It’s way too quiet around here.”
CHAPTER THREE
CHEYENNE SHOWED UP at the ranch the next morning, as agreed, at nine o’clock sharp. Jesse had just turned all but two of the horses out to graze in the pastures beyond the corral gate. He’d saddled his black-and-white paint gelding, Minotaur, first, and was finishing up with Pardner when she pulled in.
Standing just outside the barn door, Jesse yanked the cinch tighter around the horse’s belly, grinned and shook his head slightly when Cheyenne stepped out of the car and he saw what she was wearing. A trim beige pantsuit, tailored at the waist, and stack-heeled shoes with tasteful brass buckles, shiny enough to signal a rider five miles away. She’d wound her hair into the same businesslike do at the back of her head—did she sleep with it up like that?—and he wondered idly how long it was, and how it would feel to let the strands slide between his fingers.
Smiling gamely, Cheyenne minced her way across the rutted barnyard toward him. Her gaze touched the horses warily and ricocheted off again, with a reverberation like the ping of a bullet, only soundless. “It’s a beautiful morning,” she said.
Jesse gave a partial nod, tugged at his hat brim before thinking better of the idea. Talk about tells. Why not just have a billboard put up? Cheyenne Bridges Intrigues Me. Sincerely, Jesse McKettrick. “Always is, out here. Year-round.”
She drew an audible breath, that brave smile wobbling a little on her sensuous mouth, and huffed out an exhale. Adjusted the strap of that honking purse again. “Let’s go have a look at the land,” she said, jingling her keys in her right hand.
Jesse ran his gaze over her outfit, glanced toward Pardner and Minotaur, who were waiting patiently in full tack, reins dangling, tails switching. “That little car of yours,” he said, watching with amused enjoyment as realization dawned in her face, “will never make it onto the ridge. Nothing up there but old logging trails.”
She swallowed visibly, took in the horses again and shook her head. “You’re not suggesting we—ride?” The hesitation was so brief it might have gone unnoticed, if Jesse hadn’t had so much practice at picking out the very things other people tried to hide. “On horseback?”
He waited, arms folded. “That’s the usual purpose of saddling up,” he said. “Two people. Two horses. No special mental acuity required to figure it out.”
Cheyenne shifted on the soles of her fancy shoes. They’d work in a boardroom, those shoes, but on the Triple M, they were almost laughable. “I wasn’t expecting to ride a horse.”
“I can see that,” Jesse observed. “You do realize that those five hundred acres you’re so anxious to bulldoze, pave and cover with condos are pretty rugged, and not a little remote?”
“Of course I do,” she said, faltering now. “I’ve done weeks of research. I know my business, Mr. McKettrick.”
“It’s Jesse,” he corrected. “And what kind of ‘research’ did you do, exactly? Maybe you dredged up some plat maps online? Checked out the access to power and the water situation?” He waited a beat to let his meaning sink in, then gave the suit another once-over. “At least you had sense enough to wear pants,” he added charitably.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Do you even own a pair of jeans?”
“I don’t wear jeans when I’m working,” she retorted. Her tone was moderate, but if she’d been a porcupine, her quills would have been bristling.
“I guess that lets boots out, too, then.”
She paused before answering, and looked so flustered that Jesse began to feel a little sorry for her. “I guess it does,” she said, and her shoulders slackened so that she had to grab the purse and resituate it before the strap slid down her arm.
“Come on inside,” he said, indicating the house with a half turn of his head. “Mom’s about your size. You can borrow some of her stuff.”
Cheyenne stood so still that she might have sprouted roots. Jesse could imagine them, reaching deep into the ground, winding around slabs of bedrock and the petrified roots of trees so ancient that they’d left no trace of their existence aboveground. “I don’t know—”
Jesse decided it was time to up the ante by a chip or two. “Are you scared, Ms. Bridges?”
Her mouth twitched at one corner, and Jesse waited to see if she was just irritated or trying not to smile. It was the latter; a small grin flitted onto her lips and then flew away. “Yes,” she said, with a forthrightness that made Jesse wish he hadn’t teased her, let alone set her up for the challenge she was facing now.
“Pardner’s a rocking horse,” he told her. “You could sit under his belly, blow a police whistle, grab his tail in both hands and pull it between his hind legs, and he wouldn’t move a muscle.”
She bit her lip. Jesse saw her eyes widen as she assessed Minotaur, then looked hopefully toward Pardner. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?” she asked when her gaze swung in Jesse’s direction again and locked on in a way that made the pit of his stomach give out like a trapdoor opening over a bottomless chasm. It happened so fast that he found himself scrabbling for an internal handhold, but he couldn’t seem to get a grip.
“No,” he said, but it wasn’t because he was being stubborn. Things had gone too far, and she couldn’t walk away now without leaving some of her self-respect behind. All he could do was make it as easy as possible. “Knowing the land isn’t a drive-by kind of thing, Cheyenne. You gotta be there, if it’s going to speak to you.”
“Maybe you could just give the plans a glance and I could come back another day—”
He put up a hand. “Whoa,” he said. “I could let you off the hook here, but you wouldn’t like me for it in the long run, and you’d think even less of yourself.”
She paused, looked ruefully down at her clothes. Huffed out a sigh. “Just look at the blueprints, Jesse. I’m not prepared—”
Jesse dug in his heels. He sensed that this was a pivotal moment for both of them, far more important than it seemed on the surface. There was something archetypal going on here, though damned if he could have said what it was, for all those psychology classes he’d taken in college. “As if you’d come back out here, tomorrow or the next day, decked out to ride, and ask for the tour,” he said. He narrowed his eyes. “If you think I’m going to unroll those plans of yours on the kitchen table, see the error of my ways, and ask you where to sign, you’re in need of a reality check.”
She chewed on that one for a while, and Jesse knew if she hadn’t wanted that land half as badly as she did, she’d have told him what to do with both horses and possibly the barn, turned on one polished heel, stomped back to her car and left him standing there in the proverbial cloud of dust.
“All right,” she said. The words might as well have been hitched to a winch and hauled out of her.
“All right, what?”
Cheyenne sighed. “All right, I’ll borrow your mother’s clothes and ride that wretched horse,” she told him. “But if I get my neck broken, it will be on your conscience.”
Jesse indulged in a slow grin. He’d liked Cheyenne all along, but now he respected her, too, and that gave a new dimension to the whole exchange. She’d been brave enough to admit she was scared, and now she was stepping past that to stay in the game. “Nothing like that’s going to happen,” he assured her. “I know you’re a greenhorn, and I wouldn’t put you on a knot-head horse.”
With that, he led the way inside. While she waited in the kitchen, he scouted up some of his mother’s old jeans, a pair of well-worn boots and a flannel shirt. When he returned, she was looking out the window over the sink, apparently studying the schoolhouse.