Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

The joke was almost worth the price of admission to see Amsterdam’s stiff demeanor tossed off-center. Almost.

“I’ll see if I can find you a truck to use while you’re here, then.” The mayor extended a hand toward Miss Blake. “Do we have a deal?”

The artist glanced at Wes, as if her decision rested solely on the tracks her stare made across his shoulders, the length of him. Muscles in his neck tensed, edged out a warning. The statue wouldn’t be him. He’d as soon throw the Yankee out in a most inhospitable display of Southern manners than have anything to do with inspiring a hero’s statue in Close Call, Texas. Wes may have been military, but he was no hero. So long as she erected a statue that honored all those who had served, all those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, and kept him a distant afterthought, they’d be okay. Not great, but as okay as a Texan and a Yankee could ever be, sharing the same prized spot.

Amsterdam took the mayor’s hand, effectively sealing an arrangement that promised to be the longest season Wes had ever encountered, on the ranch or a tour of duty.

* * *

Pillows in the Dolly Parton suite of the Starlite Motor Lodge may have been plump enough for sweet slumber, but they did little to drown out the sounds drifting through the paper-thin walls from the room next door at two in the morning. If the historically-challenged didn’t know what fate befell the lovers who inspired the room’s theme—Bonnie and Clyde—the notion that they died while having sex seemed reasonable. Livie had heard enough crashing furniture and shout-outs to God to constitute one cataclysmic, law-breaking climax. Even one dollar and fifty cents shoved into the mattress’s magic fingers massage option was but an imperfect, teeth-chattering reprieve to the savage rutting next door.

A guest room at the Meier ranch was starting to seem like heaven. At least there, every other thought wouldn’t track in the direction of sex.

More than likely.

Well…

Wes Meier certainly wasn’t what Livie had pictured all those years ago when Daniel wrote her about his new basic training buddy. By the time her half brother had finished describing Wes, Livie had conjured up some backwoods, slow-strutting, silver-tongued cowboy who was good with his hands. No doubt Livie’s cultured upbringing had supplied the rest of the disparaging image—just this side of Hollywood cliché. But as an artist, she trusted her eye. In reality, Wes Meier was a man whose life experience chiseled him, whose natural environment informed everything from his dress to his self-confident gait, whose modest upbringing prevented him from seeing himself as striking—beautiful, even—under all that facial growth and dirt.

Livie rolled onto her stomach and reached for her sketchpad and coal pencil. In the light filtering through the window sheers—an odd combination of natural moonlight and artificial vacancy glow—she sketched Wes’s face from memory: tall, straight forehead; tight skin at his cheekbones; thick, dark hair pinned back from captivity in a hat all day; shadowy beard surrounding a firm mouth that seemed ever on the verge of laughter. And the eyes. She erased and redrew and smudged them with her ring finger twenty times, unable to properly convey the story they hinted.

A story that included Daniel’s death.

She darkened the lines, reaching for sadness, only to erase them again.

Next door, the modern-day Bonnie and Clyde went outlaw on their intercourse.

Livie squeezed her eyes shut, groaned, and slogged out of bed. She pulled on her ankle-length duster and boots and left the Starlite Motor Lodge for the innocuous safety that only remoteness brings. Perhaps a walk would inspire a half-ton sculpture. She headed toward the sculpture’s designated spot—alone, detached, the way she operated at her creative optimum—to become acquainted with the space in darkness.

Nearly a mile and a good dozen or so of Daniel’s memories into her walk, the distant strains of music curled inside her ears and settled into her awareness. The beat was steady, even—not the frenetic stomp to which she had grown accustomed from her amorous neighbors, nor the unhurried strains she expected from a sleepy town. She matched her strides to the downbeat, crossing over patches of grass and gravel stretches and wet asphalt from the late-November shower that had passed an hour before, producing a kind of synchronicity in her mind that always delighted her and made her feel as if she was precisely where she was fated to be. Soon, the puddles reflected the red and yellow neon of a beer sign

.

Livie stopped. Above the lit collection of alcohol logos, the bar’s name: The Gritty Somewhere. A horrible name for a dive, but she loved it. She couldn’t possibly go in, could she? Her couture, vaguely call girlish with barely a stitch on beneath a raincoat, wouldn’t leave the right impression of a respected and cultured artist in the place she had to call home for the next six months. Still, liberties in the immersion phase often resulted in the most surprising inspiration.

She headed for the bar’s entrance.

The door blasted open. The previously muffled one-two beat charged out into the night on brash, grating notes, followed by raucous cheers. Draped around the shoulders of a rather busty middle-aged woman, the cowboy she had been trying to draw took a handful of tipsy steps toward the ghost town’s puddles. Propped as he was, the overly-painted woman couldn’t have been closer to his lips had she found a crawlspace beside his molars.

Livie stepped into the shadow of an adjacent building.

An odd sensation reshaped her stomach, first as if she had no right to spy on such an exchange, and second that someone—anyone—should occupy the intimate space she had only just tried and failed to capture on paper. Absurd that her response felt territorial. Wes Meier was nothing to her but a shared memory from Daniel and an annoying welcoming committee to Close Call.

Sexed up and primed as she was from the sensory input from the Starlite, despite all reason, her imagination went into overdrive. No longer the appearance of a mishap in the mud, she had him stripped to the basic sculptor’s lines of human anatomy before reason took hold.

The woman helped him into the passenger seat of an old powder-blue truck, taking more than a few moments to cushion him against a potential tumble into the street before retreating to the driver’s side. Door propped, Wes reached for sloppy handholds until his hat brim tipped back and he looked Livie’s direction.

A thread of arousal curled low in her abdomen. She held her breath.

His spine lengthened; his limbs stiffened to stone. In that moment, his neon-lit face sobered. He didn’t smile. He didn’t wave. Such a bold stare might have been disturbing, awkward, inappropriate. It wasn’t. Somehow, in that moment, his connection to her was precisely what eluded her when she tried to sketch him.

Reaching.

The woman said something, broke the spell. He glanced away then spent the time it took the vehicle to pull away trying to reestablish the connection lost. But the moment had passed, and he was simply a drunk cowboy this side of Hollywood cliché, no more inspiration than the dirty water beneath her soles or the sad light that squeezed beneath the bar door.

Livie changed her mind about the drink. By the time she walked back to the Starlite Motor Lodge, she knew two things with absolute certainty: Wes Meier and his fully-fleshed companion occupied the building’s far room, as evidenced by the hastily-parked, powder-blue truck at the remote end of the parking lot—the thought kept her awake later than it should have—and the flash of inspiration for her sculpture, somewhere at the intersection of humanity and history, was not on a darkened street in the middle of the night but locked inside Wes Meier.

To risk attachment to anything, anyplace, or anyone was to risk her creative edge that was fast slipping away. She hadn’t created anything of acclaim in years. A child prodigy who hit her artistic peak too young, critics wrote. A bold, bronze statement that carved a destination out of nowhere was the opportunity to prove she could still detach observers from their comfort zone, move people to surprising mental spaces. To accomplish that, her art required room, emotional distance, distrust of things that came easily. If she wasn’t careful, Wes Meier was just the sort of thing to come easily, crowd her space, trample intentions. Even if it was only in the fertile, lonely ground of her imagination.