The McKettrick Legend (26 page)

He went out.

Meg, needing something to do, pushed the coffeepot to the back of the stove so it wouldn't boil over and then examined a few of the food packets, evidently designed for post-apocalyptic dinner parties. The expiration dates were fifty years in the future.

“Spa ghetti à la the Starship enterprise,” she muttered. There was Beef Welling ton, too, and even meat loaf. At least they wouldn't starve.

Not right away, anyhow.

They'd starve
slowly.

If they didn't freeze to death first.

Meg tried her cell phone again.

Still no service.

It was just as well, she supposed. Cheyenne knew her approximate location. Jesse would feed her horses, and if her absence was protracted, he and Keegan and Rance were sure to come looking for her. In the meantime, though, there
would be a lot of room for speculation about what might be going on up there in the high country. And Jesse wouldn't miss a chance to tease her about it.

She was still holding the phone when Brad came in again, carrying a bucket full of water. He looked so cold that Meg almost went to put her arms around him.

Instead, she poured him a cup of hot coffee, still chewy with grounds, and handed it to him as soon as he'd set the bucket down.

“I don't suppose there's a generator,” she said because the shack was darkening, even though it wasn't noon yet, and by night fall, she wouldn't be able to see the proverbial hand in front of her face.

He favored her with a tilted grin. “Just a couple of battery-operated lamps and a few candles. We'll want to conserve the batteries, of course.”

“Of course,” Meg said, and smiled determinedly, hoping that would distract Brad from the little quaver in her voice.

“We don't have to make love,” Brad said, lingering by the stove and taking slow, appreciative sips from his coffee. “Just because we're alone in a remote line shack during what may be the snow storm of the century.”

“You are not making me feel better.”

That grin again. It was saucy, but it had a wistful element. “Am I making you feel
something?
”

“Nothing discernible,” Meg lied. In truth, all her nerves felt super charged, and her body was remembering, against strict orders from her mind, the weight and warmth of Brad's hands, caressing her bare skin.

“I used to be pretty good at it. Making you feel things, that is.”

“Brad,” Meg said, “don't.”

“Okay,” he said.

Meg was relieved, but at the same time, she wished he hadn't given up quite so easily.

“You wanted coffee,” Brad remarked. “Have some.”

Meg filled a cup for herself. Scooted her crate an inch or two farther from Brad's and sat down.

The shadows deepened and the shack seemed to grow even smaller than it was, pressing her and Brad closer together. And then closer still.

“This,” Meg said, inspired by desperation, “would be a good time to talk about your second wife. Since we've been putting it off for a while.”

Brad chuckled, fished in his saddle bags, now lying on the floor at his feet, and brought out a deck of cards. “I was thinking more along the lines of gin rummy,” he said.

“What was her name again?”

“What was whose name?”

“Your second wife.”

“Oh, her.”

“Yeah, her.”

“Cynthia. Her name is Cynthia. And I don't want to talk about her right now. Either we reminisce, or we play gin rummy, or—”

Meg squirmed. “Gin rummy,” she said decisively. “There is no reason at all to bring up the subject of sex.”

“Did I?”

“Did you what?”

“Did I bring up the subject of sex?”

“Not exactly,” Meg said, embarrassed.

Brad grinned. “We'll get to that,” he said. “Sooner or later.”

Meg swallowed so much coffee in the next gulp that she nearly choked.

“There are somethings I've been wondering about,”
Brad said easily, watching her over the rim of his metal coffee mug. His eyes smoldered with lazy blue heat.

Outside, the snow-thunder crashed again, but the horses didn't react. They'd probably already settled down for the night, snug in their furry hides and their lean-to.

“I'm hungry,” Meg said, reaching for one of the food packets.

Brad went on as though she hadn't spoken at all. “Do you still like to eat cereal with yogurt instead of milk?”

Meg swallowed. “Yes.”

“Do you still laugh in your sleep?”

“I—I suppose.”

