McKettricks of Texas: Garrett (12 page)

Realizing he was naked except for the towel, he paused at the top of the stairs, garbage bag in hand, debating the wisdom of going down there in what practically constituted the altogether.

Running into Julie would be one thing—he took a few moments to savor the fantasy—but meeting up with Calvin or Esperanza would be another. With a sigh, Garrett set the bag down, returned to his bedroom and pulled on a pair of jeans.

Then
he took the garbage downstairs and outside, where the chill bit into his bare chest and the soles of
his feet, so that he did a hopping little dance back into the kitchen.

He washed his hands at the nearest sink, checked the multiple refrigerators for leftovers, and wound up munching on cold cereal because nothing else appealed to him.

He was just sticking his empty bowl into a dishwasher when the dog padded out on his three legs, wagging his tail.

Garrett acknowledged the animal with a smile, was about to head back upstairs, where he
might
get some sleep, when Harry pressed his beagle-snout to the crack between the outside door and the frame.

He glanced toward the guest quarters, half expecting—hell,
hoping
—that Julie would be there.

Only she wasn't.

The dog gave a benign little whimper.

Garrett sighed. “It's
cold
out there,” he protested.

The dog whimpered again.

He bent, checked the tags on the mutt's collar. “Listen,
Harry,
” he said, drawing on his negotiation skills, “maybe you wouldn't mind doing your thing on some newspaper, just this once—”

Harry gave an urgent whine, raised one of his front paws to scratch at the door—he had two legs in front and one in back—and he teetered a little, trying to stay balanced.

“Oh,
all right,
” Garrett said, steeling himself for a second barefoot, naked-chested venture into the night air.

He waited, shivering, while the dog took care of business.

 

“I
THINK
G
ARRETT ASKED ME OUT
,” Julie confided in Libby, bright and early the next morning, when she stopped by with Calvin. She didn't say it, of course, until her little boy had joined Audrey and Ava, who were
playing in the leaves beneath the oak trees on the other side of the yard.

Libby chuckled. “What do you mean, you
think
Garrett asked you out?” she replied. “Either he did or he didn't.”

Julie bit back the admission that he'd kissed her, too. Twice. There wasn't much she didn't tell her sisters, but she had yet to make sense of what had happened in the pool the night before.

And something
had
happened.

“He mentioned dinner in Austin or San Antonio,” Julie said.

Libby raised one eyebrow, her eyes twinkling. “And you said…?”

Julie's face burned. “And I said maybe I should cook instead,” she murmured.

Libby folded her arms; it was chilly that morning. Tate's truck wasn't in its usual place in the driveway; he must have gotten an early start, as Garrett had. Watching through one of the kitchen windows at the main ranch house, Julie had seen him drive off before the coffee had finished perking.

“It's not like you to blush over a man,” Libby pointed out, grinning and giving her a light jab with one elbow. Her eyes rounded with a sudden and delighted realization. “You're
interested
in Garrett—sexually, I mean.”

“Libby!” Julie protested, pained.

Libby laughed. Shook her head. “This is
so
not you. This reticence thing, that is. Of the three of us, you've always been the bold one, the adventurous one—and now the idea of making dinner for a man has you turning red?”

“Okay, so I'm
interested,
” Julie blurted. With a slight motion of her head, she indicated Calvin, happily plunging in and out of the gloriously colored leaf piles across the
yard. “I can't just have a fling with Garrett McKettrick—I have to think about my son.”

“As if there's any danger that you
won't
think about Calvin,” Libby said gently. “You're a great mother, Jules. The little guy knows you love him, knows you'd go to the wall for him.”

“It was just a kiss—okay
two kisses
—but Libby, the things Garrett made me feel….”

Her voice fell away.

Libby smiled, gave her a brief, tight hug. “I know all about what a man can make a woman feel, Jules,” she said. “A
McKettrick
man, anyway.”

