McKettrick's Heart Read Free Page A

rounded the back of the wagon to confront Thayer Ryan’s mistress.
    â€œWhat the hell are you doing here?” he growled. He couldn’t recall her name, but he remembered running into her at a swanky restaurant up in Flag one night. She’d been sitting with Ryan, that scumball, at a secluded table, clad in a slinky black cocktail dress and dripping diamonds—gifts, no doubt, from her married lover, and almost certainly charged to Psyche, since Ryan had never had a pot to piss in.
    The woman flinched, startled. A pink flush glowed on her cheekbones, and her green eyes flickered with affronted guilt. Still, her gaze was steady, and more defiant than ashamed.
    â€œKeegan McKettrick,” she said. Then she tried to go around him.
    He blocked her way. “You have a good memory for names,” he told her. “Yours slips my mind.”
    Florence, meanwhile, opened the back of the station wagon, presumably to stow the bags. “I’m not doing this all by myself,” she said.
    Keegan remembered his manners—at least partially—and waved Florence back from the luggage. “There’s another bus tonight,” he told the woman whose face and body he recalled so well.
    â€œMolly Shields,” she said, and raised her chin a notch to let him know she wasn’t intimidated. “And I’m not going anywhere. Kindly get out of my way, Mr. McKettrick.”
    Keegan leaned in a little. Ms. Shields was a head shorter than he was, and he must have outweighed her by fifty pounds, but she didn’t shrink back, and he had to accord her a certain grudging respect for that. “Psyche’s sick,” he said in a grinding undertone. “Just about the last thing she needs is a visit from her dead husband’s girlfriend.”
    The flush deepened, but the spring-green eyes flashed with swift defiance. “Step aside,” she said.
    Keegan was still getting over the brass-balls audacity of her attitude when Florence interceded, poking at him with a finger.
    â€œKeegan McKettrick,” the old woman said, “either make yourself useful and load up those bags, or be on your way. And if you can take time out of your busy schedule, you might stop by the house one of these days soon and say hello to Psyche. She’d like to see you.”
    Keegan deliberately softened his expression. “How is she?” he asked.
    Molly Shields took the opportunity to slip around him, grab one of the suitcases.
    â€œShe’s bad sick,” Florence answered, and tears glistened in her eyes. “She invited Molly here, and I’m not any happier about it than you are, but she must have a good reason. And I’d appreciate some cooperation on your part.”
    Keegan was both confounded and chagrined. He nodded to Florence, lifted two of the five suitcases by their fancy handles and hurled them unceremoniously into the back of the station wagon, doing his best to ignore Molly Shields, who sidestepped him.
    â€œYou tell Psyche,” he said to Florence, “that I’ll be by as soon as she feels up to company.”
    â€œShe usually holds up pretty well until around two in the afternoon,” Florence replied. “You come over tomorrow, around noon, and I’ll set out a nice lunch for the two of you, on the sunporch.”
    Keegan didn’t miss the phrase “for the two of you” and neither, he saw from the corner of his eye, did Molly, who was wrestling with the largest of the bags. “That sounds fine,” he said, and jerked the handle from Molly’s grasp to throw the suitcase in with the others.
    She glared at him.
    He went right on ignoring her.
    â€œI’d best pick up some bread and milk while we’re here,” Florence said, addressing Molly this time. With that, she disappeared into the convenience store.
    â€œDoes Psyche know you were boinking her husband?” Keegan asked in a furious whisper the moment he and Molly