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The McKettrick Legend: Sierra's Homecoming
Linda Lael Miller
SIERRA'S HOMECOMINGWhen she moved to her family's ranch, Sierra McKettrick was disconcerted by its handsome caretaker, Travis Reid. But when her son claimed to see a mysterious boy and an heirloom teapot started popping up unexpectedly, Sierra wondered if their attraction was the least of her worries. In 1919 widowed Hannah McKettrick lived at the ranch with her son and brother-in-law, Doss. Her confused feelings for Doss and her son's health occupied her thoughts…until the teapot started disappearing. Are Sierra and Hannah living parallel lives?THE MCKETTRICK WAY Meg McKettrick wants a baby–husband optional. Perfect father material is Brad O'Ballivan, old flame and ranch owner in Stone Creek. Meg wants things her way…the McKettrick way. But Brad feels as strongly about the O'Ballivan way. Marriage, babies and a lifetime to share is he wants. Not a single night of passion, an unexpected pregnancy and a woman who won't budge. It's a battle of wills he intends to win…



Praise for the novels of
LINDA LAEL MILLER
“Completely wonderful. Austin’s interactions with Paige are fun and lively and the mystery…adds quite a suspenseful punch.”
—RT Book Reviews on The McKettricks of Texas: Austin
“Miller is the queen when it comes to creating sympathetic, endearing and lifelike characters. She paints each scene so perfectly readers hover on the edge of delicious voyeurism.”
—RT Book Reviews on McKettricks of Texas: Garrett
“A passionate love too long denied drives the action in this multifaceted, emotionally rich reunion story that overflows with breathtaking sexual chemistry.”
—Library Journal on McKettricks of Texas: Tate
“As hot as the noontime desert.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Rustler
“This story creates lasting memories of soul-searing redemption and the belief in goodness and hope.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Rustler
“Loaded with hot lead, steamy sex and surprising plot twists.”
—Publishers Weekly on A Wanted Man
“Miller’s prose is smart, and her tough Eastwoodian cowboy cuts a sharp, unexpectedly funny figure in a classroom full of rambunctious frontier kids.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Man from Stone Creek
“Sweet, homespun, and touched with angelic Christmas magic, this holiday romance reprises characters from Miller’s popular McKettrick series and is a perfect stocking stuffer for her fans.”
—Library Journal on A McKettrick Christmas
“An engrossing, contemporary western romance.”
—Publishers Weekly on McKettrick’s Pride (starred review)

Linda Lael Miller
The MCKettrick Legend



CONTENTS
SIERRA’S HOMECOMING
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE MCKETTRICK WAY
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SIERRA’S HOMECOMING
To Little Angels Everywhere

CHAPTER ONE
Present Day
“STAY IN THE CAR,” Sierra McKettrick told her seven-year-old son, Liam.
He fixed her with an owlish gaze, peering through the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. “I want to see the graves, too,” he told her, and put a mittened hand to the passenger-side door handle to make his point.
“Another time,” she answered firmly. Part of her knew it was irrational to think a visit to the cemetery could provoke an asthma attack, but when it came to Liam’s health, she was taking no chances.
A brief stare-down ensued, and Sierra prevailed, but barely.
“It’s not fair,” Liam said, yet he sounded resigned. He didn’t normally give up so easily, but they’d just driven almost nonstop all the way from Florida to northern Arizona, and he was tired.
“Welcome to the real world,” Sierra replied. She set the emergency brake, left the engine running with the heat on High, and got out of the ancient station wagon she’d bought on credit years before.
Standing ankle-deep in a patch of ragged snow, she took in her surroundings. Ordinary people were buried in church yards and public cemeteries when they died, she reflected, feeling peevish. The McKettricks were a law unto them selves, living or dead. They weren’t content with a mere plot, like other families. Oh, no. They had to have a place all their own, with a view.
And what a view it was.
Shoving her hands into the pockets of her cloth coat, which was nearly as decrepit as her car, Sierra turned to survey the Triple M Ranch, sprawling in every direction, well beyond the range of her vision. Red mesas and buttes, draped in a fine lacing of snow. Copses of majestic white oaks, growing at intervals along a wide and shining stream. Expanses of pastureland, and even the occasional cactus, a stranger to the high country, a misplaced way farer, there by mistake.
Like her.
A flash of resentment rose suddenly within Sierra, and a moment or two passed before she recognized the emotion for what it was: not her own opinion, but that of her late father, Hank Breslin.
When it came to the McKettricks, Sierra had no opinions that she could honestly claim, because she didn’t know these people, except by reputation.
She’d taken their name for one reason and one reason only—because that was part of the deal. Liam needed health care, and she couldn’t provide it. Eve McKettrick—Sierra’s biological mother—had set up a medical trust fund for her grandson, but there were strings attached.
With the McKettricks, she heard her father say, as surely as if he were standing there beside her, there are always strings attached.
“Be quiet,” Sierra said, out loud. She was grateful for Eve’s help, and if she had to take the McKettrick name and live on the Triple M Ranch for a year to meet the conditions, so be it. It wasn’t as if she had anyplace better to go.
Resolutely she approached the cemetery entrance, walked under the ornate metal arch way forming the word “McKettrick” in graceful cursive.
A life-size bronze statue of a man on horse back, broad-shouldered and imposing, with a bandanna at his throat and a six-gun riding on his hip, took center stage.
Angus McKettrick, the patriarch. The founder of the Triple M, and the dynasty. Sierra knew little about him, but as she looked up into that hard, determined face, shaped by the rigors of life in the nineteenth century, she felt a kinship.
Ruthless old bastard, said the voice of Hank Breslin. That’s where McKettricks get their arrogance. From him.
“Be quiet,” Sierra repeated, thrusting her hands deeper into her coat pockets. She stood in silence for a long moment, listening to the rattle-throated hum of the station wagon’s engine, the lonely cry of a nearby bird, the thrum of blood in her ears. A piney scent spiced the air.
Sierra turned, saw the marble angels marking the graves of Angus McKettrick’s wives—Georgia, mother of Rafe, Kade and Jeb. Concepcion, mother of Kate.
Look for Holt and Lorelei, Eve had told her, the last time they’d spoken over the telephone. That’s our part of the family.
Sierra caught sight of other bronze statues, smaller than Angus’s but no less impressive in their detail. They were works of art, museum pieces, and if they hadn’t been solidly anchored in cement, they probably would have been stolen. It said something about the McKettrick legend, she supposed, that there had been no vandalism in this lonely, wind-blown place.
Jeb McKettrick, the youngest of the brothers, was represented by a cowboy with his six-gun drawn; his wife, Chloe, by a slender woman in pioneer dress, shading her eyes with one hand and smiling. Their children, grandchildren, great- and a few great-great-grandchildren surrounded them, their costly headstones laid out in neat rows, like the streets of a western town.
Next was Kade McKettrick, easy in his skin, wearing a six-shooter, like his brother, but with an open book in his hand. His wife, Mandy, wore trousers, a loose-fitting shirt, boots and a hat, and held a shotgun. Like Chloe, she was smiling. Judging by the number of other graves around theirs, these two had also been prolific parents.
The statue of Rafe McKettrick revealed a big, powerfully built man with a stubborn set to his jaw. His bride, Emmeline, stood close against his side; their arms were linked and she rested her head against the outside of his upper arm.
Sierra smiled. Again, their progeny was plentiful.
The last statue brought up an unexpected surge of emotion in Sierra. Here, then, was Holt, half brother to Rafe, Kade and Jeb, and to Kate. In his long trail coat, he looked both handsome and tough. A pair of very detailed ammunition belts criss-crossed his chest, and the badge pinned to his wide lapel read Texas Ranger.
Sierra stared into those bronze eyes and, once again, felt something stir deep inside her. I came from this man, she thought. We’ve got the same DNA.
Liam gave a jarring blast of the car horn, impatient to get to the ranch house that would be their home for the next twelve months.
Sierra waved in acknowledgment but moved on to the statue of Lorelei. She was mounted on a mule, long, lace-trimmed skirts spilling on either side of her impossibly small waist, face shadowed, not by a sun bon net but by a man’s hat. Her spirited gaze rested lovingly on her husband, Holt.
Liam laid on the horn.
Fearing he might decide to take the wheel and drive to the ranch house on his own, Sierra turned reluctantly from the markers and followed a path littered with pine needles and the dead leaves of the six towering white oaks that shared the space, heading back to the car.
Back to her son.
“Are all the McKettricks dead?” Liam asked, when Sierra settled into the driver’s seat and fastened the belt.
“No,” Sierra answered, waiting for some stray part of herself to finish meandering among those graves, making the acquaintance of ancestors, and catch up. “We’re McKettricks, and we’re not dead. Neither is your grandmother, or Meg.” She knew there were cousins, too, descended from Rafe, Kade and Jeb, but it was too big a subject to explain to a seven-year-old boy. Besides, she was still trying to square them all away in her own mind.
“I thought my name was Liam Breslin,” the little boy said practically.
It should have been Liam Douglas, Sierra thought, remembering her first and only lover. As always, when Liam’s father, Adam, came to mind, she felt a pang, a complicated mixture of passion, sorrow and helpless fury. She and Adam had never been married, so she’d given Liam her maiden name.
“We’re McKettricks now,” Sierra said with a sigh. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
She backed the car out care fully, keenly aware of the steep descent on all sides, and made the wide turn that would take them back on to the network of dirt roads bisecting the Triple M.
“I can understand now,” Liam asserted, having duly pondered the matter in his solemn way. “After all, I’m gifted.”
“You may be gifted,” Sierra replied, concentrating on her driving, “but you’re still seven.”
“Do I get to be a cowboy and ride bucking broncs and stuff like that?”
Sierra suppressed a shudder. “No,” she said.
“That bites,” Liam answered, folding his arms and settling deeper into the heavy nylon coat she’d bought him on the road, when they’d reached the first of the cold-weather states. “What’s the good of living on a ranch if you can’t be a cowboy?”

CHAPTER TWO
THE ELDERLY STATION WAGON banged into the yard, bald tires crunching half-thawed gravel, and came to an obstreperous stop. Travis Reid paused behind the horse trailer hitched to Jesse McKettrick’s mud-splattered black truck, pushed his hat to the back of his head with one leather-gloved finger and grinned, waiting for something to fall off the rig. Nothing did, which just went to prove that the age of miracles was not past.
Jesse appeared at the back of the trailer, leading old Baldy by his halter rope. “Who’s that?” he asked, squinting in the wintry late afternoon sunshine.
Travis spared him no more than a glance. “A long-lost relative of yours, unless I miss my guess,” he said easily.
The station wagon belched some smoke and died. Travis figured it for a permanent condition. He looked on with interest as a good-looking woman climbed out from behind the wheel, looked the old car over, and gave the driver’s-side door a good kick with her right foot.
She was a McKettrick, all right. Of the female persuasion, too.
Jesse left Baldy standing to jump down from the bed of the trailer and lower the ramp to the ground. “Meg’s half sister?” he asked. “The one who grew up in Mexico with her crazy, drunken father?”
“Reckon so,” Travis said. He and Meg communicated regularly, most often by email, and she’d filled him in on Sierra as far as she could. Nobody in the family knew her very well, including her mother, Eve, so the information was sparse. She had a seven-year-old son—now getting out of the car—and she’d been serving cock tails in Florida for the last few years, and that was about all Travis knew about her. As Meg’s care taker and resident horse trainer, not to mention her friend, Travis had stocked the cup boards and refrigerator, made sure the temperamental furnace was working and none of the plumbing had frozen, and started up Meg’s Blazer every day, just to make sure it was running.
From the looks of that station wagon, it was a good thing he’d followed the boss-lady’s orders.
“You gonna help me with this horse,” Jesse asked testily, “or just stand there gawking?”
Travis chuckled. “Right now,” he said, “I’m all for gawking.”
Sierra McKettrick was tall and slender, with short, gleaming brown hair the color of a good chestnut horse. Her eyes were huge and probably blue, though she was still a stride or two too far away for him to tell.
Jesse swore and stomped back up the ramp, making plenty of noise as he did so. Like most of the McKettricks, Jesse was used to getting his way, and while he was a known womanizer, he’d evidently dismissed Sierra out of hand. After all, she was a blood relative—no sense driving his herd into that canyon.
Travis took a step toward the woman and the boy, who was staring at him with his mouth open.
“Is this Meg’s house?” Sierra asked.
“Yes,” Travis said, putting out his hand, pulling it back to remove his work gloves, and offering it again. “Travis Reid,” he told her.
“Sierra Bres—McKettrick,” she replied. Her grip was firm. And her eyes were definitely blue. The kind of blue that pierces something in a man’s middle. She smiled, but tentatively. Some where along the line, she’d learned to be sparing with her smiles. “This is my son, Liam.”
“Howdy,” Liam said, squaring his small shoulders.
Travis grinned. “Howdy,” he replied. Meg had said the boy had health problems, but he looked pretty sound to Travis.
“That sure is an ugly horse,” Liam announced, pointing to wards the trailer.
Travis turned. Baldy stood spraddle-footed, midway down the ramp, a miserable gray specimen of a critter with pink eyes and liver-colored splotches all over his mangy hide.
“Sure is,” Travis agreed, and glowered at Jesse for palming the animal off on him. It was like him to pull off a dramatic last-minute rescue, then leave the functional aspects of the problem to somebody else.
Jesse flashed a grin, and for a moment, Travis felt territorial, wanted to set himself between Sierra and her boy, the pair of them, and one of his oldest friends. He felt off balance, some how, as though he’d been ambushed. What the hell was that all about?
“Is that a buckin’ bronc?” Liam asked, venturing a step to ward Baldy.
Sierra reached out quickly, caught hold of the fur-trimmed hood on the kid’s coat and yanked him back. Cold sunlight glinted off the kid’s glasses, making his eyes invisible.
Jesse laughed. “Back in the day,” he said, “Baldy was a rodeo horse. Cowboys quivered in their boots when they drew him to ride. Now, as you can see, he’s a little past his prime.”
“And you would be—?” Sierra asked, with a touch of coolness to her tone. Maybe she was the one woman out of a thousand who could see Jesse McKettrick for what he was—a good-natured case of very bad news.
“Your cousin Jesse.”
Sierra sized him up, took in his battered jeans, work shirt, sheepskin coat and very expensive boots. “Descended from…?”
The McKettricks talked like that. Every one of them could trace their lineage back to old Angus, by a variety of paths, and while there would be hell to pay if anybody riled them as a bunch, they mostly kept to their own branch of the family tree.
“Jeb,” Jesse said.
Sierra nodded.
Liam’s attention remained fixed on the horse. “Can I ride him?”
“Sure,” Jesse replied.
“No way,” said Sierra, at exactly the same moment.
Travis felt sorry for the kid, and it must have shown in his face, because Sierra’s gaze narrowed on him.
“We’ve had a long trip,” she said. “I guess we’ll just go inside.”
“Make your selves at home,” Travis said, gesturing toward the house. “Don’t worry about your bags. Jesse and I’ll carry them in for you.”
She considered, probably wondering if she’d be obligated in any way if she agreed, then nodded. Catching Liam by the hood of his coat again, she got him turned from the horse and hustled him toward the front door.
“Too bad we’re kin,” Jesse said, following Sierra with his eyes.
“Too bad,” Travis agreed mildly, though privately he didn’t believe it was such a bad thing at all.