“Do you still arch your back like a bucking horse when you climax?”

Meg's face felt hotter than the old stove, which rocked a little with the heat inside it, crimson blazes glowing through the cracks. “What kind of question is that?”

“A personal one, I admit,” Brad said. He might have passed for a choirboy, so innocent was his expression, but his eyes gave him away. They had the old glint of easy confidence in them. He knew he could have her anyplace and anytime he wanted—he was just biding his time. “I'll know soon enough, I guess.”

“No,” she said.

“No?” He raised an eyebrow.

“No, I don't arch my back when I—I don't arch my back.”

“Hmm,” Brad said. “Why not?”

Because I don't have sex,
Meg almost answered, but in the last, teetering fraction of a second, she realized she didn't want to admit that. Not to Brad, the man with all the notches on his bedpost.

“You haven't been sleeping with anybody?” he asked.

“I didn't say that,” Meg replied, keeping her distance,
mainly because she wanted so much to take Brad's coffee from his hand, set it aside, straddle his thighs and let him work his slow, thorough magic. Peeling away her outer garments, kissing and caressing everything he uncovered.

“Nobody who could make you arch your back?”

Meg was suffused with aching, needy misery. She'd been in fairly close proximity to Brad all morning, and managed to keep her perspective, but now they were alone in a remote shack, and he'd already begun to seduce her. Without so much as a kiss, or a touch of his hand. With Brad O'Ballivan, even gin rummy would qualify as foreplay.

“Some thing like that,” she said. It was a lame answer, and way too honest, but she'd figured if she tossed his ego a bone, the way she might have done to get past a junkyard dog, she'd get a chance to diffuse the in visible but almost palpable charge sparking between them.

“I came across one of Maddie's diaries a few years ago,” Brad said, still stripping her with his eyes. Maddie, of course, was his ancestress—Sam O'Ballivan's wife. “She mentioned this line shack several times. She and Sam spent a night here, once, and conceived a child.”

That statement should have quelled Meg's passion—unlike Sam and Maddie, she and Brad weren't married, weren't in love. She wasn't using any form of birth control, since there hadn't been a man in her life for nearly a year, and intuition told her that for all Brad's preparations, Brad hadn't brought any condoms along.

Yet, the mention of a baby opened a gash of yearning within Meg, a great, jagged tearing so deep and so dark and so raw that she nearly doubled over with the pain of it.

“Are you all right?” Brad asked, on his feet quickly, taking her elbows in his hands, looking down into her face.

She said nothing. She couldn't have spoken for anything, not in that precise moment.

“What?” Brad prompted, looking worried.

She couldn't tell him that she'd wanted a baby so badly she'd made arrangements with a fertility specialist on several occasions, always losing her courage at the last moment. That she'd almost reached the point of sleeping with strangers, hoping to get pregnant.

In the end, she hadn't been able to go through with that, either.

She'd never known her own father. Oh, she'd lacked for nothing, being a McKettrick. Nothing except the merest acquaintance with the man who'd sired her. He was so anonymous, in fact, that Eve had occasionally referred to him, not knowing Meg was listening, as “the sperm donor.”

She wanted more for her own son or daughter. Granted, the baby's father didn't have to be involved in their day-today life, or pay child support, or much of anything else. But he had to have a face and a name, so Meg could show her child a photograph, at some point in time, and say, “This is your daddy.”

“Meg?” Brad's hands tightened a little on her elbows.

“Panic attack,” she managed to gasp.

He pressed her down onto one of the crates, ladled some water from the bucket he'd braved the elements to fill at the pump outside, and held it to her lips.

She sipped.

“Do you need to take a pill or something?”

Meg shook her head.

He dragged the second crate closer, and sat facing her, so their knees touched. “Since when do you get panic attacks?” he asked.

Tears stung Meg's eyes. She rocked a little, hugging
her self, and Brad steadied the ladle in her hands, raised it to her mouth again.

She sipped, more slowly this time, and Brad set it aside when she was finished.

