LITMIR.BIZ

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and Mitch had different fathers; hers was dead, his was God knew where. Ten years ago, when she’d left Indian Rock, he’d been nine and she’d been seventeen. When Ayanna had followed her second husband, Pete, to Phoenix, dragging Mitch along with her, Cheyenne had been in her sophomore year at the University of Arizona, scrambling to keep up her grades and hold on to her night job. Mitch had written her a plaintive letter, begging her to come home, so the two of them could stay in this run-down shack of a house. He’d loved Indian Rock then—loved the singular freedoms of growing up in a small town.

       She’d replied with a postcard, scrawled on her break at Hooters, telling him to get real. She wasn’t about to come back, and even if she did, Ayanna would never agree to let them live alone, with Gram gone. You’ll like Phoenix, she’d said.

       “I’m sorry, Mitch,” she said now, after swallowing her heart. It was true that Ayanna wouldn’t have let her children stay there, if only because she’d needed the pittance she’d received for renting the place out, but there were gentler ways of refusing.

       “For what?” he asked.

       “Everything,” she answered.

       “It wasn’t your fault,” Mitch told her. “The accident, I mean.”

       I could have come back, gotten a job at the Roadhouse or Lucky’s, waiting tables. I could have paid Ayanna some rent, and probably gotten something from the state to help with the cost of raising my little brother. If I’d even tried…

       “It wouldn’t have happened if we’d been here,” she said.

       “Who knows?” he asked. “Maybe it was fate—maybe I’d have rolled that four-wheeler anyhow.”

       Cheyenne closed her eyes against the images that were always hovering at the edge of her consciousness: Mitch, sixteen and foolish, joyriding in the desert with friends on “four-wheelers”—all-terrain vehicles designed for the hopelessly reckless. The rollover and critical spine injury. The rush to the hospital after her mother’s frantic call, the long vigil in the waiting room outside Intensive Care, when nobody knew if Mitch would live or die.

       The surgeries.

       The slow, excruciating recovery.

       Cheyenne had been just starting to make a name for herself at Meerland then. She’d driven back and forth between San Diego and Phoenix, armed with a company laptop and a cell phone. She’d held on stubbornly and worked hard, determined to prove to Nigel that she could succeed.

       And she had. While spelling an exhausted Ayanna at the hospital—Pete, husband number two and Mitch’s dad, had fled when he’d realized he was expected to behave like a responsible adult—she’d struck up a friendship with one of her brother’s surgeons and had eventually persuaded him to invest in Meerland. When his profits were impressive, he’d brought several of his colleagues onboard.

       Mitch had gradually gotten better, until he was well enough to leave the hospital, and Cheyenne had gone back to San Diego and thrown all her energies into her job.

       “Do you think we could get a dog?”

       Cheyenne blinked. Returned to the here-and-now with a thump. “A dog?”

       Mitch smiled, and that was such a rare thing that it made her heart skitter over a beat. “We couldn’t have one at the apartment,” he said.

       “But you’ll be going back—”

       “I’m never going back,” Mitch said with striking certainty.

       “What makes you say that?”

       “We don’t have to pay rent here,” he answered. “Mom’s talking about painting again, and getting a job waiting tables or selling souvenirs someplace. She’ll probably meet some loser and make it her life’s mission to save him from himself.”

       For all her intelligence, Ayanna had the kind of romantic history that would provide material for a week of Dr. Phil episodes. At least she hadn’t married again after Pete.

       Tears burned in Cheyenne’s eyes, and she was glad the room was lit only by Mitch’s computer screen and the tacky covered-wagon lamp on the dresser.

       “I wish—” Mitch began when Cheyenne didn’t, couldn’t, speak, but his voice fell away.

       “What, Mitch?” she asked, after swallowing hard. “What do you wish?”

       “I wish I could have a job, and a girlfriend. I wish I could ride a horse.”

       Cheyenne didn’t know what to say. Jobs were few and far between in Indian Rock, especially for the disabled. Girls Mitch’s age were working, going to college, dating men who could take them places. And riding horses? That was for people with two good legs and more courage than good sense.

       “Isn’t there something else?” she said, almost whispering.

       Mitch smiled sadly, turned away again and brought the war game back up on his computer screen. Blip-blip-kabang.

       Cheyenne sat helplessly on the bed for a few moments, then got to her feet, laid a hand briefly on her brother’s shoulder, and left the room, closing the door behind her.

      THE HEADLIGHTS OF JESSE’S truck swept across the old log schoolhouse his great-great-great grandfather, Jeb McKettrick, had built for his teacher bride, Chloe. Jesse’s sisters had used the place as a playhouse when they were kids, and Jesse, being a decade younger, had made a fort of it. Now, on the rare occasions when his parents came back to the ranch, it served as an office.

       He pulled up beside the barn, and the motion lights came on.

       Inside, he checked on the horses, six of them altogether, though the number varied. They’d been fed and turned out for some exercise that morning, before he’d left for town, but he added flakes of dried Bermuda grass to their feeders now just the same, to make up for being gone so long.

       They were forgiving, like always, and grateful for the attention he gave them.

       He took the time to groom them, one by one, but eventually, there was nothing to do but face that empty house.

       It was big; generations of McKettricks had added on to it—a room here, a story there. Now that his folks spent the majority of their time in Palm Beach, playing golf and socializing, and Victoria and Sarah were busy jet-setting with their wealthy husbands, Jesse was the unofficial owner.

       He entered through the kitchen door, switched on the lights.

       The house his cousins, Meg and Sierra, owned was reportedly haunted. Jesse often wished this one was, too, because at least then he wouldn’t have been alone.

       He went to the walk-in Sub-Zero, took out a beer and popped the top. What he ought to do was get a dog, but he was gone too much. It wouldn’t be fair to consign some poor unsuspecting mutt to a lonely life, just so he could come home to somebody who’d always be happy to see him.

       “You’re losing it, McKettrick,” he said aloud.

       He thought about Cheyenne—had been thinking about her, on one level or another, ever since they’d parted in the Roadhouse parking lot.

       Thought about her long legs and her expressive eyes, and the fullness of her mouth. She was good-looking, all right, and smart, too.

       He wondered how far she’d go to persuade him to sell that five hundred acres she wanted.

       The phone rang, nearly startling him out of his hide.

       He scowled, set down his beer and picked up the receiver. “Yo,” he said. “This is Jesse.”

       “Yo, yourself,” Sierra replied. She was set to marry Travis Reid, one of his closest friends, in a month. Jesse would be best man at the ceremony, and until tonight, when he’d run into Cheyenne, he’d wished Sierra wasn’t a blood relative so he could at least fantasize about taking her away from Travis.

      

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