Linda Miller - McKettricks of Texas - Austin

It was as though Austin McKettrick possessed his own magnetic field; the farther she got from him, the easier it was to breathe, to reason. To simply be.

Reaching the outskirts of town, Paige slowed down, drove automatically toward the house where she and Libby and Julie had grown up, with their dad. Libby had lived there, before and after Will Remington’s death from pancreatic cancer, with her dog, Hildie, and had run the Perk Up Coffee Shop to support herself.

Now, thanks largely to their mother, Marva, and her questionable driving skills, the shop was gone, along with the mom-and-pop grocery store that had once stood beside it, the lot totally empty.

Rumor had it that a bank would be built on the site, but as Paige bumped along the alley toward the detached garage behind the old house, she saw no signs of construction.

After parking her car in the narrow space the garage afforded, Paige got out, walked to the back gate and let herself into the yard.

Here, there were definitely signs of construction. The old cupboards, newly pulled away from the kitchen walls, stood near the porch, seeming to crouch under blue plastic tarps. The bathtub, so outdated that it was probably about to come back into style again, rested in one of the flowerbeds, with the matching green toilet perched inside it.

Paige sighed as she let herself in through the back door and drew in the scents of sawdust and new drywall. She flipped on the overhead light and was gratified, and a little surprised, that it worked.

The kitchen, twice its former size, boasted a new slate-tile floor and an alcove set into a semicircle of floor-to-ceiling windows, but it was a long way from usable.

Paige shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and moved farther into the house.

The living room was all new; the floors were hardwood and the molding around the edges of the raised ceiling had been salvaged from an old mansion in Dallas. There was an elegant marble fireplace, with an antique mantel, and the windows, like the ones in the kitchen, stood taller than Paige did.

Black against the night, the glass threw her reflection back at her—a trim woman in jeans, a T-shirt and a jacket, with dark, chin-length hair and the saddest eyes.

A lot of changes had been made, but this was still the place—the very room—where her dad had died.

It was the same house her mother had left, for good, when she and Libby and Julie needed her most.

The same house where she’d waited in vain for Marva to come back. Where she’d cried over Austin McKettrick and grieved after her father’s death.

Julie and Libby had both signed their shares over to her. And she would live here, a spinster, growing stranger and stranger with each passing year. Adopting dozens and dozens of cats, and playing bingo three nights a week, cutting beer cans into panels, punching holes in the sides and crocheting them together into hats.

Paige sank down onto the raised hearth of the fireplace and tried to make up her mind whether to laugh or cry. It was a tough choice.

CHAPTER THREE

AUSTIN WAS ONLY half listening to his brothers’ conversation that evening, there in Garrett’s small, well-lit courtyard; a big part of his mind was on Paige. He’d heard her car door slam, listened as she started the engine, and it had been all he could do not to let himself out through the gate and run down the driveway after her, like some damn fool in a bad movie.

Lounging at the picnic table, watching the kids and the dogs dash around in the grass, Austin sipped his beer and savored the smoky scent of beef cooking on an outdoor grill.

Julie and Libby came down the back steps from Garrett’s terrace, Libby carrying a salad, Julie holding a tray of empty glasses and a pitcher of iced tea. While Austin couldn’t rightly think of a place he’d rather be just then, he wished Paige hadn’t left.

Remembering his manners—better late than never, he supposed wryly—he rose, crossed the yard and took the tray out of Julie’s hands.

Julie thanked him. She and Libby exchanged glances, and both of them looked flustered.

Austin carried the tray back to the picnic table, set it down and turned to see both his brothers watching him.

When he realized that they thought he might have done himself permanent injury by carrying the tray, he gave a brief, ragged chuckle and shook his head.

Tate and Garrett had the good grace to look chagrined, and went back to turning steaks and talking ranch business.

The meal was served, and they all sat down at the long picnic table, kids and adults, with the dogs sitting quietly—and hopefully—nearby.

“Where’s Aunt Paige?” Calvin piped up, barely visible over the hamburger towering on his plate.

An awkward little silence fell, broken only by the distant lowing of cattle and the sound of a car somewhere down the road.

“Eat your supper, sweetheart,” Julie told her son gently.

“What about Aunt Paige’s supper?” Calvin persisted. “Is she going to have any?”

“I’m sure your aunt will be fine,” Julie assured him.

Silverware clinked against dishes, and the wind whispered in the limbs of the oak trees nearest the house. It was November, and turning colder, but thanks to a pair of outdoor heaters, the patio was warm enough.

“Maybe she ran away,” Ava, one of Tate’s twins, speculated, after chewing and swallowing a big bite of burger and bun.

Calvin took immediate offense, stiffening and glaring across the table at Ava. “Did not!”

“Hush,” Julie said, ruffling the boy’s hair.

Ava blinked behind her glasses and then jutted out her fine McKettrick chin, stubborn to the bone. “Did, too!” she insisted. “Maybe.”

“Grown-ups don’t run away!” Calvin said.

“Sometimes they do!” Ava argued.

“Ava,” Tate said quietly. “That will be enough.”

Ava subsided, but not graciously.

And her sister, Audrey, by far the more outgoing of the pair, spoke right up. “Our mom ran away,” she said. “She went all the way to New York City, and she’s never coming back.”

Another silence.

Then Libby, sitting next to Audrey, slipped an arm around the child. Over the girls’ heads, her gaze connected with Tate’s. “Your mother came to visit just last month,” Libby reminded her softly. “She took you and Ava to the ballet in Austin, and you stayed in a hotel.”

Tate sighed, pushed his plate away.

Austin felt a pang of sympathy, watching his brother. Tate’s first marriage, to the twins’ mother, had been a mistake from the beginning. He and Cheryl had been divorced since the twins were babies, but they still butted heads now and then over the kids. Cheryl, probably jealous of Libby, was always playing some kind of head game.

Just one more reason, as far as Austin was concerned, to stay single. And if the idea gave him a lonesome feeling, well, he concluded, nobody had everything.

Garrett, meanwhile, managed to shift Calvin onto his lap without making a big fat production of it. “Your Aunt Paige wouldn’t run away,” he told the boy, looking straight at Austin. “She probably just didn’t feel like having steak for supper.”

Austin felt color rise to his face. What was Garrett implying? That it was his fault Paige didn’t want to join the rest of the family for a meal?

Maybe it was his fault.

Austin decided he wasn’t all that hungry. He excused himself, as he’d been taught to do, having been raised by a good Texas mama, and left the table. Carried his plate inside and left it in the sink in Garrett’s kitchen.

Shep joined him on the short walk to the door of his own apartment, just down the hall from Garrett’s.