The Mckettrick Way

“I heard you were in rehab,” she said, hoping to get under his hide.

“That’s a nasty rumor,” Brad replied cheerfully.

“How about the two ex-wives and that scandal with the actress?”

His grin, insouciant in the first place, merely widened. “Unfortunately, I can’t deny the two ex-wives,” he said. “As for the actress—well, it all depends on whether you believe her version or mine. Have you been following my career, Meg McKettrick?”

Meg reddened.

“Tell him the truth,” Angus counseled. “You never forgot him.”

“No,” Meg said, addressing both Brad and Angus.

Brad looked unconvinced. He was probably just egotistical enough to think she logged onto his Web site regularly, bought all his CDs and read every tabloid article about him that she could get her hands on. Which she did, but that was not the point.

“You’re still the best-looking woman I’ve ever laid eyes on,” he said. “That hasn’t changed, anyhow.”

“I’m not a member of your fan club, O’Ballivan,” Meg informed him. “So hold the insincere flattery, okay?”

One corner of his mouth tilted upward in a half grin, but his eyes were sad. He glanced back toward the truck, then met Meg’s gaze again. “I don’t flatter anybody,” Brad said. Then he sighed. “I guess I’d better get back to Stone Creek.”

Something in his tone piqued Meg’s interest.

Who was she kidding?

Everything about him piqued her interest. As much as she didn’t want that to be true, it was.

“I was sorry to hear about Big John’s passing,” she said. She almost touched his arm, but managed to catch herself just short of it. If she laid a hand on Brad O’Ballivan, who knew what would happen?

“Thanks,” he replied.

A girl on roller skates wheeled out of the drive-in to collect the tray from the window edge of Brad’s truck, her cheeks pink with carefully restrained excitement. “I might have said something to Heather and Darleen,” the teenager confessed, after a curious glance at Meg. “About you being who you are and the autograph and everything.”

Brad muttered something.

The girl skated away.

“I’ve gotta go,” Brad told Meg, looking toward the drive-in. Numerous faces were pressed against the glass door; in another minute, there would probably be a stampede. “I don’t suppose we could have dinner together or something? Maybe tomorrow night? There are—well, there are some things I’d like to say to you.”

“Say yes,” Angus told her.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Meg said.

“A drink, then? There’s a redneck bar in Stone Creek—”

“Don’t be such a damned prig,” Angus protested, nudging her again.

“I’m not a prig.”

Brad frowned, threw another nervous look toward the drive-in and all those grinning faces. “I never said you were,” he replied.

“I wasn’t—” Meg paused, bit her lower lip. I wasn’t talking to you. No, siree, I was talking to Angus McKettrick’s ghost. “Okay,” she agreed, to cover her lapse. “I guess one drink couldn’t do any harm.”

Brad climbed into his truck. The door of the drive-in crashed open, and the adoring hordes poured out, screaming with delight.

“Go!” Meg told him.

“Six o’clock tomorrow night,” Brad reminded her. He backed the truck out, made a narrow turn to avoid running over the approaching herd of admirers and peeled out of the lot.

Meg turned to the disappointed fans. “Brad O’Ballivan,” she said diplomatically, “has left the building.”

Nobody got the joke.

The sun was setting, red-gold shot through with purple, when Brad crested the last hill before home and looked down on Stone Creek Ranch for the first time since his grandfather’s funeral. The creek coursed, silvery-blue, through the middle of the land. The barn and the main house, built by Sam O’Ballivan’s own hands and shored up by every generation to follow, stood as sturdy and imposing as ever. Once, there had been two houses on the place, but the one belonging to Major John Blackstone, the original landowner, had been torn down long ago. Now a copse of oak trees stood where the major had lived, surrounding a few old graves.

Big John was buried there, by special dispensation from the Arizona state government.

A lump formed in Brad’s throat. You see that I’m laid to rest with the old-timers when the bell tolls, Big John had told him once. Not in that cemetery in town.

It had taken some doing, but Brad had made it happen.

He wanted to head straight for Big John’s final resting place, pay his respects first thing, but there was a cluster of cars parked in front of the ranch house. His sisters were waiting to welcome him home.

Brad blinked a couple of times, rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger, and headed for the house.

Time to face the proverbial music.

Meg drove slowly back to the Triple M, going the long way to pass the main ranch house, Angus’s old stomping grounds, in the vain hope that he would decide to haunt it for a while, instead of her. A descendant of Angus’s eldest son, Holt, and daughter-in-law Lorelei, Meg called their place home.

As they bumped across the creek bridge, Angus assessed the large log structure, added onto over the years, and well-maintained.

Though close, all the McKettricks were proud of their particular branch of the family tree. Keegan, who occupied the main house now, along with his wife, Molly, daughter, Devon, and young son, Lucas, could trace his lineage back to Kade, another of Angus’s four sons.

Rance, along with his daughters, was Rafe’s progeny. He and the girls and his bride, Emma, lived in the grandly rustic structure on the other side of the creek from Keegan’s place.

Finally, there was Jesse. He was Jeb’s descendant, and resided, when he wasn’t off somewhere participating in a rodeo or a poker tournament, in the house Jeb had built for his wife, Chloe, high on a hill on the southwestern section of the ranch. Jesse was happily married to a hometown girl, the former Cheyenne Bridges, and like Keegan’s Molly and Rance’s Emma, Cheyenne was expecting a baby.

Everybody, it seemed to Meg, was expecting a baby.

Except her, of course.

She bit her lower lip.

“I bet if you got yourself pregnant by that singing cowboy,” Angus observed, “he’d have the decency to make an honest woman out of you.”

Angus had an uncanny ability to tap into Meg’s wavelength; though he swore he couldn’t read her mind, she wondered sometimes.

“Great idea,” she scoffed. “And for your information, I am an honest woman.”