McKettrick's Luck (29 page)

Finally, the pieces fell into place.

Cheyenne backed up a few steps.

“Shit,” she heard Jesse say.

Cheyenne turned to run.

Jesse must have pushed past the blonde because there was no sign of her when he caught up to Cheyenne in the living room, made her stop and face him.

“Cheyenne,” he said, “listen to me—”

“No,” Cheyenne said, praying she wouldn't cry. “
You
listen to
me,
Jesse McKettrick. I came here to tell you that I still work for Nigel Meerland. He wanted me to spy on you, dig up some dirt, so you'd have to sell us the land—”

Jesse's face went still. The blue of his eyes, usually like a summer sky, was glacial. He'd been gripping Cheyenne's shoulders, and he let go so suddenly that she almost fell.

The blonde appeared behind him. “Hi,” she said, putting out a hand. “My name is Brandi and I'm—”

“She's my wife,” Jesse said.

Brandi must have been an actress because she looked confused, and she was damn convincing, too. “I'm your
ex
-wife—”

Jesse's gaze bored into Cheyenne. “You lied to me,” he said.

“You lied to
me,
” Cheyenne replied.

“Will somebody listen?” Brandi asked, sounding plaintive.

“No,” Cheyenne said.

“No,” Jesse said, at precisely the same moment.

“Oh,
crap,
” Brandi said. “This is all—”

Cheyenne bolted.

L
IKE A MAN WAKING UP
in the middle of a nightmare, Jesse turned to stare at Brandi, standing there in his living room, wearing one of his T-shirts and nothing else, as far as he could tell.

“What the
fuck
are you doing here?” he demanded.

Brandi's plump lower lip wobbled, but her huge eyes were defiant. “If you'd carry a cell phone, like everybody
else
on the planet, or just check your voice mail once in a blue moon, you'd
know
what I'm doing here!”

Jesse sighed. Some of the stunned fury subsided.

He ought to go after Cheyenne, he knew that. She'd blown out of the house like a hurricane wind, and he felt a twinge of fear to think of her driving the dark, crooked miles from his house to Indian Rock in that state. But his bare feet seemed glued to the floor, and he didn't know what he'd say to her, anyway. “I heard your message, Brandi,” he said, with an equanimity that cost him plenty. “Something about a guy and a lot of money. I called you back, and I got
your
voice mail.”

Brandi was in a huff. She looked around, found the phone resting on an end table, grabbed up the receiver and shoved it at him. “
Listen,
if you don't believe me.”

Jesse sighed again. Sank onto the edge of the nine-foot leather sofa his mother had ordered up on one of her furniture-buying sprees. “Talk to me,” he said warily, well aware that he was letting himself in for something.

“I can't. You're almost naked.”

“Shit,” Jesse said. It was true. He'd pulled on a pair of briefs after his shower and fallen into bed, face-first. The next thing he knew, there were two women shrieking in fright in the doorway of his bedroom.

Never a good sign.

Calmer now, he got up off the sofa, went into his room and pulled on yesterday's jeans. Dragged a T-shirt on over his head. When he got back, Brandi was curled up in his father's big leather chair, swathed in an afghan one of his sisters had knit during an earth-mother phase.

Her blond hair was rumpled, her eyes and mouth pouty.

“What were you doing in my room?” Jesse demanded, taking his former place on the sofa.

“This is a big house,” Brandi said. “I was scared. I was tired from driving all the way here from California, and you weren't home, so I stretched out on that little couch in your bedroom. I must have fallen asleep.”

The couch in question faced away from the bed, toward the fireplace, and Jesse rarely used it, except as a depository for dirty laundry.

“I came in,” he said carefully. “I took a shower. Don't tell me you slept through that.”

