McKettrick's Luck

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.