hair, in need of trimming as always, Brad thrust out a sigh and scanned the surrounding countryside. “That old stallion still running loose out here, or did the wolves and the barbed wire finally get him?” he asked, raw where the memories of his grandfather chafed against his mind, and in sore need of a distraction.
Livie probably wasn’t fooled by the dodge, but she was gracious enough to grant Brad a little space to recover in, and he appreciated that. “We get a glimpse of Ransom every once in a while,” she replied, and a little pucker of worry formed between her eyebrows. “Always off on the horizon somewhere, keeping his distance.”
Brad laid a hand on his sister’s shoulder. She’d been fascinated with the legendary wild stallion since she was little. First sighted in the late nineteenth century and called King’s Ransom because that was what he was probably worth, the animal was black and shiny as wet ink, and so elusive that some people maintained he wasn’t flesh and blood at all, but spirit, a myth believed for so long that thought itself had made him real. The less fanciful maintained that Ransom was one in a long succession of stallions, all descended from that first mysterious sire. Brad stood squarely in this camp, as Big John had, but he wasn’t so sure Livie took the same rational view.
“They’re trying to trap him,” she said now, tears glistening in her eyes. “They want to pen him up. Get samples of his DNA. Turn him out to stud, so they can sell his babies.”
“Who’s trying to trap him, Liv?” Brad asked gently. It was cold, he was hungry, and setting foot in the old ranch house, without Big John there to greet him, was a thing to get past.
“Never mind,” Livie said, bucking up a little. Setting her jaw. “You wouldn’t be interested.”
There was no point in arguing with Olivia O’Ballivan, DVM, when she got that look on her face. “Thanks for bringing my truck out here,” Brad said. “And for coming to meet me.”
“I didn’t bring the truck,” Livie replied. Some people would have taken the credit, but Liv was half again too stubborn to admit to a kindness she hadn’t committed, let alone one she considered unwarranted. “Ashley and Melissa did that. They’re probably at the ranch house right now, hanging streamers or putting up a Welcome Home, Brad banner or something. And I only came out here because I saw that jet and figured it was some damn movie star, buzzing the deer.”
Brad had one leg inside the truck, ready to hoist himself into the driver’s seat. “That’s a problem around here?” he asked, with a wry half grin. “Movie stars buzzing deer in Lear jets?”
“It happens in Montana all the time,” Livie insisted, plainly incensed. She felt just as strongly about snowmobiles and other off-road vehicles.
Brad reached down, touched the tip of her nose with one index finger. “This isn’t Montana, shortstop,” he pointed out. “See you at home?”
“Another time,” Livie said, not giving an inch. “After all the hoopla dies down.”
Inwardly, Brad groaned. He wasn’t up for hoopla, or any kind of celebration Ashley and Melissa, their twin sisters, might have cooked up in honor of his return. Classic between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place stuff—he couldn’t hurt their feelings, either.
“Tell me they’re not planning a party,” he pleaded.
Livie relented, but only slightly. One side of her mouth quirked up in a smile. “You’re in luck, Mr. Multiple Grammy Winner. There’s a McKettrick baby shower going on over in Indian Rock as we speak, and practically the whole county’s there.”
The name McKettrick unsettled Brad even more than the prospect of going home to banners, streamers and a collection of grinning neighbors, friends and sisters. “Not Meg,” he muttered, and then blushed, since he hadn’t intended to say the words out loud.
Livie’s smile intensified, the way it did when she had a solid hand at gin rummy and was fixing to go out and stick him with a lot of aces and face cards. She shook her head. “Meg’s back in Indian Rock for good, rumor has it, and she’s still single,” she assured him. “Her sister Sierra’s the one having a baby.”
In a belated and obviously fruitless attempt to hide his relief at this news, Brad shut the truck door between himself and Livie and, since the keys were waiting in the ignition, started up the rig.
Looking smug, Livie waved cheerily, climbed back into the Suburban and drove off, literally in a cloud of dust.
Brad sat waiting for it to settle.
The feelings took a little longer.
“Go haunt somebody else!” Meg McKettrick whispered to the ghost cowboy riding languidly in the passenger seat of her Blazer, as she drove past Sierra’s new house, on the outskirts of Indian Rock, for at least the third time. Both sides of the road were jammed with cars, and if she didn’t find a parking place soon, she’d be late for the baby shower. If not the actual baby. “Pick on Keegan—or Jesse—or Rance—anybody but me!”
“They don’t need haunting,” he said mildly. He looked nothing like the august, craggy-faced, white-haired figure in his portraits, grudgingly posed for late in his long and vigorous life. No, Angus McKettrick had come back in his prime, square-jaw handsome, broad shouldered, his hair thick and golden brown, his eyes intensely blue, at ease in the charm he’d passed down to generations of male descendents.
Still flustered, Meg found a gap between a Lexus and a minivan, wedged the Blazer into it, and turned off the ignition with a twist of one wrist. Tight-tipped, she jumped out of the rig, jerked open the back door, and reached for the festively wrapped package on the seat. “I’ve got news for you,” she sputtered. “I don’t need haunting, either!”
Angus, who looked to Meg as substantial and “real” as anybody she’d ever encountered, got out and stood on his side of the Blazer, stretching. “So you say,” he answered, in a lazy drawl. “All of them are married, starting families of their own. Carrying on the McKettrick name.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” Meg bit out, in the terse undertone she reserved for arguments with her great-great-however-many-greats grandfather. Clutching the gift she’d bought for Travis and Sierra’s baby, she shouldered both the back and driver’s doors shut.
“In my day,” Angus said easily, “you’d have been an old maid.”
“Hello?” Meg replied, without moving her mouth. Over her long association with Angus McKettrick—which went back to her earliest childhood memories—she’d developed her own brand of ventriloquism, so other people, who couldn’t see him, wouldn’t think she was talking to herself. “This isn’t ‘your day.’ It’s mine. Twenty-first century, all the way. Women don’t define themselves by whether they’re married or not.” She paused, sucked in a calming breath. “Here’s an idea—why don’t you wait in the car? Or, better yet, go ride some happy trail.”
Angus kept pace with her as she crossed the road, clomping along in his perpetually muddy boots. As always, he wore a long, cape-shouldered canvas coat over a rough-spun shirt of butternut cotton and denim trousers that weren’t quite jeans. The handle of his ever-present pistol, a long-barreled Colt .45, made a bulge behind his right coat pocket. He wore a hat only when there was a threat of rain, and since the early-October weather was mild, he was bareheaded that evening.
“It might be your testy nature that’s the problem,” Angus ruminated. “You’re downright pricklish, that’s what you are. A woman ought to have a little sass to her, to spice things up a mite. You’ve got more than your share, though, and it ain’t becoming.”
Meg ignored him, and the bad grammar he always affected when he wanted to impart folksy wisdom, as she tromped up the front steps, shuffling the bulky package in her arms to jab at the doorbell. Here comes your nineteenth noncommittal yellow layette, she thought, wishing she’d opted for the sterling baby rattles instead. If Sierra and Travis knew the sex of their unborn child, they weren’t telling, which made shopping even more of a pain than