Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

Livie just thought the Meier ranch was in the middle of nowhere. This, this twenty-minute-drive-away grassy knoll beside a lake and train trestle and a closed-up barn with a sign that read “Dietrich’s”—this was the true middle of nowhere. The moon hid behind the dense trees, but the clarity of the blue-black patch of twilight over the lake was extraordinary. Her chest filled with gratitude that she had something to look at beyond metal pipes and fittings that never seemed to resemble the human form. Probably because she had yet to finish sketching the most important part: the soldier.

That, she reserved for a moment when it all seemed agreeable. When Wes opened up and told her what he always seemed to be reaching for when he made eye contact. Then, the entirety of the sculpture would take shape in her mind.

Wes helped her into the two-seater, secured the oars and a blanket from his truck, and kicked away from the shoreline. Something about it all was familiar.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’ve done this before.”

“Who hasn’t in this town? But this is a special tour. Not just anyone gets to see what I’m fixin’ to show you.”

“I’m absolutely positive you’ve said that before.”

“Funny.” He rowed, his sweeps of the glass-like surface absent, unhurried. “Contrary to my first—or rather, my second—impression, I’m not the playboy you seem to think.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Why?”

“Look at you…you’re like G.I. Joe and Léon Bonnat, all rolled into one.”

“Who’s Léon Bonnat?” His drawl made a complete butchery of her French emphasis, just this side of mocking.

“Nineteenth century French painter? Chiseled cheeks? Never mind.”

Wes elevated the mocking to a sing-song level. “Someone has a dead crush.”

Not so dead, if anyone asked.

“I know you didn’t bring me all the way out here to discuss a pseudo-Impressionist who stressed simplicity in all things but his self-portrait’s gorgeous eyes.”

Wes chuckled. Enough to disrupt the easy rowing rhythm he had established.

“What?” Defensive, sure, but Livie had already divulged too much physical adoration toward a man who would have to be a corpse to not know what he did to women.

“Nothing.”

But it wasn’t nothing; it was definitely something from the inordinate length of time it took his smile to fade, how he stared straight at her when he was annoyed but in moments like this, when he didn’t seem to mind sharing his space and his life so much, he barely held her gaze.

“See the third bent from the right?” He nodded in the direction of the trestle.

“The one that looks like all the others?”

“At first glance. But the townspeople know different. The site of a tragedy. Back in Clem’s day, there was a woman named Eliza Grace who came to town. An outsider…”

“Naturally.”

“She was courted by two men. Milo was the son of a preacher. He had the Brylcreem hair and the future, taking over the pulpit after his daddy, plans to expand on the church because worshippers were thick as fleas come Sunday morning. Then there was Truman. Helluva name he never could live up to. Truman built things with his hands, picked up odd jobs around town, had a fascination with magic—card tricks, slight-of-hand, that sort of thing. No future to speak of, but Eliza Grace—she just kept coming back, and eventually, they fell in love. Trouble was, by then she had already married Milo, who had made it his mission in life to convince the good people of Close Call that Truman was the devil—or something close to it—and drive him clear out of town.”

The boat drifted closer to the trestle, seemingly pushed by a conspiracy of the natural world, and Livie remembered what was familiar. Daniel had written her something about a lake and a bridge and a tale. She shivered, nothing to do with the cold.

“Truman knew that he and Eliza Grace could never be together so long as she was married—divorce from a man of God was nearly unheard of back then—and so long as he was the most shunned man in the county. He came up with an idea to create the most elaborate illusion he had ever pulled off. He studied the train routes, which were regular enough to set a clock by in those post-war days, and decided that if he could make the townspeople believe that Eliza Grace took an accidental spill off the trestle from an oncoming train, they would eventually stop combing the lake for her and assume her body had travelled on down the river. Then they would be free to be together.”

Wes gave a dramatic pause to the story. Livie practically tossed him overboard from the suspense. One stroke, two, then three, all gliding them closer to the third bend, the crisscrossing beams of the support becoming clearer. Her toes curled inside her boots.

“But the night everyone in town was gathered at a church social,” Wes continued, “Eliza Grace snuck down to the trestle where he hid out as he was practic

ing his illusion and believed she saw him, dead on the rocky shoreline below. In a fit of grief, she jumped to her death. And seeing what had happened, Truman climbed the trestle and did the same. But that’s not where the illusion ended.”

The moon slipped clear of a shadowy block of trees, just in time to be eclipsed by the steel trestle above.