LITMIR.BIZ

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thought sadly, giving the miniature planet a little spin. New borders. New wars. AIDS and terrorism.

       Cheyenne heard Jesse come in but she didn’t turn to look. For a heartbeat or two she wanted to pretend she was Chloe McKettrick, the schoolteacher bride, and Jesse was Jeb. As long as she didn’t make eye contact, she could pretend.

       “There were never more than a dozen pupils at any given time,” Jesse said quietly. “Just Chloe and Jeb’s kids, their cousins and a few strays or ranch-hands’ children.”

       “It must have been wonderfully simple,” Cheyenne said very softly.

       “It was hard, too,” Jesse answered. She knew he was standing next to the big table, heard him slide the rubber bands off the blueprints and unroll them. “No running water, no electricity. We didn’t have lights out here until well into the thirties. Holt’s place had a line in from the road from about 1917 on, but all it powered was one bulb in the kitchen.”

       Cheyenne forced herself to turn around and look at Jesse. Just briefly, she could almost believe he was Jeb, dressed the way he was with his hat sitting beside him on the tabletop. She knew which was Holt’s place, which had been Rafe’s and Kade’s—everyone who’d ever spent any time at all in Indian Rock had heard at least the outlines of the family’s illustrious history—but hearing it from Jesse somehow made it all seem new.

       She shook her head, feeling as if she’d somehow wandered onto the set of an old movie, or fallen headlong into a romance novel. It was time to stop dreaming and start selling—if she didn’t convince Jesse to part with that five hundred acres, well, the consequences would be staggering.

       “It’s wonderful that the ranch has been so well preserved all this time,” she said as Jesse studied the blueprints, holding them open with his widely placed hands, his head down so she couldn’t see his expression. “But the land we’re talking about has never been part of the Triple M, as I understand it.”

       Jesse looked up, but he was wearing his poker face and even with all the experience Cheyenne had gathered from dealing with her cardsharp father, there was no reading him. “Land,” he said, “is land.”

       Alarms went off in Cheyenne’s head but she kept her composure. She’d had a lot of practice doing that, both as a child, coping with the ups and downs of a dysfunctional family, and as an adult struggling to build a career in a business based largely on speculation and the ability to persuade, wheedle, convince.

       She moved to stand beside Jesse, worked up a smile and pointed to a section in the middle of the proposed development. “This is the community park,” she said. “There will be plenty of grass, a fountain, benches, playground equipment for the kids. If we dam the creek, we can have a fishpond—”

       Too late, Cheyenne realized she’d made a major mistake mentioning Nigel’s plans to change the course of the stream bisecting the property before flowing downhill, onto and across the heart of the Triple M.

       Jesse’s face tightened and he withdrew his hands, letting the blueprints roll noisily back up into a loose cylinder.

       “Surely that creek isn’t the only water source—” Cheyenne began, but she fell silent at the look in Jesse’s eyes.

       “No deal,” he said.

       “Jesse—”

       He shoved the blueprints at her. “You kept up your end of the bargain and I kept up mine. And I’ll be damned if I’ll let you and a bunch of jackasses in three-piece suits mess with that creek so the condo-dwellers can raise koi.”

       “Please listen—” Cheyenne was desperate and past caring whether Jesse knew it or not.

       “I’ve heard all I need to hear,” he said.

       “Look, the fishpond is certainly dispensable—”

       Jesse crossed the room, jerked open the door. Sunlight rimmed his lean frame and broad, rancher’s shoulders. “You’re damned right it is!”

       He stormed toward the house and once again Cheyenne had no choice but to follow after she tossed the blueprints into the car through an open window.

       He left the back door slightly ajar, and Cheyenne squeezed through sideways, not wanting to push it all the way open. She was about to make a dash for the bathroom, switch the cowgirl gear for her normal garb and speed back to town, over the railroad tracks—home—when she caught herself.

       Jesse stood facing the sink with his hands braced against the counter in much the same way he’d held the blueprints down out in the schoolhouse. Judging by the angle of his head, he was staring out the window.

       “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Cheyenne said, more for her benefit than his own. “That creek can’t be all that important to the survival of this ranch or one of your ancestors would have grabbed it at the source a long time ago.”

       He turned to face her, moving slowly, folding his arms and leaning back against the edge of the sink. “If I were you, I wouldn’t talk about grabbing land,” he said.

       Cheyenne squinted at him, trying to decide if he was softening a bit or if the impression was pure wishful thinking on her part. “It’s enough to say no, Jesse,” she said quietly. “There’s no reason to be angry.”

       Jesse shoved a hand through his hair, then flashed her a grin so sudden and so bright that it almost set her back on her heels. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m mad at myself, not you.”

       Cheyenne stared at him, disbelieving, almost suspecting a trick. In her experience, anger was a shape-shifter, disguising itself as some gentler emotion only to rise up again when she least expected, and roar in her face like a demon from the fieriest pit of hell.

       “I should have thought about that creek,” he went on as she stood frozen, like a rabbit caught out in the open by some crafty predator. “For a while there I was actually playing with the idea of making the deal. I started thinking about families, little kids on tricycles and dogs chasing Frisbees. It wasn’t until you showed me where the koi pond would be that I reined myself in.”

       “What if we promised never to divert the creek, at any time, for any reason?”

       Jesse sighed. “If you promised me that I’d probably believe it, but you can’t and you know it. Once the units are sold and your company moves on, anything could happen. The homeowner’s association could vote to dynamite the creek and make their own lake, and there wouldn’t be much I could do about it.”

       Cheyenne pulled back a chair at the big kitchen table, which was not an antique as she would have expected, but an exquisite pine creation, intricately carved and inlaid with turquoise and bits of oxidized copper, and sank into it. She propped one elbow on the table top and cupped her chin in her palm. “There would be things you could do, though. McKettrickCo must have an army of lawyers on staff. You could get a court order and block anything like that indefinitely.”

       “McKettrickCo’s lawyers,” Jesse said, opening the refrigerator and taking out a bottle of sparkling water and a beer, “are not at my beck and call. Even if they were, they’ve got plenty to do as it is.”

       He set the water down in front of her, and she was impressed that he’d remembered her preference for it from the night before.

       “This is the most beautiful table I’ve ever seen,” she said as she gave a nod of thanks and twisted off the top of the lid to take a much-needed sip.

       Jesse hauled back another chair and sat down, opened his beer. “Handcrafted in Mexico,” he said. “My mother has an eye for what she calls ‘functional art.’”

       Not to mention a bottomless bank account, Cheyenne thought. “Maybe we should use coasters,” she said practically.

       Jesse laughed. “The wood is lacquered. It wouldn’t qualify as functional if you could leave rings on it with a beer can or a bottle of water.”

      

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