Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

“One night there was a fire. It was so fast, there wasn’t time to grab anything of value but my mother’s paintings. I watched the inferno for hours. The juxtaposition between the dark, looming structure where everything seemed providential and the blinding flames was something I never forgot—it inspired the piece that started my career. Later, I realized that not having a past preserved in photo albums or memory books was a gift, a little like George Langley’s infinite nows.” She glanced at the painting. Her features had fallen. “Sculpture can’t be tucked away or forgotten. It has movement and rhythm and a message. Sculpture is like a song of the present—the pervasive mood of a culture, their fears, their dreams, their fragility. Then, in twenty or fifty or a hundred years, when we’re gone, the song will still be there for those who want to listen.”

Wes knew, in that moment, what it was like to suspend the world—inside a painting of shadows, inside a small-town bookstore under the light of a single bulb. More than drinking or gambling or outdoor adrenaline rushes or sex, more than the things he always chased to find his equilibrium, she gave him his out. Olive, with her glimpses into alternate world, her balance of fantasy and realism, her profound take on humanity and heartfelt interaction with others. Olive was his amnesia. But she also shifted him off-center and brought closer the same darkness that she slayed for him.

He glanced at her lips, already tasting them in his mind, wondering at his interpretation of her kiss. Taking away her pout, the sadness that had set in as she spoke not of her own misfortune but of George Langley, ensuring his message wouldn’t be forgotten, became his priority.

Her gaze slipped low on his face then searched his eyes, more courage waging war with isolation. She leaned forward. Behind her glass mask, her eyelids slid closed, all he needed.

Lights clicked off in the book section.

Wes pressed his lips to hers before the moment passed.

Slightly sticky from the cocoa, infinitely sweet, her lips were the most potent amnesia of all. The kiss was modest in every way but how it defiled his intention to let her go to New York, get his head on straight when she wasn’t around. He thought to get one taste, to get free of this hold she had over him, to realize that intimacy here tasted wrong, like kissing a sister. But there was deceptive purpose in the way she kissed him back—feather-touch, timid, the slightest hint of a fanciful world to come.

And he was gone.

Nearby, a polite throat-clearing drove them apart.

Chet. Bookish type. Debate team state champ.

Wes could take him.

Olive smiled. Her front teeth took a nip at her bottom lip. “We should go.”

They slipped out into the cold. Wes made an excuse to return, said that he might have dropped something. A small lie that sat bitter on his tongue, given their pact to always be honest. Inside, he told Chet he’d be back for the painting, not to sell it to anyone else, not even Olive.

When he rejoined her beneath her canopy of lights, he asked her to stay for Christmas. He remembered Nat and his bull—the nemesis that broke his collarbone and the loaded words that had come from his mouth. He didn’t know how details of his worst day in the service—his life—would help him get past the guilt, but he knew it was past time to try.

Wes had grown tired of his carbon copy.

* * *

If someone had told Livie that the missing inspiration for her sculpture’s most important piece would come during the seconds right before she was kissed, she would have said that such a seed, planted at a project’s conception but growing untamed inside a moment of pure bliss, was impossible. She had only to look past her own far-reaching distrust of happiness to find evidence that her theory was true. Even dismissing the outliers of mental illness—the Van Goghs, the Sylvia Plaths—people as far back as Aristotle and Milton intuited the correlation between the maudlin and creative genius, a state which Livie knew modern research supported. Simply put, happy people were less inspired.

So why, on the cusp of being exceptionally kissed, had Livie experienced her greatest breakthrough yet?

Twelve hours later, she still had no explanation, but the moment sparked something inside her so incandescent, so electric, so scorching, she had yet to sleep. Part of her dismissed the flash as something that came from accepting Wes’s invitation to stay for the holidays and realizing she would not lose momentum. In truth, New York seemed cold after Close Call. Another part of her was so glad to put the foam molding behind her and sink her fingers into clay, she explained away the euphoria as a natural byproduct of leaving the draining planning stages of a project. The smallest, most miniscule part suspected that she might be wrong. How could something that forged an impenetrable and divine connection between cognition and emotion—as Wes’s kiss had—be bad?

At dawn, she sneaked out of the barn, watched the sunrise, and nearly wept. Fatigue. Beauty. Her project becoming reality. She had learned the closest hill had the best cell phone reception, but it was a place so sacrosanct to the Meier clan that she kept her distance from the family burial plot. She called her father in New York to tell him she wasn’t coming and asked him to box and ship Daniel’s letters. The ones where he spoke of Close Call, of Wes, would be the most healing. Wes was Daniel’s hero. Her hero. Wes was her statue, her inspiration, and it was long past time he viewed himself in that light.

For if he could feel it, she could capture it. Close enough to witness, to mine it so others could feel it, too, when they looked upon her bronze. Close enough to use, but far enough to walk away. Because the greatest part of her knew that falling in love would ruin her as an artist.

* * *

Two days before Christmas, Livie awakened in the middle of the night, certain she had heard the porch door hinges creak. She held her breath, waiting to see if she heard the sound again.

Wind buffeted the house and scraped its bones. Then, silence.

Livie sat up in bed and peeked out the window. The surfaces looked the same as always. She pressed her fingertips to the glass. Like reaching into the ice bin.

Snow was nearly unheard of in Close Call, but that hadn’t stopped the ranchers from speculating. Leading up to the plummeting temperatures and the oncoming front, most of the ranch’s holiday traditions were postponed to allow time for extra feedings and creating makeshift shelter belts for the cattle to huddle behind. She had taken on all the house chores to free Mona and January to help. Livie had learned that in times of stress, as he had when she first arrived, Wes roamed the property at night, sometimes awake, sometimes not.

Down the hall, Wes’s room was empty. His truck keys still hung from a nail in the hallway. After a search of the living areas yielded no sign of him, Livie dressed in warm layers, left a note in the kitchen, grabbed his coat and boots by the door, and headed out to look for him.

An icy blast slammed her cheeks. She shivered, fully awake, and walked faster, draping his jacket across her front. Within moments, she crossed both barns, a shed, the firepit, the storage closet beneath the back porch, and the gravesites—his most common sleep haunts—off her mental list.

Inside a cluster of live oaks, she crouched behind a rock to escape the biting wind, to think. The family ha

d talked about the wind blocks over dinner—how substantial they were, if they would hold—but most of them were in pastures too remote for him to walk to. Nat mentioned a deer blind they used to use as kids, but she was only half paying attention to the conversation, and finding it in the dark would be a needle-in-haystack search. She was about to return to the house to get reinforcements when she heard a mumble.