CHEYENNE SURVEYED THE CONTENTS of her suitcase for the third time since she’d gotten home from Jesse’s place. Tailored slacks. Suits. Silk blouses. Panty hose. Nothing suitable for a Saturday night barbecue and hayride on the Triple M.
“That Nigel dude’s on the phone again,” Mitch announced from the doorway of Cheyenne’s girl-hood bedroom. It was a tiny place, hardly larger than the walk-in closet in her San Diego apartment, and there were still bits of tape clinging to the wallpaper where she’d affixed pictures of Jesse, all through junior and senior high. Where were those clippings and school photos now? She didn’t remember throwing them away, but maybe she had, during some fit of adolescent heartbreak.
She tuned in again, just in time to hear Mitch finish with, “You’d better talk to the boss man. I don’t think he’s going to quit calling until you do.”
Cheyenne turned to look at her brother. Here was a primary reason why she had to attend that McKettrick party. Mitch had brightened just since she’d told him about it, and so had Ayanna. They were already looking forward to the event, and God knew they had little enough to keep them going. “I’ll be right there,” she said, after forestalling a sigh. “Might as well get it over with.”
Mitch smiled. “That’s what you always told me, anyway,” he said. “Whenever I had to have a spinal tap or go through another physical-therapy session.”
Unknowingly, Mitch had put all Cheyenne’s complaints squarely back into perspective. So what if she didn’t have a job anymore? So what if she didn’t own a car, or a pair of jeans to wear to the party? She had two good legs, and she’d never had to endure a single painful medical procedure in her life. Her employment situation, dicey as it was, probably looked pretty good to her brother.
She pointed a finger at him and pretended to shoot. “You made a direct hit, buddy,” she said grinning. “Thanks.”
Mitch wheeled backward to let her pass.
In the living room, she picked up the heavy receiver of the plain black rotary phone her grandmother had had installed back in the mid 1950s. The service had ebbed and flowed over the years, according to the family’s financial ups and downs.
Cheyenne took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “Hello, Nigel.”
“You’re not fired,” Nigel declared, blustering a little.
Cheyenne blinked. “I’m not? Maybe you should know I ran over my company phone, and—”
“I’m having a car delivered, and a new phone. The rental people will pick up whatever you’re driving now. I want you to keep working on this deal, Cheyenne. McKettrick must have a weak point somewhere, and we’re going to find it.”
This kind of double-pronged approach was typical of Nigel, and while Cheyenne was certainly glad she was still among the gainfully employed, and even gladder that she would have a company car, the remark about finding and exploiting Jesse’s “weak point” left her feeling disturbed and oddly protective. “Nothing underhanded, Nigel,” she warned. “I won’t be part of anything like that.”
Nigel gave a snort—possibly disbelief, possibly even contempt, there was no telling without seeing his face—and Cheyenne wondered if she’d ever really known the man at all. She’d never suspected, for instance, that he’d believed she’d used sex to land all those deals, and just remembering the insinuation made her fume.
Ayanna was watching her from the kitchen door, though, and Mitch from his chair just inside the living room. Whatever her new reservations about her boss, and about Meerland Ventures in general, she had to stay in the game as long as she could.
“Are you hung up on this guy or something?” Nigel asked.
Cheyenne simmered. “I don’t have to be ‘hung up’ on Jesse to play by the rules,” she said. “I have standards, Nigel.”
“And I don’t?”
“I’m not sure,” she replied. “First, you suggest that I sleep with him to get what I want. Now, you’re talking about looking for a soft spot to stick the knife. I’m not about to undercut Jesse McKettrick or anybody else to push this deal through. Before you send the car and the new phone, you’d better be clear on where I’m coming from.”
“I’m clear, all right,” Nigel replied. “Listen, I’m sorry if I stepped on your toes. I just thought you were willing to play hardball, that’s all. And furthermore, if you think people with the kind of money the McKettricks have don’t, you are grievously naive.”
