McKettricks of Texas: Garrett (17 page)

“Don't get mad, okay?” he said, when Julie approached her small son and drew him close for a hug, there in the yard.

“Okay,” Julie said cautiously, looking him over more closely now, in the light spilling from Libby and Tate's front porch, and the tall, wide windows on either side of the door.

No casts. No stitches. No bandages, blisters or burns.

Calvin's chin wobbled as he looked up at Julie. “I was down at the creek by myself,” he blurted, “and I fell in.”

Julie's heart nearly stopped. The creek wasn't particularly deep, nor did the water move especially fast, but it had been cold all day.

Automatically, she checked his forehead for a fever, but his temperature was normal. His clothes, though wrinkled, were dry.

“Garrett was here and he waded in and got me,” Calvin hastened on. “I had to take a warm shower and wear one of Tate's shirts until my clothes came out of the dryer.
And
I had a time-out.”

Tate appeared, shooing kids, dogs and women toward the house. There was no sign of Garrett.

Tate hung back, once everybody was inside, and Julie paused, too, both of them standing just inside the threshold. He shut the door and spoke quietly.

“I'm sorry, Julie,” he said. “The kids were playing soccer in the yard, after we got back from the stock sale this afternoon, and, well, Calvin chased the ball right into the creek.”

Julie sighed. Obviously, Tate expected her to be angry with him. Instead, she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.

“Calvin's okay,” she reminded her future brother-in-law, the man who had already brought her sister so much happiness. “That's what's important.”

Tate nodded, looking relieved. Beyond, in the kitchen, Libby and Paige and all three of the kids seemed to be talking at once.

“Did she find the dress?” he asked. Often, when Tate spoke of Libby, a note of hoarse reverence came into his voice. It happened then, too.

Julie smiled. “Yes, and it's fabulous,” she answered.

Tate's grin was as swift and as lethal as Garrett's, though it didn't have the same effect on Julie as Garrett's did. “
Libby's
fabulous,” he said.

“No argument there,” Julie replied.

Paige appeared in the doorway from the kitchen. “It's okay for Calvin to come home with me, right?” she asked. Calvin was pressed up against his aunt's side by then, clinging to her and gazing hopefully at his mother.

Calvin loved to spend time with either or both of his aunts, but he and Paige had a special bond.

Julie folded her arms, frowned a little and tapped one foot. “I don't know,” she said, pausing to run her teeth over her lower lip. “There
was
that whole creek incident, requiring a time-out.”

Paige ruffled Calvin's hair and made a face at Julie.

“Oh, all right,” Julie relented, as though making a great concession.

By then, she'd decided to tell Garrett she'd changed her mind about everything but making supper.

Julie loved cooking, and she was good at it.

For tonight, Garrett McKettrick would just have to be satisfied with food.

A
USTIN
,
CLAD ONLY IN FADED BLACK SWEATPANTS
and a shit-eatin' grin, turned from the refrigerator in the main kitchen to give Garrett an idle once-over. After a low whistle of exclamation, he plucked a can of beer from a shelf and shut the door, popped the top on the beer and raised it in a mocking toast.

“Dressed like that, big brother,” Austin drawled, “you're either announcing your candidacy for something, or fixing to charm some woman into the sack.”

Considering that he'd gone to some trouble to strike a casual tone, Garrett was not pleased by this observation—particularly since it struck so close to the bone. After he'd gotten back from Tate's place an hour or so before, he'd showered, dressed in moderately new jeans, a long-sleeved Western shirt open at the throat, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and donned a pair of decent boots.

He glared at Austin's beer, then at Austin.

“If anybody around here is a candidate for anything,” he replied, “it's you. You've been elected the resident lunatic by a landslide.”

Austin, suffering from a bad case of bed-head—on him, even that looked good, dammit—gave a companionable
belch and took a long swallow from the brew. “So it's the woman, then,” he said. “Julie Remington, I presume?”

No comment, Garrett thought.

“How about making yourself scarce?” he said aloud.

Austin mugged like he was wounded to the quick and pretended to pull a blade from his chest. He was scarred where a whole team of surgeons had put him back together after a bad turn with a mean bull on the rodeo circuit earlier that year, but that probably appealed to women, rather than putting them off.

“Well,” he said now, “
that
ain't neighborly.”

“We're not neighbors,” Garrett pointed out, casting an anxious glance toward the door leading in from the garage. “We're brothers. Get lost—and spare me the hillbilly grammar while you're at it.”

Instead of obliging, Austin padded over to the huge table in the middle of the room, drew back a chair and sat down. “I know it's inconvenient at the moment,” he said, “but I
live
here.”

Even looking like he did—he might have been sleeping on the floor of somebody's tackroom closet for a week—Austin had a way about him, especially with women. It would be just like him to wangle an invitation out of Julie to join them for supper, and then hang around for the rest of the night, knowing damn well he was getting in the way.

