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McKettrick's Luck
Linda Lael Miller
Like his celebrated ancestors who tamed the wilds of Arizona, Jesse McKettrick’s Indian Rock ties run deep. The Triple M Ranch is in his blood, along with the thrill of risk. But with his land at stake, this world-class poker player won’t be dealt into Cheyenne Bridges’ gamble – despite the temptation she brings.Cheyenne grew up in Indian Rock and left its painful memories behind to become a self-made woman. Now her job is to convince Jesse to sell his property.Jesse’s not the kind of man Cheyenne could ever forget, but he’s too wild and dangerous for a woman committed to playing it safe.Yet sparks of attraction fly, tempting Cheyenne to lay it all on the line for the passion she sees in Jesse’s eyes.


A classic tale of a new generation of cowboys staking claims to their land—and the women they love…
Like his celebrated ancestors, who tamed the wilds of Arizona, Jesse McKettrick’s Indian Rock ties run deep. The Triple M Ranch is in his blood, along with the thrill of risk. But with his land at stake, this world-class poker player won’t be dealt into Cheyenne Bridges’s gamble—despite the temptation she brings.
Cheyenne grew up in Indian Rock and left its painful memories behind to become a self-made woman. Now her job is to convince Jesse to sell his property. Jesse’s not the kind of man Cheyenne could ever forget, but he’s too wild and dangerous for a woman committed to playing it safe. Yet sparks of attraction fly, tempting Cheyenne to lay it all on the line for the passion she sees in Jesse’s eyes.
Praise for the novels of #1 New York Times and
USA TODAY bestselling author Linda Lael Miller
“Miller is one of the finest American writers
in the genre.”
—RT Book Reviews
“A fine conclusion to Miller’s latest trilogy. Animal lovers will enjoy the creatures that make up a delightfully integral part of the story.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Creed Legacy
“Only Linda Lael Miller can write the kind of romance that melts your heart and makes you want to shout Yippee ki-yay!”
—Single Titles on Creed’s Honor
“Miller excels at creating extended-family dynamics
in an authentic Western small-town setting
and richly populating her stories with animal
as well as human characters.”
—Booklist
“Ms. Miller’s characters and their intense emotions
are what make McKettrick’s Luck such a winner.”
—Single Titles on McKettrick’s Luck
“Miller’s ability to bring a cast of characters to life
is on full display here…. The veteran romance author doesn’t disappoint in her sizzling love scenes
and fine sense of place.”
—Publishers Weekly on McKettrick’s Luck
“A true winner, McKettrick’s Luck takes the pot!”
—A Romance Review
McKettrick’s Luck
Linda Lael Miller





www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
My Dear Readers,
Welcome back to the Triple M ranch! McKettrick’s Luck is the first of three books starring the modern McKettrick men, Jesse, Keegan and Rance, and the intrepid women who love them. I’m so delighted these cowboys are back in print. Be sure to look for Rance’s story in McKettrick’s Pride, coming in March from HQN Books, followed by Keegan’s story, McKettrick’s Heart, in May.
Jesse McKettrick is Indian Rock, Arizona’s bad boy—a poker-playing, heart-breaking horseman who happens to be a kink in Cheyenne Bridges’s plans to buy and develop a piece of prime land. Cheyenne has a history with Jesse—she’s loved him since her teens. He, on the other hand, barely knew she was alive. Trouble in Indian Rock!
With love,


To Pam and Jon Reily, with love
Contents
CHAPTER ONE (#u1b79909d-8c6e-53b1-9836-963cac0d3287)
CHAPTER TWO (#u665fb753-3af2-5a91-94ec-cb352c67ef85)
CHAPTER THREE (#ue61be675-7d08-59a7-94f6-fdaf3622eb90)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u1f0e6817-7654-51ee-82b2-c43084077f1e)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
MCKETTRICK LAND, Cheyenne Bridges thought stoically, as she stood next to her rented car on a gravel pullout alongside the highway, one hand shading her eyes from the Arizona sun. A faint drumbeat throbbed in her ears, an underground river flowing beneath her pulse, and she remembered a time she could not have remembered. An era when only the Great Spirit could lay claim to the valleys and canyons and mesas, to the arch of the sky, blue as her grandmother’s favorite sugar bowl—a cherished premium plucked from some long-ago flour sack—to the red dirt and the scattered stands of white oak and Joshua and ponderosa pine.
It had taken Angus McKettrick, and other intrepidly arrogant nineteenth-century pioneers like him, to fence in these thousands of square miles, to pen their signatures to deeds, to run cattle and dig wells and wrest a living from the rocky, thistle-strewn soil. Old Angus had passed that audacious sense of ownership on to his sons, and the sons of their sons, down through the generations.
McKettricks forever and ever, amen.
Cheyenne bit her lower lip. Her cell phone, lying on the passenger seat of the car, chimed like an arriving elevator—Nigel again. She ignored the insistent sound until it stopped, only too aware that the reprieve would be fleeting. Meanwhile, the land itself seemed to seep into her heart, rising like water finding its level in some dank, forgotten cistern.
The feeling was bittersweet, a complex tangle of loneliness and homecoming and myriad other emotions she couldn’t readily identify.
She had sworn never to come back to this place.
Never to set eyes on Jesse McKettrick again.
And fate, in its inimitable way, was forcing her to do both those things.
She sighed.
An old blue pickup passed on the road, horn honking in exuberant greeting. A trail of cheerfully mournful country music thrummed in its wake, and the peeling sticker on the rear bumper read Save The Cowboys.
Cheyenne waved, self-conscious in her trim black designer suit and high heels. This was boots-and-jeans country, and she’d stand out like the proverbial sore thumb the moment she drove into town.
Welcome home, she thought ruefully.
The cell chirped again, and she picked her way through the loose gravel to reach in through the open window and grabbed it.
“It’s about time you answered,” Nigel Meerland snapped before she could draw a breath to say hello. “I was beginning to think you’d fallen into some manhole.”
“There aren’t any manholes in Indian Rock,” Cheyenne replied, making her way around to the driver’s side and opening the door.
“Have you contacted him yet?” Nigel didn’t bother with niceties like “Hi, how are you?” either in person or over the telephone. He simply demanded what he wanted—and most of the time, he got it.
“Nigel,” Cheyenne said evenly, “I just got here. So, no, I have not contacted him.” Him was Jesse McKettrick. The last person in this or any other universe she wanted to see—not that Jesse would be able to place her in the long line of adoring women strung out behind him like the cars of a derailed freight train.
“Well, you’re burning daylight, kiddo,” Nigel shot back. Her boss was in his late thirties and English, but he liked using colorful terms, with a liberal smattering of clichés. Westernisms, he called them. “Let’s get this show on the road. I don’t have to tell you how anxious our investors are to get that condo development underway.”
No, Cheyenne thought, sitting down sideways on the car seat, constrained by her tight skirt and swinging her legs in under the steering wheel, you don’t have to tell me. I’ve heard nothing else for the last six months.
“Jesse won’t sell,” she said. Realizing she’d spoken the thought aloud, she closed her eyes, braced for the inevitable response.
“He has to sell,” Nigel countered. “Failure is not an option. Everything—and I mean everything—is riding on this deal. If the finance people pull out, the company will go under. You won’t have a job, and I’ll have to crawl back to the ancestral pile on my knees, begging for the scant privileges of a second son.”
Cheyenne closed her eyes. Like Nigel, she had a lot at stake. More than just her job. She had Mitch, her younger brother, to consider. And her mother.
The bonus Nigel had promised, in writing, would give them all a kind of security they’d never known.
The pit of her stomach clenched.
“I know,” she told Nigel bleakly. “I know.”
“Get cracking, Pocahontas,” Nigel instructed, and hung up in her ear.
Cheyenne opened her eyes, pressed the end button with her thumb, drew a deep breath and released it slowly. Then she tossed the phone onto the other seat, started the engine and headed for Indian Rock.
The town hadn’t changed much since she’d left it at seventeen, bound for college down in Tucson. There was the dry cleaners, the library, the elementary school. And the small, white-steepled church where she’d struggled to understand Commandments and arks and burning bushes, and had placed quarters, after unwrapping them carefully from a cheap cloth handkerchief, in the collection plate.
She sat a little straighter in the seat as she drove the length of Main Street, signaled and turned left at the old train depot, long since converted to an antiques minimall. The rental car bumped over the railroad tracks, past progressively seedier trailer courts, through a copse of cottonwood trees.
The narrow beams of the ancient cattle guard rattled under the tires.
Cheyenne gave a grateful sigh when the car didn’t fall through and slowed to round the last bend in the narrow dirt road leading to the house.
Like the single and double-wides she’d just passed, the place had gone downhill in her absence. The lawn was overgrown and coils of rusty barbed wire littered the ground. The porch sagged and the siding, scavenged and nailed to the walls without regard to color, jarred the eye.
Gram had been so proud of her house and yard. It would break her heart to see it now.
Her mother’s old van, a patchwork affair like the house, stood in the driveway with the side door open.
Cheyenne had hoped for a few days to settle in before her mother and brother arrived from Phoenix, and at least put in a ramp for Mitch’s wheelchair, but it wasn’t to be. Her heart fluttered with anticipation, then sank.
She put the rental in Park and shut off the motor, surveying the only real home she’d ever had.
“I’ll show you an ancestral pile, Nigel,” she muttered. “Just hop in your Bentley and drive on up to Indian Rock, Arizona.”
The front door swung open just then, and Ayanna Bridges appeared on the porch, wearing a faded cotton dress, high-topped sneakers and a tentative smile. Her straight ebony hair fell past her waist, loosely restrained by a tarnished silver barrette she’d probably owned since the 1960s. When her mother started toward the rickety steps, Cheyenne got out of the car.
“Look,” Ayanna called, pointing. “I found some old boards out behind the shed and dragged them around to make a ramp. Mitch whizzed right up to them like he was on flat ground.”
Life had forced Ayanna to be resourceful. Makeshift ramps for her son’s wheelchair were the least of her accomplishments. She’d waited tables, often pulling two shifts, grappled with various social-service agencies to get Mitch the medical care he needed, sold cosmetics and miracle vitamins, all without a twinge of self-pity—at least, not one she’d ever allowed her children to see.
Cheyenne scrounged up a smile. Pretended to admire the pair of teetering, weathered two-by-fours, each with one end propped on the porch floor and one disappearing into the weedy grass. Doubtless, Mitch had used them to alight from the van, too.
If—when—the bonus came through, Cheyenne planned to buy a new van, specially equipped with a hydraulic lift and maybe even hand controls. For now, they would have to make do, as they’d always done.
“Good work,” she said.
Ayanna met her in the middle of the yard, enfolding Cheyenne in a hug that made her breath catch and her eyes burn.
She blinked a couple of times before meeting her mother’s fond gaze.
“Where’s Mitch?” Cheyenne asked.
“Inside,” Ayanna said, her words gently hushed. “I’m afraid he’s brooding again—he misses his friends in Phoenix. He’ll be all right once he’s had a little while to get used to being here.”
Cheyenne could empathize. She thought, with poignant longing, of her one-bedroom condo in sunny San Diego, half a mile from the beach. She’d sublet it, and that was another worry. If she couldn’t convince Jesse McKettrick to part with five hundred acres of prime real estate, she not only wouldn’t have a job, she’d have to stay in Indian Rock, find whatever work there was to be had and stockpile pennies until she could afford to start over somewhere else.