“Meg,” he repeated. “The panic attacks?”

It only happens when I suddenly realize I want to have a certain man's baby more than I want anything in the world. And when that certain man turns out to be you.

“It's a freak thing,” she said. “I've never had one before.”

Brad raised an eyebrow—he'd always been perceptive. It was one of the qualities that made him a good song writer, for example. “I mentioned that Sam and Maddie conceived a child in this line shack, and you started hyperventilating.” He leaned forward a little, took both Meg's hands gently in his. “I remember how much you wanted kids when we were together,” he mused. “And now your sister is having a baby.”

Meg's heart wedged itself into her windpipe. She'd wanted a baby, all right. And she'd conceived one, with Brad, and miscarried soon after he left for Nashville. Not even her mother had known.

She nodded.

Brad stroked the side of her cheek with the backs of his fingers, offering her comfort. She'd never told him about the pregnancy—she'd been saving the news for their wedding night—but now she knew she would have no choice, if they got involved again.

“I'm not jealous of Sierra,” she said, anxious to make that clear. “I'm happy for her and Travis.”

“I know,” Brad said. He drew her from her crate onto his lap; she straddled his thighs. But beyond that, the gesture wasn't sexual. He simply held her, one hand gently pressing her head to his shoulder.

After a little deep breathing, in order to calm herself, Meg straightened and gazed into Brad's face.

“Suppose we had sex,” she said softly. Tentatively. “And I conceived a child. How would you react?”

“Well,” Brad said after pondering the idea with an expression of wistful amusement on his face, “I guess that would depend on a couple of things.” He kissed her neck, lightly. Nibbled briefly at her earlobe.

A hot shudder went through Meg. “Like what?”

“Like whether we were going to raise the baby together or not,” Brad replied, still nibbling. When Meg stiffened slightly, he drew back to look into her face again. “What?”

“I was sort of thinking I could just be a single mother,” Meg said.

She was off Brad's thighs and plunked down on her crate again so quickly that it almost took her breath away.

“And my part would be what?” he demanded. “Keep my distance? Go on about my business? What, Meg?”

“You have your career—”

“I don't have my career. That part of my life is over. I've told you that.”

“You're young, Brad. You're very talented. It's inevitable that you'll want to sing again.”

“I don't have to be in a concert hall or a recording studio to sing,” he said tersely. “I mean to live on Stone Creek Ranch for good, and any child of
mine
is going to grow up there.”

Meg stood her ground. After all, she was a McKettrick. “Any child of
mine
is going to grow up on the Triple M.”

“Then I guess we'd better not make a baby,” Brad replied. He got up off the crate, went to the stove and refilled his coffee cup.

“Look,” Meg said more gently, “we can just let the
subject drop. I'm sorry I brought it up at all—I just got a little emotional there for a moment and—”

Brad didn't answer.

They were stuck in a cabin together, at least over night, and maybe longer. They had to get along, or they'd both go crazy.

She retrieved the pack of cards from the floor, where Brad had set them earlier. “Bet I can take you, O'Ballivan,” she said, waggling the box from side to side. “Gin rummy, five-card stud, go fish—name your poison.”

He laughed, and the tension was broken—the overt kind, anyway. There was an under ground river of the stuff, coursing silently beneath their feet. “Go fish?”

“Lately, I've played a lot of cards—with my nephew, Liam. That's his favorite.”

Brad chose rummy. Set a third crate between them for a table top. “You think you can take me, huh?” he challenged. And the look in his eyes, as he dealt the first hand, said
he
planned on doing the taking—and the cards didn't have a thing to do with it.

I
T WAS A WONDER TO
B
RAD
that he could sit there in the middle of that line shack, playing gin rummy with Meg McKettrick, when practically all he'd thought about since coming home to Stone Creek was bedding down with her. She'd practically invited him to father her baby, too.

Whatever his reservations might be where her insistence on raising the child alone was concerned, and on the Triple M to boot, he sure wouldn't have minded the
process
of conceiving it.

