Secondhand Bride

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Nope,” he said.

  He felt the quickening in his half brother before he saw it play out in his features. “I can ride him,” he declared.

  “Fifty dollars says you can’t,” Holt replied.

  “You’re on,” Jeb said, and started toward the corral, where there was already a whole lot of dust-raising and cussing going on. His own horse had wandered over to the nearest water trough, oblivious to everything but thirst.

  Holt reached out, stopped Jeb. “Wait a minute, little brother,” he drawled. “I don’t trade in charm. I’m putting up fifty dollars here. Let’s see your money.”

  Jeb’s grin was audacious, as usual. He patted his pockets—his clothes looked like he’d kicked them around on the floor a while before putting them on—and spread his hands. “Seems like I left it at home,” he said. “If I lose— which I won’t—you’ll just have to collect your winnings at the Triple M.”

  Holt looked down, saw that Lizzie was staring adoringly up at Jeb, and softened a little, despite another flash of resentment. He could barely get the kid to talk to him, but she seemed to think her uncle had wings on his feet.

  “All right,” he agreed. “Lizzie, you wait in the house.”

  The child’s face, filled with hero worship a moment before, was transformed into a study in rebellion. “No, sir,” she said, folding her arms. “You can whup me if you want to, but I’m not going to miss this!”

  Jeb laughed. “She’s a McKettrick, all right,” he said.

  “She’s a Cavanagh,” Holt insisted coldly. Then he turned an irritated scowl on his daughter. “And nobody’s going to ‘whup’ you, anyhow, so just put that idea out of your head for good.”

  “Can I stay?” she pleaded.

  Jeb arched an eyebrow, waiting.

  “Oh, hell,” Holt spat, that being as close as he could get to a yes, and the three of them headed for the corral.

  The paint was in fine form that bright fall morning, red-eyed and snorting, looking for somebody to stomp the life out of. Lizzie scrambled onto the first rung of the fence; Holt warned her, with a glance, to go no farther.

  Jeb rolled his shoulders, resettled his hat, watching the horse the whole while. The paint planted his hind legs, watching him back. The air felt charged to Holt, and heavy, like there was a storm brewing. A couple of cowboys meandered over, dust-coated and curious.

  “You might as well shoot that sumbitch,” one of them said, gesturing toward the paint. “He can’t be rode.”

  Holt indicated his daughter’s presence with a slight inclination of his head and glared the man back a step or two. “Get the gear,” he said. “My brother is feeling lucky today.”

  A rope, saddle, and bridle were fetched from the barn.

  Jeb, having walked around to the opposite side of the corral and climbed up onto the highest rail, took the rope, made a deft loop in one end, and lassoed that four-legged fury in one try. The horse, ready for a fight, shuddered and blew, but he didn’t move.

  It seemed to Holt that every cowpuncher on the ranch had drawn nigh to watch the spectacle—they lined the fence, silent and watchful.

  Holt imagined himself carrying Angus’s youngest pup back to the Triple M in bloody chunks, and laid a hand on Lizzie’s small, stiff back, as though she were a touchstone.

  After the rope came the bridle, made special for cussed broncs. Jeb walked right up to that horse, slipped the rigging over his head, set the bit. The stallion nickered and tossed his head, as if to say, Bring it on, cowboy.

  “Careful,” Holt breathed, and only realized that he’d spoken aloud when Lizzie turned to look at him.

  The saddle came next. The brute hung his head, and another shudder, this one ominously rhythmic, flowed visibly through his powerful body, muscle by muscle. Nonetheless, he let Jeb tighten the cinch and buckle it fast.

  “Whoa, now,” somebody said, though Holt wasn’t sure whether the words had come from another onlooker, Jeb, or his own mouth.

  Jeb planted a foot in the stirrup, the horse sidestepped and quivered again. Everything was dead still, it seemed to Holt; even the birds had stopped singing.

  In the next instant, Jeb was in the saddle, and all hell broke loose. Old Demon Spawn turned himself inside out, flinging out his hind legs, then going into a spin. Jeb let out a Rebel yell and held on.

  The stallion tried to sunfish—turn his belly to the sky— but Jeb was still with him, one hand in the air, though whether he was trying to keep his balance or just showing off, Holt couldn’t say. The kid went right on spurring with his bootheels, and the horse went right on bucking.

