father?”
“Reckon so,” Travis said. He and Meg communicated regularly, most often by email, and she’d filled him in on Sierra as far as she could. Nobody in the family knew her very well, including her mother, Eve, so the information was sparse. She had a seven-year-old son—now getting out of the car—and she’d been serving cock tails in Florida for the last few years, and that was about all Travis knew about her. As Meg’s care taker and resident horse trainer, not to mention her friend, Travis had stocked the cup boards and refrigerator, made sure the temperamental furnace was working and none of the plumbing had frozen, and started up Meg’s Blazer every day, just to make sure it was running.
From the looks of that station wagon, it was a good thing he’d followed the boss-lady’s orders.
“You gonna help me with this horse,” Jesse asked testily, “or just stand there gawking?”
Travis chuckled. “Right now,” he said, “I’m all for gawking.”
Sierra McKettrick was tall and slender, with short, gleaming brown hair the color of a good chestnut horse. Her eyes were huge and probably blue, though she was still a stride or two too far away for him to tell.
Jesse swore and stomped back up the ramp, making plenty of noise as he did so. Like most of the McKettricks, Jesse was used to getting his way, and while he was a known womanizer, he’d evidently dismissed Sierra out of hand. After all, she was a blood relative—no sense driving his herd into that canyon.
Travis took a step toward the woman and the boy, who was staring at him with his mouth open.
“Is this Meg’s house?” Sierra asked.
“Yes,” Travis said, putting out his hand, pulling it back to remove his work gloves, and offering it again. “Travis Reid,” he told her.
“Sierra Bres—McKettrick,” she replied. Her grip was firm. And her eyes were definitely blue. The kind of blue that pierces something in a man’s middle. She smiled, but tentatively. Some where along the line, she’d learned to be sparing with her smiles. “This is my son, Liam.”
“Howdy,” Liam said, squaring his small shoulders.
Travis grinned. “Howdy,” he replied. Meg had said the boy had health problems, but he looked pretty sound to Travis.
“That sure is an ugly horse,” Liam announced, pointing to wards the trailer.
Travis turned. Baldy stood spraddle-footed, midway down the ramp, a miserable gray specimen of a critter with pink eyes and liver-colored splotches all over his mangy hide.
“Sure is,” Travis agreed, and glowered at Jesse for palming the animal off on him. It was like him to pull off a dramatic last-minute rescue, then leave the functional aspects of the problem to somebody else.
Jesse flashed a grin, and for a moment, Travis felt territorial, wanted to set himself between Sierra and her boy, the pair of them, and one of his oldest friends. He felt off balance, some how, as though he’d been ambushed. What the hell was that all about?
“Is that a buckin’ bronc?” Liam asked, venturing a step to ward Baldy.
Sierra reached out quickly, caught hold of the fur-trimmed hood on the kid’s coat and yanked him back. Cold sunlight glinted off the kid’s glasses, making his eyes invisible.
Jesse laughed. “Back in the day,” he said, “Baldy was a rodeo horse. Cowboys quivered in their boots when they drew him to ride. Now, as you can see, he’s a little past his prime.”
“And you would be—?” Sierra asked, with a touch of coolness to her tone. Maybe she was the one woman out of a thousand who could see Jesse McKettrick for what he was—a good-natured case of very bad news.
“Your cousin Jesse.”
Sierra sized him up, took in his battered jeans, work shirt, sheepskin coat and very expensive boots. “Descended from…?”
The McKettricks talked like that. Every one of them could trace their lineage back to old Angus, by a variety of paths, and while there would be hell to pay if anybody riled them as a bunch, they mostly kept to their own branch of the family tree.
“Jeb,” Jesse said.
Sierra nodded.
Liam’s attention remained fixed on the horse. “Can I ride him?”
“Sure,” Jesse replied.
“No way,” said Sierra, at exactly the same moment.
Travis felt sorry for the kid, and it must have shown in his face, because Sierra’s gaze narrowed on him.
“We’ve had a long trip,” she said. “I guess we’ll just go inside.”
“Make your selves at home,” Travis said, gesturing toward the house. “Don’t worry about your bags. Jesse and I’ll carry them in for you.”
She considered, probably wondering if she’d be obligated in any way if she agreed, then nodded. Catching Liam by the hood of his coat again, she got him turned from the horse and hustled him toward the front door.
“Too bad we’re kin,” Jesse said, following Sierra with his eyes.
“Too bad,” Travis agreed mildly, though privately he didn’t believe it was such a bad thing at all.
The house was a long, sprawling structure, with two stories and a wrap around porch. Sierra’s most immediate impression was of substance and practicality, rather than elegance, and she felt a subtle interior shift, as if she’d been a long time lost in a strange, winding street, thick with fog, and suddenly found her self standing at her own front door.
“Those guys are real cowboys,” Liam said, once they were inside.
Sierra nodded distractedly, taking in the pegged wood floors, gleaming with the patina of venerable age, the double doors and steep stair case on the right, the high ceilings, the antique grandfather clock ticking ponderously beside the door. She peeked into a spacious living room, probably called a parlor when the house was new, and admired the enormous natural-rock fire place, with its raised hearth and wood-nook. Worn but colorful rugs gave some relief to the otherwise uncompromisingly masculine decor of leather couches and chairs and tables of rough-hewn pine, as did the piano set in an alcove of floor-to-ceiling windows.
An odd nostalgia overtook Sierra; she’d never set foot on the Triple M before that day, let alone entered the home of Holt and Lorelei McKettrick, but she might have, if her dad hadn’t snatched her the day Eve filed for divorce, and carried her off to San Miguel de Allende to share his expatriate life style. She might have spent summers here, as Meg had, picking black berries, wading in mountain streams, riding horses. Instead, she’d run barefoot through the streets of San Miguel, with no more memory of her mother than a faint scent of expensive perfume, some times encountered among the waves of tourists who frequented the markets, shops and restaurants of her home town.
Liam tugged at the sleeve of her coat. “Mom?”
She snapped out of her reverie, looked down at him, and smiled. “You hungry, bud?”
Liam nodded
