The Virgin Next Door (Stud Ranch)

Jeremiah slapped him upside the back of the head.

“What?” Liam said. “Soon they aren’t going to need any of us around because they’ll have their own labor force.”

Mack came forward and landed a kiss on Mel’s cheek. “Congratulations, you two.”

“Yeah, congrats,” Jeremiah said, joining Mack’s side and reaching out to give Mel a hug.

“Thanks.” Xavier was grinning so wide it all but transformed his face. The burned half didn’t seem nearly so menacing when he smiled like that.

“It does mean that I won’t be able to compete in the Extreme Horse Makeover competition this summer, though.”

“The ranch signed up for three spots,” Xavier said, his gaze moving over all of them, even Calla who was the only one already seated. “Mack and Liam are taking two, but there’s a spot for one more if anyone’s interested in the third.”

Calla’s heart leapt in her chest. She’d wanted to do the horse makeover challenge ever since she’d first heard of it. One hundred wild mustangs the BLM had rounded up were divvied up among volunteers who then had one hundred days to break and tame the horses. There was a competition at the end of the hundred days to see who’d trained their horse the best. Along with cash prizes. Serious cash prizes. Last year the winner got a hundred thousand dollars.

Plus it was for a good cause—the horses were auctioned so people could bid on them to give them a home.

Calla watched as Jeremiah and Nicholas looked at each other. But mainly Calla’s mind was stuck on the cash prizes. With a hundred thousand dollars, she could start over. Buy herself a patch of land. Not a big one, sure. But still something she could call her own. Maybe get a loan and set up a little boarding and training place like Chris Mendoza had. Plenty folks were being forced to downsize and needed places to board their animals. She could—

“I’m still too busy with my online classes,” Jeremiah said. Calla’s eyes jerked back to the table. Damn, she was putting the cart before the horse. There was every chance one of these guys would want to snatch up the spot.

Nicholas shook his head. “Not this year.”

“What about you, Cal?” Xavier asked. “It’s fine if you don’t want to take on too much since you just got here—”

“I’d love to,” Calla cut in before he even finished his sentence. Then she felt her cheeks heat. “I mean, if no one else wants the spot, that is.”

Jeremiah just held up his hands. “Like I said, I’m too busy.”

[Nicholas nodded. “I’m out too.”]

“Looks like you’re on deck then, Cal,” Xavier said. “We head out to pick up the mustangs after breakfast, so eat up. Only one of the trailers is hooked up and we need to be there by three.”

Calla stared down at her plate. The excitement tingling in her chest felt so foreign. It had been years since she’d competed and almost as long since she’d had a new horse to train. She’d wanted to set up one of her dad’s barns as a boarding and training stable. But like all the other options Calla had raised as ways to bring in more income on the ranch, Dad had vetoed the idea.

After all, keeping the land as just a cattle ranch had been good enough for his parents and grandparents and he wasn’t going to go and ‘reinvent the wheel.’ Lord how many times had he stubbornly kept to that line? No matter how hard Calla tried to convince him they had to join the twenty-first century and accept that cattle ranching couldn’t go on as it always had. The land couldn’t take it.

But trying to get her dad to embrace sustainable ranching was like trying to convince an atheist there was a God—he wasn’t willing to even consider it and he’d only mock her when she tried. He wouldn’t have some green cowboy ranching his lands. He refused to hear her out about how they could be as much as tripling their profits if he would just get his head out of his ass. They could have at least tried some of the land management and revitalization programs that had turned some rancher’s fortunes around.

But then it was too late and they lost it all.

“Cal. Calla.”

Calla jerked her head up to Mel calling her name. “You want a waffle?” She gestured toward Calla’s untouched eggs. “If you don’t grab one now, believe me, there won’t be any left.”

Calla nodded and started to stand up but Mel just waved her back. “I got it.” She plopped two waffles on her plate and then came over and slid one off onto Calla’s.

“Thanks.”

“No problem,” Mel smiled. “We girls gotta stick together.” She sat down beside Calla.

Liam plopped his plate on the other side of her, hiking up one lanky leg to straddle the bench seat, body turned toward Calla.