As she stood there despairing, Nigel’s cell-phone comment blew through her spirit like a cold wind scouring the walls of a lonely canyon. Everything’s riding on this deal. And I mean everything.
“Come on inside, honey,” Ayanna said, taking Cheyenne’s arm when she would have turned and fled back to the rental car. “We can bring your things in later.”
Cheyenne nodded, ashamed that she’d come so close, after all her preparation and effort, to fleeing the scene.
Ayanna smiled, butted her taller daughter lightly with the outside of one shoulder. “We’ve all come home,” she said softly. “You and Mitch and me. And home is a great place to start over.”
Home might be a “great place to start over,” Cheyenne reflected grimly, if you were a McKettrick. If your key fit the lock of one of the several sprawling, rustically elegant houses standing sturdily on a section of the legendary Triple M Ranch.
If your name was Bridges, on the other hand, and you were the daughter of a charming but compulsive gambler who’d died in jail, and a hardworking but fatally codependent dreamer like Ayanna, making a clean-slate beginning was a luxury you couldn’t afford.
Ordinary people had to settle for survival.

NURLEEN GENTRY SHUFFLED and dealt the flop—a pair of sevens and a queen. Once the cards were down, lying helter-skelter on the scruffy green-felt tabletop, she folded her hands, glittering with fake diamonds ordered from the shopping channel, and waited.
Jesse leaned back in his customary chair in the card room behind Lucky’s Main Street Bar and Grill and pretended to consider his options. He felt the eyes of the other poker players on him, through the stale and shifting haze of blue-gray cigarette smoke, and gave nothing away.
“Bet or fold, McKettrick,” Wade Parker grumbled from the other side of the table. Jesse allowed one corner of his mouth to crook up, ever so slightly, in the go-to-hell grin he’d been perfecting since he was eleven. Wade wore a bad rug and a windbreaker emblazoned with the logo of the beer company he worked for, and his full lips twitched with impatience. The tobacco smudge rose from the cheap cigar smoldering in the ashtray beside him.
Next to Wade was Don Rogers, who owned the Laundromat. Don squirmed on the patched vinyl seat of his chair, but Jesse knew it wasn’t the wait that bothered the other man. Don was a neat freak and wanted to tidy the flop so badly that a muscle under his right eye jerked. Touching anybody’s cards but his own could get a man shot in some parts, though the retribution would be neither swift nor terrible in the old hometown.
Could be Don had pocket queens, Jesse thought, but that didn’t seem likely. When it came to tells, Don was easier to read than the twelve-foot limestone letters set into the slope east of town, spelling out INDIAN ROCK.
Everything about Don said, WINGING IT.
Jesse made a show of pondering myriad possibilities, then accordioned four fifty-dollar chips into the pot.
“Shit,” Don muttered, and put down his cards without revealing them, one precisely on top of the other.
Wade leaned forward, his bushy eyebrows raised. Nurleen, an old hand at dealing poker and a better-than-fair player herself, though her specialty was Omaha, not Texas Hold ’Em, said nothing, but simply looked on with intense disinterest.
“I think you’re bluffing, McKettrick,” Wade said. He rifled his chips, which had been growing steadily for the last half hour.
“Think what you like,” Jesse countered, without inflection. He’d already thrown in a couple of winning hands, just to support Wade’s delusion that the poker gods were lined up solidly behind him, armed for battle. Jesse had time, and he had money—a deadly combination, in poker or just about any other endeavor.
Wade plucked a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of his windbreaker and shoved them onto his face.
A little late, Jesse thought, but this time, he kept his grin on the inside, where nobody knew about it but him.
Nurleen dealt the fourth card, known in Hold ’Em parlance as the turn.
Jesse ruminated. Even if Wade had twin aces to go with the one on the table, three of a kind wouldn’t take the pot, which meant the beer salesman was screwed. Unless the fifth card, or the river, turned out to be another ace, of course.
Bad beats happened—in the back rooms of small-town bars and the championship tournaments in Vegas and everywhere in between. Jesse’s gut said Risk it, but then, it rarely said anything else.
Out of the corner of one eye, Jesse saw someone slip through the doorway from the bar. Coins clinked into the jukebox.
After a brief intro, Kenny Rogers proclaimed the wisdom of knowing when to hold ’em, and when to fold ’em. When to walk away, and when to run.
Jesse knew all about holding and folding, but walking away was anathema to him, never mind running.
Wade matched Jesse’s bet and raised him three hundred.
Jesse responded in kind.
Nurleen turned the river card.
A deuce of hearts.
Jesse let his grin show again.
“Call,” Wade said. He pushed his wager to the middle of the table, showed his cards. King of hearts, queen of spades. He’d been counting on the lady in his hand and the one on the table to make a hand.
Nurleen sighed almost imperceptibly and shook her head.
Jesse felt a twinge of guilt as he tossed out two sevens.
Four of a kind.
Wade swore. “Damn your dumb-ass luck, Jesse,” he growled.
Nurleen gathered the cards, shuffled for a new game. “You still in, Wade? Don?”
Know when to walk away, Kenny advised. Know when to run.
Jesse spared a sidelong glance and saw his cousin Keegan leaning against the jukebox with his arms folded. He looked like a city lawyer, or even a banker, in his tailored slacks, vest and crisply pressed shirt.
Jesse cracked another grin, mostly because he knew what he was about to say would piss Keegan off. “I’m in,” he said.
“I’d like a word with you,” Keegan said, keeping his distance but looking downright implacable at the same time. “Maybe you could skip a hand.”
Wade and Don looked so hopeful that Jesse exchanged glances with Nurleen and pushed back his chair to stand and cross the floor, which was littered, in true Old West style, with peanut shells and sawdust. There might have been tobacco juice, too, if the health department hadn’t been sure to kick up a fuss. Around Indian Rock, folks took their history seriously.
“What’s so important that it can’t wait?” he asked, in a low voice that slid in under Kenny’s famous vibrato.
Keegan was the same height as Jesse, but the resemblance ended there. Keegan had reddish-brown hair, always neatly trimmed, while Jesse’s was dark blond and shaggy. Keegan had the navy-blue eyes that ran in Kade McKettrick’s lineage, and Jesse’s were the light azure common to Jeb’s descendents.
“We had a meeting, remember?” Keegan snapped.
Kenny wrapped up the song, and a silence fell. The jukebox whirred and Patsy Cline launched into “Crazy.”
Jesse grinned. First, a musical treatise on gambling. Then, a comment on mental health. “That’s real Freudian, Keeg,” he drawled. “And I didn’t know you cared.”
Keegan’s square jaw tightened as he set his back molars. By now, they must have been worn down to nubs, Jesse reckoned, but he kept that observation to himself.
“Goddamn it,” Keegan rasped, “you’ve got as big a share in the Company as I do. How about showing a little responsibility?” Keegan always capitalized any reference to McKettrickCo, the family conglomerate, verbally or in writing. The man worked twelve-hour days, pored over spreadsheets and pulled down a seven-figure salary.
By contrast, Jesse rode horses, entered the occasional rodeo, chased women, played poker and banked his dividend checks. He considered himself one lucky son of a gun, and in his more charitable moments he felt sorry for Keegan. Now, he straightened his cousin’s tasteful pin-striped tie, which had probably cost more than the newest front-loader over at Don’s Laundromat.
“You think poker isn’t work?” he asked and waited for the steam to shoot out of Keegan’s ears. They’d grown up together on the Triple M, fishing and camping out in warm weather, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing in winter, with Rance, a third cousin, completing the unholy trio. They’d all gone to college at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where Keegan had majored in business, Rance had studied high finance and Jesse had attended class between rodeo competitions and card games. Despite their differences, they’d gotten along well enough—until Rance and Keegan had both married. Everything had changed then.
They’d both turned serious.
These days Rance traveled the world, making deals for McKettrickCo.
“Smart-ass,” Keegan said, struggling not to grin.
“Buy you a beer?” Jesse asked, hopeful, for a brief moment, that his cousin was back.
Keegan glanced at his Rolex. “It’s my weekend with Devon,” he said. “I’m supposed to pick her up at six-thirty.”
Devon was Keegan’s nine-year-old daughter, and since he and his wife, Shelley, had divorced a year ago, they’d been shuttling the kid back and forth between Shelley and the boyfriend’s upscale condo in Flag and the main ranch house on the Triple M where Keegan remained.
Jesse hesitated, then laid a hand on Keegan’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said quietly. “Another time.”
Keegan sighed. “Another time,” he agreed, resigned. He started to walk away, then turned back. “And, Jesse?”
“What?”
The old, familiar grin spread across Keegan’s face. “Grow up, will you?”
“I’ll put that on my calendar,” Jesse promised, returning the grin. He loved Devon, whom he thought of as a niece rather than a cousin however many times removed, and certainly didn’t begrudge her time with Keegan. Just the same, he felt a twinge of sadness, too.
Everything and everybody in the world changed—except him.
That was the reality. Best accept it.
Jesse went back to the poker table and anted up for the next hand.

“CAN’T THIS WAIT UNTIL tomorrow?” Ayanna had asked, somewhat plaintively, after coffee at the kitchen table, where Mitch had sat brooding in his chair, when Cheyenne had announced her intention to track down Jesse McKettrick.
With a shake of her head, Cheyenne had said no, gathered her wits, smoothed her skirt and straightened her jacket, and made for the rental car.
McKettrickCo seemed to be the logical place to start her search—she’d already discovered, via her cell phone, that Jesse’s number was unlisted.
Cheyenne knew, having grown up in Indian Rock, that the company’s home offices were in San Antonio. The new building housed a branch of the operation, which meant the outfit was in expansion mode. According to her research, McKettrickCo was a diverse corporation, with interests in cutting-edge technology and global investment.
Jesse’s name wasn’t on the reader board in the sleekly contemporary reception area, a fact that didn’t surprise Cheyenne. When she’d known him, he was the original trust-fund bad boy, wild as a mustang and committed to one thing: having a good time.
She approached the desk, relieved that she didn’t recognize the woman tapping away at the keyboard of a supercomputer with three large flat-screen monitors.
“May I help you?” the receptionist asked pleasantly. She was middle-aged, with a warm smile, a lacquered blond hairdo and elegant posture.
Cheyenne introduced herself, hoping her last name wouldn’t ring any bells, and asked how to locate Jesse McKettrick. With luck—and she was due for some of that—she wouldn’t have to drive all the way out to his house and confront him on his own turf.
Not that any part of Indian Rock was neutral ground when it came to the McKettricks.
The receptionist assessed Cheyenne with mild interest. “Jesse could be anywhere,” she said, after some length, “but if I had to make a guess, I’d say he’s probably in the back room over at Lucky’s, playing poker.”
Cheyenne stiffened. Of course he’d be at Lucky’s—fate wouldn’t have it any other way. How many times, as a child, had she sneaked through the back door of that place from the alley and tried to will her father away from a game of five-card stud?
She produced a business card, bearing her name, affiliation with Meerland Real Estate Ventures, Ltd., and her cell number. “Thanks,” she said. “Just in case you see Mr. McKettrick before I do, will you give him my card and ask him to please call me as soon as possible?”