Brandi's lip started wobbling again. “I didn't. But I thought I might scare you to death if I just popped up and said ‘hello,' or you might shoot me or something, so I decided to wait until you woke up. I fell asleep again, and when I woke up, I was hungry. I raided the fridge and put some music on the stereo, thinking that might bring you around—you know—gently.
Then,
I think I hear somebody moving around in the house. This place is
big,
and it's old. I figured it might even be a ghost. So I went back to your room to wake you up, but you were practically comatose—”

That much was true, Jesse thought ruefully.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I'm up to speed on the arrival part. Now, if you'll just explain the unexpected pleasure of your company?”

“The guy I wanted to tell you about—
on the phone,
so I wouldn't have to take time off from work and school—is named Nigel Meerland. He wanted me to put the squeeze on you, so you'd sell him a tract of land for a development. He said there might be as much as four and a half million dollars in it for me—
four and a half million dollars,
Jesse—so I couldn't just ignore him.”

“Right,” Jesse said, after willing his clamped jaw to release. Nigel Meerland. Cheyenne's boss.

What a damn fool he'd been. All the evidence had been right there in front of him, like cursive on a giant blackboard. He'd ignored it. Skirted around it.

Why?

Because he'd wanted Cheyenne Bridges.

Wanted her body.

Wanted her mind.

Even wanted her spirit.

He'd
wanted
to believe her. So he had.

And all the while, she'd been jacking him around. Setting him up.

Her deception wasn't the worst part, though. Oh, no. The worst part was that he'd bought in, in spite of everything.

I came here to tell you that I still work for Nigel Meerland,
she'd said, in a fury of indignant conviction.
He wanted me to spy on you, dig up some dirt, so you'd have to sell us the land….

In that moment, the bottom had dropped out of Jesse's personal universe.

Now, remembering, he closed his eyes.

Sucker,
he thought.

“What are we going to do now?” Brandi asked.

Jesse opened his eyes. Sighed again. “The ball's in your court,” he countered quietly. “You can't force me to sell the land, Brandi. You're almost a lawyer, so you know that. All you could do is keep me tied up in court for a long time, and trust me, my resources would last a lot longer than yours.”

Brandi looked as though he'd slapped her. “I'm not stupid, Jesse. And I'm not mean.
I tried to warn you, remember?
Does that sound like somebody who wanted to make trouble?”

“No,” Jesse admitted. “But the prospect of making four and a half million dollars obviously caught your attention.”

“It would catch
anybody's
attention, Jesse,” Brandi said, smiling for the first time since the whole boulder of a disaster had rolled down on him from out of nowhere. “Maybe not yours. But to the rest of us, that's a chunk of change.”

Jesse spared a grin, even though he felt dead inside. In the end, everything came down to money. With Brandi. With Cheyenne.

It was all about money.

The idea depressed him so much that he almost couldn't stand it.

“What do you want?” he asked, after suffering in silence for a while.

“A settlement?”

“Brandi, we were married for a week.”

She blushed. “But we
were
married.”

Jesse pondered that, staring at the floor. At his naked, ugly feet. “Okay,” he said. “You'll hear from my lawyer. His name is Travis Reid. Just in case you're wondering—
no,
I'm not giving you four and a half million dollars—but it will be enough to set you up. In return, you'll have to sign off on any claims, past, present or future. No more phone calls. No more ‘loans.' Especially no more showing up at my house, stripping to the skin, and helping yourself to my shirts. Understood?”

Brandi looked both ashamed and encouraged. “Understood,” she said.

“Good. Now, put your clothes on and get out of here.”

She nodded, but she didn't move from the chair. Tears glazed her eyes.

“How come I didn't see your car when I came in?” Jesse asked, as an afterthought. His mind was still reeling, sorting and sifting, struggling to make sense of things that seemed obvious in retrospect, but weren't. He had a lot of catching up to do, a lot of squaring away.

Only a couple of weeks ago, his life had been so simple. The next step? Always obvious. Keep on keeping on.

Then Cheyenne had come back to Indian Rock and turned the whole works upside down.

Nothing about his relationship with Cheyenne Bridges was obvious. Or simple. She'd played Delilah to his Sampson, and that infuriated him. But there was something else coursing beneath that rage, an underground river of emotions he couldn't readily define.