Cheyenne frowned. “I’m confused, here, Nigel. Do I still have a job or not? And if I do, do I get to do it my way? Because I don’t give a rip how anybody else conducts business. I’m only concerned with my own conscience.”
Mitch and Ayanna applauded.
Cheyenne widened her eyes and mimed a gulp.
“You get the car,” Nigel said. “You get the phone. And you get three weeks—twenty-one bright, shiny days—to pull this off. If you fail, no car, no phone, no job.” He paused, then added solemnly, “No company.”
“I want one more thing,” Cheyenne said. In poker terms, she thought wryly, her chips were in the center of the table and she was all in. Might as well call Nigel’s car and phone and raise him an ultimatum. “No more phone calls. I believe I’ve said this before, but since it didn’t get through, I’ll try one more time. When I have something to say, I’ll call you.”
Another round of applause from the family, louder this time.
“Do you have the television set on or something?” Nigel asked with a frown in his voice.
“Yeah,” Cheyenne answered, with a wink for Mitch and Ayanna. The TV, with its foil-flagged antenna, probably didn’t even work. “Wheel of Fortune.”
I’ll spin, Pat.
“You’ll have the car tomorrow,” Nigel promised.
Cheyenne thanked him, hung up and then stood there, wondering whether to do a victory dance or burst into tears.
Ayanna and Mitch stared at her, waiting for some reaction.
“I need jeans,” she said. “And let’s splurge on supper at the Roadhouse. I’m buying.”
She didn’t want to go near Lucky’s, because of old memories, and besides, the Roadhouse was more accessible for Mitch.
Their faces glowed.
“You don’t own a pair of jeans?” Ayanna asked, sounding stunned, looking down at her own battered Levi’s.
“Why does everybody make such a big deal about that?” Cheyenne retorted good-naturedly. “You’d think they were part of a national uniform or something.”
“They are,” Ayanna said.
Half an hour later, with everybody spit-shined and presentable, and Mitch’s chair folded and loaded into the trunk of the rental car, they set out for town. Cheyenne dashed into the local Stuff-Mart, bought two pairs of jeans, two T-shirts, a denim jacket and some cheap but flashy boots. When she got back to the car, Ayanna was reading a newspaper, while Mitch, ensconced in the backseat, played a handheld video game.
“All set?” Ayanna asked, eyeing the bulging blue plastic bag Cheyenne carried.
“All set,” Cheyenne replied, hoping it was true.
She had jeans.
She had three weeks to change Jesse’s mind about selling his land.
And it would take a miracle.
“NO ANSWER,” KEEGAN SAID, hanging up the phone and sitting back in his chair again. His eyes twinkled as he studied Jesse, though the set of his face remained serious. “You know, cousin, you don’t look as if you want me to bring Cheyenne in for an interview, let alone offer her a job with McKettrickCo. And I find that fascinating, given that that was allegedly the reason why you came here in the first place.”
Jesse couldn’t help scowling. He was losing his touch, he concluded. All of a sudden, people could read him like a book.
Maybe he ought to stay away from that big poker tournament in Vegas. Leave well enough alone.
As if he’d ever been able to do that.
“She’s coming to Sierra and Travis’s party with me on Saturday,” Jesse said, for the sake of clarity.
“I see,” Keegan said sagely, grinning with everything but his mouth. “You don’t just like Cheyenne—you like her.”
Jesse shifted in his chair. He’d drawn a line in the sand, marked his territory. So be it. “Just don’t put the moves on her, okay?”
Keegan chuckled. “Now that’s funny, coming from you. I’m not the famous heartbreaker in this family, you know.”
“I mean it, Keeg. Cheyenne’s vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable? Good God, you have been watching talk-TV. I remember her as serious and smart. Tough, too—she had to be, to grow up with Cash Bridges for a father. But ‘vulnerable’? I don’t think so, Jesse.”
“Think whatever you damn well please,” Jesse said tersely. “But don’t mess with her.”
