The McKettrick Legend (25 page)

“I don't rightly recall,” Angus said glumly.

Meg knew he was lying. She also knew he wasn't going to tell her his brother's assumed name.

She got up again, went back to brewing tea.

Angus sat brooding in silence, and the phone rang just as Meg was pouring boiling water over the loose tea leaves in the bottom of Lorelei's pot.

Glancing at the caller ID panel, she saw no name, just an unfamiliar number with a 615 area code.

“Hello?”

“He's going to recover,” Brad said.

Tears rushed to Meg's eyes, and her throat constricted. He was referring to the dog, of course. And using the cell phone he'd carried when he still lived in Tennessee. “Thank God,” she managed to say. “Did Olivia operate?”

“No need,” Brad answered. “Once she'd taken X-rays and run a scan, she knew there were no internal injuries. He's pretty torn up—looks like a baseball with all those stitches—but he'll be okay.”

“Was there a microchip?”

“Yeah,” Brad said after a charged silence. “But the phone number's no longer in service. Livie ran an internet search and found out the original owner died six months ago. Who knows where Willie's been in the meantime.”

“Willie?”

“The dog,” Brad explained. “That's his name. Willie.”

“What's going to happen to Willie now?”

“He'll be at the clinic for a while,” Brad said. “He's in pretty bad shape. Livie will try to find out if anybody adopted him after his owner died, but we're not holding out a lot of hope on that score.”

“He'll go to the pound? When he's well enough to leave the clinic?”

“No,” Brad answered. He sounded as tired as Meg felt. “If nobody has a prior claim on him, he'll come to live with me. I could use a friend—and so could he.” He paused. “I hope I didn't wake you or anything.”

“I was still up,” Meg said, glancing in Angus's direction only to find that he'd disappeared again.

“Good,” Brad replied.

A silence fell between them. Meg knew there was something else Brad wanted to say, and that she'd want to hear it. So she waited.

“I'm riding up into the high country again first thing in the morning,” he finally said. “Looking for Ransom. I was wondering if—well—it's probably a stupid idea, but—”

Meg waited, resisting an urge to rush in and finish the sentence for him.

“Would you like to go along? Livie has a full schedule tomorrow—one of the other vets is out sick—and she wants to keep an eye on Willie, too. She's going to obsess about this horse until I can tell her he's fine, so I'm going to find him if I can.”

“I'd like to go,” Meg said. “What time are you leaving the ranch?”

“Soon as the sun's up,” Brad answered. “You're sure? The country's pretty rough up there.”

“If you can handle rough country, O'Ballivan, so can I.”

He chuckled. “Okay, McKettrick,” he said.

Meg found herself smiling. “I'll be there by 6:00 a.m., unless that's too early. Shall I bring my own horse?”

“Six is about right,” Brad said. “Don't go to the trouble of trailering another horse—you can ride Cinnamon. Dress warm, though. And bring whatever gear you'd need if we had to spend the night for some reason.”

Alone in her kitchen, Meg blushed. “See you in the morning,” she said.

“'Night,” Brad replied.

“Good night,” Meg responded—long after Brad had hung up.

Giving up on the tea and, at least for that night, researching Josiah McKettrick, and having decided she needed to at least
try
to sleep, since tomorrow would be an eventful day, Meg locked up, shut off the lights and went upstairs to her room.

After getting out a pair of thermal pajamas, she took a long shower in the main bathroom across the hall, brushed her teeth, tamed her wet hair as best she could and went to bed.

Far from tossing and turning, as she'd half expected, she dropped into an immediate, consuming slumber, so deep she remembered none of her dreams.

Waking, she dressed quickly, in jeans and a sweat shirt, over a set of long under wear, made of some miraculous microfiber and bought for skiing, and finished off her ensemble with two pairs of socks and her sturdiest pair of
boots. She shoved tooth paste, a brush and a small tube of moisturizer into a plastic storage bag, rolled up a blanket, tied it tightly with twine from the kitchen junk drawer and break fasted on toast and coffee.

