Claiming The Cowboy (Meier Ranch Brothers 3)

“You married to the bottle?”

“No. Nothing like that.

“Why whiskey?”

“I’d be invited to parties—rich guys, more money than they could spend in their lifetimes—and they wanted to hear what I had to say because they knew they’d never have the kind of guts it took to climb up on five thousand pounds of raw animal fury. And I wasn’t a stupid hick from the country anymore. They respected my opinion about things. They brought out their finest labels from far-off places and taught me about vintages and palettes and what kind of liquor they would make if they only had the guts to try.”

“And you have the guts,” said Yancy.

“I’ve done everything I set out to do, Yance.”

“Everything but go for eight on Stalin’s Assassin.”

Reporters had lobbed that softball at every one of Chase’s media junkets for the past year. That bull was like a death sentence—agile and smart as fucking hell. Never bucked the same way twice. Had crippled every single rider out of a career and any kind of quality of life. The purse matched the risk. Like the leading hype to an unprecedented fight at Madison Square Garden, speculators believed it was a foregone conclusion that Stalin’s Assassin would meet his match in Chase Meier. Problem was, no one bothered to ask Chase.

“I’m not sure I can do it.”

“You’re agile. Reaction time of a rattlesnake. Anyone can beat that bull, it’s you.”

“Nah. The bull’s the easy part. I worry about what follows the dream. When there’s nowhere else to go. That moment after, that day and week and year after you get everything you’ve ever wanted. Do people even care what you have to say after that?”

Yancy stroked his knee through the denim, absent circles that traced the same circumference over and over. He was old school, not much for anything deeper than horse shit. That included emotion. But Chase could tell he was thinking, thinking, thinking, just like that pivotal moment in both their lives when a nine-year-old boy put him on the spot with childish exuberance and unbridled ignorance. When he spoke, his words struggled through the undeniable notes of something deeper.

“You show up at a city council meeting and present your case with as much passion for this as I saw that day you kicked up dust in my pasture, and I’ll give you my vote. Even if you never climb into another chute, I’ll always care what you have to say.”

Gretchen knew two things with absolute certainty when she entered her office that morning. One, that she was eternally grateful for her assistant, Darcy, whom she had brought with her from an internship in Atlanta because of her attention to detail, her mad genius research skills, and her history of not Close Call. Politics was nothing if not fertile ground for buried skeletons and time capsules filled with stale perspectives. And two, staying ahead of developments that impacted her community was the reason Gretchen’s term as mayor had been so successful.

Chase Meier’s plan to turn this little slice of country into highball heaven was no exception.

She settled in her chair, asked Darcy to hold all calls unless Liam Hemsworth came to his senses and wanted to propose, sight-unseen, then thumbed through the dusty files Darcy had resurrected from the basement archives. The collection was a town bible of sorts: loose-leaf notes scrawled on official stationery that captured moments of worry and triumph from past leaders, including generals dating back to the battle for independence; bombshells regarding events in the town’s history, most notably redacted parts of the investigation conducted by the FBI during the racial firestorm in the 1960s; hidden pools of money and resources for natural and unnatural disasters; sensitive research and projections for everything that would put a town mayor on the offensive side of the political football. The file was a jackpot for a history nut like Gretchen, and she had spent hours poring over the contents during her days between election and inauguration. Most certainly, Gretchen remembered mention of the property in question; she just couldn’t mine specifics from her memory.

The file was organized chronologically. Gretchen worked backward until her eyes crossed, her morning coffee metabolized out of her blood stream, and the dust had turned her sinuses to a faucet. Close Call, Texas, wasn’t big or especially noteworthy, but the town had a meandering and colorful history that dated back to Colonel Ulysses H. Tull and his volunteer Army Corps sent to aid revolutionaries in their quest for independence from Mexico.

Tucked inside the official narrative of the town’s genesis, she found a copy of the official account of a case before the closest judge in the territory—the Honorable James Marshall of the Confederate Court in Austin: a land dispute involving a parcel at the “critical junction of a farm road to the Brazos watering hole and the settlement of one Andrew C. Clark, recent transplant from St. Louis, Missouri.”

The hand-drawn map looked more like Darcy’s recent margarita-fueled sketch of her fallopian tubes twisting and drying up on the eligible dating prospects in Close Call, but the natural markers were there: the unmistakable bend in a Brazos tributary that looked like an arm flexing its bicep, the limestone cliff and watering hole at the paper’s edge with a scribbled estimation of ten miles, the intersection where a major north-south trading route from the Gulf met the settlement that had been the county’s first on record, not Clark’s, but Oscar Pettigrew’s property.

On the back of the map, Judge Marshall wrote, “The claimant, Andrew C. Clark, with only circumstantial and insufficient proof, has failed to satisfy original ownership of the land in question to this court. A man of considerable means, Clark attempted to use that wealth to intimidate and manufacture witness testimony of said incident away from the defendant.”

Gretchen flipped a few pages back. Said incident? Nothing further.

She pressed the clear button at the bottom of her desk phone. Darcy called it the mayday button—a vehicle for everything from need an excuse to get this person out of here to must have food before I gnaw off my arm. For some things, Gretchen preferred old tech. Less of an inadvertent trail.

“Room service,” answered Darcy, who rarely answered the call of duty in the same way twice. Darcy’s all-time favorite? “A-hoy-hoy,” after Alexander Graham Bell’s original idea before hello took hold.

“Research field trip,” said Gretchen. “Take the rest of the day.”

> The door opened. Darcy entered, nomadic journal in hand, pencil rammed through her messy bun. “Ooooh. Does it involve finding out where the eligible Prince Guillaume of Luxembourg will be staying on his trip to Houston next month?”

“No. But good luck on that one—on your own time.” Gretchen smiled. This is what they did—why she loved Darcy so much. She was effervescent, but when it came down to her job, her skills were unsurpassed. If an answer existed or something needed attention, Darcy wrestled the task in record time.

“And you said politics would be fun.” Darcy plucked the pencil free and opened her book, poised to write.

“I need whatever you can dig up on the parcel of land where the old welding warehouse is at the end of Main—deeds, land surveys, maps, 1830s to present day. You may have some luck at the Texas State Archives in Austin, but I suspect the more reliable information would be local—in the Marin County records. There was a fire—1945-ish—but they managed to save some records.”

“What am I looking for, exactly?”

“Any evidence Andrew C. Clark was the rightful owner of the property at the town’s origin. Also, trace his family lineage along with the descendants of Oscar Pettigrew, the original owner of record. We could have a legal fight with a lot of money behind it on our hands.”