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brother had seen him coming from a long way off. Cavanagh didn’t acknowledge him with so much as a wave or a glance, and he took his Texas time climbing down the tall ladder set against the near wall, but when he walked toward Kade, his gaze was direct and his expression was just shy of affable. He was a big man, big as Rafe, with brown hair and shrewd hazel eyes. He wore work clothes that day, and his stride was even, though he’d broken a leg several months before when a pile of logs had broken loose from their chains and all but crushed him. Back then, he was still posing as an ordinary ranch hand, and helping to build Rafe and Emmeline’s first house, the one Rafe had burned to the ground.
    “I’d say it was a pleasure,” Cavanagh drawled in that honeyed Southern voice of his, “but from the look on your face, I know better.”
    Kade dismounted and stood facing the interloper. He didn’t put out his hand, and neither did Holt. “There are some things we need to discuss,” Kade said. He’d been the one to come here, so it was up to him to get things started.
    Cavanagh waited, arms folded. It would have been neighborly to offer a cup of coffee, or water for the horse, but Holt wasn’t on neighborly terms with any of the McKettricks. While Angus had wanted to take his firstborn son right into the fold, back before the trouble started anyhow, Rafe, Kade, and Jeb weren’t quite so ready to accept him. There was too much at stake.
    Kade pulled off his riding gloves, stuffed them into the pockets of his duster. “Last night some squatters were burned out just west of our place. Somebody used a Triple M iron to mark a tree so they could put the blame on us.”
    Holt arched one eyebrow, shifted slightly on his feet, and didn’t unfold his arms. “That so?”
    Curiosity welled up inside Kade, strange and sudden, out of context and purely unbidden; he wondered about Holt, about his schooling and his growing up, the places he’d been and the people he’d known and the things he’d done in his life before he came to Indian Rock. He wasn’t about to ask about any of that, though, so he resigned himself to knowing next to nothing about his father’s son.
    “I figure you or one of your men was behind it,” Kade said. This conclusion didn’t seem as sensible as it had during the ride from the Triple M, but he was here and that was the only reason he had for showing up.
    A ghost of a grin quirked one side of Holt’s mouth. “Do you, now? And why’s that, since it was the Triple M brand they found, and not mine?”
    “Whoever set that fire wanted everybody to think we were behind it.” Just thinking about that made Kade fighting mad. The McKettricks had their share of enemies, always had. It was part of running the biggest ranch north of Tucson; folks got to feeling jealous sometimes, and that made them fractious and inclined to believe the worst. Incidents like the one on the Fee homestead could only exacerbate the problem.
    “And you really think I did it?”
    “You or somebody who works for you,” Kade reiterated. “It’s no secret that there’s been some bad blood between us.”
    “Bad blood,” Holt echoed in the tone of one reflecting upon great and grave matters. “Interesting term.” He paused, pondering again, then skewered Kade with a narrow look. “Did our old pappy send you here to talk to me? I would have thought he had more backbone than to ask a boy to do a man’s job.”
    Kade pressed his lips together briefly, then let out a breath. “I’m no boy,” he said evenly, “and I don’t run errands for Pa or anybody else. What I came here to say is that nobody needs a range war, but there’s going to be one for sure if you don’t back off.”
    A flush crept up Holt’s neck to pulse under his jaw, and Kade took strong if unseemly satisfaction in the knowledge that the other man was rattled. Up till then, he’d acted as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Your men have been