The Rancher's Untamed Heart

I smiled at him.

"Do you want me to move in with you?" I asked. "It seems a little fast, and we haven't, well, slept together yet."

He flushed a little.

"I'm just saying, you'd be welcome," he muttered, staring intently at the road.

"Thanks," I said. "I don'

t want to live with a guy in the first year, though, the last time I tried that it didn't go well."

Clint grinned at me.

"Am I still some guy?" he asked. "Is that all I am to you?"

I shrugged. "I care about you, of course, but we don't have any sort of title, do we? You're the guy I'm dating," I said. "I don't know, we haven't really talked about terms, have we?"

"I'd like to be able to say you were my girlfriend," he said, plainly.

"I'd like that too," I admitted. The idea set a happy shiver down my back. "Do you want to be my boyfriend, then?"

He nodded. "Silly words, but I guess they'll do. Even I am not old-fashioned enough to call you my 'best dame.'"

“I suppose I should call my mother and tell her I have a new boyfriend,” I said, rolling my eyes. “She calls me every week to see if I’m finally dating someone again, but I usually dodge her calls. You’d probably never do something like that.”

"What happens when you talk to her?" he asked.

"She tells me about everything I'm doing wrong with my life and tries to convince me to marry the next guy I meet so my eggs don't dry up," I said, laughing a little bitterly.

"That doesn't sound pleasant at all," he said. "No big mystery why you aren't desperate to be around her."

"I thought you were all about family," I said, before I could help myself.

"I am. I'm not an idiot, though. Not all families are good, and you can't tie yourself to one that doesn't treat you right. Brandon's lived in that cabin, off-and-on, since he was fifteen, you know. My parents fixed it up for him, it used to just be a shack," Clint said.

That was definitely new information.

"Brandon's family wasn't good?" I asked.

"Brandon's family wanted him to be something he wasn't. I'm sure you can imagine," Clint said. "He was almost the perfect son, rodeo rider, good at sports, dutiful, respectful - but he wouldn't date girls and give them grandchildren, so they wouldn't get off his back about going to hell and being a real man."

"Ouch," I murmured.

"That didn't sit too well with my folks, even my father," Clint said. "Before Brandon told us he was queer, my father wasn't real accepting about that sort of thing. After he figured out about Brandon, though, he told us a few years later that, sure, it made him uncomfortable, but Brandon was the same good kid that he'd always been, so my father guessed that he should just make his peace with it real quick, and he did."

"Sounds like a loving man," I said. "Your father, I mean, not anyone in Brandon's family."

"He was," Clint said, simply. "He wasn't afraid to change his mind."

“What about your mother?” I asked. “What did she think of Brandon’s announcement?”

Clint laughed.

“She insists that she knew before he did, and she might be right. She was a good woman, old-fashioned, but like my father, she loved Brandon and she decided that if Brandon was queer, being queer couldn’t be all that bad,” he said. “That’s about how simple it was, for her. Even before he was a teenager, he spent more time on our ranch than with his own family. My parents bought me bunk beds, and Brandon always had the top bunk.”

“Sounds like they loved Brandon,” I said.

"They sure did. So, don't think that because I love my family, I think everybody should sit meek as a doormat and let their families run all over them," Clint said.