She called Jesse on her cell phone as she climbed into the Blazer, after feeding Banshee and the others. Cheyenne, Jesse's wife, answered on the second ring.

“Hi, it's Meg. Is Jesse around?”

“Sleeping,” Cheyenne said, yawning audibly.

“I woke you up,” Meg said, embarrassed.

“Jesse's the lay-abed in this family,” Cheyenne responded warmly. “I've been up since four. Is anything wrong, Meg? Sierra and the baby—?”

“They're fine, as far as I know,” Meg said, anxious to reassure Cheyenne and, at the same time, very glad she'd gotten Jesse's wife instead of Jesse himself. He'd look after her horses if she asked, but he'd want to know where she was going, and if she replied that she and Brad O'Ballivan were riding off into the sunrise together, he'd tease her unmercifully. “Look, Cheyenne, I need a favor. I'm going on a—on a trail ride with a friend, and I'll probably be back tonight, but—”

“Would this ‘friend' be the famous Brad O'Ballivan?”

“Yes,” Meg said, but reluctantly, backing out of the driveway and turning the Blazer around to head for Stone Creek. It was still dark, but the first pinkish gold rays of sunlight were rimming the eastern hills. “Cheyenne, will you ask Jesse to check on my horses if he doesn't hear from me by six or so tonight?”

“Of course,” Cheyenne said. “So you're going riding with Brad, and it might turn into an over night thing. Hmm—”

“It isn't anything romantic,” Meg said. “I'm just helping him look for a stallion that might be hurt, that's all.”

“I see,” Cheyenne said sweetly.

“Just out of curiosity, what made you jump to the conclusion that the friend I mentioned was Brad?”

“It's all over town that you and country music's baddest bad boy met up at the Dixie Dog Drive-In the other day.”

“Oh, great,” Meg breathed. “I guess that means Jesse knows, then. And Rance and Keegan.”

Cheyenne laughed softly, but when she spoke, her voice was full of concern. “Rance and Jesse are all for finding Brad and punching his lights out for hurting you so badly all those years ago, but Keegan is the voice of reason. He says give Brad a week to prove himself,
then
punch his lights out.”

“The McKettrick way,” Meg said. Her cousins were as protective as brothers would have been, and she loved them. But in terms of her social life, they weren't any more help than Angus had been.

“We'll talk later,” Cheyenne said practically. “You're probably driving.”

“Thanks, Chey,” Meg answered.

When she got to Stone Creek Ranch, Brad came out of the house to greet her. He was dressed for the trail in jeans, boots, a work shirt and a medium-weight leather coat.

Meg's breath caught at the sight of him, and she was glad of the mechanics of parking and shutting off the Blazer, because it gave her a few moments to gather her composure.

Normally, she was unflappable.

She'd handled some of the toughest negotiations during her career with McKettrickCo, without so much as a flutter of nerves, but there was something about Brad that erased all the years she'd spent developing a thick skin and a poker face.

He opened the Blazer door before she was quite ready to face him.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“I had toast and coffee at home,” Meg answered.

“That'll never hold you till lunch,” he said. “Come on inside. I've got some
real
food on the stove.”

“Okay,” Meg said, because short of sitting stubbornly in the car, she couldn't think of a way to avoid accepting his invitation.

The O'Ballivan house, like the ones on the Triple M, was large and rustic, and it exuded a sense of rich history. The porch wrapped around the whole front of the structure, and the back door was on the side nearest the barn. Meg followed Brad up the porch steps in front and around to another entrance.

The kitchen was big, and except for the wooden floors, which looked venerable, the room showed no trace of the old days. The countertops were granite, the cup boards gleamed, and the appliances were ultramodern, as were the furnishings.

Meg felt strangely let down by the sheer glamour of the place. All the kitchens on the Triple M had been modernized, of course, but in all cases, the original wood-burning stoves had been incorporated, and the tables all dated back to Holt, Rafe, Kade and Jeb's time, if not Angus's.

If Brad noticed her reaction, he didn't mention it. He dished up an omelet for her, and poured her a cup of coffee.