The woman studied Cheyenne’s information, frowned and then nodded politely. “He doesn’t come in too often,” she said.
Of course he didn’t.
Still Jesse, after all these years.
Cheyenne left McKettrickCo, got back into her car and drove resolutely to Lucky’s Main Street Bar and Grill. The gravel parking lot beside the old brick building was full, with the dinner hour fast approaching, so she parked in the alley, next to a mud-splattered black truck with both windows rolled down.
For a moment, she was a kid again, sent by her misguided mother to fetch Daddy home from the bar. She remembered propping her bike against the wall, next to the overflowing trash bin, rehearsing what she’d say once she got inside, forcing herself up the two unpainted steps and through the screened door, which always groaned on its hinges.
When the door suddenly creaked open, Cheyenne was startled. She wrenched herself out of the time warp and actually considered crouching behind the Dumpster until whoever it was had gone.
Jesse stepped out, stretched like a lazy tomcat at home in an alley and fixing to go on the prowl, and adjusted his cowboy hat. He wore old jeans, a Western shirt unbuttoned to his collarbone and the kind of boots country people called shit-kickers. Even mud and horse manure couldn’t disguise the fact that they were expensive, probably custom-made.
When Cheyenne’s gaze trailed back up to Jesse’s face, she realized that he was looking at her. Grinning that lethal grin.
She blushed.
Someone flipped the porch light on from inside, and moths immediately gravitated to it, out of nowhere. Drawing an immediate parallel between Jesse and the bulb, she took half a step back.
He registered her suit and high-heeled shoes in a lazy sweep of his eyes. He clearly didn’t recognize her, which was at once galling and a relief.
He tugged at the brim of his battered hat. “You lost?” he asked.
Cheyenne was a moment catching her breath. “No,” she answered, fishing in her hobo bag for another card. “My name is Cheyenne Bridges, and I was hoping to talk to you about a business proposition.”
She instantly regretted using the word proposition because it made a corner of Jesse’s mouth tilt with amusement, but she was past the point of no return.
He descended the steps with that loose-limbed, supremely confident walk she remembered so well and approached her. Put out his hand. “Jesse McKettrick,” he said.
There was nothing to say but “I know.” She’d given herself away with the first words she’d spoken.
“Bridges,” he said, reflecting. Studying the card pensively before slipping it into his shirt pocket.
Cheyenne braced herself inwardly. Glanced toward the screen door Jesse had come through a few moments before.
“Any relation to—?” He paused, stooped slightly to look into her face. Recollection dawned. “Wait a second. Cheyenne Bridges.” He grinned. “I remember you—Cash’s daughter. We went to the movies a couple of times.”
She swallowed, nodded, hiked her chin up a notch. “That’s right,” she said carefully. Cash’s daughter, that’s who she was to him. A shy teenager he’d dated twice and then lost interest in. He didn’t know, she reminded herself silently, that she’d tacked every picture of him she could get to the wall of her bedroom in that shack out beyond the railroad tracks, the way most girls did photos of rock stars and film idols. He didn’t know she’d loved him with the kind of desperate, hopeless adoration only a sixteen-year-old can feel.
He didn’t know she’d prayed that he’d fall madly in love with her. That she’d imagined their wedding, their honeymoon and the birth of their four children so often that sometimes it felt like a memory of something that had really happened, rather than the fantasy it was.
Thank God Jesse didn’t know any of those things. She wouldn’t have been able to face him if he had, even with Mitch and her mom and Nigel all depending on her to persuade him to sell five hundred unspoiled acres of land to her company.
“I heard about your brother’s accident,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Shaken out of her reverie, Cheyenne nodded again. “Thanks.”
“Your dad, too.”
Her eyes stung. She tried to speak, swallowed instead.
Jesse smiled, took a light grip on her elbow. “Do you always do business in alleys?” he teased.
For a moment, she was affronted. Then she realized it was a perfectly reasonable question. “No,” she said.
“I was just heading for the Roadhouse to grab some supper. Want to come along?” He gestured toward the muddy truck.
The Roadhouse, also known as the Roadkill Café, was an institution in Indian Rock, a haven for truck drivers, bikers, cowboys and state patrolmen. Ironically, families dined at Lucky’s, probably pretending that the card room behind it didn’t exist.
“I’ll meet you there,” Cheyenne said. She’d have been safe enough with Jesse, but no way was she climbing into that truck in a straight skirt. She had some dignity, after all, even if she did feel like the scrawny ten-year-old who’d parked her bike in this alley and gone inside to beg her father, with a stellar lack of success, to come home for supper. Or to watch her perform in the class play. Or to take Gram to the hospital because she couldn’t catch her breath.…
“Okay,” Jesse said easily. He walked her to the rental car, which looked nondescript beside his truck. Like his boots, the vehicle had seen its share of action. Like his boots, it was top-of-the-line, with dual tires and an extended cab. Definitely leather seats, custom CD player and a GPS, too.
Once she was behind the wheel of the rental, with the window rolled down, Jesse leaned easily against the door and looked in at her.
“It’s good to see you again, Cheyenne,” he said.
“You, too,” she replied. But a lump rose in her throat. Don’t go there, she told herself sternly. This is business. You’ll buy the land. You’ll help Nigel get the construction project rolling. You’ll collect your bonus and take care of Mitch and your mother. And then you’ll go back to San Diego and forget Jesse McKettrick ever existed.
“As if,” she muttered aloud.
Jesse, in the process of turning away to head for his truck, turned back. “Did you say something?”
She gave him her best smile. “See you there,” she said.
He waved. Hoisted himself into the truck and fired up the engine.
Cheyenne waited until he pulled out, and then followed.
If she’d been as smart as other people thought she was, she thought grimly, she’d have kept on going. Sped right out of Indian Rock, past the Roadhouse, past Jesse and all the other memories and impossible dreams he represented, and never looked back.
CHAPTER TWO
JESSE REACHED THE Roadhouse first and waited in his truck for Cheyenne to catch up. Things had been dull around Indian Rock lately, with nothing much to do besides play poker and feed horses, but he had a feeling life was about to get a little more interesting.
Smiling slightly, he pulled Cheyenne’s business card from his pocket and read it again. Meerland Real Estate Ventures, Ltd.
This time, it clicked.
The smile faded to black.
She wanted the land.
“Damn,” he muttered, watching in the side mirror as Cheyenne’s car turned into the lot and pulled up beside him.
He sighed. She’d been pretty, as a girl. Strangely alert, too, like a deer raising its head at a watering hole at the snap of a twig, sniffing the wind for the scent of danger. Now, as a woman, Cheyenne Bridges was beautiful. Slight in adolescence, she’d rounded out real well, and if she’d let that rich dark hair down from the prim French twist and ditch the librarian gear, she’d be a showstopper.
Jesse got out of the truck, waited stiffly while Cheyenne pushed open her car door to stand teetering in those ridiculous shoes. She smiled tentatively and touched her hair.
In poker, that move would be an eloquent tell: Cheyenne was nervous.
And if his suspicions were right, she had cause to be nervous. He retallied the facts in his head—she worked for a real-estate company, of the “ventures” variety, and back there in the alley behind Lucky’s she’d said she wanted to discuss a business proposition.
In those few moments while they both stood in the gap between silence and speech, between uncertainty and decision, he considered sparing her fruitless expectations. He wasn’t about to sell the acres just beyond the eastern boundaries of the Triple M, if that was what she wanted. That land was the only thing he’d ever gotten on his own and not by virtue of being born a McKettrick.
Then again, he supposed he ought to at least hear her out. Maybe he was wrong, and she was beating the brush for investors. Being a gambler, he might be able to get behind something like that, if only because it would mean spending time with Cheyenne, unraveling some of the mysteries.
One thing was obvious. Cheyenne had come a long way since she’d left Indian Rock. The car was nothing special—probably rented—but the clothes were upscale. And while she still used her maiden name, that didn’t mean she wasn’t married. His older sisters, Sarah and Victoria, both had husbands, but still they went by McKettrick.
He glanced at Cheyenne’s left hand, looking for a ring, but the hand was hidden by the wide strap of her purse.
“Shall we?” he asked and gestured toward the entrance of the Roadhouse.
She looked relieved. “Sure,” she said. She walked a little ahead, and he opened the door for her.
Jesse had been eating at the Roadhouse all his life, but as he followed Cheyenne over the threshold, it seemed strange to him, a place he’d never been before. The sounds and smells and colors spun around him, and he felt disoriented, as though he’d just leaped off some great wheel while it was still spinning. He was a second or two getting his bearings.
He’d gone to school with the hostess, from kindergarten through his senior year at Indian Rock High, but as he and Cheyenne followed the woman to a corner booth, he couldn’t have said what her name was.
What the hell was wrong with him?
Cheyenne slid into the red vinyl seat, and Jesse sat opposite, placing his hat on the wide windowsill behind the miniature jukebox. He ordered coffee, she asked for sparkling mineral water with a twist of lime.
They studied their plastic menus, and when the waitress showed up—Jesse had gone to school with her, too, and consulted her name tag so he wouldn’t be caught out—Cheyenne went with French onion soup and he chose a double-deluxe cheeseburger, with fries.
“Thanks, Roselle,” he said, to anchor himself in ordinary reality.
Roselle touched his shoulder, smiled flirtatiously and sashayed away to fill the orders.
Cheyenne raised her eyebrows slightly, but said nothing.
Might as well bite the bullet, Jesse figured. “So Cheyenne, what brings you back to Indian Rock after all this time?” he asked easily.
She took a sip of fizzy water. “Business,” she said.
Jesse thought of his land. Of the timber, and the wide, grassy clearings, and the creek that shone so brightly in the sun that it made a man blink. He tasted his coffee and waited.
Cheyenne sighed. She had the air of someone about to jump through an ice hole in a frozen lake. “My company is prepared to offer you a very competitive price for—”
“No,” Jesse broke in flatly.
She’d made the jump, and from her expression, the water was even colder than expected. “No?”
“No,” he repeated.
“You didn’t let me finish,” she protested, rallying. “We’re talking about several million dollars here. No carrying back a mortgage. No balloon payments. Cash. We can close on the deal within two weeks of going to contract.”
Jesse started to reach for his hat, sighed and withdrew his hand. He’d seen this coming. Why did he feel like a kid who’d counted on getting a BB gun for Christmas and found new underwear under the tree instead?
“There isn’t going to be any contract,” he said.
She paled. Settled back against the booth seat. Her hand trembled as she set down her water glass.
“The price is negotiable,” she told him after a few moments of looking stricken.
He knew what she was thinking; he could read it in her face. Money talks. She thought he was angling for a higher price.
“You should never take up poker,” he said.
The food arrived.
Roselle winked as she set the burger down in front of him.
“I hate women like that,” Cheyenne told him after Roselle had swivel-hipped it back behind the counter.
Unprepared for this bend in the conversational river, Jesse paused with a French fry halfway to his mouth. “What?”
“They’re a type,” Cheyenne said, leaning in a little and lowering her voice. “Other women are invisible to them. If they had their way, the whole world would be a reverse harem.”
Jesse chuckled. “Well, that’s an interesting take on the subject,” he allowed. “The soup’s pretty good here.”
She picked up her spoon, put it down again. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to sell any part of the Triple M,” she said. Another hairpin turn, but this time, Jesse was ready. “That land is just sitting there. Unused.”
