Something Wilder

Lily wasn’t the only one who was glad she was finally old enough to take on the burden of his family’s land.

He shifted his gaze over her shoulder, and Lily watched Duke’s face as he carried on some silent exchange with Leo. Sometimes Lily thought she barely knew her father; other times she could read him like a book. Duke had no love for Wilder Ranch, but right then Lily could hear his thoughts as if he’d spoken them aloud: That kid doesn’t look like a cowboy.

Because Leo wasn’t a cowboy. He was a college student, a math whiz, a New York City boy who had come to the ranch for a summer job, fallen in love, and upended his life to stay on with her in the off-season. Shy and quiet and thoughtful, he was everything Duke Wilder wasn’t. Only twenty-two, staring at a fifty-year-old man with the local reputation of Indiana Jones and the confidence of Captain Jack Sparrow, Leo Grady didn’t shrink or shift at her side.

“We’ll be fine, Duke,” she said, snapping the moment shut.

“You’ll look after her until I’m back,” Duke commanded, eyes still fixed on Leo, so he missed his daughter’s exasperated grimace.

“I will,” Leo assured him.

“I don’t need looking after,” Lily reminded them both.

Duke reached forward, mussing her dark hair. “Sure you don’t, kid. I left y’a note in the dining hall.”

“Great.” A riddle. A puzzle. Some cipher for her to decode. Her father had raised her on the games he loved, always poking at her like a kid prods a beetle, unable to understand how she ended up so different from him. A wrestling match between resentment and curiosity would ensue until necessity would beat them both, and she’d finally sit down to solve whatever puzzle he’d left for her. It was entirely possible that the note would translate into something asinine like See you later or Don’t eat all the oatmeal cookie dough, but it was just as likely that he’d left some critical piece of information just out of her reach that Lily would require in order to run this place. Everything Lily had ever wanted or needed had always been hidden somewhere complicated, sometimes miles from home, and if she didn’t have the motivation to look, Duke had figured she hadn’t needed it after all.

Maybe today she wouldn’t bother. Maybe she and Duke would finally agree that they didn’t have to love the same things—they didn’t even have to love each other—to coexist. For the first time, that sat fine with her. Maybe Duke would go back to his world, where he hunted artifacts and dug up lost treasure, and Lily would stay at the ranch with her horses and her land and her love and ignore the note on the table forever.

The tension stretched and then snapped when Duke took one last sweeping glance at the lodge, the barn, the rolling hills beyond. His parents had bought this land and raised two boys here—Duke and his brother, Daniel. Daniel had turned it into the Wilder Ranch, living here year-round and welcoming guests each summer until he died two years ago. Lily and Duke kept the business limping along, but it was never his priority and always her dream to be here full-time, to take it over, to bring it back to what it had been in the golden summers of her childhood. Seventy-eight horses and two hundred acres of glimmering Wyoming beauty were her idea of perfection, but Duke resented every single fence on the property like he was a cat in a cage.

Her larger-than-life father fit his cowboy hat on his head and nodded to the two of them. “Well. I’m off.”

There weren’t hugs. Leo and Lily didn’t even step down from the wide porch. They silently watched the long, strong shape of Duke Wilder stride over to his old hulking truck and climb in.

Lily turned to Leo, bouncing on the balls of her feet, joy bubbling up inside her with a force that might shoot her off into the gray-blue sky.

“You ready for this, boss?” he asked.

Lily answered Leo with a kiss she hoped told him the things she sometimes still struggled to say.

She let it all sink in. Right now, everything was exactly right. No one and nothing rushed her past this single, perfect moment. With the dust of Duke’s truck still swirling in his wake, all that mattered was the love at her side and the bejeweled galaxy of land around her. Her galaxy. She took a breath to speak but was caught in a double take at the tender expression on Leo’s face as he looked down at her. “Lovesick City Boy,” all the cowboys had called him from that very first day he met her, five months ago.

Laughing—blissful—Lily cupped his cheek and stretched to kiss him again. “Promise me we’ll be happy here forever.”