McKettrick's Heart (8 page)

“If you're short on horses,” he said, looking Spud over, “I could lend you one of ours.”

“You know, Rance,” Keegan replied tersely, “sometimes you're just so freakin' hilarious, I can't stand it.”

Rance's grin broadened. “What the hell do you want with a jackass?”

“Damned if I know,” Keegan said. “But I've got one now.”

“How are you planning to get him out to the ranch?”

Now it was Keegan's turn to grin. “Well, I figured since you own a horse trailer, you'd haul him out there for me.”

Rance chuckled. Then he took a closer look at Spud and frowned. “He's half-starved,” he said. “And it's a wonder he can walk, with his hooves grown out like that.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Keegan said.

Expertly Rance lifted one of Spud's feet and inspected it. Did the same with the other three. “I'll go back to the Triple M and hitch the trailer to the back of my truck,” he said when he was finished. Dusting his hands together, he looked Keegan in the eye and grinned again. “If you're going into the ranching business, Keeg, you're off to a pretty pitiful start.”

Keegan made a this-is-me-amused face. “Want me to ride out with you? Help with the trailer?”

“In those dandy duds?” Rance joked, shaking his head at Keegan's clothes. “Do you
own
any jeans or a decent pair of boots?”

“Never mind my wardrobe,” Keegan said. Until he'd taken up with Emma just a few weeks before, Rance had lived in custom-tailored suits himself.

Rance looked over toward the barbecue area, where the picnic was starting up in earnest. Folks were loading up their plates, and the bar and the cold-drink stand were already doing a brisk business. “There had better be some beer left when I get back,” he warned.

Keegan laughed. He'd added a mangy donkey to all his other problems, but his spirits had risen a little, just the same.

Go figure,
he thought.

Rance crossed to Emma, said something to her and headed back to his truck.

Emma wobbled toward Keegan on a pair of pink high-heeled shoes, which matched her cotton-candy dress, sticking in the grass every few steps. Cautiously she reached out to pat Spud on the nose. Then she smiled, and Keegan figured the fireworks would suffer by comparison.

“Molly's here,” she said. “And the new people.”

Keegan looked around and, sure enough, there was Molly Shields over by the picnic tables, looking delectable in a floaty blue dress and a straw hat with a bent-back brim. Psyche was there, too, seated in a lawn chair, with a blanket covering her lap. Florence, intent on lifting Lucas from his stroller, wore her usual starchy uniform.

As though she felt him watching her, Molly looked his way.

Smiled, probably because of the donkey.

Keegan hooked a finger under his shirt collar, trying to loosen it. It was the heat, he figured. The air seemed charged, and he actually looked up, expecting to see storm clouds.

The first stars winked in a clear, placid sky.

Emma tugged at his sleeve, whispered, “Keegan. You're staring.”

Molly spoke to Psyche, then strolled his way.

“I guess it's never too soon to start practicing for the Christmas pageant,” she said, her eyes warming as she took in poor, bedraggled Spud. “Are you playing Joseph this year?”

“I'd better go and find the girls, make sure they don't eat too much cotton candy and spoil their supper,” Emma said before Keegan could respond, and promptly vanished.

Keegan swallowed.

Molly smiled, clearly enjoying his discomfort. Then, as Emma had done, she stroked Spud's long face, threw in an ear-ruffling for good measure.

Spud lifted his head and brayed.

Keegan felt like doing the same thing, and that made him set his back teeth.

Molly's leaf-colored eyes shone with amusement, turned tender when she looked at the donkey again. The blue cloth flower, pinned to the turned-up brim of her hat, bobbed. “We have to be civil to each other, Keegan,” she said quietly. “Because of Lucas.”

He sighed. Wished she'd look at him the way she was looking at the donkey. “I can be civil,” he said without a trace of civility. “And that is a really goofy-looking hat. Does that flower squirt water?”

She laughed, and the sound gave Keegan the same quivery feeling in the pit of his stomach that he used to get when he was rodeoing, back in college, with Rance and Jesse. Just before he climbed the side of a chute and lowered himself onto the back of a pawing, snorting bull, crazy to buck. “I wish it did,” she said. “I'd like nothing better than to let you have it right about now.”

Against his will Keegan grinned. Loosened his hold on Spud's reins a little so the critter could munch on the well-kept municipal grass. Psyche, sitting up straight in her lawn chair, smiled tentatively and waved.

Keegan's grin faded. “It isn't right,” he said.

Molly, still petting the donkey, turned to follow his gaze, looked back at his face. “Don't spoil this night for her by being sad,” she told him.

He worked up another smile, waved to Psyche. “Better?” he asked.

“Much better,” Molly said.

Lucas came toddling toward them, his face alight. He was barefoot, wearing nothing but a diaper.

Molly probably knew as well as Keegan did that Spud was the big attraction, not either of them. Still, it did something to Keegan, watching that little boy toddle across the grass.

Keegan handed Molly the reins, went to meet Lucas and swept him up in his arms. Over the child's head he saw Psyche watching with a faint smile.

“Ride!” Lucas crowed, straining for the donkey. “Ride!”

“Not tonight, buddy,” Keegan said, shifting Lucas onto his hip so he could reach out and pat Spud's neck.

Spud twitched his spindly tail a couple of times.

“Ride!” Lucas yelled.

“Another time,” Keegan told the child quietly, looking into Molly's eyes again. Feeling as though he'd just tumbled headfirst down some storybook rabbit hole.

“Why not?” Molly asked, reaching for Lucas, soothing him.

“Spud's been abused,” Keegan said, indicating the donkey with a motion of his head. “He'd probably mind his manners, but until I know that for sure, I'm not putting Psyche's child on his back.”