“Unspoiled,” Jesse clarified. “I suppose you want to turn it into an industrial park. Or a factory—the world really needs more disposable plastic objects.”
“Condominiums,” Cheyenne said, squaring her shoulders.
Jesse winced. “Even worse,” he replied.
“People need places to live.”
“So do critters,” Jesse said. He’d been hungry when he’d suggested supper at the Roadhouse. Now, he wasn’t sure he could choke down any part of that cheeseburger. “We’ve got so many coyotes and bobcats coming right into town these days that the feds are about to put a bounty on them. Do you know why, Ms. Bridges?” he asked, suddenly icily formal.
“Why are coyotes and bobcats coming into town,” she countered, “or why is the government about to put a bounty on them?”
Jesse set his back teeth, thought of his cousin Keegan for no reason he could have explained, and deliberately relaxed his jaws. “Wild animals are being driven farther out of their natural habitat every day,” he said. “By people like you. They’ve got to be somewhere, damn it.”
“Which do you care more about, Mr. McKettrick? People or animals?”
“Depends,” Jesse said. “I’ve known people who could learn scruples from a rabid badger. And it’s not as if building more condominiums is a service to humanity. Most of them are a blight on the land—and they all look alike, too. Stucco boxes, stacked on top of each other. What’s that about?”
Cheyenne picked up her spoon, made a halfhearted swipe at her soup. Straightened her spine. “I’d be glad to show you the blueprints,” she said. “Our project is designed to blend gracefully into the landscape, with minimal impact on the environment.”
Jesse eyed his cheeseburger regretfully. All those additives and preservatives going to waste, not to mention a lot of perfectly good grease. “No deal,” he said. With anybody else, he’d have played out the hand, let her believe he was interested in selling, just to see what came of it. Cheyenne Bridges was different, and that was the most disturbing element of all.
Why was she different?
“Just let me show you the plans,” she persisted.
“Just let me show you the land,” he retorted.
She smiled. “I’ll let you show me yours,” she bargained, “if you’ll let me show you mine.”
He laughed. “You sure are persistent,” he said.
“You sure are stubborn,” she answered.
Jesse reached for his cheeseburger. By that time, he’d had ample opportunity to notice that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
“You ever get married?” he asked.
She seemed to welcome the change of subject, though the quiet, bruised vigilance was still there in her eyes and the set of her shoulders and the way she held her head. “No,” she said. “You?”
“No,” he told her. He and Brandi, a rodeo groupie, had been married by an Elvis in Las Vegas, come to their senses before word had got out, and agreed to divorce an hour after they’d checked out of the hotel. They’d parted friends, and he hadn’t seen her in a couple of years, though she hit him up for a few hundred dollars every now and then, and he always sent the money.
As far as he was concerned, he’d answered honestly. Brandi slipped out of his mind as quickly as she’d slipped in.
Meanwhile, he’d only taken a couple of bites of the sandwich, but the patty was thick and goopy with cheese, and protein always centered him—especially when he’d been playing cards all day, subsisting on the cold cereal he’d had for breakfast after doing the chores on the ranch. Sure enough, it was the burger that lifted his spirits.
Sure enough, said a voice in his head, you’re full of sheep dip.
It’s the woman.
“How’s the soup?” he asked.
“Cold,” she said. “How’s the burger?”
He grinned. “It’s clogging my arteries even as we speak.”
Cheyenne lifted one eyebrow, but she was smiling. “And that’s good?”
“Probably not,” he said. “But it tastes great.”
After that, the conversation was relatively easy.
They finished their meal, Jesse paid the bill, and Cheyenne left the tip.
He walked her to her car. There was virtually no crime in Indian Rock, but that kind of courtesy was bred into him, like opening doors and carrying heavy things.
“You’ll really look at the plans?” she asked quietly, her eyes luminous, once she was behind the wheel.
“If you’ll look at the land,” Jesse reminded her. “Come up to the ranch tomorrow, around nine o’clock. I’ll be through feeding the horses around then.”
She nodded. A pulse fluttered at the base of her throat. “I’ll bring the blueprints,” she said.
“Please,” he said, with mock enthusiasm, “bring the blueprints.”
She laughed and moved to close the car door. “Thanks for supper, Jesse.”
He went to tug at the brim of his hat, then remembered he’d left it inside the Roadhouse. “My pleasure,” he said, feeling awkward for the first time in recent memory.
He watched as Cheyenne started the car, backed out and drove away. Ordinarily, he’d have gone back to Lucky’s to play a few more hands of cards, but that night, he just wanted to go home.
He went back into the Roadhouse, reclaimed his hat.
Roselle invited him to a party at her place.
If her eyes had been hands, he’d have been stripped naked, right there in the Roadhouse. Clearly, the “party” she had in mind would include the two of them and nobody else.
He said some other time, adding a mental “maybe.”
Back in his truck, he adjusted the rearview mirror and looked into his own eyes. Who are you? he asked silently. And what have you done with Jesse McKettrick?

“I COMPLETELY BLEW IT,” Cheyenne told her mother the moment she stepped into the house that night.
Ayanna sat on the old couch, her feet resting bare on the cool linoleum floor, crocheting something from multi-strands of variegated yarn. “How so?” she asked mildly.
The sounds of cyber-battle bounced in from the next room. Mitch was playing a video game on his laptop. Mitch was always playing a video game on his laptop. It was as though by shooting down animated enemies he could keep his own demons at bay.
“Jesse flatly refused to sell me the land,” Cheyenne said.
Ayanna smiled softly. “You expected that.”
Cheyenne tossed her heavy handbag onto a chair, kicked off her shoes and sighed with relief. “Yeah,” she said.
“Want something to eat?” Ayanna asked. “Mitch and I had mac-and-cheese.”
“I had soup,” Cheyenne said.
Her cell phone played its elevator song inside her bag.
“Ignore it,” Ayanna advised.
“I can’t,” Cheyenne answered. She fished out the phone, flipped it open and said, “Hello, Nigel.”
“Have you made any progress?” Nigel asked.
Cheyenne looked at her watch. “Gosh, Nigel. You’ve shown amazing restraint. It’s been at least an hour and a half since the last time you called.”
“You said you were on your way to have dinner with McKettrick,” Nigel reminded her. They’d talked, live via satellite, during the drive between Lucky’s and the Roadhouse. “How did it go?”
Ayanna sat serenely, crocheting away.
“He said no,” Cheyenne reported.
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“We’re doomed.”
“Take a breath, Nigel. He agreed to look at the plans—on one condition.”
“What condition?”
“I have to look at the land. Tomorrow morning. I’m meeting him at his place at 9:00 a.m.”
“So we’re still in the running?”
“Anybody’s guess,” Cheyenne said wearily, moving her purse to sink into the chair herself. “Jesse’s direct, if nothing else, and as soon as he knew what I wanted, he dug in his heels.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have sprung it on him so soon,” Nigel mused. Cheyenne could just see her boss’s bushy brows knitting together in a thoughtful frown. She wondered if he’d ever considered investing in a weed eater, for purposes of personal grooming.
“You didn’t give me any other choice, remember?”
“Don’t make this my fault.”
“You’ve been breathing down my neck since I got off the plane in Phoenix yesterday morning. If you want me to do the impossible, Nigel, you’ve got to give me some space.”
“You can do this, can’t you, Cheyenne?”
She felt a surge of shaky confidence. “I specialize in the impossible,” she said.
“Come through for me, babe,” Nigel wheedled.
“Don’t call me babe,” Cheyenne responded. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mother smile. “And don’t bug me, either. When I have something to tell you, I’ll be in touch—”
“But—”
“Goodbye, Nigel.” Cheyenne thumbed the end button.
Sounds of intense warfare burgeoned from Mitch’s room.
With another sigh, Cheyenne tossed the cell phone onto a dust-free end table and rose from her chair. “You know something, Mom?” she said, brightening. “You’re amazing. You’ve been in this house for a few hours, and already it feels like home.”
Ayanna’s eyes glittered with a sudden sheen of tears. “I want to do my part, Cheyenne,” she said. “I know you think you’re in this alone, but you’re not. You have me, and you have Mitch.”
Cheyenne’s throat knotted up. When she spoke, her voice came out as a croak. “Speaking of Mitch—”
Ayanna set aside her crochet project and stood, pointed herself in the direction of the kitchen, which, unlike those in the condos Cheyenne and Nigel planned to build, boasted none of the modern conveniences. “I’ll make you some herbal tea,” Ayanna said. “Might help you sleep.”
“Thanks,” Cheyenne said and crossed to push open the partially closed door to her brother’s room.
Mitch sat hunched over his computer, a refurbished model, bought with money Ayanna had probably saved from the checks Cheyenne sent every payday. He seemed so slight and fragile, slouched in his wheelchair, with a card table for a desk. Once, he’d been athletic. One of the most popular kids in school.
“Hey,” Cheyenne said.
“Hey,” Mitch responded without looking away from the laptop screen.
She considered mussing his hair, the way she’d done when he was younger, before the accident, and decided against the idea. Mitch was nineteen now, and his dignity was about all he had left.
When the deal was done, she reminded herself, she’d buy him a real computer, like the one she’d seen at McKettrickCo when she’d stopped in looking for Jesse earlier that day. Maybe then he’d start hoping again.
“I wish we could go back to Phoenix,” he said.
She sat down on his bed. Ayanna had brought his blankets and spread from home, put them on the rollaway that had been old when Cheyenne had left for college. Oh, yes, Ayanna had tried, but the room was depressing, just the same. The wallpaper was peeling, and the curtains looked as though they’d been through at least one flood. The linoleum floor was scuffed, with the pattern worn away in several places.
“What’s in Phoenix?” she asked lightly, though she knew. In the low-income housing where he and Ayanna lived, he’d had friends. He’d had cable TV, and there was a major library across from the apartment building, with computers. Here, he had an old laptop and a rollaway bed.
Mitch merely shrugged, but he shut down the game and swiveled his chair around so he could face Cheyenne.
“Things are gonna get better,” she said.
“That’s what Mom says, too,” Mitch replied, but he didn’t sound as if he believed it.
Cheyenne studied her brother. She and Mitch had different fathers; hers was dead, his was God knew where. Ten years ago, when she’d left Indian Rock, he’d been nine and she’d been seventeen. When Ayanna had followed her second husband, Pete, to Phoenix, dragging Mitch along with her, Cheyenne had been in her sophomore year at the University of Arizona, scrambling to keep up her grades and hold on to her night job. Mitch had written her a plaintive letter, begging her to come home, so the two of them could stay in this run-down shack of a house. He’d loved Indian Rock then—loved the singular freedoms of growing up in a small town.
She’d replied with a postcard, scrawled on her break at Hooters, telling him to get real. She wasn’t about to come back, and even if she did, Ayanna would never agree to let them live alone, with Gram gone. You’ll like Phoenix, she’d said.
“I’m sorry, Mitch,” she said now, after swallowing her heart. It was true that Ayanna wouldn’t have let her children stay there, if only because she’d needed the pittance she’d received for renting the place out, but there were gentler ways of refusing.
“For what?” he asked.
“Everything,” she answered.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Mitch told her. “The accident, I mean.”
I could have come back, gotten a job at the Roadhouse or Lucky’s, waiting tables. I could have paid Ayanna some rent, and probably gotten something from the state to help with the cost of raising my little brother. If I’d even tried…
“It wouldn’t have happened if we’d been here,” she said.