  The spectators seemed to let out one and the same breath, and a few cackles of delight went up. Holt glanced down at Lizzie and saw that she was beaming with excitement. Damned if she wasn’t a McKettrick, whether he liked it or not.

  Jeb’s hat sailed off on the breeze; his bright hair gleamed in the sunshine. He hollered again, a purely exuberant sound, but the horse wasn’t ready to give up yet. He flattened himself out in midair, and came down in a wicked whirl of horseflesh and foam, this time in the opposite direction.

  Jeb gave another shout—the damn fool, the rougher the ride got, the better he seemed to like it—and gripped that horse’s sides with his thighs like a banker holding on to a dollar. The dust flew, the cowboys cheered, and the horse kicked and twisted and hurled himself at the sky.

  The struggle went on for some ten minutes, by Holt’s watch, ten of the longest minutes of his life. You see, old man, he heard himself telling Angus contritely, this whole thing was Jeb’s idea, God rest his soul. I tried to talk him out of it, I surely did. Oh, well, you’ve got other sons.

  “Ride him, Jeb!” Lizzie called out, her voice pure and sweet. Jesus, he should have made her go into the house, like he’d planned. She’d already experienced more tragedy, in her short life, than most people ever had to endure— she didn’t need to see this. Besides, she was his daughter, and it didn’t sit well that she was so taken with Jeb.

  The devil’s saint had one last trick in him, it turned out, and it was a dandy. The horse pitched forward onto his knees, and Holt closed his eyes. When he opened them, he fully expected to see his half brother either rolling end over end over the paint’s head, or already sprawled in the dirt, fixing to get himself stomped to blood and splintered bone.

  Instead, he was sitting there in the saddle, his body relaxed, waiting for more action. Holt was embarrassed to find himself on the top rail of the fence, ready to run for the center of the corral, if necessary, and drag the damn idiot clear of the stallion’s hooves.

  The paint shivered, nickered, and jostled to his feet. He stood stock-still then, and, once again, Holt held his breath. In the next instant, he knew the battle was over. Jeb’s grin was a white flash of victory in his dirty, arrogant face.

  “I’ll be damned,” Holt muttered.

  Jeb reined the stallion to the right, then to the left, then around in a circle. If the demon had any bucking left in him, he was saving it for another day, and another cowboy. He’d conceded the contest to this one.

  Jeb rode to the fence, a wrangler handed up his hat, and he replaced it with a decisive motion of one hand. “You owe me fifty dollars,” he told Holt.

  Holt’s belly unclenched, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to smile. His jaw was clamped down tight as a bear trap. He took out his wallet, extracted the money, and handed it over.

  Jeb folded the bills with an air of satisfaction and tucked them into his pocket, standing in the stirrups to stretch his legs. “Thanks,” he said affably. “It’s a start.”

  “A start to what?” Holt asked, irritated. Life had been so much simpler before he’d known these brothers of his—they were nothing but trouble, all three of them.

  “A bank account,” Jeb replied. He leaned in the saddle to ruffle Lizzie’s hair with one gloved hand. “Thanks for cheering for me, kid.”

  A crazy thought struck Holt, right out of the blue. “You want a job?
”

  Jeb chewed on the offer, one forearm resting on old Demon Spawn’s sweaty neck. “Depends on how much it pays,” he said, in his own good time.

  In seven years with the Texas Rangers, Holt had never seen anybody ride like Jeb McKettrick, Comanches included, but there was no sense in inflating the kid’s head by going on about it. “I think we can come to terms,” he said moderately.

  Jeb’s grin flashed again. Hide the women, Holt thought. “It’ll piss Pa off for sure.”

  At last, Holt smiled. “Yup,” he said, with grim pleasure. “It surely will do that.”

  23

  Far as Lizzie was concerned, that baby was the ugliest little critter God ever put on the earth, but she didn’t reckon it would be polite to say so. She glanced up at her grandfather, beaming beside the big bed at the Triple M, then met the Mexican woman’s kindly eyes. She was conscious, all the while, of her papa, leaning one shoulder against the framework of the open door with his arms folded.

