The Man From Montana

Annoyance flickered in those dark eyes, then vanished. “Issue? The only issue I see here is you—harassing my family.”

“Making one phone call is hardly harassment, Mr. McKee.”

He studied her a moment with eyes that might have offered warmth because of their clear-tea color. Not today. Today they were frozen as the earth outside. “What do you want with him?”

“To ask about the guesthouse.” She pinched back her guilt at the omission of the story.

“And he told you to talk to me. What else?”

On a sustaining breath, she said, “I’m writing a freelance series about Vietnam’s Hells Field.” She let that settle. His eyes remained steady, unreadable. She pressed on, “I’ve been working on the story for several years. Your father is the last of seven surviving veterans and the key to the series. I’d like—” she swallowed when McKee’s eyes narrowed “—a chance to talk to him. Please.”

“Why? There’ve been three decades and two wars in the interim.”

“Because in an already controversial war, Hells Field was a battle that was undisclosed.”

His pupils pinpricked. He understood. A battle fought, facts swept by the wayside, one soldier the fall guy.

“Leave him alone, Ms. Brant.”

“I can’t. At least not until he tells me no.”

McKee stepped into her space. Crowding her. She smelled his skin and the soap he’d washed with this morning. And hay, a whiff of hay. “We don’t need old war wounds opened. Go back to reporting the weekly news.”

“Look,” she said, desperate. “You can read what I’ve written about the other vets so far. I’m a good reporter.”

His jaw remained inflexible. “Tom doesn’t want you hanging around him any more than I do.”

Except, the heat in those dark eyes when they settled on her mouth indicated differently. A zing shot through her belly.

“I understand,” she said slowly. And she did. Newspeople were too often an unwelcome lot. “You don’t like reporters.”

She turned back to her desk. Dismissing him, dismissing the entire conversation, her entire mission. God, why was she so needy when it came to pleasing her dad—oh, face it—when it came to men in general? Men like foreign correspondent Floyd Stephens, pontificating how a kid—his son!—would dump her career in the toilet. Men, valuing her according to some parameter.

Rats, all of them. Shuffling several pages of notes, she muttered, “If I had somewhere else to go I would.”

Which was, in itself, a paradox. If it hadn’t been for her need to make her father proud, to prove to him—and all men for that matter, maybe even to herself—that she was a capable and creditable career woman, she would not be in these sticks.

She would not be begging Ash McKee to understand.

A movement from behind reeled her around. He still stood by her cubicle.

“I thought you’d left,” she said, vexed. Why didn’t he just go?

Under the hat, his tea eyes were pekoe dark. “Where are you staying?”

A tiny hope-flame. “The Dream On Motel.” She thought of Charlie sleeping in that dingy room, the lumpy bed, inhaling smoke-stagnated air into his young lungs. When it came right down to it, his welfare was more important than any story. God, she should just get out of this town and go back to Arizona. At least there it was warm and Charlie had a little friend.

She pushed a wing of hair behind her ear. “I have a child, Mr. McKee. A boy. That’s why I need a place. Somewhere clean and—and welcoming. I know,” she rushed on, “you said I’m not welcome on the Flying Bar T, but you won’t know I’m there. I won’t come near your house without permission. And if your father doesn’t want the interview, that’s fine. Scout’s honor.”

She hated pleading with him, this man with his invisible iron wall surrounding his people.

“How old is he?”

“My son? Seven.”

Again, those unyielding eyes. “I’ll talk to Tom.”

She couldn’t help sagging against her desk. “Thank you. Thank you so much. You won’t be sorry.”

He didn’t answer. Simply looked at her. Into her. Through her. Then turned and strode from the newsroom, out the squeaky door, into the street.

Chapter Two

Ash jaywalked to his truck. A light snow had begun to fall again, fat flakes that caught on his hat and shoulders.

What the hell happened back there in that newspaper office?

How could he even consider renting the cottage to her? She with the fine-boned cheeks that he damn near touched when she looked up at him with those cat eyes.

He climbed into the pickup, backed from the parking slot and drove out of town.

Of course, the kid had done it. Picturing her boy—with her July-blue eyes and burnt-brown hair, probably minus a front tooth—in that dump of a motel where Ash had sown his oats at eighteen, splintered the stone around his heart.

Why hadn’t she told him about the boy before? Was she using him to get closer to Tom? No, her eyes when she mentioned the boy’s name said different.

She loved her kid. The way he loved Daisy.

Shoving a hand through his hair, Ash sighed. Sucker, that’s what he was. Sucker for kids with sad stories.

He’d been one himself once. He and his sister, Meggie, living in that ramshackle house on the edge of town, their mom trying to put bread on the table and decent clothes on their backs. Until Tom entered their lives. Tom, changing lives with the Flying Bar T.

Ash had to give Rachel credit. She’d woven herself right under his skin in five blasted minutes, persuaded him to let her rent Susie’s cottage. Oh, the bit about talking to Tom was only a formality. He knew it, she knew it.

Hell. Here he was, managing nine hundred head of Black Angus and fifty-five hundred acres of land and he’d been bamboozled by a woman—and a seven-year-old kid he had yet to meet.

She’d been daydreaming about him striding across the street with snow on his big shoulders when her desk phone rang the next morning.

“Rachel?” His voice rumbled in her ear.

Her breath stopped. The way he said her name… “Yes?”

“You want to look at the cottage, it’ll be open Sunday.”

In two days. “Thank you for letting me know, Ash.”

“Welcome. What time?”

A civil conversation. “Can I come in the morning, say, ten?”