Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

“You okay?” Bess sat upright. The sheet nudged lower to reveal outward-facing, gourd-shaped breasts, a little like catching an accidental eyeful of your aunt changing her clothes.

Wes opened the door and emptied his stomach behind a nearby bush. Twice. A fitting punishment. Bess appeared at the door wrapped in a sheet. Away from the neon lights, in the unforgiving light of morning, she looked like a hundred miles of bad road, all of them leading nowhere. He was certain he looked worse.

“I have to go.” He snatched his hat off the side table.

“How’ll you get back?”

His truck. Shit. Where was his truck? Two full earthquakes of his gut later, he realized his truck was back at the bar. Wes retreated to the next door and beyond before he had his toes good and solid inside his boots.

“Take care of yourself, Miss Bess.” The men of Marin county always added the Miss more as a mental note of her advanced age and extensive experience than as a polite nod to formality.

Bess saluted him.

He fucking hated that. Not so much when kids and vets did it—they were the innocents who meant well. As for the rest of them? They hadn’t earned the right, couldn’t even fathom all that went into the privilege. Bess was no different. If it had a uniform, she chased it. Even Burl Makepeace, senior milkman from the Happy Heifer Dairy could attest to that.

Wes passed fifteen motel doors before he came to the Parton-Reynolds suite clear at the other end of the building. The door was open. He hesitated, breathed a gusty exhale into his hat and nearly gagged on what came back to him, then chided himself. For God’s sake, he didn’t want to date her—bro code withstanding. He just wanted to read her the riot act for not telling him who she was and the real reason she took this job. She owed him that much, at least.

He knocked on the ajar door.

Mary Beth Peal poked her head around the wall separating a recreation of the Best Little Whorehouse from the Best Little Bathroom. She wore a gray maid’s uniform and a judgmental frown. Mary Beth was his mother’s best friend. Wes’s early morning motel crawl was sure to get back to his momma.

“If you’re looking for the pretty brunette, she went to the motel office.”

“Nice to see you, Miss Peal.”

“Starlite used to be a respectable establishment. Leastwise in daylight.”

If you could call a place that glorified the fiery end of Rhett and Scarlett respectable. Her insinuation was clear: get your backside on home before gossip twists your being here like two tin cans connected by a string. She was right, of course. Already, the ranch’s morning chores were a distant memory—a reality he would have to set to rights for days to make up to Nat—but Wes was nothing if not an opportunist. The way out of Amsterdam spending the next half-year in his barn had just presented itself, and he couldn’t let it ride. A half-year-long reminder of the parts of his life he was trying hard to balance back out was a half-year too long.

Wes entered the motel office, little more than an old desk and a display crowded with fliers advertising family fun hundreds of miles from Close Call. Conversation in the tight space died. Two sets of eyes—one belonging to Harvey Drummond, second-generation motel proprietor, the other belonging to the same genetic pool as his buddy and capable of snatching away Wes’s thoughts and manners and oxygen—stared a hole through him.

“Help you, son?” said Harvey.

Amsterdam’s eyelids squeezed tighter.

Wes snatched off his hat and sat in a tangerine-colored armchair that had probably been fashionable when Nixon was having his own hotel issues. “I’ll wait.”

The two returned their focus to a wall of photographs.

“So, the one next to my grandfather was Gully.” Harvey pointed to a framed black and white. “Gulverson, really, but they all called him Gully; H Company, second platoon, first gunner. Granddad didn’t know why Gully made such a top-notch nose gunner until one sunny spring morning in a German ditch.”

The military jargon snagged Wes’s attention, but not so much as the brunette, whose presence pushed back the walls until they didn’t press in so tight, who stood in her baggy overalls and rust-colored scarf and shrink-wrapped shirt, eyes enraptured, fingertips resting against her lips as if a gasp was next on her thought horizon. Harvey’s last name—Drummond—slogged through the whiskey refuse in Wes’s memory until he recalled why it was familiar: Russell Drummond, Harvey’s father and First Sergeant of H Company in the United States Army during the Second World War, was the first recorded enlistment from Close Call who died in the line of duty. Everything Harvey knew of his father came from now-yellowed letters home from the Allied Front. Wes squirmed against the chair, tried not to listen.

“Only had their side arms on them, their machine guns having been mounted to the Jeeps nearby. They were talking about what they always talked about—dreams waiting for them at home, beaches that didn’t hold the possibility of death. They teased each other about their newly shorn hair they had prepped the previous night because they anticipated head wounds and shaving made it easier to triage. You can see Gully had a mane of hair that would put a stallion to shame, but apparently a damned ugly head. Anyways, they was talking, and Gully broke the conversation and nudged my dad. Pointed out a pillbox across the field…”

Amsterdam’s brow twisted. “Pillbox?”

Wes knew the term but wasn’t supposed to be listening. Except that he was—drawn into the story because that life was so much a part of him.

“Pillboxes were defensive structures made out of concrete, rocks, hillsides, whatever the landscape offered. They carved out holes for the gun barrels to rest on,” explained Harvey. “Looked like an old pillbox.”

“I’ve seen those. Some of them are still around,” said Amsterdam, her voice reverent and wide and gathered enough to sound scholarly but leave space for imagination and wonder. “There’s a French photographer who roams the countryside, capturing the war’s relics in haunting black and white photography.”

She was immersed, all-in with her emotions in a story that, to most, would have been a footnote, ancient history. The woman studied the squadron photograph as if it were an artifact, recently unearthed, and she an archaeologist set on bringing it to life.

Harvey picked up the story. “Gully was insistent that the pillbox was there despite my grandfather’s protest that his new buddy was seeing nothing but morning forest shadows and a trick of the eyes from their lack of sleep. Turns out, Gully was colorblind. His eyes weren’t tricked by the camouflage the Germans used to conceal the structure. When the shots rang out that next minute, my grandfather knew immediately which direction the enemy fire had come from. Saved his life that day.”

“And Gully?” Amsterdam’s voice had retreated.