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Alcohol at three in the afternoon.
Alcohol affecting her competence.
No seat belt. Busted windshield. Busted brain.
God help him, but Susie’s disregard was his secret. Not Tom’s, and never, never Daisy’s.
His pain. His business. Like Tom with Nam.
Ash pushed away from the counter. Patting the old man’s shoulder, he said, “I’ll tell Daiz to wash up.”
At her computer in the cramped newsroom of the Rocky Times, Rachel put her face into her hands and took a long, deep breath. Yesterday she had gone about it wrong, driving out to the Flying Bar T, trying to get past Ash McKee and his warhorse.
God, when she thought of the rancher and that animal… They exuded a beauty and authority that kept her enthralled for twenty-four hours. McKee’s pole-erect back, his muscular thighs controlling the animal whose charcoal forelock shrouded its eyes. The man himself blocking the sunlit sky with his mountain-wide shoulders, his Stetson.
She rose and went to the window beside her desk, drew up the dusty blinds, welcoming the sunlight. Shaw had swept the sidewalk clear of snow. On this last day of January, the sky promoted a bank of gray snow clouds to the north, which meant that before midnight February would be whistling its way over the landscape.
Several pickups drove down Cardinal Avenue, their wheels churning the previous night’s snowfall into a crusted brown blend. Across the street, a two-tone green crew-cab angle-parked in front of Toole’s Ranch Supplies.
Ash McKee stepped down into the crystalized mush. As he closed the door of his vehicle, his gaze collided with hers across the street. Rachel drew a sharp breath. Again, she saw him on that sweat-flanked horse, smelled the steamy hide of animal, the leather of the saddle as the rancher leaned down toward her….
He turned and disappeared inside Toole’s.
Ash. Here in town. Tom, alone on the ranch.
Rachel snatched up the phone on her desk. In the face of what she wanted, Ash McKee was a massive problem. Local lore, gleaned at Old Joe’s Bakery and Darby’s coffee shop down the street, said he was not a man to take lightly. And when did that stop you, Rachel? You’ve met men far more daunting than this one. Case in point, your father and Floyd Stephens.
This was her chance. Phone Tom while his son was twenty miles away, talk to the old soldier about the guesthouse first, give him a reason to speak with her. Later, she could bring up the story.
“At all costs, get the story.” Her father’s mantra.
Nerves and guilt lifted the hair on her nape. Don’t think. Do. Her fingers shook, but she punched the number without stumbling. At the other end the phone rang twice, three times, six times.
“Come on, pick up or at least get an answering machine.”
Eight rings… “’Lo.”
“Mr. McKee?”
“Yeah?”
“My name is Rachel Brant.” She glanced toward the window. No Ash. “I was out your way yesterday to see you, but—” she couldn’t stop the edgy chuckle “—your cattle were in the way, so I wasn’t able to—”
“You the reporter?”
“I, uh—yes, that’s right. I work at the Rocky Times.”
Silence.
“I’d like to talk to you, sir, if you have a moment.”
“You’re looking to rent the cottage.”
So Ash had relayed the information. “If possible.”
“Ain’t my deal. It’s Ash’s. Convince him and you’ll have a place to hang your hat.”
“I thought you owned the ranch.”
“I do. But the cottage is his venture.”
“Actually, I’d like to talk to you, too.”
“Like I said the cottage is—”
“I know, Ash’s business. But I’d like to talk to you about something else.”
Pause. “This got to do with some damned story?”
“In a way, yes, it does. I—”
Dial tone. He’d hung up. Damn. Now what? Should she phone back? Go out anyway while Ash was in town? No, she couldn’t trust how long he’d be. The last thing she needed was to get caught out in the boonies with a fire-breathing dragon on her heels.
She should have left it with renting the guesthouse, waited until she was out there to talk to Tom face-to-face.
She sat and fumed at her desk. Almost two weeks of planning gone down the drain. Two weeks of schmoozing with the townsfolk, getting to know them on a first-name basis, cracking smiles she didn’t feel, pushing her little boy into yet another school with strange kids. Living in a moth-eaten motel.
All for what? Fame and glory?
So her father—an editor with the Washington Post—would recognize she was as capable of meritorious reporting as her mother had been? Qualified to make the big leagues, to one day write her way to a possible Pulitzer?
Worth loving just a little?
The thought left a barb. Bill Brant had loved no one but his long-dead wife, Grace. Times like these, Rachel wished, wished her mother still lived. But she had died of cancer twenty-four years ago, on Rachel’s eighth birthday. A day branded in her mind. Not only had she lost her mother forever, but her daddy had set the blame at his daughter’s feet. Stupid, Rachel knew. But still.
She had to try. Had to. For her own sake as well as her father’s.
But, oh, she was tired. Of the lying, the pushing, the shoving. Of living in seven different backwater towns in seven states, soliciting local newspapers for a job—just so she could have the time to gain the trust of their wary resident Hells Field veteran. God, what she wouldn’t give to find her own niche and have Bill Brant be happy for her. Just once.
“You don’t give up, do you?”
She jerked around. Ashford McKee stood five feet away, big and tough as the land he owned. A pine and forest man.
Hands buried in a sheepskin jacket, Stetson pulled low as always, he stared down at her with dark, unfriendly eyes. Slowly he removed a cell phone from his pocket and lifted one smooth black brow. “We McKee’s keep in touch.”
She should have known. A fly speck couldn’t get past him without that speck becoming a mountain.
Rachel rose. At five-ten, she was no slouch, but beside him she felt gnome short. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but as I mentioned yesterday my issue is with your father—who I understand owns the Flying Bar T?”
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?”
