Tempting the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 1)

“That’s not true. That man knows you better than the Almighty himself. Else why would he have asked you for help when that heifer went missing?”

“He needed someone to sing to her?”

Mona’s burst of jovial laughter nearly toppled the pin box from her hand. “Lord, no. Didn’t want her running out into traffic from that caterwauling.”

January bristled. “Ouch.”

“You know I tease. Mostly.” Mona settled close, face to face, the deadpan way she used to when January got in trouble as a teenager. “Nat asked you for help because you have those strong instincts and you never focus on what could go wrong. He was worried sick, and he needed your optimism, that way you always seem to work yourself out of a pickle, that healthy balance you carry between fear and hope.”

“It could never work. We’re so different.”

“Way I see it, you both want the same things. You just disagree on where those things should happen. Purely geographical. Who needs maps and pins and borders when you’re already each other’s whole world?”

January blinked against the moisture filling her vision. A tear cantered down her cheek.

Mona swiped it free.

“Now you get yourself gussied up for tonight, and I’ll head over to the northwest field to make sure everything’s ready.” Her mother unwrapped the towel from her head and tracked to her makeup table at the rear of the trailer. Mona and Mary Kay went together like chips and queso.

January picked up the plain envelope and turned it in her grasp. How easy it would be to grab her pack on the way out, leave her mother a voicemail message once she got to Houston. Her palms itched to flee hard choices. She glanced at the map, closed her eyes, and tried to sort instinct from habit.

* * *

Nat’s pasture was a true parking lot. Like Houston’s 610/59 interchange at rush hour. This eclectic crowd, however, broke out their classic convertibles, tractors, golf carts, red wagons, horses, and flatbed trailers loaded with hay bales and blankets to enjoy a cool night under the stars with their neighbors.

The movie this year was one of Clem’s favorites: The Gunfighter. Aside from Gregory Peck’s hall-of-fame-worthy moustache—“Not every man can grow a beaut like that,” Clem had been known to comment—the film about a guy who tries to leave bad choices in his past to be with his true sweetheart stirred something deeper in Nat than nostalgia. If the notorious gunfighter Jimmy Ringo could chase repentance, so too could Nat.

Nat and the guys had arrived home from the auction to find Willie, who long ago set a tradition of shining the crew’s dress boots while they hauled and sold the herd each year, at the kitchen table going to town on Wes’s boots—so slightly used they didn’t need a shine. No one ever said a word to Willie, though. Nat opened a beer for Willie and one for himself. A quiet clink of the longnecks, just the two of them, was the way Nat liked it. No pomp and circumstance. Simply another year on this land to do what Nat loved. After Willie said how proud Clem would have been, he told Nat about an envelope January had dropped off earlier. ‘Mysterious’ Willie described it.

Mysterious didn’t begin to cover it.

Magnanimous, baffling, extravagant…A hundred other adjectives couldn’t cover the contents of that envelope. He had to find January. Tell her he couldn’t accept her leaving money. Then, maybe, he’d find the courage to make it through a repeat of her goodbye.

Nat scanned the crowd. Opening credits rolled after dark, making the search harder than locating a sober individual at Close Call’s annual Pluot Jamboree—the most raucous celebration of hybrid plums and apricots, and the wine made thereof, this side of the Mason-Dixon line.

Behind him, a smarmy, familiar voice called his name.

Austin ka-ching Pickford.

Nat closed his eyes, considered for a half second that getting hit in the junk with a wrecking ball might be more enticing than the conversation to come, then turned and extended his hand and courtesy, as Clem had taught him. Austin already had Nat’s repayment, in full—Nat made sure the bank was his first stop back in town. As if his modest fortune hadn’t been enough, now the guy wanted to siphon his precious time before January went wheels-up.

Austin pumped his hand a little too long, a little too hard. A dick measuring contest, no doubt.

“Great doing business with you this year,” he said. “I must admit, I had my doubts, but Community Trust is pleased to underwrite the Meier family for years to come.”

Or at least until Austin’s trust-fund trips to Aruba were threatened.

Mona’s big hair moved through the crowd like the tawny wave on a prairie ocean. Nat had never been so happy to see her.

“Would you excuse me, Austin?”

He might have answered.

“Mona,” Nat called.

She turned toward his voice. Her face lit like a sparkler.

“Am I glad to see you.” Hand at the glittery outline of Texas riding high on her bosom, she produced a folded piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to Nat. “From January.”