The McKettrick Way Read online

  "Something like that," she said. It was a lame answer, and way too honest, but she'd figured if she tossed his ego a bone, the way she might have done to get past a junkyard dog, she'd get a chance to diffuse the invisible but almost palpable charge sparking between them.

  "I came across one of Maddie's diaries a few years ago," Brad said, still stripping her with his eyes. Maddie, of course, was his ancestress—Sam O'Ballivan's wife. "She mentioned this line shack several times. She and Sam spent a night here, once, and conceived a child."

  That statement should have quelled Meg's passion—unlike Sam and Maddie, she and Brad weren't married, weren't in love. She wasn't using any form of birth control, since there hadn't been a man in her life for nearly a year, and intuition told her that for all Brad's preparations, Brad hadn't brought any condoms along.

  Yet, the mention of a baby opened a gash of yearning within Meg, a great, jagged tearing so deep and so dark and so raw that she nearly doubled over with the pain of it.

  "Are you all right?" Brad asked, on his feet quickly, taking her elbows in his hands, looking down into her face.

  She said nothing. She couldn't have spoken for anything, not in that precise moment.

  "What?" Brad prompted, looking worried.

  She couldn't tell him that she'd wanted a baby so badly she'd made arrangements with a fertility specialist on several occasions, always losing her courage at the last moment. That she'd almost reached the point of sleeping with strangers, hoping to get pregnant.

  In the end, she hadn't been able to go through with that, either.

  She'd never known her own father. Oh, she'd lacked for nothing, being a McKettrick. Nothing except the merest acquaintance with the man who'd sired her. He was so anonymous, in fact, that Eve had occasionally referred to him, not knowing Meg was listening, as "the sperm donor."

  She wanted more for her own son or daughter. Granted, the baby's father didn't have to be involved in their day-to-day life, or pay child support, or much of anything else. But he had to have a face and a name, so Meg could show her child a photograph, at some point in time, and say, "This is your daddy."

  "Meg?" Brad's hands tightened a little on her elbows.

  "Panic attack," she managed to gasp.

  He pressed her down onto one of the crates, ladled some water from the bucket he'd braved the elements to fill at the pump outside, and held it to her lips.

  She sipped.

  "Do you need to take a pill or something?"

  Meg shook her head.

  He dragged the second crate closer, and sat facing her, so their knees touched. "Since when do you get panic attacks?" he asked.

  Tears stung Meg's eyes. She rocked a little, hugging herself, and Brad steadied the ladle in her hands, raised it to her mouth again.

  She sipped, more slowly this time, and Brad set it aside when she was finished.

  "Meg," he repeated. "The panic attacks?"

  It only happens when I suddenly realize I want to have a certain man's baby more than I want anything in the world. And when that certain man turns out to be you.

  "It's a freak thing," she said. "I've never had one before."

  Brad raised an eyebrow—he'd always been perceptive. It was one of the qualities that made him a good songwriter, for example. "I mentioned that Sam and Maddie conceived a child in this line shack, and you started hyperventilating." He leaned forward a little, took both Meg's hands gently in his. "I remember how much you wanted kids when we were together," he mused. "And now your sister is having a baby."

  Meg's heart wedged itself into her windpipe. She'd wanted a baby, all right. And she'd conceived one, with Brad, and miscarried soon after he left for Nashville. Not even her mother had known.

  She nodded.

  Brad stroked the side of her cheek with the backs of his lingers, offering her comfort. She'd never told him about the pregnancy—she'd been saving the news for their wedding night—but now she knew she would have no choice, if they got involved again.

  "I'm not jealous of Sierra," she said, anxious to make that clear. "I'm happy for her and Travis."

  "I know," Brad said. He drew her from her crate onto his lap; she straddled his thighs. But beyond that, the gesture wasn't sexual. He simply held her, one hand gently pressing her head to his shoulder.

  After a little deep breathing, in order to calm herself, Meg straightened and gazed into Brad's face.

  "Suppose we had sex," she said softly. Tentatively. "And I conceived a child. How would you react?"

