McKettrick's Heart (9 page)

Rance's smile widened. “Keegan's starting a herd,” he said. “He's going to be very big in the lop-eared jackass trade.”

Keegan just shook his head and made for the churchyard.

“I'll help,” Jesse said, falling in step with Keegan, while Rance went to join Emma and the others.

“You're just back from your honeymoon,” Keegan reminded him, his strides lengthening a little. “Shouldn't you be hanging out with your new bride?”

Jesse kept pace. “How long does it take to load a donkey into a horse trailer?” he reasoned.

Spud, watching them approach, nickered a welcome.

Keegan opened the gate and the donkey came right to him, reins dangling.

Just as Rance had, Jesse checked the animal's feet, ran a hand over his protruding rib cage. There was no trace of the trademark grin when Jesse faced Keegan. “He's been neglected, and abused, too, from the looks of him.”

Keegan nodded, and as the three of them crossed the street he explained briefly how he'd acquired Spud.

Jesse threw the bolt on the back of Rance's trailer and lowered the ramp. Keegan led the donkey inside and was glad to see that Rance had thought to put hay in the feeder and make sure there was water.

After removing the bridle and buckling on a halter, adjusted for size, from the selection on the tack wall, Keegan fastened on a lead rope and tied it with a slip knot, so Spud wouldn't rattle around in that trailer like a dry bean in the bottom of a tin bucket.

“There'll be fireworks later,” Jesse observed. “Lots of noise. Maybe we ought to take old Seabiscuit here out to the Triple M right now. Get him settled into a stall.”

“I don't imagine he's too skittish,” Keegan observed. “Not after carrying a lot of screaming, kicking kids around in circles for who knows how many years.”

“Keeg,” Jesse said.

Keegan didn't look at him. Didn't answer.

“You're taking it pretty hard—Psyche's being so sick, I mean.”

Keegan felt his backbone stiffen. “I guess Myrna told you that, too.”

“Nobody had to tell me, Keeg.”

He and Rance and Jesse had grown up together, like pups from a barn litter. They didn't have many secrets from each other.

“I'll be all right,” Keegan said, stepping out of the trailer to join Jesse in the road. He put the ramp up again, closed and fastened the doors. “Once I get over the shock.”

He
would
be all right, he knew.

But Psyche wouldn't.

And Lucas might not be, either.

Jesse regarded him silently in the dim glow of a streetlight. Carnival music played, and the Ferris wheel turned, and little kids shrieked with delight on the spinning cars on the spider ride.

“I'll be all right,” Keegan repeated.

Jesse rested a hand on his shoulder. “I know,” he said. “But the meantime is bound to be hard.”

Keegan swallowed, nodded. Again, he didn't trust himself to talk.

“We'll be here, Keeg,” Jesse told him. “Rance and me.”

Keegan was counting on that, though he couldn't say so.

“McKettrick-tough,” Jesse said. It was one of a dozen such phrases, drilled into them from the time they could understand the spoken word.

“McKettrick-tough,” Keegan confirmed.

P
SYCHE SAT ALONE
under a tree, with Lucas snoozing on a blanket nearby. Seeing Keegan returning with Jesse, she beckoned.

Keegan's heart turned over. She was so brave. By comparison, he felt like a sniveling yellow-belly.

Nonetheless, he approached. Jesse immediately bent and kissed Psyche's cheek. “Hey, beautiful,” he said. “Welcome home.”

She smiled. “I hear congratulations are in order,” she replied. “The uncatchable Jesse McKettrick has been caught.”

Jesse chuckled, nodded. “Snagged, bagged and tagged,” he said.

“I'd like to meet your wife,” Psyche told him. “I promise I won't tell her what a rounder you've always been.”

Jesse flashed that famous grin. “I think she suspects,” he replied. “I'll go find her.” With that, he slapped Keegan once on the shoulder and walked away.

“Sit down, Keegan,” Psyche said.

He sat cross-legged in the fragrant grass.

“You and Molly look wonderful together,” Psyche remarked, probably trying to be subtle.

Keegan had known Psyche all his life, and he knew instantly what she was getting at. “No possible way,” he said. “Forget it.”

“Forget what?” Psyche asked innocently.

“You know damn well what,” Keegan answered.

She grinned. “Okay, so I thought it would be nice if you and Molly fell in love and got married. Lucas would have a real family then—he'd be a McKettrick. I can just picture all of you beaming out of one of those photo Christmas cards—‘Happy Holidays from the Four of Us.'”

“Lucas can be a McKettrick,” Keegan said. “All you have to do is let me adopt him, instead of Molly.”

Psyche sighed. “It would be much simpler if you married Molly, and the two of you adopted him together.”