The house was a long, sprawling structure, with two stories and a wrap around porch. Sierra’s most immediate impression was of substance and practicality, rather than elegance, and she felt a subtle interior shift, as if she’d been a long time lost in a strange, winding street, thick with fog, and suddenly found her self standing at her own front door.
“Those guys are real cowboys,” Liam said, once they were inside.
Sierra nodded distractedly, taking in the pegged wood floors, gleaming with the patina of venerable age, the double doors and steep stair case on the right, the high ceilings, the antique grandfather clock ticking ponderously beside the door. She peeked into a spacious living room, probably called a parlor when the house was new, and admired the enormous natural-rock fire place, with its raised hearth and wood-nook. Worn but colorful rugs gave some relief to the otherwise uncompromisingly masculine decor of leather couches and chairs and tables of rough-hewn pine, as did the piano set in an alcove of floor-to-ceiling windows.
An odd nostalgia overtook Sierra; she’d never set foot on the Triple M before that day, let alone entered the home of Holt and Lorelei McKettrick, but she might have, if her dad hadn’t snatched her the day Eve filed for divorce, and carried her off to San Miguel de Allende to share his expatriate life style. She might have spent summers here, as Meg had, picking black berries, wading in mountain streams, riding horses. Instead, she’d run barefoot through the streets of San Miguel, with no more memory of her mother than a faint scent of expensive perfume, some times encountered among the waves of tourists who frequented the markets, shops and restaurants of her home town.
Liam tugged at the sleeve of her coat. “Mom?”
She snapped out of her reverie, looked down at him, and smiled. “You hungry, bud?”
Liam nodded solemnly, but brightened when the door bumped open and Travis came in, lugging two suit cases.
Travis cleared his throat, as though embarrassed. “Plenty of grub in the kitchen,” he said. “Shall I put this stuff upstairs?”
“Yes,” Sierra said. “Thanks.” At least that way she’d know which rooms were hers and Liam’s without having to ask. She might have been concerned, sharing the place with Travis, but Meg had told her he lived in a trailer out by the barn. What Meg hadn’t mentioned was that her resident care taker was in his early thirties, not his sixties, as Sierra had imagined, and too attractive for comfort, with his lean frame, blue-green eyes and dark-blond hair in need of a trim.
She blushed as these thoughts filled her mind, and shuffled Liam quickly toward the kitchen.
It was a large room, with the same plank floors she’d seen in the front of the house and modern appliances, strangely juxtaposed with the black, chrome-trimmed wood cookstove occupying the far-left-hand corner. The table was long and rustic, with benches on either side and a chair at each end.
“Tables like that are a tradition with the McKettricks,” a male voice said from just behind her.
Sierra jumped, startled, and turned to see Jesse in the doorway.
“Sorry,” he said. He was handsome, Sierra thought. His coloring was similar to Travis’s, and so was his build, and yet the two men didn’t resemble each other at all.
“No problem,” Sierra said.
Liam wrenched open the refrigerator. “Bologna!” he yelled triumphantly.
“Whoopee,” Sierra replied, with a dryness that was lost on her son. “If there’s bologna, there must be white bread, too.”
“Jesse!” Travis’s voice, from the direction of the front door. “Get out here and give me a hand!”
Jesse grinned, nodded affably to Sierra and vanished.
Sierra took off her coat, hung it from a peg next to the back door, and gestured for Liam to remove his, too. He complied, then went straight back to the bologna. He found a loaf of bread in a colorful polka-dot bag and started to build a sandwich.
Watching him, Sierra felt a faint brush of sorrow against the back of her heart. Liam was good at doing things on his own; he’d had a lot of practice, with her working the night shift at the club and sleeping days. Old Mrs. Davis from the apartment across the hall had been a conscientious babysitter, but hardly a mother figure.
She put coffee on to brew, once Liam was settled on a bench at the table. He’d chosen the side against the wall, so he could watch her moving about the kitchen.
“Cool place,” he observed, between bites, “but it’s haunted.”
Sierra took a can of soup from a shelf, opened it and dumped the contents into a saucepan, placing it on the modern gas stove be fore answering. Liam was an imaginative child, often saying surprising things. Rather than responding instantly, Sierra usually tried to let a couple of beats pass before she answered.
“What makes you say that?”
“Don’t know,” Liam said, chewing. They’d had a drive-through break fast, but that had been hours ago, and he was obviously starving.
Another jab of guilt struck Sierra, keener than the one before. “Come on,” she prodded. “You must have had a reason.” Of course he’d had a reason, she thought. They’d just been to a grave yard, so it was natural that death would be on his mind. She should have waited, made the pilgrimage on her own, instead of dragging Liam along.
Liam looked thoughtful. “The air sort of…buzzes,” he said. “Can I make another sandwich?”
“Only if you promise to have some of this soup first.”
“Deal,” Liam said.
An old china cabinet stood against a far wall, near the cookstove, and Sierra approached it, even though she didn’t intend to use any of the dishes inside. Priceless antiques, every one.
Her family had eaten off those dishes. Generations of them.
Her gaze caught on a teapot, sturdy looking and, at the same time, exquisite. Spell bound, she opened the glass doors of the cabinet and reached inside to touch the piece, ever so lightly, with just the tips of her fingers.
“Soup’s boiling over,” Liam said mildly.
Sierra gasped, turned on her heel and rushed back to the modern stove to push the saucepan off the flame.
“Mom,” Liam interjected.
“What?”
“Chill out. It’s only soup.”
The inside door swung open, and Travis stuck his head in. “Stuff’s upstairs,” he said. “Anything else you need?”
Sierra stared at him for a long moment, as though he’d spoken in an alien language. “Uh, no,” she said finally. “Thanks.” Pause. “Would you like some lunch?”
“No, thanks,” he said. “Gotta see to that damn horse.”
With that, he ducked out again.
“How come I can’t ride the horse?” Liam asked.
Sierra sighed, setting a bowl of soup in front of him. “Because you don’t know how.”
Liam’s sigh echoed her own, and if they’d been talking about anything but the endangerment of life and limb, it would have been funny.
“How am I supposed to learn how if you won’t let me try? You’re being over protective. You could scar my psyche. I might develop psychological problems.”
“There are times,” Sierra confessed, sitting down across from him with her own bowl of soup, “when I wish you weren’t quite so smart.”
Liam waggled his eyebrows at her. “I got it from you.”
“Not,” Sierra said. Liam had her eyes, her thick, fine hair, and her dogged persistence, but his remarkable IQ came from his father.
Don’t think about Adam, she told herself.
Travis Reid sidled into her mind.
Even worse.
Liam consumed his soup, along with a second sandwich, and went off to explore the rest of the house while Sierra lingered thoughtfully over her coffee.
The telephone rang.
Sierra got up to fetch the cordless receiver and pressed Talk with her thumb. “Hello?”
“You’re there!” Meg trilled.
Sierra noticed that she’d left the china cabinet doors open and went in that direction, intending to close them. “Yes,” she said. Meg had been kind to her, in a long-distance sort of way, but Sierra had only been two when she’d last seen her half sister, and that made them strangers.
“How do you like it? The ranch house, I mean?”
“I haven’t seen much of it,” Sierra answered. “Liam and I just got here, and then we had lunch….” Her hand went, of its own accord, to the teapot, and she imagined she felt just the faintest charge when she touched it. “Lots of antiques around here,” she said, thinking aloud.
“Don’t be afraid to use them,” Meg replied. “Family tradition.”
Sierra withdrew her hand from the teapot, shut the doors. “Family tradition?”
“McKettrick rules,” Meg said, with a smile in her voice. “Things are meant to be used, no matter how old they are.”
Sierra frowned, uneasy. “But if they get broken—”
“They get broken,” Meg finished for her. “Have you met Travis yet?”
“Yes,” Sierra said. “And he’s not at all what I expected.”
Meg laughed. “What did you expect?”
“Some gimpy old guy, I guess,” Sierra admitted, warming to the friendliness in her sister’s voice. “You said he took care of the place and lived in a trailer by the barn, so I thought—” She broke off, feeling foolish.
“He’s cute and he’s single,” Meg said.
“Even the teapot?” Sierra mused.
“Huh?”
Sierra put a hand to her forehead. Sighed. “Sorry. I guess I missed a segue there. There’s a teapot in the china cabinet in the kitchen—I was just wondering if I could—”
“I know the one,” Meg answered, with a soft fondness in her voice. “It was Lorelei’s. She got it for a wedding present.”
Lorelei. The matriarch of the family. Sierra took a step backward.
“Use it,” Meg said, as if she’d seen Sierra’s reflexive retreat.
Sierra shook her head. “I couldn’t. I had no idea it was that old. If I dropped it—”
“Sierra,” Meg said, “it’s not china. It’s cast iron, with an enamel overlay.”
“Oh.”
“Kind of like the McKettrick women, Mom always says.” Meg went on. “Smooth on the outside, tough as iron on the inside.” Mom. Sierra closed her eyes against all the conflicting emotions the word brought up in her, but it didn’t help.
“We’ll give you time to settle in,” Meg said gently, when Sierra was too choked up to speak. “Then Mom and I will probably pop in for a visit. If that’s okay with you, of course.”
Both Meg and Eve lived in San Antonio, Texas, where they helped run McKettrickCo, a multinational corporation with interests in everything from software to communication satellites, so they wouldn’t be “popping in” without a little notice.
Sierra swallowed hard. “It’s your house,” she said.
“And yours,” Meg pointed out, very quietly.
After that, Meg made Sierra promise to call if she needed any thing. They said goodbye, and the call ended.
Sierra went back to the china cabinet for the teapot.
Liam clattered down the back stairs. “I told you this place was haunted!” he crowed, his small face shining with delight.
The teapot was heavy—definitely cast iron—but Sierra was careful as she set it on the counter, just the same. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“I just saw a kid,” Liam announced. “Upstairs, in my room!”
“You’re imagining things.”
Liam shook his head. “I saw him!”
Sierra approached her son, laid her hand to his forehead. “No fever,” she mused, worried.
“Mom,” Liam protested, pulling back. “I’m not sick—and I’m not delusional, either.”
Delusional. How many seven-year-olds used that word? Sierra sighed and cupped Liam’s eager face in both hands. “Listen. It’s fine to have imaginary friends, but—”
“He’s not imaginary.”
“Okay,” Sierra responded, with another sigh. It was possible, she supposed, that a neighbor child had wandered in before they arrived, but that seemed unlikely, given that the only other houses on the ranch were miles away. “Let’s investigate.”
Together they climbed the back stairs, and Sierra got her first look at the upper story. The corridor was wide, with the same serviceable board floors. The light fixtures, though old-fashioned, were electric, but most of the light came from the large arched window at the far end of the hallway. Six doors stood open, an indication that Liam had visited each room in turn after leaving the kitchen the first time.
He led her into the middle one, on the left side.
No one was there.
Sierra let out her breath, admiring the room. It was spacious, perfect quarters for a boy. Two bay windows over looked the barn area, where Baldy, the singularly unattractive horse, stood stalwartly in the middle of the corral, looking as though he in tended to break loose at any second and do some serious bucking. Travis was beside Baldy, stroking the animal’s neck as he eased the halter off over its head.
A quivery sensation tickled the pit of Sierra’s stomach.
“Mom,” Liam said. “He was here. He had on short pants and funny shoes and suspenders.”
Sierra turned to look at her son, feeling fretful again. Liam stood near the other window, examining an antique telescope, balanced atop a shining brass tripod. “I believe you,” she said.
“You don’t,” Liam argued, jutting out his chin. “You’re humoring me.”
Sierra sat down on the side of the bed positioned between the windows. Like the dressers, it was scarred with age, but made of sturdy wood. The head board was simply but intricately carved, and a faded quilt provided color. “Maybe I am, a little,” she admitted, because there was no fooling Liam. He had an uncanny knack for seeing through anything but the stark truth. “I don’t know what to think, that’s all.”
“Don’t you believe in ghosts?”
I don’t believe in much of anything, Sierra thought sadly. “I believe in you,” she said, patting the mattress beside her. “Come and sit down.”
Reluctantly, he sat. Stiffened when she slipped an arm around his shoulders. “If you think I’m going to take a nap,” he said, “you’re dead wrong.”
The word dead tiptoed up Sierra’s spine to dance lightly at her nape. “Everything’s going to be all right, you know,” she said gently.
“I like this room,” Liam confided, and the hopeful uncertainty in his manner made Sierra’s heart ache. They’d always lived in apartments or cheap motel rooms. Had Liam been secretly yearning to call a house like this one home? To settle down some where and live like a normal kid?
“Me, too,” Sierra said. “It has friendly vibes.”
“Is that supposed to be like a closet?” Liam asked, indicating the huge pine armoire taking up most of one wall.
Sierra nodded. “It’s called a wardrobe.”
“Maybe it’s like the one in that story. Maybe the back of it opens into another world. There could be a lion and a witch in there.” From the smile on Liam’s face, the concept intrigued rather than troubled him.
She ruffled his hair. “Maybe,” she agreed.
His attention shifted back to the telescope. “I wish I could look through that and see Andromeda,” he said. “Did you know that the whole galaxy is on a collision course with the Milky Way? All hell’s going to break loose when it gets here, too.”
Sierra shuddered at the thought. Most parents worried that their kids played too many video games. With Liam, the concern was the Discovery and Science Channels, not to mention programs like Nova. He thought about things like Earth losing its magnetic field and had night mares about creatures swimming in dark oceans under the ice covering one of Jupiter’s moons. Or was it Saturn?
“Don’t get excited, Mom,” he said, with an understanding smile. “It’s going to be something like five billion years before it happens.”
“Before what happens?” Sierra asked, blinking.
“The collision,” he said tolerantly.
“Right,” Sierra said.
Liam yawned. “Maybe I will take a nap.” He studied her. “Just don’t get the idea it’s going to be a regular thing.”
She mussed his hair again, kissed the top of his head. “I’m clear on that,” she said, standing and reaching for the crocheted afghan lying neatly folded at the foot of the bed.
Liam kicked off his shoes and stretched out on top of the blue chenille bed spread, yawning again. He set his glasses on the night stand with care.
She covered him, resisted the temptation to kiss his forehead, and headed for the door. When she looked back from the threshold, Liam was already asleep.
1919
Hannah McKettrick heard her son’s laughter before she rode around the side of the house, toward the barn, a week’s worth of mail bulging in the saddle bags draped across the mule’s neck. The snow was deep, with a hard crust, and the January wind was brisk.
Her jaw tightened when she saw her boy out in the cold, wearing a thin jacket and no hat. He and Doss, her brother-in-law, were building what appeared to be a snow fort, their breath making white plumes in the frigid air.
Some thing in Hannah gave a painful wrench at the sight of Doss; his resemblance to Gabe, his brother and her late husband, in variably startled her, even though they lived under the same roof and she should have been used to him by then.
She nudged the mule with the heels of her boots, but Seesaw-Two didn’t pick up his pace. He just plodded along.
“What are you doing out here?” Hannah called.
Both Tobias and Doss fell silent, turning to gaze guiltily in her direction.
The breath plumes dissipated.
Tobias set his feet and pushed back his narrow shoulders. He was only eight, but since Gabe’s coffin had arrived by train one warm day last summer, draped in an American flag and with Doss for an escort, her boy had taken on the mien of a man.
“We’re just making a fort, Ma,” he said.
Hannah blinked back sudden, stinging tears. A soldier, Gabe had died of influenza in an army infirmary, without ever seeing the battleground. Tobias thought in military terms, and Doss encouraged him, a fact Hannah did not appreciate.
“It’s cold out here,” she said. “You’ll catch your death.”
Doss shifted, pushed his battered hat to the back of his head. His face hardened, like the ice on the pond back of the orchard where the fruit trees stood, bare-limbed and stoic, waiting for spring.
“Go inside,” Hannah told her son.
Tobias hesitated, then obeyed.
Doss remained, watching her.
The kitchen door slammed eloquently.
“You’ve got no business putting thoughts like that in his head,” Doss said, in a quiet voice. He took old Seesaw’s reins and held him while she dismounted, careful to keep her woolen skirts from riding up.
“That’s a fine bit of hypocrisy, coming from you,” Hannah replied. “Tobias had pneumonia last fall. We nearly lost him. He’s fragile, and you know it, and as soon as I turn my back, you have him outside, building a snow fort!”
Doss reached for the saddle bags, and so did Hannah. There was a brief tug-of-war before she let go. “He’s a kid,” Doss said. “If you had your way, he’d never do anything but look through that telescope and play checkers!”
Hannah felt as warm as if she were standing close to a hot stove, instead of Doss McKettrick. Their breaths melded between them. “I fully intend to have my way,” she said. “Tobias is my son, and I will not have you telling me how to raise him!”
Doss slapped the saddle bags over one shoulder and stepped back, his hazel eyes narrowed. “He’s my nephew—my brother’s boy—and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you turn him into a sickly little whelp hitched to your apron strings!”
Hannah stiffened. “You’ve said quite enough,” she told him tersely.
He leaned in, so his nose was almost touching hers. “I haven’t said the half of it, Mrs. McKettrick.”
Hannah side stepped him, marching for the house, but the snow came almost to her knees and made it hard to storm off in high dudgeon. Her breath trailed over her right shoulder, along with her words. “Supper’s in an hour,” she said, without turning around. “But maybe you’d rather eat in the bunk house.”
Doss’s chuckle riled her, just as it was no doubt meant to do. “Old Charlie’s a sight easier to get along with than you are, but he can’t hold a candle to you when it comes to home cooking. Anyhow, he’s been gone for a month, in case you haven’t noticed.”
She felt a flush rise up her neck, even though she was shivering inside Gabe’s old woolen work coat. His scent was fading from the fabric, and she wished she knew a way to hold on to it.
“Suit yourself,” she retorted.
Tobias shoved a chunk of wood into the cookstove as she entered the house, sending sparks snapping up the gleaming black chimney before he shut the door with a clang.
“We were only building a fort,” he grumbled.
Hannah was stilled by the sight of him, just as if somebody had thrown a lasso around her middle and pulled it tight. “I could make biscuits and sausage gravy,” she offered quietly.
Tobias ignored the olive branch. “You rode down to the road to meet the mail wagon,” he said, without meeting her eyes. “Did I get any letters?” With his hands shoved into the pockets of his trousers and his brownish-blond hair shining in the wintry sunlight flowing in through the windows, he looked the way Gabe must have, at his age.
“One from your grandpa,” Hannah said. Methodically, she hung her hat on the usual peg, pulled off her knitted mittens and stuffed them into the pockets of Gabe’s coat. She took that off last, always hating to part with it.
“Which grandpa?” Tobias lingered by the stove, warming his hands, still refusing to glance her way.
Hannah’s family lived in Missoula, Montana, in a big house on a tree-lined residential street. She missed them sorely, and it hurt a little, knowing Tobias was hoping it was Holt who’d written to him, not her father.
“The McKettrick one,” she said.
“Good,” Tobias answered.
The back door opened, and Doss came in, still carrying the saddle bags. Usually he stopped outside to kick the snow off his boots so the floors wouldn’t get muddy, but today he was in an obstinate mood.
Hannah went to the stove and ladled hot water out of the reservoir into a basin, so she could wash up before starting supper.
“Catch,” Doss said cheer fully.
She looked back, saw the saddle bags, burdened with mail, fly through the air. Tobias caught them ably with a grin.
When was the last time he’d smiled at her that way?
The boy plundered anxiously through the bags, brought out the fat envelope post marked San Antonio, Texas. Her in-laws, Holt and Lorelei McKettrick, owned a ranch outside that distant city, and though the Triple M was still home to them, they’d been spending a lot of time away since the beginning of the war. Hannah barely knew them, and neither did Tobias, for that matter, but they’d kept up a lively correspondence, the three of them, ever since he’d learned to read, and the letters had been arriving on a weekly basis since Gabe died.
Gabe’s folks had come back for the funeral, of course, and in the intervening months Hannah had been secretly afraid. Holt and Lorelei saw their lost son in Tobias, the same as she did, and they’d offered to take him back to Texas with them when they left. She hadn’t had to refuse— Tobias had done that for her, but he’d clearly been torn. A part of him had wanted to leave.
Hannah’s heart had wedged itself up into her throat and stayed there until Gabe’s mother and father were gone. When ever a letter arrived, she felt anxious again.
She glanced at Doss, now shrugging out of his coat. He’d gone away to the army with Gabe, fallen sick with influenza him self, recovered and stayed on at the ranch after he brought his brother’s body home for burial. Though no one had come right out and said so, Hannah knew Doss had remained on the Triple M, instead of joining the folks in Texas, mainly to look after Tobias.
Maybe the McKettricks thought she’d hightail it home to Montana, once she got over the shock of losing Gabe, and they’d lose track of the boy.
Now Tobias stood poring over the letter, devouring every word with his eyes, getting to the last page and starting all over again at the beginning.
Deliberately Hannah diverted her attention, and that was when she saw the teapot, sitting on the counter. She looked toward the china cabinet, across the room. She hadn’t touched the piece, knowing it was special to Lorelei, and she couldn’t credit that Doss or Tobias would have taken it from its place, either. They’d been playing in the snow while she was gone to fetch the mail, not throwing a tea party.
“Did one of you get this out?” she asked casually, getting a good grip on the pot before carrying it back to the cabinet. It was made of metal, but the pretty enamel coating could have been chipped, and Hannah wasn’t about to take the risk.
Tobias barely glanced her way before shaking his head. He was still intent on the letter from Texas.
Doss looked more closely, his gaze rising curiously from the teapot to Hannah’s face. “Nope,” he said at last, and busied himself emptying the contents of the coffeepot down the sink before pumping in water for a fresh batch.
Hannah closed the doors of the china cabinet, frowning.
“Odd,” she said, very softly.

