Tempting the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 1)

His first thought: the goodbye letter he told her would have made it better the first time. A lie.

His second thought: a goodbye letter meant progress.

“Where is she?”

“She promised she’d be here, but you know her.” Mona laid a hand atop his forearm and gave it a sweet pat. “Said she had her most important place ahead of her.”

“Nepal.”

“For as long as she’s travelled, Nat, she’s dreamed of that place. Sounds god-awful to me, what with the brown water and all the rules about feet. I tried. Said my piece. I’m sorry.”

January’s void smarted like a bruised rib from a flying hoof, dead-center in Nat’s chest. In a dry, dusty, three-acre sea filled with nearly a thousand people, he was adrift. He jostled his way around packs of teenaged girls, old-timers lighting up their cheroots, and crowded pockets of women’s auxiliary members exchanging salacious town gossip, all to the tune of the gunfighter Jimmy Ringo saying, “Well, I didn’t get it. It just kinda came over me. The way gettin’ older comes over ya. All of a sudden, you look at things different than the way ya did five years ago. All of a sudden, I knew this was the only thing in the world I wanted.”

In the solitude of his stable, Nat opened the paper that wasn’t really a paper at all. It was a piece ripped from January’s map—the one in Mona’s trailer. Backlit by the yellow bulb strings lining the stalls, the places January had been illuminated the page like constellations. He turned the western hemisphere over to find no words, no goodbye, just a hand-drawn map labeled “Meier Land.”

A bad map, at that. No compass directions. No key. But he recognized a broken fence near a highway, a dotted line to a stick-drawn house structure and an eyelash-heavy animal that looked more like a dachshund than a donkey. Across the bottom, the words: “Claim the space, claim me.”

Adrenaline whipped him. Full-on assault of the senses: fresh manure smelled more pungent, hay dust coated the exposed surfaces inside his mouth, a low nicker from Poe pulsated against his eardrums. One minute, Nat believed he held a goodbye letter. The next minute, January Rose dangled herself like a carrot before a horse.

He bent forward, hands on his knees, and leaned against a stall door. Wind punched from his lungs in uneven spurts. Guy gets what he wants after ten years of pining, takes him a bit to reconcile it in his mind.

Part of him—the yearling part January had awakened inside him, the one that swam by moonlight and wrote the last scene of his book sitting on a roof and made love with absolutely no forethought but the instinct riding shotgun in his gut—wanted to mount Poe and thunder across his land to claim a destiny with the woman he loved. The other part—the dependable, overly cautious, overly sensitive part that had ruled him since Clem took him fishing at age six and he watched his first catch fling itself on the dry canoe bottom and plead, with gaping mouth and straining gills, for Nat to toss him back into his element—that most substantial part of Nat that put others before self, knew January would forever be like that brown trout.

Now that he had a chance to have her, the thought of his tiny slice of t

he world changing her terrified him.

For as long as she’s travelled, she’s dreamed of that place.

Today, Nat’s dreams delivered on him.

Tomorrow, January’s dreams should do the same for her.

He shows, I stay.

January hadn’t spoken the plan aloud, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t run it through every cell in her body for approval. The fact that she had a plan was evidence that Nat had rubbed off on her.

Unable to remain calm, she paced the cabin’s interior. She felt sure the sprucing-up stayed true to how Clem envisioned it for his bride all those years ago: gossamer window curtains, knotted at the base, hung from a spare branding iron rod Willie found in storage—the initials C and M scrolled in a fancy, purposeful style; where a saddle once sat, an old attic bed piled high with white eyelet linens; pine quarters stacked at the stove; mason jars crowding the shelves with non-perishables; holes in the log walls patched to seal off the space from the world; a special crate repurposed into a bedside table; and a desk, stockpiled with everything a budding novelist could ever need and a few things—like a pitcher of wildflowers and a bottle of whiskey—that he didn’t.

This was Nat’s space. Nat’s dream. She had claimed for him what he couldn’t claim in himself. And if things on the ranch ever took a turn, Nat could rent it out as a rustic guest cottage. Plenty of city folks would plunk down cash for the chance to escape the grind and frontier it up for a night. Make some memories and some love. Carry on a Meier tradition that had nothing to do with livestock.

January sat in the repaired rocker. Fresh runners grazed the polished hardwood. She checked the time on her phone. Mona would have given Nat the map more than an hour ago. The movie would be over soon. Willie said Nat never stayed for the whole thing—that the auction usually took the best out of him by nightfall, which left her with the possibility that he wasn’t coming.

And she became him.

All those years back, stretched out in the bed of Clem’s classic truck, headlamps piercing an otherwise dark night, country music trickling out the open windows. All those years back, she had watched from the bushes—first, as he sat high with confidence, then as he paced circles in the field, and then the moment he crawled into the cab, forehead to the wheel, shoulders shaking uncontrollably.

It wasn’t retribution. Nat didn’t have a payback bone in his body.

At eighteen, she had lacked courage; at twenty-eight, more than ten years into the most exhilarating love she had ever known, Nat had enough courage for them both.

January rocked until she could breathe again, until the body-wracking kind of anguish subsided, until her eyes squeezed out the last drizzles of hope. Half an hour on, she slid her pack over her shoulder.

He shows, I stay.

So much for plans. Never been much for them, anyway.

January made a mark in the open journal on his desk then took one final look around. She liked it here. There would be nothing like it in Nepal. There would be nothing like it anywhere. That was what happened when the home inside your head finally picked up and settled somewhere.