So why wasn't he on top of her at that very moment?

He studied his cards solemnly—Meg was going to win this hand, as she had the last half dozen—and pondered the situation. The wind howled around the shack like a million shrieking banshees determined to drive them both out into the freezing cold, making the walls shake. And the light was going, too, even though it wasn't noon yet.

“Play,” Meg said impatiently, a spark of mischievous triumph—and something else—dancing in her eyes.

“If I didn't know better,” Brad said ruefully, “I'd think you'd stacked the deck. You're going to lay down all your cards and set me again, aren't you?”

She grinned, looking at him coyly over the fan of cards. Even batting her eye lashes. “There's only one way to find out,” she teased.

A cowboy's geisha,
Brad thought. Later, when he was alone at the ranch, he'd tinker around with the idea, maybe
make a song out of it. He might have retired from recording and life on the road, but he knew he'd always make music.

Resigned, he drew a card from the stack, couldn't use it, and tossed it away.

Meg's whole being seemed to twinkle as she took his discard, incorporated it into a grand-slam of a run and went out with a flourish, spreading the cards across the top of the crate.

“McKettrick luck,” she said, beaming.

On impulse, Brad put down his cards, leaned across the crate between them and kissed Meg lightly on the mouth. She tensed at first, then responded, giving a little groan when he used his tongue.

Her arms slipped around his shoulders.

He wanted with everything in him to shove cards and crate aside, lay her down, then and there, and have her.

Whoa,
he told himself.
Easy. Don't scare her off.

There were tears in her eyes when she drew back from his kiss, sniffled once, and blinked, as though surprised to find herself alone with him, in the eye of the storm.

Like most men, Brad was always unsettled when a woman cried. He felt an urgent need to rectify whatever was wrong, and at the same time, knew he couldn't.

Meg swabbed at her cheeks with the back of one hand, straightened her proud McKettrick spine.

“What's the matter?” Brad asked.

“Nothing,” Meg answered, averting her gaze.

“You're lying.”

“Just hedging a little,” she said, trying hard to smile and falling short. “It was like the old days, that's all. The kiss I mean. It brought up a lot of feelings.”

“Would it help if I told you I felt the same way?”

“Not really,” she said. A thoughtful look came into those fabulous, fathomless eyes of hers.

Brad slid the crate to one side and leaned in close, filled with peculiar suspense. He had to know what was going on in her head. “What?”

“Lots of people have sex,” she told him, “without anybody getting pregnant.”

“The reverse is also true,” he felt honor-bound to say. “Far as I know, making love still causes babies.”

“Making love,” Meg said, “is not necessarily the same thing as having sex.”

Brad cleared his throat, still walking on figurative eggshells. “True,” he said very cautiously. Was she messing with him? Setting him up for a rebuff? Meg wasn't a particularly vengeful person, at least as far as he knew, but he'd hurt her badly all those busy years ago. Maybe she wanted to get back at him a little.

“What I have in mind,” she told him decisively, “is
sex,
as opposed to making love.” A pause. “Of course.”

“Of course,” he agreed. Hope fluttered in his chest, like a bird flexing its wings and rising, wind borne, off a high tree branch. At the same time, he felt stung—Meg was making it clear that any intimacy they might enjoy during this brief time-out-of-time would be strictly for physical gratification. Frenetic coupling of bodies, an emotion-free zone.

Since beggars couldn't be choosers, he was willing to bargain, but the disturbing truth was, he wanted more from Meg than a noncommittal quickie. She wasn't, after all, a groupie to be groped and taken in the back of some tour bus, then forgotten.

She squinted at him, catching something in his expression. “This bothers you?” she asked.

He tried to smile. “If you want to have sex, McKettrick, I'm definitely game. It's just that—”

“What?”

“It might not be a good idea.” Was he crazy? Here was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, essentially offering herself to him—and he was leaning on the brake lever?

