rolled her eyes shaking her head. “That doesn’t surprise me one bit about Mom. Other than her, why would anyone want to kill him? That is what I cannot accept. You know how he is, or was, everyone loved him,” she said standing up unable to sit any longer.
Going to the edge of the porch, she leaned against the rough wood railing which she noted was in dire need of a paint job then stared out into the darkness as if the answer would be found somewhere in the distance.
Robert left her to her thoughts.
“Thanks for calling me, Robert,” she inhaled deeply letting it out slowly. “I know I’ve been a little hard to reach these days,” she said lowering her head in shame picking at the pealing paint of the railing.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of, Kate. Life sometimes kicks us when we seem to need it the least.” He offered, comforting her feelings.
“Um.” She nodded in agreement.
She shifted her focus off the rail and onto the man standing next to her. She had forgotten how tall he was, but then all the McKinnon men were tall from what she could recall. At 5'9" she usually stood eye to eye with most men. Not so with Robert whose frame was at least 6’4", if not more. His broad chest and trim waist topped off the long legs encased in freshly pressed black jeans and highly polished calfskin boots.
If he only knew, she thought, just how close she was actually standing next to defeat, he might not come so quickly to her defense. Her choices were her own, and she took full responsibility for those choices. Not that it made much difference. She still was almost thirty and did not have “…a pot to pee in or a window to toss it out of” as George was known to say. It fit her current status in life.
Her father would not be proud of her at this point and her mother never talked to her anymore. It had been several years since she had any contact whatsoever with the woman who gave her life. She did not get up to Madison Avenue much and God forbid her mother should ever darken the doors of her current living arrangements. She called once to ask for some monetary help with some legal fees. Her stepfather had declined citing she was a credit risk. Kyle and George had bailed her out on that occasion. There was no way she could have known that Kyle had borrowed the money from Robert to help pay those ever mounting fees.
She took a deep breath and lifted her chin. It would get better, eventually.
It had been years since Robert had seen little Katie. When he called, he half expected to hear the little girl’s voice he remembered.
She was definitely not little Katie any more. She was a grown woman with rich brunette hair, well past her shoulders, parted on the side with wispy bangs. Her long, dark lashes offset warm brown eyes and full red lips begged for a kiss. Robert recognized the signature Brandenburg smile with the small dimple gracing each side of that lush mouth. It looked to him she had never outgrown her colt-like legs which seemed to go on forever. She was beautiful, she was grieving, and she was the baby sister to his best friend who was dead under tragic circumstances.
Definitely off limits, he warned himself. Definitely off limits.
Robert knew her grief. He had lost his fiancé in college to leukemia. It took him years to get past it. Leaning his backside against the rail next to her he rested his palms on the railing.
“Katherine, if you need anything...,” he let his offer trail.
“Thank you. However, at this point I don’t know what I need.” Shrugging her shoulders, she was at a loss, but appreciated his offer nonetheless.
“Fair enough, but if you do think of anything the offer still stands.”
They stood in silence as the night creatures played their symphony. As a child she had loved the night. Leaning her head against the porch pillar she let the tears stream down.
“How can you prepare for something like this?”
Her grief-stricken question tore through him as he noticed her silent tears.
“Oh, Katherine, you don’t prepare, baby, then pray it never happens.”
Pulling her to him he held her head against his heart gently stroking her hair.
And the dam broke as she slipped her arms around his waist.
He hated to see a woman cry. It was in his genetic makeup and his God given duty to save the damsel in distress, a pattern set down by more generations of McKinnon men then he cared to count. Who was he to fight it?
He let her cry as he gently, rhythmically rubbed his palm against her back, resting his chin on top of her head. He would miss Kyle, too, and he had his own guilt to bear for not seeing the signs of Kyle’s troubles.
“Katherine, I know it is very hard right now for you, but you do not have to go this alone.” Robert was not just offering to be poli
te.
“Kyle and this ranch were all I had left,” she said pitifully leaning her forehead against his chest clutching the front of his crisp white oxford shirt.
