McKettrick's Heart

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Go on your trail ride,” Psyche said serenely. “Take Lucas along, and Molly, too, of course. Think this situation over very carefully. You said you wanted to raise Lucas, Keegan. Well, here’s your chance. All you have to do is marry his mother.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  THINK THIS SITUATION OVERvery carefully. You said you wanted to raise Lucas, Keegan. Well, here’s your chance. All you have to do is marry his mother.

  Keegan loosened his tie with a hard motion of one hand. “This is blackmail,” he told Psyche. “I don’t love Molly, and she doesn’t love me. Given that minor detail, what kind of home could we possibly provide for Lucas? And I thought you wanted him to grow up in this house. Travis and Sierra just built one of their own, and they won’t move here.”

  Psyche fidgeted with the vial attached to her IV line. The veins stood out under her skin, and the lines of her skull seemed more prominent, even though only a little over twenty-four hours had passed since he’d last seen her.

  She looked at Molly, who sat silently at the edge of Keegan’s awareness, then met his gaze and answered, “I want Lucas to grow up in or around Indian Rock. As for you and Molly not loving each other—well, you’d just have to work things out, wouldn’t you?”

  “Psyche, this is unreasonable.”

  “It’s swan-song time for me, Keegan. I’m not required to be reasonable.”

  Molly sat with her head down, gripping the sides of her chair. Keegan felt a swift, fierce stab of compassion for her, but it passed as quickly as it had come.

  “Now,” Psyche went on, “leave me alone, please. I need to cry, and I want to do it in private.”

  Keegan didn’t move immediately, and when he did, he reached out, caught hold of one of Molly’s hands and pulled her to her feet. Dragged her off the sunporch with him, through the kitchen, where Lucas and Devon and Florence all marked their passage with partially open mouths, through the enormous formal dining room beyond and finally into the study just off the front entrance.

  At no point in the journey did Molly resist, which was cause enough for concern, to Keegan’s way of thinking, admittedly disjointed as it was. Inwardly, he was still wrestling with the implications of losing McKettrickCo—and now this.

  He plunked Molly into a leather chair, wing-backed and ancient, and dragged its twin up square in front of it. Sat down, facing Molly, their knees almost but not quite touching.

  “Don’t you dare accuse me of putting Psyche up to that!” Molly cried in a sudden eruption of emotion she must have been holding in before. Her face was so bloodless, the desolation in her eyes so vivid, that Keegan found himself believing her. She was as surprised and dismayed by this new development as he was.

  “Do you need a glass of water or something?” he asked.

  She shook her head. Dashed at her cheeks with the back of one hand.

  If she was putting on an act, it was a damned good one.

  Keegan rested his hands on his thighs, tried some deep breathing. It didn’t help in the least.

  “It’s because of the affair,” Molly murmured miserably. “This is Psyche’s way of getting back at me.”

  He sighed. “No,” he said. “Psyche’s not that kind of person.”

  “Isn’t she?” Molly said, her eyes welling up again. Her nostrils were red, and there was a little catch in her breathing.

  Keegan repressed an urge to pull her onto his lap and hold her close until she felt better. “No,” he repeated, but Molly didn’t seem to hear him.

  “I should have known it was some kind of trap,” she fretted. “I should have known she’d never let me raise Lucas.”

  “Psyche,” Keegan said again, evenly, “is not that kind of person.”

  Molly gripped the arms of her chair, as though meaning to thrust herself upright but not quite able to attempt it. “I didn’t know Thayer was married,” she said.

  “If you didn’t,” Keegan said, “you should have.”

  She nodded wretchedly. “You’re right. Does that make you happy, Keegan? Are you satisfied? Or should I have a scarlet A printed on a T-shirt and wear it every day for the rest of my life?”

  Keegan took a certain grim enjoyment in the image—the T-shirt was wet in his version—but in the next instant he was ashamed of himself. “We all make mistakes,” he said, though not with much generosity.

  “Even you?” Molly challenged, straining to pluck a handful of tissues from the box sitting on the corner of the desk that had belonged to Psyche’s father.

  “Even me,” Keegan said.

