Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

“Wes?”

It can’t be me, Olive. Promise me.

She promised. She fucking promised.

Hot tears gathered in his eyes and stung his nose. He had known this would happen, believed it from word one. She’d remind him of his past, all right. Every time he drove his truck down Main and saw himself bronzed, every time someone came up to him in the feed store and shook his hand as if he were John Glenn and had been to the moon instead of leading his best friend to his untimely death, every goddamned time some hero-worshipping kid wanted an autograph. He had known this would happen.

Wes backed away from the sculpture, let the cloth fall back into place. But the fabric hung up on itself and Olive rounded the hay bales in time to see him doubled over, mildly nauseous, as if he’d been kicked in the nuts, the evidence of all he had seen, exposed.

“What did you do?” She asked, wrapped in a blanket, her voice thick with accusations and slumber.

“What did I do?” His voice charged out like an air raid siren. “That’s rich, Olive. I tell you I’ll pose, even though putting on that uniform was the last goddamned thing I wanted to do, and you promised…” His voice hung up, went gravelly and weak and shit, so he cleared it and forged ahead, “You promised it wouldn’t be me.”

Fingertips from both hands spanned her open lips but it was no longer endearing or sensual. It was the mask of someone who had been caught in a betrayal.

“It isn’t what you think—” she stammered.

“It’s my fucking name, Olive. There’s nothing else to think.”

Wes stormed past her, toward the barn door. He bucked her hand free when she reached for him. Through strangled cries he heard a few twisted words, apologies, excuses, reminders that he violated her rules, but his pulse roared in his ears, and his vision had not recovered yet from being flashlight-blinded.

He rifled the doors open and fished the master key to Clem’s truck from his toolbox. Wes had fired her engine exactly twice. He wasn’t even sure it would hold a charge; he simply knew he couldn’t be there in his barn—their barn—one minute more.

The truck started, first try.

He threw the transmission into reverse, harder than he ever would have had adrenaline not dictated his movements, and backed out in a violent arc.

A plea on her voice reached through the window.

A light clicked on inside the house.

Wes shifted into first and gunned it. The last thing he saw in the tiny oval of his rearview mirror, was Olive, still wrapped in a blanket, collapse to the barn floor.

* * *

For two weeks, Wes disappeared.

Livie couldn’t say where he went, though Mona and January assured her it was totally out of his character to run to Bess Scandy or any of the dozens of other eligible Close Call women who would bed him in a heartbeat. The men on the ranch knew more—she could tell by the way they avoided eye contact with her—but they weren’t divulging anything. So Livie roamed the empty barn, moved hay bales to the periphery so there was no longer a partition, and handled old truck parts when her eyes misted over to the point where painting a final outer-jacket coating to give her rubber molds structure proved impossible. And she rehearsed all the things Wes didn’t give her a chance to say.

She roamed the cavernous space and talked to Wes as if he were living and breathing in the fantasy world in her head then blamed her delusions on the chemical fumes from mold-making. The process reached the end of what she could do without an ironworks. And on this, her last night in Close Call, she boxed the pieces into special containers. Tomorrow, a highly-trained team would load the shipping containers, and she would follow them to a foundry in Dallas where a wax replica could be made from the molds.

Livie was double-checking the metal rigging inside the packing crates when Willie visited. Her pulse leapt.

He stood where Clem’s truck had been parked all those months—years, in fact. And though Willie shuffled, his three-point walk unsteady, holding his badass cane with the stallion grip, his ever-present companion away from the house, he made a grand effort to come toward her voice and give her a hug.

“How are you?”

She gripped his fancy shirt, all parading elephants and India-inspired tents and fuchsia silk, wholly impractical for a dude who still shoved his hand into the exit chute of sizeable ranch animals. Moisture brimmed her eyelids. She allowed the open display she showed no one else because Willie would be none the wiser. Intentionally, she kept her words bright.

“Busy. Takes a lot of prep to move this operation.”

“I didn’t ask about the statue, Olive.”

He had taken to calling her by her given name because Wes had. The reminder deflated her attempt at masking the storm inside.

“I’m relieved. It’s time to move on.”

“Is it?”