McKettricks of Texas: Austin (11 page)

Trusting Austin had nearly destroyed her once before.

She'd been little more than a child then, that was true. But she'd given him her whole self—mind, body and soul—unable to hold anything back from him. She'd loved him with everything she was, everything she ever hoped to be.

They'd talked about getting married someday, when she finished nursing school and he got the rodeo out of his system.

They'd counted stars, lying on their backs in high, sweet grass, and spent hours choosing names for the children they would have.

Six of them.

And even now, after a whole decade, Paige could have recited those names, in order.

“Tell me what you're thinking,” Austin urged now, cupping her face in his hands, tilting her head back, very gently, so he could look directly into her eyes.

“That we're on dangerous ground,” she answered, after biting down hard on her lower lip. “The truth is, I'd really like to have sex with you right now, tonight. But I can't afford to play fast and loose here, Austin. I'm not eighteen anymore. I love my sisters.
They
love your brothers. That means we'll be running into each other a lot, you and me, probably for the rest of our lives. If we have a fling and then things fall apart, where will that leave us?”

Austin sighed. “Not in a good place,” he admitted.

Paige allowed herself the fleeting solace of drinking him in with her eyes. Her voice came out sounding thick. “Not in a good place,” she agreed very softly.

She moved away, climbed out of the pool, wrapped her dripping body in the towel she'd discarded earlier. Put on the flip-flops.

Without another word, or a look back, she hurried away from Austin, well aware that it was already far too late to escape.

A
USTIN MADE IT TO THE SECOND FLOOR
under his own power, once Paige had carried out her strategic retreat from the swimming pool.

Maybe, he reasoned, too distracted to really give a hoot one way or the other, spending some time in the water
had
helped, as Paige had claimed it would. Eased the bunched muscles on either side of his spine, if not actually smoothing them out.

Unfortunately, there were some new knots now, of a very different variety. And they weren't in his back—no, they were in his conscience, his heart and the core of his solar plexus.

A rush of restless discontent nearly overwhelmed him, as he stood on the threshold of his quarters—a house within a house.

But not a home.

The place hadn't really qualified as one of those since his parents had died in the car crash—on their way back from watching him win yet another fancy silver buckle, riding yet another impossible bull at yet another rodeo.

He'd been just eighteen when Jim and Sally McKettrick were killed, a foolish, hotheaded kid, hurting in secret over the breakup with Paige, doing his arrogant best to convince everyone around him that he was glad he'd cut himself loose.

Bring on the women. Bring on the booze and the badass bulls and the back-alley brawls. At the time, no choice had been so bad that he couldn't make a worse one.

First, he'd hurt Paige. Purposely betrayed her and made sure she knew it.

One bad choice down, one to go.

Next, he'd talked his mom and dad into putting off their vacation in Hawaii, just for a couple of days, so they could be in Lubbock to watch him ride in that damn rodeo.

Remembering, Austin squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again, forced himself through the doorway and into his Spartan living room. There was no escaping the truth, though.

If he hadn't entered
that one rodeo,
his mom and dad would be alive right now, Jim still running the ranch, Sally bustling around helping plan the double wedding, both of them enjoying Audrey and Ava, the grandchildren they'd never even gotten to see. They'd have taken Calvin straight to their hearts, too, as one of their own, regarded Libby and Julie as
daughters,
not just their sons' wives.

So many things would be different.

And the ranch house on the Silver Spur would still be a home.

Austin shook off those thoughts like a dog shaking off water. Or, at least, he tried. Got himself moving.

Reaching his bathroom, Austin took off his swim-sodden boxers and flung them in the general direction of the laundry chute, narrowly missing Shep, who seemed determined to stay close by.

He showered, letting the multiple streams of hot water pummel him, shaved hastily and then got out and toweled himself dry.

All that time, Shep waited patiently, resting on a hooked rug in front of the sink.

“Might be the best thing for everybody,” Austin told the dog, squinting at his reflection in the long mirror and running the fingers of both hands through his damp hair, that being all the combing he meant to do, “if you and I hit the road for a while. Let the dust settle around here.”

But Austin remembered Molly then, knew he couldn't just up and leave her, not after promising to see her through the rough part of her recovery.

And she was by no means out of the woods, that little mare.

Shep made a low, mournful sound.

