McKettrick's Luck Read Free Page B

gaze trailed back up to Jesse’s face, she realized that he was looking at her. Grinning that lethal grin.
    She blushed.
    Someone flipped the porch light on from inside, and moths immediately gravitated to it, out of nowhere. Drawing an immediate parallel between Jesse and the bulb, she took half a step back.
    He registered her suit and high-heeled shoes in a lazy sweep of his eyes. He clearly didn’t recognize her, which was at once galling and a relief.
    He tugged at the brim of his battered hat. “You lost?” he asked.
    Cheyenne was a moment catching her breath. “No,” she answered, fishing in her hobo bag for another card. “My name is Cheyenne Bridges, and I was hoping to talk to you about a business proposition.”
    She instantly regretted using the word proposition because it made a corner of Jesse’s mouth tilt with amusement, but she was past the point of no return.
    He descended the steps with that loose-limbed, supremely confident walk she remembered so well and approached her. Put out his hand. “Jesse McKettrick,” he said.
    There was nothing to say but “I know.” She’d given herself away with the first words she’d spoken.
    â€œBridges,” he said, reflecting. Studying the card pensively before slipping it into his shirt pocket.
    Cheyenne braced herself inwardly. Glanced toward the screen door Jesse had come through a few moments before.
    â€œAny relation to—?” He paused, stooped slightly to look into her face. Recollection dawned. “Wait a second. Cheyenne Bridges. ” He grinned. “I remember you—Cash’s daughter. We went to the movies a couple of times.”
    She swallowed, nodded, hiked her chin up a notch. “That’s right,” she said carefully. Cash’s daughter, that’s who she was to him. A shy teenager he’d dated twice and then lost interest in. He didn’t know, she reminded herself silently, that she’d tacked every picture of him she could get to the wall of her bedroom in that shack out beyond the railroad tracks, the way most girls did photos of rock stars and film idols. He didn’t know she’d loved him with the kind of desperate, hopeless adoration only a sixteen-year-old can feel.
    He didn’t know she’d prayed that he’d fall madly in love with her. That she’d imagined their wedding, their honeymoon and the birth of their four children so often that sometimes it felt like a memory of something that had really happened, rather than the fantasy it was.
    Thank God Jesse didn’t know any of those things. She wouldn’t have been able to face him if he had, even with Mitch and her mom and Nigel all depending on her to persuade him to sell five hundred unspoiled acres of land to her company.
    â€œI heard about your brother’s accident,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
    Shaken out of her reverie, Cheyenne nodded again. “Thanks.”
    â€œYour dad, too.”
    Her eyes stung. She tried to speak, swallowed instead.
    Jesse smiled, took a light grip on her elbow. “Do you always do business in alleys?” he teased.
    For a moment, she was affronted. Then she realized it was a perfectly reasonable question. “No,” she said.
    â€œI was just heading for the Roadhouse to grab some supper. Want to come along?” He gestured toward the muddy truck.
    The Roadhouse, also known as the Roadkill Café, was an institution in Indian Rock, a haven for truck drivers, bikers, cowboys and state patrolmen. Ironically, families dined at Lucky’s, probably pretending that the card room behind it didn’t exist.
    â€œI’ll meet you there,” Cheyenne said. She’d have been safe enough with Jesse, but no way was she climbing into that truck in a straight skirt. She had some dignity, after all, even if she did feel like the scrawny ten-year-old who’d parked her bike in this alley and gone inside to