Keegan held up both hands, palms out, in a gesture of amused concession. “I hear you,” he said, but the thoughtful look in his eyes still raised Jesse’s hackles.
He thrust himself out of his chair, reached for his hat. “See ya,” he said.
“See ya,” Keegan replied.
Jesse left the office without another word.
SUPPER AT THE ROADHOUSE was a celebration, of sorts. Ayanna was pleased about her new job at the supermarket, and Mitch flirted the whole time with a teenage waitress named Bronwyn. Cheyenne was the only one putting on an act. Behind a cheerful smile, she mentally relived that morning’s encounter with Jesse, over and over again. Hadn’t he told her, straight out, that he wasn’t about to sell his precious five hundred acres? What did she hope to accomplish by staying on in Indian Rock?
Three weeks wasn’t enough time to change Jesse’s mind.
He was a McKettrick, genetically stubborn. Three centuries probably wouldn’t do the trick.
All she was really doing was putting off the inevitable.
Prolonging the agony.
Maybe she ought to look into bagging groceries alongside her mother.
She was actually thinking of asking the Roadhouse manager for a job application when some primitive sense awakened, crackling in her nerve endings, and her gaze swung, without her consciously intending to look in that direction, toward the front door.
Jesse McKettrick ambled in.
He looked straight at her.
The air sizzled.
She wondered why the smoke detectors didn’t go off, and if he’d left his hat in the truck, because he wasn’t wearing it.
He smiled and came directly over to their booth.
“Hello, Cheyenne,” he said. He nodded to Ayanna. “Mrs. Bridges.” Then he turned his easy, approving smile on Mitch. “Jesse McKettrick,” he said, putting out his hand.
Mitch, parked at the end of the table in his wheelchair, shook it manfully. “Mitch Bridges,” he said.
“Why don’t you join us, Jesse?” Ayanna asked, beaming.
Cheyenne nudged her mother’s ankle with the toe of her shoe.
“We’re just about to order dessert,” Ayanna added, ignoring the signal.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Jesse said. Cheyenne had to scoot over a little to let him sit down next to her in the booth, or he’d have landed on her lap, but she didn’t give him much room.
“Do they have any horses at the ranch where we’re going to for the barbecue?” Mitch asked, so hopefully that Cheyenne’s throat constricted.
“Mitch,” she began, “you can’t—”
This time, it was Jesse who did the nudging. His right thigh whacked eloquently against her left, effectively silencing her. And sending a flash of heat through her entire body. “Sure there are,” he said. “I’ll saddle one for you if you want.”
Cheyenne whacked him back. A painful flush climbed her neck and pulsed in her cheeks.
Jesse didn’t spare her so much as a glance, but the pressure of his thigh increased, hard and muscular.
“That would be great!” Mitch said exuberantly.
Ayanna looked equally delighted.
Had these people lost their minds? Was she, Cheyenne, the only one with any common sense at all? Mitch was a paraplegic. He couldn’t ride a horse.
Bronwyn, Mitch’s new friend, strolled over to take dessert orders. She was cute, with gleaming brown hair worn in a lengthy French braid, huge green eyes and an angelic smile. Her gaze kept slanting sideways to land on Mitch, who smiled up at her as though they’d known each other from birth.
“The peach cobbler’s good today,” she said. Only then, apparently, did she notice the latest addition to the corner booth. “Oh. Hi, Jesse.”
Cheyenne allowed a moment of smugness to distract her from her irritation over Jesse’s glib promise to put Mitch on horseback. Obviously, there were women who were oblivious to the McKettrick charm.
“Hi,” Jesse said amiably. His thigh was still pressing against Cheyenne’s, and she couldn’t seem to muster the coordination to move away. “I’ll have the cobbler, please.”
Mitch and Ayanna both followed suit.
“Ice water,” Cheyenne said when Bronwyn gave her a questioning glance.
“It won’t help,” Jesse observed, as if the two of them were alone.
“Shut up,” Cheyenne told him.
“Cheyenne!” Ayanna protested.