Garrett resisted an urge to shove a hand through his hair. He'd just combed it after his shower, gotten rid of the crease left by his hat. He'd spent the day helping the fence crew drive postholes and string wire, except for a stop at Tate's place on the way back home.

He smiled, recalling that. Maybe all wasn't lost, after all.

He'd fished Calvin out of the creek, though the kid had
never been in any serious danger of drowning, and that might have earned him a few points with Julie.

“Okay,” Garrett said, almost sighing the word. “What's it going to cost me to get you the hell out of here for the rest of the night?”

Austin's eyes twinkled with a faint reflection of the old mischief, then hardened slightly. “You've been kowtowing to Morgan Cox for too long, brother,” he said. “Not everybody has a price, whatever your boss may have led you to believe.”

Garrett's back molars ground together. He stood beside the table, gripping the edge, and did his best to loom. Not that Austin was intimidated, the little bastard—he was cocky as a rooster.

“Maybe I'll pretend you didn't say that,” Garrett said slowly and evenly. “The fact is, right about now I'd just as soon drown you in the pool as anything else.”

Austin chuckled, but the sound was raspy and there was no amusement in it. He shook his head once, and then leaned back to drain the beer can. That done, he stood up so fast that his chair nearly tipped over. He caught it before turning toward Garrett.

“Bring it on,” he challenged. His blue eyes flashed with temper, and with pain.

“Some other time,” Garrett replied quietly. Something was sure as hell eating his kid brother alive, but whatever it was, Austin wasn't ready to talk about it.

Austin raised an eyebrow. “Scared?”

In the near distance, one of the garage doors rolled up.

“You know I'm not,” Garrett said. “I happen to have other plans, that's all, and they don't include getting into a pissing match with you, little brother.”

Some of the granite drained out of Austin's eyes and his jawline; he looked almost like his old self again.

Almost, but not quite.

He slapped Garrett on the shoulder and headed for one of the stairways, and by the time Julie stepped into the kitchen, carrying one plastic grocery bag and her purse, Austin was gone.

“Where's Harry?” she asked, looking around the kitchen.

It took Garrett a moment to realize she was referring to the dog.

He smiled, crossed the room and took the bag from her hand. “He's taken to hanging out in front of my fireplace,” he explained. “I hope that's all right with you.”

“I wouldn't have thought he could manage the stairs,” Julie said, her tone fretful and her gaze straying up the steps.

“I carried him,” Garrett said. And just then, the three-legged beagle appeared on the landing above, making a happy whining sound down deep in his throat and wagging his tail and both hips.

Julie seemed strained and pretty tired, but a smile transformed her face. “You carried him?” she asked, as though she wasn't sure she'd heard him correctly.

“Yeah,” Garrett admitted, puzzled. The dog was about to start down the stairs, a decision that could prove disastrous, considering the critter's anatomical limitations, so he said, “Hold it right there” and bounded up there to head Harry off.

He caught the mutt in the curve of one arm, hoisted.

Julie stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at them, that soft smile still gracing her face. For a moment, it seemed to Garrett that she glowed like a stained-glass Madonna in a church window.

The sight of her made his breath catch and then swell in his throat.

“I hear you saved Calvin in the face of certain survival,” she quipped, the smile turning to a grin. “Thanks for that, Garrett.”

He chuckled. “You're welcome,” he answered, frozen where he was, at the top of the stairs, with a dog under his arm and a grocery sack dangling from his other hand. His voice came out sounding hoarse. “Come on up,” he said. “Whatever's in this bag, we'll cook it together.”

She hesitated, set her purse aside on a countertop and mounted the stairs, looking down at her feet as she climbed. It was only when she'd reached the landing that Garrett saw the heat burning in her cheeks.

She was still wearing her coat, and the rich autumn-brown color of the cloth turned her changeable eyes to a smoky shade of amber. “About what we were planning—for after supper, I mean—”

Garrett set Harry down, and the dog greeted Julie with a few jabs of his nose to her shins, then turned and trotted off toward the double doors opening into Garrett's living area.

Garrett shifted the grub-sack to his other hand and pressed his palm lightly into the small of Julie's back, steering her toward the well-lit privacy of his living room. He meant the gesture to reassure her, and she did seem to relax a little. At the same time, he felt energy zipping through her like electricity through a wire.

“Wow,” she said, after crossing the threshold.

A fire crackled on the hearth, and the tall windows overlooking the range seemed speckled with stars. Lamps burned here and there, switched to “dim,” giving the room a welcoming glow.

Garrett grinned at her, but proceeded to the kitchen, where he looked into the bag, saw that it contained a package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, and tossed the works into the refrigerator.

He'd opened a good shiraz earlier, to let it “breathe,” though he was secretly skeptical about the respiratory capacity of wine, no matter how fancy its label.

