McKettricks of Texas: Tate

A scraping sound alerted him to Audrey, dragging her suitcase down the front walk on its wheels. He went to take the bag from her, stowed it in the front seat, on the passenger side, where his dog, Crockett, used to ride. Crockett had died of old age more than a year before, but Tate still forgot he wasn’t around sometimes and stood with the truck door open, waiting to hoist his sidekick aboard.

“You got your bag packed?” he asked Ava, when she scrambled into the back seat, with Audrey. They both had those special safety rigs, booster chairs with straps and hooks.

“I’ve got plenty of clothes at the ranch,” Ava responded, with a shake of her head. One of the pink barrettes holding her bangs out of her face had sprung loose, and her braid was coming undone. “Let’s go before Mom makes us come back and sing.”

Tate laughed, rounded the front of the truck and got behind the wheel.

“Beauty-Shop Betsey,” Audrey scoffed. “What possessed Jeffrey’s mom to buy us doll heads with curlers?” She’d been talking like a grown-up since she was two.

“Hey,” Tate said, starting up the engine, waiting for the flock of departing vans and Volvos to thin out a little. God only knew when Blue River, official population 8,472, had last seen a traffic snarl like this. “If somebody goes to all the trouble of buying you a birthday present, you ought to appreciate it.”

“Mom said we could exchange the stuff we don’t want,” Audrey informed him, with a touch of so-there in her tone. “Everybody included gift receipts.”

Tate figured it was high time to change the subject. “How about those orange smoothies?” he asked.

TATE MCKETTRICK, LIBBY REMINGTON thought, watching as he drew his truck and horse trailer to a stop in front of her shop, got out and strode purposefully toward the door.

It bothered her that after all this time the sight of him still made her heart flutter and her stomach jump. Damn the man, with his dark, longish hair, ink-blue eyes, and that confident, rolling way he moved, as though he’d greased his hip sockets.

Although it was growing, with a population now of almost 9,000, Blue River wasn’t exactly a metropolis, and that meant she and Tate ran into each other from time to time. Whenever they did, they’d nod and quickly head in separate directions, but they’d never sought each other out.

Poised to turn the “Open” sign to “Closed,” Libby closed her eyes for a moment, hoping he was a mirage. A figment of her fevered imagination.

He wasn’t, of course.

When she looked again, he was standing just on the other side of the glass door, peering through the loop in the P in Perk Up, grinning.

A McKettrick—a pedigree in that part of the country—Tate was used to getting what he wanted, including service on a Sunday afternoon, when the store closed early.

Libby sighed, turned the dead bolt, and opened the door.

“Two orange smoothies,” he said, without preamble. “To go.”

Libby looked past him, saw his twin daughters in the back seat of his fancy truck. An old grief rose up within her, one she’d worked hard to lay to rest. From the time she’d fallen for Tate, back in second grade, she’d planned on marrying him when they both grew up, been bone-certain she’d be the one to have his babies.

“Where’s Crockett?” she asked, without intending to.

Sadness moved in Tate’s impossibly blue eyes. “Had to have him put down a while back,” he said. “He was pretty old, and then he got sick.”

“I’m sorry,” Libby said, because she was. For the dog.

“Thanks,” he answered.

She stepped back to let Tate in, against her better judgment. “I’m fostering a couple of mixed breeds, because the shelter is full again. Want one—or, better yet, both?”

Tate shook his head. Light caught in his ebony hair, where the comb ridges still showed. “Just a couple of those smoothie things. Orange. Light on the sugar, if that’s an option.”

Libby stepped behind the counter, more because she wanted to put some kind of solid barrier between herself and Tate than to mix the drinks he’d requested. Her gaze strayed to the kids waiting in the truck again. They both looked like their father. “Will there be anything else?”

“No,” Tate said, taking out his beat-up wallet. “How much?”

Libby told him the price of two orange smoothies, with tax, and he laid the money on the countertop. There were at least three drive-through restaurants on the outskirts of town; he’d pass them coming and going from the Silver Spur. So why had he stopped at her store, on Blue River’s narrow main street, with a horse trailer hitched to his huge phallic symbol of a truck?

“You’re sure you don’t want something for yourself?” she asked lightly, and then wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

Tate’s grin tilted to one side. He smelled of sun-dried laundry and aftershave and pure man. A look of mischief danced in his eyes.

When he spoke, though, he said, “It’s their birthday,” accompanied by a rise and fall of his powerful shoulders. His blue shirt was open at the throat, and she could see too much—and not quite enough—of his chest.

Libby whipped up the drinks, filling two biodegradable cups from a pitcher, attached the lids and set them next to the cash register. “Then maybe you’d like to give them a dog or two,” she replied, with an ease she didn’t feel. Being in such close proximity to Tate rattled her, but it probably didn’t show. “Since it’s their birthday.”

“Their mother would have a fit,” he said, reaching for the cups. His hands were strong, calloused from range work. Despite all that McKettrick money, he wasn’t afraid to wade into a mudhole to free a stuck cow, set fence posts in the ground, buck bales or shovel out stalls.

It was one of the reasons the locals liked him so much, made them willing to overlook the oil wells, now capped, and the ridiculously big house and nearly a hundred thousand acres of prime grassland, complete with springs and creeks and even a small river.

He was one of them.

Of course, the locals hadn’t been dumped because he’d gotten some other woman pregnant just a few months after he’d started law school.

No, that had happened to her.

She realized he was waiting for her to respond to his comment about his ex-wife. Their mother would have a fit.

Can’t have that, Libby thought, tightening her lips.

“The ice is melting in those smoothies,” she finally said. Translation: Get out. It hurts to look at you. It hurts to remember how things were between us before you hooked up with somebody you didn’t even love.

Tate grinned again, though his eyes looked sad, and then he turned sideways, ready to leave. “Maybe we’ll stop by your place and have a look at those dogs after all,” he said. “Would tomorrow be good?”

He’d stayed with Cheryl-the-lawyer for less than a year after the twins were born. As soon as the babies began to thrive, he’d moved Cheryl and his infant daughters into the two-story colonial on Oak Street.

The gossip had burned like a brush fire for months.

“That would be fine,” Libby said, back from her mental wanderings. Tate McKettrick might have broken her heart, but he’d loved his ancient, arthritic dog, Davy Crockett. And she needed to find homes for the pair of pups.

Hildie, her adopted black Lab, normally the soul of charity, was starting to resent the canine roommates, growling at them when they got too near her food dish, baring her teeth when they tried to join her on the special fluffy rug at the foot of Libby’s bed at night. The newcomers, neither more than a year old, seemed baffled by this reception, wagging their tails uncertainly whenever they ran afoul of Hildie, then launching right back into trouble.

They would be very happy out there on the Silver Spur, with all that room to run, Libby thought.

A rush of hope made the backs of her eyes burn as she watched Tate move toward the door.

“Six?” she said.

Tate, shifting the cups around so he could open the door, looked back at her curiously, as though he’d already forgotten the conversation about the dogs, if not Libby herself.

“I close at six,” Libby said, fanning herself with a plastic-coated price list even though the secondhand swamp cooler in the back was working fine, for once. She didn’t want him thinking the heat in her face had anything to do with him, even though it did. “The shop,” she clarified. “I close the shop at six tomorrow. You could stop by the house and see the dogs then.”

Tate looked regretful for a moment, as though he’d already changed his mind about meeting the potential adoptees. But then he smiled in that way that made her blink. “Okay,” he said. “See you a little after six tomorrow night, then.”