“You cook?” Meg teased, washing her hands at the gleaming stainless steel sink.

“I'm a fair hand in a kitchen,” Brad replied modestly. “Dig in. I'll go saddle the horses while you eat.”

Meg nodded, sat down and tackled the omelet.

It was delicious, and so was the coffee, but she felt uncomfortable sitting alone in that kitchen, as fancy as it was. She kept wondering what Maddie O'Ballivan would think,
if she could see it, or even Brad's mother. Surely if things had been as difficult financially as Brad had let on the night before, at Jolene's, the renovations were fairly recent.

Having eaten as much as she could, Meg rinsed her plate, stuck it into the dish washer, along with her fork and coffee cup, and hurried to the back door. Brad was out in front of the barn, the big paint ready to ride, tightening the cinch on Cinnamon's saddle. He picked her rolled blanket up off the ground and tied it on behind.

“Not much gear,” he said. “Do you know how cold it gets up there?”

“I'll be fine,” Meg said.

Brad merely shook his head. His own horse was restless, and the rifle was in evidence, too, looking ominous in the worn scabbard.

“That's quite a kitchen,” Meg said as Brad gave her a leg up onto Cinnamon's back.

“Big John said it was a waste of money,” Brad recalled, smiling to himself as he mounted up. “That was my granddad.”

Meg knew who Big John O'Ballivan was—every body in the county did—but she didn't point that out. If Brad wanted to talk about his family, to pass the time, that was fine with Meg. She nudged Cinnamon to keep pace with Brad's horse as they crossed a pasture, headed for the hills beyond.

“He raised you and your sisters, didn't he?” she asked, though she knew that, too.

“Yes,” Brad said, and the set of his jaw reminded her of the way Angus's had looked, when he told her about his estranged brother.

Meg's curiosity spiked, but she didn't indulge it. “I take it Willie's still on the mend?”

Brad's grin was as dazzling as the coming sunrise would
be. “Olivia called just before you showed up,” he said with a nod. “Willie's going to be fine. In a week or two, I'll bring him home.”

Remembering the way Brad had handled the dog, with such gentleness and such strength, Meg felt a pinch in the center of her heart. “You plan on staying, then?”

He tossed her a thoughtful look. “I plan on staying,” he confirmed. “I told you that, didn't I?”

You also told me we'd get married and you'd love me forever.

“You told me,” she said.

“Would this be a good time to tell you about my second wife?”

Meg considered, then shook her head, smiling a little. “Probably not.”

“Okay,” Brad said, “then how about my sisters?”

“Good idea.” Meg had known Olivia slightly, but there was a set of twins in the family, too. She'd never met them.

“Olivia has a thing for animals, as you can see. She needs to get married and channel some of that energy into having a family of her own, but she's got a cussed streak and runs off every man who manages to get close to her. Ashley and Melissa—the twins—are fraternal. Ashley's pretty down-home—she runs a bed-and-break fast in Stone Creek. Melissa's clerking in a law office in Flag staff.”

“You're close to them?”

“Yes,” Brad said, expelling a long breath. “And, no. Olivia resents my leaving home— I can't seem to get it through her head that we wouldn't have
had
a home if I hadn't gone to Nashville. The twins are ten years younger than I am, and seem to see me more as a visiting celebrity than their big brother.”

“When Olivia needed help,” Meg reminded him, “she
came to you. So maybe she doesn't resent you as much as you think she does.” There was something really different about Olivia O'Ballivan, Meg thought, looking back over the night before, but she couldn't quite figure out what it was.

“I hope you're right,” Brad said. “It's fine to love animals—I'm real fond of them myself. But Olivia carries it to a whole new place. So much so that there's no room in her life for much of anything—or anybody—else.”

“She's a veterinarian, Brad,” Meg said reasonably. “It's natural that animals are her passion.”

“To the exclusion of everything else?” Brad asked.

“She'll be fine,” Meg said. “When Olivia meets the right man, she'll make room for him. Just wait and see.”

Brad looked unconvinced. He raised his chin and said, “If we're going to find that horse, we'd better move a little faster.”