“I parked behind the house,” Brandi said.

“Why?”

“Because everything about that Meerland guy creeped me out, that's why. I felt like he was following me.
Watching
me. He looked me up on the Internet, Jesse. He knew all about Dan, and my dad getting shot in that robbery, and us being married. I'm not a famous person—I sell shoes and go to night school. It's not like there are a bunch of Web sites dedicated to me. But Meerland
knew
so much.”

Jesse shook his head. Ah, the wonders of mega search engines. “Nobody's going to hurt you, Brandi,” he said. “I'll deal with Meerland. You go back to California and do your thing.”

“You're not mad at me?”

“I'm not mad at you,” Jesse confirmed.

“Couldn't I just stay the night? Sleep in one of your sisters' rooms? I'm not scared, now that you're awake.”

Now that you're awake.

Was
he? If so, then why did he still feel as though he were stuck in the middle of a bad dream?

“No,” he said. “I'll follow you back to town. Get you a room. In the morning, you're out of here, Brandi. For good. That's part of the deal.”

She sighed. “Okay,” she said, unfolding her long legs and standing up, keeping herself cosseted in the afghan, like a small child with a favorite blanket. “No hard feelings?”

“No hard feelings,” Jesse agreed.

Not where Brandi was concerned, anyway.

 

“I
KNEW IT
,” R
ANCE SAID
, the next morning in the meeting room when Cheyenne spilled the whole story to him and Keegan. Turning to his cousin, who looked grim, he added, “Didn't I tell you something was rotten?”

Cheyenne sat up very straight, fighting tears. All she had left was her dignity, and precious little of that. It was over with Jesse—if indeed “it” had ever really begun—and now her job was gone, too. She'd already left a message for Nigel on his voice mail.

“Sue me,” she'd said. “I'm telling them everything.”

With that, she'd hung up, and when the inevitable callback had come, a few minutes later, she'd shut off the phone instead of answering.

“Now what?” Keegan asked, focusing on Cheyenne with disturbing intensity.

“I guess that's up to you,” Cheyenne said. “I know you probably won't want me around, so—”

Keegan frowned. “Hold it,” he interrupted. “I need some time to think about this.”

“What's to think about?” Rance asked.

Cheyenne braced herself. What, indeed, was there to think about? She'd committed the unpardonable sin. She'd deceived people who had placed their trust in her.

Tears threatened again. She was going to lose ever so much more than her job. When the word got out, nobody in Indian Rock would want her around.

Not Jesse, certainly.

Not Rance and Keegan.

Not even Sierra and Janice and Elaine.

She'd be left without a single friend.

“She came to us and told us the truth,” Rance went on. “That's worth something to me.”

The words so startled Cheyenne that, for a long moment, she didn't believe she'd actually heard them. She'd made them up, surely.

“Me, too,” Keegan agreed, but only after a gusty sigh. “It took a lot of ba—er—courage, considering.”

Cheyenne blinked, confused. Were they—? Did she dare hope—?

“Nobody,” Rance said, “messes with a McKettrick.”

Forget hope. She was toast.

“Come off it,” Keegan argued wearily. “
Plenty
of people mess with us. Shelley, for instance.”

Cheyenne fished in her purse, brought out the keys to the leased Escalade and the McKettrickCo cell phone. Laid them on the conference table.

“I'll just go now,” she said.

“Go?” Keegan asked, looking blank.

“I'm fired, aren't I?”

Rance and Keegan exchanged glances.

“Is she?” Rance asked.

“I don't think so,” Keegan answered.

Cheyenne swallowed. “But—”

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Keegan said. “
Especially
the McKettricks. You're allowed, Cheyenne.”

“Of course, if you hadn't made it right—” Rance ventured.

Cheyenne risked a faltering smile. “You might as well know that Nigel intends to sue me for breach of contract, and that will mean some legal wrangling. And Jesse—well—Jesse is never going to forgive me.”

“Never is a long time,” Keegan told her, gruffly gentle. “Jesse's a hothead. Once he's had a chance to cool down—”