Tempting the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 1)

“It’s a forgotten room in a stable, J.”

“Willie says you’re in here most nights until early morning.”

“What’s your point?”

“Claim the space and you claim the dream.”

Nat’s body went rigid with pushback, all the way to his toes. “You don’t get it. You push a pin into a map and drop a postcard home every now and then, and in between you live in whatever fantasy world you want.”

“That isn’t how it is, Nat. Not even close.”

“It must be brutal working on a catamaran in the Greek Isles, J. I may be country, but I’m not naïve.”

“You want the truth? I wait to buy postcards until I get to a place where my mom won’t worry. She doesn’t need to know that I spent two days clearing an overgrown plantain field in Haiti with nothing but a machete. She doesn’t need to know that sometimes I go months without being able to communicate with anything more explicit than grunts and hand gestures. And she certainly doesn’t need to know that I’ve lived in places where I have to string noisemakers across entrances and sleep with a knife under my pillow because women who had the job ahead of me were raped. I send home a fantasy, but I rarely live it.”

“So why do it?”

“Because it’s me. It’s my story. It’s intoxicating and awful and magical, all at once. I go, not to escape life, but to keep life from escaping me. And the longer I travel, the more I realize that it isn’t another National Geographic-worthy landscape I crave, it’s the people. They’re wild and raw and wonderful and they share the same human experiences—longing, joy, grief, love.”

Her last, impassioned word lingered on the air, already heavy with the fragrance of saddle oil and leather.

Nat whispered, “You don’t have to set foot outside of Close Call to see that.” He had meant joy, like the time Clive Davidson came back from Afghanistan to meet his new baby and the whole town turned out. Grief, like when so many came for Clem’s funeral, the cowboy church overflowing. And longing, the way the town’s former mayor, at age ninety-two, walked the sidewalks in front of the abandoned buildings on Main Street every day because he remembered when the stores bustled with patrons. Nat had meant all of those things—longing, joy, grief, but mostly he had meant the last of them. Love.

“No, but it doesn’t hurt every once in a while. Especially if your dream is to capture life on the page.” She took one more turn at the spur and walked out. A “Goodnight, Nat” trailed back to him from a distance.

Her retreating steps paused. Loud crunches filled the stable. Horse-loud.

Poe finishing her apple.

Nat sank into the office chair. The leather held warmth from January’s skin. His nerve endings were raw, exposed. He pivoted on the chair’s swivel, ever so slightly, staring at objects on the walls that weren’t his and wondering if she had recognized herself in Ellie.

Maybe that’s what his final scene was missing. Life. The every once in a while part.

Before he could sink his boots into that particular mental pasture, he opened the desk drawer to lock the manuscript inside. A Close Call Community Trust logo snagged his gaze. He slipped the statement free of its envelope. The balance due number at the bottom of the page churned his stomach.

This was real life. Four zeros was the anvil-to-the-nuts kind of real. His life. His story.

He shoved everything inside the desk, locked the drawer, and headed to the transport trailer to bed it with fresh hay before he allowed himself a turn at his pillow.

* * *

Nat should have known by the day. A greenish-gray pressed at them from all sides, one of those sticky, crackling May afternoons that came on humid and squashed air from the lungs for all the struggle it took to find oxygen. Only the two of them at the apartment she shared with her mother—the way January wanted her final day. Beneath bedsheets with purple hearts, they made each other shudder, but neither said a word. Sadness was a distant, rumbling storm neither wished to acknowledge.

Afterwards, while she dozed, he lay on his back. The only part of her room not packed in boxes was the world map on the wall opposite her bed. He wanted to take scissors to it, cut away everything beyond Marin County, but she had spent the better part of the last two years pushing pins into locations—red for everywhere her father said he had gone, green for the places her mother had seen in some magazine down at the beauty salon, yellow for those January couldn’t spell. January had been a straight-A student. Best speller Nat knew. She considered those locations a challenge. Nat had never heard of such a stupid reason to shove a pin through a map.

And then there were the blue pins. At first, he didn’t know what they meant. January refused to say, but the more the future came at them, the more the blue pins multiplied. Then one day, when he had hauled a window air conditioner up to January’s room and installed it, he asked Mona. She told him a blue pin appeared every time January steamed home after a fight with him.

Nat squirmed beneath the sheet. Humidity. Reality. Something. His stare zeroed in on her first destination staked with a blue pin: Murfreesboro, Arkansas.

His love hadn’t been enough to keep her from her plans to head to Murfreesboro, Arkansas.

“Why Murfreesboro?”

January stirred beside him. “Has free in the name. Besides, I have a friend there. We have plans to find diamonds in the volcanic field there before I go see my dad in New York. Someone found a two-carat diamond last week. I’ll need more money to travel.”

“I thought you had it all figured out.”

“I do, but a girl can’t have too much money.”