The Charmer in Chaps

by Julia London

  “We mined limestone until we used all that up. We drilled for oil until that was gone. We ran cattle until we’d overgrazed it. A lot of our land just sits now. Look at the wildflowers over there,” he said, motioning to a field of bluebonnets. “See how they aren’t quite as vibrant or as thick as you see in other places? The soil is depleted.”

  Ella looked at the field of bluebonnets. “I see,” she said thoughtfully.

  What Luca feared, he told her, was a move toward more development. What he loved about being the son of a rancher was the land. How he and his best friend, Brandon, who shared his love, had begun to look at ways to conserve something of what both their families had. He told her about the five hundred acres Brandon had bought for the sole purpose of seeing if they could revive it, but how they’d realized it was almost too small to really affect a change in an entire ecosystem. He told her how he’d been talking to Brandon about something a little different since his father had died.

  “Different how?” she asked.

  “My dad left me some land,” Luca said. “Land that surrounds your house and includes this spring, to be precise. There is enough land here to test all the theories that Brandon and I have wanted to test. And my interest has only intensified.”

  “How much land did he leave you?” she asked curiously.

  “Two thousand acres. Land south of the river, depleted of resources, too remote to be of use to anyone.”

  “But . . . why did he leave you depleted land?” she asked, her brow furrowing.

  Luca told her about his dad’s will, how he’d left something to all of his kids, but no one seemed to give much thought to the used-up, dried-up land he’d left for Luca. “No one in my family expects me to do anything they would find productive, like running cattle or selling the mineral rights or drilling for oil or gas, you know? To them, it’s just barren land. But to me, it’s a canvas.”

  He mentioned the painting in his bedroom at the ranch. He told her how he had longed for the land in that painting, to have what God had left here, appreciated first by the Indians, then the French and the Spaniards, then the Texans. He told her that when he’d learned his dad had left him this land, the worst they had, he’d felt despondent. “I didn’t get it at first,” he said. “I thought, this is what my dad put aside for me in case he died unexpectedly? This was his legacy to me? I get that he didn’t have time to work out the finer details, but obviously he’d put some thought into it, and this is what he’d come up with? I thought maybe I’d offended him. Or disappointed him.”

  “That can’t be true,” Ella said.

  Luca gave her a bitter laugh. “Oh, but it can.” He realized he was saying things aloud to Ella that he’d never said to anyone else. Not even his twin. It felt good to get some of these feelings off his chest. “But then it hit me, Ella. One day I was staring at the painting. I’ve seen it a thousand times, but that morning, something suddenly clicked. I got it. Dad left me this land so I could try my hand at conservation like I’d been talking about since I knew what conservation was. He left me my shot.”

  Ella shook her head. “But the Prince ranch is so big. Couldn’t you have conserved a piece of it before?”

  Luca shook his head. It was difficult to explain how the Prince family thought, how it had been ingrained since they were children that the land was everything. It was their God, their savior, their only way. Every inch was supposed to make money. Not to mention, he wasn’t able to follow through with any plans because he couldn’t read.

  “This has been my interest for a long time, but my brother Nick is the one who runs the ranch, not me. And every time I brought up the idea of conserving the land, at least some of it, the idea was too vague, and my parents—well, my mother—thought it was half-baked.”

  “Oh,” she said, sounding surprised.

  “I get it,” he said with a shrug. “Ranching runs through our DNA. It’s knitted into our membranes. I know how they think because I think that way, too. But I can see other possibilities. I remember a class I had in high school. It was for ranch kids, sort of like a 4-H class, but one particular lecture was about conservation. It was the first time I heard actual words put to the types of things I was feeling about our land. So I went home and told my folks that we should conserve.” He laughed, remembering the skinny, freckle-faced kid. “I think I actually said, ‘We should be good stewards to nature,’ because I’d heard the teacher say it.”

  Ella laughed. “And what did they say?”

  “Well, my grandmother said it was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard.” Luca laughed, remembering his grandmother in her easy chair, her white Keds on the upraised footrest. “I asked, ‘Why is it dumb, Grandma? Do you know how many cows we’d have to put on the whole ranch to make it economically viable?’ or something like that, and she said, ‘Well, it sure won’t be economically viable with a bunch of tree-huggers dancing around the Maypole out there.’”

  “Ah, okay.” Ella nodded. “I see.”

  He smiled at her. “Right? But still, I kept at it for a couple of weeks. I tried to make the point that we could turn some of the land back to its natural state, and lease it for hunting or, I don’t know, let people just see and breathe and experience what God gave us before we ruined it. My mother wasn’t having it. She said, ‘It’s supposed to look like a ranch. Maybe God gave it to us so we could turn it into the wealthiest ranch in Texas and not a fifth-grade science project.’” Luca could still picture that evening, all of them sitting around the dinner table. His grandmother had snickered and said, I didn’t have a fifth grade. We all went to school in that little one-room schoolhouse out on Gonzalez Road until they found out the school superintendent was having an affair with the pastor’s wife. Talk about an uproar.