Julie gnawed at her lower lip for a moment, watching Calvin and the twins and the happy dogs, frolicking in rustling mounds of orange and yellow and crimson leaves, scattering them in all directions. “Garrett and I live under the same roof,” she reminded Libby. “Things could get really awkward, really fast.”

Libby's blue eyes were alight with love as she watched the kids and the dogs. “So much for the two hours I spent raking the yard yesterday afternoon,” she said good-naturedly. Then she turned and looked directly at Julie again. “Is this my frankly sensual sister speaking? The one who lamented, not all that long ago, the lack of hot stand-up sex in her life?”

She was going to be late for work if she didn't hurry.

Hedging, Julie got into the Cadillac and turned the key in the ignition until it made a grinding sound. Then she gunned the engine a couple of times before responding to what Libby had said. “I'm going to lose my mind if I think about stand-up sex, hot or otherwise, so don't remind me, okay?”

“I think stand-up sex is
always
hot,” Libby speculated mischievously.

Julie couldn't help laughing, and that expelled some of the tension that had been building up inside her since the night before.

Temporarily, anyway.

“And of course you speak from experience,” Julie teased, making Libby laugh. “You lucky woman.”

With that, she shifted the Caddie into Reverse, tooted the horn in farewell and waved to Libby and to the kids jumping in the leaf piles under the oak trees.

Calvin was too busy having a good time to wave back.

 

H
AVING APPROPRIATED
A
USTIN'S
battered old red pickup from the garage at home, since the Porsche wasn't suitable for the kind of day he was bound to have, Garrett pulled up behind Tate's blue Silverado, parked across the road from the downed fence line the two of them had spotted from the airplane the day before, late in the afternoon.

A pair of horses grazed nearby, while Tate and two of the ranch hands crouched, examining something in the dirt.

The sinking sensation in Garrett's gut told him it was nothing good, even before he got there and saw the tread marks sunk into the soft dirt on the shoulder. They'd been left by a big rig, those tracks, not a car or a pickup.

The dirt around the fallen fence was churned up, pocked with the impressions of a few hundred hooves.

Seeing Garrett approach, Tate straightened, stood.

“Well,” he said grimly, “it's official.”

“Rustlers,” Garrett confirmed, with a nod. “Any idea how many cattle we're missing?”

Tate sighed. “Henson and Bates are running a quick tally right now,” he answered, gesturing toward two distant
men on horseback. “Offhand, though, I'd say fifty to a hundred head.”

Since even a semi wouldn't hold that many cattle, the thieves must have made several trips, maybe even over a period of days. The Silver Spur rambled on for miles in all four directions, like a giant patchwork quilt spread over a lumpy mattress, and while there were great, grassy expanses of open range, there were also stands of oaks and other deciduous trees hiding shallow canyons and old wagon trails and even a dry riverbed.

A crew arrived to repair the fence, began setting the posts back in their holes and packing dirt and rocks in around them. Once that was done, they'd secure them with cement and then string new wire.

Tate put a call through to Brent Brogan on his cell phone, walking toward his truck as he explained the situation to the lawman and gesturing for Garrett to come along.

When the call ended, Tate had the driver's-side door open and one foot up on the running board. “Let's take that plane of yours up again, have another look around. Maybe we missed something last time.”

Garrett nodded. “Meet you at the hangar,” he said, turning and sprinting back to Austin's pickup.

Twenty minutes later, they were in the sky.

Tate's voice came through Garrett's headphones, sounding tinny and a lot farther away than one seat over. “Let's make a pass over the oil field,” he said.

Garrett nodded and banked the plane to the right, began a gradual decline, and swung in low over the rusty derricks and the two long Quonset huts where equipment had been stored in the old days.

The shacks built to house the workers were gone now,
just bits of foundation jutting out of the grass here and there. Once, though, there had been
homes
on this piece of land—nothing fancy, but clean and sturdy and warm in winter. Folks had laughed and fought and loved and raised kids, made a community for themselves—there had even been a church and a one-room schoolhouse, way back when.

During the Great Depression, when so many men and women were desperate for work, the oil had just kept on coming, and the shantytown had been a haven for several dozen workers and their families; back at the main ranch house, there were boxes of old pictures of the place and the people.