Robert knew that statement was truer than she actually knew. He knew he eventually would have to break the bad news, but now was not the time. She was exhausted, grieving, and had suffered enough bad news for one day. Nevertheless, she had to be told soon, and it needed to come from him.
Chapter 4
How did he tell her? Robert thought. There was just no easy way.
Kyle was bankrupt, and instead of coming to him for assistance, Kyle had gone to Dallas Langston, an unscrupulous son-of-a-bitch, who until nine o’clock that evening held the note to all the Brandenburg lands -- lock, stock, and barrel. Robert had a meeting with Dallas earlier. That meeting was where he was coming from when he drove past the farm and saw the lights still burning. He called the meeting, settling Kyle’s debt much to Langston’s surprise and displeasure. He had no desire to have Kate and George at Dallas Langston’s mercy, so he and his lawyer had paid the outstanding note before Langston could set the legal wheels in motion to call the debt. Dallas had been furious, but could not legally decline the payment given the conditions of the note. In turn, Dallas could not retain the land and was unhappy in the extreme.
He had paid the debt within forty-eight hours of Kyle’s death. It had just been luck that he called the meeting tonight, not waiting until Monday. It was a sneaky move on Langston’s part to insert a clause in the note stating the debt had to be paid within forty-eight hours of the death of the primary debtor or the land was considered payment in full. To his way of thinking that clause made Dallas Langston and his son Brice prime suspects in Kyle’s death. Convincing the sheriff and district attorney was going to be another matter. There was motive, to be sure, but opportunity might be trickier to prove.
Dallas had flown in from his hunting lodge in Colorado for the meeting. He was still in his camouflage hunting gear having flown straight in, and Brice was at present in San Francisco as far as Dallas knew. It would be easy enough to prove or disprove either man’s alibi. He was not naive enough to think Dallas or Brice would be stupid enough to do the deed himself; however, both were capable of contracting it without a backward glance, a fact for which he had absolutely no doubt.
If dealing with Dallas this evening wasn’t bad enough, he really hated to be the one responsible for breaking more bad news to her. He was not sure how she was going to take the news that her ancestral home would now be his unless she could come up with a way to repay him. He would not push for payment and would be very willing to work something out with her. However, even at that, he felt the ranch was lost to her unless she had a magic trick up her sleeve, and realistically, he did not see it happening, especially, given her current state of financial affairs. Though what he paid Langston to clear the note was pennies on the dollar and a fraction of the market value of what this land was worth, it still was a large sum. Not just anyone had three million dollars lying around. On such short notice and a weekend to boot, even he had to borrow funds from the McKinnon Trust. Getting the family banker in London out of bed in the middle of the night for the wire transfer had not been pleasant, but the McKinnon money and continued good will was incentive enough for the transfer to happen. His bank in Dallas was not open and the stock market was also closed, but come Monday he could cover that debt to the trust. All it would take would be a call to his broker. This would sting, but by no stretch damage him financially. After leaving the Secret Service, he opened his own personal security business. Business was thriving, and he had become a very wealthy man guarding political figures, foreign dignitaries, and famous faces.
Purchasing this track of land was a good investment for the long run, so he was getting something for his trouble. He hoped he did not lose Kate’s respect over a strip of dirt and her Brandenburg pride, which if memory served was nothing short of legendary. All Brandenburgs had a tendency to be too prideful for their own good. He hoped time had tempered hers.
Once George reached him with word of Kyle’s death, he did some investigating to locate her. Neither George nor Kyle had spoken to her in over a year, which according to George, was very unusual. However, she had sent letters, if infrequently. The neighborhood addresses on those letters had gotten progressively dicier before they stopped coming all together right before Christmas.
Robert felt he had discovered the reason why she had alienated herself. After being humiliated and fired from her posh Wall Street international brokerage job three years earlier, she had all but disappeared. When separated from her ex-husband, Daniel Masterson, he sought revenge and got it. The bastard was completely responsible for the demise of her career after accusing her of insider trading. She had been exonerated of all charges, but not before her reputation suffered total devastation in the financial community. The Securities Exchange Commission pulled her brokerage license pending the full investigation. Yet, regardless of the reinstatement of her license, none would touch her with a ten-foot pole. The financial district was a bunch of jackals with very long memories and completely unforgiving hearts.
