Claiming The Cowboy (Meier Ranch Brothers 3)

Oh God-oh God-oh God. From nowhere came the advice to breathe.

Breathe, chief. Gretchen sucked in two greedy inhales. Somehow, without Chase there, it didn’t work so well at slowing her racing pulse.

The landline in the kitchen rang. Her cell phone buzzed across the coffee table.

Immediately, her stomach spun like a Tilt-A-Whirl.

“I feel like I ate radioactive cheese,” she said.

Darcy helped her back to the sofa. “Listen to me. You already got ahead of this. Days ago. Every single person in that city hall has your back, including the city attorney. This is nothing more than a slow news cycle and a grab for ratings. And some apparent jealousy by a reporter with helmet hair.”

Still the phones rang.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Pumpkin. Just another move in the chess match.”

Gretchen grabbed the remote and stabbed the back button to the movie in time to hear the line about two kinds of people in the world—those with loaded guns and those who dig. None of the characters particularly good or remarkable. Simply a reminder of the lengths to which humans pursue success at any cost.

Mercilessly, both phones quieted—one to machine, low volume, one to voicemail.

No one moved. Darcy’s eyes stayed wide. Her father glanced back and forth, screen to daughter. Lincoln blinked one long, protracted Morse code of love.

Gretchen smiled, a sardonic, bitter smile of disbelief that squeezed unshed tears down her cheeks. “I think I’ll turn in,” she managed in her strongest mayoral voice.

Four hours into turning in, Gretchen gave up on chasing sleep, went to her desk, and drafted her resignation letter.

13

Emile Pickford was the patriarch of one of the most powerful families in Marin County. Equally powerful as the Meier clan in acreage and town influence, Emile had one advantage the Meiers didn’t have: an office in town government. As one of her first acts as elected mayor, Gretchen kept Emile Pickford on as town manager. She didn’t see a reason to change the office when Emile’s vision for the town so closely aligned with hers. Close Call couldn’t part with much of a salary for the man. But the irony of Gretchen having to deliver her resignation letter to a man whose ancestors were screwed over by the Meiers’ ancestors while she, herself, had done the same in her own non-proactive way—history repeating itself and all that—left her feeling like an empty shell of her former self.

Emile wasn’t much for stuffy offices, though he had one in city hall. It was mostly a place to hang various pictures of him in deer blinds all over the state and throughout Central and South America. If there was one thing at which Emile excelled, it was shooting unsuspecting souls between the eyes. She found him at dawn, in the field where the concert took place, each of them with a trash bag in hand, along with twenty or so other citizens, a few Meiers included, who had shown up simply because something in the town needed done.

Gretchen shifted her trash bag to her left hand, sniffed away at the early-morning breeze, maybe some tears at the thought of what came next, and pulled the envelope from her hoodie pocket. When she approached, the town manager’s expression turned grave.

“Emile, I’d like to give you this.”

He glanced down at his hand, wiped it on his jeans, and took the offering. “What is it?”

Gretchen straightened, as much pride as she could muster while holding smelly garbage and at the end of a political dream.

“My resignation. When I took the oath to put this town first—in all things—I meant it. I don’t see how Close Call can move forward under this dark cloud of rumor and innuendo that surrounds me.”

Emile glanced down at the envelope. He sucked air through his teeth as if he had already downed a hefty breakfast burrito and was still enjoying the parts riding his molars. The toothpick dangling from his lips was entirely for show.

“This what you want?”

She’d handed it to him, hadn’t she? But the time for half-truths and delicacy had come and gone. “No. It’s the furthest thing from what I want.”

Emile nodded, seemingly took forever to process what she had said, then ripped the envelope straight down the middle. A man of few words, he dropped the remnants into his trash bag and moved on to the next offending item of litter on the ground.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, scrambling after him.

“I don’t accept it.”

“You can’t…” She hesitated, stopped short. Could he? She hadn’t exactly run across this mayoral policy before.

“I can, and I did.”

“But the news story last night—”