CHAPTER THREE
Present Day
SIERRA DESCENDED THE REAR STAIR CASE into the kitchen, being extra quiet so she wouldn’t wake Liam up. He hadn’t had an asthma attack in almost a month, but he needed his rest.
Intending to brew herself some tea and spend a few quiet minutes restoring her equilibrium, she chose a mug from one of the cup boards, located a box of orange pekoe, and reached for the heir loom teapot.
It was gone.
She glanced toward the china cabinet and saw Lorelei’s teapot sitting behind the glass.
Jesse or Travis must have come inside while she was upstairs, she reasoned, and put it away.
But that seemed unlikely. Men, especially cowboys, didn’t usually fuss with teapots, did they? Not that she knew that much about men in general or cowboys in particular.
She’d seen Travis earlier, from Liam’s bedroom window, working with the horse, and she was sure he hadn’t been back in the house after carrying in the bags.
“Jesse?” she called softly, half-afraid he might jump out at her from some where.
No answer.
She moved to the front of the house, peered between the lace curtains in the parlor. Jesse’s truck was gone, leaving deep tracks in the patchy mud and snow, rapidly filling with gossamer white flakes.
Bemused, Sierra returned to the kitchen, grabbed her coat and went out the back door, shoving her hands into her pockets and ducking her head against the thickening snowfall and the icy wind that accompanied it. Nothing in her life had prepared her for high-country weather; she’d been raised in Mexico, moved to San Diego after her father died and spent the last several years living in Florida. She supposed it would be a while before she adjusted to the change in climate, but if there was one thing she’d learned to do, on the long journey from then to now, it was adapt.
The doors of the big, weathered-board barn stood open, and Sierra stepped inside, shivering. It was warmer there, but she could still see her breath.
“Mr. Reid?”
“Travis” came the taciturn answer from a nearby stall. “I don’t answer to much of anything else.”
Sierra crossed the sawdust floor and saw Travis on the other side of the door, grooming poor old Baldy with long, gentle strokes of a brush. He gave her a sidelong glance and grinned slightly.
“Settling in okay?” he asked.
“I guess,” she said, leaning on the stall door to watch him work. There was something soothing about the way he attended to that horse, almost as though he were touching her own skin….
Perish the thought.
He straightened. A quiver went through Baldy’s body. “Some thing wrong?” Travis asked.
“No,” Sierra said quickly, attempting a smile. “I was just wondering…”
“What?” Travis went back to brushing again, though he was still watching Sierra, and the horse gave a contented little snort of pleasure.
Suddenly the whole subject of the teapot seemed silly. How could she ask if he or Jesse had moved it? And, so what if they had? Jesse was a McKettrick, born and raised, and the things in that house were as much a part of his heritage as hers. Travis was clearly a trusted family friend—if not more.
Sierra found that possibility unaccountably disturbing. Meg had said he was single and free, but she obviously trusted Travis implicitly, which might mean there was a deeper level to their relationship.
“I was just wondering…if you ever drink tea,” Sierra hedged lamely.
Travis chuckled. “Not often, unless it’s the electric variety,” he replied, and though he was smiling, the expression in his eyes was one of puzzlement. He was probably asking himself what kind of nut case Meg and Eve had saddled him with. “Are you inviting me?”
Sierra blushed, even more self-conscious than before. “Well…yes. Yes, I guess so.”
“I’d rather have coffee,” Travis said, “if that’s all right with you.”
“I’ll put a pot on,” Sierra answered, foolishly relieved. She should have walked away, but she seemed fixed to the spot, as though someone had smeared the soles of her shoes with super glue.
Travis finished brushing down the horse, ran a gloved hand along the animal’s neck and waited politely for Sierra to move, so he could open the stall door and step out.
“What’s really going on here, Ms. McKettrick?” he asked, when they were facing each other in the wide aisle, Baldy’s stall door securely latched. Along the aisle, other horses nickered, probably wanting Travis’s attention for them selves.
“Sierra,” she said. She tried to sound friendly, but it was forced.
“Sierra, then. Somehow I don’t think you came out here to ask me to a tea party or a coffee klatch.”
She huffed out a breath and pushed her hands deeper into her coat pockets. “Okay,” she admitted. “I wanted to know if you or Jesse had been inside the house since you brought the baggage in.”
“No,” Travis answered readily.
“It would certainly be all right if you had, of course—”
Travis took a light grip on Sierra’s elbow and steered her toward the barn doors. He closed and fastened them once they were outside.
“Jesse got in his truck and left, first thing,” he said. “I’ve been with Baldy for the last half an hour. Why?”
Sierra wished she’d never begun this conversation. Never left the warmth of the kitchen for the cold and the questions in Travis’s eyes. She’d done both those things, though, and now she would have to explain. “I took a teapot out of the china cabinet,” she said, “and set it on the counter. I went up to Liam’s room, to help him settle in for a nap, and when I came down stairs—”
A startling grin broke over Travis’s features like a flash of summer sunlight over a crystal-clear pond. “What?” he prompt ed. He moved to Sierra’s other side, shielding her from the bitter wind, increasing his pace, and there fore hers, as they approached the house.
“It was in the cabinet again. I would swear I put it on the counter.”
“Weird,” Travis said, kicking the snow off his boots at the base of the back steps.
Sierra stepped inside, shivering, took off her coat and hung it up.
Travis followed, closed the door, pulled off his gloves and stuffed them into the pockets of his coat before hanging it beside Sierra’s, along with his hat. “Must have been Liam,” he said.
“He’s asleep,” Sierra replied. The coffee she’d made earlier was still hot, so she filled two mugs, casting an uneasy glance toward the china cabinet as she did so. Liam couldn’t have gotten down stairs without her seeing him, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to reach the high shelf in the china closet without dragging a chair over. She would have heard the scraping sound and, anyway, Liam being Liam, he wouldn’t have put the chair back where he found it. There would have been evidence.
Travis accepted the cup Sierra offered with a nod of thanks, took a sip. “You must have put it away yourself, then,” he said reasonably. “And then forgotten.”
Sierra sat down in the chair closest to the wood-burning cookstove, suddenly yearning for a fire, while Travis made himself comfortable nearby, on the bench facing the wall.
“I know I didn’t,” she said, biting her lower lip.
Travis concentrated on his coffee for some moments before turning his gaze back to her face. “It’s a strange house,” he said.
Sierra blinked.
Cool place, Liam had said, right after they arrived, but it’s haunted.
“What do you mean, ‘It’s a strange house’?” she asked. She made no attempt to keep the skepticism out of her voice.
“Meg’s going to kill me for this,” Travis said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“She doesn’t want you scared off.”
Sierra frowned, waiting.
“It’s a good place,” Travis said, taking the homey kitchen in with a fond glance. Clearly, he’d spent a lot of time there. “Odd things happen some times, though.”
Sierra heard Liam’s voice again. I saw a kid, upstairs in my room.
She shook off the memory. “Impossible,” she muttered.
“If you say so,” Travis replied affably.
“What kind of ‘odd things’ happen in this house?”
Travis smiled, and Sierra had the sense that she was being handled, skill fully managed, in the same way as the horse. “Once in a while, you’ll hear the piano playing by itself. Or you walk into a room, and you get the feeling you passed somebody on the threshold, even though you’re alone.”
Sierra shivered again, but this time it had nothing to do with the icy January weather. The kitchen was snug and warm, even without the cookstove lit. “I would appreciate it,” she said, “if you wouldn’t talk that kind of nonsense in front of Liam. He’s…impressionable.”
Travis raised an eyebrow.
Suddenly, strangely, Sierra wanted to tell him what Liam had said about seeing another little boy in his room, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. She wouldn’t have Travis Reid—or anybody else, for that matter—thinking Liam was…different. He got enough of that from other kids, being so smart, and his asthma set him apart, too.
“I must have moved the teapot myself,” Sierra said, at last, “and forgotten. Just as you said.”
Travis looked unconvinced. “Right,” he agreed.
1919
Tobias carried the letter to the table, where Doss sat comfortably in the chair everyone thought of as Holt’s. “They bought three hundred head of cattle,” the boy told his uncle excitedly, handing over the sheaf of pages. “Drove them all the way from Mexico to San Antonio, too.”
Doss smiled. “Is that right?” he mused. His hazel eyes warmed in the light of a kerosene lantern as he read. The place had electricity now, but Hannah tried to save on it where she could. The last bill had come to over a dollar, for a mere two months of service, and she’d been horrified at the expense.
Standing at the stove, she turned back to her work, stood a little straighter, punched down the biscuit dough with sharp jabs of the wooden spoon. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to Tobias that she might like to see that infernal letter. She was a McKettrick, too, after all, if only by marriage.
“I guess Ma and Pa liked that buffalo you carved for them,” Doss observed, when he’d finished and set the pages aside. Hannah just happened to see, since she’d had to pass right by that end of the table to fetch a pound of ground sausage from the icebox. “Says here it was the best Christmas present they ever got.”
Tobias nodded, beaming with pride. He’d worked all fall on that buffalo, even in his sick bed, whittling it from a chunk of firewood Doss had cut for him special. “I reckon I’ll make them a bear for next year,” he said. Not a word about carving something for her parents, Hannah noted, even though they’d sent him a bicycle and a toy fire engine back in December. The McKettricks, of course, had arranged for a spotted pony to be brought up from the main ranch house on Christmas morning, all decked out in a brand-new saddle and bridle, and though Tobias had dutifully written his Montana grand parents to thank them for their gifts, he’d never played with the engine. Just set it on a shelf in his room and forgotten all about it. The bicycle wouldn’t be much use before spring, that was true, but he’d shown no more interest in it once the pony had arrived.
“Wash your hands for supper, Tobias McKettrick,” Hannah said.
“Supper isn’t ready,” he protested.
“Do as your mother says,” Doss told him quietly.
He obeyed immediately, which should have pleased Hannah, but it didn’t.
Doss, mean while, opened the saddle bags, took out the usual assortment of letters, periodicals and small parcels, which Hannah had already looked through before the mail wagon rounded the bend in the road. She’d been both disappointed and relieved when there was nothing with her name on it. Once, in the last part of October, when the fiery leaves of the oak trees were falling in puddles around their trunks like the folds of a discarded garment, she’d gotten a letter from Gabe. He’d been dead almost four months by then, and her heart had fairly stopped at the sight of his handwriting on that envelope.
For a brief, dizzying moment, she’d thought there’d been a mistake. That Gabe hadn’t died of the influenza at all, but some stranger instead. Mix-ups like that happened during and after a war, and she hadn’t seen the body, since the coffin was nailed shut.
She’d stood there beside the road, with that letter in her hand, weeping and trembling so hard that a good quarter of an hour must have passed before she broke the seal and took out the thick fold of vellum pages inside. She’d come to her practical senses by then, but seeing the date at the top of the first page still made her bellow aloud to the empty country side: March 17, 1918.
Gabe had still been well when he wrote that letter. He’d been looking forward to coming home. It was about time they added to their family, he’d said, and got cattle running on their part of the Triple M again.
She’d dropped to her knees, right there on the hard-packed dirt, too stricken to stand. The mule had wandered home, and presently Doss had come looking for her. Found her still clutching that letter to her chest, her throat so raw with sorrow that she couldn’t speak.
He’d lifted her into his arms, Doss had, without saying a word. Set her on his horse, swung up behind her and taken her home.
“Hannah?”
She blinked, came back to the kitchen and the biscuit batter, the package of sausage in her hands.
Doss was standing beside her, smelling of snow and pine trees and man. He touched her arm.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She swallowed, nodded.
It was a lie, of course. Hannah hadn’t been all right since the day Gabe went away to war. Like as not, she would never be all right again.
“You sit down,” Doss said. “I’ll attend to supper.”
She sat, because the strength had gone out of her knees, and looked around blankly. “Where’s Tobias?”
Doss washed his hands, opened the sausage packet, and dumped the contents into the big cast iron skillet waiting on the stove. “Upstairs,” he answered.
Tobias had left the room without her knowing?
“Oh,” she said, unnerved. Was she losing her mind? Had her sorrow pushed her not only to absent-minded distraction, but beyond the boundaries of ordinary sanity as well?
She considered the mysterious movement of her mother-in-law’s teapot.
Adeptly, Doss rolled out the biscuit dough, cut it into circles with the rim of a glass. Lorelei McKettrick had taught her boys to cook, sew on their own buttons and make up their beds in the morning. You could say that for her, and a lot of other things, too.
Doss poured Hannah a mug of coffee, brought it to her. Started to rest a hand on her shoulder, then thought better of it and pulled back. “I know it’s hard,” he said.
Hannah couldn’t look at him. Her eyes burned with tears she didn’t want him to see, though she reckoned he knew they were there anyhow. “There are days,” she said, in a whisper, “when I don’t think I can go another step. But I have to, because of Tobias.”
Doss crouched next to Hannah’s chair, took both her hands in his own and looked up into her face. “There’s been a hundred times,” he said, “when I wished it was me in that grave up there on the hill, instead of Gabe. I’d give any thing to take his place, so he could be here with you and the boy.”
A sense of loss cut into Hannah’s spirit like the blade of a new ax, swung hard. “You mustn’t think things like that,” she said, when she caught her breath. She pulled her hands free, laid them on either side of his earnest, handsome face, then quickly withdrew them. “You mustn’t, Doss. It isn’t right.”
Just then Tobias clattered down the back stairs.
Doss flushed and got to his feet.
Hannah turned away, pretended to have an interest in the mail, most of which was for Holt and Lorelei, and would have to be for warded to San Antonio.
“What’s the matter, Ma?” Tobias spoke worriedly into the awkward silence. “Don’t you feel good?”
She’d hoped the boy hadn’t seen Doss sitting on his haunches beside her chair, but obviously he had.
“I’m fine,” she said briskly. “I just had a splinter in my finger, that’s all. I got it putting wood in the fire, and Doss took it out for me.”
Tobias looked from her to his uncle and back again.
“Is that why you’re making supper?” he asked Doss. Doss hesitated. Like Gabe, he’d been raised to abhor any kind of lie, even an innocent one, designed to soothe a boy who’d lost his father and feared, in the depths of his dreams, losing his mother, too.
“I’m making supper,” he said evenly, “because I can.”
Hannah closed her eyes, opened them again.
“Set the table, please,” Doss told Tobias.
Tobias hurried to the cabinet for plates and silver-ware.
Hannah met Doss’s gaze across the dimly lit room.
A charge seemed to pass between them, like before, when Hannah had come back from getting the mail and found To bias outside, in the teeth of a high-country winter, building a snow fort.
“It’s too damn dark in this house,” Doss said. He walked to the middle of the room, reached up, and pulled the beaded metal cord on the overhead light. The bare bulb glowed so brightly it made Hannah blink, but she didn’t object. Some thing in Doss’s face prevented her from it.
Present Day
Travis had long since finished his coffee and left the house by the time Liam got up from his nap and came down stairs, tousle-haired and puffy-eyed from sleep.
“That boy was in my room again,” he said. “He was sitting at the desk, writing a letter. Can I watch TV? There’s a nice HD setup in that room next to the front door. A computer, too, with a big, flat-screen monitor.”
Sierra knew about the fancy electronics, since she’d explored the house after Travis left. “You can watch TV for an hour,” she said. “Hands off the computer, though. It doesn’t belong to us.”
Liam’s shoulders slumped slightly. “I know how to use a computer, Mom,” he said. “We had them at school.”
Between rent, food and medical bills, Sierra had never been able to scrape together the money for a PC of their own. She’d used the one in the office of the bar she worked in, back in Florida. That was how Meg had first contacted her. “We’ll get one,” she said, “as soon as I find another job.”
“My mailbox is probably full,” Liam replied, unappeased. “All the kids in the Geek Program were going to write to me.”
Sierra, in the midst of putting a package of frozen chicken breasts into the microwave to thaw, felt as though she’d been poked with a sharp stick. “Don’t call it the Geek Program, please,” she said.
Liam shrugged one shoulder. “Every body else does.”
“Go watch TV.”
He went.
A rap sounded at the back door, and Sierra peered through the glass, since it was dark out, to see Travis standing on the back porch.
“Come in,” she called, and headed for the sink to wash her hands.
Travis entered, carrying a fragrant bag of take-out food in one hand. The collar of his coat was raised against the cold, his hat brim pulled low over his eyes.
“Fried chicken,” he said, lifting the bag as evidence.
Sierra paused, shut off the faucet, dried her hands. The timer on the microwave dinged. “I was about to cook,” she said.
Travis grinned. “Good thing I got to you in time,” he answered. “If you’re anything like your sister, you shouldn’t be allowed to get near a stove.”
If you’re anything like your sister.
The words saddened Sierra, settled bleak and heavy over her heart. She didn’t know whether she was like her sister or not; until Meg had emailed her a smiling picture a few weeks ago, she wouldn’t have recognized her on the street.
“Did I say something wrong?” Travis asked.
“No,” Sierra said quickly. “It was—thoughtful of you to bring the chicken.”
Liam must have heard Travis’s voice, because he came pounding into the room, all smiles.
“Hey, Travis,” he said.
“Hey, cowpoke,” Travis replied.
“The computer’s making a dinging noise,” Liam reported.
Travis smiled, set the bag of chicken on the counter but made no move to take off his hat and coat. “Meg’s got it set to do that, so she’ll remember to check her email when she’s here,” he said.
“Mom won’t let me log on,” Liam told him.
Travis glanced at Sierra, turned to Liam again. “Rules are rules, cowpoke,” he said.
“Rules bite,” Liam said.
“Ninety-five percent of the time,” Travis agreed.
Liam recovered quickly. “Are you going to stay and eat with us?”
Travis shook his head. “I’d like that a lot, but I’m expected some where else for supper,” he answered.
Liam looked sorely disappointed.
Sierra wondered where that “some where else” was, and with whom Travis would be sharing a meal, and was irritated with her self. It was none of her business, and besides, she didn’t care what he did or who he did it with anyway. Not the least little bit.
“Maybe another time,” Travis said.
Liam sighed and retreated to the study and his allotted hour of television.
“You shouldn’t have,” Sierra said, indicating their supper with a nod.
“It’s your first night here,” Travis answered, opening the door to leave. “Seemed like the neighborly thing to do.”
“Thank you,” Sierra said, but he’d already closed the door between them.

