Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

Wes bundled the letters and placed them on the passenger seat. Olive’s seat. He stripped to his underwear and walked into the Atlantic, allowing one wave of salty water to wash away another. And when he had screamed at the boats in the distance and was spent, he called home to tell everyone he loved them and that he was okay, then hit the open road with the sole intention of forgetting Olive Blake.

* * *

Wes spent the next four months in pursuit of the freedom for which he fought so hard as a Marine. After high school graduation, when most kids headed to Tull’s Teabags or secluded pastures with more bottles of alcohol than livestock, Wes had bummed a ride to Austin, to the nearest recruiter office, and signed up. No gap summer. No joyriding. No vision quest to discover the kind of man he would be before the military broke him down and reshaped him for their purposes. Now Wes convinced himself it was high time for a rootless trek.

He just hadn’t counted on the trek leading him back to Olive, time and again.

At the Rocky sculpture in Philly, he found a kindred spirit, arms up, and he wondered for the first time what the Marine in Olive’s bronze held above his head.

Inside New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he spent an entire day sitting on a padded bench, lost in the childish and unnatural colors of a Matisse painting simply because it contained trees that may—or may not—have been olive trees.

In Chicago, he stood at George Langley’s grave and paid his respects.

And in front of a jukebox in a greasy, late-night dive in Kentucky, he dropped in a dollar’s worth of quarters to hear Hank Williams, Jr., profess to not give a damn.

Except he did.

Wes, not Hank.

When Wes ran low on cash, he signed up for a six-man crew that did prescribed burns in the pine forests of Florida. Long hours hiking on foot in dry heat seemed a fitting penance for the mistakes he had made with the ones he loved. On a strip-head fire one week into the job, Wes looked up to find himself in a grassy field with five dark figures, his crew, in various stages of smoke cover. In two months, he had put nearly two thousand miles on his classic truck, but he was right back in that bookstore in Close Call, aching to kiss the woman beside him.

Wind shifted against Wes’s face. The fire climbed, migrated, intensified. Radio frequency went dead. He looked for the crew chief, but lost him in the surreal mix of filtered sunlight and billowing smoke. A wall of flames spiked and twisted like lava poured from the sky. The fire sounded like an M1 Abrams tank chewing the land at top speed.

Someone yelled. More shouts. Wes spun around, disoriented. Two men had flanked his left, one his right. Every one of them was vapor to him now.

At his feet, a body fell. Fire engulfed the man’s forearm and torso. Callihan-something. Hell, Wes didn’t even know. He was in a goddamned field, fighting battles that weren’t his with people who didn’t know his name any more than he knew theirs.

Never had he felt more alone.

He stripped off his heat-protection jacket and pummeled the flames from flesh as another member of the crew filled the space beside him. The whites of the burned guy’s eyes swallowed everything else in Wes’s line of sight.

Wes crouched beside him and screamed above the roar, “We’re going to get you out.”

And Daniel was looking up at him, his eyes pleading for help.

Wes froze. His ears felt singed. The stench that crowded his nostrils was unholy.

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Another voice. A shout in his ear, loud enough to deafen but far enough away that it seemed meant for someone else.

He glanced up at the burning horizon, like a distant planet, his very own infinite now filled with carbon copy moments that didn’t have to be.

Not one more day.

Wes slid one hand beneath the guy’s thigh, grabbed his free arm, and hauled him into a fireman carry while the other crewman draped the protective jacket over them as a heat shield. Wes’s boots pounded the singed earth, jolting his legs inward to his body cavity with each running step. They were in a blazing vacuum where nothing else existed. The adrenaline saturating his blood stream was the kind of controlled and thoughtful panic the Marines had programed into him.

He followed a break in the orange and black to a trickle of blue so very much like the childish colors of Matisse. Sky. A voice in his head, maybe Daniel, maybe his own freaked out soul, told him to go toward the blue. And when blue balanced the more intense colors and the sky cooled, Wes broke free of the flame wall and into the waiting arms of emergency personnel. He set the man on the ground. Medics swarmed the burned man. Dry, hiccupping gulps of air rushed into Wes windpipe, but he still ran. Wes stripped off his helmet and surged through the cries of men telling him that everything was okay, that he had saved someone, tossing around the word hero like hot ashes, incendiary and dangerous. He barreled past the second crew line. A scream ripped from his lungs.

A hand reached out, gripped his chest gear, snagged his progress. Wes’s gaze saw little but the mesmerizing, reflective strips on the guy’s jacket. Full-on firefighter. The man looked him in the eye.

“What’re you runnin’ from, son?” he shouted.

Wes collapsed in his arms. “I don’t know anymore.”

The man’s flushed cheeks reshaped. His frown subsided.

“I want to go home,” Wes confessed.

The stranger sat Wes in the grass. Someone handed him water.