Tempting the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 1)

“It’s time to take your own advice.”

Wes cupped Nat on the neck, shook him a bit as he stood, and started back down the hill. “I’m fixin’ to crash, man. I’ll be up to help with evening chores.”

He hadn’t made it ten yards before Nat stopped him. “Wes?”

“Yeah?”

“Welcome home.”

Wes gave him a half-assed salute and cleared the shade of the elm. For Nat, quite possibly, the best view of all.

* * *

/> With Wes home, Nat’s workload was cut in half. His brother had showered and crawled back into bed to sleep off his jetlag. The house was quiet. Nat found himself in his stable office hours earlier than his usual midnight, not a thing left on his to do list but anguish over the sale.

He pulled the five journal sheets he had written on the cabin roof from the desk drawer. His handwriting was crazed. The words belonged to him, but he didn’t remember writing them. All he remembered was the transformative nature of January’s head in his lap, her lids closed, the even cadence of her breath the only inspiration he needed.

Nat studied the room. Claim the space and you claim the dream. January’s words sounded like more advanced bullshit, but no more so than the advice he dished out with every column. What kind of hypocrite tells people to live with intent and doesn’t do the same? He reached for the spur, turned the rowel, touched the things that belonged to Clem. Then he packed it all away. Everything but the spur and the honey-soaked Virginia leaves in a corner tin.

Slate clean, he opened his laptop and finished his novel.

* * *

January had poked her finger with a needle no less than four times. The gauzy material in her hands was perfect for curtains, not so ideal for someone with two left thumbs and no thimbles. She found the domesticity of sewing oddly therapeutic, however. Or maybe it was simply her plan for Nat’s gift coming together in the way she hoped.

Twenty-four hours ago, they drove back to the main house in silence, Mack behind the wheel, Willie in the passenger seat, trying to make small talk and failing. When the terrain swelled and caused Nat’s knee to bump hers, he shifted away. Hours earlier, their bodies had been playgrounds; after their dust-up, incidental touch made him recoil.

She had known it would happen. To the deepest cell in her body, she knew he would hurt. Nat lived life like he was a china cabinet: hardwood and sturdy on the outside; inside, filled with the fragile things in life—porcelain hearts and feelings—taken out on special occasions and polished but rarely ever enjoyed. What January hadn’t counted on was feeling like a broken dish herself.

“J-Rose? You in there?” her mother called from outside the trailer.

January untangled herself from the material, grabbed her iced tea, and went to the door. Her mother exited one of the ranch’s old trucks. A bright overnight delivery envelope in her grip stood out in stark contrast to her dusty gray mechanic hands.

“Driver delivered this to the house. Thought it might be important. Last time one of those trucks drove all the way out here, the boys’ mother had signed away ownership of the ranch.”

“Who’s it from?”

A silly question. The agency sent trackable paperwork filled with legalese contracts that released them from all liability should you, say, fall in a river in Kenya and get eaten by crocodiles. The delivery was an assignment. Quite possibly the assignment. The timing was right, the season a prime window to get her into elevated terrain before winter.

Mona met her on the trailer steps, offered her the delivery.

An odd flutter—not entirely unpleasant but decidedly foreign—meandered through January’s belly. Her stomach hardened, like an overturned mason jar that had trapped a moth, oblivious to losses greater than freedom. She set her tea on the step.

“Well? Aren’t you going to open it?” Her mother, used to prodding livestock, had no issue prodding her daughter past this pivotal moment.

January’s gaze drifted to the return address. Sure enough, the agency.

“It’s my next assignment.”

“Oh. Well, let’s hear it.”

To say notes of disappointment tripped through her mother’s twang was an understatement. January recognized it because she felt it, too: late nights when Mona worked on some machine part at the table while January told her everything she could remember about the places she’d been; their mutual obsession for ice cream that had them meeting at the fridge at three in the morning; and last night, when January’s tears over Nat flowed faster than her mother’s special-reserve peach bourbon.

Mona crawled up on the trailer steps. January sank beside her and opened the envelope.

Double-indented on the cover page, in bold type, the words: Tsum Valley, Gorkha, Nepal.

Beside her, Mona allowed several heartbeats to pass before she celebrated with a subdued hoot and a maudlin holler. “Can’t say as I know where the hell that is, but I know it’s what you wanted.”