Billionaire's Escort

Working as a ranch hand really wasn’t a great job; I knew it, my father knew it, and I suspected even the ranch hands knew it. But many of the men we hired were drifters. They were in the process of moving from one place to the next and needed a few weeks of pay to make that happen. Some would stay on for the whole summer, and even fewer would stay on throughout the winter. We paid well; it wasn’t as if we were taking advantage of them. But the work was hard. It was labor intensive and exhausting and I could see it on the men’s faces that morning.

For me, there was a sense of calm that came when I was on the ranch though. Working outside and with the animals was an entirely different world than the corporate one I came from. Even the long days seemed to fly by because I was out and moving around. The sun was on my face, the wind in my hair; nothing seemed all that bad when you had nature on your side.

While I worked in the corporate world, I had days when I felt energized and excited, but I had many more days where I felt totally drained and unable to move forward. The long hours in an office worked my body both physically and mentally. Working that much made it difficult to find friends outside of the office and I certainly didn’t have time to pursue hobbies or relationships much.

The corporate job was what I thought I wanted and needed though. How was I ever going to help my parents financially if I didn’t make a ton of money? Soon the vicious cycle of working long hours and spending my money to keep up appearances started though. Once I started to become concerned about the luxury handbag I was carrying to my meetings, that was when I stopped working my corporate job to help my family. By the time I was carrying an Hermes Birkin into my meetings on Mondays, I had long fallen down the hole that I wanted to avoid so desperately.

After cleaning up breakfast, I made my way out to the horse barn to take care of them. The horses were my pride and joy; they calmed me, and just being near them always made me feel like I was exactly where I was supposed to be in this life. When I was younger, I had begged my father to let me take riding lessons and he refused to allow it. He promised to teach me everything he knew about horses and then I could be in charge of them. But I wasn’t willing to wait and I started saddling the horses up myself and sneaking them out for ride.

Wild horses were my favorite though. They were like children exploring their boundaries and sometimes they would wander near our ranch. In the beginning, my father ignored the wild horses who would come to our property, but soon we had one that just wouldn’t leave. The horse wanted to be part of our group so we kept her and I worked with my father to break her in.

The idea of breaking in a horse seemed like torture to me when my father first explained things. We had to walk her on a lead rope at all times. I couldn’t spend a lot of time petting her or grooming her until she learned how to behave. It didn’t seem fair. But soon my father explained that the reason she had been sticking around the ranch was likely because the other horses had ostracized her. They didn’t want her with them, so it was our job to give her a home; that made so much sense to me.

“This is Buckjoy,” my father said as he held the rope of a wild horse.

“Dad, you can’t keep bringing home wild things and thinking they are going to like you saddling them up.”

“I think Bambi would disagree with you.”

“She was special. We just have a bond, but I was here to train her and show her she was safe. I don’t think it’s going to work like that for all wild horses.”

After my father struggled with training Bambi, I stepped up and offered to give it a try. I was only a teenager, but I felt like the horse liked me and would listen to me. Sure enough, Bambi ended up liking me very much and wanting to be good so she would get praise. That was what I found as a key to bonding with the horses: I had to find a reason for the animal to like me.

Sometimes animals weren’t all that easy to convince that they liked you. Bambi hadn’t really fallen in love with me until I started sneaking her apples before my father would get up. Then she spent the rest of the morning being nice to me in hopes that she would get another apple. I finally started incorporating feeding the horses apples as a way of building up trust with them and it really started to work well.

“Well, you are home again, so try and tame Buckjoy. I need a new horse for myself and I’d like a nice, strong one like him. I’ve been riding out to the river and it’s exhausting the horses we have. I need a wild one that can handle that kind of range.”

“Why are you going to the river?” I asked.

Although, the river was certainly one of the most beautiful aspects of our land. It was nearly ten miles north of the house and not accessible by car unless we used the off-road vehicle. My father had brought me out to the river area several times over the years and the trek up and over the mountains used to scare me to death. But as I got older, I realized that by just slowing down and keeping in control of the horse, I could make it up and over the mountain with relatively no issues.

“I’m thinking of selling the land north of the river. I’ve been going out there to put some fencing up and take photos for a listing. Although my photos have turned out horrible.”

“What? Dad, no. You can’t sell off part of the ranch. I’m here now. I’m going to help make things work. Why would you even consider this?”

“Honey, it’s not just about taking care of the animals anymore. We really don’t have the money to keep this whole place up and running. I think it’s fine to sell off that piece; we hardly use it, only for some occasional cattle running. It will bring in some good money and help keep the rest of the ranch afloat.”

“How about I take a look at the books and see if there are any other options?” I offered. “That land is worth more and more money every year you hold onto it. Perhaps you’d be best to wait a few more years.”

I did have my MBA from Harvard, the least I could do was look at the financials of the ranch and see if there was anything we could be doing better. Running a ranch was a huge undertaking. I didn’t even have to look at the books to know that my father probably hadn’t been keeping track of things as closely as he needed to be.

In order to run a successful business of any kind, there had to be very close monitoring of the financials. Even the smallest of mistakes could cost a business their profits. I hadn’t gotten my chance to fully run the financials for a business yet, but I had run them for the marketing division of my company. Not only did I cut back in unneeded expenses, but my department made twice as much as we had been predicted to do.

The problem with running a very efficient group of people was that my organization started to think they didn’t need me anymore. They believed the high functioning staff that worked for me could handle all the jobs that I had done. I wasn’t sure they would be as good as me.

But I wasn’t sure I had the energy to train Buckjoy. He was a big horse and full of energy and I was emotionally exhausted from just losing my job. I didn’t have that passion for the horses yet, but I did have a passion for my father. I would do anything for him, and if that meant training a wild horse, I’d give it my best shot and I knew that was exactly what my father wanted me to do.

“Okay,” he said reluctantly. “But you also need to train Buckjoy for me.”

“Deal.”

I was surprised he had agreed to let me look at the books. I had offered once before while I was in college and my father had vehemently denied my offer. My father was a proud man and I’m sure he didn’t want to admit defeat when it came to his ranch. I knew that by agreeing to allow me to look at his books, my father was agreeing that his ranch wasn’t doing well at all. It took a lot of insight for my father to finally be at a place where he truly understood the financial peril the ranch was in.

Operating a ranch had been a very lucrative endeavor as I was growing up, or so it seemed from where I was looking in on things. We always had a bustling group of ranch hands and even two or three men who had stayed on for many years. In his prime, my father had m

anaged the men himself, but in recent years, he had the man with the most seniority in charge of the other men.

Currently we only had one supervisor over the ranch hands, Walter, and one assistant to him, Forest. Walter was getting ready to leave and I didn’t know much about Forest at all. He was relatively new to me. I had heard of him, but he hadn’t been at the ranch when I came home over Christmas. But that was how things were going lately: the good guys ended up leaving and moving on to larger ranches that were operated by big conglomerates. The larger ranches typically had better hours for about the same pay, so I couldn’t blame them for wanting to move on.