Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

“Is that a flash mob of farmers? Because I can totally see that.”

“It’s a plum-apricot hybrid.”

“Sounds…”

“Sweet?”

“Unnecessary.” Just like this conversation. “I don’t mean to be rude…”

“But you’re going to be anyway.”

They exchanged abrupt smiles.

“I have less than two minutes to decide my next creative year,” Livie said. “Pluots don’t really factor into that decision.”

“Shame. They probably should. Likely the best thing to ever cross your lips. Unless you’ve been exceptionally kissed.” He pinched the brim of his hat so briefly it must have been an afterthought. “I’ll leave you be.”

The cowboy walked away, headed in the direction of the old courthouse, the easternmost component of the park-like town square. The building surprised with Romanesque Revival architecture, a worthy counterpoint to a formidable sculpture, not unlike the juxtaposition of the rigid limestone steps to the cowboy’s easy gait. After their stimulating but slightly dizzying banter, the void felt like fireflies escaped from an opened jar—not wholly unwelcome but empty, nevertheless.

Her gaze trickled back to the live oak. At the base was a historical marker, decayed with time, mostly unreadable but for intermittent words that hinted at a much longer tale: Augusta and Mildred and white patron and colored.

Livie called after him. “What happened here?”

From across the road, the cowboy turned back her direction.

She pointed to the worn sign.

“It’s a family marker from the days of segregation. Two beautiful girls’ lives cut short simply because they wanted a drink of water on a hot afternoon. Darkest day in Close Call’s history. Be nice to see this spot replaced with something positive. Something that resembles the future.”

Livie’s heart swelled not only from him wielding her words but also because she had always found inspiration in that intersection of history and humanity. That he had known why she was there, who she was all along, made her realize she had underestimated him.

“I don’t pretend to know what factors into your decision,” he said. “I know we’re not Amsterdam or New York. We’re nothing like what you’re probably used to—some ten-dollar word you used and unable to mind our own business because we don’t ever want to see another dark day in our town like the one in 1966. But I don’t really see caring about each other as a bad thing. In fact, the world could use a little more of that.”

He gave her a weak smile, as if he hadn’t meant to fly his flag of vulnerability, then took the courthouse steps two at a time and disappeared inside. Across Main, a few shop owners turned their signs, emerged from their storefronts, and locked up. Livie glanced at the courthouse’s impressive central pediment surrounded by four conical copper towers. The clock hands stood at a split, twelve and five.

Livie took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Away from distraction, in that moment of centeredness, she sought the sensation that always accompanied her artist decisions—that peaceful inevitability, as if she had already completed a work of art and looked back on it with favor and gratitude. What he said—the rawness, the honesty, the creative oddities already present in the environment, the subtextual hunger for something to unite observer and artist on a transcendental level—made her want to stay, to take the commission, to believe that this statue had the possibility of becoming the defining piece of her legacy, despite feeling like a New York minute stuck inside a country decade.

But when she opened her eyes, she didn’t think of her brother, who never had the chance to settle in this town he loved because an IED robbed him of his future, or the sizeable sum she would receive from a town that clearly couldn’t afford to pay respects to Augusta and Mildred’s memory with proper signage. She didn’t consider her off manners to the handsome stranger, which would have made her socialite mother go apoplectic, or pouring her heart into a piece that only a handful of people would ever see or how the blissful quiet might affect her creativity. When Livie opened her eyes, she wondered only what it meant to be exceptionally kissed.

She pulled out a pen and signed.

2

“Great. I see you two have met.”

Gretchen de Havilland rocketed to her sensible pumps from her winged armchair and skirted her desk to shake hands with both of her five o’clock visitors.

Sometime between Wes’s door knock and hearing the sassy back end of a phone conversation through the glass etched with the word Mayor, followed by a sweeter-toned, “Come in,” Amsterdam had showed up beside him.

He tried to suppress a gloating smile. Mostly, he failed.

Wes swapped his hat to his left hand and indicated for Amsterdam to go first. She hesitated, her eyes askance, as if she were moments from being on the wrong end of a prank. He cranked up his smile, which only seemed to make her more distrustful. Damn those people in New York for conditioning anyone to bristle against kindness.

Close Call’s newly-elected official looked nothing like a small-town mayor. Miss Texas, maybe, with her bulldozer cheer, her stellar smile, and her long, fiery red hair. This woman’s talent clearly surpassed twirling a baton and lauding world peace. One minute with Gretchen de Havilland in her official element—a fourth-floor office wallpapered in lawyerly accolades and philanthropic photographs—and Wes knew exactly how she had scaled from valedictorian in Chase’s graduating class to a position of esteem.

He just didn’t understand why that climb had brought her back to Close Call.

Wes had called her Fetchin’ Gretchen more times than he had teased Chase about losing his mind anytime she walked past, but this time he addressed her with a polite nod and greeting of “Mayor.”