“You're right,” Austin told the dog, figuring he'd probably wind up as one of those crazy old bachelors who never matched up their socks before putting them on and made long, involved speeches to all manner of critters. “This is where we belong, at least for now. Right here on the Silver Spur.”

Shep looked on with polite interest as Austin grabbed a pair of sweatpants—faded and holey but most likely clean—from a pile on the floor of his closet.

Careful not to make any sudden moves, lest he screw up his back again, Austin supported himself by leaning against the bedroom wall while stepping into the sweats and went right on yammering. “No,” he told the attentive Shep, as he wandered over to the long row of windows to stand looking out over the darkened range, “we've got to stick around here and tend to business, whether we want to or not. After all, we're McKettricks, you and me.”

It was then that he saw—or
thought
he saw—the brief flicker of light.

Austin squinted, concentrating.

And he saw it again, clearly this time, far off at the edge of the oil field.

Something quickened inside Austin—something besides guilt over his folks' death and the unsettling realization that he still wanted Paige Remington.

“What the hell?” he said to Shep.

Shep offered no useful input.

Quickly but carefully, Austin ditched the sweatpants and got dressed, pulling on jeans, socks, a flannel shirt for warmth and his everyday boots.

Reaching the corridor, he thought about knocking on Garrett's door, letting his brother in on the plan—if you could call anything this nebulous a plan—and immediately discarded the idea.

What was he going to say?
“I saw a light over there by the oil field and like some dumb-ass in a bad horror movie, I'm on my way to check it out”?

Austin grinned to himself. In this situation, he figured, one dumb-ass was enough—no need to go recruiting another one.

He checked the bathroom counter for his cell phone and didn't find it; figured he must have left it downstairs, in his jeans pocket, when he'd stripped to his underwear to go swimming.

He could retrieve it on the way out.

Mindful of his earlier commitment to cleaner living, Austin kicked the wet towels and the boxers into a single pile on the bathmat. Bending over to gather the stuff up so he could drop it down the laundry chute seemed too chancy, considering his new propensity for back spasms.

Ironic, Austin thought wryly, given that he was headed
out into an abandoned oil field in the dark, with one skittish dog for backup.

Downstairs, he found the main kitchen empty, though one or two lights burned. He located his other pair of jeans, tossed over a chaise longue out by the pool, as expected, and rummaged for his cell phone and keys.

He mostly avoided looking in any direction except the one he meant to head in—straight on—but he couldn't help picturing Paige as she'd looked earlier, when they were both in the water, gazing up at him with her eyes all luminous and her hair and her shoulders sprinkled with diamondlike droplets.

Pocketing the phone and making sure not to jiggle the keys, lest that attract somebody's attention—admittedly an unlikely scenario, in a house that size—Austin proceeded to the garage.

He hadn't considered the problem of lifting the dog into his old truck, but in the end, it turned out to be a nonissue. As soon as Austin opened the door, Shep leaped nimbly onto the running board, stepped onto the floor of the truck and then wriggled his way up onto the passenger seat and sat there grinning and panting like he had good sense.

Austin chuckled. “Born ranch dog,” he said with approval.

A few moments later, he and Shep were rolling down the long driveway, toward the gates.

They were closed for the night, those towering panels of wrought iron and fancy brass. Austin touched a button on the remote affixed to his visor and they whispered open with well-oiled grace.

Austin hung a left turn and, with another push of a button, conscientiously closed the gates behind him. He
thought of his ancestor, Clay McKettrick, the original owner of the spread, and smiled.

Clay would think it was half a mile the other side of crazy, this modern setup. In his day, opening and shutting gates involved getting in and out of a wagon, or at least bending from the saddle to work a latch.

Thinking about Clay and all he'd gone through to buy and then build this ranch made Austin feel a little better about things in general and himself in particular. Whatever demons might have haunted that old-time cowboy, he'd planted his feet in the good old Texas dirt and stayed put.

Fought every battle.

Loved his wife, raised their kids, lived to see most of his grandchildren with babies of their own.

He'd stuck around and done what needed doing, Clay had, and left a legacy for the future.

Austin didn't figure he could do any less than that and still call himself a McKettrick. It wasn't just the injured horse—Tate and Garrett had their hands full running the ranch, especially with all the rustling and such, and it was time he knuckled down and did his share, injured back or not.

As for Paige Remington—well, he'd have to figure things out as he went along. Steering clear of her would be next to impossible with both her sisters about to marry into the family and all, but maybe that wasn't entirely a bad thing. Sure, he wanted her—but every other word that came out of her luscious little mouth tended to piss him right off.

