Tempting the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 1)

, but there’s no reason you can’t go with her. Travel every so often. Write about those places in a book someday.”

“I don’t know.” Translation: Nat was scared as all get out.

“I do. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my deployments, it’s that for all that we train and drill and plan, life hands you moments when all the preparation in the world won’t make a damn bit of difference. Those are the moments that define you.” Wes glanced at Nat. “What do you want this moment to say about you, brother?

“That the Meier legacy is about more than land.” It was brave men, doing what they had to do, claiming their dreams, unwilling to accept defeat. It was about love. Love given and love received, in all forms. And it was about admitting when you were wrong. Wrong to sell an old truck. Wrong to re-up for another tour. Wrong to let the love of your life slip through your fingers.

“I have to hurry,” said Nat.

Wes grinned, ear to ear. “Then you’d better let me drive.”

10

The cabin was black, no sign anyone had been there but the faint scent of January Rose.

Time stopped. Nat was here, at Clem’s cabin, but she wasn’t. Somehow, impossibly, Wes was here and January wasn’t.

Wes reached for the lantern by the door. “Glass is warm.”

They glanced around. Nat’s truck headlights punched through the darkness, two solitary beams that exposed little of their surroundings.

“Maybe she’s gone back to Mona’s,” said Nat.

“Mona was up at the house after the movie. Said January took her pack with her.”

Light from the headlamps refracted against him and shattered into a thousand pieces. Wes’s voice was muffled, distant. Nat processed the noises closest to him—his flat and lifeless inhales, a heart that beat double time and crowded his head with rushing, for all the good it did.

Wes found matches wedged between the metal tines and the housing of the lantern’s base. He struck one, set the oiled wick ablaze, and handed the light to Nat.

“I’ll wait out here,” said Wes.

Nat’s boots felt as leaden as his heart. He held the lantern at shoulder-level and entered the cabin. The warm yellow glow flickered against surfaces familiar and new: the quilt they had shared, slightly less tattered, brighter and folded neatly over a trunk he recognized from his attic; an iron bed he had never seen before, saddle no longer necessary; January’s open journal, sitting atop a desk clearly meant for writing.

Not only was she asking to stay, but she believed in his dream enough to claim a space.

Their space.

His feet carried him to the journal before he had the good sense to stop himself. He set the lantern on the desk. The next page after those he had torn out contained a handwritten note. One line.

Fill this with a life lived with me.

January had crossed out the last two words.

Nat crumpled to the floor.

Maybe the rainwater swelling in the gulch had washed him away. Maybe he couldn’t find the surface, on the night her naked body swam circles around him. Maybe he didn’t have it in him to surface. Nat felt suspended under water. Oxygen deprived. Unable to speak or move beyond numb, fruitless strokes.

An arm around his shoulders pulled him into an embrace. “It’s okay, man.”

Nat wanted…oh, God, he wanted the world to back away, the moon to flee, the sun to break so he never had to see another sunrise without her. He wanted the stars to blow free of the heavens, and he wanted his knees to forever press against the floor as they were now as penance for losing her twice in one lifetime.

“What was it you said about the Meier legacy?” Wes said.

“She’s going halfway around the world, Wes.”

“She ain’t there yet.” Wes hooked a strong grip under his brother’s arm and hauled him to his feet. “Come on, brother. We got a plane to catch.”

Twenty years from now, Nat mused, whiskey-soaked stories around the ranch’s backyard fire pit will mention how two brothers—one more handsome than the other, depending on the storyteller—tore through that same house like a tornado, tossing clothes and money into a duffel bag while looking for a passport one brother had stamped on a bull-breeding transaction in Costa Rica years earlier.