Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

For if he was ever to gift her such a pain, she would be a most unworthy sycophant to use it.

Livie crumbled the page from the book and tossed it aside.

* * *

Wes wasn’t entirely sure how Olive ended up in the passenger side of Clem’s truck. Served her right that it had no seat, but she didn’t seem to mind perching on the rusted gas tank that spanned the length of the cab. One minute, at nearly midnight, she had appeared at the barn door and stole glances at him. The next, her slim, floor-length skirt swept his workspace. Now her hands skimmed the old Ford’s interior surfaces reverently, as if the old V8 were her creation. She had asked, of course. He said sure for reasons he couldn’t figure. The decision went beyond manners. Quite possibly wasn’t a decision at all. They hadn’t spoken in two days, but that hadn’t stopped her from intruding on his world.

When delivery trucks had backed up to the barn, Wes had spent a good twenty distracted minutes puzzling together the supplies—spools of wire, hardware screws and brackets, Styrofoam—and realized he knew very little about what went into creating a bronze sculpture. When Mona strung wire between the lights and attached S-clips to Olive’s hook and rake and rubber and kidney tools—terms he learned from the collective gab over the hay wall—so that

Olive would always have what she needed within reach, the women of the ranch had a grand unveiling of her aesthetic workspace, complete with hoots and music-less dancing, as if they had found a way to stretch a day into twenty-five hours. And once, when the temperature plummeted in a late-autumn chill and Olive peeked around the wall of hay, she had only to wrap her fuzzy, cream-colored sweater like a shroud around her body to communicate her wish. He fetched his space heater without a word, but the damage was done. Wes had spent the better part of the next few hours negotiating a very different kind of heat in his imagination.

Olive’s fingertips smoothed the dashboard’s prominent brow, the pointed ridge that delineated the driver’s side of the cab from the passenger’s side, then walked the metal vein that bisected the windshield. “How long until repairs are finished?”

Her voice was a bit like a song breaking into a conversation in his head. He found it a struggle to work through how to turn a C-clamp into a door pin remover while the muted notes drifted toward him, so he took a shop rag to his already-clean socket wrench instead.

“At the rate I’m going? Twenty years.”

“Nat could help you. Make it go faster.”

“Nat couldn’t tell a rear gasket from a rear fender.”

“How did you learn how to do all this?” She mimed unfastening a glove box door that wasn’t there then closing it again.

Wes found it odd and endearing all at once.

“I was never one for the kind of learning that came from books. I’m more hands-on. Friend in high school taught me some. His dad had a repair shop outside of town. Rest I learned in the service, more out of necessity than anything.” He shrugged. “You probably think it’s a waste of time.”

“Actually, it’s as much art as what I do.”

She kicked back and propped her feet against the door frame as if she planned to snooze after a lazy Sunday drive. That they were bare, that it did something to him to see her stripped down, in any way, seemed an inroad on a challenge where she already had the upper hand.

“What happened to ‘junky?’”

“That was before I saw you with the truck.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re different when you’re here.”

“Different?” She had no idea. “Here” meant around her. Still, he engaged, going so far as to lean against the rusty frame if it meant a closer look.

“Less…guarded. More authentic.”

“Rather presumptuous, you think? You know nothing about me.”

“I know what Daniel wrote.”

His buddy’s name was an ice bath to the flirtation. Wes bristled, distanced himself, returned to arranging his tools. When her voice came again, it was bright—too bright—as if she, too, mourned something lost in their rapport and was attempting to drive the conversation out of the ditch.

“To recreate history, to take a complex machine that no longer works and make it hum, to make it beautiful again? I could never do anything so amazing.”

“Isn’t all that different, except I know what the end result looks like. You create that all on your own.” His words came out with an edge. He loved Daniel like a brother, but if she insisted on bringing up ancient history every time they were together, sharing a barn—sharing anything—wasn’t going to happen.

“I want to drive it. Someday.”

He didn’t answer.

“Wes?”