Claiming The Cowboy (Meier Ranch Brothers 3)

“Saw it.”

“And?”

He shifted the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “It’ll blow over.”

“But the legalities alone…”

“Not if I don’t do a damned thing.”

Maybe it was the wind curling in her ears or the fact that her head felt like a melon dropped from atop the clock tower, after the punishing night of stress and tears. She understood nothing.

“What are you saying?”

“Way I figure it, with the fire and all, I figure there’s plenty of blame to go around. Now, we could all get into a legal battle that would stretch out for a decade. Or we could leave things in the past, where they belong.” Emile reached for a child’s lost shoe and shoved it in his bag. “Tell Meier he can keep the property. One condition.”

Now she was way beyond understanding.

“What’s that?”

“Chase takes me on as a silent investor. I figure most of his capital is tied up in inventory. ’Bout damned time we put this feud to rest.”

That dissolved any potential property dispute, but it didn’t change the fact that she’d discovered something important about her municipality and done nothing. “What about the scandal?”

“From where I’m standing, no more an issue than when the diner stopped serving a short stack with their egg-and-bacon special.”

How small town. Waffle Shack over whistle-stop politics any day.

Emile put the issue to rest by moving on. Three more items of trash in, he hesitated, glanced back.

“You’re the best mayor this town has ever seen. We ain’t about to lose you over something that’s already settled over a hundred and fifty years ago. Let us handle things at city hall. Put out a statement saying that I knew the history all along and you suppressed nothing. Take a day or two, hear?”

Gretchen nodded.

Emile took the trash bag from her hand and motioned for her to get going with a wag of his chin.

Hands empty, she brushed them together and looked around. The curtain of night had peeled back to reveal the eastern sky, the start of a new day that couldn’t possibly be any worse than the previous one. She hadn’t taken a single day off since being elected. Her first thought wasn’t to visit her mother; that would be moving back. Emile had christened this a new day. New narrative, new friendships, new possibilities.

She spotted Wes taking down the scaffolding of the makeshift stage. Crossing the field, she steeled herself against glances, whispers, something to indicate the town had lost faith in their leader. Aside from a few “Morning, mayor” greetings, everything was business

as usual. She explained it away as the rooster crowd: to bed before news time, up with the rooster. None the wiser.

Wes slowed his work when she drew near. She was fully aware that the secret she’d kept hadn’t only impacted Chase—the entire Meier clan deserved better. With dirty hands, muddy boots, and eyelids as swollen as grapes, it was hard to put on her mayoral face, so she aimed for Gretchen instead.

“I want to apologize, Wes. To your whole family. I should have come to you and your brothers the moment I learned there was a discrepancy about the original parcel of land. I was wrong. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

Wes nodded. “Thank you.”

“I was also hoping you can tell me where Chase is. He hasn’t picked up one of my calls. I’ve left him messages and apologized sixteen ways to Sunday, so I feel pretty sure he won’t pick up now, when I need to tell him that Emile Pickford wants to outright give him the land on Main and put things to rest between your families for good. We all think the distillery’s a pretty good idea, and we want him to come back.”

Wes’s gaze scattered about, no doubt processing a hundred fifty years of bad juju coming to its peaceful conclusion. When the moment stretched long, his wife, Livie, joined them, gave him a sweet little rub on his shoulder, and answered for him.

“Chase said something about a rodeo in Corpus Christi. Some bull named Stalin’s Assassin. We don’t know much else. We haven’t heard from him since he packed up and headed out yesterday.”

Had Gretchen not smelled like a minor offender in ankle cuffs and an orange jumpsuit on the side of a broiling Texas highway, she would have hugged Livie. She thanked her, profusely, rather embarrassingly—so awkward when she wasn’t being mayor, but she was trying.

As Gretchen, there was so much to do today. A shower. A suitcase filled with enough clothes for a day to two, as Emile had said, and something fitting for a rodeo. And of course, she had to gas up the Prius. Corpus Christi was nearly two hundred miles from Close Call. There was no way she was running out of fuel, today of all days.

She bolted across the open field to her car, thankful—for once—she wasn’t in heels.