  He could picture his mother, too, in her seat, holding her wineglass up, like she was contemplating hurling it against the wall. Dolly? Could we please save the history of schoolhouse adultery for another time? I am trying to talk some sense into my son.

  Ella winced. “No one stood up for you?”

  He shook his head. His dad had calmly carried on with his dinner without saying much, just sopping up the gravy on his plate with biscuits. “My dad told me that it cost too much money to conserve big chunks of land.” He’d always believed his father had sided with his mother. Until his death. Until he realized his dad had left him this land to turn back to its natural state.

  Ella laughed. “How can it cost money to conserve?”

  “To do it right would require clearing out nonnative species. Planting native grasses and shrubs to take their place. Cleaning out the silt from waterways and building berms to stop erosion. For two thousand acres, that doesn’t come cheap.”

  “So are you going to do it?” Ella asked. “Are you going to . . . what’s the word? Conserve it?”

  “I want to. But what I want to do requires more than desire. It requires a lot of money and a lot of buy-in. Brandon and I were planning a fund-raiser to do this on the acreage he bought. But this is a better place for it. We have the spring; we have the grassland and the hills here. We’ll need even more money, but we’re going to raise it.”

  “You’re going to ask your friends to donate?” she asked, confused.

  “Yes, but we’re really targeting government agencies that are vested in the environment. And university types that study environmental change and ecological evolution. We’re looking for grants and partnerships with university learning labs. Honestly, I’m not sure what all. I’ve still got some learning to do.”

  Ella looked out over the spring, to the land beyond.

  “Imagine a flock of egrets and ducks over there,” he said, motioning across the pond. “A healthy stand of cattails and water willows, ferns and water clover. Imagine a rabble of butterflies and wildflowers so thick that it feels like carpet under your feet.”

  She squinted.

  �
�You probably think I’m crazy,” Luca said. He didn’t care, really—he was used to it.

  “I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you’re lucky.”

  “Right,” he said with a snort. “Lucky Luca Prince with all that money to throw away—”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Ella said. “You’re lucky you have a dream. A lot of people don’t. But you do, and it’s a clear dream.”

  He glanced at her, surprised. Her praise swelled in his chest a little—he hadn’t realized until now how much he’d wanted her to understand him. “Thanks,” he said appreciatively. “But I’ve talked enough. What’s your dream?”

  “Mine?” She laughed. “It’s different for me. My whole life has been about survival— Hey!” she said suddenly, and sat up. “There are my horses!”

  Her survival? Luca wanted to know more about that but looked in the direction she was pointing. The horses, a little smaller and shaggier than those at the ranch, looked at them from across the spring before dipping their heads to drink. “Mustangs,” he said. “They’re feral.”

  Ella gasped. “What?”

  He chuckled at her surprise. “Yep, those are wild horses.”

  “No way!” She clasped her hands together as if trying to contain her astonishment in a manner he found utterly charming. “No, Luca, they can’t be. They come up to my fence every morning!”

  “Sure they do. You’re offering them a full buffet.”

  “Wait, wait,” she said, and scrambled to her feet. When she did, the three horses turned skittish and galloped away. “But . . . how can you be sure?”

  “Have you seen a brand on them?” he asked, coming to his feet, too.

  She shook her head as the horses disappeared into the woods.

  “I’ve seen them around. You can tell by looking at them. Their hooves are untrimmed, and they have thicker winter coats than horses who wear blankets or are stabled and brushed regularly.”

  “But wild horses? How is that even possible in this day and age?”

  “Easy,” he said. “Bad storms displace livestock. Three Rivers is thousands of acres. On a spread as big as ours, animals can get lost and stay lost, and then they breed and produce feral foals.”

  “I’ve been putting out oats for wild horses?”

  “Looks like,” he said, grinning. “I’ll let my brother know. He’ll send some ranch hands down to round them up.”

  “No!” she cried, looking alarmed. “What will he do with them?”

  Luca laughed. “He’s not going to send them to the glue factory, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’ll break them.”

  Ella gasped.

  “Domesticate them,” he amended. “Better?”

  “Hardly! They clearly like being free.”

  “Believe me—they would like to be fed on the regular, too. They’d like a farrier to trim their hooves. They would love a good brushing. It’s a good thing.” He held out his hand to her. “We should go back. But it’s going to be tough to climb up that path in rubber boots.”

  She looked at the trail, then at his hand. She slipped her hand into his. “Just to get up the path,” she said.

  “Goes without saying. I wouldn’t think of holding your hand a moment past the top. I’d rather chop off my own hand than hold yours a moment longer than necessary.”

  “Okay, then.” She smiled.

  But when they reached the top of the path, she did not pull her hand from his, and he did not let go of hers. They walked down the two tracks, this time on the same side of the grass and weeds, hand in hand. “I don’t know about this hand-holding business,” Ella said. “It feels dangerously close to teetering on a thing.”

  “God, you must be beside yourself,” he agreed. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m thinking about it.” She glanced up at him, and her eyes were sparkling in the sun. “I could yank my hand free, but you’d probably get your feelings hurt.”

