Rode Hard, Put Up Wet (Rough Riders #2)(32)

Cash was wrong. Gemma felt like crying all over again.


Chapter Thirteen


Macie woke up and didn’t know where she was.


Seemed like that had happened to her a lot lately. Right. She was such a wild child.


She sat up and looked around. Ah. She was in Carter’s trailer.


But where was Carter?


Out in that run-down barn he called a studio? She called out, “Carter?”


No answer.


As she stood and stretched, she squinted at the clock. Five thirty? She’d slept for three hours? Dammit. Why hadn’t Carter woken her up?


Macie remade the bed and noticed nothing else was out of place. No dirty clothes scattered across the carpet. No dog-eared skin magazines stacked on the nightstand. The ceiling fan was even dust-free.


Talk about being a neat freak.


She made a pit stop in the bathroom and wandered into the living area. Not the bachelor pad she expected with leather couches, a big screen TV and neon beer signs.


He’d shoved an ugly green and orange plaid sofa beneath the windows. A brown corduroy recliner sporting several silver patches of duct tape was kitty-corner to the door.


The pressed wood coffee table didn’t host a pile of remote controls. Or an empty beer can. Or a discarded newspaper. No personal objects covered the scarred surface.


The temporary feel to the place made her sad. Mostly because it reminded her of every place she’d ever lived.


As she walked to the kitchen she realized the trailer wasn’t completely devoid of decoration; an entire wall was devoted to pictures. Family pictures.


In the largest one, eight smiling faces stared back at her. The infamous McKay family. Five men, one girl and a couple who didn’t look old enough to have so many kids. By looking at younger Carter, she realized the picture was several years old. She  93


scrutinized each person. All of the men were tall, with broad chests and shoulders. Three of the sons resembled their father: dark brown hair, rugged features and indigo eyes.


Carter and another brother looked more like their mother: curly, lighter hair made up of every shade from red to blond, eyes as blue as the Wyoming sky, and their bone structure ran more to chiseled than rugged. The only girl inherited the best from each of her parents: her father’s dark hair and eyes and her mother’s angular face and blindingly beautiful smile.


Macie inched closer to scrutinize the dozens of snapshots. A picture of a young Carter and his dad dressed in camouflage, sitting next to a dead buck. A photo of one brother on the back of an enormous bucking bull. Another pic of a man in Army fatigues, squinting into the desert sun. A studio picture of his sister in a formal pink ball gown. A McKay man holding a baby and grinning proudly at the camera. A shot of a two-year-old boy standing beside a Christmas tree wearing brand new cowboy boots and a diaper. A dark-haired brother waving from the seat of a John Deere tractor with jagged mountain peaks towering in the background. Carter wearing a cap and gown sandwiched between his parents. A photo of all five McKay sons mounted on horses.


There were more. The McKays fishing. The McKays hunting. The McKays working in the garden, the fields, the barn. The McKays kicking up their bootheels at a pig roast.



The McKays gathered around a table piled high with food—laughing, smiling, happy.


Normal pictures of a normal family with fond memories.


Something like jealousy twisted in Macie’s gut. She didn’t have any pictures like that. She had a few happy memories from her childhood, but no documentation.


What would it be like to have that connection? To people? To a single place? To have a history?


Someone like Carter would never understand that even as she craved that kind of bond, the idea of permanence scared her to death.


As she studied the second row of pictures, her face burned like she’d peeked into a forbidden window to the subject’s soul. She knew without a doubt Carter had snapped these photos.


The first one was a close-up of his parents. His mother’s hand rested on his father’s weathered cheek. An intense love was apparent on their faces and they seemed unaware of anything but each other.


The second photo was of a dark-haired brother, wearing the duds of a rodeo cowboy.


He hung on a metal fence watching the action in the arena, a far-away look in his eyes.


The next one was of the man with the baby, except he was alone, exhaustion lining his face as he threw a hay bale from the bed of a beat-up truck, oblivious to the beautiful pearly orange glow of the sunset behind him. The black and white picture of his sister showed her grinning in pigtail braids, not yet woman, not quite girl, innocence and deviltry mixed with an innate sensuality. The last snapshot was of the brother who was probably the source of the bad McKay reputation, given he had a gorgeous blonde stripper perched on each knee, a big cigar clamped between his teeth and a bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand.


No other pictures of the soldier. No intimate glimpses into Carter either. She wondered if any members of his family had such introspective pictures of him? Or did he hide behind his art? Use the camera and his sketch pad as a shield? Was there a deeper reason for the distance she glimpsed in him when others were around?


So what would the pictures he’d taken of her reveal? Would her face, her heart, her soul, be an open book?