  She dabbed at her eyes—a hopeless endeavor, given that her mascara was running down her face in pitiful streaks—and then blew her nose with such unselfconscious vigor that Keegan had to fight back a smile. “What am I going to do?” she asked plaintively.

  “What are you going to do? Seems to me this is a we kind of problem.”

  “How do you figure that?” Molly immediately demanded. “As I understand it, Psyche’s lawyer and his wife live in Indian Rock. You’ll be able to see Lucas any time you want. I, on the other hand, am—forgive the expression—shit out of luck.”

  Keegan remembered kissing Molly in the park on the Fourth of July, and wanted, incomprehensibly, to do it again. Since the timing was obviously lousy, he didn’t give in to the urge—but it was there.

  Oh, it was there.

  “Keegan?”

  He gave himself an internal shake. “I care about Lucas, too,” he said. “It’s almost as though—”

  There was a change in her face, barely discernible but eloquent. “As though you and Psyche had him together?”

  “Something like that,” he admitted.

  “You really love her, don’t you?”

  “I really love her.”

  “So it follows that you love Lucas.”

  Keegan nodded. “It follows,” he said, a little distracted, important as the conversation was, by the strangely bruised look in Molly’s eyes.

  She nodded, sniffled, pitched the wad of tissue into a nearby wastebasket. “Of course it would be really stupid if we got married. You and me, I mean.”

  Keegan thought of his big house, empty except when Devon came to visit, and of the bed he hated to sleep in alone. Usually he bunked on the living-room couch, or the one in his office. Might as well have been a park bench, with newspapers for covers, for all it mattered.

  Not that the office couch was going to be an option much longer.

  Maybe he’d get a sleeping bag and share Spud’s stall, out in the barn.

  “Really stupid,” he agreed, long after the fact.

  She began to cry again.

  Keegan was overwhelmed by the conflicting emotions the sight stirred in him. He did what he’d decided not to do only moments earlier—took Molly’s hand and pulled her onto his lap.

  She stiffened with resistance for a moment, then allowed him to hold her.

  He was alarmed at how good it felt.

  “What am I going to do?” she asked again, her voice muffled by his shoulder.

  His shirt felt soggy from her tears, and he pondered the inevitable mascara stains. Decided he didn’t give a rat’s ass if the shirt was ruined—he had way too many just like it.

  “You’re going to pack some gear for you and Lucas and take a trail ride,” he said in answer to her question.

  She lifted her head, stared into his eyes. “What?”

  He grinned. “What’s the matter, city girl? Are you chicken? Afraid of snakes and bears and bugs?”

  She smiled wetly, but with some spirit. “No,” she said. “I’m not chicken.”

  “Have you ever ridden a horse?”

  “Once, when I was nine,” she said. “I went on a pony ride at a carnival on Santa Monica Beach.”

  “Oh, well, then, that makes you an expert,” Keegan replied, bemused by the fact that he felt so good, while his life was collapsing around his ears.

  “Which is not to say I won’t be saddle sore,” she sai
d, looking worried.

  “So will I,” he admitted, at some cost to his pride. He was a McKettrick. He was supposed to be a hand with horses—and women.

  “You don’t ride? But Psyche thinks you can teach Lucas—”

  “I didn’t say I couldn’t ride,” Keegan told her. “It’s just been a while, that’s all.” He set her on her feet. “Get your stuff together,” he said. “You and Lucas can ride out to the Triple M with Devon and me.”

  Clearly wary, Molly thought for a while, finally nodded.

  Taking a baby on a trail ride, it turned out, required a surprising amount of gear and getting ready.

  Half an hour later, with all the stuff stashed in the trunk, Lucas and his car seat both securely fastened into the backseat of Keegan’s Jag, Devon sitting solicitously beside the little boy and Molly riding shotgun up front, they were on their way.

  Molly looked good in her old jeans and a T-shirt—alas, totally dry—but the sneakers weren’t going to pack it once she was on the back of a horse. The floor of one of the downstairs closets at home was jammed with boots in a variety of sizes. He’d insist that she try them on until she found a pair to fit.

  “Will Travis and Sierra Reid be along on this trail ride?” Molly asked when they were well out of town.