“Who knows?” he asked. “Maybe it was fate—maybe I’d have rolled that four-wheeler anyhow.”
Cheyenne closed her eyes against the images that were always hovering at the edge of her consciousness: Mitch, sixteen and foolish, joyriding in the desert with friends on “four-wheelers”—all-terrain vehicles designed for the hopelessly reckless. The rollover and critical spine injury. The rush to the hospital after her mother’s frantic call, the long vigil in the waiting room outside Intensive Care, when nobody knew if Mitch would live or die.
The surgeries.
The slow, excruciating recovery.
Cheyenne had been just starting to make a name for herself at Meerland then. She’d driven back and forth between San Diego and Phoenix, armed with a company laptop and a cell phone. She’d held on stubbornly and worked hard, determined to prove to Nigel that she could succeed.
And she had. While spelling an exhausted Ayanna at the hospital—Pete, husband number two and Mitch’s dad, had fled when he’d realized he was expected to behave like a responsible adult—she’d struck up a friendship with one of her brother’s surgeons and had eventually persuaded him to invest in Meerland. When his profits were impressive, he’d brought several of his colleagues onboard.
Mitch had gradually gotten better, until he was well enough to leave the hospital, and Cheyenne had gone back to San Diego and thrown all her energies into her job.
“Do you think we could get a dog?”
Cheyenne blinked. Returned to the here-and-now with a thump. “A dog?”
Mitch smiled, and that was such a rare thing that it made her heart skitter over a beat. “We couldn’t have one at the apartment,” he said.
“But you’ll be going back—”
“I’m never going back,” Mitch said with striking certainty.
“What makes you say that?”
“We don’t have to pay rent here,” he answered. “Mom’s talking about painting again, and getting a job waiting tables or selling souvenirs someplace. She’ll probably meet some loser and make it her life’s mission to save him from himself.”
For all her intelligence, Ayanna had the kind of romantic history that would provide material for a week of Dr. Phil episodes. At least she hadn’t married again after Pete.
Tears burned in Cheyenne’s eyes, and she was glad the room was lit only by Mitch’s computer screen and the tacky covered-wagon lamp on the dresser.
“I wish—” Mitch began when Cheyenne didn’t, couldn’t, speak, but his voice fell away.
“What, Mitch?” she asked, after swallowing hard. “What do you wish?”
“I wish I could have a job, and a girlfriend. I wish I could ride a horse.”
Cheyenne didn’t know what to say. Jobs were few and far between in Indian Rock, especially for the disabled. Girls Mitch’s age were working, going to college, dating men who could take them places. And riding horses? That was for people with two good legs and more courage than good sense.
“Isn’t there something else?” she said, almost whispering.
Mitch smiled sadly, turned away again and brought the war game back up on his computer screen. Blip-blip-kabang.
Cheyenne sat helplessly on the bed for a few moments, then got to her feet, laid a hand briefly on her brother’s shoulder, and left the room, closing the door behind her.

THE HEADLIGHTS OF JESSE’S truck swept across the old log schoolhouse his great-great-great grandfather, Jeb McKettrick, had built for his teacher bride, Chloe. Jesse’s sisters had used the place as a playhouse when they were kids, and Jesse, being a decade younger, had made a fort of it. Now, on the rare occasions when his parents came back to the ranch, it served as an office.
He pulled up beside the barn, and the motion lights came on.
Inside, he checked on the horses, six of them altogether, though the number varied. They’d been fed and turned out for some exercise that morning, before he’d left for town, but he added flakes of dried Bermuda grass to their feeders now just the same, to make up for being gone so long.
They were forgiving, like always, and grateful for the attention he gave them.
He took the time to groom them, one by one, but eventually, there was nothing to do but face that empty house.
It was big; generations of McKettricks had added on to it—a room here, a story there. Now that his folks spent the majority of their time in Palm Beach, playing golf and socializing, and Victoria and Sarah were busy jet-setting with their wealthy husbands, Jesse was the unofficial owner.
He entered through the kitchen door, switched on the lights.
The house his cousins, Meg and Sierra, owned was reportedly haunted. Jesse often wished this one was, too, because at least then he wouldn’t have been alone.
He went to the walk-in Sub-Zero, took out a beer and popped the top. What he ought to do was get a dog, but he was gone too much. It wouldn’t be fair to consign some poor unsuspecting mutt to a lonely life, just so he could come home to somebody who’d always be happy to see him.
“You’re losing it, McKettrick,” he said aloud.
He thought about Cheyenne—had been thinking about her, on one level or another, ever since they’d parted in the Roadhouse parking lot.
Thought about her long legs and her expressive eyes, and the fullness of her mouth. She was good-looking, all right, and smart, too.
He wondered how far she’d go to persuade him to sell that five hundred acres she wanted.
The phone rang, nearly startling him out of his hide.
He scowled, set down his beer and picked up the receiver. “Yo,” he said. “This is Jesse.”
“Yo, yourself,” Sierra replied. She was set to marry Travis Reid, one of his closest friends, in a month. Jesse would be best man at the ceremony, and until tonight, when he’d run into Cheyenne, he’d wished Sierra wasn’t a blood relative so he could at least fantasize about taking her away from Travis.
“What’s up?” he asked and grinned. Most likely, if anything was up, it was Travis. The man had been at full mast ever since he’d first laid eyes on Sierra one day last winter.
“We’re having a prewedding party,” Sierra said. “Saturday night. Live music. A hayride and a barbecue. The whole works. Be there, and bring a date.”
“I’ve got a big tournament that night,” Jesse protested. “Cliffcastle Casino. No limit and plenty of tourists who think they know the game because they watch the World Poker Tour on TV.”
“Come on, Jesse. You spend too much time at the tables as it is. And don’t make me play the guilt card. As in, you’re the best man and this is part of the gig.”
“I wouldn’t think of making you play the guilt card,” Jesse said dryly, downing a big swig of beer. “Except that you just did.”
She laughed. “It could get worse. Liam’s counting on seeing you. Meg’s flying in from San Antonio, and Rance and Keegan have both cleared their schedules to come. Since it would be really crass of me to point out that that involves more than missing a poker tournament, I won’t.”
Jesse sighed. “Okay,” he said. “But I want something in return.”
“Like what?”
“Send over a ghost, will you? It’s way too quiet around here.”
CHAPTER THREE
CHEYENNE SHOWED UP at the ranch the next morning, as agreed, at nine o’clock sharp. Jesse had just turned all but two of the horses out to graze in the pastures beyond the corral gate. He’d saddled his black-and-white paint gelding, Minotaur, first, and was finishing up with Pardner when she pulled in.
Standing just outside the barn door, Jesse yanked the cinch tighter around the horse’s belly, grinned and shook his head slightly when Cheyenne stepped out of the car and he saw what she was wearing. A trim beige pantsuit, tailored at the waist, and stack-heeled shoes with tasteful brass buckles, shiny enough to signal a rider five miles away. She’d wound her hair into the same businesslike do at the back of her head—did she sleep with it up like that?—and he wondered idly how long it was, and how it would feel to let the strands slide between his fingers.
Smiling gamely, Cheyenne minced her way across the rutted barnyard toward him. Her gaze touched the horses warily and ricocheted off again, with a reverberation like the ping of a bullet, only soundless. “It’s a beautiful morning,” she said.
Jesse gave a partial nod, tugged at his hat brim before thinking better of the idea. Talk about tells. Why not just have a billboard put up? Cheyenne Bridges Intrigues Me. Sincerely, Jesse McKettrick. “Always is, out here. Year-round.”
She drew an audible breath, that brave smile wobbling a little on her sensuous mouth, and huffed out an exhale. Adjusted the strap of that honking purse again. “Let’s go have a look at the land,” she said, jingling her keys in her right hand.
Jesse ran his gaze over her outfit, glanced toward Pardner and Minotaur, who were waiting patiently in full tack, reins dangling, tails switching. “That little car of yours,” he said, watching with amused enjoyment as realization dawned in her face, “will never make it onto the ridge. Nothing up there but old logging trails.”
She swallowed visibly, took in the horses again and shook her head. “You’re not suggesting we—ride?” The hesitation was so brief it might have gone unnoticed, if Jesse hadn’t had so much practice at picking out the very things other people tried to hide. “On horseback?”
He waited, arms folded. “That’s the usual purpose of saddling up,” he said. “Two people. Two horses. No special mental acuity required to figure it out.”
Cheyenne shifted on the soles of her fancy shoes. They’d work in a boardroom, those shoes, but on the Triple M, they were almost laughable. “I wasn’t expecting to ride a horse.”
“I can see that,” Jesse observed. “You do realize that those five hundred acres you’re so anxious to bulldoze, pave and cover with condos are pretty rugged, and not a little remote?”
“Of course I do,” she said, faltering now. “I’ve done weeks of research. I know my business, Mr. McKettrick.”
“It’s Jesse,” he corrected. “And what kind of ‘research’ did you do, exactly? Maybe you dredged up some plat maps online? Checked out the access to power and the water situation?” He waited a beat to let his meaning sink in, then gave the suit another once-over. “At least you had sense enough to wear pants,” he added charitably.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Do you even own a pair of jeans?”
“I don’t wear jeans when I’m working,” she retorted. Her tone was moderate, but if she’d been a porcupine, her quills would have been bristling.
“I guess that lets boots out, too, then.”
She paused before answering, and looked so flustered that Jesse began to feel a little sorry for her. “I guess it does,” she said, and her shoulders slackened so that she had to grab the purse and resituate it before the strap slid down her arm.
“Come on inside,” he said, indicating the house with a half turn of his head. “Mom’s about your size. You can borrow some of her stuff.”
Cheyenne stood so still that she might have sprouted roots. Jesse could imagine them, reaching deep into the ground, winding around slabs of bedrock and the petrified roots of trees so ancient that they’d left no trace of their existence aboveground. “I don’t know—”
Jesse decided it was time to up the ante by a chip or two. “Are you scared, Ms. Bridges?”
Her mouth twitched at one corner, and Jesse waited to see if she was just irritated or trying not to smile. It was the latter; a small grin flitted onto her lips and then flew away. “Yes,” she said, with a forthrightness that made Jesse wish he hadn’t teased her, let alone set her up for the challenge she was facing now.
“Pardner’s a rocking horse,” he told her. “You could sit under his belly, blow a police whistle, grab his tail in both hands and pull it between his hind legs, and he wouldn’t move a muscle.”
She bit her lip. Jesse saw her eyes widen as she assessed Minotaur, then looked hopefully toward Pardner. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?” she asked when her gaze swung in Jesse’s direction again and locked on in a way that made the pit of his stomach give out like a trapdoor opening over a bottomless chasm. It happened so fast that he found himself scrabbling for an internal handhold, but he couldn’t seem to get a grip.
“No,” he said, but it wasn’t because he was being stubborn. Things had gone too far, and she couldn’t walk away now without leaving some of her self-respect behind. All he could do was make it as easy as possible. “Knowing the land isn’t a drive-by kind of thing, Cheyenne. You gotta be there, if it’s going to speak to you.”
“Maybe you could just give the plans a glance and I could come back another day—”
He put up a hand. “Whoa,” he said. “I could let you off the hook here, but you wouldn’t like me for it in the long run, and you’d think even less of yourself.”