  “What’s her name?” she asked. For her, everything began with that. When she knew what to call a person, she felt properly acquainted.

  “Katherine Angelina McKettrick,” Concepcion replied, smiling, and it seemed like that smile reached into all the dark places inside Lizzie, warming them. “We’ll call her Katie, though.”

  “Katie,” Lizzie repeated. “Sounds all right to me.”

  Her grandfather chuckled at her response and put out his big, tree root of a hand to her. “Come on, Lizziebeth,” he said, making up his own name for her, just like that. “Let’s go out to the barn and have a look at Old Blue’s puppies. See how they’re doing.”

  Lizzie glanced at her papa, trying to read his face. He’d shaved and changed his clothes before they drove down to the Triple M in a buggy, and his wavy hair gleamed in the light. He was solemn for a moment, but then he nodded.

  Lizzie took Angus’s hand, still outstretched, and her papa stepped back to let them pass.

  Old Blue, to Lizzie’s initial disappointment, wasn’t blue at all. She was gray, with floppy ears and yellow eyes, and lay curled up in a bed of straw in an empty stall. Five puppies nuzzled at her belly, fat and sleek.

  She touched one of them, tentatively, filled with an instant yearning, fierce enough to make her breath catch.

  Angus crouched beside her. “You know something, Lizzie,” he began awkwardly, in the tone of a question, though he didn’t seem to be asking her anything. “That little Katie girl you just met, she’s mighty precious to me, like a present from God, tied up with a bow, but there’s one thing I want you to understand.” He cleared his throat, and Lizzie didn’t look at him, figuring he didn’t want her to, just then. “You’re just as important.”

  Lizzie was happy, but her eyes burned, and she couldn’t swallow. She had to look at Angus then, whether he was ready or not. “Why?” she asked, stricken with a strange, sorrowful joy.

  Angus picked up one of the puppies, dwarfing it with his huge hands, and offered it to her. She knelt in the straw, holding the squirmy little dog in her lap. “Your papa was as little as Katie, once—about the size of that pup you’re holding,” he said, in a husky, remembering sort of voice. He smiled, though it seemed to Lizzie that his eyes were wet. “He was mine, and I loved him as much as I’d ever loved anything or anybody.” He stopped, some struggle going on inside him. “His mama died, when he was just a few days old, and I had to leave him.”

  Lizzie took the images inside her, one by one, to sort through and set in their proper places. “Why?” she asked, again. Her mama used to say that was her favorite word, and she reckoned it was true enough.

  Angus sighed, ran the back of one hand across his face. “Times were hard, and I was hurting real bad. I couldn’t seem to stay put, back then. Bounced around like a drop of cold water on a hot griddle. Anyhow, I gave my son to his aunt and uncle, and I rode out.” He paused, watching as Lizzie stroked the puppy. She could feel its tiny heart beating against her thigh. “I’d change it all, if I could go back. I’d bring your papa right here, to this ranch, and raise him with his brothers.”

  Lizzie wondered how that made her as important as Katie McKettrick, who was evidently very important, even if she did have a red face and patchy hair and a bad disposition, but she didn’t figure it was the right time to ask, so she just waited.

  Angus was silent for a long time, and it was a sad silence, if a peaceable one. When he finally spoke, though, he answered Lizzie’s question as surely as she’d offered it aloud. “When I met you, I knew it all came right, whatever your papa might think to the contrary. If I hadn’t left him to grow up in Texas, you might never have been born. You’re my granddaughter, with my blood in your veins and McKettrick grit in your belly. I’ll love you until the day I die, and beyond that. I’ll be here for you, Lizzie, like I wasn’t for Holt, and when I’m gone, you can be sure your aunts and uncles will stand by you, too.”

  A tear fell on the puppy’s back, and it was Lizzie’s. Her grandfather’s words would take a lot of studying before she understood them, but the impact of them struck her to the heart. She knew they were true, sure as the sky was blue and the mama dog was gray.

  Angus leaned over, kissed the top of her head, then stood, with a creaking and popping of bones.

  “That was a fine speech, old man,” Holt said, when Angus reeled out of the barn into the afternoon sunlight and found him waiting there. “I was hard put not to applaud.”