Travis started up his truck, just in case Sierra was listening for the engine, drove it around behind the barn and parked. After stopping to check on Baldy and the three other horses in his care, he shrugged down into the collar of his coat and slogged to his trailer.
The quarters were close, smaller than the closet off his master bedroom at home in Flag staff, but he didn’t need much space. He had a bed, kitchen facilities, a bathroom and a place for his laptop. It was enough.
More than Brody was ever going to have.
He took off his hat and coat and tossed them on to the built-in, padded bench that passed for a couch. He tried not to think about Brody, and in the daytime, he stayed busy enough to succeed. At night, it was another matter. There just wasn’t enough to do after dark, especially out here in the boonies, once he’d nuked a frozen dinner and watched the news.
He thought about Sierra and the boy, in there in the big house, eating the chicken and fixings he’d picked up in the deli at the one and only super market in Indian Rock. He’d never intended to join them, since they’d just arrived and were settling in, but he could picture himself sitting down at that long table in the kitchen, just the same.
He rooted through his refrigerator, something he had to crouch to do, and chose between Salisbury steak, Salisbury steak and Salisbury steak.
While the sectioned plastic plate was whirling round and round in the lilliputian microwave that came with the trailer, he made coffee and remembered his last visit from Rance McKettrick. Widowed, Rance lived alone in the house his legendary ancestor, Rafe, had built for his wife, Emmeline, and their children, back in the 1880s. He had two daughters, whom he largely ignored.
“This place is just a fancy coffin,” Rance had observed, in his blunt way, when he’d stepped into the trailer. “Brody’s the one that’s dead, Trav, not you.”
Travis rubbed his eyes with a thumb and fore finger. Brody was dead, all right. No getting around that. Seventeen, with everything to live for, and he’d blown himself up in the back room of a slum house in Phoenix, making meth.
He looked into the window over the sink, saw his own reflection.
Turned away.
His cell phone rang, and he considered letting voice mail pick up, but couldn’t make himself do it. If he’d answered the night Brody called…
He fished the thing out, snapped it open and said, “Reid.”
“Whatever happened to ‘hello’?” Meg asked.
The bell on the microwave rang, and Travis reached in to retrieve his supper, burned his hand and cursed.
She laughed. “Better and better.”
“I’m not in the mood for banter, Meg,” he replied, turning on the water with his free hand and then switching to shove his scorched fingers into the flow.
“You never are,” she said.
“The horses are fine.”
“I know. You would have called me if they weren’t.”
“Then what do you want?”
“My, my, we are testy tonight. I called, you big grouch, to ask about my sister and my nephew. Are they okay? How do they look? Sierra is so private, she’s almost stand-of fish.”
“You can say that again.”
“Thank you, but in the interest of brevity, I won’t.”
“Since when do you give a damn about brevity?” Travis inquired, but he was grinning by then.
Once again Meg laughed. Once again Travis wished he’d been able to fall in love with her. They’d tried, the two of them, to get something going, on more than one occasion. Meg wanted a baby, and he wanted not to be alone, so it made sense. The trouble was, it hadn’t worked.
There was no chemistry.
There was no passion.
They were never going to be anything more than what they were—the best of friends. He was mostly resigned to that, but in lonely moments, he ached for things to be different.
“Tell me about my sister,” Meg insisted.
“She’s pretty,” Travis said. Real pretty, added a voice in his mind. “She’s proud, and over protective as hell of the kid.”
“Liam has asthma,” Meg said quietly. “According to Sierra, he nearly died of it a couple of times.”
Travis forgot his burned fingers, his Salisbury steak and his private sorrow. “What?”
Meg let out a long breath. “That’s the only reason Sierra’s willing to have anything to do with Mom and me. Mom put her on the company health plan and arranged for Liam to see a specialist in Flag staff on a regular basis. In return, Sierra had to agree to spend a year on the ranch.”
Travis stood still, absorbing it all. “Why here?” he asked. “Why not with you and Eve in San Antonio?”
“Mom and I would love that,” Meg said, “but Sierra needs…distance. Time to get used to us.”
“Time to get used to two McKettrick women. So we’re talking, say, the year 2050, give or take a decade?”
“Very funny. Sierra is a McKettrick woman, remember? She’s up to the challenge.”
“She is definitely a McKettrick,” Travis agreed ruefully. And very definitely a woman. “How did you find her?”
“Mom tracked her and Hank down when Sierra was little,” Meg answered.
Travis dropped on to the edge of his bed, which was unmade. The sheets were getting musty, and every night, the pizza crumbs rubbed his hide raw. One of these days he was going to haul off and change them.
“‘Tracked her down’?”
“Yes,” Meg said, with a sigh. “I guess I didn’t tell you about that part.”
“I guess you didn’t.” Travis had known about the kidnapping, how Sierra’s father had taken off with her the day the divorce papers were served, and that the two of them had ended up in Mexico. “Eve knew, and she still didn’t lift a finger to get her own daughter back?”
“Mom had her reasons,” Meg answered, with drawing a little.
“Oh, well, then,” Travis retorted, “that clears everything up. What reason could she possibly have?”
“It’s not my place to say, Trav,” Meg told him sadly. “Mom and Sierra have to work it all through first, and it might be a while before Sierra’s ready to listen.”
Travis sighed, shoved a hand through his hair. “You’re right,” he conceded.
Meg brightened again, but there was a brittleness about her that revealed more than she probably wanted Travis to know, close as they were. “So,” she said, “what would you say Mom’s chances are? Of reconnecting with Sierra, I mean?”
“The truth?”
“The truth,” Meg said, without enthusiasm.
“Zero to zip. Sierra’s been pleasant enough to me, but she’s as stubborn as any McKettrick that ever drew breath, and that’s saying something.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“You said you wanted the truth.”
“How can you be so sure Mom won’t be able to get through to her?”
“It’s just a hunch,” Travis said.
Meg was quiet. Travis was famous for his hunches. Too bad he hadn’t paid attention to the one that said his little brother was in big trouble, and that Travis ought to drop everything and look for Brody until he found him.
“Look, maybe I’m wrong,” he added.
“What’s your real impression of Sierra, Travis?”
He took his time answering. “She’s independent to a fault. She’s built a wall around herself and the kid, and she’s not about to let anybody get too close. She’s jumpy, too. If it wasn’t for Liam, and the fact that she probably doesn’t have two nickels to rub together, she definitely wouldn’t be on the Triple M.”
“Damn,” Meg said. “We knew she was poor, but—”
“Her car gave out in the driveway as soon as she pulled in. I took a peek under the hood, and believe me, the best mechanic on the planet couldn’t resurrect that heap.”
“She can drive my Blazer.”
“That might take some convincing on your part. This is not a woman who wants to be obliged. It’s probably all she can do not to grab the kid and hop on the next bus to nowhere.”
“This is depressing,” Meg said.
Travis got up off the bed, peeled back the plastic covering his dinner, and poked warily at the faux meat with the tip of one finger. Talk about depressing.
“Hey,” he said. “Look on the bright side. She’s here, isn’t she? She’s on the Triple M. It’s a start.”
“Take care of her, Travis.”
“As if she’d go along with that.”
“Do it for me.”
“Oh, please.”
Meg paused, took aim and scored a bull’s-eye. “Then do it for Liam.”

CHAPTER FOUR
1919
DOSS LEFT THE HOUSE AFTER supper, ostensibly to look in on the live stock one last time before heading upstairs to bed, leaving the dishwashing to Tobias and Hannah. He stood still in the dooryard, raising the collar of his coat against the wicked cold. Stars speckled the dark, wintry sky.
In those moments he missed Gabe with a piercing intensity that might have bent him double, if he wasn’t McKettrick proud. That was what his mother called the quality, anyhow. In the privacy of his own mind, Doss named it stubbornness.
Thinking of his ma made his pa come to mind, too. He missed them almost as sorely as he did Gabe. His uncles, Rafe and Kade and Jeb, along with their wives, were all down south, around Phoenix, where the weather was more hospitable to their aging bones. Their sons, to a man, were still in the army, even though the war was over, waiting to be mustered out. Their daughters had all married, every one of them keeping the McKettrick name, and lived in places as far-flung as Boston, New York and San Francisco.
There was hardly a McKettrick left on the place, save himself and Hannah and Tobias. It deepened Doss’s loneliness, knowing that. He wished every body would just come back home, where they belonged, but it would have been easier to herd wild barn cats than that bunch.
Doss looked back toward the house. Saw the lantern glowing at the kitchen window. Smiled.
The moment he’d gone outside, Hannah must have switched off the bulb. She worried about running short of things, he’d noticed, even though she’d come from a prosperous family, and certainly married into one.
His throat tightened. He knew she’d been different before he brought Gabe home in a pine box, but then, they all had. Gabe’s going left a hole in the fabric of what it meant to be a McKettrick, and not a tidy one, stitched at the edges. Rather, it was a jagged tear, and judging by the raw newness of his own grief, Doss had little hope of it ever mending.
Time heals, his mother had told him after they’d laid Gabe in the ground up there on the hill, with his Grandpa Angus and those that had passed after him, but she’d had tears in her eyes as she said it. As for his pa, well, he’d stood a long time by the grave. Stood there until Rafe and Kade and Jeb brought him away.
Doss thrust out a sigh, remembering. “Gabe,” he said, under his breath, “Hannah says it’s wrong of me, but I still wish it had been me instead of you.”
He’d have given anything for an answer, but wherever Gabe was, he was busy doing other things. Maybe they had fishing holes up there in the sky, or cattle to round up and drive to market.
“Take care of Hannah and my boy,” Gabe had told him, in that army infirmary, when they both knew there would be no turning the illness around. “Promise me, Doss.”
Doss had swallowed hard and made that promise, but it was a hard one to keep. Hannah didn’t seem to want taking care of, and every morning when Doss woke up, he was afraid this would be the day she’d decide to go back to her own people, up in Montana, and stay gone for good.
The back door opened, startling Doss out of his musings. He hesitated for a moment, then tramped in the direction of the barn, trying to look like a man bent on a purpose.
Hannah caught up, bundled into a shawl and carrying a lighted lantern in one hand.
“I think I’m going mad,” she blurted out.
Doss stopped, looked down at her in puzzled concern. “It’s the grief, Hannah,” he told her gruffly. “It will pass.”
“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” Hannah challenged, catching up with herself. The snow was deep and getting deeper, and the wind bit straight through to the marrow.
Doss moved to the windward side, to be a buffer for her. “I’ve got to believe it,” he said. “Feeling this bad forever doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“I put the teapot away,” Hannah said, her breath coming in puffs of white, “I know I put it away. But I must have gotten it out again, without knowing or remembering, and that scares me, Doss. That really scares me.”
They reached the barn. Doss took the lantern from her and hauled open one of the big doors one-handed. It wasn’t easy, since the snow had drifted, even in the short time since he’d left off feeding and watering the horses and the milk cow and that cussed mule Seesaw. The critter was a son of Doss’s mother’s mule, who’d borne the same name, and he was a son of something else, too.
“Maybe you’re a mite forgetful these days,” Doss said, once he’d gotten her inside, out of the cold. The familiar smells and sounds of the darkened barn were a solace to him—he came there often, even when he didn’t have work to do, which was seldom. On a ranch, there was always work to do—wood to chop, harnesses to mend, animals to look after. “That doesn’t mean you’re not sane, Hannah.”
Don’t say it, he pleaded silently. Don’t say you might as well take Tobias and head for Montana.
It was a selfish thought, Doss knew. In Montana, Hannah could live a city life again. No riding a mule five miles to fetch the mail. No breaking the ice on the water troughs on winter mornings, so the cattle and horses could drink. No feeding chickens and dressing like a man.
If Hannah left the Triple M, Doss didn’t know what he’d do. First and foremost, he’d have to break his promise to Gabe, by default if not directly, but there was more to it than that. A lot more.
“There’s something else, too,” Hannah confided.
To keep himself busy, Doss went from stall to stall, looking in on sleepy horses, each one confounded and blinking in the light of his lantern. He was giving Hannah space, enough distance to get out whatever it was she wanted to say.
“What?” he asked, when she didn’t speak again right away.
“Tobias. He just told me—he told me—”
Doss looked back, saw Hannah standing in the moonlit doorway, rimmed in silver, with one hand pressed to her mouth.
He went back to her. Set the lantern aside and took her by the shoulders. “What did he tell you, Hannah?”
“Doss, he’s seeing things.”
He tensed on the inside. Would have shoved a hand through his hair in agitation if he hadn’t been wearing a hat and his ears weren’t bound to freeze if he took it off. “What kind of things?”
“A boy.” She took hold of his arm, and her grip was strong for such a small woman. It did curious things to him, feeling her fingers on him, even through the combined thickness of his coat and shirt. “Doss, Tobias says he saw a boy in his room.”
Doss looked around. There was nothing but bleak, frozen land for miles around. “That’s impossible,” he said.
“You’ve got to talk to him.”
“Oh, I’ll talk to him, all right.” Doss started for the house, so fixed on getting to Tobias that he forgot all about keeping Hannah sheltered from the wind. She had to lift her skirts to keep pace with him.
Present Day
“Tell me about the boy you saw in your room,” Sierra said, when they’d eaten their fill of fried chicken, macaroni salad, mashed potatoes with gravy, and corn on the cob.
Liam’s gaze was clear as he regarded her from his side of the long table. “He’s a ghost,” he replied, and waited, visibly expecting the statement to be refuted.
“Maybe an imaginary playmate?” Sierra ventured. Liam was a lonely little boy; their life style had seen to that. After her father had died, drunk himself to death in a back-street cantina in San Miguel, the two of them had wandered like gypsies. San Diego. North Carolina, Georgia, and finally Florida.
“There’s nothing imaginary about him,” Liam said staunchly. “He wears funny clothes, like those kids on those old-time shows on TV. He’s a ghost, Mom. Face it.”
“Liam—”
“You never believe anything I tell you!”
“I believe everything you tell me,” Sierra insisted evenly. “But you’ve got to admit, this is a stretch.” Again she thought of the teapot. Again she pushed the recollection aside.
“I never lie, Mom.”
She moved to pat his hand, but he pulled back. The set of his jaw was stubborn, and his gaze drilled into her, full of challenge. She tried again. “I know you don’t lie, Liam. But you’re in a strange new place and you miss your friends and—”
“And you won’t even let me see if they sent me emails!” he cried.
Sierra sighed, rested her elbows on the tabletop and rubbed her temples with the finger tips of both hands. “Okay,” she relented. “You can log on to the internet. Just be careful, because that computer is expensive, and we can’t afford to replace it.”
Suddenly Liam’s face was alight. “I won’t break it,” he promised, with exuberance.
Sierra wondered if he’d just scammed her, if the whole boy-in-the-bedroom thing was a trick to get what he wanted.
In the next instant she was ashamed. Liam was direct to a fault. He believed he’d seen another child in his empty bedroom. She’d call his new doctor in Flag staff in the morning, talk to the woman, see what a qualified professional made of the whole thing. She offered a silent prayer that her car would start, too, because the doctor was going to want to see Liam, pronto.
Mean while, Liam got to his feet and scram bled out of the room.
Sierra cleared away the supper mess, then followed him, as casually as she could, to the room at the front of the house.
He was already online.
“Just what I thought!” he crowed. “My mailbox is bulging.”
The TV was still on, a narrator dole fully describing the effects of a second ice age, due any minute. Run for the hills. Sierra shut it off.
“Hey,” Liam objected. “I was listening to that.”
Sierra approached the computer. “You’re only seven,” she said. “You shouldn’t be worrying about the fate of the planet.”
“Somebody’s got to,” Liam replied, without looking at her. “Your generation is doing a lousy job.” He was staring, as if mesmerized, into the computer screen. Its bluish-gray light flickered on the lenses of his glasses, making his eyes disappear. “Look! The whole Geek Group wrote to me!”
“I asked you not to—”
“Okay,” Liam sighed, without looking at her. “The brilliant children in the gifted program are engaging in communication.”
“That’s better,” Sierra said, sparing a smile.
“You’ve got a few emails waiting yourself,” Liam announced. He was already replying to the cybermissives, his small fingers ranging deftly over the keyboard. He’d skipped the hunt-and-peck method entirely, as had all the other kids in his class. Using a computer came naturally to Liam, almost as if he’d been born knowing how, and she knew this was a common phenomenon, which gave her some comfort.
“I’ll read them later,” Sierra answered. She didn’t have that many friends, so most of her messages were probably sales pitches of the penis-enlargement variety. How had she gotten on that kind of list? It wasn’t as if she visited porn sites or ordered battery-operated boy friends online.
“They get to watch a real rocket launch!” Liam cried, without a trace of envy. “Wow!”
“Wow indeed,” Sierra said, looking around the room. According to Meg, it had originally been a study. Old books lined the walls on sturdy shelves, and there was a natural rock fire place, too, with a fire already laid.
Sierra found a match on the mantelpiece, struck it and lit the blaze.
A chime sounded from the computer.
“Aunt Meg just IM’d you,” Liam said.
Where had he gotten this “Aunt Meg” thing? He’d never even met the woman in person, let alone established a relationship with her. “‘IM’d’?” she asked.
“Instant Messaged,” Liam translated. “Guess you’d better check it out. Just make it quick, because I’ve still got a pile of mail to answer.”
Smiling again, Sierra took the chair Liam so reluctantly surrendered and read the message from Meg.

Travis tells me your car died. Use my Blazer. The keys are in the sugar bowl beside the teapot.

Sierra’s pride kicked in. Thanks, she replied, at a fraction of Liam’s typing speed, but I probably won’t need it. My car is just… She paused. Her car was just what? Old? tired, she finished, inspired.
The Blazer won’t run when I come back if somebody doesn’t charge up the battery. It’s been sitting too long, Meg responded quickly. She must have been as fast with a keyboard as Liam.
Is Travis going to report on everything I do? Sierra wrote. She made so many mistakes, she had to retype the message before hitting Send, and that galled her.
Yes, Meg wrote. Because I plan to nag every last detail out of him.
Sierra sighed. It won’t be that interesting, she answered, taking her time so she wouldn’t have to revise. She was out of practice, and if she hoped to land anything better than a waitressing job in Indian Rock, she’d better polish her computer skills.
Meg sent a smiley face, followed by, Good night, Sis. (I’ve always wanted to say that.)
Sierra bit her lower lip. Good night, she tapped out, and rose from the chair with a glance at the clock on the mantel above the now-snapping fire.
Why had she lit it? She was exhausted, and now she would either have to throw water on the flames or wait until they died down. The first method, of course, would make a terrible mess, so that was out.
“Hurry up and finish what you’re doing,” she told Liam, who had plopped in the chair again the moment Sierra got out of it. “Half an hour till bedtime.”
“I had a nap,” Liam reminded her, typing simultaneously.
“Finish,” Sierra repeated. With that, she left the study, climbed the stairs and went into Liam’s room to get his favorite pajamas from one of the suit cases. She meant to put them in the clothes dryer for a few minutes, warm them up.
Some thing drew her to the window, though. She looked down, saw that the lights were on in Travis’s trailer and his truck was parked nearby. Evidently, he hadn’t stayed long in town, or wherever he’d gone.
Why did it please her so much, knowing that?
1919
Hannah stood in the doorway of Tobias’s room, watching her boy sleep. He looked so peaceful, lying there, but she knew he had bad dreams some times. Just the night before, in the wee small hours, he’d crawled into bed beside her, snuggled as close as his little-boy pride would allow, and whispered earnestly that she oughtn’t die anytime soon.
She’d been so choked up, she could barely speak.
Now she wanted to wake him, hold him tight in her arms, protect him from whatever it was in his mind that made him see little boys that weren’t there.
He was lonely, that was all. He needed to be around other children. Way out here, he went to a one-room school, when it wasn’t closed on account of snow, with only seven other pupils, all of whom were older than he was.
Maybe she should take him home to Montana. He had cousins there. They’d live in town, too, where there were shops and a library and even a moving-picture theater. He could ride his bicycle, come spring, and play baseball with other boys.
Hannah’s throat ached. Gabe had wanted his son raised here, on the Triple M. Wanted him to grow up the way he had, rough-and-tumble, riding horses, rounding up stray cattle, part of the land. Of course, Gabe hadn’t expected to die young—he’d meant to come home, so he and Hannah could fill that big house with children. Tobias would have had plenty of company then.
A tear slipped down Hannah’s cheek, and she swatted it away. Straightened her spine.
Gabe was gone, and there weren’t going to be any more children.
She heard Doss climbing the stairs, and wanted to move out of the doorway. He thought she was too fussy, always hovering over Tobias. Always trying to protect him.
How could a man understand what it meant to bear and nurture a child?
Hannah closed her eyes and stayed where she was.
Doss stopped behind her, uncertain. She could feel that, along with the heat and sturdy substance of his body.
“Leave the child to sleep, Hannah,” he said quietly.
She nodded, closed Tobias’s door gently and turned to face Doss there in the darkened hallway. He carried a book under one arm and an unlit lantern in his other hand.
“It’s because he’s lonesome,” she said.
Doss clearly knew she was referring to Tobias’s hallucination. “Kids make up playmates,” he told her. “And being lonesome is a part of life. It’s a valley a person has to go through, not something to run away from.”
No McKettrick ever ran from anything. Doss didn’t have to say it, and neither did she. But she wasn’t a McKettrick, not by blood. Oh, she still wrote the word, whenever she had to sign something, but she’d stopped owning the name the day they put Gabe in the ground.
She wasn’t sure why. He’d been so proud of it, like all the rest of them were.
“Do you ever wish you could live some place else?” Hannah heard herself say.
“No,” Doss said, so quickly and with such gravity that Hannah almost believed he’d been reading her mind. “I belong right here.”
“But the others—your uncles and cousins—they didn’t stay….”
“Ask any one of them where home is,” Doss answered, “and they’ll tell you it’s the Triple M.”
Hannah started to speak, then held her tongue. Nodded. “Good night, Doss,” she said.
He inclined his head and went on to his own room, shut himself away.
Hannah stood alone in the dark for a long time.
She’d been so happy on the Triple M when Gabe was alive, and even after he’d gone into the army, because she’d never once doubted that he’d return. Come walking up the path with a duffel bag over one shoulder, whistling. She’d rehearsed that day a thousand times in her mind—pictured herself running to meet him, throwing herself into his arms.
It was never going to happen.
Without him, she might as well have been alone on the barren landscape of the moon.
Her eyes filled.
She walked slowly to the end of the hall, into the room where Gabe had brought her on their wedding night. He’d been conceived and born in the big bed there, just as Tobias had. As so many other babes would have been, if only Gabe had lived.
Hannah didn’t undress after she closed the door behind her. She didn’t let her hair down and brush it, like usual, or wash her face at the basin on the bureau.
Instead, she sat down in Lorelei’s rocking chair and waited. Just waited.
For what, she did not know.
Present Day
After Liam had gone to bed, Sierra went back downstairs to the computer and scanned her email. When she spotted Allie Douglas-Fletcher’s return address, she wished she’d waited until morning. She was always stronger in the mornings.
Allie was Adam’s twin sister. Liam’s aunt. After Adam was murdered, while on assignment in South America, Allie had been inconsolable, and she’d developed an unhealthy fixation for her brother’s child.
After taking a deep breath and releasing it slowly, Sierra opened the message. Typically, there was no preamble. Allie got right to the point.

