Tempting the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 1)

Wanted.

Want? Well, that was an entirely different matter.

Her gaze tracked lower on the page. The reporting date was in red. “Four days.”

“Don’t give you much time, do they?” said Mona.

“Letter is dated last week.”

A million details flooded her brain. She had to call the agency travel rep to get a flight booked and email her updated immunization record and file her work plan and the name of her contact with the nearest embassy and pack—God, it would be winter, and her boots weren’t warm enough—when all she really wanted to do was crawl back into the trailer and finish the curtains for Nat’s surprise.

What the hell was wrong with her? She should want to run through her mother’s guinea fowls, scattering them with all her dancing and carrying on. At the very least, she should want to move. Work travelers sat on waiting lists for years to draw dream places like Nepal. She wanted peace and Zen-like serenity and prayer flags and rickshaws and all the things that promised complete detachment and a life-altering adventure. But she also wanted Nat, and the two were mutually exclusive. As much as he said he would give it all up, that would be like asking the sun not to rise. His light was here.

January remembered what Nat had told her: Agnes is more your mother than me. She had never confided in her mother before, but if Mona gave advice like the kind January read in the column, January had waited twenty-eight years too long to ask.

“What made dad want to leave? I mean, why weren’t we enough?”

Mona inhaled deeply and looked out over the pasture. “When we first met, he was like a cool drink of water on a hot day, better than any high found in hand-rolled paper or at the bottom of a bottle. He had this restless curiosity that was always there, at the edges of everything we did together…” She gave a gentle shoulder bump to January. “Even parenting. Being out of his element was his element. It was a part of him I accepted in exchange for the most exhilarating love I had ever known.”

“I’m afraid that’s who I am for Nat.”

Mona’s expression squeezed into a maternal, poor-dear smile. January wasn’t sure if it was a poor-dear-you’re-just-like-him smile or a poor-dear-you’re-deluded smile.

“Your father ran from a childhood of pain. His father—your grandfather—abused every substance he could get his hands on and ran into trouble with the law, which is why you probably don’t have many memories of him. To deal with that, your grandmother began another life, had more children, pretended her first life—and son—didn’t exist.”

January tucked her hair behind her ear and watched sweat trickle down her glass. Her father’s past had always been weak tea to her—diluted, mostly sweet, because who wants to tell a little girl her grandparents were messed up?

“J-Rose, your father told lies to himself, created stories about how he wanted to remember his past, not how it had been. And he believed them. After a while, I couldn’t believe in him anymore. His wanderlust came from pain. But yours? Well, I’d like to think you got the best of him.”

January’s awareness split, like the part of her who had always believed her father, who still wanted to believe, scooted beside her, and the truth left her behind inside a cavernous shell.

Her mother took her hand and squeezed.

“This world needs fearless people,” said Mona. “People who take a hard look at their own biases and limitations and have the courage to move past them. Just be careful that you don’t get to the end of your life, alone, and have to create stories about how it had been.”

January’s throat tightened. She squeezed Mona’s hand back. A million things filled her brain, but all January wanted was to pass time with the woman beside her. A woman she never really took the time to know, distracted as she was by the noise and the fanfare of her father.

“I should clean up for my date tonight with Harlan. Man’s been asking me out for five years. Then you come in, wanting some fix-it man favors, and I’m stuck in my heels and Sunday best going for ribeye over in Hickory, trying not to notice his teeth slipping in and out when he chews.”

January giggled. “Nat’s worth it. Have you seen it, yet? It’s almost finished.”

“I’ll get over there after the sale.”

After January was on a plane to Bangkok, her second of three flights. The thought turned the tea in her stomach sour.

“I’m sure it’s special. Everything you touch seems to head that direction.” Mona’s direction sounded more like die-rection.

“Thanks, Mom.” January clenched her into a side-embrace.

“You’re welcome.” Mona’s cheekbones lifted on a grin. After one of those great Southern hugs that zinged all the way to the toes, her mother stood and made her way into the trailer. Her voice drifted back to January as she pulled a swig of drink past her lips.

“But if you tell me you need plumbing for something, you’re out of luck. Oswald Graf squeezes a quarter so tight the eagle screams, and his ears look like the open doors to a Buick.”

Tea sprayed all over Mona’s geraniums.

* * *

Nat whipped into a choice parking spot in front of What the Hay feed store, the only name Close Call’s city council would approve after the Marin Missionary Baptist Church came to blows with the store owner—once an opening comedy act for Lyle Lovett—who had originally named it Roll in the Hay. Locals took to the old name. Even came up in a Google search that way. After a while, the preacher moved his righteous crusade on to the Lord of the Wings chicken place over on Birch Street.