McKettricks of Texas: Tate Read Online Free PDF Page A

liked him so much, made them willing to overlook the oil wells, now capped,and the ridiculously big house and nearly a hundred thousand acres of prime grassland, complete with springs and creeks and even a small river.
    He was one of them.
    Of course, the locals hadn’t been dumped because he’d gotten some other woman pregnant just a few months after he’d started law school.
    No, that had happened to her.
    She realized he was waiting for her to respond to his comment about his ex-wife. Their mother would have a fit.
    Can’t have that, Libby thought, tightening her lips.
    “The ice is melting in those smoothies,” she finally said. Translation: Get out. It hurts to look at you. It hurts to remember how things were between us before you hooked up with somebody you didn’t even love.
    Tate grinned again, though his eyes looked sad, and then he turned sideways, ready to leave. “Maybe we’ll stop by your place and have a look at those dogs after all,” he said. “Would tomorrow be good?”
    He’d stayed with Cheryl-the-lawyer for less than a year after the twins were born. As soon as the babies began to thrive, he’d moved Cheryl and his infant daughters into the two-story colonial on Oak Street.
    The gossip had burned like a brush fire for months.
    “That would be fine,” Libby said, back from her mental wanderings. Tate McKettrick might have broken her heart, but he’d loved his ancient, arthritic dog, Davy Crockett. And she needed to find homes for the pair of pups.
    Hildie, her adopted black Lab, normally the soul of charity, was starting to resent the canine roommates, growling at them when they got too near her food dish, baring her teeth when they tried to join her on the special fluffy rug atthe foot of Libby’s bed at night. The newcomers, neither more than a year old, seemed baffled by this reception, wagging their tails uncertainly whenever they ran afoul of Hildie, then launching right back into trouble.
    They would be very happy out there on the Silver Spur, with all that room to run, Libby thought.
    A rush of hope made the backs of her eyes burn as she watched Tate move toward the door.
    “Six?” she said.
    Tate, shifting the cups around so he could open the door, looked back at her curiously, as though he’d already forgotten the conversation about the dogs, if not Libby herself.
    “I close at six,” Libby said, fanning herself with a plastic-coated price list even though the secondhand swamp cooler in the back was working fine, for once. She didn’t want him thinking the heat in her face had anything to do with him, even though it did. “The shop,” she clarified. “I close the shop at six tomorrow. You could stop by the house and see the dogs then.”
    Tate looked regretful for a moment, as though he’d already changed his mind about meeting the potential adoptees. But then he smiled in that way that made her blink. “Okay,” he said. “See you a little after six tomorrow night, then.”
    Libby swallowed hard and then nodded.
    He left.
    She hurried to lock the door again, turned the “Closed” sign to the street, and stood there, watching Tate stride toward his truck, so broad-shouldered and strong and confident.
    What was it like, Libby wondered, to live as though you owned the whole world?
    On the off chance that Tate might glance in her direction again, once he’d finished handing the cups through the window of his truck to the girls, Libby quickly turned away.
    She took the day’s profits from the till—such as they were—and tucked the bills and checks into a bank deposit bag. She’d hide them in the usual place at home, and stop by First Cattleman’s in the morning, during one of the increasingly long lulls in business.
    The house she’d lived in all her life was just across the alley, and Hildie and the pups were in the backyard when she approached the gate, Hildie lying in the shade of the only tree on the property, the foster dogs playing tug-of-war with Libby’s