“Like I said the cottage is—”
“I know, Ash’s business. But I’d like to talk to you about something else.”
Pause. “This got to do with some damned story?”
“In a way, yes, it does. I—”
Dial tone. He’d hung up. Damn. Now what? Should she phone back? Go out anyway while Ash was in town? No, she couldn’t trust how long he’d be. The last thing she needed was to get caught out in the boonies with a fire-breathing dragon on her heels.
She should have left it with renting the guesthouse, waited until she was out there to talk to Tom face-to-face.
She sat and fumed at her desk. Almost two weeks of planning gone down the drain. Two weeks of schmoozing with the townsfolk, getting to know them on a first-name basis, cracking smiles she didn’t feel, pushing her little boy into yet another school with strange kids. Living in a moth-eaten motel.
All for what? Fame and glory?
So her father—an editor with the Washington Post—would recognize she was as capable of meritorious reporting as her mother had been? Qualified to make the big leagues, to one day write her way to a possible Pulitzer?
Worth loving just a little?
The thought left a barb. Bill Brant had loved no one but his long-dead wife, Grace. Times like these, Rachel wished, wished her mother still lived. But she had died of cancer twenty-four years ago, on Rachel’s eighth birthday. A day branded in her mind. Not only had she lost her mother forever, but her daddy had set the blame at his daughter’s feet. Stupid, Rachel knew. But still.
She had to try. Had to. For her own sake as well as her father’s.
But, oh, she was tired. Of the lying, the pushing, the shoving. Of living in seven different backwater towns in seven states, soliciting local newspapers for a job—just so she could have the time to gain the trust of their wary resident Hells Field veteran. God, what she wouldn’t give to find her own niche and have Bill Brant be happy for her. Just once.
“You don’t give up, do you?”
She jerked around. Ashford McKee stood five feet away, big and tough as the land he owned. A pine and forest man.
Hands buried in a sheepskin jacket, Stetson pulled low as always, he stared down at her with dark, unfriendly eyes. Slowly he removed a cell phone from his pocket and lifted one smooth black brow. “We McKee’s keep in touch.”
She should have known. A fly speck couldn’t get past him without that speck becoming a mountain.
Rachel rose. At five-ten, she was no slouch, but beside him she felt gnome short. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but as I mentioned yesterday my issue is with your father—who I understand owns the Flying Bar T?”
Annoyance flickered in those dark eyes, then vanished. “Issue? The only issue I see here is you—harassing my family.”
“Making one phone call is hardly harassment, Mr. McKee.”
He studied her a moment with eyes that might have offered warmth because of their clear-tea color. Not today. Today they were frozen as the earth outside. “What do you want with him?”
“To ask about the guesthouse.” She pinched back her guilt at the omission of the story.
“And he told you to talk to me. What else?”
On a sustaining breath, she said, “I’m writing a freelance series about Vietnam’s Hells Field.” She let that settle. His eyes remained steady, unreadable. She pressed on, “I’ve been working on the story for several years. Your father is the last of seven surviving veterans and the key to the series. I’d like—” she swallowed when McKee’s eyes narrowed “—a chance to talk to him. Please.”
“Why? There’ve been three decades and two wars in the interim.”
“Because in an already controversial war, Hells Field was a battle that was undisclosed.”
His pupils pinpricked. He understood. A battle fought, facts swept by the wayside, one soldier the fall guy.
“Leave him alone, Ms. Brant.”
“I can’t. At least not until he tells me no.”
McKee stepped into her space. Crowding her. She smelled his skin and the soap he’d washed with this morning. And hay, a whiff of hay. “We don’t need old war wounds opened. Go back to reporting the weekly news.”
“Look,” she said, desperate. “You can read what I’ve written about the other vets so far. I’m a good reporter.”
His jaw remained inflexible. “Tom doesn’t want you hanging around him any more than I do.”
Except, the heat in those dark eyes when they settled on her mouth indicated differently. A zing shot through her belly.
“I understand,” she said slowly. And she did. Newspeople were too often an unwelcome lot. “You don’t like reporters.”
She turned back to her desk. Dismissing him, dismissing the entire conversation, her entire mission. God, why was she so needy when it came to pleasing her dad—oh, face it—when it came to men in general? Men like foreign correspondent Floyd Stephens, pontificating how a kid—his son!—would dump her career in the toilet. Men, valuing her according to some parameter.
Rats, all of them. Shuffling several pages of notes, she muttered, “If I had somewhere else to go I would.”
Which was, in itself, a paradox. If it hadn’t been for her need to make her father proud, to prove to him—and all men for that matter, maybe even to herself—that she was a capable and creditable career woman, she would not be in these sticks.
She would not be begging Ash McKee to understand.
A movement from behind reeled her around. He still stood by her cubicle.
“I thought you’d left,” she said, vexed. Why didn’t he just go?
Under the hat, his tea eyes were pekoe dark. “Where are you staying?”
A tiny hope-flame. “The Dream On Motel.” She thought of Charlie sleeping in that dingy room, the lumpy bed, inhaling smoke-stagnated air into his young lungs. When it came right down to it, his welfare was more important than any story. God, she should just get out of this town and go back to Arizona. At least there it was warm and Charlie had a little friend.
She pushed a wing of hair behind her ear. “I have a child, Mr. McKee. A boy. That’s why I need a place. Somewhere clean and—and welcoming. I know,” she rushed on, “you said I’m not welcome on the Flying Bar T, but you won’t know I’m there. I won’t come near your house without permission. And if your father doesn’t want the interview, that’s fine. Scout’s honor.”
She hated pleading with him, this man with his invisible iron wall surrounding his people.
“How old is he?”
“My son? Seven.”
Again, those unyielding eyes. “I’ll talk to Tom.”
She couldn’t help sagging against her desk. “Thank you. Thank you so much. You won’t be sorry.”
He didn’t answer. Simply looked at her. Into her. Through her. Then turned and strode from the newsroom, out the squeaky door, into the street.
Chapter Two
Ash jaywalked to his truck. A light snow had begun to fall again, fat flakes that caught on his hat and shoulders.
What the hell happened back there in that newspaper office?
How could he even consider renting the cottage to her? She with the fine-boned cheeks that he damn near touched when she looked