Claiming The Cowboy (Meier Ranch Brothers 3)

Wes deadpanned a look to Nat. “Might be an STD.”

Right about that time, Mona walked in on the love fest, headed straight for the coffee pot. “Way to class it up, boys. Someday this house’ll be overrun by women and y’all’ll be about as welcome as an outhouse breeze.”

Nat leaned over and gave an exaggerated—and rather noisy kiss—to the wallpaper milkmaid January had turned into a duck-faced Mona Lisa-look-alike with the name Mona Lott written beneath her. The joke stemmed from Mona’s encounter with an old billy goat that knocked her over and broke her ankle in two places. No one missed the sexual innuendo that had sprung from it.

Mona poured out her dark roast and added sugar and cream. “Y’all tell him yet?”

Chase’s gut did a somersault. Coming from his brothers, anything was likely to be ninety percent bullshit, ten percent truth. But he held Mona to such high and accurate gossip standards that no one, not even him, wanted to hear something like that come from her mouth.

“Tell me what?”

The three kitchen invaders exchanged looks. Really, one look.

Crap.

His brothers looked to Mona with pleading eyes. She had a way about her that made bad news seem like it was served with a side of homemade preserves to make it go down better. They all settled in chairs at the table.

“A few days back, Darcy Valentine came out here. Brought one of those tortes from Cake My Day.” She looked to Nat and Wes. “You know—the one with the raspberry layer and the cocoa powder that tickled Clem something fierce…”

The eldest two Meier brothers nodded, fully enraptured in her diversionary tale.

“Mona,” Chase snapped. “Darcy?”

Mona politely cleared her throat and resumed her story. “Well, no woman brings a torte to callin’ unless she wants something. Turns out, she thought Clem might have had some information on that property on Main and ‘did he have any knowledge dating back to the town’s founding?’ Well, that got me to speakin’ about the story Clem would tell sometimes about how his great-grandfather would take him out to that very same place when he was a boy, and they’d stare at whatever it happened to be at the time, and he’d tell him about a house that once stood there with a fine porch for rockin’ and how it was destroyed by a fire. His great-grandfather had called it the reckoning house. Clem grew up believing it had something to do with all the reckoning and thinking his grandfather did in that spot.”

Chase had no idea what this all had to do with him, but Mona damned near always steered things back around to an important point. She wouldn’t be the town’s advice queen if she didn’t.

“So, long about twenty minutes into her visit, plied with enough of that liqueur-flavored raspberry sauce,” liqueur came from Mona’s lone-star tongue as lee-coor, “Darcy got to flapping her gums about how there were questions surrounding proper ownership of that place on Main where you aim to do business and might there still be some additional evidence to that end sitting around this old place?”

Chase glanced to his brothers. “I’m not following.”

“The property where you want to build the distillery?” said Nat. “Started with a land-grab under questionable circumstances.”

“Which means that it’s possible it might have been Pickford land all along,” added Wes. “Seems some family rivalries stretch back further than we knew.”

“Is there proof?” asked Chase.

“See now, that’s the interesting part,” said Mona. “When I ran into Darcy the next day, I asked her if she’d had any luck on her paper trail. She was reeeeal quiet-like. Not nearly as chatty as the day before. Almost like she wished she’d nev

er brought it up.”

“Does Gretchen know about this?” His gut flopped again; he didn’t want to know.

Mona reached over to lay her hand atop Chase’s. “She ordered the investigation, sweetheart.”

“Likely as a backup,” said Nat. “If the council passed the rezoning by a majority, overrode her vote, she’d have a recourse. All she’d have to do is announce her discovery, and determining the true ownership of the property would keep things tied up in the courts for years before a Meier, a Pickford, or anyone else could touch it.”

“Long enough that your investors wouldn’t wait,” said Wes.

“Sorry to break it to you, man,” said Wes. “Better you know it now than when it hits the front page. Dale Euclid ain’t gonna stop until he proves that he was the better candidate to elect.”

Chase sat back in his chair and exhaled. He pictured Gretchen in her pluck it all-cursing glory. She was Disney and by the book and click-click-click professional-to-the-toes. No plan B because she had worked out plan A down to the last detail. The smartest person he had ever known. If Darcy Valentine knew the truth days ago, that meant Gretchen had, too. Her “Yes” in Austin the other night was meaningless.

Being assumed an abduction victim was not a great way for Gretchen to wrap up her business week. Having the events from two days earlier splashed all over the front page of the Close Caller-Times with a bit of a salacious edge upped the challenge of her job to an unprecedented level. Feeling the inertia of her “secret”—Dale Euclid’s linguistic bomb, potentially nuclear to a politician, in reference to the history of the Main Street property and whether or not there had been a cover-up because she was in a purported relationship with Chase Meier—outdistance her capacity to keep up with all her mayoral and sesquicentennial duties plus find time to breathe and process all that had happened with Chase made Gretchen want to go all-in on a dozen Two Maples for Sister Sara donuts and curl up in the fetal position under her impressive desk.

But she hadn’t been elected to cower from adversity. And she certainly hadn’t been elected to binge on yeasty sugar-loaded carbs.

She glanced across her desk at Darcy, poised to write in her notebook.