  "Well," Brad said after pondering the idea with an expression of wistful amusement on his face, "I guess that would depend on a couple of things." He kissed her neck, lightly. Nibbled briefly at her earlobe.

  A hot shudder went through Meg. "Like what?"

  "Like whether we were going to raise the baby together or not," Brad replied, still nibbling. When Meg stiffened slightly, he drew back to look into her face again. "What?"

  "I was sort of thinking I could just be a single mother," Meg said.

  She was off Brad's thighs and plunked down on her crate again so quickly that it almost took her breath away.

  "And my part would be what?" he demanded. "Keep my distance? Go on about my business? What, Meg?"

  "You have your career—"

  "I don't have my career. That part of my life is over. I've told you that."

  "You're young, Brad. You're very talented. It's inevitable that you'll want to sing again."

  "I don't have to be in a concert hall or a recording studio to sing," he said tersely. "I mean to live on Stone Creek Ranch for good, and any child of mine is going to grow up there."

  Meg stood her ground. After all, she was a McKettrick. "Any child of mine is going to grow up on the Triple M."

  "Then I guess we'd better not make a baby," Brad replied. He got up off the crate, went to the stove and refilled his coffee cup.

  "Look," Meg said more gently, "we can just let the subject drop. I'm sorry I brought it up at all—I just got a little emo-tional there for a moment and—"

  Brad didn't answer.

  They were stuck in a cabin together, at least overnight, and maybe longer. They had to get along, or they'd both go crazy.

  She retrieved the pack of cards from the floor, where Brad had set them earlier. "Bet I can take you, O'Ballivan," she said, waggling the box from side to side. "Gin rummy, five-card stud, go fish—name your poison."

  He laughed, and the tension was broken—the overt kind, anyway. There was an underground river of the stuff, coursing silently beneath their feet. "Go fish?"

  "Lately, I've played a lot of cards—with my nephew, Liam. That's his favorite."

  Brad chose rummy. Set a third crate between them for a table top. "You think you can take me, huh?" he challenged. And the look in his eyes, as he dealt the first hand, said he planned on doing the taking—and the cards didn't have a thing to do with it.

  Chapter Six

  It was a wonder to Brad that he could sit there in the middle of that line shack, playing gin rummy with Meg McKettrick, when practically all he'd thought about since coming home to Stone Creek was bedding down with her. She'd practically invited him to father her baby, too.

  Whatever his reservations might be where her insistence on raising the child alone was concerned, and on the Triple M to boot, he sure wouldn't have minded the process of conceiving it.

  So why wasn't he on top of her at that very moment?

  He studied his cards solemnly—Meg was going to win this hand, as she had the last half dozen—and pondered the situation. The wind howled around the shack like a million shrieking banshees determined to drive them both out into the freezing cold, making the walls shake. And the light was going, too, even though it wasn't noon yet.

  "Play," Meg said impatiently, a spark of mischievous triumph—and something else—dancing in her eyes.

  "If I didn't know better," Brad said ruefully, "I'd think you'd stacked the deck. You're going to lay down all y
our cards and set me again, aren't you?"

  She grinned, looking at him coyly over the fan of cards. Even batting her eyelashes. "There's only one way to find out," she teased.

  A cowboy's geisha, Brad thought. Later, when he was alone at the ranch, he'd tinker around with the idea, maybe make a song out of it. He might have retired from recordin| and life on the road, but he knew he'd always make music.

  Resigned, he drew a card from the stack, couldn't use it, and tossed it away.

  Meg's whole being seemed to twinkle as she took his discard, incorporated it into a grand-slam of a run and went out with a flourish, spreading the cards across the top of the crate

  "McKettrick luck," she said, beaming.

  On impulse, Brad put down his cards, leaned across the crate between them and kissed Meg lightly on the mouth. She tensed at first, then responded, giving a little groan when he used his tongue.

  Her arms slipped around his shoulders.

  He wanted with everything in him to shove cards and crate aside, lay her down, then and there, and have her.

  Whoa, he told himself. Easy. Don't scare her off.