She paused, looked ruefully down at her clothes. Huffed out a sigh. “Just look at the blueprints, Jesse. I’m not prepared—”
Jesse dug in his heels. He sensed that this was a pivotal moment for both of them, far more important than it seemed on the surface. There was something archetypal going on here, though damned if he could have said what it was, for all those psychology classes he’d taken in college. “As if you’d come back out here, tomorrow or the next day, decked out to ride, and ask for the tour,” he said. He narrowed his eyes. “If you think I’m going to unroll those plans of yours on the kitchen table, see the error of my ways, and ask you where to sign, you’re in need of a reality check.”
She chewed on that one for a while, and Jesse knew if she hadn’t wanted that land half as badly as she did, she’d have told him what to do with both horses and possibly the barn, turned on one polished heel, stomped back to her car and left him standing there in the proverbial cloud of dust.
“All right,” she said. The words might as well have been hitched to a winch and hauled out of her.
“All right, what?”
Cheyenne sighed. “All right, I’ll borrow your mother’s clothes and ride that wretched horse,” she told him. “But if I get my neck broken, it will be on your conscience.”
Jesse indulged in a slow grin. He’d liked Cheyenne all along, but now he respected her, too, and that gave a new dimension to the whole exchange. She’d been brave enough to admit she was scared, and now she was stepping past that to stay in the game. “Nothing like that’s going to happen,” he assured her. “I know you’re a greenhorn, and I wouldn’t put you on a knot-head horse.”
With that, he led the way inside. While she waited in the kitchen, he scouted up some of his mother’s old jeans, a pair of well-worn boots and a flannel shirt. When he returned, she was looking out the window over the sink, apparently studying the schoolhouse.
“Is it really a one-room school?” she asked when he stepped up beside her and placed the pile of gear in her arms.
He nodded. “The blackboard’s still there, and a few of the desks,” he said. “It’s pretty much the way it was when old Jeb built it for his bride back in the 1880s.”
She looked up at him, her eyes wide and solemnly wistful. “Could I see it?”
“Sure,” he answered, frowning. “Why the sad look, Cheyenne?”
She tried to smile, but the operation wasn’t a success. Shrugged both shoulders and tightened her hold on the change of clothes. “Did I look sad? I’m not, really. I was just wondering what it would be like to have a history like you McKettricks do.”
“Everybody has a history,” he said, knowing she’d lied when she’d said she wasn’t sad.
“Do they?” she asked softly. “I never knew my dad’s parents. My maternal grandmother died when I was thirteen. Nobody tells stories. Nobody wrote anything down, or took a lot of pictures. We have a few, but I couldn’t identify more than two or three of the people in them. It’s as if we all just popped up out of nowhere.”
In that moment, Jesse wanted to kiss Cheyenne Bridges in a way he’d never wanted to kiss another woman. He settled for touching the tip of one finger to her nose because she was still as skittish as the deer he’d imagined when he’d first seen her again, behind Lucky’s, and he didn’t want to send her springing for the tall timber.
“Ready to ride?” he asked.
“I’m never going to be any readier,” she replied.
He gave her directions to the nearest bathroom, and she set out, walking straight-shouldered and stalwart, like somebody who’d been framed for a crime arriving at the prison, about to put on an orange jumpsuit with a number on the back and take her chances with the population.

THE JEANS WERE A LITTLE BAGGY, but the boots fit. Cheyenne folded her trousers, blazer and silk camisole neatly and set them on a counter. Arranged her favorite shoes neatly alongside. Looked into the mirror above the old-fashioned pedestal sink.
“You can do this,” she told herself out loud. “You have to do this.” She turned her head, looked at herself from one side, then the other. “And by the way, your hair looks ridiculous, pinned up like that.”
“Nothing for it,” her reflection answered.
She got lost twice, trying to find her way back to the kitchen, where Jesse was waiting, leaning back against the counter in front of the sink, arms folded, head cocked to one side. His gaze swept over her, and nerves tripped under the whole surface of her skin, dinging like one of Mitch’s computer games racking up points, headed for tilt.
“That’s more like it,” Jesse drawled. He seemed so at ease that Cheyenne, suffering by contrast, yearned to make him uncomfortable.
She couldn’t afford to do that, of course, so she quashed the impulse—for the moment. She’d take it out on Nigel later, over the telephone, when she reported that she’d risked life and limb for his damnable condominium development by getting on the back of a horse and trekking off into the freaking wilderness like a contestant on some TV survival show. Provided she didn’t end up in the intensive care unit before she got the chance to call him, anyway.
What she didn’t allow herself to think about was the bonus, and all it would mean to her, her mother and Mitch.
“Take it easy,” Jesse said, more gently than before. She had no defense against tenderness, and consciously raised her invisible force field. With the next breath, he made the whole effort unnecessary. “I told you—Pardner’s a good horse, and he’s used to kids and craven cowards.”
“I am not a coward,” Cheyenne replied tersely. “‘Craven’ or otherwise.”
Jesse grinned, thrust himself away from the counter and ambled toward the back door. There, he paused and gave her another lingering glance. “You’re obviously not a kid, either. My mistake.”
“You’re enjoying this,” she accused, following him outside into the warm spring morning. She’d been going for a lighthearted tone, but it came out sounding a little hollow and mildly confrontational.
He crossed to the horses, took the brute he called Pardner by the reins. “All aboard,” he said.
Cheyenne walked steadily toward the man and the horse because she knew if she stopped, she might not get herself moving again.
“You’ve never been in the saddle before?” Jesse asked, marveling, when she got close to him and that beast. “How’d you manage that, growing up in Indian Rock just like I did?”
They’d shared a zip code and gone to the same schools, Cheyenne reflected. Beyond those similarities, they might as well have been raised on different planets. Unable to completely hide her irritation, whatever the cost of it might be, she gave Jesse a look as she put a foot in the stirrup and grabbed the saddle horn in both hands. “I guess I was so busy with debutante balls and tea at the country club,” she quipped, “that I never got around to riding to the hounds or playing polo.”
Jesse laughed. Then he put a hand under her backside and hoisted her unceremoniously onto the horse in one smooth but startlingly powerful motion.
She landed with a thump that echoed from her tailbone to the top of her spine.
“You can let go of the horn,” he said. “Pardner will stand there like a monument in the park until I get on Minotaur and take off.”
Cheyenne released her two-handed death grip, finger by finger. “You won’t make him run?”
Jesse laid a worn leather strap in her left palm, closed her hand around it, then ducked under Pardner’s head to do the same on the other side. “Hold the reins loosely,” he instructed, “like this. He’ll stop at a light tug, so don’t yank. That’ll hurt him.”
Cheyenne nodded nervously. The creature probably weighed as much as a Volkswagen, and if either of them got hurt, odds on, it would be her. Just the same, she didn’t want to cause him any pain.
She was in good shape, but the insides of her thighs were already beginning to ache. She wondered if it would be ethical to put a gallon or two of Bengay on her expense account so she could dip herself in the stuff when she got home.
“You’re okay?” Jesse asked after a few beats.
She bit down hard on her lower lip and nodded once, briskly.
He smiled, laid a hand lightly on her thigh, and turned to mount his horse with the easy grace of a movie cowboy. If Nigel had been there, armed with his seemingly endless supply of clichés, he probably would have remarked that Jesse McKettrick looked as though he’d been born on horseback, or that he and the animal might have been a single entity.
Jesse nudged his horse’s sides with the heels of his boots, and it began to walk away.
“No spurs?” Cheyenne asked, drawing on celluloid references, which constituted the extent of her knowledge of cowboys. It was an inane conversation, but Pardner was moving, and she had to talk to keep herself calm.
Jesse frowned as though she’d suggested stabbing the poor critter with a pitchfork. “No spurs on the Triple M,” he said. “Ever.”
Cheyenne clutched the reins, her hands sweating, and waited for her heart to squirm back down out of her throat and resume its normal beat. The ride wasn’t so bad, really—just a sort of rolling jostle.
As long as an impromptu Kentucky Derby didn’t break out, she might just survive this episode. Anyway, it was a refreshing change from shuffling paperwork, juggling calls from Nigel and constantly meeting with prospective investors.
Reaching a pasture gate, Jesse leaned from the saddle of his gelding to free the latch. The fences, Cheyenne noted, now that she wasn’t hyperventilating anymore, were split-rail as far as she could see. The wood was weathered, possibly as old as the historic schoolhouse Jesse had promised to show her when they got back, and yet the poles stood straight.
Just as there were no spurs on the Triple M, she concluded, there appeared to be no barbed wire, either. Considering the size of the spread—the local joke was that the place was measured in counties rather than acres—that was no small feat.
Cheyenne rode through the gate, waited while Jesse shut it again.
“I don’t see any barbwire,” she said.
“You won’t,” Jesse answered, adjusting his hat so the brim came down low over his eyes. “There isn’t any. Horses manage to tear themselves up enough as it is, without rusty spikes ripping into their hide.”
In spite of all he was putting her through, before he’d even agree to look at the blueprints for Nigel’s development, Jesse rose a little in Cheyenne’s estimation. Spurs were cruel, and so was barbed wire. He clearly disapproved of both, and Cheyenne had to give him points for compassion.
Jesse had never been mean, she reminded herself. He’d been wild, though. Even in high school, he’d been a seasoned poker player—she’d seen him in illicit games with her dad and some of the other old-timers long before he was of age.
“Is this what you do all day?” she asked, as they rode through high, fragrant grass toward a distant ridge. White clouds scalloped the horizon like foam on an ocean tide, and the sky was the same shade of blue as Jesse’s eyes.
One side of his mouth cocked up in a grin, and he adjusted his hat again. “Is what what I do all day? Ride the range with good-looking women, you mean?”
Cheyenne was foolishly pleased by the compliment, however indirect, though the practical part of her said she was being played and she’d better beware. She’d dated, when she had the time, and even had had one or two fairly serious relationships, but Jesse McKettrick was way out of her league. Forgetting that could only get her into trouble.
She smiled, held both reins in one hand so she could wipe a damp palm dry on the leg of Jesse’s mother’s jeans, and then repeated the process with the other. “You must herd cattle and things like that,” she said, as if he needed prompting.
“Rance would like to run a few hundred head of beef,” Jesse answered, picking up the pace just a little, so both horses accelerated into a fast walk. “The Triple M isn’t really in the cattle business anymore. It’s more like what the easterners call hobby farming. I train the occasional horse, ride in a rodeo once in a while, and play a hell of a lot of poker. What about you, Cheyenne? What do you do all day?”
“I work,” she said, and then realized she’d sounded like a self-righteous prig, and immediately wished she wasn’t too damn proud to backpedal.
He pretended to pull an arrow, or maybe a poisoned spear, out of his chest, but his grin was as saucy as ever. Nothing she could say was going to get under that thick McKettrick hide.
Not that she really wanted to. Much.
“How far are we going to ride?” she asked, closing the figurative barn door after the horse was long gone.
“Just onto that ridge up there,” Jesse answered, pointing. His horse was trotting now, and Cheyenne’s kept pace. “You can see clear across to the county road from just outside the Triple M fence line. It’ll take your breath away.”
Cheyenne swallowed, bouncing so hard in the saddle that she had to be careful not to bite her tongue. Her Native American grandmother, a proud member of the Apache tribe, would die of shame to see the way Cheyenne rode—if she hadn’t already been dead.
