Claiming The Cowboy (Meier Ranch Brothers 3)

“Where are you going?”

“We are going someplace I can hear myself think and you won’t be embarrassed to add my name to your meeting notes. A

n April sunset in Texas screams for a picnic, don’t you think?”

“I’m not embarrassed.”

“You have two shades to your cheeks. One is a dusty pink that’s pretty perfect and looks a little like a redhead spent a few extra minutes out in nature. The other I call Chase red, and it’s the color you turn when you’re caught pulling a varsity letter jacket through a crack in a locker door the thickness of a quarter. And right now, your color couldn’t be any more Chase red than if I had spread Niles’s barbecue sauce on them and went in for a taste.”

Chase could have fit a barbecue wing in the opening between Gretchen’s lips. Her podium-worthy speech could have gone any number of directions after that outburst. She surprised him when she chose the Gretchen route over the mayor route.

“You remember that day?”

“The jacket? Hell yeah. My favorite day in high school.”

Her expression looked like the fiftieth page of a spreadsheet that made no sense. Chase loved it.

“But you were Homecoming King. And you won your first rodeo that year. And you dated Ivy Makepeace, head cheerleader.” As if all those artificial moments added up to anything close to the real moment of someone wanting to talk to you so much she was willing to leave her dignity right there in the English Honors hallway. He couldn’t explain it, so he didn’t try.

He held open the passenger door for her. “Hop in.”

“I should take my own car.”

Chase laughed by way of a broad smile. His gaze trailed to her tin-can, plug-in mainstream hybrid, the size and color of a ladybug.

“Rained yesterday. Where we’re going, you’ll get stuck in the mud.”

“You never said where we’re going.”

“Do you plan everything?”

“Yes.” She crossed her arms.

He was losing ground; he had to think fast.

“If you come with me now, you can have your Tour of Homes.”

Gretchen dove into her bag and produced her voice recorder in less time than it took for him to realize he had just sabotaged the premiere event for the distillery. “Again, please. With more specifics.”

She pressed the red button.

“I’ll add Clyde Hammond’s double-wide to the tour if you don’t get in the truck now,” said Chase.

Gretchen hopped up into his 4x4 cab faster than two-forked heat lightning. No voice recording needed.

Chase laughed.

Clyde Hammond was the most notorious hoarder and herper in Marin County. The kind who collected a crazy number of reptiles, not the STD kind—though Clyde did enjoy dropping a story or two about his R&R trips to Bangkok during the Vietnam War.

On his front-bumper route back to his driver’s side, he realized that somewhere between her infuriating notebook and Burmese python threats, the pain in his head had vanished. Chase was the sort of reckless to reach back to that authentic moment in childhood and hang his hopes and dreams on the one person who wasn’t dazzled by his tired reputation, the one person in authority he could muster up an ounce of respect for, the one person who was on a first-name basis with pain of a different sort. She just so happened to be the one person hell-bent on banishing him from her town for good.

7

Turned out, Gretchen de Havilland was a sweet-tea kind of mayor.

Who knew?

Chase hadn’t even reached the end of Main Street, and coincidentally, the old welding warehouse, before he hung a right and realized where his truck was taking them. Mention of the day he’d caught her with his letter jacket brought to mind the perfect place to offer her an explanation about why that day had been so pivotal. On a blanket in his truck bed, over brisket and honey-roll sandwiches and enough side dishes to feed their captive audience—a handful of Meier cattle in the northernmost pasture—Chase confessed to Gretchen how he had come home from school that day, straight here, to the place Yancy had set up for him to practice on a saddled drum barrel and pressure coils years earlier, and decided professional bull riding was his future. She had wanted to speak to him that day, and when he was a rider, people would care what he had to say.