The guest house is ready for you and Liam. You know Adam would want his son to grow up right here in San Diego, Sierra. Tim and I can give Liam everything—a real home, a family, an education, the very best medical care. We’re willing to make a place for you, too, obviously. If you won’t come home, at least tell us you arrived safely in Arizona.

Sierra sat, wooden, staring at the stark plea on the screen. Although Allie and Adam had been raised in relative poverty, both of them had done well in life. Adam had been a photojournalist for a major magazine; he and Sierra had met when he did a piece on San Miguel.
Allie ran her own fund-raising firm, and her husband was a neurosurgeon. They had everything—except what they wanted most. Children.
You can’t have Liam, Sierra cried, in the silence of her heart. He’s mine.
She flexed her fingers, sighed, and hit Reply. Allie was a good person, just as Adam had been, for all that he’d told Sierra a lie that shook the foundations of the universe. Adam’s sister sincerely believed she and the doctor could do a better job of raising Liam than Sierra could, and maybe they were right. They had money. They had social status.
Tears burned in Sierra’s eyes.
Liam is well. We’re safe on the Triple M, and for the time being, we’re staying put.

It was all she could bring herself to say.
She hit Send and logged off the computer.
The fire was still flourishing on the hearth. She got up, crossed the room, pushed the screen aside to jab at the burning wood with a poker. It only made the flames burn more vigorously.
She kicked off her shoes, curled up in the big leather chair and pulled a knitted afghan around her to wait for the fire to die down.
The old clock on the mantel tick-tocked, the sound loud and steady and almost hypnotic.
Sierra yawned. Closed her eyes. Opened them again.
She thought about turning the TV back on, just for the sound of human voices, but dismissed the idea. She was so tired, she was going to need all her energy just to go upstairs and tumble into bed. There was none to spare for fiddling with the television set.
Again, she closed her eyes.
Again, she opened them.
She wondered if the lights were still on in Travis’s trailer.
Closed her eyes.
Was dragged down into a heavy, fitful sleep.
She knew right away that she was dreaming, and yet it was so real.
She heard the clock ticking.
She felt the warmth of the fire.
But she was standing in the ranch house kitchen, and it was different, in subtle ways, from the room she knew.
She was different.
Her eyes were shut, and yet she could see clearly.
A bare light bulb dangled overhead, giving off a dim but determined glow.
She looked down at herself, the dream-Sierra, and felt a wrench of surprise.
She was wearing a long woolen skirt. Her hands were smaller—chapped and work worn—someone else’s hands.
“I’m dreaming,” she insisted to herself, but it didn’t help.
She stared around the kitchen. The teapot sat on the counter.
“Now what’s that doing there?” asked this other Sierra. “I know I put it away. I know for sure I did.”
Sierra struggled to wake up. It was too intense, this dream. She was in some other woman’s body, not her own. It was sinewy and strong, this body. She felt the heart beat, the breath going in and out. Felt the weight of long hair, pinned to the back of her head in a loose chignon.
“Wake up,” she said.
But she couldn’t.
She stood very still, staring at the teapot.
Emotions stormed within her, a loneliness so wretched and sharp that she thought she’d burst from the inside and shatter. Longing for a man who’d gone away and was never coming home, an unspeakable sorrow. Love for a child, so profound that it might have been mourning.
And something else. A for bid den wanting that had nothing to do with the man who’d left her.
Sierra woke herself then, by force of will, only to find her face wet with another woman’s tears.
She must have been asleep for a while, she realized. The flames on the hearth had become embers. The room was chilly.
She shivered, tugged the afghan tighter around her, and got out of the chair. She went to the window, looked out. Travis’s trailer was dark.
“It was just a dream,” she told herself out loud.
So why was her heart breaking?
She made her way into the kitchen, navigating the dark hall way as best she could, since she didn’t know where the light switches were. When she reached her destination, she walked to the middle of the room, where she’d stood in the dream, and suppressed an urge to reach up for the metal-beaded cord she knew wasn’t there.
What she needed, she decided, was a good cup of tea.
She found a switch beside the back door and flipped it.
Reality returned in a comforting spill of light.
She found an electric kettle, filled it at the sink and plugged it in to boil. Earlier she’d been too weary to get out of that chair in the study and turn on the TV. Now she knew it would be pointless to try to sleep.
Might as well do this up right, she thought.
She went to the china cabinet, got the teapot out, set it on the table. Added tea leaves and located a little strainer in one of the drawers. The kettle boiled.
She was sitting quietly, sipping tea and watching fat snow flakes drift past the porch light outside the back door, when Liam came down the back stairway in his pajamas. Blinking, he rubbed his eyes.
“Is it morning?” he asked.
“No,” Sierra said gently. “Go back to bed.”
“Can I have some tea?”
“No, again,” Sierra answered, but she didn’t protest when Liam took a seat on the bench, close to her chair. “But if there’s cocoa, I’ll make you some.”
“There is,” Liam said. He looked in credibly young, and so very vulnerable, without his glasses. “I saw it in the pantry. It’s the instant kind.”
With a smile, Sierra got out of the chair, walked into the pan try and brought out the cocoa, along with a bag of semihard marsh mal lows. Thanks to Travis’s preparations for their arrival, there was milk in the refrigerator and, using the microwave, she had Liam’s hot chocolate ready in no time.
“I like it here,” he told her. “It’s better than any place we’ve ever lived.”
Sierra’s heart squeezed. “You really think so? Why?”
Liam took a sip of hot chocolate and acquired a liquid mustache. One small shoulder rose and fell in a characteristic shrug. “It feels like a real home,” he said. “Lots of people have lived here. And they were all McKettricks, like us.”
Sierra was stung, but she hid it behind another smile. “Wherever we live,” she said care fully, “is a real home, because we’re together.”
Liam’s expression was benignly skeptical, even tolerant. “We never had so much room before. We never had a barn with horses in it. And we never had ghosts.” He whispered the last word, and gave a little shiver of pure joy.
Sierra was looking for a way to approach the ghost subject again when the faint, delicate sound of piano music reached her ears.

CHAPTER FIVE
“DO YOU HEAR THAT?” she asked Liam.
His brow furrowed as he shifted on the bench and took another sip of his cocoa. “Hear what?”
The tune continued, flowing softly, forlornly, from the front room.
“Nothing,” Sierra lied.
Liam peered at her, perplexed and suspicious.
“Finish your chocolate,” she prompted. “It’s late.”
The music stopped, and she felt relief and a paradoxical sorrow, reminiscent of the all-too-vivid dream she’d had earlier while dozing in the big chair in the study.
“What was it, Mom?” Liam pressed.
“I thought I heard a piano,” she admitted, because she knew her son wouldn’t let the subject drop until she told him the truth.
Liam smiled, pleased. “This house is so cool,” he said. “I told the Geek—the kids—that it’s haunted. Aunt Allie, too.”
Sierra, in the process of lifting her cup to her mouth, set it down again, shakily. “When did you talk to Allie?” she asked.
“She sent me an email,” he replied, “and I answered.”
“Great,” Sierra said.
“Would my dad really want me to grow up in San Diego?” Liam asked seriously. The idea had, of course, come from Al lie. While Sierra wasn’t without sympathy for the woman, she felt violated. Allie had no business trying to entice Liam behind her back.
“Your dad would want you to grow up with me,” Sierra said firmly, and she knew that was true, for all that Adam had betrayed her.
“Aunt Allie says my cousins would like me,” Liam confided.
Liam’s “cousins” were actually half sisters, but Sierra wasn’t ready to spring that on him, and she hoped Allie wouldn’t do it, either. Although Adam had told Sierra he was divorced when they met, and she’d fallen immediately and helplessly in love with him, she’d learned six months later, when she was carrying his child, that he was still living with his wife when he wasn’t on the road. It had been Allie, earnest, meddling Allie, who traveled to San Miguel, found Sierra and told her the truth.
Sierra would never forget the family photos Allie showed her that day—snap shots of Adam with his arm around his smiling wife, Dee. The two little girls in matching dresses posed with them, their eyes wide with innocence and trust.
“Forget him, kiddo,” Hank had said airily, when Sierra went to him, in tears, with the whole shameful story. “It ain’t gonna fly.”
She’d written Adam immediately, but her letter came back, tattered from forwarding, and no one answered at any of the telephone numbers he’d given her.
She’d given birth to Liam eight weeks later, at home, attended by Hank’s long-time mistress, Magdalena. Three days after that, Hank brought her an American newspaper, tossed it into her lap without a word.
She’d paged through it slowly, possessed of a quiet, escalating dread, and come across the account of Adam Douglas’s death on page four. He’d been shot to death, according to the article, on the out skirts of Caracas, after infiltrating a drug cartel to take pictures for an exposé he’d been writing.
“Mom?” Liam snapped his fingers under Sierra’s nose. “Are you hearing the music again?”
Sierra blinked. Shook her head.
“Do you think my cousins would like me?”
She reached out, her hand trembling only slightly, and ruffled his hair. “I think anybody would like you,” she said. When he was older, she would tell him about Adam’s other family, but it was still too soon. She took his empty cup, carried it to the sink. “Now, go upstairs, brush your teeth again and hit the sack.”
“Aren’t you going to bed?” Liam asked practically.
Sierra sighed. “Yes,” she said, resigned. She didn’t think she’d sleep, but she knew Liam would wonder if she stayed up all night, prowling around the house. “You go ahead. I’m just going to make sure the front door is locked.”
Liam nodded and obeyed without protest.
Sierra considered marking the occasion on the calendar.
She went straight to the front room, and the piano, the moment Liam had gone upstairs. The keyboard cover was down, the bench neatly in place. She switched on a lamp and inspected the smooth, highly polished wood for finger prints. Nothing.
She touched the cover, and her fingers left distinct smudges.
No one had touched the piano that night, unless they’d been wearing gloves.
Frowning, Sierra checked the lock on the front door.
Fastened.
She inspected the windows—all locked—and even the floor. It was snowing hard, and anybody who’d come in out of that storm would have left some trace, no matter how careful they were—a puddle some where, a bit of mud.
Again, there was nothing.
Finally she went upstairs, found a night gown, bathed and got ready for bed. Since Travis had left her bags in the room adjoining Liam’s, she opened the connecting door a crack and crawled between sheets worn smooth by time.
She was asleep in an instant.
1919
Hannah closed the cover over the piano keys, stacked the sheet music neatly and got to her feet. She’d played as softly as she could, pouring her sadness and her yearning into the music, and when she returned to the upstairs corridor, she saw light under Doss’s door.
She paused, wondering what he’d do if she went in, took off her clothes and crawled into bed beside him.
Not that she would, of course, because she’d loved her husband and it wouldn’t be fitting, but there were times when her very soul ached within her, she wanted so badly to be touched and held, and this was one of them.
She swallowed, mortified by her own wanton thoughts.
Doss would send her away angrily.
He’d remind her that she was his brother’s widow—if he ever spoke to her again at all.
For all that, she took a single, silent step toward the door.
“Ma?”
Tobias spoke from behind her. She hadn’t heard him get out of bed, come to the threshold of his room.
Thanking heaven she was still fully dressed, she turned to face him.
“What is it?” she asked gently. “Did you have another bad dream?”
Tobias shook his head. His gaze slipped past Hannah to Doss’s door, then back to her face, solemn and worried. “I wish I had a pa,” he said.
Hannah’s heart seized. She approached, pulled the boy close, and he allowed it. During the day, he would have balked. “So do I,” she replied, bending to kiss the top of his head. “I wish your pa was here. Wish it so much it hurts.”
Tobias pulled back, looked up at her. “But Pa’s dead,” he said. “Maybe you and Doss could get hitched. Then he wouldn’t be my uncle any more, would he? He’d be my pa.”
“Tobias,” Hannah said very softly, praying Doss hadn’t over heard somehow. “That wouldn’t be right.”
“Why not?” Tobias asked.
She crouched, looked up into her son’s face. One day, he’d be handsome and square-jawed, like the rest of the McKettrick men. For now he was still a little boy, his features childishly innocent. “I was your pa’s wife. I’ll love him for the rest of my days.”
“That might be a long time,” Tobias said, with a measure of dubiousness, as well as hope. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I don’t want Doss to marry somebody else, Ma,” he said. “All the women in Indian Rock are sweet on him, and one of these days he might take a notion to get himself a wife.”
“Tobias,” Hannah reasoned, “you must put this foolishness out of your head. If Doss chooses to take a bride, that’s certainly his right. But it won’t be me he marries. It’s too hard to explain right now, but Doss was your pa’s brother. I couldn’t—”
“You’d marry some man in Montana, though, wouldn’t you?” Tobias demanded, suddenly angry, and this time, he made no effort to keep his voice down. “Some stranger who wears a suit to work!”
“Tobias!”
“I won’t go to Montana, do you hear me? I won’t leave the Triple M unless Doss goes, too!”
Hannah reddened with embarrassment and anger— Doss had surely heard—and rose to her full height. “Tobias McKettrick,” she said sternly, “you go to bed this instant, and don’t you ever talk to me like that again!”
Tobias’s chin jutted out, in the McKettrick way, and his eyes flashed. “You go anyplace you want to,” he told her, turning on one bare heel to flee into his room, “but I’m not going with you!” With that, he slammed the door in her face.
Hannah took a step toward it, even reached for the knob.
But in the end she couldn’t face her son.
“Hannah.”
Doss.
She stiffened but didn’t turn. Doss would see too much if she did. Guess too much.
He caught hold of her arm, brought her gently around.
She whispered his name, despondent.
He took her hand, led her to the opposite end of the hall, opened the last door on the right, the one where she kept her sewing machine.
“What are you—?”
Doss stepped over the threshold first, turned, and drew her in behind him. Reached around her to shut the door.
She leaned against the panel. It was hard at her back.
“Doss,” she said.
He cupped her face in his hands, bent his head, and kissed her, full on the mouth.
A sweet shock went through her. She knew she ought to break away, knew he wouldn’t force himself on her if she uttered the slightest protest, but she couldn’t say a word. Her body came alive as he pressed himself against her. His weight was hard and warm and blessedly real.
Doss reached behind her head, pulled the pins from her hair, let it fall around her shoulders, to her waist. He groaned, buried his face in it, burrowed through to take her earlobe between his lips and nibble on it.
Hannah gasped with guilty pleasure. Her knees went weak, and Doss held her upright with the lower part of his body.
She moaned softly.
“We can’t,” she whispered.
“We’d damn well better,” Doss answered, “before we both go crazy.”
“What if Tobias…?”
Doss leaned back, opened the buttons on her bodice, put his hands inside, under her camisole, to take the weight of her breasts. Chafed the nipples lightly with the sides of his thumbs.
“He won’t hear,” he said.
He bent to find a nipple, take it into his mouth. Suckled in the same nibbling, teasing way he’d tasted her earlobe.
Hannah plunged her fingers into his hair, groaned and tilted her head back, already surrendering. Already lost.
She tried to bring Gabe’s face to her mind, hoping the image would give her the strength to stop—stop—before it was too late, but it wouldn’t come.
Doss made free with her breasts, tonguing them until she was in a frenzy.
She sank against the door, barely able to breathe.
And then he knelt.
Hannah trembled. Even though the room was cold, perspiration broke out all over her body. She made a slight whimpering sound when Doss lifted her skirts, went under them and pulled down her drawers.
She felt him part her private place with his fingers, felt his tongue touch her, like fire. Sobbed his name, under her breath.
He took her full in his mouth, hungrily.
Her hips moved frantically, seeking him, and her knees buckled.
He braced her securely against the door, put her legs over his shoulders, first one, and then the other, and through all that, he drew on her.
She writhed against him, one hand pressed to her mouth so that the guttural cries pounding at the back of her throat wouldn’t get out.
He suckled.
She felt a surge of heat, radiating from her center into every part of her, then stiffened in a spasm of release so violent that she was afraid she would splinter into pieces.
“Doss,” she pleaded, because she knew it was going to happen again, and again.
And it did.
When it was over, he ducked out from under the hem of her skirt and held her as she sagged, spent, to her knees. They were facing each other, her breasts bared to him, her body still quivering with an ebbing tide of passion.
“We can stop here,” he said quietly.
She shook her head. They’d gone past the place of turning back.
Doss opened his trousers, reached under her skirt and petticoat to take hold of her hips. Lifted her onto him.
She slid along his length, letting him fill her, exalting in the size and heat and slick hardness of him. She gave a loud moan, and he covered her mouth with his, kissed her senseless, even as he raised and lowered her, raised and lowered her. The friction was slow and exquisite. Hannah dug her fingers into his shoulders and rode him shamelessly until satisfaction overtook her again, convulsed her, like some giant fist, and didn’t let go until she was limp with exhaustion.
Only when she wept with relief did Doss finish. She felt him erupt inside her, swallowed his groans as he gave himself up to her.
He brushed away her tears with his thumbs, still inside her, and looked deep into her eyes. “It’s all right, Hannah,” he said gruffly. “Please, don’t cry.”
He didn’t understand.
She wasn’t weeping for shame, though that would surely come, but for the most poignant of joys.
“No,” she said softly. She plunged her fingers into his hair, kissed him boldly, fervently. “It’s not that. I feel…”
He was growing hard within her again.
“Oh,” she groaned.
He played with her nipples. And got harder still.
“Doss,” she gasped. “Doss—”
Present Day
Sierra awakened with a start, sounding from the depths of a dream so erotic that she’d been on the verge of climax. The light dazzled her, and the muffled silence seemed to fill not only her bed room, but the world beyond it.
She lay still for a long time, recovering. Listening to her own quick, shallow breathing. Waiting for her heart beat to slow down.
Liam peeked through the doorway linking her room to his.
“Mom?”
“Come in,” Sierra said.
He bounded across the threshold. “It snowed!” he whooped, heading straight for the window. “I mean, it really snowed!”
Sierra smiled, sat up in bed and put her feet on the floor.
A jolt of cold went through her.
“It’s freezing in here!”
Liam turned from the window to grin at her. “Travis says the furnace is out.”
“Travis?”
“He’s down stairs,” Liam said. “He’ll get it going.”
A dusty-smelling whoosh rose from the nearest heat vent, as if to illustrate the point.
“What’s he doing here?” Sierra asked, scrambling through her suit cases for a bathrobe. All she had was a thin nylon thing, and when she saw it, she knew it would be worse than nothing, so she pulled the quilt off the bed and wrapped herself in that instead.
“Don’t be a grump,” Liam replied. “Travis is doing us a favor, Mom. We’d probably be icicles by now if it wasn’t for him. Did you know that old stove down stairs works? Travis built a fire in it, and he put the coffee on, too. He said to tell you it will be ready in a couple of minutes and we’re snowed in.”
“Snowed in?”
“Keep up, Mom,” Liam chirped. “There was a blizzard last night. That’s why Travis came to make sure we were all right. I heard him knock, and I let him in.”
Sierra joined Liam at the window and drew in her breath.
The whiteness of all that snow practically blinded her, but it was beautiful, too, in an apocalyptic way. She’d never seen any thing like it before and, for a long moment, she was spell bound. Then her sensible side kicked in.
“Thank God the power didn’t go out,” she said, easing a little closer to the vent, which was spewing deliciously warm air.
“It did,” Liam informed her happily. “Travis got the generator started right away. We don’t have lights or anything, but he said the furnace is all that matters.”
She frowned. “How could he have made coffee?”
“On the cookstove, Mom,” Liam said, with a roll of his eyes.
For the first time Sierra noticed that Liam was fully dressed.
He headed for the door. “I’d better go help Travis bring in the wood,” he said. “Get some clothes on, will you?”
Five minutes later Sierra joined Travis and Liam in the kitchen, which was blessedly warm. Her jeans would do well enough, but she’d had to raid Meg’s room for socks and a thick sweat shirt, because her tank tops weren’t going to cut it. “Are we stranded here?” she demanded, watching as Travis poured coffee from a blue enamel pot that looked like it came from a stash of camping gear.
He grinned. “Depends on how you look at it,” he said. “Liam and I, we see it as an adventure.”
“Some adventure,” Sierra grumbled, but she took the coffee he offered and gave a grateful nod of thanks.
Travis chuckled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll adjust.”
Sierra hastened over to stand closer to the cookstove. “Does this happen often?”
“Only in winter,” Travis quipped.
“Hilarious,” she drawled.
Liam laughed uproariously. “You are enjoying this,” she accused, tousling her son’s hair.
“It’s great!” Liam cried. “Snow! Wait till the Geeks hear about this!”
“Liam,” Sierra said.
He gave Travis a long-suffering look. “She hates it when I say ‘geek,’” he explained.
Travis picked up his own mug of coffee, took a sip, his eyes full of laughter. Then he headed toward the door, put the cup on the counter and re claimed his coat down from the peg.
“You’re leaving?” Liam asked, horrified.
“Gotta see to the horses,” Travis said, putting on his hat.
“Can I go with you?” Liam pleaded, and he sounded so desperately hopeful that Sierra swallowed the “no” that instantly sprang from her vocal cords.
“Your coat isn’t warm enough,” she said.
“Meg’s got an old one around here some place,” Travis said care fully. “Hall closet, I think.”
Liam dashed off to get it.
“I’ll take care of him, Sierra,” Travis told her quietly, when the boy was gone.
“You’d better,” Sierra answered.
1919
Hannah knew by the profound silence, even before she opened her eyes, that it had been snowing all night. Lying alone in the big bed she’d shared with Gabe, she burrowed deeper into the covers and groaned.
She was sore.
She was satisfied.
She was a trollop.
A tramp.
She’d practically thrown herself at Doss the night before. She’d let him do things to her that no one else besides Gabe had ever done.
And now it was morning and she’d come to her senses and she would have to face him.
For all that, she felt strangely light, too.
Almost giddy.
Hannah pulled the covers up over her head and giggled.
Giggled.
She tried to be stern with herself.
This was serious.
Down stairs the stove lids rattled.
Doss was building a fire in the cookstove, the way he did every morning. He would put the coffee on to boil, then go out to the barn to attend to the live stock. When he got back, she’d be making break fast, and they’d talk about how cold it was, and whether he ought to bring in extra wood from the shed, in case there was more snow on the way.
It would be an ordinary ranch morning.
Except that she’d behaved like a tart the night before.
Hannah tossed back the covers and got up. She wasn’t one to avoid facing things, no matter how awkward they were. She and Doss had lost their heads and made love. That was that.
It wouldn’t happen again.
They’d just go on, as if nothing had happened.
The water in the pitcher on the bureau was too cold to wash in.
Hannah decided she would heat some for a bath, after the break fast dishes were done. She’d send Tobias to the study to work at his school lessons, and Doss to the barn.
She dressed hastily, brushed her hair and wound it into the customary chignon at the back of her head. Just before she opened the bedroom door to step out into the new day, the pit of her stomach quivered. She drew a deep breath, squared her shoulders and turned the knob resolutely.
Doss had not left for the barn, as she’d expected. He was still in the kitchen, and when she came down the back stairs and froze on the bottom step, he looked at her, reddened and looked away.
Tobias was by the back door, pulling on his heaviest coat. “Doss and me are fixing to ride down to the bend and look in on the widow Jessup,” he told Hannah matter-of-factly, and he sounded like a grown man, fit to make such decisions on his own. “Could be her pump’s frozen, and we’re not sure she has enough firewood.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Hannah saw Doss watching her.
“Go out and see to the cow,” Doss told Tobias. “Make sure there’s no ice on her trough.”
It was an excuse to speak to her alone, Hannah knew, and she was unnerved. She resisted an urge to touch her hair with both hands or smooth her skirts.
Tobias banged out the back door, whistling.
“He’s not strong enough to ride to the Jessups’ place in this weather,” Hannah said. “It’s four miles if it’s a stone’s throw, and you’ll have to cross the creek.”
“Hannah,” Doss said firmly, grimly. “The boy will be fine.”
She felt her own color rise then, remembering all they’d done together, on the spare room floor, herself and this man. She swallowed and lifted her chin a notch, so he wouldn’t think she was ashamed.
“About last night—” Doss began. He looked distraught.
Hannah waited, blushing furiously now. Wishing the floor would open, so she could fall right through to China and never be seen or heard from again.
Doss shoved a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Hannah hadn’t expected anything except shame, but she was stung by it, just the same. “We’ll just pretend—” She had to stop, clear her throat, blink a couple of times. “We’ll just pretend it didn’t happen.”
His jaw tightened. “Hannah, it did happen, and pretending won’t change that.”
She inter twined her fingers, clasped them so tightly that the knuckles ached. Looked down at the floor. “What else can we do, Doss?” she asked, almost in a whisper.
“Suppose there’s a child?”
Hannah hadn’t once thought of that possibility, though it seemed pain fully obvious in the bright, rational light of day. She drew in a sharp breath and put a hand to her throat.
How would they explain such a thing to Tobias? To the McKettricks and the people of Indian Rock?
“I’d have to go to Montana,” she said, after a long time. “To my folks.”
“Not with my baby growing inside you, you wouldn’t,” Doss replied, so sharply that Hannah’s gaze shot back to his face.
“Doss, the scandal—”
“To hell with the scandal!”
Hannah reached out, pulled back Holt’s chair at the table and sank into it. “Maybe I’m not. Surely just once—”
“Maybe you are,” Doss insisted.
Hannah’s eyes smarted. She’d wanted more children, but not like this. Not out of wedlock, and by her late husband’s brother. Folks would call her a hussy, with considerable justification, and they’d make Tobias’s life a plain misery, too. They’d point and whisper, and the other kids would tease.
“What are we going to do, then?” she asked.
He crossed the room, sat astraddle the long bench next to the table, so close she could feel the warmth of his body, glowing like the fresh fire blazing inside the cookstove.
His very proximity made her remember things better forgotten.
“There’s only one thing we can do, Hannah. We’ll get married.”
She gaped at him. “Married?”
“It’s the only decent thing to do.”
The word decent stabbed at Hannah. She was a proud person, and she’d always lived a respectable life. Until the night before. “We don’t love each other,” she said, her voice small. “And anyway, I might not be—expecting.”
“I’m not taking the chance,” Doss told her. “As soon as the trail clears a little, we’re going into Indian Rock and get married.”
“I have some say in this,” Hannah pointed out.
Outside, on the back porch, Tobias thumped his boots against the step, to shake off the snow.
“Do you?” Doss asked.