Meg nodded in agreement and Cinnamon fell in behind Brad's gelding as they started the twisting, perilous climb up the mountainside.

L
OOKING FOR THAT WILD STALLION
was a fool's errand, and Brad knew it. As he'd told Meg, his primary reason for undertaking the quest was to keep Olivia from doing it. Now he wondered how many times, during his long absence, his little sister had climbed this mountain alone, at all hours of the day and night, and in all seasons of the year.

The thought made him shudder.

The country above Stone Creek was as rugged as it had ever been. Wolves, coyotes and even javelinas were plentiful, as were rattlesnakes. There were deep crevices in the red earth, some of them hidden by brush, and they'd swallowed many a hapless hiker. But the worst threat was probably the weather—at that elevation, blizzards could strike literally without warning, even in July and August. It was October now, and that only in creased the danger.

Meg, shivering in her too-light coat, rode along beside him without complaint. Being a McKettrick, he thought, with a sad smile turned entirely inward, she'd freeze to death before she'd admit she was cold.

Inviting her along had been a purely selfish act, and Brad regretted it. Too many things could happen, most of them bad.

They'd been traveling for an hour or so when he stopped along side a creek to rest the horses. High banks on either
side sheltered them from the wind, and Meg got a chance to warm up.

Brad opened his saddle bags and brought out a long-sleeved thermal shirt, extended it to Meg. She hesitated a moment—that damnable McKettrick pride again—then took the shirt and pulled it on, right over the top of her coat.

The effect was comically unglamorous.

“Where's a Star bucks when you need one?” she joked.

Brad grinned. “There's an old line shack up the trail a ways,” he told her. “Big John always kept it stocked with supplies, in case a hiker got stranded and needed shelter. It's not Star bucks, but I'll probably be able to rustle up a pot of coffee and some lunch. If you don't mind the survivalist packaging.”

Meg's relief was visible, though she wouldn't have expressed it verbally, Brad knew. “We didn't need to bring the blankets and other gear then,” she reasoned. “If there's a line shack, I mean.”

“You've been living in the five-star lane for too long,” Brad replied, but the jibe was a gentle one. “A while back, some hunters were trespassing on this land—Big John posted No Hunting signs years ago—and a snow storm came up. They were found, dead of exposure, about fifty feet from the shack.”

She shivered. “I remember,” she said, and for a moment, her blue eyes looked almost haunted. The story had been a gruesome one, and she obviously
did
remember—all too clearly.

“We're not all that far from the ranch,” Brad said. “It would probably be best if I took you back.”

Meg's gaze widened, and grew more serious. “And you'd turn right around and come back up here to look for Ransom?”

“Yes,” Brad answered, resigned.

“Alone.”

He nodded. Once, Big John would have made the journey with him. Now there was no one.

“I'm staying,” Meg said and shifted slightly, as if planting her feet. “You
invited
me to come along, in case you've forgotten.”

“I shouldn't have. If anything happened to you—”

“I'm a big girl, Brad,” she interrupted.

He looked her over, and—as always—liked what he saw. Liked it so much that his throat tightened and he had a hard time swallowing so he could hold up his end of the conversation. “You probably weigh a hundred and thirty pounds wrapped in a blanket and dunked into a lake. And despite your illustrious heritage, you're no match for a pack of wolves, a sudden blizzard, or a chasm that reaches halfway to China.”

“If you can do it,” Meg said, “
I
can do it.”

Brad shoved a hand through his hair, exasperated even though he knew it was his own fault that Meg was in danger. After all, he
had
asked her to come along, half hoping the two of them would end up sharing a sleeping bag.

What the hell had he been thinking?

The pertinent question, he decided, was what had he been thinking
with
—not his brain, certainly.

“We'd better get moving again,” she told him, when he didn't speak. Before they'd left the ranch, he'd given her a pair of binoculars on a neck strap; now she pulled them out from under the donated under shirt, her coat, and whatever was beneath that. “We have a horse to find.”

Brad nodded, cupped his hands to give her a leg up onto Cinnamon's back. She paused for a moment, deciding, before setting her left foot in the stirrup of his palms.