  There were tears in her eyes when she drew back from his kiss, sniffled once, and blinked, as though surprised to find herself alone with him, in the eye of the storm.

  Like most men, Brad was always unsettled when a woman cried. He felt an urgent need to rectify whatever was wrong, and at the same time, knew he couldn't.

  Meg swabbed at her cheeks with the back of one hand, straightened her proud McKettrick spine.

  "What's the matter?" Brad asked.

  "Nothing," Meg answered, averting her gaze.

  "You're lying."

  "Just hedging a little," she said, trying hard to smile and falling short. "It was like the old days, that's all. The kiss I mean. It brought up a lot of feelings."

  "Would it help if I told you I felt the same way?"

  "Not really," she said. A thoughtful look came into those fabulous, fathomless eyes of hers.

  Brad slid the crate to one side and leaned in close, filled with peculiar suspense. He had to know what was going on in her head. "What?"

  "Lots of people have sex," she told him, "without anybody getting pregnant."

  "The reverse is also true," he felt honor-bound to say. "Far as I know, making love still causes babies."

  "Making love," Meg said, "is not necessarily the same thing as having sex."

  Brad cleared his throat, still walking on figurative eggshells. "True," he said very cautiously. Was she messing with him? Setting him up for a rebuff? Meg wasn't a particularly vengeful person, at least as far as he knew, but he'd hurt her badly all those busy years ago. Maybe she wanted to get back at him a little.

  "What I have in mind," she told him decisively, "is sex, as opposed to making love." A pause. "Of course."

  "Of course," he agreed. Hope fluttered in his chest, like a bird flexing its wings and rising, windborne, off a high tree branch. At the same time, he felt stung—Meg was making it clear that any intimacy they might enjoy during this brief time-out-of-time would be strictly for physical gratification. Frenetic coupling of bodies, an emotion-free zone.

  Since beggars couldn't be choosers, he was willing to bargain, but the disturbing truth was, he wanted more from Meg than a noncommittal quickie. She wasn't, after all, a groupie to be groped and taken in the back of some tour bus, then forgotten.

  She squinted at him, catching something in his expression. "This bothers you?" she asked.

  He tried to smile. "If you want to have sex, McKettrick, I'm definitely game. It's just that—"

  "What?"

  "It might not be a good idea." Was he crazy? Here was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, essentially offering herself to him—and he was leaning on the brake lever?

  "Okay," she said, and she looked hurt, uncomfortable, suddenly shy.

  And that was his undoing. All his noble reluctance went right out the door.

  He pulled her onto his lap again.

  She hesitated, then wrapped both arms around his neck.

  "Are you sure?" he asked her quietly, gruffly. "We're taking a chance here, Meg. We could conceive a child—"

  The idea filled him with desperate jubilation, strangely mingled with sorrow.

  "We could," she agreed, her eyes shining, dark with sultry heat, despite the chill seeping in between the cracks in the plain board walls.

  He cupped her chin in his hand, made her look into his face. "Fair warning, McKettrick. If there's a baby, I'm not going to be an anonymous father, content to cut a check once a month and go on about my business as if it had never happened."

  She studied him. "You're serious."

  He nodded.

  "I'll take that chance," she decided, after a few moments of deliberation.

  He kissed her again, deeply this time, and when their mouths parted, she looked as dazed as he felt. Once, during a rehearsal before a concert, he'd gotten a shock from an electric guitar with a frayed chord. The jolt he'd taken, kissing Meg just now, made the first experience seem tame.

  She was straddling him, and even through their jeans, the insides of her thighs, squeezing against his hips, seemed to sear his skin. She squirmed against his erection, making him groan.

  Never in his life had Brad wanted a bed as badly as he did at that moment. It wasn't right to lay Meg down on a couple of sleeping bags, on that cold floor.

  But even as he was thinking these disjointed thoughts, he was pulling her shirt up, slipping his hands beneath all that fabric, stroking her bare ribs.

  She shivered deliciously, closed her eyes, threw her head back.

  "Cold?" Brad asked, worried.

  "Anything but," she murmured.

  "You're sure?"

