Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

“I should get out to pasture. Help Nat.” Wes’s voice came out as a whisper in the secluded barn, almost intimate. To his ears, hesitant.

Olive nodded. She pressed lips that looked like a perfectly flattened, perfectly pink heart into a half-smile that reminded him of infinite sadness.

Immediately, he wanted to kiss it away. Instead, he turned. He made it clear to the bumper of Clem’s truck before she spoke again.

“Wes?”

That accent around his name. His balance nearly toppled from the sound of it. Though it wasn’t in the throes of intimacy as he had imagined, it was quiet and personal, all the same. He stopped and turned, thought she might make another request in that subtly guarded way of hers. When she didn’t speak, he prompted. “Yeah?”

“I don’t understand this place, the people, in the same way Daniel did.”

Wes smiled. He knew next to nothing about her—that she was a prodigy from a young age, that people believed her to be a definitive artist of her generation, all that could be gleaned with a social media search, but he knew, somehow, that she had come here, not to create something, but to uncover it. About this, Wes could speak with certainty.

“You will, Olive. Give it time.”

5

Livie had been at the Meier ranch long enough to see two sunsets, both of which surpassed her ultimate sunset memory from Casablanca. In Morocco, she had found a purity to the day’s end: few clouds to fracture the light, enough particles in the atmosphere to shape the sun into a glowing, tiger-orange sphere, and enough water to reflect thousands of replications on the sea. Here, in the shallow patch of land in an otherwise massive place known as Texas, the heavens spared nothing at the day’s final curtain—patches of absolute clarity, a distant electrical display, shards of light fractured at so many angles from the storm clouds the effect had to have been a directive from a greater artist. Perhaps it was the humidity against her bare arms that replicated closeness, perhaps it was the unconditional acceptance and far-reaching warmth she had found on the ranch in the short span of time, perhaps a foreign sense of family—not entirely blood but also choice—informed the place’s rustic, bucolic beauty.

Accustomed to being alone, Livie had retreated often—taking long walks to sketch, organizing the delivered supplies that would provide first-stage structure to her art, sitting in the barn because there were no well-meaning questions, no curiosity about her unusual life and pursuit,

no family stories that didn’t remind her of the joy she had bypassed in childhood. Often, the energy was simply too much.

She was no closer to concept, so she sought inspiration in the grand and the mundane. Stiff bubbles around the dinner dishes she volunteered to wash provided her an abstract outlet—and an eyeful of amusing cartoon milkmaids with alter egos—but brought her no closer to her goal of understanding the chasm between duty and off-topic, light and dark, and the distant and isolated things about which Daniel and Wes knew that few others ever could. The closest she had come to a pure emotional moment of inspiration was a ditch in the German countryside.

And the back-porch steps of a ranch house on a hill, dish towel in hand.

Behind her, the screen-door hinges creaked.

The man she knew only as Willie poked his head through the opening. “Do you mind the company?”

She found she didn’t mind. Already, she had discovered that Willie had the ordinary superpower to see things others missed. “Not at all. May I help you?”

“Only in describing the sunset.”

“A little like a volcano flowing against gravity.”

Willie closed his eyes as if savoring a forbidden sweet or vice. His cheeks rounded. “I think we may have to keep you around permanently.”

The word—permanently—flowed up through her chest, a little against gravity.

The porch was cluttered, one piece of furniture bumped up against another in a half-circle, so as to funnel Willie’s movements in a protected way. By his unflinching navigation of his surroundings, she suspected he’d known the space well before his eyesight left. When he neared her, she reached for his hand.

His palm was calloused and dry. She guessed his age to be in his seventies from the proliferation of spots in his dark skin. He sat beside her, but did not release her touch right away. Perhaps he sensed she craved touch more than most. His nostrils flared, taking in the evening air.

“Thank you for all you did in the barn. Wes told me you arranged for that plywood stage and oiled the doors in the back.”

“Least I could do. You need anything else, ask.”

“Actually…”

“Name it.”

“The barn is dark. Especially at night after Wes finishes working on the truck. I found one of those caged task-lights on a cord, but it’s flexible and doesn’t stay in place.”

“Got just the thing. Old rodeo lights on a stand from Chase’s early days. I’ll have Randy check the bulbs and set ’em up ’fore dark.”

“Wes won’t mind?”