The Mckettrick Way. Linda Miller Lael

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      “The whole town could show up at the Steakhouse, and it wouldn’t be enough to make a mob.”

      “Okay,” Meg agreed. “But you’re buying.”

      Brad laughed. “Fair enough,” he said.

      Then he got up from his chair and summoned the bartender, who’d evidently been cooling his heels in a storeroom or office.

      The floor felt oddly spongy beneath Meg’s feet, and she was light-headed enough to wonder if there’d been some alcohol in that iced tea after all.

      The Steakhouse, unlike Jolene’s, was jumping. People called out to Brad when he came in, and young girls pointed and giggled, but most of them had been at the welcome party Ashley and Melissa had thrown for him on the ranch the night before, so some of the novelty of his being back in town had worn off.

      Meg drew some glances, though—all of them admiring, with varying degrees of curiosity mixed in. Even in jeans, boots and a plain woolen coat over a white blouse, she looked like what she was—a McKettrick with a trust fund and an impressive track record as a top-level executive. When McKettrickCo had gone public, Brad had been surprised when she didn’t turn up immediately as the CEO of some corporation. Instead, she’d come home to hibernate on the Triple M, and he wondered why.

      He wondered lots of things about Meg McKettrick.

      With luck, he’d have a chance to find out everything he wanted to know.

      Like whether she still laughed in her sleep and ate cereal with yogurt instead of milk and arched her back like a gymnast when she climaxed.

      Since the Steakhouse was no place to think about Meg having one of her noisy orgasms, Brad tried to put the image out of his mind. It merely shifted to another part of his anatomy.

      They were shown to a booth right away, and given menus and glasses of water with the obligatory slices of fresh lemon rafting on top of the ice.

      Brad ordered a steak, Meg a Caesar salad.

      The waitress went away, albeit reluctantly.

      “Okay,” Brad said, “it’s my turn to ask questions. Why did you quit working after you left McKettrickCo?”

      Meg smiled, but she looked a little flushed, and he could tell by her eyes that she was busy in there, sorting things and putting them in their proper places. “I didn’t need the money. And I’ve always wanted to live full-time on the Triple M, like Jesse and Rance and Keegan. When I spent summers there, as a child, the only way I could deal with leaving in the fall to go back to school was to promise myself that one day I’d come home to stay.”

      “You love it that much?” Given his own attachment to Stone Creek Ranch, Brad could understand, but at the same time, the knowledge troubled him a little, too. “What do you do all day?”

      Her mouth quirked in a way that made Brad want to kiss her. And do a few other things, too. “You sound like my mother,” she said. “I take care of the horses, ride sometimes—”

      He nodded. Waited.

      She didn’t finish the sentence.

      “You never married.” He hadn’t meant to say that. Hadn’t meant to let on that he’d kept track of her all these years, mostly on the Internet, but through his sisters, too.

      She shook her head. “Almost,” she said. “Once. It didn’t work out.”

      Brad leaned forward, intrigued and feeling pretty damn territorial, too. “Who was the unlucky guy? He must have been a real jackass.”

      “You,” she replied sweetly, and then laughed at the expression on his face.

      He started to speak, then gulped the words down, sure they’d come out sounding as stupid as the question he’d just asked.

      “I’ve dated a lot of men,” Meg said.

      The orgasm image returned, but this time, he wasn’t Meg’s partner. It was some other guy bringing her to one of her long, exquisite, clawing, shouting, bucking climaxes, not him. He frowned.

      “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about my love life,” she suggested.

      “Maybe not,” Brad agreed.

      “Not that I exactly have one.”

      Brad felt immeasurably better. “That makes two of us.”

      Meg looked unconvinced. Even squirmed a little on the vinyl seat.

      “What?” Brad prompted, enjoying the play of emotions on her face. He and Meg weren’t on good terms—too soon for that—but it was a hopeful sign that she’d met him at Jolene’s and then agreed to supper on top of it.

      “I saw that article in People magazine. ‘The Cowboy with the Most Notches on His Bedpost,’ I think it was called?”

      “I thought we weren’t going to talk about our love lives. And would you mind keeping your voice down?”

      “We agreed not to talk about mine, if I remember correctly, which, as I told you, is nonexistent. And to avoid the subject of your second wife—at least, for now.”

      “There have been women,” Brad said. “But that bedpost thing was all Phil’s idea. Publicity stuff.”

      The food arrived.

      “Not that I care if you carve notches on your bedpost,” Meg said decisively, once the waitress had left again.

      “Right,” Brad replied, serious on the outside, grinning on the inside.

      “Where is this Phil person from, anyway?” Meg asked, mildly disgruntled, her fork poised in midair over her salad. “Seems to me he has a pretty skewed idea on the whole cowboy mystique. Rehab. Trashing hotel rooms. The notch thing.”

      “There’s a ‘cowboy mystique’?”

      “You know there is. Honor, integrity, courage—those are the things being a cowboy is all about.”

      Brad sighed. Meg was a stickler for detail; good thing she hadn’t gone to law school, like she’d once planned. She probably would have represented his second ex-wife in the divorce and stripped his stock portfolio clean. “I tried. Phil works freestyle, and he sure knew how to pack the concert halls.”

      Meg pointed the fork at him. “You packed the concert halls, Brad. You and your music.”

      “You like my music?” It was a shy question; he hadn’t quite dared to ask if she liked him as well. He knew too well what the answer might be.

      “It’s…nice,” she said.

      Nice? Half a dozen Grammies and CMT awards, weeks at number one on every chart that mattered, and she thought his music was “nice”?

      Whatever she thought, Brad finally concluded, that was all she was going to give up, and he had to be satisfied with it.

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