Molly's mouth tightened, probably because he'd said
Psyche's child.
The flower on her hat jostled around some more as she bounced Lucas on her hip, whispered to him. The boy whimpered, rested his head on Molly's shoulder, gave a little shudder as he settled in.

Keegan realized he'd taken back Spud's reins at some point, and it bothered him that he didn't remember when it had happened.

“You may have given birth to Lucas,” he told Molly in an undertone, returning the greetings of old friends and passers-by with a rigid smile and a nod, “but
Psyche's
his mother. She's the one who protected him, provided for him,
loved
him.”

“Do you think I need you to tell me that, you pompous ass?” Molly shot back, doing the smile-and-nod thing herself.

So much for the two of them being civil to each other, Keegan reflected, shoving a hand through his hair.

Molly turned on her heel and marched away, lugging Lucas with her. The boy struggled and reached back, not for Keegan, who was after all a stranger to him, but for the donkey.

Devon appeared, balancing a plate of barbecued chicken, potato salad and coleslaw in one hand. “What do donkeys eat?” she asked, looking as though she might be about to offer Spud her picnic supper.

“The same things horses do,” Keegan answered, still way too aware of Molly. He was practically spinning in her wake. “Grass. Hay. Alfalfa. Grain.”

“How come he's not giving rides?”

“His carnival career is over. He's going home with us.”

Devon brightened. “Really? We get to keep him?”

“Yes,” Keegan said, just as a familiar roar filled the air. A sleek jet passed overhead, bearing the McKettrickCo logo, an updated version of Angus's original brand, on the undersides of the wings.

“They're back!” Devon cried. “Jesse and Cheyenne are back from their honeymoon!”

“Maybe,” Keegan agreed.

“What do you mean, ‘maybe'?” Devon asked. “Who else could it be?”

Keegan could have named several possibilities—from famous country singers to a detachment of Texas McKettricks bent on taking the company public whether he liked it or not. He sure as hell hoped it was Jesse.

“Dad?” Devon pressed, sounding worried.

“Let's find a place to park this donkey,” he said, trying to smile. “I'd like a cold beer and some supper.”

“Good idea,” Devon said, relieved.

He'd have eaten with Psyche, but Molly was there, and he'd had enough of
her
for one night. Make that one lifetime.

In the end they stowed Spud in the churchyard across the street from the park, behind a picket fence. He immediately began dining on the petunias, and Keegan made a mental note to send the pastor a check.

He ate with a flock of women, Emma among them. Cora Tellington, Rance's former mother-in-law, was there, too. Cora ran the Curl and Twirl, a combination beauty shop and baton-twirling school, and Keegan had always liked her. Since Rance's first wife, Julie, had died in a riding accident five years before, Cora had taken up the maternal slack with Rianna and Maeve. Rance hadn't made it easy for her, either.

“You're looking pretty down in the mouth tonight,” Cora confided affectionately, sitting beside him on a bench at one of the picnic tables and bumping his upper arm with her shoulder.

“I'm fine,” he lied. Fact was, since that last set-to with Molly, he'd been feeling a little sorry for himself, and a hell of a lot sorrier for Devon. Maeve and Rianna had a devoted grandmother in Cora, and Rance's parents, divorced years before and dating again since they'd hooked up after Jesse and Cheyenne's wedding, both adored the kids.

Keegan's own folks had died in a plane crash when he was in high school, and even though the rest of the family had looked out for him straight through college, it was as if a part of him had gone down in flames right along with his mom and dad. He'd been working at McKettrickCo for a few years when he met Shelley and thought he'd found a way to fill that hollow spot at the back of his heart. Shelley was already pregnant with Devon when they eloped, and he might never have known he'd been conned if the baby hadn't needed a transfusion after emergency surgery.

He'd gone straight to the lab to give blood, only to learn he couldn't because Devon's was of a rare type. The doctor hadn't exactly said Devon couldn't be Keegan's biological child, but the facts had been there in his eyes. Later, tearfully, Shelley had admitted that she'd been with somebody else while they were engaged. She'd never said who.

He closed his eyes against the memory.

A stir in the crowd made him open them again.

Jesse and Cheyenne were indeed back from wherever they'd gone, both of them smiling, walking hand in hand toward the center of the festivities.

Devon, Rianna and Maeve all shrieked with delight, ran toward them and practically knocked Jesse off his feet. Grinning, he greeted each one in turn.

Jesse had a way with women, all right. Big ones, little ones, old ones, young ones and everything in between. They
all
adored him.

Keegan excused himself from the table, got up and went to kiss Cheyenne's cheek and shake Jesse's hand.

“I heard about Psyche,” Jesse said quietly, when Cheyenne was surrounded by chattering girlfriends and spirited away. “I'm sorry, Keeg.”

“Who told you?” Keegan asked, frowning. Jesse and Cheyenne hadn't mentioned where they were going on their honeymoon, and as far as he'd known, no one had been in contact with them since the reception.

“Myrna,” Jesse replied. Myrna Terp was the office manager at the Indian Rock branch of McKettrickCo, and she prided herself on knowing more about other people's business than the average CIA mole.

About that time, Rance rolled up in his truck, the horse trailer hitched behind. He got out of the pickup, walked around and slapped Jesse on the shoulder. “How was the honeymoon?”

Jesse merely grinned.

It said it all, that grin.

Rance chuckled and whacked Jesse again. Then he turned to Keegan. “Where's that damn donkey?”

“Across the street in the churchyard, eating petunias,” Keegan answered.

“You go get some supper and spend a little time with Emma and the kids. I'll load Spud.”

“What donkey?” Jesse asked, clearly out of the loop.