“Okay,” she said, and she looked hurt, uncomfortable, suddenly shy.

And that was his undoing. All his noble reluctance went right out the door.

He pulled her onto his lap again.

She hesitated, then wrapped both arms around his neck.

“Are you sure?” he asked her quietly, gruffly. “We're taking a chance here, Meg. We
could
conceive a child—”

The idea filled him with desperate jubilation, strangely mingled with sorrow.

“We could,” she agreed, her eyes shining, dark with sultry heat, despite the chill seeping in between the cracks in the plain board walls.

He cupped her chin in his hand, made her look into his face. “Fair warning, McKettrick. If there's a baby, I'm not going to be an anonymous father, content to cut a check once a month and go on about my business as if it had never happened.”

She studied him. “You're serious.”

He nodded.

“I'll take that chance,” she decided, after a few moments of deliberation.

He kissed her again, deeply this time, and when their mouths parted, she looked as dazed as he felt. Once, during a rehearsal before a concert, he'd gotten a shock from an
electric guitar with a frayed chord. The jolt he'd taken, kissing Meg just now, made the first experience seem tame.

She was straddling him, and even through their jeans, the insides of her thighs, squeezing against his hips, seemed to sear his skin. She squirmed against his erection, making him groan.

Never in his life had Brad wanted a bed as badly as he did at that moment. It wasn't right to lay Meg down on a couple of sleeping bags, on that cold floor.

But even as he was thinking these disjointed thoughts, he was pulling her shirt up, slipping his hands beneath all that fabric, stroking her bare ribs.

She shivered deliciously, closed her eyes, threw her head back.

“Cold?” Brad asked, worried.

“Anything but,” she murmured. “You're sure?”

“Absolutely sure,” Meg said.

He found the catch on her bra, opened it. Cupped both hands beneath her full, warm breasts.

She moaned as he chafed her nipples gently, using the sides of his thumbs.

And that was when they heard the deafening and unmistakable
thwup-thwup-thwup
of helicopter blades, directly above the roof of the line shack.

 

Meg looked up, disbelieving
.
Jesse, Rance, or Keegan—or all three. Who else would take a chopper up in weather like that?

Out in the lean-to, the horses whinnied in panic. The walls of the cabin shook as Meg jumped to her feet and righted her bra in almost the same motion.
“Damn!”
she sputtered furiously.

“That had better not be Phil,” Brad said ominously.
He was standing, too, his gaze fixed on the trembling ceiling.

Meg smoothed her hair, straightened her clothes. “Phil?”

“My manager,” Brad reminded her.

“We should be so lucky,” Meg yelled, straining to be heard over the sound of the blades. “It's my cousins!”

They both went to the door and peered out, heedless of the blasting cold, made worse by the down draft from the chopper, Meg ducking under Brad's left arm to see.

Sure enough, the McKettrickCo helicopter, a relic of the corporation days, was settling to the ground, bouncing on its runners in the deepening snow.

“I'll be damned,” Brad said with a grin of what looked like rueful admiration, forcing the door shut against the icy wind. At the last second, Meg saw two figures moving toward them at a half crouch.

“I'll kill them,” Meg said.

The door rattled on its hinges at the first knock.

Meg stood back while Brad opened it again.

Jesse came through first, followed by Keegan. They wore Western hats pulled low over their faces, leather coats thickly lined with sheep's wool, and attitudes.

“I tried to stop them,” Angus said, appearing at Meg's elbow.

“Good job,” Meg scoffed, under her breath, without moving her lips.

Angus spread his hands. “They're McKettricks,” he reminded her, as though that explained every mystery in the universe, from spontaneous human combustion to the Bermuda Triangle.

“Are you crazy?” Meg demanded of her cousins, storming forward to stand toe-to-toe with Jesse, who was tight-
jawed, casting suspicious glances at Brad. “You could have been killed, taking the copter up in a blizzard!”