Don’t let me love that land too much, she prayed.
Jesse slowed his horse with no discernible pull on the reins. Reached over to take hold of Pardner’s bridle strap with one hand and bring him back to a sedate walk. “Do you ever wish you could do anything else?” he asked.
The question confused Cheyenne at first because she was concentrating on two things: not falling off the horse, and not throwing away everything she’d worked for because she liked the scenery. Then she realized Jesse was asking whether or not she liked her job.
“It’s a challenge,” she allowed carefully. “Very rewarding at times, and very frustrating at others. Our last development was geared to the mid-income crowd, and it was nice to know younger families would be moving in, raising kids there.”
Nigel had lost his shirt on that development, but Jesse didn’t need to know that. Naturally, the investors hadn’t been pleased, which was why Cheyenne’s boss was so desperate to secure the prime acres she was about to see in person for the first time.
She’d offered to buy one of the condos in the batch Nigel had privately called El Fiasco, for Ayanna and Mitch to live in. The price had been right—next to nothing, since they’d practically been giving the places away by the time the project had limped to a halt. Ayanna had toured the demo condo, thanked Cheyenne for the thought, and had graciously refused, saying she’d rather live in a tepee.
The refusal still stung. This from a woman who subsists in public housing, she thought. A place where the Dumpsters overflow and the outside walls are covered with graffiti.
“Where was this development?” Jesse asked.
“Outside of Phoenix,” Cheyenne answered. They were riding up a steep incline now. Then, before he could ask, she added, “You wouldn’t have heard of it.”
“What was it called?”
She wet her lips and avoided his eyes. There was another gate up ahead, and beyond it, trees. Magnificent pines, their tips fiercely green against the soft sky. “Casa de Meerland,” she said.
“Catchy name,” Jesse said dryly. “I read about that in the Republic.”
Great, Cheyenne thought. He knew about the delays, the lawsuits, the unsold units, the angry investors. “As I told you last night,” she said, carefully cheerful, “we’re prepared to pay cash. You needn’t worry about the company’s reputation—we’re rock solid.”
“Your company’s reputation is just about the last thing I’d ever worry about,” Jesse said. “Mowing down old-growth timber and covering the meadows with concrete—now, that’s another matter.”
Cheyenne tensed. She knew her smile looked as fixed as it felt, hanging there on her face like an old window shutter clinging to a casing by one rusted hinge. “We have a deal,” she said. “I’ll look at the land, and you’ll give the blueprints a chance. I sincerely hope you’re not about to renege on your end of it.”
“I never go back on my word,” Jesse told her.
Cheyenne held her tongue. If he never went back on his word, it was probably only because he so rarely gave it in the first place.
“What do you do when you’re not pillaging the environment?” he asked. They were approaching a second gate, held shut by another loop of wire.
She glared at him.
He laughed.
“I don’t have time for hobbies,” she said. Wearing Jesse’s mother’s jeans and boots reminded her of the woman she’d seen only from a distance, around Indian Rock, always dressed in custom-made suits or slacks and a blazer. Evidently, there was another, earthier side to Callie McKettrick.
“I could give you riding lessons.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” she answered, a little too quickly and a little too tightly.
“Suppose I completely lost my head and agreed to sell you this land. Would you be in town for a while afterward?”
The question shook Cheyenne, though she thought she did a pretty good job of hiding her reaction. Was there a glimmer of hope that he’d agree to the deal? And what did he want her to say? That she’d be gone before the ink was dry on the contract, or that she’d stay on indefinitely?
In the end, it didn’t matter what he wanted. The truth was the truth, and while Cheyenne liked to dole it out in measured doses, she was a lousy liar. “I’d be here for six months to a year, overseeing the construction end and setting up a sales office.”
They’d reached the upper gate, and again, Jesse leaned to open it. She couldn’t get a clear look at his face, but she sensed something new in his manner—a sort of quiet conflict. He’d been so clear about his intention to hold on to the land. Was he relenting?
She felt a peculiar mixture of hope and disappointment.
“I guess you could rent that empty storefront next to Cora’s Curl and Twirl,” he said as she rode through the opening. “For a sales office, I mean.”
Cheyenne’s heart fluttered its wings, then settled onto its roost again, afraid to fly. “I remember the Curl and Twirl,” she said. The balance was delicate, and she knew an ill-chosen word could tip things in the wrong direction. “Cora’s still cutting hair and teaching little girls to twirl batons?”
Jesse grinned at her before riding slowly back to close the gate again. “Not much changes in Indian Rock,” he observed. “Did you ever take lessons from Cora?”
Something spiky lodged in Cheyenne’s throat. God, she’d longed for a pink tutu and a baton with sparkly fringe on each end, longed to be one of those fortunate kids, spilling out of station wagons and pickup trucks, rushing into the Curl and Twirl for a Saturday-morning session. But there had never been enough money—Cash Bridges had needed every cent the family could scrape together to drink, play cards and bail his cronies out of jail. After all, Cheyenne remembered hearing him tell Ayanna gravely, they’d do the same for him.
“No,” Cheyenne said flatly. She tried for a lighter note because she didn’t want to talk about her father or any other part of her past. “Did you?”
Jesse chuckled. “Nope,” he answered. “But my sisters went for it in a big way.”
Ah, yes, Cheyenne thought. The McKettrick sisters. They’d been grown and gone by the time she’d got out of kindergarten, Sarah and Victoria had, but their legend lingered on. Always the most beautiful, always the most popular, always the best-dressed. They’d been cheerleaders and prom queens, as well as honor students and class presidents. One had married a movie executive, the other a CEO.
Some people were born under a lucky star.
She’d been born under a dark cloud instead.
“There’s the trail,” Jesse told her, indicating a narrow, stony path that seemed to go straight up. “Follow me, and lean forward in the saddle when it gets steep.”
When it gets steep? Cheyenne swallowed hard and lifted her chin a notch or two. As for the following, the horse did that part. She concentrated on staying in the saddle and avoiding the backlash of tree branches as Jesse forged ahead.
She was sweating when they finally reached the top and Pardner stepped up beside Jesse’s horse. What was its name? Something Greek and mythological.
The land spilled away from the ridge, and nothing could have prepared her for the sight of it. Trees by the thousands. Sun-kissed meadows where deer grazed. A twisting creek, gleaming like a tassel pulled from the end of one of the batons at Cora’s Curl and Twirl.
Tears sprang to Cheyenne’s eyes, and that drumbeat started up again, in her very blood, thrumming through her veins.
Jesse swung a leg over the gelding’s neck and landed deftly on his feet. He wound the reins loosely around the saddle horn.
“I told you it would take your breath away,” he said quietly.
Cheyenne was speechless.
Jesse reached up, helped her down to the ground.
The bottoms of her feet stung at the impact, and she was grateful for the pain because it broke the spell.
“It’s magnificent,” she said, almost whispering.
Jesse nodded, took off his hat as reverently as if he’d just entered a cathedral. Looking up at him, she saw his face change, as though he were drinking in that land, not just with his eyes, but through the pores of his skin.
Cheyenne reminded herself that the tract wasn’t part of the Triple M; if it had been, there wouldn’t have been a hope in hell of developing so much as an inch of it. She’d been over the public records a dozen times, knew Jesse had purchased the land two years ago from the state. It must have taken a chunk out of his trust fund, even though the price he’d paid was a fraction of what Nigel was willing to pony up.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, Jesse turned slightly and looked down into her eyes. “When we were kids, Rance and Keegan and I used to camp up here. I still like to bring a bedroll and sleep under the stars once in a while. A couple of years back, about the time the governor of Arizona decided not to turn it into a state park, I won a big poker tournament, and I bought it outright.”
“That must have been some tournament,” Cheyenne said, as casually as she could.
“World championship,” Jesse answered, with a verbal shrug. “I’m going back to Vegas in a couple of months to defend my title.” He turned to survey the land again, gesturing with his hat. “That creek practically jumps with trout every spring. There are deer, as you can see, as well as wolves and bobcats and coyotes and bear—just about any kind of critter you’d expect to run across in this country.” He watched her for a few moments, choosing his words, turning his hat in his hands just the way any one of his cowboy ancestors might have done. “Where do you figure they’d go, if you and your company put in a hundred stucco boxes and a putting green?”
CHAPTER FOUR
CHEYENNE LOOKED away, blinked. Wished the land would disappear, and Jesse’s question with it.
Remember your mother, she thought. Remember Mitch.
Jesse turned her gently to face him. “When Angus McKettrick came here in the mid 1800s,” he said, “the whole northern part of the state must have looked pretty much like this. He cut down trees to build a house and a barn, and used windfall for firewood. He put up fences to keep his cattle in, too, but other than that he didn’t change the land much. His sons built houses, too, when they married—my place, the main ranch house where Keegan now lives, and the one across the creek from it. That belongs to Rance. They’ve been added onto, those houses, and modernized, but that’s the extent of it. No short-platting. No tennis courts. We McKettricks like to sit light on the land, Cheyenne, and I don’t intend to be the one to break that tradition.”
Cheyenne gazed up at him, full of frustration and admiration and that infernal drumbeat, rising from her own core to pound in her ears. The majesty of the land seemed to reply, like a great, invisible heart, thumping an elemental rhythm of its own. “You promised you’d look at the blueprints,” she said. It was lame, and she could feel all her hopes slipping away, but still she couldn’t let go.
Jesse put his hat on again, helped Cheyenne back up onto her horse, and mounted the gelding. Neither of them said anything during the ride to the ranch house.
“I do care what happens to the land,” she told him, quietly earnest, when they’d reached the barn and dismounted again.
“Do you?” Jesse asked, but he clearly didn’t expect an answer. “Get your blueprints,” he urged with a nod toward her rental car. “I’ll put Pardner and Minotaur away and meet you in the schoolhouse.”
She ran damp palms down the thighs of Callie McKettrick’s jeans and returned his nod. She watched until he disappeared into the barn, leading both horses behind him.
“What do I do now?” she asked softly, tilting her head back to look up at the sky.
She stood there for a few seconds longer, then turned and went to the rental car. Plucked the thick roll of blueprints from the backseat.
The schoolhouse was cool and shadowy, and dust particles, stirred by her entrance, bobbed like little golden flecks in the still air.
Cheyenne laid the roll on a large table with an old chair behind it, and looked around with interest. Someone had scrawled a list of stock quotes on the blackboard, and there was an old-fashioned rotary phone on the table next to a vintage globe, but beyond those things, the place probably hadn’t changed much since it was built.
She ran a hand across the single row of small desks, admired the potbelly stove and returned to the globe.
The world was profoundly different now she thought sadly, giving the miniature planet a little spin. New borders. New wars. AIDS and terrorism.
Cheyenne heard Jesse come in but she didn’t turn to look. For a heartbeat or two she wanted to pretend she was Chloe McKettrick, the schoolteacher bride, and Jesse was Jeb. As long as she didn’t make eye contact, she could pretend.
“There were never more than a dozen pupils at any given time,” Jesse said quietly. “Just Chloe and Jeb’s kids, their cousins and a few strays or ranch-hands’ children.”
“It must have been wonderfully simple,” Cheyenne said very softly.