It took some doing to locate her. He had a buddy in the N.Y.P.D. who worked in the seventy-fifth precinct so he had called in some favors, discovering she was currently working as a waitress at an all night café in Brooklyn. It was a tough part of town. Unemployment rates were high, hopes were low, and crime always a concern. He could see she was being dragged under by her circumstances.
The lease on her apartment expired shortly after her marriage fell apart. Her landlord raised her rent to the point she could no longer afford to keep it. After being evicted she had moved around frequently, and she currently called home an apartment building his cop friend described as a hovel. He said it smelled like cat pee and the gang graffiti on the entryway was so thick there was no way to tell in whose territory it actually was.
Her ex-husband left her with loads of debt, and she had sold her soul to a loan shark for a meteoric interest loan to pay that debt. According to one of her co-workers, the thug continually harassed her even though she was managing to make the payments as agreed, sacrificing even necessities to meet the obligation.
Robert had already seen the loan paid in full. Issued along with the payment was a very strong recommendation to leave Katherine alone. He had not bothered to veil his threat, which ran something along the line of should he ever discover the bastard approaching her again, he would personally see to it that the man never did business inside the borders of the United States. Robert had very little patience for scum, especially a piece of scum who got his rocks off by harassing women. The day Kyle died, Katherine became his responsibility and no one messes with what belongs to a McKinnon and not regret it.
He was going to give the encounter a little time to cool before he called in a few more favors. He was sure the shark was not totally on the up-and-up and he had every intention of exploiting his suspicion. With his connections in the law enforcement community, the man would be doing time before he knew what hit him, and it would never be connected back to Katherine.
To top it off, Kyle had no life insurance. George knew she could not afford to bury her brother and had offered to pay for the funeral. Robert had refused to let the old man pay knowing it was most likely a good chunk of his life savings. He was wondering when she would figure out the funeral was not free and if her pride would keep her from accepting any more of his help.
Walking her back into the house, he shut and locked the front door and windows on the ground floor. Personal security was his business, and given Kyle had been murdered, he saw where there was potential for a breach in her defenses as well. He could not take any chances.
Tomorrow he would come by and better secure the premises. He owed it to Kyle, who would have done the same thing had the roles been reversed and his sister needed help.
“Katherine, it is almost midnight and you need some sleep. Go on up and tuck in.
Tomorrow is going to be difficult for all of us. I’ll stay down here tonight and be here if you need anything.”
She was not just a little surprised by his offer. However, she could not impose.
“I’ll be fine, Robert. I live in New York for goodness sake. Go on home to your wife and get some rest yourself. I appreciate the gesture, but really, I’ll be fine.”
“Kate?” He ran his hands down her arms. Taking her hand and kissing her fingers was unconscious on his part. “I hate to leave you alone.”
“I’m used to taking care of myself, Robert,” she said nodding, feeling very old and tired.
Getting on tiptoes she placed a lingering kiss on his cheek and whispered in his ear.
“Kyle loved you like a brother. Thank you, Robert.” She hugged him again. Any other circumstances and any other woman and he might have taken it as a come on, but not tonight and not with her.
“My pleasure,” he replied, hugging her back holding her longer than he probably should have, sensing she needed his strength. He had enough for both of them.
Feeling her take in a deep breath and slowly release it, he knew she was exhausted as she swayed on her feet.
“All right, Katie Bug. I’ll go, but call if you need anything, even if you just want to talk.”
Hating to leave her, but understanding her need for independence, he walked back through the kitchen.
“Here is my cell phone number. Don’t lose it.”
Jotting it down, he left it on the note pad by the phone. “If you need anything, Kate, call me. I don’t care what time of the day or night. I’m close and just a phone call away.”
On impulse he cupped her chin.
Realizing what he was about to do and fighting the urge, at the last minute he kissed her on the forehead.
“It is late, Robert. I appreciate you and your support, but go home to your family. I’m sure your wife is worried by now.”