  "Absolutely sure," Meg said.

  He found the catch on her bra, opened it. Cupped both hands beneath her full, warm breasts.

  She moaned as he chafed her nipples gently, using the sides of his thumbs.

  And that was when they heard the deafening and unmistakable thwup-thwup-thwup of helicopter blades, directly above the roof of the line shack.

  ***

  Meg looked up, disbelieving. Jesse, Rance, or Keegan—or all three. Who else would take a chopper up in weather like that?

  Out in the lean-to, the horses whinnied in panic. The walls of the cabin shook as Meg jumped to her feet and righted her bra in almost the same motion. "Damn!" she sputtered furiously.

  "That had better not be Phil," Brad said ominously. He was standing, too, his gaze fixed on the trembling ceiling.

  Meg smoothed her hair, straightened her clothes. "Phil?"

  "My manager," Brad reminded her.

  "We should be so lucky," Meg yelled, straining to be heard over the sound of the blades. "It's my cousins!"

  They both went to the door and peered out, heedless of the blasting cold, made worse by the downdraft from the chopper, Meg ducking under Brad's left arm to see.

  Sure enough, the McKettrickCo helicopter, a relic of the corporation days, was settling to the ground, bouncing on its runners in the deepening snow.

  "I'll be damned," Brad said with a grin of what looked like rueful admiration, forcing the door shut against the icy wind. At the last second, Meg saw two figures moving toward them at a half crouch.

  "I'll kill them," Meg said.

  The door rattled on its hinges at the first knock.

  Meg stood back while Brad opened it again.

  Jesse came through first, followed by Keegan. They wore Wentern hats pulled low over their faces, leather coats thickly lined with sheep's wool, and attitudes.

  "I tried to stop hem," Angus said, appearing at Meg's elbow.

  "Good job," Meg scoffed, under her breath, without moving her lips.

  Angus spread his hands. "They're McKettricks," he reminded her, as though that explained every mystery in the universe, from spontaneous human combustion to the Bermuda Triangle.

  "Are you crazy?" Meg demanded
of her cousins, storming forward to stand toe-to-toe with Jesse, who was tight-jawed, casting suspicious glances at Brad. "You could have been killed, taking the copter up in a blizzard!"

  Brad, by contrast, hoisted the coffeepot off the stove, grinning wryly, and not entirely in a friendly way. "Coffee?" he asked.

  Jesse scowled at him.

  "Don't mind if I do," Keegan said, pulling off his heavy leather gloves. He tossed Meg a sympathetic glance in the meantime, one that said, Don't blame me. I'm just here to keep an eye on Jesse.

  Brad found another cup and, without bothering to wipe it out, filled it and handed it to Keegan. "It's good to see you again," he said with a sort of charged affability, but underlying his tone was an unspoken, Not.

  "I'll just bet," Jesse said, whipping off his hat. His dark blond hair looked rumpled, as though he'd been shoving a hand through it at regular intervals.

  "Jesse," Keegan warned quietly.

  Meg stood nearly on tiptoe, her nose almost touching Jesse's, her eyes narrowed to slits. "What the hell are you doing here?"

  Jesse wasn't about to back down, his stance made that clear, and neither was Meg. Classic McKettrick stand-off.

  Keegan, used to the family dynamics, and the most diplo-matic member of the current generation, eased an arm between them, holding his mug of hot coffee carefully in the other. "To your corners," he said easily, forcing them both to take a step back.

  Jesse gave Brad a scathing look—once, they'd been friends—and turned to face Meg again. "I might ask you the same question," he countered. "What the hell are you doing here? With him?'

  Brad cleared his throat, folded his arms. Waited. He looked amused—the expression in his eyes notwithstanding.

  "That, Jesse McKettrick," Meg seethed, "is my own business!"

  "We came," Keegan interceded, still unruffled but, in his own way, as watchful as Jesse was, "because Cheyenne told us you were up here on horseback. When we got word of the blizzard, we were worried."

  Meg threw her arms out, slapped them back against her sides. "Obviously, I'm all right," she said. "Safe and sound."