“It was hard, too,” Jesse answered. She knew he was standing next to the big table, heard him slide the rubber bands off the blueprints and unroll them. “No running water, no electricity. We didn’t have lights out here until well into the thirties. Holt’s place had a line in from the road from about 1917 on, but all it powered was one bulb in the kitchen.”
Cheyenne forced herself to turn around and look at Jesse. Just briefly, she could almost believe he was Jeb, dressed the way he was with his hat sitting beside him on the tabletop. She knew which was Holt’s place, which had been Rafe’s and Kade’s—everyone who’d ever spent any time at all in Indian Rock had heard at least the outlines of the family’s illustrious history—but hearing it from Jesse somehow made it all seem new.
She shook her head, feeling as if she’d somehow wandered onto the set of an old movie, or fallen headlong into a romance novel. It was time to stop dreaming and start selling—if she didn’t convince Jesse to part with that five hundred acres, well, the consequences would be staggering.
“It’s wonderful that the ranch has been so well preserved all this time,” she said as Jesse studied the blueprints, holding them open with his widely placed hands, his head down so she couldn’t see his expression. “But the land we’re talking about has never been part of the Triple M, as I understand it.”
Jesse looked up, but he was wearing his poker face and even with all the experience Cheyenne had gathered from dealing with her cardsharp father, there was no reading him. “Land,” he said, “is land.”
Alarms went off in Cheyenne’s head but she kept her composure. She’d had a lot of practice doing that, both as a child, coping with the ups and downs of a dysfunctional family, and as an adult struggling to build a career in a business based largely on speculation and the ability to persuade, wheedle, convince.
She moved to stand beside Jesse, worked up a smile and pointed to a section in the middle of the proposed development. “This is the community park,” she said. “There will be plenty of grass, a fountain, benches, playground equipment for the kids. If we dam the creek, we can have a fishpond—”
Too late, Cheyenne realized she’d made a major mistake mentioning Nigel’s plans to change the course of the stream bisecting the property before flowing downhill, onto and across the heart of the Triple M.
Jesse’s face tightened and he withdrew his hands, letting the blueprints roll noisily back up into a loose cylinder.
“Surely that creek isn’t the only water source—” Cheyenne began, but she fell silent at the look in Jesse’s eyes.
“No deal,” he said.
“Jesse—”
He shoved the blueprints at her. “You kept up your end of the bargain and I kept up mine. And I’ll be damned if I’ll let you and a bunch of jackasses in three-piece suits mess with that creek so the condo-dwellers can raise koi.”
“Please listen—” Cheyenne was desperate and past caring whether Jesse knew it or not.
“I’ve heard all I need to hear,” he said.
“Look, the fishpond is certainly dispensable—”
Jesse crossed the room, jerked open the door. Sunlight rimmed his lean frame and broad, rancher’s shoulders. “You’re damned right it is!”
He stormed toward the house and once again Cheyenne had no choice but to follow after she tossed the blueprints into the car through an open window.
He left the back door slightly ajar, and Cheyenne squeezed through sideways, not wanting to push it all the way open. She was about to make a dash for the bathroom, switch the cowgirl gear for her normal garb and speed back to town, over the railroad tracks—home—when she caught herself.
Jesse stood facing the sink with his hands braced against the counter in much the same way he’d held the blueprints down out in the schoolhouse. Judging by the angle of his head, he was staring out the window.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Cheyenne said, more for her benefit than his own. “That creek can’t be all that important to the survival of this ranch or one of your ancestors would have grabbed it at the source a long time ago.”
He turned to face her, moving slowly, folding his arms and leaning back against the edge of the sink. “If I were you, I wouldn’t talk about grabbing land,” he said.
Cheyenne squinted at him, trying to decide if he was softening a bit or if the impression was pure wishful thinking on her part. “It’s enough to say no, Jesse,” she said quietly. “There’s no reason to be angry.”
Jesse shoved a hand through his hair, then flashed her a grin so sudden and so bright that it almost set her back on her heels. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m mad at myself, not you.”
Cheyenne stared at him, disbelieving, almost suspecting a trick. In her experience, anger was a shape-shifter, disguising itself as some gentler emotion only to rise up again when she least expected, and roar in her face like a demon from the fieriest pit of hell.
“I should have thought about that creek,” he went on as she stood frozen, like a rabbit caught out in the open by some crafty predator. “For a while there I was actually playing with the idea of making the deal. I started thinking about families, little kids on tricycles and dogs chasing Frisbees. It wasn’t until you showed me where the koi pond would be that I reined myself in.”
“What if we promised never to divert the creek, at any time, for any reason?”
Jesse sighed. “If you promised me that I’d probably believe it, but you can’t and you know it. Once the units are sold and your company moves on, anything could happen. The homeowner’s association could vote to dynamite the creek and make their own lake, and there wouldn’t be much I could do about it.”
Cheyenne pulled back a chair at the big kitchen table, which was not an antique as she would have expected, but an exquisite pine creation, intricately carved and inlaid with turquoise and bits of oxidized copper, and sank into it. She propped one elbow on the table top and cupped her chin in her palm. “There would be things you could do, though. McKettrickCo must have an army of lawyers on staff. You could get a court order and block anything like that indefinitely.”
“McKettrickCo’s lawyers,” Jesse said, opening the refrigerator and taking out a bottle of sparkling water and a beer, “are not at my beck and call. Even if they were, they’ve got plenty to do as it is.”
He set the water down in front of her, and she was impressed that he’d remembered her preference for it from the night before.
“This is the most beautiful table I’ve ever seen,” she said as she gave a nod of thanks and twisted off the top of the lid to take a much-needed sip.
Jesse hauled back another chair and sat down, opened his beer. “Handcrafted in Mexico,” he said. “My mother has an eye for what she calls ‘functional art.’”
Not to mention a bottomless bank account, Cheyenne thought. “Maybe we should use coasters,” she said practically.
Jesse laughed. “The wood is lacquered. It wouldn’t qualify as functional if you could leave rings on it with a beer can or a bottle of water.”
Cheyenne felt herself relaxing, which was strange given that she could almost hear everything she’d planned for and dreamed of creaking like the framework of an old roller coaster about to come crashing down around her ears. The dust wouldn’t settle for years.
“Why do you want that particular tract of land so badly?” Jesse asked, catching her off guard again. “It’s more than the job, isn’t it?”
Maybe, Cheyenne thought, she ought to go for the sympathy vote. She sighed, took another drink of water. Jesse had already made up his mind; at this point, she had nothing to lose.
“There’s a bonus in it,” she said. “The money would make a lot of difference to my family.”
Jesse shifted in his chair and turned his beer can around on the tabletop as he thought. “There must be a lot of other people out there, ready and even eager to sell their property. Why does it have to be my land?”
“Nigel wants it,” Cheyenne answered.
He raised one eyebrow. “Nigel?”
“My boss. And this is probably going to mean my job.”
“You could always get another job.”
“Easy to say when you’re somebody who doesn’t need one.”
Jesse hoisted his beer can slightly. “Touché,” he said. “There might be a place for you at McKettrickCo. I could ask Keegan.”
Cheyenne remembered Keegan from school. He’d been the serious, focused one. And Rance, who’d been almost as wild as Jesse. She might have gone for the sympathy vote in a last-ditch effort to pull the deal out of the soup, but accepting McKettrick charity was another thing. “I’ll be all right,” she said. Good thing she didn’t have to say how that was going to happen, because she had no earthly idea. She smiled. “Is the Roadhouse hiring? I might be able to get on as a waitress. Or maybe I could deal cards in the back room at Lucky’s—”
He reached out unexpectedly and squeezed her hand. “You’re smart, Cheyenne. You always were. You have experience and a degree, unless I’ve missed my guess. There are a lot of options out there.”
“Not in Indian Rock, there aren’t,” she said. “And for right now, anyway, I’m stuck here.”
Jesse circled the center of her palm with the pad of one thumb, and a delicious shiver went through Cheyenne. “I can’t say I mind the idea of your hanging around for a while,” he told her. “And Flag’s just up the road. Probably lots of work there, for somebody with your skills.”
Cheyenne bit down on her lower lip. “Sure,” she said, with an attempt at humor. “There must be at least one company looking to drive wildlife out of its natural habitat and decimate the tree population. Why was I worried?”
Maybe, answered her practical side, because she’d sold her car and sublet her apartment. Once Nigel pulled the company credit cards and she’d turned in the rental, she’d either have to drive her mother’s van or hope her old bike was still stashed in the garage behind the house.
“You must have done well, Cheyenne. Why are you in such a pinch?”
“What makes you think I’m in a pinch?” How the hell do you know these things? Are you some kind of cowboy psychic?
“I can see it in your eyes. Come on. What’s the deal? Maybe I can help.”
She bristled at that. “If you want to help, Jesse, sell me the land. I’m not soliciting donations here. I’m offering you the kind of money most people couldn’t even dream of laying their hands on.”
“Take it easy,” Jesse counseled. “I didn’t mean to step on your pride. We went to school together, and that makes us old friends. I just want to know what’s going on.”
She would not cry. “Medical bills,” she said.
“From your brother’s accident.”
“Yes.”
“Wasn’t there insurance?”
“No. My mother worked as a waitress.” She isn’t a socialite, ordering tables inlaid with turquoise. “My stepfather was a day laborer when he worked at all, which wasn’t often. He was more interested in trying to get some kind of disability check out of the government so he could play pool all day. In fact, if he’d worked half as hard at a real job as he did at getting on the dole, he might have accomplished something.”
“So it all fell on you? You weren’t legally responsible, Cheyenne. Why take on something like that?”
“Mitch is my brother,” she said. For her, that was reason enough. The hospitals and doctors had written off a lot of the initial costs, and Mitch received a stipend from Social Security. At nineteen, he was on Medicare. But the gap between the things they wouldn’t pay for and the things he needed was wide. “He can survive on his benefits. I want him to do more than survive—I want him to have a life.”
“Enough to sacrifice your own?”
Cheyenne was silent for a long time. “I didn’t think it was going to be this hard,” she finally admitted, to herself as well as Jesse. “I thought there would be an end to it. That Mitch would walk again. That everything would be normal.”
I wish I could have a job and a girlfriend, she heard her brother telling her the night before in his room. I wish I could ride a horse.
“And my selling you five hundred acres of good land would change any of that? Make things ‘normal’ again?”
Cheyenne sighed, swallowed more water, pushed back her chair to stand. Plan A was down the swirler; best get cracking with plan B. Whatever the hell that was. “No,” she said. “No, it wouldn’t.”
She returned to the bathroom then, changed clothes, brought the jeans, boots and flannel shirt back to Jesse.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She believed him—that was the crazy thing. “Thanks for the ride,” she told him.
He opened the kitchen door for her, walked her to the car.
“Friends?” he asked, once she was behind the wheel.
“Friends,” she said, starting the engine.
“Then maybe you’d do me a favor,” Jesse pressed.
She frowned up at him, puzzled. What kind of favor could she possibly do for him?
“There’s a party Saturday night, sort of a pre-wedding thing my cousin Sierra and her fiancé are throwing. Barbecue, a hayride, that kind of thing. I need a date.”
If there was one thing Jesse McKettrick didn’t lack for, besides money, it was available women. “Why me?” she asked.
“Because I like you. Your mom and Mitch can come, too. It’ll be a good way for them to get reacquainted with the locals.”

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