  “Travis is a Reid,” Keegan said. “Sierra goes by ‘McKettrick.’ And, yeah, they’ll probably be there. Some of the out of towners, too, most likely.”

  “The out of towners?”

  “More McKettricks,” Keegan explained. “There was a megameeting at the office today, and a lot of them are probably still around.” He waited for the pit of his stomach to drop open, like a trapdoor, with the reminder that his corporate career was over unless he wanted to work for strangers, which he didn’t.

  Curiously, the hinges held.

  Molly looked solemn. “I want to meet them. Travis and Sierra, I mean.”

  Keegan glanced in the rearview mirror, saw Devon reflected there, bobbing one of Lucas’s toys under his nose, making him giggle. He didn’t want to discuss Psyche’s adoption terms in front of his daughter.

  When he looked briefly in Molly’s direction before turning his gaze back to the road ahead, he knew she’d seen him check the mirror, and had picked up on his concern.

  She shifted slightly in the seat, turned to smile back at Devon. “I’ll bet you’re a very accomplished rider,” she said.

  Something warmed inside Keegan.

  “Not as good as Maeve is,” Devon answered proudly. “But I can ride, all right.”

  “Who’s Maeve?” Molly asked, as though she knew she ought to remember the name but didn’t quite.

  “My cousin, sort of,” Devon said. “Really distant, though. Like Dad and Uncle Jesse and Uncle Rance. They call themselves cousins, but they’re really just McKettricks.”

  “Oh,” Molly said, frowning in pretty confusion. “What does that mean, to be ‘just McKettricks’?”

  Devon drew a deep breath. Like all the kids in the family, she was well versed in clan history. “A long time ago a man named Angus McKettrick settled a little piece of what’s now the Triple M. That’s our ranch….”

  Keegan’s throat caught at the word our. Someday he’d probably have to tell Devon she wasn’t a blood McKettrick, and he was already dreading that.

  “And anyway,” Devon went on with touching confidence, “he had four sons—Holt, Rafe, Kade and Jeb. Sierra and Meg are related to Holt. Uncle Rance is de—de—”

  “Descended,” Keegan coached quietly.

  “Descended,” Devon said, “from Rafe. Uncle Jesse is—descended from Jeb, and Dad—well, Kade was his great-great, however many greats, grandfather. They all had houses of their own, of course—Holt and Rafe and Kade and Jeb, I mean—and the cool thing is, everybody still lives in the same one.”

  Keegan gave Molly a sidelong glance. “Clear as mud?”

  She smiled, a little sadly, he thought. “Clear enough,” she said.

  They passed the road to Holt’s place, and Devon pointed it out. Later, going by a tilted mailbox at the base of a hill, she said, “Uncle Jesse lives up that way. Our house is close to a creek, but you don’t have to worry. I’ll make sure Lucas doesn’t fall in or anything.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Molly said.

  “Maeve and Rianna live right on the other side,” Devon elaborated. “Of the creek, I mean. But our house is the oldest one. Angus built it himself.”

  “There was a daughter, too,” Keegan said, finding a singular comfort in talking about his family tree. “Katie McKettrick, Angus’s youngest. She married a United States senator when she grew up. The women in the family keep the name when they marry, and the tradition started with her.”

  “Wow,” Molly said. “She must have been something.”

  Keegan grinned. “According to family legend, she was a real firebrand. Held her own, even with four brothers, all grown men when she was born.”

  “What’s your family like, Molly?” Devon asked, with the generous innocence of a child trying to make sure no one felt left out.

  Molly sighed. “My mother died when I was fifteen,” she said. “My dad is a retired police officer.”

  “Are you an only child?” Devon pressed.

  “Dev,” Keegan said.

  “It’s okay,” Molly told him. Then, to Devon, “Yes. Just me.”

  “Me, too,” Devon said wistfully. “So’s Dad.”

  Keegan scraped his lower lip between his teeth.

  Devon’s cross-examination went on. “Do you ever wish you had brothers and sisters?” she asked Molly.

  “All the time,” Molly said, watching Keegan.