CHAPTER SIX
Present Day
WHILE TRAVIS AND LIAM WERE in the barn, Sierra inspected the wood-burning stove. She found a skillet, set it on top, took bacon and eggs from the refrigerator, which was ominously dark and silent, and laid strips of the bacon in the pan. When the meat began to sizzle, she felt a little thrill of accomplishment.
She was actually cooking on a stove that dated from the nineteenth century. Briefly, she felt connected with all the McKettrick women who had gone before her.
When the electricity came on, with a startling revving sound, she was almost sorry. Keeping an eye on breakfast, she switched on the small countertop TV to catch the morning news.
The entire northern part of Arizona had been in undated in the blizzard, and thou sands were without power. She watched as images of people skiing to work flashed across the screen.
The telephone rang, and she held the portable receiver between her shoulder and ear to answer. “Hello?”
“It’s Eve,” a gracious voice replied. “Is that you, Sierra?”
Sierra went utterly still. Travis and Liam tramped in from out side, laughing about something. They both fell silent at the sight of her, and neither one moved after Travis pushed the door shut.
“Hello?” Eve prompted. “Sierra, are you there?”
“I’m…I’m here,” Sierra said.
Travis took off his coat and hat, crossed the room and elbowed her away from the stove. “Go,” he told her, cocking a thumb to ward the center of the house. “Liam and I will see to the grub.”
She nodded, grateful, and hurried out of the warm kitchen. The dining room was frigid.
“Is this a bad time to talk?” Eve asked. She sounded uncertain, even a little shy.
“No—” Sierra answered hastily, finally gaining the study. She closed the door and sat in the big leather chair she’d occupied the night before, waiting for the fire to go out. Now she could see her breath, and she wished the blaze was still burning. “No, it’s fine.”
Eve let out a long breath. “I see on the Weather Channel that you’ve been hit with quite a storm up there,” she said.
Sierra nodded, remembered that her mother—this woman she didn’t know—couldn’t see her. “Yes,” she replied. “We have power again, thanks to Travis. He got the generator running right away, so the furnace would work and—”
She swallowed the rush of too-cheerful words. She’d been blathering.
“Poor Travis,” Eve said.
“Poor Travis?” Sierra echoed. “Why?”
“Didn’t he tell you? Didn’t Meg?”
“No,” Sierra said. “Nobody told me anything.”
There was a long pause, then Eve sighed. “I’m probably speaking out of turn,” she said, “but we’ve all been a little worried about Travis. He’s like a member of the family, you know. His younger brother, Brody, died in an explosion a few months ago. It really threw Travis. He walked away from the company and just about everyone he knew. Meg had to talk fast to get him to come and stay on the ranch.”
Sierra was very glad she’d brought the phone out of the kitchen. “I didn’t know,” she said.
“I’ve already said more than I should have,” Eve told her rue fully. “And anyway, I called to see how you and Liam are doing. I know you’re not used to cold weather, and when I saw the storm report, I had to call.”
“We’re okay,” Sierra said. Had she known the woman better, she might have confided her worries about Liam—how he claimed he’d seen a ghost in his room. She still planned to call his new doctor, but driving to Flag staff for an appointment would be out of the question, considering the state of the roads.
“I hear some hesitation in your voice,” Eve said. She was treading lightly, Sierra could tell, and she would be a hard person to fool. Eve ran McKettrickCo, and hundreds of people answered to her.
Sierra gave a nervous laugh, more hysteria than amusement. “Liam claims the house is haunted,” she admitted.
“Oh, that,” Eve answered, and she actually sounded relieved.
“‘Oh, that’?” Sierra challenged, sitting up straighter.
“They’re harmless,” Eve said. “The ghosts, I mean. If that’s what they are.”
“You know about the ghosts?”
Eve laughed. “Of course I do. I grew up in that house. But I’m not sure ghosts is the right word. To me, it always felt more like sharing the place than its being haunted. I got the sense that they—the other people—were as alive as I was. That they’d have been just as surprised, had we ever come face-to-face.”
Sierra’s mind spun. She squeezed the bridge of her nose between a thumb and fore finger. The piano notes she’d heard the night before tinkled sadly in her memory. “You’re not saying you actually believe—”
“I’m saying I’ve had experiences,” Eve told her. “I’ve never seen anyone. Just had a strong sense of someone else being present. And, of course, there was the famous disappearing teapot.”
Sierra sank against the back of the chair, both relieved and confounded. Had she told Meg about the teapot? She couldn’t recall. Perhaps Travis had mentioned it—called Eve to report that her daughter was a little loony?
“Sierra?” Eve asked.
“I’m still here.”
“I would get the teapot out,” Eve re counted, “and leave the room to do something else. When I came back, it was in the china cabinet again. The same thing used to happen to my mother, and my grandmother, too. They thought it was Lorelei.”
“How could that be?”
“Who knows?” Eve asked, patently unconcerned. “Life is mysterious.”
It certainly is, Sierra thought. Little girls get separated from their mothers, and no one even comes looking for them.
“I’d like to come and see you,” Eve went on, “as soon as the weather clears. Would that be all right, Sierra? If I spent a few days at the ranch? So we could talk in person?”
Sierra’s heart rose into her throat and swelled there. “It’s your house,” she said, but she wanted to throw down the phone, snatch Liam, jump into the car and speed away before she had to face this woman.
“I won’t come if you’re not ready,” Eve said gently.
I may never be ready, Sierra thought. “I guess I am,” she murmured.
“Good,” Eve replied. “Then I’ll be there as soon as the jet can land. Barring another snow storm, that should be tomorrow or the next day.”
The jet? “Should we pick you up some where?”
“I’ll have a car meet me,” Eve said. “Do you need anything, Sierra?”
I could have used a mother when I was growing up. And when I had Liam and Dad acted as though nothing had changed—well, you would have come in handy then, too, Mom. “I’m fine,” she answered.
“I’ll call again before I leave here,” Eve promised. Then, after another tentative pause and a brief goodbye, she rang off.
Sierra sat a long time in that chair, still holding the phone, and might not have moved at all if Liam hadn’t come to tell her break fast was on the table.
1919
It was a cold, seemingly endless ride to the Jessup place, and hard going all the way. More than once Doss glanced anxiously at his nephew, bundled to his eyeballs and jostling patiently along side Doss’s mount on the mule, and wished he’d listened to Hannah and left the boy at home.
More than once, he at tempted to broach the subject that was uppermost in his mind—he’d been up half the night wrestling with it—but he couldn’t seem to get a proper handle on the matter at all.
I mean to marry your ma.
That was the straight for ward truth, a simple thing to say.
But Tobias was bound to ask why. Maybe he’d even raise an objection. He’d loved his pa, and he might just put his old uncle Doss right square in his place.
“You ever think about livin’ in town?” Tobias asked, catching him by surprise.
Doss took a moment to change directions in his mind. “Some times,” he answered, when he was sure it was what he really meant. “Especially in the wintertime.”
“It’s no warmer there than it is here,” Tobias reasoned. Whatever he was getting at, it wasn’t coming through in his tone or his manner.
“No,” Doss agreed. “But there are other folks around. A man could get his mail at the post office every day, instead of waiting a week for it to come by wagon, and take a meal in a restaurant now and again. And I’ll admit that library is an enticement, small as it is.” He thought fondly of the books lining the study walls back at the ranch house. He’d read all of them, at one time or another, and most several times. He’d borrowed from his uncle Kade’s collection, and his ma sent him a regular supply from Texas. Just the same, he couldn’t get enough of the damn things.
“Ma’s been talking about heading back to Montana,” Tobias blurted, but he didn’t look at Doss when he spoke. Just kept his eyes on the close-clipped mane of that old mule. “If she tries to make me go, I’ll run away.”
Doss swallowed. He knew Hannah thought about moving in with the home folks, of course, but hearing it said out loud made him feel as if he’d not only been thrown from his horse, but stomped on, too. “Where would you go?” he asked, when he thought he could get the words out easy. He wasn’t entirely successful. “If you ran off, I mean?”
Tobias turned in the saddle to look him full in the face. “I’d hide up in the hills some where,” he said, with the conviction of innocence. “Maybe that canyon where Kade and Mandy faced down those outlaws.”
Doss suppressed a smile. He’d grown up on that story him self, and to this day, he wondered how much of it was fact and how much was legend. Mandy was a sharpshooter, and she’d given Annie Oakley a run for her money, in her time. Kade had been the town marshal, with an office in Indian Rock back then, so maybe it had happened just the way his pa and uncles related it.
“Mighty cold up there,” he told the boy mildly. “Just a cave for shelter, and where would you get food?”
Tobias’s shoulders slumped a little, under all that wool Hannah had swaddled him in. If the kid took a spill from the mule, he’d probably bounce. “I could hunt,” he said. “Pa taught me how to shoot.”
“McKettricks,” Doss replied, “don’t run away.”
Tobias scowled at him. “They don’t live in Missoula, either.”
Doss chuckled, in spite of the heavy feeling that had settled over his heart after he and Hannah had made love and stayed there ever since. Gabe was dead, but it still felt as if he’d betrayed him. “They live in all sorts of places,” Doss said. “You know that.”
“I won’t go, anyhow,” Tobias said.
Doss cleared his throat. “Maybe you won’t have to.”
That got the boy’s full attention. His eyes were full of questions.
“I wonder what you’d say if I married your ma.”
Tobias looked as though he’d swallowed a lantern with the wick burning. “I’d like that,” he said. “I’d like that a lot!”
Too bad Hannah wasn’t as keen on the prospect as her son. “I thought you might not care for the idea,” Doss confessed. “My being your pa’s brother and all.”
“Pa would be glad,” Tobias said. “I know he would.”
Secretly, Doss knew it, too. Gabe had been a practical man, and he’d have wanted all of them to get on with their lives.
Doss’s eyes smarted something fierce, all of a sudden, and he had to pull his hat brim down. Look away for a few moments.
Take care of Hannah and my boy, Gabe had said. Promise me, Doss.
“Did Ma say she’d hitch up with you?” Tobias asked, frowning so that his face crinkled comically. “Last night I said she ought to, and she said it wouldn’t be right.”
Doss stood in the stirrups to stretch his legs. “Things can change,” he said cautiously. “Even in a night.”
“Do you love my ma?”
It was a hard question to answer, at least aloud. He’d loved Hannah from the day Gabe had brought her home as his bride. Loved her fiercely, hopelessly and honorably, from a proper distance. Gabe had guessed it right away, though. Waited until the two of them were alone in the barn, slapped Doss on the shoulder and said, Don’t you be ashamed, little brother. It’s easy to love my Hannah.
“Of course I do,” Doss said. “She’s family.”
Tobias made a face. “I don’t mean like that.”
Doss’s belly tightened. The boy was only eight, and he couldn’t possibly know what had gone on last night in the spare room.
Could he?
“How do you mean, then?”
“Pa used to kiss Ma all the time. He used to swat her on the bustle, too, when he thought nobody was looking. It always made her laugh, and stand real close to him, with her arms around his neck.”
Doss might have gripped the saddle horn with both hands, because of the pain, if he’d been riding alone. It wasn’t the reminder of how much Hannah and Gabe had loved each other that seared him, though. It was the loss of his brother, the way of things then, and it all being over for good.
“I’ll treat your mother right, Tobias,” he said, after more hat-brim pulling and more looking away.
“You sound pretty sure she’ll say yes,” the boy commented.
“She already has,” Doss replied.
Present Day
More snow began to fall at midmorning and, worried that the power would go off again, and stay off this time, Sierra gathered her and Liam’s dirty laundry and threw a load into the washing machine. She’d telephoned Liam’s doctor in Flag staff, from the study, while he and Travis were filling the dish washer, but she hadn’t mentioned the hallucinations. She’d heard the piano music herself, after all, and then Eve had made such experiences seem almost normal.
Sierra didn’t know precisely what was happening, and she was still unsettled by Liam’s claims of seeing a boy in old-time clothes, but she wasn’t ready to bring up the subject with an outsider, whether that outsider had a medical degree or not.
Dr. O’Meara had reviewed Liam’s records, since they’d been expressed to her from the clinic in Florida, and she wanted to make sure he had an inhaler on hand. She’d promised to call in a prescription to the pharmacy in Indian Rock, and they’d made an appointment for the following Monday afternoon.
Now Liam was in the study, watching TV, and Travis was out side split ting wood for the stove and the fire places. If the power went off again, she’d need firewood for cooking. The generator kept the furnace running, along with a few of the lights, but it burned a lot of gas and there was always the possibility that it would break down or freeze up.
Travis came in with an armload just as she was starting to prepare lunch.
Watching him, Sierra thought about what Eve had said on the phone earlier. Travis’s younger brother had died horribly, and very recently. He’d left his job, Travis had, and come to the ranch to live in a trailer and look after horses.
He didn’t look like a man carrying a burden, but appearances were deceiving. Nobody knew that better than Sierra did.
“What kind of work did you do, before you came here?” she asked, and then wished she hadn’t brought the subject up at all. Travis’s face closed instantly, and his eyes went blank.
“Nothing special,” he said.
She nodded. “I was a cocktail waitress,” she told him, because she felt she ought to offer him something after asking what was evidently an intrusive question.
Standing there, beside the antique cookstove and the wood box, in his leather coat and cowboy hat, Travis looked as though he’d stepped through a time warp, out of an earlier century.
“I know,” he said. “Meg told me.”
“Of course she did.” Sierra poured canned soup into a sauce pan, stirred it industriously and blushed.
Travis didn’t say anything more for a long time. Then, “I was a lawyer for McKettrickCo,” he told her.
Sierra stole a sidelong glance at him. He looked tense, standing there holding his hat in one hand. “Impressive,” she said.
“Not so much,” he countered. “It’s a tradition in my family, being a lawyer, I mean. At least, with everyone but my brother, Brody. He became a meth addict instead, and blew himself to kingdom-come brewing up a batch. Go figure.”
Sierra turned to face Travis. Noticed that his jaw was hard and his eyes even harder. He was angry, in pain, or both.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Yeah,” Travis replied tersely. “Me, too.”
He started for the door.
“Stay for lunch?” Sierra asked.
“Another time,” he answered, and then he was gone.
1919
It was near sunset when Doss and Tobias rode in from the Jessup place, and by then Hannah was fit to be tied. She’d paced for most of the afternoon, after it started to snow again, fretting over all the things that could go wrong along the way.
The horse or the mule could have gone lame or fallen through the ice crossing the creek.
There could have been an avalanche. Just last year, a whole mountainside of snow had come crashing down on to the roof of a cabin and crushed it to the ground, with a family inside.
Wolves prowled the countryside, too, bold with the desperation of their hunger. They killed cattle and some times people.
Doss hadn’t even taken his rifle.
When Hannah heard the horses, she ran to the window, wiped the fog from the glass with her apron hem. She watched as they dismounted and led their mounts into the barn.
She’d baked pies that day to keep from going crazy, and the kitchen was redolent with the aroma. She smoothed her skirts, patted her hair and turned away so she wouldn’t be caught looking if Doss or Tobias happened to glance toward the house.
Almost an hour passed before they came inside—they’d done the barn chores—and Hannah had the table set, the lamps lighted and the coffee made. She wanted to fuss over Tobias, check his ears and fingers for frost bite and his fore head for fever, but she wouldn’t let herself do it.
Doss wasn’t deceived by her smiling restraint, she could see that, but Tobias looked down right relieved, as though he’d expected her to pounce the minute he came through the door.
“How did you find Widow Jessup?” she asked.
“She was right where we left her last time,” Doss said with a slight grin.
Hannah gave him a look.
“She was fresh out of firewood,” Tobias expounded importantly, unwrapping himself, layer by layer, until he stood in just his trousers and shirt, with melted snow pooling around his feet. “It’s a good thing we went down there. She’d have froze for sure.”
Doss looked tired, but his eyes twinkled. “For sure,” he confirmed. “She got Tobias here by the ears and kissed him all over his face, she was so grateful that he’d saved her.”
Tobias let out a yelp of mortification and took a swing at Doss, who side stepped him easily.
“Stop your rough housing and wash up for supper,” Hannah said, but it did her heart good to see it. Gabe used to come in from the barn, toss Tobias over one shoulder and carry him around the kitchen like a sack of grain. The boy had howled with laughter and pummeled Gabe’s chest with his small fists in mock resistance. She’d missed the ordinary things like that more than anything except being held in Gabe’s arms.
She served chicken and dumplings, in her best Blue Willow dishes, with apple pie for dessert.
Tobias ate with a fresh-air, long-ride appetite and nearly fell asleep in his chair once his stomach was filled.
Doss got up, hoisted him into his arms and carried him, head bobbing, toward the stairs.
Hannah’s throat went raw, watching them go.
She poured a second cup of coffee for Doss, had it waiting when he came back a few minutes later.
“Did you put Tobias in his night shirt and cover him with the spare quilt?” she asked, when Doss appeared at the bottom of the steps. “He mustn’t take a chill—”
“I took off his shoes and threw him in like he was,” Doss interrupted. That twinkle was still in his eyes, but there was a certain wariness there, too. “I made sure he was warm, so stop fretting.”
Hannah had put the dishes in a basin of hot water to soak, and she lingered at the table, sipping tea brewed in Lorelei’s pot.
Doss sat down in his father’s chair, cupped his hands around his own mug of steaming coffee. “I spoke to Tobias about our getting married,” he said bluntly. “And he’s in favor of it.”
Heat pounded in Hannah’s cheeks, spawned by indignation and something else that she didn’t dare think about. “Doss McKettrick,” she whispered in reproach, “you shouldn’t have done that. I’m his mother and it was my place to—”
“It’s done, Hannah,” Doss said. “Let it go at that.”
Hannah huffed out a breath. “Don’t you tell me what’s done and ought to be let go,” she protested. “I won’t take orders from you now or after we’re married.”
He grinned. “Maybe you won’t,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t give them.”
She laughed, surprising herself so much that she slapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the sound. That gesture, in turn, brought back recollections of the night before, when Doss had made love to her, and she’d wanted to cry out with the pleasure of it.
She blushed so hard her face burned, and this time it was Doss who laughed.
“I figure we’re in for another blizzard,” he said. “Might be spring before we can get to town and stand up in front of a preacher. I hope you’re not looking like a watermelon smuggler before then.”
Hannah opened her mouth, closed it again.
Doss’s eyes danced as he took another sip of his coffee.
“That was an insufferably forward thing to say!” Hannah accused.
“You’re a fine one to talk about being forward,” Doss observed, and repeated back something she’d said at that very height of her passion. “That’s enough, Mr. McKettrick.”
Doss set his cup down, pushed back his chair and stood. “I’m going out to the barn to look in on the stock again. Maybe you ought to come along. Make the job go faster, if you lent a hand.”
Hannah squirmed on the bench.
Doss crossed the room, took his coat and hat down from the pegs by the door. “Way out there, a person could holler if they wanted to. Be nobody to hear.”
Hannah did some more squirming.
“Fresh hay to lie in, too,” Doss went on. “Nice and soft, and if a man were to spread a couple of horse blankets over it—”
Heat surged through Hannah, brought her to an aching simmer. She sputtered something and waved him away.
Doss chuckled, opened the door and went out, whistling merrily under his breath.
Hannah waited. If Doss McKettrick thought he was going to have his way with her—in the barn, of all places—well, he was just…
She got up, went to the stove and banked the fire with a poker.
He was just right, that was what he was.
She chose her biggest shawl, wrapped herself in it, and hurried after him.
Present Day
As soon as Sierra put supper on the table that night, the power went off again. While she scram bled for candles, Liam rushed to the nearest window.
“Travis’s trailer’s dark,” he said. “He’ll get hypothermia out there.”
Sierra sighed. “I’ll bet he comes back to see to the furnace, just like he did this morning. We’ll ask him to have supper with us.”
“I see him!” Liam cried glee fully. “He’s coming out of the barn, with a lantern!” He raced for the door, and before Sierra could stop him, he was outside, with no coat on, galloping through the deepening snow and shouting Travis’s name.
Sierra pulled on her own coat, grabbed Liam’s and hurried after him.
Travis was already herding him toward the house.
“Mom made meat loaf, and she says you can have some,” Liam was saying, as he tramped breathlessly along.
Sierra wrapped his coat around him, and would have scolded him, if her gaze hadn’t collided unexpectedly with Travis’s.
Travis shook his head.
She swallowed all that she’d been about to say and hustled her son into the house.
“I’ll start the generator,” Travis said.
Sierra nodded hastily and shut the door.
“Liam McKettrick,” she burst out, “what were you thinking, going out in that cold without a coat?”
In the candlelight, she saw Liam’s lower lip wobble. “Travis said it isn’t the cowboy way. He was about to put his coat on me when you came.”
“What isn’t the ‘cowboy way’?” she asked, chafing his icy hands between hers and praying he wouldn’t have an asthma attack or come down with pneumonia.
“Not wearing a coat,” Liam replied, downcast. “A cowboy is always prepared for any kind of weather, and he never rushes off half-cocked, without his gear.”
Sierra relaxed a little, stifled a smile. “Travis is right,” she said.
Liam brightened. “Do cowboys eat meat loaf?”
“I’m pretty sure they do,” Sierra answered.
The furnace came on, and she silently blessed Travis Reid for being there.
He let himself into the kitchen a few minutes later. By then Sierra had set another place at the table and lit several more candles. They all sat down at the same time, and there was something so natural about their gathering that way that Sierra’s throat caught.
“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, feeling awkward.
“I’m starved,” Travis replied.
“Cowboys eat meat loaf, right?” Liam inquired.
Travis grinned. “This one does,” he said.
“This one does, too,” Liam announced.
Sierra laughed, but tears came to her eyes at the same time. She was glad of the relative darkness, hoping no one would notice.
“Once,” Liam said, scooping a helping of meat loaf onto his plate, his gaze adoring as he focused on Travis, “I saw this show on the Science Channel. They found a cave man, in a block of ice. He was, like fourteen thousand years old! I betcha they could take some of his DNA and clone him if they wanted to.” He stopped for a quick breath. “And he was all blue, too. That’s what you’ll look like, if you sleep in that trailer tonight.”
“You’re not a kid,” Travis teased. “You’re a forty-year-old wearing a pygmy suit.”
“I’m really smart,” Liam went on. “So you ought to listen to me.”
Travis looked at Sierra, and their eyes caught, with an almost audible click and held.
“The generator’s low on gas,” Travis said. “So we have two choices. We can get in my truck and hope there are some empty motel rooms at the Lamp light Inn, or we can build up the fire in that cookstove and camp out in the kitchen.”
Liam had no trouble at all making the choice. “Camp out!” he whooped, waving his fork in the air. “Camp out!”
“You can’t be serious,” Sierra said to Travis.
“Oh, I’m serious, all right,” he answered.
“Lamp light Inn,” Sierra voted.
“Roads are bad,” Travis replied. “Real bad.”
“Once on TV, I saw a thing about these people who froze to death right in their car,” Liam put in.
“Be quiet,” Sierra told him.
“Happens all the time,” Travis said.
Which was how the three of them ended up bundled in sleeping bags, with couch and chair cushions for a makeshift mattress, lying side by side within the warm radius of the wood-burning stove.

