McKettrick's Luck (7 page)

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?”

C
HEYENNE 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. “WhenAngus 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 30s. 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.”