Brad, by contrast, hoisted the coffeepot off the stove, grinning wryly, and not entirely in a friendly way. “Coffee?” he asked.

Jesse scowled at him.

“Don't mind if I do,” Keegan said, pulling off his heavy leather gloves. He tossed Meg a sympathetic glance in the meantime, one that said,
Don't blame me. I'm just here to keep an eye on Jesse.

Brad found another cup and, without bothering to wipe it out, filled it and handed it to Keegan. “It's good to see you again,” he said with a sort of charged affability, but underlying his tone was an unspoken,
Not.

“I'll just bet,” Jesse said, whipping off his hat. His dark blond hair looked rumpled, as though he'd been shoving a hand through it at regular intervals.

“Jesse,” Keegan warned quietly.

Meg stood nearly on tiptoe, her nose almost touching Jesse's, her eyes narrowed to slits. “What the
hell
are you doing here?”

Jesse wasn't about to back down, his stance made that clear, and neither was Meg. Classic McKettrick standoff.

Keegan, used to the family dynamics, and the most diplomatic member of the current generation, eased an arm between them, holding his mug of hot coffee care fully in the other. “To your corners,” he said easily, forcing them both to take a step back.

Jesse gave Brad a scathing look—once, they'd been friends—and turned to face Meg again. “I might ask you the same question,” he countered. “What the hell are
you
doing here? With
him?
”

Brad cleared his throat, folded his arms. Waited. He
looked amused—the expression in his eyes not withstanding.

“That, Jesse McKettrick,” Meg seethed, “is my own business!”

“We came,” Keegan inter ceded, still unruffled but, in his own way, as watchful as Jesse was, “because Cheyenne told us you were up here on horse back. When we got word of the blizzard, we were worried.”

Meg threw her arms out, slapped them back against her sides. “Obviously, I'm all right,” she said. “Safe and sound.”

“I don't know about that,” Jesse said, taking Brad's measure again.

A muscle bunched in Brad's jaw, but he didn't speak.

“Get your stuff, if you have any,” Jesse told Meg. “We're leaving.” He turned to Brad again, added reluctantly, “You'd better come with us. This storm is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

“Can't leave the horses,” Brad said.

Meg was annoyed. Her cousins had landed a helicopter in front of the line shack, in the middle of a blinding white-out, determined to carry her out bodily if they had to, and all he could think about was the horses?

“I'll stay and ride out with you,” Jesse told Brad. Whatever his issues with Brad might be, he was a rancher, born and bred. And a rancher never left a horse stranded, whether it was his own or someone else's, if he had any choice in the matter. His blue eyes sliced to Meg's face. “Keegan will get you back to the Triple M.”

“Suppose I don't want to go?”

“Better decide,” Keegan put in. “This storm is picking up steam as we speak. Another fifteen or twenty minutes, and the four of us will be bunking in here until spring.”

Meg searched Jesse's face, glanced at Brad.

He wasn't going to express an opinion one way or the other, apparently, and that galled her. She knew it wasn't cowardice—Brad had never been afraid of a brawl, with her rowdy cousins or anybody else. Which probably meant he was relieved to get out of a sticky situation.

Color flared in her cheeks.

“I'll get my coat,” she said, glaring at Brad. Still hoping he'd stop her, send Jesse and Keegan packing.

But he didn't.

She scram bled into her coat with jamming motions of her fists, and got stuck in the lining of one sleeve.

“Call Olivia,” Brad said, watching her struggle, one corner of his mouth tilted slightly upward in a bemused smile. “Let her know I'm okay.”

Meg nodded once, angrily, and let Keegan shuffle her out into the impossible cold to the waiting helicopter.

 

“Smooth,” Brad remarked, studying Jesse, shutting the door behind Meg and Keegan and offering a brief, silent prayer for their safety. Flying in this weather was a major risk, but if anybody was up to the job, it was Keegan. His father had been a pilot, and all three of the McKettrick boys were as skilled at the controls of a plane or a copter as they were on the back of a horse.