CHAPTER SEVEN
1919
HANNAH AND DOSS RETURNED separately from the barn, by tacit agreement. Hannah, weak-kneed with residual pleasure and reeling with guilt, pumped water into a bucket to pour into the near-empty reservoir on the cookstove, then filled the two biggest kettles she had and set them on the stove to heat. She was adding wood to the fire when she heard Doss come in.
She blushed furiously, unable to meet his gaze, though she could feel it burning into her flesh, right through the clothes he’d sweet-talked her out of just an hour before, laying her down in the soft, surprisingly warm hay in an empty stall, kissing and caressing and nibbling at her until she’d begged him to take her.
Begged him.
She’d carried on something awful while he was at it, too.
“Look at me, Hannah,” he said.
She glared at Doss, marched past him into the pantry and dragged out the big wash tub stored there under a high shelf. She set it in front of the stove with an eloquent clang.
“Hannah,” Doss repeated.
“Go upstairs,” she told him, flustered. “Leave me to my bath.”
“You can’t wash away what we did,” he said.
She whirled on him that time, hands on her hips, fiery with temper. “Get out,” she ordered, keeping her voice down in case Tobias was still awake or even listening at the top of the stairs. “I need my privacy.”
Doss raised both hands to shoulder height, palms out, but his words were juxtaposed to the gesture. “If we’re going to talk about what you need, Hannah, it’s not a bath. It’s a lot more of what we just did in the barn.”
“Tobias might hear you!” Hannah whispered, outraged. If the broom hadn’t been on the back porch, she’d have grab bed it up and whacked him silly with it.
“He wouldn’t know what we were talking about even if he did,” Doss argued mildly, lowering his hands. He approached, plucked a piece of straw from Hannah’s hair and tickled her under the chin with it.
She felt as though she’d been electrified, and slapped his hand away.
He laughed, a low, masculine sound, leaned in and nibbled at her lower lip. “Good night, Hannah,” he said.
A hot shiver of renewed need went through her. How could that be? He’d satisfied her that night, and the one be fore. Both times he’d taken her to heights she hadn’t even reached with Gabe. The difference was, she’d been Gabe’s wife, in the eyes of God and man, and she’d loved him. She not only wasn’t married to Doss, she didn’t love him. She just wanted him, that was all, and the realization galled her.
“You’ve turned me into a hussy,” she said.
Doss chuckled, shook his head. “If you say so, Hannah,” he answered, “it must be true.”
With that, he kissed her forehead, turned and left the kitchen.
She listened to the sound of his boot heels on the stairs, heard his progress along the second-floor hallway, even knew when he opened Tobias’s door to look in on the boy before retiring to his own room. Only when she’d heard his door close did Hannah let out her breath.
When the water in the kettles was scalding hot, Hannah poured it into the tub, sneaked upstairs for a towel, a bar of soap and a night gown. By the time she’d put out all the lanterns in the kitchen and stripped off her clothes, her bath water had cooled to a temperature that made her sigh when she stepped into it.
She soaked for a few minutes, and then scrubbed with a vengeance.
It turned out that Doss had been right.
She tried but she couldn’t wash away the things he’d made her feel.
A tear slipped down her cheek as she dried herself off, then donned her night gown. She dragged the tub to the back door and on to the step, drained it over one side and dashed back in, covered with goose flesh from the chill.
“I’m sorry, Gabe,” she said, very quietly, huddling by the stove. “I’m sorry.”
Present Day
Travis was building up the fire when Sierra opened her eyes the next morning. “Stay in your sleeping bag,” he told her. “It’s colder than a meat locker in here.”
Liam, lying between them through out the night, was still asleep, but his breathing was a shallow rattle. Sierra sat bolt-upright, watchful, holding her own breath. Not feeling the external chill at all, except as a vague biting sensation.
Liam opened his eyes, blinked. “Mom,” he said. “I can’t—”
Breathe, Sierra finished the sentence for him, replayed it in her mind.
Mom, I can’t breathe.
She bounded out of the sleeping bag, scram bled for her purse, which was lying on the counter and rummaged for Liam’s inhaler.
He began to wheeze, and when Sierra turned to rush back to him, she saw a look of panic in his eyes.
“Take it easy, Liam,” she said, as she handed him the inhaler.
He grasped it in both hands, all too familiar with the routine, and pressed the tube to his mouth and nose.
Travis watched grimly.
Sierra dropped on to her knees next to her boy, put an arm loosely around his shoulders. Let it work, she prayed silently. Please let it work!
Liam lowered the inhaler and stared apologetically up into Sierra’s eyes. He could barely get enough wind to speak. He was, in essence, choking. “It’s—I think it’s broken, Mom—”
“I’ll warm up the truck,” Travis said, and banged out of the house.
Desperate, Sierra took the inhaler, shook it and shoved it back into Liam’s hands. It wasn’t empty—she wouldn’t have taken a chance like that—but it must have been clogged or somehow defective. “Try again,” she urged, barely avoiding panic herself.
Outside, Travis’s truck roared audibly to life. He gunned the motor a couple of times.
Liam struggled to take in the medication, but the inhaler simply wasn’t working.
Travis returned, picked Liam up in his arms, sleeping bag and all, and headed for the door again. Sierra, frightened as she was, had to hurry to catch up, snatching her coat from the peg and her purse from the counter on the way out.
The snow had stopped, but there must have been two feet of it on the ground. Travis shifted the truck into four-wheel drive and the tires grabbed for purchase, finally caught.
“Take it easy, buddy,” he told Liam, who was on Sierra’s lap, the seat belt fastened around both of them. “Take it real easy.”
Liam nodded solemnly. He was drawing in shallow gasps of air now, but not enough. Not enough. His lips were turning blue.
Sierra held him tight, but not too tight. Rested her chin on top of his head and prayed.
The roads hadn’t been plowed—in fact, except for sloping drifts on either side, Sierra wouldn’t have known where they were. Still, the truck rolled over them as easily as if they were bare.
What if we’d been alone, Liam and me? Sierra thought frantically. Her old station wagon, a snow-covered hulk in the driveway in front of the house, probably wouldn’t have started, and even if it had by some miracle, the chances were good that they’d have ended up in the ditch some where along the way to safety.
“It’s going to be okay,” she heard Travis say, and she’d thought he was talking to Liam. When she glanced at him, though, she knew he’d meant the words for her.
She kept her voice even. “Is there a hospital in Indian Rock?” She and Liam had passed through the town the day they arrived, but she didn’t remember seeing anything but houses, a diner or two, a drug store, several bars and a gas station. She’d been too busy trying to follow the hand-drawn map Meg had scanned and sent to her by email—the McKettricks’ private cemetery was marked with an X, and the ranch house an uneven square with lines for a roof.
“A clinic,” Travis said. He looked down at Liam again, then turned his gaze back to the road. The set of his jaw was hard, and he pulled his cell phone from the pocket of his coat and handed it to Sierra.
She dialed 411 and asked to be connected.
When a voice answered, Sierra explained the situation as calmly as she could, keeping it low-key for Liam’s sake. They’d been through at least a dozen similar episodes during his short life, and it never got easier. Each time, Sierra was hysterical, though she didn’t dare let that show. Liam was taking his cues from her. If she lost it, he would, too, and the results could be disastrous.
The clinic receptionist seemed blessedly unruffled. “We’ll be ready when you get here,” she said.
Sierra thanked the woman and ended the call, set the phone on the seat.
By the time they arrived at the town’s only medical facility, Liam was struggling to remain conscious. Travis pulled up in front, gave the horn a hard blast and was around to Sierra’s side with the door open before she managed to get the seat belt unbuckled.
Two medical assistants, accompanied by a gray-haired doctor, met them with a gurney. Liam was whisked away. Sierra tried to follow, but Travis and one of the nurses stopped her.
Her first instinct was to fight.
“My son needs me!” She’d meant it for a scream, but it came out as more of a whimper.
“We’ll need your name and that of the patient,” a clerk in formed her, advancing with a clip board. “And of course there’s the matter of insurance—”
Travis glared the woman into retreat. “Her name,” he said, “is McKettrick.”
“Oh,” the clerk said, and ducked behind her desk.
Sierra needed something, anything, to do, or she was going to rip apart every room in that place until she found Liam, gathered him into her arms. “My purse,” she said. “I must have left it in the truck—”
“I’ll get it,” Travis said, but first he steered her toward a chair in the waiting area and sat her down.
Tears of frustration and stark terror filled her eyes. What was happening to Liam? Was he breathing? Were they forcing the hated tube down into his bronchial passage even at that moment?
Travis cupped her face between his hands, for just a moment, and his palms felt cold and rough from ranch work.
The sensation triggered something in Sierra, but she was too distraught to know what it was.
“I’ll be right back,” he promised.
And he was.
Sierra snatched her bag from his hands, scrabbled through it to find her wallet. Found the insurance card Eve had sent by express the same day Sierra agreed to take the McKettrick name and spend a year on the Triple M, with Liam. She might have kissed that card, if Travis hadn’t been watching.
The clerk nodded a little nervously when Sierra walked up to the desk and asked for the papers she needed to fill out.
Patient’s Name. Well, that was easy enough. She scrawled Liam Bres—crossed out the last part, and wrote McKettrick instead.
Address? She had to consult Travis on that one. Everybody in Indian Rock knew where the Triple M was, she was sure, but the people in the insurance company’s claims office might not.
Occupation? Child.
Damn it, Liam was a little boy, hardly more than a baby. Things like this shouldn’t happen to him.
Sierra printed her own name, as guarantor. She bit her lip when asked about her job. Unemployed? She couldn’t write that.
Travis, watching, took the clip board and pen from her and inserted, Damn good mother.
The tears came again.
Travis got up, with the forms and the clip board and the insurance card, in scribed with the magical name and carried them over to the waiting clerk.
He was halfway back to Sierra when the doctor re appeared.
“Hello, Travis,” he said, but his gaze was on Sierra’s face, and she couldn’t read it, for all the practice she’d had.
“I’m Sierra McKettrick,” she said. The name still felt like a garment that didn’t quite fit, but if it would help Liam in any way, she would use it every chance she got. “My son—”
“He’ll be fine,” the doctor said kindly. His eyes were a faded blue, his features craggy and weathered. “Just the same, I think we ought to send him up to Flag staff to the hospital, at least over night. For observation, you understand. And because they’ve got a reliable power source up there.”
“Is he awake?” Sierra asked anxiously.
“Partially sedated,” replied the doctor, exchanging glances with Travis. “We had to perform an intubation.”
Sierra knew how Liam hated tubes, and how frightened he probably was, sedated or not. “I have to see him,” she said, prepared for an argument.
“Of course” was the immediate and very gentle answer.
Sierra felt Travis’s hand close around hers. She clung, in stead of pulling away, as she would have done with any other virtual stranger.
A few minutes later they were standing on either side of Liam’s bed in one of the treatment rooms. His eyes widened with recognition when he saw Sierra, and he pointed, with one small finger, to the mouth piece of his oxygen tube.
She nodded, blinking hard and trying to smile. Took his hand.
“You have to spend the night in the hospital in Flag staff,” she told him, “but don’t be scared, okay? Because I’m going with you.”
Liam relaxed visibly. Turned his eyes to Travis. Sierra’s heart twisted at the hope she saw in her little boy’s face.
“Me, too,” Travis said hoarsely.
Liam nodded and drifted off to sleep.
The doctor had ordered an ambulance, and Sierra rode with Liam, while Travis followed in the truck.
There was more paper work to do in Flag staff, but Sierra was calmer now. She sat in a chair next to Liam’s bed and filled in the lines.
Travis entered with two cups of vending-machine coffee, just as she was finishing.
“Thank you,” Sierra said, and she wasn’t just talking about the coffee.
“Wranglers like Liam and me,” he replied, watching the boy with a kind of fretful affection, “we stick together when the going gets tough.”
She accepted the paper cup Travis offered and set the ubiquitous clip board aside to take a sip. Travis drew up a second chair.
“Does this happen a lot?” he asked, after a long and remarkably easy silence.
Sierra shook her head. “No, thank God. I don’t know what we would have done without you, Travis.”
“You would have coped,” he said. “Like you’ve been doing for a long time, if my guess is any good. Where’s Liam’s dad, Sierra?”
She swallowed hard, glanced at the boy to make sure he was sleeping. “He died a few days before Liam was born,” she answered.
“You’ve been alone all this time?”
“No,” Sierra said, stiffening a little on the inside, where it didn’t show. Or, at least, she hoped it didn’t. “I had Liam.”
“You know that isn’t what I meant,” Travis said.
Sierra looked away, made herself look back. “I didn’t want to—complicate things. By getting involved with someone, I mean. Liam and I have been just fine on our own.”
Travis merely nodded, and drank more of his coffee.
“Don’t you have to go back to the ranch and feed the horses or something?” Sierra asked.
“Eventually,” Travis answered with a sigh. He glanced around the room again and gave the slightest shudder.
Sierra remembered his younger brother. The wounds must be raw. “I guess you probably hate hospitals,” she said. “Be cause of—” the name came back to her in Eve’s telephone voice “—Brody.”
Travis shook his head. His eyes were bleak. “If he’d gotten this far—to a hospital, I mean—it would have meant there was hope.”
Sierra moved to touch Travis’s hand, but just before she made contact, his cell phone rang. He pulled it from the pocket of his western shirt, flipped open the case. “Travis Reid.”