Close and constant proximity—Paige serving as his nurse, for instance—would probably intensify the physical attraction at first, on his side, anyway. But they'd
inevitably get on each other's nerves, sooner rather than later, and the effect would be the same as an inoculation against some disease.

He'd be immune to Paige, and she'd be immune to him, and that would be that.

Problem solved. They'd be able to coexist, like two civilized adults, without either killing each other
or
falling into bed and screwing their brains out.

Just making a decision, albeit a convoluted one, brought Austin a measure of peace, though there was no telling how long it would last.

Probably just until he ran into Paige again, but for the moment, all he had to worry about was the possibility of armed trespassers up to no good out there in the oil field.

He and Shep drove on.

The Silver Spur spanned both sides of the road and continued for miles in three directions, but the graveyard full of rusty derricks wasn't far away.

Austin proceeded maybe half a mile, then shut off the headlights and steered the truck onto an old cattle trail. There was a full moon, allowing him to see without other light. He soon came to another gate, but this one was the old-fashioned kind—lengths of barbed wire nailed to weathered wooden posts.

He stopped, got out of the truck, opened up the gate, hoisted himself back into the driver's seat without raising much of a sweat and bumped on through the opening. Time enough to shut the gate on his way out, he decided, leaning a little to reach under the driver's seat.

The .357 was there, in its usual spot.

He left it where it lay, nice and handy, though unloaded.

Austin sighed as he and Shep proceeded through the thin moonlight. Once, he'd been way more “cowboy” as far as guns were concerned, liked to have bullets already in the chamber, just in case, but with kids on the ranch, certain precautions had to be taken. With rare exceptions—like the .357—firearms were stored in sealed vaults on the Silver Spur, and the combinations were changed on a regular basis.

Scanning the dark landscape up ahead—the derricks reminded him of dinosaurs in the gloom—Austin didn't see the flicker of light again. He and Shep were probably on the classic wild-goose chase, but at least this way he wouldn't lie awake half the night, wondering.

He gave a low, chortling laugh. No, he'd be awake half the night thinking about
Paige,
what it would be like to make love to her again, now that he was a man instead of a boy and she was a woman instead of a girl.

Shep, meanwhile, seemed to be getting a little antsy—his hackles were up, and he kept scrabbling around in the passenger seat, making a sound that was part whimper and part growl.

In the next instant, a pair of headlights appeared at the top of the little rise just ahead, bearing down hard. Momentarily blinded by the glare, Austin cursed and, keeping his left hand on the steering wheel, put out his right to prevent the dog from slamming into the dashboard or going through the windshield.

There was a crash, but no collision.

Cracks snaked over the windshield, turning it opaque.

Austin felt an impact, and then a searing pain in his left shoulder.

At that point, he lost his grip on the wheel and the
pickup nosed into the ditch, landing hard. Shep gave a startled yelp, and then everything went silent.

 

T
HE DOGS WERE BARKING.

Tate McKettrick groaned and rolled onto his belly, pulling the pillow over his head.

Damn,
he thought.

Libby poked him in the ribs. “Tate,” she whispered, “
wake up.
Something's wrong.”

He felt a rush of chilly air as she threw back the covers, knew she was fixing to go and investigate, with or without him.

Grumbling, he got out of the warm, soft bed where Libby had loved him into sweet oblivion only a few hours before, and wrenched on his jeans. Shirtless, bootless, he followed the noise.

All three of the dogs were gathered at the front door, carrying on as if Santa Ana himself were out there, with five thousand troops and a yen to level the house the same as he'd done with the Alamo.

Tate peered out through the glass oval in the front door and at first he didn't see anything but the shadows of the oaks and the sparkle of moonlight on creek water.

Hildie, Buford and Ambrose, meanwhile, turned frenzied.

“Should I get your pistol?” Libby asked, standing a few feet behind Tate.

Any moment now, the twins would be out of bed, too, and scared to death.

Tate shook his head and worked the dead bolt. He heard Libby gasp as he opened the door a crack and peered out.

Austin's dog, Shep, sat on the porch, his sides heaving and his tongue lolling out on one side.

Alarm burned through Tate like a spill of acid. Simultaneously, he silenced his own dogs with a low command and stepped out onto the porch.

“Austin?” he called.