Linda Lael Miller - McKettricks Bundle

M C K ETTRICK LAND , Cheyenne Bridges thought stoically, as she stood next to her rented car on a gravel pullout alongside the highway, one hand shading her eyes from the Arizona sun. A faint drumbeat throbbed in her ears, an underground river flowing beneath her pulse, and she remembered a time she could not have remembered. An era when only the Great Spirit could lay claim to the valleys and canyons and mesas, to the arch of the sky, blue as her grandmothers favorite sugar bowla cherished premium plucked from some long-ago flour sackto the red dirt and the scattered stands of white oak and Joshua and ponderosa pine.

It had taken Angus McKettrick, and other intrepidly arrogant nineteenth-century pioneers like him, to fence in these thousands of square miles, to pen their signatures to deeds, to run cattle and dig wells and wrest a living from the rocky, thistle-strewn soil. Old Angus had passed that audacious sense of ownership on to his sons, and the sons of their sons, down through the generations.

McKettricks forever and ever, amen.

Cheyenne bit her lower lip. Her cell phone, lying on the passenger seat of the car, chimed like an arriving elevatorNigel again. She ignored the insistent sound until it stopped, only too aware that the reprieve would be fleeting. Meanwhile, the land itself seemed to seep into her heart, rising like water finding its level in some dank, forgotten cistern.

The feeling was bittersweet, a complex tangle of loneliness and homecoming and myriad other emotions she couldnt readily identify.

She had sworn never to come back to this place.

Never to set eyes on Jesse McKettrick again.

And fate, in its inimitable way, was forcing her to do both those things.

She sighed.

An old blue pickup passed on the road, horn honking in exuberant greeting. A trail of cheerfully mournful country music thrummed in its wake, and the peeling sticker on the rear bumper read Save The Cowboys.

Cheyenne waved, self-conscious in her trim black designer suit and high heels. This was boots-and-jeans country, and shed stand out like the proverbial sore thumb the moment she drove into town.

Welcome home, she thought ruefully.

The cell chirped again, and she picked her way through the loose gravel to reach in through the open window and grabbed it.

Its about time you answered, Nigel Meerland snapped before she could draw a breath to say hello. I was beginning to think youd fallen into some manhole.

There arent any manholes in Indian Rock, Cheyenne replied, making her way around to the drivers side and opening the door.

Have you contacted him yet? Nigel didnt bother with niceties like Hi, how are you? either in person or over the telephone. He simply demanded what he wantedand most of the time, he got it.

Nigel, Cheyenne said evenly, I just got here. So, no, I have not contacted him. Him was Jesse McKettrick. The last person in this or any other universe she wanted to seenot that Jesse would be able to place her in the long line of adoring women strung out behind him like the cars of a derailed freight train.

Well, youre burning daylight, kiddo, Nigel shot back. Her boss was in his late thirties and English, but he liked using colorful terms, with a liberal smattering of clichs. Westernisms, he called them. Lets get this show on the road. I dont have to tell you how anxious our investors are to get that condo development underway.

No, Cheyenne thought, sitting down sideways on the car seat, constrained by her tight skirt and swinging her legs in under the steering wheel, you dont have to tell me. Ive heard nothing else for the last six months.

Jesse wont sell, she said. Realizing shed spoken the thought aloud, she closed her eyes, braced for the inevitable response.

He has to sell, Nigel countered. Failure is not an option. Everythingand I mean everything is riding on this deal. If the finance people pull out, the company will go under. You wont have a job, and Ill have to crawl back to the ancestral pile on my knees, begging for the scant privileges of a second son.

Cheyenne closed her eyes. Like Nigel, she had a lot at stake. More than just her job. She had Mitch, her younger brother, to consider. And her mother.

The bonus Nigel had promised, in writing, would give them all a kind of security theyd never known.

The pit of her stomach clenched.

I know, she told Nigel bleakly. I know.

Get cracking, Pocahontas, Nigel instructed, and hung up in her ear.

Cheyenne opened her eyes, pressed the end button with her thumb, drew a deep breath and released it slowly. Then she tossed the phone onto the other seat, started the engine and headed for Indian Rock.

The town hadnt changed much since shed left it at seventeen, bound for college down in Tucson. There was the dry cleaners, the library, the elementary school. And the small, white-steepled church where shed struggled to understand Commandments and arks and burning bushes, and had placed quarters, after unwrapping them carefully from a cheap cloth handkerchief, in the collection plate.

She sat a little straighter in the seat as she drove the length of Main Street, signaled and turned left at the old train depot, long since converted to an antiques minimall. The rental car bumped over the railroad tracks, past progressively seedier trailer courts, through a copse of cottonwood trees.

The narrow beams of the ancient cattle guard rattled under the tires.

Cheyenne gave a grateful sigh when the car didnt fall through and slowed to round the last bend in the narrow dirt road leading to the house.

Like the single and double-wides shed just passed, the place had gone downhill in her absence. The lawn was overgrown and coils of rusty barbed wire littered the ground. The porch sagged and the siding, scavenged and nailed to the walls without regard to color, jarred the eye.

Gram had been so proud of her house and yard. It would break her heart to see it now.

Her mothers old van, a patchwork affair like the house, stood in the driveway with the side door open.

Cheyenne had hoped for a few days to settle in before her mother and brother arrived from Phoenix, and at least put in a ramp for Mitchs wheelchair, but it wasnt to be. Her heart fluttered with anticipation, then sank.

She put the rental in Park and shut off the motor, surveying the only real home shed ever had.

Ill show you an ancestral pile, Nigel, she muttered. Just hop in your Bentley and drive on up to Indian Rock, Arizona.

The front door swung open just then, and Ayanna Bridges appeared on the porch, wearing a faded cotton dress, high-topped sneakers and a tentative smile. Her straight ebony hair fell past her waist, loosely restrained by a tarnished silver barrette shed probably owned since the 1960s. When her mother started toward the rickety steps, Cheyenne got out of the car.

Look, Ayanna called, pointing. I found some old boards out behind the shed and dragged them around to make a ramp. Mitch whizzed right up to them like he was on flat ground.

Life had forced Ayanna to be resourceful. Makeshift ramps for her sons wheelchair were the least of her accomplishments. Shed waited tables, often pulling two shifts, grappled with various social-service agencies to get Mitch the medical care he needed, sold cosmetics and miracle vitamins, all without a twinge of self-pityat least, not one shed ever allowed her children to see.