  Angus stopped, squared himself, stood his ground. “Thanks for coming to see the baby,” he said.

  Holt was shaken, had been since he’d gone to the barn to make sure Angus didn’t give Lizzie every puppy on the place and overheard their conversation. And he’d have died before he let it show. “What are you going to do with a girl?” he asked lightly, and did his best to smile.

  “Spoil her,” Angus said, with a scratchy laugh. “I reckon she’ll be a sight easier to bring up than her brothers were.”

  Holt thought of Jeb, on the back of that incorrigible stallion, grinning like a kid on a rocking horse. “I wouldn’t count on that,” he advised.

  Angus hooked his thumbs in his belt and rested his weight on one side. He wasn’t packing the usual .45; maybe being the father of a baby girl had mellowed him. “She’s got four brothers to look after her, once I’m gone.”

  Holt didn’t correct the old man’s figures from four to three, though he wasn’t sure why. “You’ll outlive the lot of us,” he said instead, and with an ease he didn’t feel. “That baby, she’s the good Lord’s way of giving you your comeuppance, old man. Just you wait and see.”

  “Seems to me the good Lord’s handing out comeuppance right and left these days,” Angus allowed. He cocked a thumb toward the barn. “Have you talked to that child about her mother? Asked her where they’ve been all this time, and what it was like for her?”

  Holt ran a hand through his hair and thrust out a breath. “I don’t know where to start,” he admitted.

  “Did you love the woman, or just use her?”

  A flash of anger went through Holt, but he waited it out. “I loved her, all right,” he said. “Trouble was, I didn’t figure that out until it was too late.”

  Angus studied him for a long moment, then nodded. Evidently, the conversation was over.

  He watched, a thousand questions tangled in his throat, as the old man walked away. He was about to collect Lizzie from the barn and head for the Circle C when he saw Emmeline and Rafe crossing the creek in a buckboard drawn by two horses, but they hadn’t come from their place. They’d been to town, and they had Becky and Chloe Wakefield with them, riding in the second seat. The new schoolteacher looked pale and tight-lipped, as though she were a captive rather than a willing guest. Becky had a sociable, slightly smug air. Damn but Chloe was a pretty thing. Made Holt ache, deep down, just to look at her.

  He waited, out of curiosity, he guessed, rather than good manners, until the wagon pulled up beside the house.

  Rafe se
cured the brake lever, wrapped the reins around it, and got down to help Emmeline to the ground, then Becky, then Chloe. Emmeline tossed an anxious smile in Holt’s direction, Becky waved, and Chloe seemed ready to bolt for the hills. Emmeline took Chloe by one elbow, and Becky got her by the other, and the two of them half dragged her toward the house.

  Rafe stayed behind, watching Holt, standing still as Demon Spawn fixing to buck, his features cast into shadow by his hat brim, then broke through whatever was holding him back and walked toward him.

  “Come to claim your inheritance?” he asked. There was a flush in his neck, and along his jaw.

  Holt frowned, puzzled. He hadn’t expected a warm welcome, but Rafe’s mood intrigued him. “What do you mean by that?” he countered.

  Rafe sighed, took his hat off, and wiped the band with his handkerchief before putting it on again. “Never mind,” he said.

  “Never mind, hell,” Holt retorted. “You started this conversation, and you’re going to finish it.”

  Rafe surprised him with a sheepish grin. “Soon as I figure out what to say,” he said, “I’ll say it.”

  Holt shook his head. “Is everybody in this outfit touched in the head?”

  Rafe laughed. “Some more than others,” he answered. He pondered a bit. “You have anybody in particular in mind when you asked that question?”

  “Jeb, for one,” Holt reflected. “You ever seen him bust a bronc?”

  “A time or two,” Rafe said, and laughed again. “Just don’t let that cocky little bugger tell you he’s never been thrown. For every bronc he’s ridden to a standstill, ten others have made him eat dirt.”

  “He’s good,” Holt said, though he hated to part with the admission.

  “Best I’ve ever run across,” Rafe confirmed. “Not that I’d ever let him hear me say it.”

  Holt was pensive. “I offered him a job on the Circle C today,” he said, with a reluctance he didn’t understand. “And he took it.”