Claiming The Cowboy (Meier Ranch Brothers 3)

family hawking her cosmetic wares to a group of retired women over bear claws; Pastor Richards from the Cowboy Church wearing his Serminator T-shirt; and Mary Beth Peal, who treated gossip as an Olympic sport. Nearly all of them glanced in the direction of their mayor in a spirited discourse.

“Making this harder on me will only make me more determined.” Chase had straightened his spine, sat tall, introduced an unflinching stare to their conversation.

“Why is this so important to you? Why my town?” Gretchen hated how she sounded—quiet, sensitized, defensive, not at all the ruthless, trial-ready attorney she was once projected to be. Her hometown had made her soft.

“Because this is my home, too. I want people to know about it, to see how special it is.” He backed off his bull-busting tone, as if that was the way of it—eight seconds, hot and heavy, all in, then nothing but retreat. “And I need something besides rodeoing, or I’ll climb into that chute until a bull puts me six feet under.”

His admission pumped the brakes on her rapid-fire response—that they wanted different things but for the same reason and why couldn’t they table this discussion until she had more time to deal with it—preferably after the largest event the town had ever produced. Directness, she supposed, was a byproduct of danger. No time for half-truths. No hedging honesty for a day that may not come. She became aware of features beyond his window dressing of handsome: the slight asymmetry to his nose, one scar across his right lid that interfered with his dark eyebrow and another hidden beneath the strong line of his jaw, roughly the shape of Idaho. Somehow, she felt like a confidence had passed between them—she, a semi-unhealthy possessiveness for this town; he, an unapologetic confession that he didn’t know who he was beyond the rodeo.

Gretchen ripped a corner from the newspaper, dug out a pen from her bag, and wrote the first and last names of the other council members. She pushed it across the table to him.

He didn’t look at the paper right away; his gaze trickled down only after he had captured hers, eight seconds, all in, as if he was trying to hold on long enough to puzzle through her concessions, then nothing but retreat. When he finally read the list, he smiled broad enough to dimple.

Her nerves went grassroots uprising. “What?”

“You said it was a majority vote?”

“About most issues.”

“Rezoning decisions?”

“Yes.”

Good gracious, but his grin stretched wider than his buckle.

Uh oh. Gretchen mustered whatever bravado hadn’t skedaddled out of the bakery and blown away up the street. “You’re wasting your energy. Close Call will never allow that kind of business on Main.”

Chase took his time standing, as if large-scale movements required him to first catalog every past bone fracture. Likely, he was used to peacocking through a room.

“We’ll see about that, Mayor. Enjoy your…” His tongue emerged, rather suggestively, to lick the corner of his mouth.

Her slightly feminist streak, which had solidified while battling her way through sexism in law, rallied a tenseness to her muscles until he brushed his index finger across his chin. Reflexively, her hand mirrored his and met with an ugly smear of sticky substance beneath her lips, present and accounted for throughout the duration of their debate.

This time, her attention to the mess on her face was nothing less than aggressive.

Chase left the bakery, but not before he signed a napkin autograph for Mary Beth Peal’s unattached daughter. The last smile of his appearance he reserved for Gretchen.

And she became convinced that someone had swapped her High Plains Sifter donut for The Good, The Bad, and The Sprinkled Lusty.

Yep. Seven seconds too long.

2

Chase wasted no time driving out to Yancy Roesen’s property. Guy had a coveted twelve hundred acres bisected by a little-known tributary of the Brazos that kept his cattle ranch an Eden during frequent stretches of Texas drought. He had raised eight children, bred Brahmans for surly disposition, and tossed a handful of eager Close Call kids into the preteen riding circuit after his own son, Tate, begged him to outfit a pen with all manner of homemade contraptions designed to raise boys to men on the back of a bull.

None were as successful as Chase. Not by a long shot. As Chase’s entertainment stock rose and he chatted up the bulls out of Yancy’s genetic pool, Roesen-bred bovines became coveted, the standard for beastly superiority. The bull that broke Chase’s clavicle and slashed his eye socket brought Yancy a tidy breeding prize of a quarter-million dollars. So yeah, his city council vote? Low-hanging fruit.

Unlike the fiery redhead who rode mental shotgun all the way out of town. He couldn’t spare one give-a-damn for most people in authority save those who had earned his respect. Politicians landed on his regard meter somewhere between criminals and Pickfords, who made their money off ranchers’ sweat and held every lien in Close Call. These elected civil servants diddled the system, hid behind pretense, and overreached their power. Chase had been invited to enough parties at the elite’s million-dollar penthouses—usually senators with plastic wives who couldn’t keep their hands from roaming his pockets, searching for their lost promiscuity—to know they were all the same, to varying degrees.

Gretchen de Havilland was a slippery combination of down-home sensibilities and unexpected beauty. The forgettable valedictorian had left Close Call for the Ivy League and returned with toothpaste-commercial teeth, a lawyer’s talent for using complicated words, and a pencil-skirted power suit with heels that could bust balls. His type as of never, but after absorbing her sophistication for the better part of ten minutes, he knew the way around her kind of challenge. Chase wasn’t taking sex out of his arsenal.

At the instruction of Yancy’s better half—and her insistence he roam the grounds with an icy glass of sweet tea—Chase located his mentor indulging an aged longhorn with a handful of pellets and a neck rub. It was a side to rodeoing Chase rarely saw. After bulls got on in years, they were retired and cherished. Part of the ranch family in which they were reared. Atonement, maybe, for all those rides where the animal’s testicles were cinched tight enough to make him lash out. Chase recognized the grizzled old bull as Boot Knocker. Took out a rider or two in his day. Now, his eyes blinked lazily like a stroked kitten in the sunshine.

“Maude know you get this friendly with the livestock?” Chase teased.

“Why she won’t let me raise sheep,” Yancy said, his crusty old wit not missing a beat. Immediately, he went to Chase with one of those aggressive knuckle-crushing old-dude handshakes that telegraphed fondness. “The hell you doin’ in these parts?”

“Taking some time off. Nice to have a break without an injury.”