Read Online McKettrick's Luck by Linda Lael Miller - Free Book Online

and I used to camp up here. I still like to bring a bedroll and sleep under the stars once in a while. A couple of years back, about the time the governor of Arizona decided not to turn it into a state park, I won a big poker tournament, and I bought it outright.”
    â€œThat must have been some tournament,” Cheyenne said, as casually as she could.
    â€œWorld championship,” Jesse answered, with a verbal shrug. “I’m going back to Vegas in a couple of months to defend my title.” He turned to survey the land again, gesturing with his hat. “That creek practically jumps with trout every spring. There are deer, as you can see, as well as wolves and bobcats and coyotes and bear—just about any kind of critter you’d expect to run across in this country.” He watched her for a few moments, choosing his words, turning his hat in his hands just the way any one of his cowboy ancestors might have done. “Where do you figure they’d go, if you and your company put in a hundred stucco boxes and a putting green?”

CHAPTER FOUR
    C HEYENNE LOOKED AWAY , blinked. Wished the land would disappear, and Jesse’s question with it.
    Remember your mother, she thought. Remember Mitch.
    Jesse turned her gently to face him. “WhenAngus McKettrick came here in the mid 1800s,” he said, “the whole northern part of the state must have looked pretty much like this. He cut down trees to build a house and a barn, and used windfall for firewood. He put up fences to keep his cattle in, too, but other than that he didn’t change the land much. His sons built houses, too, when they married—my place, the main ranch house where Keegan now lives, and the one across the creek from it. That belongs to Rance. They’ve been added onto, those houses, and modernized, but that’s the extent of it. No short-platting. No tennis courts. We McKettricks like to sit light on the land, Cheyenne, and I don’t intend to be the one to break that tradition.”
    Cheyenne gazed up at him, full of frustration and admiration and that infernal drumbeat, rising from her own core to pound in her ears. The majesty of the land seemed to reply, like a great, invisible heart, thumping an elemental rhythm of its own. “You promised you’d look at the blueprints,” she said. It was lame, and she could feel all her hopes slipping away, but still she couldn’t let go.
    Jesse put his hat on again, helped Cheyenne back up onto her horse, and mounted the gelding. Neither of them said anything during the ride to the ranch house.
    â€œI do care what happens to the land,” she told him, quietly earnest, when they’d reached the barn and dismounted again.
    â€œDo you?” Jesse asked, but he clearly didn’t expect an answer. “Get your blueprints,” he urged with a nod toward her rental car. “I’ll put Pardner and Minotaur away and meet you in the schoolhouse.”
    She ran damp palms down the thighs of Callie McKettrick’s jeans and returned his nod. She watched until he disappeared into the barn, leading both horses behind him.
    â€œWhat do I do now?” she asked softly, tilting her head back to look up at the sky.
    She stood there for a few seconds longer, then turned and went to the rental car. Plucked the thick roll of blueprints from the backseat.
    The schoolhouse was cool and shadowy, and dust particles, stirred by her entrance, bobbed like little golden flecks in the still air.
    Cheyenne laid the roll on a large table with an old chair behind it, and looked around with interest. Someone had scrawled a list of stock quotes on the blackboard, and there was an old-fashioned rotary phone on the table next to a vintage globe, but beyond those things, the place probably hadn’t changed much since it was built.
    She ran a hand across the single row of small desks, admired the potbelly stove and returned to the globe.
    The world was