Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

Livie reached across the boat and gripped an oar to still it.

“Daniel loved you.”

Wes’s labored breaths joined the night. A man clearly unaccustomed to truths, to confessions of such a delicate nature, seemed to have run a marathon in the time it took Livie to reach his epiphany of truth. Under cloak of darkness, his voice charged out, broken.

“He came to me the week before. Told me everything. I said I understood. I didn’t know what to say, so I pulled away, kept my distance. He must have sensed it, because he pulled double-duty that day so we would be together. He kept wanting to talk, and I’d tell him later, later. But later never came. He shouldn’t have been there that day. He shouldn’t have been there…”

Livie walked her grip up the oar to Wes’s hand. At her touch, he threaded her fingers through his. The power of his grip reached all the way inside, to her chest, and squeezed her heart.

“What happened wasn’t your fault, Wes. Daniel loved being a Marine, more than anything. And if he was there that day, then he had found his happiness because he served his country alongside his best friend.”

Wes nodded, looked out where the lake carried things away. Long minutes passed, the silence between them necessary, comforting. And when they had drifted out too far, he put the oars in the water and rowed them back. A few strokes in, he paused, confessed again.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be what he needed.”

“I’m not. You showed him everything about who you were that summer he came here that gave him so much joy. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.” Livie reached forward and gave Wes’s knee a playful shove. “Besides, you’re kind of a Bonnat. I can totally see it.”

Wes fell from the tenuous wire he walked between sadness and joy. His chuckle eased the grip on her heart. Even in the blue-black light, she swore he turned a shade of red.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” she said. “For showing me all of this.”

“Not helping you get much done.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong. The trestle informed the precise angle of armature I needed. And the company? Well, it informed quite a bit more.”

Livie had yet to finish sketching the most important part: the soldier. This night, she would. She felt it in the fullness just beneath her skin; she felt it inside the buoyancy of her mood that seemed to carry him right along with her. Out of nowhere, she had penetrated in him what was, before, out of reach. The bronze would be chin down, Wes, yet any man and no man. He would be Daniel and Wes and Gully and Clem, and he would carry this town, these people, into hope. The hope that lived on in legends beneath a train trestle. The hope that carried them beyond dark days.

The hope that Daniel would want Wes to have again.

* * *

Christmas in Close Call was what Mona called all gussied and tied up with hallelujah. Every person on the Meier ranch had to knock off chores an hour early each day in December simply to usher in some flimsy holiday excuse to be merry—carols, cookies, cards. Wes’s mother sent word she’d be enjoying the new year in Barcelona. Beneath the stars and a scattering of blankets one night, January told the group about Spain, and Olive chimed in with such an artist’s eye, Wes couldn’t say he blamed his momma for staying put.

The closest Wes came to true seasonal bliss was the time he spent in the barn, alone, with Olive.

In the week since their outing in the rowboat, he had discovered the manufactured hay wall between their work areas shrank by one bale each day, mostly at the edges. No one on the ranch owned up to the deed, which meant she was deconstructing what had once been so important. Wes couldn’t deny he enjoyed the game of it all—everything but the slow-burn realization that he wanted her. His mind couldn’t move past the hurt Daniel must have felt in his final hours, and there was no way Wes would subject his sister to the kind of pain he was capable of causing.

He wanted to tell Nat all of this. Confide the way Nat had to him, time and again, about January, about his fears of holding it all together and supporting a family on nothing more substantial than his imagination. And five hundred or so head of cattle. At the town’s annual Lights on Main bulb-hanging event, two weeks before Christmas, Wes tried.

“I don’t know, man.” Nat stood wide, like a boat captain, as if untangling a massive string of lights required sea legs and an iron constitution. “I don’t see the problem. Guy loved it here. You two were inseparable, all the way back to boot camp. Why wouldn’t he want you showing an interest in his sister?”

“For one, he’s not here.”

“Because this is 1950 and you need his permission?”

“That’s not it.”

“Because she’s sophisticated and beautiful and you still decide what you’re going to wear each day by sniffing it?”

Wes grabbed another string of lights from the boxes that someone on the town council had dumped near the courthouse steps. Inside the wreath of bulbs, he displayed his middle finger like an Advent candle.

Nat laughed and returned fire with a gnome-like Santa lawn decoration—a covert, plastic-resin white glove with one choice human digit. Game on. Trading creative fuck offs was likely to escalate into something that involved a phallic nutcracker in front of the Roll in the Hay Feed Store or the freshly cut wood displayed in the First Baptist manger scene.

“This is why I come to you.” Wes’s voice dripped with sarcasm. He collapsed on the courthouse steps and tackled the snarled, green plastic wire.

His brother sat beside him. “Come on, man. This is what we do. The only thing missing here is that you’re not having fun.”

“That’s the thing. This place has always been that—fun. My lifeline. No matter what shit went down over there, I came back here and it was like some grand reset button because this