Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

1

In isolation, Livie Blake’s eyeful was abstract: tawny hide against rich blue, curves defining the negative spaces in subtle but organic ways, a sculpture so foreign that it captivated her to distraction and made her wonder at the composition of it all.

Taken as a whole, the sun-bronzed art was a one-of-a-kind original squeezed into string-tied chaps that cinched a second-skin denim-clad package—front and back—into a surprising and tingle-inducing relief map of the male form. A cowboy, not of the shiny pleather, homoerotic variety that paraded outside her Long Island apartment every Pride Day, but of the dusty, nothing-fancy, mounted-on-a-genuine-horse-all-day-swagger variety. Until that moment, Livie believed chaps were the fringed shell of a mythic beast, an urban legend told to gullible city dwellers to conjure up the romanticism of the Old West…

“Only thing we stare at longer than that around here is Clyde Hammond’s extra toe when he’s had too much to drink and goes barefoot.”

The cowboy’s voice jaywalked the town’s two-lane Main Street, as subtle as a caller at a starving-artist auction.

Livie’s face incinerated. Busted. She glanced up and down Main to see if her embarrassment had an audience. The street was empty. At five in the evening on a weekday, a time Livie had been conditioned to traffic jams and subway crowds, the only movement in Close Call, Texas, was the blinking red traffic signal one block away.

And one cowboy’s disarming grin.

She unrolled the artist’s contract in her hand and stared at it. Two thousand words of fine-print legalese stared back. Not one word registered in her frontal lobe. The town’s mayor had given her until day’s end to make a decision on the commissioned piece. With five minutes left to study the chosen spot—the late-day natural light, the imagined spatial interaction between the bronze statue and those who came to view it, environmental concerns that might affect the patina in one way or another—Livie stood on an abandoned street corner, ogling a cowboy’s package.

Professional, Livie. Or as the locals would say, “Real professional-like.”

She had been in Close Call long enough for to fill up with gas, to eat, to check into her room at the Starlite Motor Lodge—long enough to saturate her brain with that ever-present Texas drawl. The town was Chuck Norris and Twin Peaks, with a sprinkle of Real Housewives of Podunk tossed in for charm.

Could she exist in this town the way her half brother had all those years back? Livie looked down the barrel of six months, maybe more, to the bronze’s completion, longer than some of Daniel’s deployments to Afghanistan, longer than most gallery shows in Soho, longer than the marriages of several friends.

“You lost?”

Same deep voice. Same loose, unhurried drawl. The cowboy crossed the road toward her. He didn’t glance up one side of the street and down the other for cars. No doubt the same complacency that had flattened a few armadillos Livie had seen on the drive up from Houston. The cowboy’s ambush wasn’t entirely unwelcome. He brought to mind the Dying Gaul, a Hellenistic sculpture that portrayed a brooding pathos, a superior physique, and prime-of-life sexuality. And heroic nudity.

Livie scuttled outside herself, her manners, and simply stared, speechless, her artist brain taking too many liberties with that last bit.

“You all right, ma’am?”

Ma’am made her feel as old as Elizabeth Taylor in the last minutes of Giant.

“Fine.” Curt. To the point. No danger of betraying her affectedness. She lifted her chin and mentally sketched a figure on a plinth.

The cowboy sidled closer, nearly a replica cast of her body position, and stared at the same strip of sky next to an impressive live oak.

“Cat in the tree?”

“No.”

“Biblical locusts?”

Her mouth pitched into a severe frown. Eww. “That’s a thing here?”

“Only every other year.” He gave her a side-glance to match his side-grin. “So, what are we staring at?”

“The future.” Cryptic. Deep. Conversation-ending, hopefully.

“That the same future you were staring at a few minutes ago?”

Once again, he snatched her words. How absurd for him to insinuate that he was her future.

She blinked away the flurry of interference in her thoughts. It was like standing inside a jar, swarmed by fireflies—not wholl

y unwelcome but dizzying, nevertheless. “I’ve just never seen anyone wearing chaps before.”

“Chinks.”

“Excuse me?”

“Chaps go all the way down. Course, you’d probably know that if you were from around here. Short dress, combat boots, ankle-length duster, educated but dismissive tone. I’m guessing you’re a Yankee.”

She might have taken offense had her history professor father not traced their lineage back to Thaddeus Blake, pride of the New Hampshire militia during the American Revolution.

“I’m from Amsterdam…”

His brows lifted, concealed by his hat brim.

“…by way of New York.”

He nodded as if to say I knew it.

“And from your gregarious inability to mind your own business, I’m guessing you’re a native.”

“Born and raised.”

“Proud of that, aren’t you?”

“Hell, yeah. Besides, we’re not without sophistication around here. We’ve got a Baptist preacher who once met the King.”

“Spain? Belgium?”

“Memphis. And Close Call has a cemetery where the most notorious Texas outlaw in history is buried. Met his tragic end on the wrong side of a Ranger’s gun at a bar that’s now the five and dime. Also, we’re in the Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest pluot.”