  “You could ease it out,” he suggested. “Less room for interpretation.”

  “You could let go and save me the trouble,” she suggested.

  “Yeah, but that’s the difference between you and me, Ella. I don’t want to let go.” He squeezed her hand.

  And Ella squeezed back. And then she stopped walking, forcing him to stop, too. She turned toward him and glanced up, still holding his hand.

  He eyed her warily. “Why do I feel something’s about to happen that I’m not going to like?” he mused.

  “Luca . . . I meant it. I’m not going to fall for you,” she said.

  “Okay, now you’re just giving me a complex. I know, Ella, because you’ve already said it at least a dozen times.”

  “So whatever happens doesn’t mean anything.”

  For Chrissakes, she made this hard. “It’s just a hand—”

  Ella caught him completely off guard. She suddenly threw her free arm around his neck, rose up on her toes, and kissed him. Or rather, she briefly pressed her lips to his, but rather earnestly, and then just as suddenly fell away from him and stared, wide-eyed. She had managed to surprise even herself.

  But she’d only confused the hell out of him. “What the hell was that?” he demanded.

  “That . . . that was impetuous,” she said breathlessly.

  He put his hands on his waist and stared down at her spring blue eyes. “So what . . . are you falling or not? Because a big bus of mixed signals just pulled up at my house, and I am more of the straightforward signals kind of guy.”

  “Not falling,” she said, still breathless. “I just needed to get that off my chest.”

  For the first time since meeting her on that dusty county road, Luca had the clear sense that this woman could very well be the death of him. No woman had ever befuddled him quite like she was doing. He didn’t know what to do with her. But he knew one thing—if he needed to kiss someone, it wouldn’t have gone down like that. “Well, baby, the only thing I can say is, if you’re going to get something off your chest, get it off your chest,” he said adamantly, and slipped his arm around her waist, yanked her into his body, knocked the sun hat off her head, and by God, he kissed her. None of this plant-one-and-get-out business. She was going to get a kiss that would hold her for the next twelve years if he had anything to do with it. He cupped her face, angled her head, and brushed his lips against hers. Just barely at first, just enough to let her know she had lit a fire.

  Her lips parted. She grabbed his arm and dug her fingers into his flesh as if she thought he might let go of her and she would fall.

  “You might want to close your eyes for this,” he said, and brushed her lips with his again.

  “I don’t know if I can,” she whispered to his mouth.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, and kissed her again, only this time, a little more urgently, his tongue slipping into her mouth. Her lips were velvety soft, and the touch of her tongue galvanized him and lit him up.

  His fingers spread across her face and into her hair as the wave of lust and desire began to slink through him and curve around his heart, his lungs, his groin. It took a moment for Ella to see where he was going, but she caught on and began to respond, her tongue tangling with his, her free hand moving up his chest to his shoulder.

  Luca’s heart was thudding in his chest—her mouth sped him past all the usual vague thoughts about what’s next. He was reacting from instinct, from a primitive place of desire. He pulled her into him, and she pressed against him, and his fingers tangled in her hair, and he could smell that faint scent of roses, and she felt so perfectly soft and ripe against him, and he was the one falling. He was falling over the edge, tumbling headlong into this want.

  And then, with a sudden gasp as if she’d just broken the surface of the pool, Ella leaned back away from him and ended that kiss. It was agonizing—fire was burning through Luca’s veins and
pooling in his groin, and he wanted desperately to be in her, be with her. No one else, just her, out here on his land. He wanted her, and that wall Ella was so adept at putting up, that distance she would not let him cross, that mystery as to why, excited him to an unreasonable, indefensible degree.

  “Did you fall?” he asked, hearing that he, too, was a little breathless.

  “No,” she said, her voice full of wonder. “But I almost did. I stopped just in the nick of time.”

  “Ella—”

  She dipped down unsteadily to pick up her hat, which she stuffed onto her head. “Thanks for letting me get that off my chest,” she said, and patted his chest. Her eyes were glittering at him, her smile luminescent.

  Luca sighed.

  Her smile deepened.

  “Well, now you’ve gone and presented me with a problem. You’re not going to fall, but I damn sure am.”

  Her smile was now beaming. “Really?”

  He snorted. “Yes, Ella, really.”

  She laughed.

  “Don’t get cocky on me,” he warned her.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.” She gave him a playful shove. “You have to go now.”

  “Let me guess—you’re busy,” he drawled.

  “So busy,” she said as they began to walk again. “I’m alphabetizing my salt and pepper today.”

  He grinned, and with a shake of his head he put his arm around her shoulders. “You’re going to kill me, Ella Kendall.”

  She laughed, but he meant it. He could not recall a time he’d ever wanted a woman like he wanted Ella and didn’t get his way.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Buddy was the one who took it the hardest when Luca left, chasing after his truck up the road for a time, then trotting dejectedly back to the house. Ella watched until they couldn’t see the truck anymore. She wasn’t even annoyed that he apparently had a nice big truck and a silent-but-deadly Sombra. Usually, she would have added that information to the con column, because no one that well-off should be hanging out with someone as poor as her.