Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

“Wes?” She turned toward the sound.

Snagged in the underbrush, barefoot, dressed only in pajama bottoms, Wes sat with his back to a tree. He had buried himself in leaves and branches. Dirt masked his face.

Camouflage.

Her chest compressed, partly from finding him, partly from finding him in this state. She didn’t want to sneak up and touch him. Clearly jacked for combat, he might startle or attack. If she knew his rank, she would call it. If she had something to bang against the nearby trees, she would create a racket. With few options left, she sang. Loudly. Out of tune. Wrong lyrics.

“We tend to smell and we say y’all.” Livie sang about fishing and deer blinds and a bunch of mumbles in between. When she got to the part she knew, she brought it home. “If you ain’t into that, we don’t give a daaaaammmmn.”

Wes shuffled. She walked slowly, crouched close. In the dark, his expression was lost, but his voice came to her strong and even inside his strong drawl, slightly judgmental. “That’s wrong.”

Livie might have smiled, but she was in no mood. Flakes flew and her pajama pants headed south the more she tried to help him from the brush. She slipped his coat over his broad, naked shoulders and rammed on his boots then pointed him in the direction of the house. Inside his coat, she looped her arm around his back.

She didn’t let go. Not once.

“You’re wrong,” he told her again when they were halfway home.

“You can teach it to me on the way back.”

Teach it to her, he did. All the way back to the house, loud enough in the kitchen to rouse Willie and January. They helped him out of the coat and boots in a strangely silent drill that was all too familiar. Willie tried to take it from there. Wes wanted none of it. He held Livie’s hand like a lifeline.

“It’s okay,” she whispered to Willie. “I’ll take him.”

He led her to his bed.

Livie took off her coat and crawled in beside him. The smell of earth and mud overwhelmed her. His skin was still impossibly cold. She did her best to remedy that with covers, tucked strategically, but Wes wanted none of it. He tugged her close so that their limbs were intertwined, their faces close.

“Amsterdam has to go.” His syllables were slurred.

His words were a detour of the subconscious, the same part of him that recycled his past, nothing more.

But winter had set in. The wind buffeted the house and the brittleness of it all settled in Livie’s bones.

A whisper came on his final sigh into peace. “Nemo Residio.”

No man left behind.

Her nose stung with unshed tears. She wanted to answer a quiet, here…everyone is here, but they had agreed long ago to be honest. Instead, she held him until his exhales turned long and steady and she had memorized his exquisite face for her sculpture. Then she held him longer.

9

The storm came. The cattle held. That was thing about the cold in Texas—it rarely stayed.

On Christmas eve, Mona and January kicked into high holiday gear to make up for time lost. Baked cookies and vanilla fragrance sent the house into sugar overdrive. Mona blasted country holiday tunes by some George, whom she claimed as her King of country music, presiding over the Lone Star State in his belt buckle and chords that never really stretched much. January was in charge of decorating the tree, freshly cut by Nat and a few ranch hands at first light on the property’s far reaches. Willie gave Livie a botany lesson about the cypress—a short, stocky Carolina Sapphire that looked like a fat tumbleweed with blue tips. And everyone else who had a pulse on the ranch and wasn’t looking after cows circled around the homecoming of the third Meier brother, Chase.

Fresh off a rodeo competition in Las Vegas, Chase had arrived that morning with all the fanfare of an artist honoree at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When introduced to Livie, Chase refused a handshake and went straight for an embrace, saying he already knew enough about her to know she was family. He showed a genuine interest in her process, wore a gold and silver buckle that could double as a satellite dish, carried the fragrance of someone who had elevated cow-handling to an art—and big money—and lavished extra attention on those of the female persuasion, clearly the charmer in the family. She never did figure out who had been feeding him all the insider information.

Livie hadn’t seen Wes smile so much in days. She wondered how much of his sleepwalk he remembered, if any.

As welcome as everyone made Livie feel, the concept of family overwhelmed her, and she wanted to give them privacy for the short twenty-four hours Chase was home. She escaped to her art for a good part of the morning. In the long hours she had put in on the clay, the joining narrative took shape. She had saved the soldier for last; having seen Wes in nearly every element but a uniform, the final details eluded her.

January sent Willie to convince Livie to knock off early, to join them for lunch, and to decorate the tree. Willie said they voted him the safest choice not to violate the artist’s rules. Also, refusing Willie would have been like refusing a cold beer and mealtime grace around these parts. It simply wasn’t done.

After a midday meal of homemade tamales one of the ranch hands’ wife had gifted the family, Livie helped with the tree.

“There must be another box in the attic,” said Mona. “I’m not seeing the ornaments from when the boys were young.”

“I’ll find them,” said Livie.