“I had one cheating wife,” Keegan retorted, without intending to. “I don't need another.”

Psyche held out a hand. After a moment's hesitation, spent feeling like an idiot for spilling his emotional guts the way he had, and to a dying woman, for God's sake, Keegan took the hand.

“I always thought Shelley was a real bitch,” she said.

“Frankly, I wondered what you saw in her.”

Keegan chuckled. He'd expected something different from Psyche, though he didn't know exactly what. “I had similar thoughts about you and Thayer,” he said.

She squeezed his hand, then released it—an ordinary gesture, and yet Keegan felt it as a precursor to the permanent parting yawning up ahead like the mouth of a dark cave.

“They dated, you know,” Psyche said. “Thayer and Shelley, I mean. While they were in college. I think it was pretty hot and heavy.”

Keegan remembered. It was, he had to admit, if only to himself, one of the reasons he'd never liked Psyche's husband. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. It would have saved us a lot of grief if they'd married each other, and left you and me out of the equation.”

“But they didn't,” Psyche reflected. Her gaze fell on Lucas, his little body covered by part of the blanket he was lying on. “I called Travis this afternoon, about the documents—the adoption, and your appointment as my executor—and he said he'll have everything ready by Monday.”

Travis and Sierra were away in Scottsdale, with Sierra's seven-year-old son, Liam, shopping for furniture for the new house they'd just built on the other end of town.

“There's still time to change your mind,” Keegan said.

“I'm not going to change my mind, Keegan,” Psyche told him pointedly, “so stop nagging me about it. I've given this a lot of thought, and I want everything in order before I—well—before. I need your cooperation, damn it.”

Just then, Jesse reappeared with Cheyenne.

Keegan stood.

Jesse introduced the two women.

Marital bliss looked good on Cheyenne, Keegan thought, but then, just about anything would. She was a beauty—dark haired and slender, and smart as hell.

After she and Psyche had exchanged pleasantries and Jesse started chatting Psyche up just as if everything were normal, Cheyenne turned to Keegan and pulled him aside. “You're ready for the meeting on Monday morning?” she asked.

“What meeting?” He'd left his cell phone in the car and hadn't been to the office at all that day.

“Eve and Meg are coming in from San Antonio,” Cheyenne told him quietly. Eve McKettrick was Meg and Sierra's mother, as well as president and CEO of McKettrickCo. “Along with most of the board of directors. This is it, Keegan. They want a final vote on the decision to go public.”

Of course they did. Eve, actually a distant cousin, had been like a mother to him, but when it came to company business, she was a force of nature.

Keegan swore under his breath. “What's going to happen to your job?” he asked, trying to get some kind of foothold.

Cheyenne touched his arm. “I'll be all right,” she said. “I might stay on, or go into business for myself. It's you I'm worried about.”

He sighed. “Has Jesse said anything about how he plans to vote?”

“You'll have to talk to him about that,” Cheyenne said reasonably.

Alarm coursed through Keegan, like a shock from a live wire. He glanced Jesse's way, and in that moment he knew. “Damn,” he rasped.

Cheyenne's voice went soft. “He's tired of all the fighting,” she said.

Keegan took a step toward Jesse, who was looking at him now, and stopped. This was no time for a confrontation, but Keegan felt betrayed just the same. Jesse had had plenty of time to tell him what he'd decided while they were loading Spud into Rance's trailer. Instead he'd promised that he and Rance would be there, help him through the imminent loss of one of his closest friends.

“Damn,” Keegan repeated, more fiercely this time.

“Is something wrong?” Psyche asked.

“Nothing at all,” Keegan said, glaring at Jesse.

“You'll be by Monday afternoon to sign the papers?”

“Monday afternoon,” Keegan promised. Then he turned, without another word, and walked away.

 

M
OLLY STOOD
with her back to a tree and a finger in one ear, talking into her cell phone. It wasn't easy, given that a carnival and town picnic were going on all around her.

“Denby, listen to me—”

“I want a new agent!” Denby Godridge screamed. He was taking it hard, not making the bestseller lists with his last epic novel. Molly had sold it for big bucks on the strength of a Pulitzer Prize won in the 1970s, and the publishers weren't too pleased, either. “It was bad enough when you worked out of L.A.,” Denby ranted. “Now I'm supposed to deal with someone in
Indian Rock, Arizona?
”

“Denby, please—”

“You're fired, Molly!”

Molly closed her eyes.

Denby hung up with a crash.

Tears seeped between Molly's lashes.

“Boyfriend tired of waiting for the loot to start rolling in?” The voice was only too familiar.