He listened. Raised his eyebrows. “Hello, Eve. I wouldn’t have thought even your pilot could land in this kind of weather.”
Sierra tensed.
Eve said something, and Travis responded. “I’ll let Sierra explain,” he said, and held out the phone to her.
Sierra swallowed, took it. “Hello, Eve,” she said.
“Where are you?” her mother asked. “I’m at the ranch. It looks as if you’ve been sleeping in the kitchen—”
“We’re in Flag staff, in a hospital,” Sierra told her. Only then did she realize that she and Travis were both wearing the clothes they’d slept in. That she hadn’t combed her hair or even brushed her teeth.
All of a sudden she felt in credibly grubby.
Eve drew in an audible breath. “Oh, my God—Liam?”
“He had a pretty bad asthma attack,” Sierra confirmed. “He’s on a breathing machine, and he has to stay until tomorrow, but he’s okay, Eve.”
“I’ll be up there as soon as I can. Which hospital?”
“Hold on,” Sierra said. “There’s really no need for you to come all this way, especially when the roads are so bad. I’m pretty sure we’ll be home tomorrow—”
“Pretty sure?” Eve challenged.
“Well, he’ll need his medication adjusted, and the inflammation in his bronchial tubes will have to go down.”
“This sounds serious, Sierra. I think I should come. I could be there—”
“Please,” Sierra interrupted. “Don’t.”
A thoughtful silence followed. “All right, then,” Eve said finally, with a good grace Sierra truly appreciated. “I’ll just settle in here and wait. The furnace is running and the lights are on. Tell Travis not to rush back—I can certainly feed the horses.”
Sierra could only nod, so Travis took the phone back.
Evidently, a barrage of orders followed from Eve’s end.
Travis grinned through out. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I will.”
He ended the call.
“You will what?” Sierra inquired.
“Take care of you and Liam,” Travis answered.
1919
That morning the world looked as though it had been carved from a huge block of pure white ice. Hannah marveled at the beauty of it, staring through the kitchen window, even as she longed with bittersweet poignancy for spring. For things to stir under the snow bound earth, to put out roots and break through the surface, green and growing.
“Ma?”
She turned, troubled by something she heard in Tobias’s voice. He stood at the base of the stairs, still wearing his night shirt and barefoot.
“I don’t feel good,” he said.
Hannah set aside her coffee with exaggerated care, even took time to wipe her hands on her apron before she approached him. Touched his forehead with the back of her hand.
“You’re burning up,” she whispered, stricken.
Doss, who had been re reading last week’s newspaper at the table, his barn work done, slowly scraped back his chair.
“Shall I fetch the doc?” he asked.
Hannah turned, looked at him over one shoulder, and nodded. If you hadn’t insisted on taking him with you to the widow Jessup’s place, she thought—
But she would go no further.
This was not the time to place blame.
“You get back into bed,” she told Tobias, briskly efficient and purely terrified. The bout of pneumonia that had nearly killed him during the fall had started like this. “I’ll make you a mustard plaster to draw out the congestion, and your uncle Doss will go to town for Dr. Willaby. You’ll be right as rain in no time at all.”
Tobias looked doubtful. His face was flushed, and his night shirt was soaked with perspiration, even though the kitchen was a little on the chilly side. The boy seemed dazed, almost as though he were walking in his sleep, and Hannah wondered if he’d taken in a word she’d said.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Doss promised, already pulling on his coat and reaching for his hat. “There’s whisky left from Christmas. It’s in the pantry, behind that cracker tin,” he added, pausing before opening the door. “Make him a hot drink with some honey. Pa used to brew up that concoction for us when we took sick, and it always helped.”
Doss and Gabe, along with their adopted older brother, John Henry, had never suffered a serious illness in their lives, if you didn’t count John Henry’s deafness. What did they know about tending the sick?
Hannah nodded again, her mouth tight. She’d lost three sisters in child hood, two to diphtheria and one to scarlet fever; only she and her younger brother, David, had survived.
She was used to nursing the afflicted.
Doss hesitated a few moments on the threshold, as though there was something he wanted to say but couldn’t put into words, then went out.
“You change into a dry night shirt,” Hannah told Tobias. His sheets were probably sweat-soaked, too, so she added, “And get into our bed.”
Our bed.
Meaning Gabe’s and hers.
And soon, after they were married, Doss would be sleeping in that bed, in Gabe’s place.
She could not, would not, consider the implications of that.
Not now. Maybe not ever.
She was like the ranch woman she’d once read about in a Montana newspaper, making her way from the house to the barn and back in a blinding blizzard, with only a frozen rope to hold on to. If she let go, she’d be lost.
She had to attend to Tobias. That was her rope, and she’d follow it, hand over hand, thought over thought. Hannah retrieved an old flannel shirt from the rag bag and cut two matching pieces, approximately twelve inches square. These would serve to protect Tobias’s skin from the heat of the poultice, but like as not, he would still have blisters. She kept a mixture on hand for just such occasions, in a big jar with a wire seal. She dumped a big dollop of the stuff on to one of the bits of flannel, spread it like butter, and put the second cloth on top, her nose twitching at the pungent odors of mustard seed, pounded to a pulp, and camphor.
When she got upstairs, she found Tobias huddled in the middle of her bed, and his eyes grew big with recollection when he saw what she was carrying in her hands.
“No,” he protested, but weakly. “No mustard plaster.” He’d begun to shiver, and his teeth were chattering.
“Don’t fuss, Tobias,” Hannah said. “Your grand father swears by them.”
Tobias groaned. “My Montana grandfather,” he replied. “My grand pa Holt wouldn’t let anybody put one of those things on him!”
“Is that a fact?” Hannah asked mildly. “Well, next time you write to the almighty Holt McKettrick, you ask. I’ll bet he’ll say he wouldn’t be without one when he’s under the weather.”
Tobias made a rude sound, blowing through his lips, but he rolled on to his back and allowed Hannah to open the top buttons of his night shirt and put the poultice in place.
“Grandpa Holt,” he said, bearing the affliction stalwartly, “would probably make me a whisky drink, just like he did for Pa and Uncle Doss.”
Hannah sighed. Privately she thought there was a good deal of the rough neck in the McKettrick men, and while she wouldn’t call any of them a drunk, they used liquor as a remedy for just about every ill, from snake bite to the grippe. They’d swabbed it on old Seesaw’s gashes, when he tangled with a sow bear, and rubbed it into the gums of teething babies.
“What you’re going to have, Tobias McKettrick, is oatmeal.”
He made a face. “This burns,” he complained, pointing to the mustard plaster.
Hannah bent and kissed his forehead. He didn’t pull away, like he’d taken to doing of late, and she found that both reassuring and worrisome.
She glanced at the window, saw a scallop of icicles dangling from the eave. It might be many hours—even tomorrow—before Doss got back from Indian Rock with Dr. Willaby. The wait would be agony, but there was nothing to do but endure.
When Tobias closed his eyes and slept, Hannah left the room, descended the stairs and went into the pantry again. She moved the cracker tin aside, looked up at the bottle of whisky hidden behind it, gave a disdainful sniff, and took a canned chicken off the shelf instead. It was a treasure, that chicken—she’d been saving it for some celebration, so she wouldn’t have to kill one of her laying hens—but it would make a fine, nourishing soup.
After gathering onions, rice and some of her spices—which she cherished as much as preserved meat, given how costly they were—Hannah commenced to make soup.
She was surprised when, only an hour after he’d ridden out, Doss returned with another man she recognized as one of the ranch hands down at Rafe’s place. She frowned, watching from the window as Doss dismounted and left the new comer to lead both horses inside.
That was odd. Doss hadn’t been to Indian Rock yet; he couldn’t have covered the distance in such a short time. Why would he ask someone to put up his horse? Puzzled, impatient and a little angry, Hannah was waiting at the door when Doss came in.
“Bundle the boy up warm,” he said, without any preamble at all. “Willie’s going to stay here and look after the horses and the place. Once I’ve hitched the draft horses to the sleigh, we’ll go overland to Indian Rock.”
Hannah stared at him, confounded. “You’re suggesting that we take Tobias all the way to Indian Rock?”
“I’m not ‘suggesting’ anything, Hannah,” Doss interposed. “I met Seth Baker down by the main house, when I was about to cross the stream, and he hailed me, wanted to know where I was headed. I told him I was off to fetch Doc Willaby, be cause Tobias was feeling poorly. Seth said Willaby was down with the gout, but his nephew happened to be there, and he’s a doctor, too. He’s looking after the doc’s practice, in town, so he wouldn’t be inclined to come all the way out here.”
Hannah’s throat clenched, and she put a hand to it. “A ride like that could be the end of Tobias,” she said.
Doss shook his head. “We can’t just sit here,” he countered, grim-jawed. “Get the boy ready or I’ll do it myself.”
“May I remind you that Tobias is my son?”
“He’s a McKettrick,” Doss replied flatly, as though that were the end of it—and for him, it probably was.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Present Day
TRAVIS WAITED UNTIL SIERRA HAD DRIFTED off into a fitful sleep in her chair next to Liam’s hospital bed. Then he got a blanket from a nurse, covered Sierra with it and left.
A few minutes later, he was behind the wheel of his truck.
The roads were sheer ice, and the sky looked gray, burdened with fresh snow. After consulting the GPS panel on his dash board, he found the nearest Wal-Mart, parked as close to the store as he could and went inside.
Shopping was something Travis endured, and this was no exception. He took a cart and wheeled it around, choosing the things Sierra and Liam would need if this hitch in Flag staff turned out to be longer than expected. He’d spent the night at his own place, a few miles from the hospital, showered and changed there.
When he got back from his expedition—a January Santa Claus burdened down with bulging blue plastic bags—he made his way to Liam’s room.
Sierra was awake, blinking and be fuddled, and so was Liam. A huge teddy bear, holding a helium balloon in one paw, sat on the bedside table. The writing on the balloon said Get Well Soon in big red letters.
“Eve?” Travis asked, indicating the bear with a nod of his head.
Sierra took in the bags he was carrying. “Eve,” she confirmed. “What have you got there?”
Travis grinned, though he felt tired all of a sudden, as though ten cups of coffee wouldn’t keep him awake. Maybe it was the warmth of the hospital, after being out in the cold.
“A little something for every body,” he said.
Liam was sitting up, and the breathing tube had been removed. His words came out as a sore-throated croak, but he smiled just the same, and Travis felt a pinch deep inside. The kid was so small and so brave. “Even me?”
“Especially you,” Travis said. He handed the boy one of the bags, watched as he pulled out a portable DVD player, still in its box, and the episodes of Nova he’d picked up to go with it.
“Wow,” Liam said, his voice so raw that it made Travis’s throat ache in sympathy. “I’ve always wanted one of these.”
Sierra looked worried. “It’s way too expensive,” she said. “We can’t accept it.”
Liam hugged the box close against his little chest, obstinately possessive. Everything about him said, I’m not giving this up.
Travis ignored Sierra’s statement and tossed her another of the bags, this one fat and light. “Take a shower,” he told her. “You look like somebody who just went through a harrowing medical emergency.”
She opened her mouth, closed it again. Peeked inside the bag. He’d bought her a sweat suit, guessing at the sizes, along with tooth paste, a brush, soap and a comb.
She swallowed visibly. “Thanks.”
He nodded.
While Sierra was in Liam’s bathroom, showering, Travis helped the boy get the DVD player out of the box, plugged in and running.
“Mom might not let me keep it,” Liam said sadly.
“I’m betting she will,” Travis assured him.
Liam was en grossed in an episode about killer bees when Sierra came out of the bathroom, looking scrubbed and cautiously hopeful in her dark-blue sweats. Her hair was still wet from washing, and the comb had left distinct ridges, which Travis found peculiarly poignant.
Complex emotions fell into line after that one, striking him with the impact of a runaway boxcar, but he didn’t dare explore any of them right away. He’d need to be alone to do that, in his truck or with a horse. For now, he was too close to Sierra to think straight.
She glanced at Liam, softened noticeably as she saw how much he was enjoying Travis’s gift. His small hands clasped the machine on either side, as though he feared someone would wrench it away.
Some thing similar to Travis’s thoughts must have gone through her mind, because he saw a change in her face. It was a sort of resignation, and it made him want to take her in his arms—though he wasn’t about to do that.
“I could use something to eat,” he said.
“Me, too,” Sierra admitted. She tapped Liam on the shoulder, and he barely looked away from the screen, where bees were swarming. Music from the speakers portended certain disaster. “You’ll be all right here alone for a while, if Travis and I go down to the cafeteria?”
The boy nodded distractedly, refocused his eyes on the bees.
Sierra smiled with a tiny, forlorn twitch of her lips.
They were well away from Liam’s room, and waiting for an elevator, when she finally spoke.
“I’m grateful for what you did for Liam and me,” she said, “but you shouldn’t have given him something that cost so much.”
“I won’t miss the money, Sierra,” Travis responded. “He’s been through a lot, and he needed something else to think about be sides breathing tubes, medical tests and shots.”
She gave a brief, almost clipped nod.
That McKettrick pride, Travis thought. It was something to behold.
The elevator came, and the doors opened with a cheerful chiming sound. They stepped inside, and Travis pushed the but ton for the lower level. Hospital cafeterias always seemed to be in the bowels of the building, like the morgues.

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