McKettrick's Luck. Linda Lael Miller

lip. Her cell phone, lying on the passenger seat of the car, chimed like an arriving elevator—Nigel again. She ignored the insistent sound until it stopped, only too aware that the reprieve would be fleeting. Meanwhile, the land itself seemed to seep into her heart, rising like water finding its level in some dank, forgotten cistern.

       The feeling was bittersweet, a complex tangle of loneliness and homecoming and myriad other emotions she couldn’t readily identify.

       She had sworn never to come back to this place.

       Never to set eyes on Jesse McKettrick again.

       And fate, in its inimitable way, was forcing her to do both those things.

       She sighed.

       An old blue pickup passed on the road, horn honking in exuberant greeting. A trail of cheerfully mournful country music thrummed in its wake, and the peeling sticker on the rear bumper read Save The Cowboys.

       Cheyenne waved, self-conscious in her trim black designer suit and high heels. This was boots-and-jeans country, and she’d stand out like the proverbial sore thumb the moment she drove into town.

      Welcome home, she thought ruefully.

       The cell chirped again, and she picked her way through the loose gravel to reach in through the open window and grabbed it.

       “It’s about time you answered,” Nigel Meerland snapped before she could draw a breath to say hello. “I was beginning to think you’d fallen into some manhole.”

       “There aren’t any manholes in Indian Rock,” Cheyenne replied, making her way around to the driver’s side and opening the door.

       “Have you contacted him yet?” Nigel didn’t bother with niceties like “Hi, how are you?” either in person or over the telephone. He simply demanded what he wanted—and most of the time, he got it.

       “Nigel,” Cheyenne said evenly, “I just got here. So, no, I have not contacted him.” Him was Jesse McKettrick. The last person in this or any other universe she wanted to see—not that Jesse would be able to place her in the long line of adoring women strung out behind him like the cars of a derailed freight train.

       “Well, you’re burning daylight, kiddo,” Nigel shot back. Her boss was in his late thirties and English, but he liked using colorful terms, with a liberal smattering of clichés. Westernisms, he called them. “Let’s get this show on the road. I don’t have to tell you how anxious our investors are to get that condo development underway.”

      No, Cheyenne thought, sitting down sideways on the car seat, constrained by her tight skirt and swinging her legs in under the steering wheel, you don’t have to tell me. I’ve heard nothing else for the last six months.

       “Jesse won’t sell,” she said. Realizing she’d spoken the thought aloud, she closed her eyes, braced for the inevitable response.

       “He has to sell,” Nigel countered. “Failure is not an option. Everything—and I mean everything—is riding on this deal. If the finance people pull out, the company will go under. You won’t have a job, and I’ll have to crawl back to the ancestral pile on my knees, begging for the scant privileges of a second son.”

       Cheyenne closed her eyes. Like Nigel, she had a lot at stake. More than just her job. She had Mitch, her younger brother, to consider. And her mother.

       The bonus Nigel had promised, in writing, would give them all a kind of security they’d never known.

       The pit of her stomach clenched.

       “I know,” she told Nigel bleakly. “I know.”

       “Get cracking, Pocahontas,” Nigel instructed, and hung up in her ear.

       Cheyenne opened her eyes, pressed the end button with her thumb, drew a deep breath and released it slowly. Then she tossed the phone onto the other seat, started the engine and headed for Indian Rock.

       The town hadn’t changed much since she’d left it at seventeen, bound for college down in Tucson. There was the dry cleaners, the library, the elementary school. And the small, white-steepled church where she’d struggled to understand Commandments and arks and burning bushes, and had placed quarters, after unwrapping them carefully from a cheap cloth handkerchief, in the collection plate.

       She sat a little straighter in the seat as she drove the length of Main Street, signaled and turned left at the old train depot, long since converted to an antiques minimall. The rental car bumped over the railroad tracks, past progressively seedier trailer courts, through a copse of cottonwood trees.

       The narrow beams of the ancient cattle guard rattled under the tires.

       Cheyenne gave a grateful sigh when the car didn’t fall through and slowed to round the last bend in the narrow dirt road leading to the house.

       Like the single and double-wides she’d just passed, the place had gone downhill in her absence. The lawn was overgrown and coils of rusty barbed wire littered the ground. The porch sagged and the siding, scavenged and nailed to the walls without regard to color, jarred the eye.

       Gram had been so proud of her house and yard. It would break her heart to see it now.

       Her mother’s old van, a patchwork affair like the house, stood in the driveway with the side door open.

       Cheyenne had hoped for a few days to settle in before her mother and brother arrived from Phoenix, and at least put in a ramp for Mitch’s wheelchair, but it wasn’t to be. Her heart fluttered with anticipation, then sank.

       She put the rental in Park and shut off the motor, surveying the only real home she’d ever had.

       “I’ll show you an ancestral pile, Nigel,” she muttered. “Just hop in your Bentley and drive on up to Indian Rock, Arizona.”

       The front door swung open just then, and Ayanna Bridges appeared on the porch, wearing a faded cotton dress, high-topped sneakers and a tentative smile. Her straight ebony hair fell past her waist, loosely restrained by a tarnished silver barrette she’d probably owned since the 1960s. When her mother started toward the rickety steps, Cheyenne got out of the car.

       “Look,” Ayanna called, pointing. “I found some old boards out behind the shed and dragged them around to make a ramp. Mitch whizzed right up to them like he was on flat ground.”

       Life had forced Ayanna to be resourceful. Makeshift ramps for her son’s wheelchair were the least of her accomplishments. She’d waited tables, often pulling two shifts, grappled with various social-service agencies to get Mitch the medical care he needed, sold cosmetics and miracle vitamins, all without a twinge of self-pity—at least, not one she’d ever allowed her children to see.

       Cheyenne scrounged up a smile. Pretended to admire the pair of teetering, weathered two-by-fours, each with one end propped on the porch floor and one disappearing into the weedy grass. Doubtless, Mitch had used them to alight from the van, too.

       If—when—the bonus came through, Cheyenne planned to buy a new van, specially equipped with a hydraulic lift and maybe even hand controls. For now, they would have to make do, as they’d always done.

       “Good work,” she said.

       Ayanna met her in the middle of the yard, enfolding Cheyenne in a hug that made her breath catch and her eyes burn.

       She blinked a couple of times before meeting her mother’s fond gaze.

       “Where’s Mitch?” Cheyenne asked.

       “Inside,” Ayanna said, her words gently hushed. “I’m afraid he’s brooding again—he misses his friends in Phoenix. He’ll be all right once he’s had a little while to get used to being here.”

       Cheyenne could empathize. She thought, with poignant longing, of her one-bedroom condo in sunny San Diego, half a mile from the beach. She’d sublet it, and that was another worry. If she couldn’t convince Jesse McKettrick to part with five hundred acres of prime real estate, she