She opened her eyes. Sure enough, there stood Keegan, with his hands jammed into the pockets of his grass-stained slacks, hair mussed, as though he'd been running his fingers through it. Behind him, the pink, green and blue lights of the Ferris wheel blended like colorful amoebas.

She shoved the phone back into her purse, marched over to him, wrenched off her favorite straw hat and slapped him in the belly with it. “You know what, Mr. Smart-Ass Keegan Freaking
McKettrick?
I've had just about
enough
of your snide remarks and sleazy insinuations!”

His eyes widened when she popped him with the hat. They were the most extraordinary blue, those eyes. The color of new denim.

Then, remarkably, he laughed.

“Are you drunk?” she demanded.

“No,” he said. “But I wish I were.” He paused a beat. “Who made you cry, Molly Shields?”

The question took her aback. She looked down, saw that the flower had fallen off her hat, and bent to retrieve it. Unfortunately, so did Keegan at the same moment, and they conked heads.

“Oww,” Keegan complained, laying a hand to his crown as he straightened. He looked and sounded so much like a small boy that Molly, contending with a skull fracture of her own, laughed right out loud.

Keegan's eyes softened slightly, and Molly felt a tiny pinch, smack in the center of her heart.

“Who made you cry?” he asked again.

She sighed, fumbling to pin the flower back onto the brim of her hat. “It was nothing,” she said. “I've just had a lot of emotional ups and downs lately.”

“Haven't we all?” Keegan muttered.

“Nobody more than Psyche,” Molly replied, giving up on the flower and shoving it into the twilight zone of her bag, where the phone had already disappeared. A chilly breeze made her hug herself.

“Cold?” Keegan asked.

“I'm fine,” Molly said.

“You look like somebody who could appreciate a good joke.”

She squinted. “Huh?”

“Psyche thinks you and I ought to get married,” Keegan told her, “and adopt Lucas together. How crazy is that?”

“
Real
crazy,” Molly was quick to say. Now, why did it hurt so much that he thought the idea of marrying her was ludicrous enough to be funny?

His eyes turned serious now, intent. Molly wondered if she had barbecue sauce on her face, and while she was considering the possibility, he took her by surprise with a kiss.

Electricity coursed through her, like a bolt of lightning.

Keegan's mouth rested lightly on hers, barely more than a breath.

Molly stepped back, blinking and breathless.

“Sorry,” Keegan said.

“You really have a gift for saying the wrong thing, you know that?”

He grimaced. “So I've been told.”

Molly trembled. If he noticed, she decided, she'd blame it on the coolness of the evening. “We'll just pretend it didn't happen,” she said.

“You're pretty good at that, aren't you?”

Five seconds ago the man had kissed her. Sweetly. Tenderly. Made her toes curl. Now he was digging at her again.

“Pretty good at
what?
” she demanded.

“Pretending things didn't happen. Like your affair with Thayer Ryan, for instance.”

“I'm not pretending I didn't have an affair with Thayer Ryan!”

“Yes, you are. Either that, or you have no conscience at all. Molly, how can you do it? How can you move into another woman's house—take over raising her child, as if nothing had happened?”

The words
pelted
Molly. Knocked the breath out of her, like a fall onto hard ground.

“Well?” Keegan pressed. They were ruthless now, those impossibly blue eyes, and colder than a January wind.

Molly swallowed, determined not to lose her temper and make a scene at the Fourth of July celebration. Indian Rock was a small town—she had to make a home there for Lucas and she didn't need the kind of notoriety a screaming match with Keegan McKettrick would bring. “Pay close attention, you lame-brained, arrogant son of a bitch,” she said, acidly pleasant. “I'm not going to say this again.
I came here because Psyche asked me to.
Because—”
Because Lucas is my son and because there were times when I missed him so much, I curled up in a fetal position on the floor and cried until my eyes swelled shut.

Keegan didn't answer.

Overhead, the first of the fireworks erupted in a splash of blue fire, swelling into a huge flower against the night sky, then spilling gracefully down like the tears of an angel.

Keegan looked up at the display, and so did Molly, but out of the corner of her eye she noticed his profile—the strong jawline, the conservative haircut that didn't really suit him, the straight nose. He was probably the most obnoxious man she'd ever met, not counting certain waiters and some of the panhandlers on Sunset, and yet something about him stirred her, way down deep.

Maybe it was just the barbecue sauce.

“I'd better go and find my daughter,” he said.

“I'd like to share the experience with my son,” she replied in terse agreement, putting only the slightest emphasis on the last two words.

With that, they went their separate ways.

 

I
T WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT
when Molly maneuvered Lucas into his pajamas and laid him in his crib.

“Isn't he beautiful?”

Molly hadn't realized Psyche was in the room, and she started slightly before turning to face the other woman. “He is,” she whispered.