“This is a tall horse,” she said, a little flushed.

“We should have named him Stilts instead of Cinnamon,” Brad allowed, amused. Meg, like the rest of her cousins, had virtually grown up on horse back, as had he and Olivia and the twins. She'd interpret even the smallest courtesy—the offer of a boost, for instance—as an affront to her riding skills.

Forty-five minutes later, Meg, using the binoculars, spotted Ransom on the crest of a rocky rise.

“There he is!” she whispered, awed. “Wait till I tell Jesse he's real!”

After a few seconds, she lifted the binoculars off her neck by the strap and handed them across to Brad.

Brad drew in a breath, struck by the magnificence of the stallion, the defiance and barely restrained power. A moment or so passed before he thought to scan the horse for wounds. It was hard to tell, given the distance, even with binoculars, but Ransom wasn't limping, and Brad didn't see any blood. He could report to Olivia, in all honesty, that the object of her equine obsession was holding his own.

Before lowering the binoculars, Brad swept them across the top of that rise, and that was when he saw the two mares. He chuckled. Ransom had himself a harem, then.

He watched them a while, then gave the binoculars back to Meg, with a cheerful, “He has company.”

Meg's face glowed. “They're beautiful,” she whispered, as if afraid to startle the horses and send them fleeing, though they were well over a mile away, by Brad's estimation. “And Ransom. He knows we're here, Brad. It's almost as if he wanted to let us see that he's all right.”

Brad raised his coat collar against a chilly breeze and wished he'd worn his hat. He'd considered it that morning, but it had seemed like an affectation, a way of asserting that he was still a cowboy, by his own standards if not those of the McKettricks. “He knows,” he agreed finally, “but
it's more likely that he's taunting us. Catch-me-if-you-can. That's what he'd say if he could talk.”

Meg's entire face was glowing. In fact, Brad figured if he could strip all those clothes off her, that glow would come right through her skin and be enough to warm him until he died of old age.

“How about that coffee?” she said, grinning.

 

After seeing Brad's kitchen on Stone Creek Ranch, Meg had expected the “line shack” to be a fancy log A-frame with a Jacuzzi and internet service. It was an actual
shack,
though, made of weathered board. There was a lean-to on one side, to shelter the horses, but no barn, with hay stored inside. Brad gave the animals grain from a sealed metal bin, and filled two water buckets for them from a rusty old pump outside.

Meg might have gone inside and started the fire, so they could brew the promised coffee, but she was mesmerized, watching Brad. It was as though the two of them had somehow gone back in time, back to when all the earlier McKettricks and O'Ballivans were still in the prime of their lives.

Once, there had been several shacks like that one on the Triple M, far from the barns and bunk houses. Ranch hands, riding the far-flung fence lines, or just traveling overland for some reason, used to spend the night in them, take refuge there when the weather was bad. Eventually, those tiny buildings had become hazards, rather than havens, and they'd been knocked down and burned.

“Pretty decrepit,” Brad said, leading the way into the shack.

Things skittered inside, and the smell of the place was faintly musty, but Brad soon had a good fire going in the ancient potbellied stove. There was no furniture at all, but
shelves, made of old wooden crates stacked on top of each other, held cups, food in airtight silver packets, cans of coffee.

The whole place was about the size of Meg's down stairs powder room on the Triple M.

“I'd offer you a chair,” Brad said, grinning, “but obviously there aren't any. Make yourself at home while I rinse out these cups at the pump and fill the coffeepot.”

Meg examined the plank floor, sat down cross-legged, and reveled in the warmth beginning to emanate from the wood-burning stove. The shack, inadequate as it was, offered a welcome respite from the cold wind outside. The hunters Brad had mentioned probably wouldn't have died if they'd been able to reach it. She remembered the news story; the facts had been bitter and brutal.

