Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

“People say you can only see it from a rowboat, the only angle from which Truman’s illusion didn’t work…”

It. Oh, God. Livie’s breath came out in shallow puffs.

“Eliza Grace will show you your one true love, the way she saw Truman that night, as a way to ensure no one else will ever know the same star-crossed fate.”

Wes pointed. Livie’s pulse raced. She turned to see the lake meet the shoreline, the cliff whose glossy, black surface collected moonlight to look like a waterfall, ice, something iridescent, and a secondary reflection that may or may not have existed.

7

What Livie didn’t see from the rowboat was a face.

Her one true love.

She glanced back at Wes. His smile was unparalleled, collected moonlight, an illusion of its own. Happiness where she knew sadness pooled. Happiness that an outsider could not deliver with all of her bronze and words of encouragement. She felt silly, lured by the promise of an image, answers, inspiration, some truth greater than collective town lore. And she felt silly because she wanted to see someone, to know she would not be so alone.

Livie stared up as the beams slipped past, let the breeze dry her eyes, and thought to sketch the imposing structure, this angle of hope so many believed in, when she returned to her bed. Everyone, she supposed, wanted to see someone.

Wes leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, oars resting across his legs. He looked amazing and unreachable, and the fear of the story became real. Though she wanted every happiness for him, she could not have it for herself. As Eliza Grace had discovered, love in any form was an illusion, just as Livie’s parents’ marriage had been. Happiness never coexisted with truth. And truth was the only place where her greatest art lived.

“What did you see?” he asked.

“A trick of the light. The power of suggestion.”

“No Léon Bonnat?”

“Only you.”

She floated the admission out there, regretted how it might come across. But they had promised honesty.

“What about you? Who did you see?”

He shrugged his broad shoulders, formidable in the fill of his coat against the twilight. “It only works the first time. I was seventeen.”

“And?”

“I thought I saw someone. Didn’t recognize her. For a while, I kept an eye out for her. But then I went into the Marines where there was nothing to look at but wall-to-wall men. I guess I forgot about her. Until now.”

“Daniel wrote about this place. Part of the magic, he said.”

This time, when Livie mentioned her half brother, Wes did not bristle. Maybe the intimacy of the rowboat encouraged confidences. Tiny waves lapped at the boat’s hull, the only witness to vulnerabilities.

“He said the time you brought him out here, everyone was swimming in the nearby cove. You insisted he take some girl who worked at the Dairy Mart out in the rowboat.”

Wes smiled. He stared at the water shifting between their feet inside the boat, but it was dark and Livie suspected he saw nothing of the water and everything about which they spoke.

“She got so scared, she fell in the water.” One mirth-filled moment slipped free. His transfixed expression softened on a laugh. “Cursed him up one side and down the other, all the way to the shore. We gave him shit about it for days.”

“I never heard the rest of the story, but in the letter before he died he said something about an illusion. I didn’t know what he meant until tonight.” She swallowed, hard. “Wes…”

“Don’t…” Wes’s warning came low, even, nearly devoid of the strength to hold her back from the truth.

“He saw you, didn’t he? In that moment, he saw you. He always knew it.”

“Please…”

“In his final letter, he went on and on about how much he respected you, how much you had changed his life.”

Wes collected the oars, began rowing, more splashing than progress.