  “Me, too,” Devon repeated. “What about you, Dad? Did you ever want to be part of a big family?”

  His gaze met Devon’s in the rearview mirror. “I’ve got Rance and Jesse,” he said. “They’re like brothers to me. In fact, the whole McKettrick bunch is pretty tight.”

  “You’re lucky,” Molly told him.

  “I know,” he said. He’d forgotten it for a while, but he was lucky. He had a solid heritage, a daughter, a home. A long, long story had begun on this land, and he had a place in the tale.

  They reached the last road, crossed over the wooden bridge spanning the creek, built by some industrious McKettrick back in the 1940s, and still sturdy, like the houses and the barns and the surrounding hills.

  His own place, so familiar, looked strangely new to him.

  “In the old days,” Devon piped up, “everybody had to ride horses through a shallow place in the creek to get across.”

  Keegan smiled. So what if Devon wasn’t his biological child? She was still a McKettrick, through and through.

  “You really know your family history,” Molly told Devon, with what sounded like sincere admiration. She was taking in the ranch house as she spoke, and Keegan wondered what she thought of the sprawling, two-story structure, with its many windows and its weathered log walls and its natural-rock chimneys.

  He would have liked it better if her opinion hadn’t mattered to him, but he couldn’t deny, at least to himself, that it did.

  “That’s where Uncle Rance lives, over there,” Devon said, ever the tour guide. “Do you want to see our donkey? His name is Spud, and he’s in the barn.”

  As soon as the car came to a full stop, Devon was out the door and sprinting for Spud’s stall.

  Keegan grinned. “She’ll run down in a while,” he said quietly.

  “I hope not,” Molly replied. “She’s delightful.” She got out of the Jag, started unstrapping Lucas, who was bouncing with impatience, from the car seat.

  Keegan stood behind her, admiring her shapely backside.

  “I guess we’d better say hello to the donkey,” she said, straightening and turning around with the child in her arms.

  The sun struck them both just right, the woman and the boy, rimming them in a flash of radiant gold.

  Keegan had to clear his throat. “I guess so,
” he agreed.

  Devon was already astraddle the stall door when they got inside the barn. Like most ranch kids, she was more likely to scramble over than simply open it. He’d been the same way, and so had Jesse and Rance and Meg.

  “There’s a note from Doc Swann,” she called, waving a sheet of yellow legal paper, ripped from a nail in the barn wall. “He gave Spud a shot for mange and said to get his feet trimmed.” She grinned. “Spud’s feet, I mean. Not Doc’s.”

  Molly laughed, still carrying Lucas, but that fragility Keegan had glimpsed in her earlier was there again. She was about to lose a child she’d only recently found, and for all his disapproval and distrust of her motives, Keegan wasn’t unsympathetic.

  Devon, meanwhile, had moved on. “It’s a good thing Uncle Rance and Uncle Jesse have a lot of horses,” she remarked, now inside Spud’s stall. “This is a piss-poor excuse for a barn, with only one donkey in it.”

  “Devon,” Keegan said. “Language.”

  “You say ‘piss-poor’ all the time,” she retorted.

  Molly gave him a wobbly, let’s-see-you-get-out-of-this-one kind of grin.

  “I say a lot of things I’d better not hear you saying,” Keegan told his daughter.

  They all admired Spud for a little while, then Devon decided they ought to go into the house. She was going on a trail ride, and she had preparations to make. Keegan wondered distractedly if she’d want to lug the pink teddy bear along.

  Molly, Lucas and Keegan went as far as the kitchen, while Devon pounded up the back stairs.

  Molly set Lucas down on the floor and gravitated to the cookstove. Ran a hand over the black surface. Turned to Keegan.

  “Do you still use it?” she asked.

  “Sometimes,” he said, oddly pleased that she’d asked. “When it snows, nothing beats a wood-burning stove for atmosphere.”

  “It’s wonderful,” Molly said, and she sounded as though she meant it.

  Keegan’s mind flashed to Shelley. When they were married she’d spent as little time as possible on the ranch. Seeing the stove the first time, she’d shaken her head and asked why it hadn’t been hauled off to the nearest junkyard.