He slid two wineglasses from the built-in rack under one row of cupboards, holding them by their stems, and set them on the counter as Julie slid out of her coat and draped it over the back of one of the barstools at the counter.

Garrett washed his hands at the sink, remembering that he'd been holding the dog, dried them on a dish towel, and gave Julie a questioning look as he reached for the wine bottle.

She nodded, met his eyes as he handed her a glass and then clinked his own against it, very lightly.

“To a friendly supper,” he said huskily, wanting to put her at ease, “between two friends.”

Julie looked relieved, but a little disconcerted, too, as she nodded and then sipped. Closing her eyes, she said, “Ummm,” and things ground inside Garrett, like rusted gears freshly oiled and just starting to turn again.

If it hadn't felt so damn good, he reflected, it would have hurt like hell.

“Are we friends, Garrett?” she asked.

“I hope so,” he answered.

As if that settled something, Julie set the wineglass down, washed her hands and opened the fridge door to retrieve the bag. “Let's cook,” she said. “I'm starved.”

Right on cue, Garrett pulled a baking sheet lined with stuffed mushrooms from the oven. They'd been warming
there for a while, thanks to Esperanza, but they weren't shriveled, and they smelled fine.

Julie's eyes widened. “You cook?”

If only he could have lied and taken the credit. Alas, Garrett came from a long line of compulsive truth-tellers. “I know how to fry eggs,” he confessed. “Esperanza keeps a stash of frozen finger foods on hand at all times. Her theory is, You never know when a dinner party might break out.”

Julie laughed at that. Reached for one of the mushrooms and lifted it to her mouth, taking a delicate sniff before she bit into it.

“Ummmm,” she said again, just the way she had before, when she first tasted the wine. She
breathed
the sound, and there was something so sensual about it that Garrett's brain turned to vapor inside his skull and then seemed to dissipate like mist under a hot sun.

In that moment, the sophisticated Garrett McKettrick, former top aide to a U.S. senator, forgot everything he'd ever known about women, except for one thing: He loved them.

Loved the way they looked, the way they smelled, the way they felt.

Or maybe it was just this particular one he loved.

He was still standing there, dumbstruck by the implications, when Julie opened those marvelous, magical eyes, looked straight into his, and suddenly popped a mushroom into his mouth.

It was an ordinary gesture, entirely innocent.

And it struck Garrett with all the wallop of a punch.

It was only by superhuman effort that he refrained from taking the wineglass out of her hand, pressing her body against the wall or the refrigerator door, with the full length of his own, and kissing her like she'd never been kissed before.

Even by him.

“Whoa,” he ground out, amazed that it was so hard to rein himself in.

Julie gave a breathy little giggle and fluttered a hand in front of her face like a fan. “Phew,” she said. “Esperanza must have stuffed those mushrooms with jalapeños.”

Garrett laughed as some new and startled kind of joy welled up inside him and broke free. His heart pounded and his breath came shallow and raspy.

He loved Julie Remington.

No, he instantly corrected himself. He couldn't
possibly
be in love with her—it was too soon.

And he was in transition.

“We'd better cook,” he said, desperate to distract her.

And equally desperate
not
to.

Julie giggled again and put her wineglass on the counter, then slid both arms around his neck. He felt her breasts, soft against the hard wall of his chest. “Oh,” she said, “I think we're
already
cooking.”

Garrett, like his brothers, like his father and his grandfather and a whole slew of greats, had been raised to be a gentleman.

Cursing his upbringing, he took a very light grip on Julie's wrists and brought her arms down from around his neck. He held onto her hands, though. Squeezed them.

“Food first,” he said, and the rumble in his voice reminded him of the pre-earthquake sound of tectonic plates shifting far underground.

Julie's cheeks glowed and something flashed brief and bright in her eyes. But then she swallowed visibly and nodded.

“Food first,” she agreed.

 

T
HE WHOLE TIME SHE AND
G
ARRETT
were assembling that batch of chicken spaghetti, Julie was torn between equally strong impulses to run in the other direction, as fast as she could, and fling herself at him again.

Not that putting her arms around Garrett's neck really qualified as
flinging herself at him,
she thought. On the other hand, what
else
could she call it?

She couldn't blame it on the wine. Two sips weren't enough to make her brazen.

No, it hadn't been the wine.

She'd raised that stupid stuffed mushroom to his mouth—what had possessed her to do such a forward thing she would never know—and he'd taken it from her. Moreover, he'd sucked lightly at her fingers as she withdrew.

That
was the moment it happened. The moment she lost her mind.

They worked reasonably well together, Julie thought, taking occasional and very slow sips from her wineglass, and chatted like the old friends they most definitely were not while she slipped the casserole into the preheated oven and set the timer, after musing over the dials and buttons a little.

While the main course baked, Garrett threw together a very decent salad, and Julie watched, munching on another stuffed mushroom.