Like Stone Creek Ranch, the Triple M was posted, and hunting wasn't allowed. Still, people trespassed constantly, and Rance, Keegan and Jesse enforced the boundaries—mostly in a peaceful way. Just the winter before, though, Jesse had caught two men running deer with snowmobiles on the high meadow above his house, and he'd scared them off with a rifle shot aimed at the sky. Later, he'd tracked the pair to a tavern in Indian Rock—strangers to the area, they'd laughed at his warning—and put both of them in the hospital. He might have killed them, in fact, if Keegan hadn't gotten wind of the fight and come to break it up, and even with his help, it took the local marshal, Wyatt Terp, his deputy, and half the clientele in the bar to get Jesse off the second snowmobiler. He'd already pulverized the first one.

There was talk about filing assault charges against Jesse, and later it was rumored that there might be lawsuits, but nothing ever came of either. Meg, along with every body
else in Indian Rock, doubted the snowmobilers would ever set foot in town again, let alone on the Triple M.

But there was always, as Keegan liked to say, a fresh supply of idiots.

Brad came in with the cups and the full coffeepot, shoving the door closed behind him with one shoulder. Again, Meg had a sense of having stepped right out of the twenty-first century and into the nineteenth.

Despite cracks between the board walls, the shack was warm.

Brad set the coffeepot on the stove, measured ground beans into it from a can, and left it to boil, cowboy-style. No basket, no filter.

Then he emptied two of the crates being used as cupboards and dragged them over in front of the stove, so he and Meg could sit on them.

Overhead, thunder rolled across the sky, loud as a freight train.

Meg stiffened. “Rain?”

“Snow,” Brad said. “I saw a few flakes drift past while I was outside. Soon as we've warmed up a little and fortified our selves with caffeine and some grub, we'd better make for the low-country.”

Had there been any windows, Meg would have gotten up to look out of one of them. She could open the door a crack, but the thought of being buffeted by the rising wind stopped her.

By reflex, she scram bled to extract her cell phone from her coat pocket, flipped it open.

“No service,” she murmured.

“I know,” Brad said, smiling a little as he rose off the crate he'd been sitting on to add wood to the stove. Fortunately, there seemed to be an adequate supply of that. “I
tried to call Olivia and let her know Ransom was still king of the hill a few minutes ago. Nothing.”

Another round of thunder rattled the roof, and out in the lean-to, the horses fussed in alarm.

“Be right back,” Brad said, heading for the door.

When he returned, he had a bedroll and Meg's pitifully in sufficient blanket with him. And the horses were quiet.

“Just in case,” he said when Meg's gaze landed, alarmed, on the over night gear. “It's snowing pretty hard.”

Meg, feeling foolish for sitting on her backside while Brad had been tending to the horses and fetching their gear inside, stood to lift the lid off the coffeepot and peek inside. The water was about to boil, but it would be a few minutes before the grounds settled to the bottom and they could drink the stuff.

“Relax, Meg,” Brad said quietly. “There's still a chance the snow will ease up before dark.”

At once tantalized and full of dread at the prospect of spending the night alone in a line shack with Brad O'Ballivan, Meg paced back and forth in front of the stove.

She knew what would happen if they stayed.

She'd known when she accepted Brad's invitation. Known when she set out for Stone Creek Ranch before dawn.

And he probably had, too.

She shoved both hands into her hair and paced faster.

“Meg,” Brad said, sitting lei surely on his upended crate,
“relax.”

“You knew,” she accused, stopping to shake a finger at him. “You knew we'd be stuck here!”

“So did you,” Brad replied, unruffled.

Meg went to the door, wrenched it open and looked out, oblivious to the cold. The snow was coming down so hard
and so fast that she couldn't see the pine trees towering less than a hundred yards from where she stood.

Attempting to travel under those conditions would be suicide.

Brad came and helped her shut the door again.

On the other side of the wall, in the lean-to, the horses made no sound.

Meg was standing too close to Brad, no question about it. But when she tried to move, she couldn't.

They looked into each other's eyes.

The very atmosphere zinged around them.

If Brad had kissed her then, she wouldn't have had the will to do anything but kiss him right back, but he didn't. “I'd better get some drinking water,” he said, turning away and reaching for a bucket. “While I can still find my way back from the pump.”