Cheyenne subsided. Folded her arms and slid as close to the wall as she could get. Even with several inches of distance between them though, she still felt the heat and substance of Jesse’s body. They might as well have been in full contact.
Jesse turned and looked down into Cheyenne’s eyes. “My cousin Keegan is trying to reach you,” he said bluntly.
“Why?” Cheyenne asked.
Jesse’s jaw tightened, but the move was so slight that Cheyenne almost missed it. “He wants to set up an interview at McKettrickCo.”
“For what?”
“A job.”
“Jesse, I told you—”
Cheyenne felt her mother’s heel digging into her instep.
“You can always say no,” Jesse reasoned. “You did tell me you were about to be out of work, didn’t you?”
“Out of work?” Mitch put in proudly, probably more for Bronwyn’s benefit than anyone else’s. The girl lingered, though she’d already taken the order for three cobblers and Cheyenne’s ice water. “She’s getting a company car.”
Cheyenne’s cheeks heated. Now what was she supposed to say to Jesse?
Change of plans. I have three weeks to do the impossible.
Oh, and before I forget, my boss is probably looking for your Achilles’ heel right this very moment. You don’t have one—do you?
Jesse frowned. “So you still think you can change my mind?” It was clearly a rhetorical question. Why else would she be staying in Indian Rock and getting a car as a perk after telling Jesse only that morning she’d almost certainly be fired as soon as Nigel heard what his decision was?
She opened her mouth and promptly closed it again, because anything she would have said could only have gotten her in deeper.
Bronwyn left, reluctantly, and returned with desserts.
“This cobbler,” Ayanna piped up hastily, “is delicious.”
It was an interesting observation, Cheyenne thought, since she hadn’t actually tasted the stuff yet.
Jesse sat with his fork poised in midair, and Cheyenne didn’t reach for her glass of water. Suddenly, he flashed that wicked grin, but his eyes were stone serious.
“You might want to consider working for McKettrickCo,” he said. “I can’t promise a company car, but I can tell you this—you won’t be asked to ruin a tract of land that’s been pretty much the same since God spoke it into existence.”
With that, he stood, tossed enough money to pay for his untouched cobbler onto the table and left the Roadhouse.
Mitch and Ayanna sat in uncomfortable silence.
After a moment’s hesitation and a muttered swearword, Cheyenne got up and hurried after Jesse, nearly running over Bronwyn in the process. She caught up to him in the parking lot, just as he was about to climb into his truck.
“Jesse, wait.”
He turned slowly to look at her, and it struck her that he didn’t look angry. He looked hurt.
“Are we still on for Saturday night?” she asked, feeling foolish.
Jesse didn’t speak.
“My mother and brother are counting on going.”
“I’ll be around at six,” Jesse told her flatly. “Just like I said I would.”
“I bought jeans and everything,” she said. He’d just answered her question. Why was she prattling like this? And why couldn’t she simply cut her losses and run?
He took a step toward her. “You just don’t give up, do you?”
“I can’t, Jesse.”
“Because of the company car?”
“Because of my family.”
He sighed, reached into the truck for his hat and settled it on his head. “I’ve got a family, too, Cheyenne. Sure, that whole creek thing got by me, but the fact is, we depend pretty heavily on that water in dry years, down on the Triple M. Even if I wanted to sell that land to a developer—and we’ve already established that I don’t—I couldn’t put the ranch in jeopardy like that.”
Cheyenne clasped her hands together behind her back. “I know all that, Jesse,” she said. “And believe it or not, I respect you for taking a stand. But I’ve got to try to change your mind, because it’s my job.”
Jesse surprised her with another grin. Even standing at least ten feet from him, she felt the impact of it, and had to catch her breath. The feeling roughly corresponded to being French-kissed without warning.
“I can’t say I’m averse to being persuaded,” he said. “As long as you understand that you don’t have a chance in the furthest corner of hell.” He climbed into the truck, spoke to her from behind the wheel. “Tell your brother and mother it was good to see them.”
