McKettrick's Luck

“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.