Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

“If you don’t want to get hurt.”

He edged his gaze from the road, a sideways glance, no doubt to gauge her response.

“Then don’t hurt me.”

Wes studied her, longer than was prudent for someone in control of a two-ton automobile barreling down the road. His expression was unreadable. She didn’t know if he wanted to scoop her flyaway hair back from her face or shove her out of the moving vehicle.

Livie retreated to her sketch, made a few strokes sharpening Gully’s features, but the lines favored the profile of someone much closer to her than a seventy-five-year-old photograph.

Wes kept time to the music with two bobs of his head and joined in the lyrics. “If you ain’t into that….” He pointed to her.

She busted out the worst exaggerated drawl in history. “We don’t give a dammmmn.”

He barked out an appreciative laugh and tapped his fingertips against the dash.

“Awful, isn’t it?” she asked.

“I barely have the heart to tell you it sounded like a Russian trying to sound like a Brit trying to sound like something between Cajun French and Deliverance.”

“You’re the one with an accent here.”

The sounds of the road polished away their shared humor. He surprised her when he spoke again.

“Her name is Bess Scandy,” he said. “Loneliest woman in town. Fell in love young, but he died on some oil rig out in the Gulf. She fills the emptiness with what she can.”

“With you?” She found it easier to challenge him with her hand in motion, sketching truth on the page.

“Is this the way it’s going to be? Between us?”

“Honest?”

“Intrusive.”

“You find honesty intrusive?”

“No.” His tone held none of the pretense of their earlier conversation. If anything, he sounded surprised. “I find it refreshing. People are in the habit of telling service members what they think we want to hear. To protect us. Keep our minds off the bullshit long enough to stay alive.”

“Then we’ll always be honest with each other.”

Her pulse raced ahead, from forged connections, from the possibility of not being so alone, from the progress she had made in opening him up on the drive.

“No. Bess and I have never…”

“Not even in the suite belonging to the King of Rock and Roll?”

Livie meant it as a joke, not to pry. But honesty, it seemed, could be a scary thing on the return trip.

“Guess I was thinking about someone else.”

She had pushed too far, too fast. Part of her wanted to start their journey again, rewind the conversation from the moment they had retrieved his truck at the bar and he insisted on opening the passenger door for her. A quaint gesture, to be sure. One that left a pleasing warmth in her belly. The other part of her wanted to get where they were going so she could put distance between them.

Livie had never been inside a truck before. She couldn’t recall ever driving with the windows down, hadn’t listened to country music for any real length of time, and certainly couldn’t have anticipated the satisfaction of singing the word damn wildly out of tune and at the top of her lungs. But among the firsts on her journey to the Meier ranch was a subtle but powerful movement inside her chest that stirred her to fanciful thoughts. She had never been so swiftly taken by anything that was not art. She couldn’t say if she should embrace it or fear it.

For now, she put pencil to flapping paper in a world she could control, and the truck’s cab slipped again into a quiet vacancy.

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