Cheyenne took a step toward him. “About saddling that horse for Mitch—”
He held up a hand to stop the flow of words. “That,” he said, “is between Mitch and me.” With that, he closed the truck door, started the engine and backed out, waving once as he passed.
Cheyenne stood rooted to that potholed parking lot, watching him drive away.
THE NEXT MORNING, she was breaking in one of her new pairs of jeans and an old cotton shirt of her mother’s when Jesse pulled into the front yard, with a bunch of new lumber sticking out of the bed of his truck.
Cheyenne had been clearing away debris since just after sunup, in an effort to make the place look halfway decent, but she was still waist-high in weeds. Sweat dampened her scalp and forehead, and her hair was coming down from the loose clip on top of her head.
She sighed and tried to ignore the strange jubilation she felt.
“Mornin’,” Jesse said, climbing out of the pickup. He took off his hat, tossed it onto the passenger seat and approached.
“What are you doing here?” Cheyenne asked, embarrassed by both her own appearance and that of the property.
“Just a neighborly visit,” he answered and rounded the truck to begin unloading the lumber. “I brought a box of doughnuts, hoping you’d contribute the coffee.”
Cheyenne approached. “What—?”
“Okay, I admit it,” Jesse said with another shameless grin. “I cruised by the place last night, after I left you at the Roadhouse, and noticed you needed a ramp for Mitch’s wheelchair.”
Cheyenne’s pride kicked in. “We have—”
Jesse nodded toward the half-rotted boards stretching between the porch and the ground. “Recipe for disaster,” he said.
“I appreciate your concern, but we really don’t need—”
Ayanna came out onto the porch, dressed in jeans and the red cotton shirt provided by the supermarket. “Jesse,” she called. “What a nice surprise!”
“You’re supposed to be friendly to me, remember?” Jesse whispered, close—much too close—to Cheyenne’s ear. “Try to get on my good side, so I’ll sell you that five hundred acres?”
“But you don’t have any intention of doing that,” Cheyenne protested, whispering, too.
“No,” Jesse said, “I don’t. But l will enjoy your efforts at persuasion. You might start by taking the doughnuts inside, and giving up a cup of coffee. I take it black.”
“This is crazy!”
“Yeah,” Jesse grinned. “I don’t know what’s come over me.”
Cheyenne gave up—at least temporarily—and went to the passenger side of the truck for the doughnuts. She and her mother bumped shoulders as they passed in the yard, Cheyenne on her way into the house, Ayanna headed straight for Jesse.
“Behave,” Ayanna ordered under her breath.
Cheyenne stiffened her spine and kept walking.
When she returned a few minutes later, with Jesse’s coffee and three doughnuts on a cracked plate, Ayanna was pulling out in the van, on her way to work. She must have met the rental-car people on the bend in the driveway because she’d just disappeared into the stand of cottonwoods when two guys showed up in a minibus.
Cheyenne shoved the coffee and doughnuts at Jesse and went to sign off on the car and surrender the keys. She felt oddly bereft as she watched the two vehicles speed away.
When she turned to look at Jesse, he was sipping coffee and holding a doughnut with a big bite out of one side.
“Guess you’re on foot for the time being,” he said.
Cheyenne lifted her wrist, then remembered she wasn’t wearing a watch. “Not for long,” she replied. “What are you up to, Jesse?”
“Just doing a kindness for a friend,” he said.
Mitch wheeled out onto the porch, which took some maneuvering, since the door was barely wide enough to accommodate his chair. “Hey, Jesse,” he said.
“Hey, dude,” Jesse replied.
“What’s with the boards?” Mitch asked, but the expression in his eyes said he knew, or hoped he did.
“Building a ramp,” Jesse said. He finished the doughnut, set his coffee down and walked back to the truck, returning almost immediately with a toolbox swinging from one hand.
Mitch’s smile broadened. “Can I help?”
Cheyenne held her breath.
“Sure,” Jesse said. “You didn’t expect to just sit around and watch, did you?”