Claiming The Cowboy (Meier Ranch Brothers 3)

1

For a string of days—Gretchen de Havilland had lost count, but something close to two years, because she started around the same time she became the youngest person and only female ever elected as mayor of Close Call, Texas, population 2,122—morning coffee at Cake My Day had been her thing. Not because the house roast was especially great—it had a faint whiff of singed beans and flat, square notes if it wasn’t masked with sugary cream or pumps of vanilla—but because it was an excuse to add the Clint Eastwood-inspired High Plains Sifter raspberry-filled powdered donut to her order. And because a town’s bakery was the tax-paying pulse of the community—frequented by those who rose with the sun, attacked the day with purpose, and had a little extra in the mason jar to splurge on donut holes. No politician worth the air God gave her would make policy decisions based on constituents who frequented The Gritty Somewhere bar or the hourly-rate Starlite Motor Lodge.

On this drizzly morning in early April, however, Gretchen simply wanted to be invisible for five minutes. Ten, tops.

She didn’t feel like a leader at all. With bad humidity hair, an even worse disposition from being up most of the night working on budget spreadsheets, and no prospects to replace the lead organizer for the town’s sesquicentennial celebration happening in a month, she wanted—just for five minutes—for it to all be someone else’s responsibility. Not that she didn’t love being mayor. She did. But, she supposed, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t want to be Ruth Bader Ginsburg some days.

Close Caller-Times in hand, open to the Dear Agnes column, she sank her teeth into the blissful, yeasty, and absurdly powdery decadence that was her morning donut. The sugary pocket of raspberry jelly did not fill the pastry’s epicenter but squeezed a lop-sided burst at the corner of her mouth with the subtlety of a firehose. The carb load crowded her mouth while she scrambled for a napkin.

And found none.

Beside her table, a prime street-view that might as well have been engraved mayor for the regularity with which she occupied the space, a man entered her personal bubble.

Denim.

Tall.

Good gracious, but that was a big belt buckle.

Her hand shielded the blob dangling from her lips.

“Here.” He held out a paper napkin.

She accepted it, unable to make eye contact until the offending globule was no more and she could form words around the sticky dough. On an ambitious swallow, the bite vacated her mouth but left a powdery blizzard on her lips.

Gretchen glanced up—a serious challenge given the blinding, plate-sized, gold and silver crowning glory at the man’s trim waist. Past the retro white chambray shirt with the dark, tattoo-like embroidery at the shoulders, her gaze reached the face of the man sporting such extravagance. He was one of those Wrangler jeans models on the Tractor Depot inserts of the Sunday Houston Chronicle crossed with a dark-and-edgy-haired vampire actor. Ninety-nine percent bomb factory, one percent familiar.

She inhaled a tiny gulp.

The ensuing sugar blizzard at the back of her throat sent her into a coughing fit that twisted his slightly boyish features into a frown. Even in a moment of distress, he was a far cry handsomer than the usual morning crowd. And while she squeaked out an apology, washed the powder down on a heathy pull from her coffee cup, blinked back tears that had sprouted, and generally recovered from the urge to crawl under the table, that one percent clicked: championship buckle, Meier-brother cheekbones, a vague recollection of the least ambitious person in her graduation class.

“Folks in town said you’d be here. I wanted to catch you away from your office.” Chase Meier spun a chair backward and straddled the seat as if he was prepping to go a good eight seconds.

Seven second longer than she wanted to give him.

Gretchen kissed her privacy goodbye—again—and flipped a switch in her demeanor, a skill set she had perfected in law school. Her all-business countenance, a composed presentation that included the right cross of her ankles, the right measured words for a media response, and a veil of confidence she did not always possess.

“An aversion to City Hall?” she asked.

“More like an aversion to formality.”

“What can I do for you,

Mr. Meier?”

“For starters, you can call me Chase.”

Calling him Chase brought to mind his more infamous moniker around town: Chase the skirts. Oh, and most likely to bed a Nashville starlet—in the informal poll not publishable in their senior yearbook.

“Right. An aversion to formality. What can I do for you, Mr. Meier?” she repeated, gently apprising him of how the exchange would go down. She was no longer the freckle-faced, ginger girl who once spotted his jacket sticking out of his locker in an empty high school hallway and seized the opportunity to yank it free so that she’d have an excuse to talk to him when she told him she found it. The jacket had been bulkier than Gretchen anticipated, but she was nothing if not tenacious. She wrestled it low and pressed her heels against the locker’s lower vents for leverage. Chase picked that exact moment to visit the drinking fountain. They both froze, his jacket twisted between her thighs, his smile the precise degree of amused as at this moment. That charm he flexed all the way back to the single kindergarten ladies wouldn’t work on her. Gretchen was no longer the girl who needed an excuse to talk to anyone. Now, people wanted to hear what she had to say.

“I want to turn the old welding warehouse at the far end of Main into a distillery and tasting room.”

Ninety-nine percent bomb factory of a different sort.

He was direct, she had to give him that. In her line of work, chock full of bullshit, candor went further than chamber-of-commerce talk. She knew the property well. It was a fire-code-violating blemish on a town that was polishing up nicely during her tenure. That didn’t mean she wanted to see just anything replace it.

“That property is zoned industrial. Anything beyond that—tasting room, retail store—would be in violation. Not to mention the alcohol restrictions inside town boundaries.”

“What about the bar?”

“Grandfather clause. The Gritty Somewhere predates the law that has been on the books since 1979,” said Gretchen. “Why not parcel off the Meier ranch? Go at it from an agricultural direction? You’ll meet with less resistance.”

“From you?”

She blinked back his boldness. “From everyone who wants to see this town grow in the right direction.”

“My investors want people, traffic.”

“Go to Houston or Austin.”

“Indie labels get lost in urban areas. To sell, it has to have a story, and Close Call has a great story. It’s all about visibility, the brand.” He did a clumsy Vanna White flourish with his hands in the vicinity of his head and torso in case she woke up under a rock that morning and didn’t know the most successful bull rider in the state hailed from her fair hamlet. Mentally, she rolled her eyes.