Home To Texas

The hills here are stony, arid. The trees are bare. They’re twisted into strange, low shapes.

Shut up, she fiercely told that treacherous voice. Hills were hills, dammit, and trees were trees. Home was where you made it, and by all that was holy, she vowed she would make a home here.

What she needed to worry about wasn’t the scenery, but if the Texas move could really slow down Burleigh’s plan to be the dominant force in Del’s life. She had sent him a letter on the day she left. She hoped it would take a while to reach him. When he read it, he would not take it kindly.

She took a sip of coffee and straightened her spine defiantly. If he wanted to fight, she’d fight. If he wanted to maneuver, she’d outmaneuver.

“Found it,” Lynn said, bustling back into the kitchen with a fat, leather-covered photo album.

Lynn was petite, and she moved with an efficient briskness and an athlete’s grace. Her hair was swept up into two pert ponytails that made her look like a teenager, not a woman with two grown stepdaughters and a ten-year-old son.

She sat down on the banquette beside Tara and began flipping through the album’s pages. Lynn giggled. “Cal would kill me if he knew I showed you this. Ha! Just let me find it…”

Lynn paused, pointing with amusement at a snapshot. “This isn’t it, but look. The gang of usual suspects.”

Tara looked and smiled. After her long journey, it was good to see familiar faces.

There, with their arms around each other’s shoulders, stood a trio of tall men, mugging and grinning for the camera. One was her brother, Gavin, another was Cal, and the third was Spencer Malone. The Three Amigos, Inc.

Lynn gave Tara a wry look. “But the real hoot is a shot I took last month. The last time they were all down here together.”

She turned the page. The same three men stood on a nearly barren lawn. They wore ludicrously large, sequined sombreros, and they held up margarita glasses in an exaggerated toast.

“Idiots,” Lynn said, but she said it fondly. “That’s the day they signed themselves into debt up to their necks. Recognize where they are?”

In the background only a portion of a house showed. Built of native stone, even that small section managed to look both elegant and on the edge of ruin. Boards barred the door and the windows gaped blankly.

Tara swallowed. She knew the place from other pictures. This was the house she had been sent to save. It was where she and Del would live, perhaps for a long time.

Again she peeped at Del, dangling by his arms from one of the jungle-gym bars. She’d known for his sake and her own, that they needed to be far from Los Angeles. But this far?

Lynn turned pages, paused and tapped another photo. “This is me and both my brothers.”

Tara looked at a slightly younger Lynn, her arms linked with those of two young men in Stetsons, one serious, one laughing. The laughing one, of course, was Cal. The more solemn one Tara had only heard about: Tyler.

Lynn’s finger moved to another picture. “And this is my whole family together.”

Cal had regaled Tara with stories often enough that to her the McKinneys were already the stuff of legend. As the founding family of Crystal Creek, they had cast their fate with that of the Hill Country.

Lynn pointed out a handsome older couple with a young girl. “This is my father, J.T.,” Lynn said fondly. “And our stepmother and little sister. Daddy just retired. The three of them are in Paris now. Believe me, it’s very hard to imagine Daddy in Paris.”

She smiled, then sighed. “This is Tyler again. And his wife and two girls. They’ve gone out to Napa Valley for the year. They’re trying to see if they can handle two wineries—one here, one there.”

Lynn shook her head pensively. “And Cal’s in Mexico, selling his brewery. Everybody’s so…far away. It’s the first time they’ve all been away at once. I feel—abandoned.”

Tara bit her inner lip, knowing how it was to be truly abandoned.

Lynn’s expressed grew abashed. “I shouldn’t complain, heaven knows,” she murmured. “And I’m not really the only one left. Daddy’s cousin’s here. He’s a cousin, but he and Daddy were as close as brothers, so he’s almost like an uncle. Big Bret. We called him that because Mama also had a cousin Bret, and he was short, so he was Little Bret. Big Bret’s managing the Double C for Daddy. I’ve got a picture here—somewhere.”

How different it must feel, thought Tara, to have roots deep and strong in one place. Her family had moved eleven times while she was growing up.

“Here he is,” Lynn said, smoothing the page flat. “Big Bret. Looks like Daddy, doesn’t he?”

Tara studied the man. In his fifties, he gazed into the camera grimly. He did not look like the sort who changed his mind or gave his affections easily.

Yet if affection didn’t show in his unsmiling face, it showed in how his arms draped the shoulders of two younger men. Although they stood close to him, their expressions were as joyless as his.

“His sons,” Tara said, knowing it must be so.

“Yes.” Lynn’s voice was quiet. “This isn’t the greatest picture. It was taken just a little while after my aunt Maggie’s funeral. She really was the glue that held that family together. Without her, it’s become a bit undone.”

She squared her shoulders, forced a smile. “You’ll meet him soon, Big Bret. He’s your neighbor, and he’ll be a good one. This son—”

She indicated a handsome, boyish young man with angel-blue eyes. “This is Jonah, the youngest. I’d kill for eyelashes like that. He came to the Double C to finish his dissertation. A sweetheart. But all he thinks of is books and cows.”

Jonah, Tara mused, was so handsome he was perilously close to being pretty. He was not as interesting as his brooding dark-eyed brother.

“The other one,” Lynn said, “is Lang. He’ll be here soon. He’s kind of at loose ends now. He’s getting a divorce.”

She must have seen Tara’s face tighten in control. She quickly changed the subject. “There’s another brother. Grady. But you won’t meet him.”

Tara looked at Lynn with mild curiosity. “Why not?”

Lynn’s smile was indulgent. “Grady’s the one with the Gypsy in his soul. We’re afraid he’ll never settle down. I wish he would. Of the three brothers, he was always the most…”

She paused, bemused.

“Most what?” prompted Tara.

“The most fun to be with,” Lynn said thoughtfully. “The hardest working. Maybe—it’s a hard call—the smartest. The easiest to talk to. The hardest to understand.”

She shrugged, patted the album cover and smiled. “Whatever. Ready for lunch?”

BRET MCKINNEY WAS GOING about his business in all innocence when he was ambushed by a godlessly seductive nightie.

All he’d done was open a closet door in an unused bedroom of the Double C. There were other clothes in the closet, but it was the nightgown that sneak-attacked him.

Then Bret realized that there was a crowd of nightgowns and negligees. They hung tauntingly empty on their satin hangers, and they reminded him of how long it had been since he’d been with a woman.

Bret slammed the closet door shut in panicky haste. He felt guilty, like an inadvertent Peeping Tom. Whose intimate, gauzy stuff was this? Did it belong to his cousin’s wife? One of his nephews’ wives?

For the first time in years, Bret felt the stirring of a long dormant sensuality. He’d thought such feelings were dead, and he hadn’t mourned them. He meant to be faithful to his wife’s memory. He was a man of iron discipline, and he’d made up his mind.

It disturbed him that his body had rebelled against his mind’s dictate. He stepped to the window and stared out at the miles of rolling Texas range.

Bret still missed his wife, Maggie, dead two years now. He had severed himself from his job in Idaho in part because he could no longer endure the ranch house so painfully haunted by memories of her.

Bret’s plan had been to come back to Texas to learn to live alone and like it. Fate, however, had decreed that solitude was not an option. First, his youngest son, Jonah, had announced he’d join him.