It gave Garrett a hollowed-out feeling, thinking how there could be so much life and energy in a place, and then—nothing.

They made a wide loop and then passed over the area again.

Not so much as a blade of grass moved down there; the broken foundations, the Quonset huts, the time-frozen derricks…the place was as still as any ghost town.

Just the same, Garrett felt uneasy, and when he glanced at Tate, he saw that his brother was frowning, too.

“Can you land this thing down there?” Tate asked.

“I can land anywhere,” Garrett answered.

The wheels bumped and jostled over the hard-packed dirt when they touched down a couple of minutes later, rolling to a stop a few dozen yards from one of the huts.

“This,” Tate said, indicating the larger of the two Quonset huts with a nod of his head, “would be a damn good place to hide a semi between raids on the herd.”

Garrett braked, shut down the engine, pulled off his earphones. He'd never run from trouble in his life, and
there was no sign of any that he could see, but he knew something was off, just the same. Maybe it was because he hadn't gotten much sleep, thanks to Julie Remington and all the fantasies she'd inspired.

“It can't hurt to look around,” he said, his voice gruff.

The two brothers climbed out of the plane, walked toward the tail, in order to avoid the still-spinning blades on the wings.

Here there were no tracks to indicate the comings and goings of any kind of rig, big or otherwise. The padlocks securing the roll-up doors on the Quonsets were not only fastened, but rusted shut, and the panes in the windows remained intact.

So why were the little hairs on his nape standing straight up like a dog's hackles? Garrett wondered. He glanced at Tate, saw his brother wipe off a corner of one of the windows to look inside.

Garrett turned, scanning the immediate area.

He saw old derricks, tumbleweeds and not much else.

And it gave him the creeps.

“See anything?” he asked, when Tate stepped back, dusting his hands together.

Tate shook his head. “Just cobwebs and a lot of dust,” he answered.

“Is it just me,” Garrett pressed, “or is there something about this place that doesn't feel right?”

Tate's teeth flashed as he grinned. “You spooked?” he asked.

“No,” Garrett said, too quickly. As kids, they'd explored this area on horseback, he and Tate and Austin. The dry bed of an ancient river cut through the land just beyond a nearby rise, and there were a number of caves around, too,
though most of them had probably fallen in a long time ago. “
Hell,
no, I'm not spooked.”

Tate chuckled, slapped Garrett on the back. “Remember when you and Austin and I used to camp out here sometimes, with Brent Brogan and Nico Ruiz?”

Garrett nodded, relaxed a little. “We liked to scare the hell out of each other with yarns about ghosts and guys with hooks for hands,” he said. “That one time, when you were twelve and I was eleven and Austin was ten, we told our baby brother we were going to sneak back home as soon as he dropped off to sleep, and he was so worried about being left alone in camp that he didn't shut his eyes for the rest of the night and kept us awake, too, saying one of our names every five minutes.”

Tate grinned. “We had to do all the usual chores the next day. Damn, I was too tired to spit. Served us right, I guess.”

Garrett laughed. “You and I and Brent and Nico did chores,” he corrected. “Austin got to go to the cattle auction with Dad, if I recall it correctly.”

Tate seemed to enjoy the recollection as much as Garrett did, though neither of them had thought the experience was funny back then. Remembering, he chuckled and shook his head.

“That little runt must have snitched on us,” Garrett said, referring to Austin. “How else could Dad have known we gave him a hard time?”

Tate slapped him on the shoulder. “After all these years,” he jibed, though not unkindly, “you still haven't realized that we just
thought
we were all by ourselves out here? Dad and Pablo Ruiz took turns bedding down within a hundred yards so they could keep an eye on us.”

Garrett
hadn't
known, and he figured Tate hadn't, either,
at least not until after the fact, because they'd talked about practically everything in the relative anonymity of country-dark nights, staring up at that endless expanse of stars. Neither their dad nor Pablo had ever let on that they'd overheard.