Читать книгу McKettrick's Luck - Linda Lael Miller - Страница 11

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?”