Tempting the Rancher: Meier Ranch Brothers Book One

by North, Leslie

  She had known it would happen. To the deepest cell in her body, she knew he would hurt. Nat lived life like he was a china cabinet: hardwood and sturdy on the outside; inside, filled with the fragile things in life—porcelain hearts and feelings—taken out on special occasions and polished but rarely ever enjoyed. What January hadn’t counted on was feeling like a broken dish herself.

  “J-Rose? You in there?” her mother called from outside the trailer.

  January untangled herself from the material, grabbed her iced tea, and went to the door. Her mother exited one of the ranch’s old trucks. A bright overnight delivery envelope in her grip stood out in stark contrast to her dusty gray mechanic hands.

  “Driver delivered this to the house. Thought it might be important. Last time one of those trucks drove all the way out here, the boys’ mother had signed away ownership of the ranch.”

  “Who’s it from?”

  A silly question. The agency sent trackable paperwork filled with legalese contracts that released them from all liability should you, say, fall in a river in Kenya and get eaten by crocodiles. The delivery was an assignment. Quite possibly the assignment. The timing was right, the season a prime window to get her into elevated terrain before winter.

  Mona met her on the trailer steps, offered her the delivery.

  An odd flutter—not entirely unpleasant but decidedly foreign—meandered through January’s belly. Her stomach hardened, like an overturned mason jar that had trapped a moth, oblivious to losses greater than freedom. She set her tea on the step.

  “Well? Aren’t you going to open it?” Her mother, used to prodding livestock, had no issue prodding her daughter past this pivotal moment.

  January’s gaze drifted to the return address. Sure enough, the agency.

  “It’s my next assignment.”

  “Oh. Well, let’s hear it.”

  To say notes of disappointment tripped through her mother’s twang was an understatement. January recognized it because she felt it, too: late nights when Mona worked on some machine part at the table while January told her everything she could remember about the places she’d been; their mutual obsession for ice cream that had them meeting at the fridge at three in the morning; and last night, when January’s tears over Nat flowed faster than her mother’s special-reserve peach bourbon.

  Mona crawled up on the trailer steps. January sank beside her and opened the envelope.

  Double-indented on the cover page, in bold type, the words: Tsum Valley, Gorkha, Nepal.

  Beside her, Mona allowed several heartbeats to pass before she celebrated with a subdued hoot and a maudlin holler. “Can’t say as I know where the hell that is, but I know it’s what you wanted.”

  Wanted.

  Want? Well, that was an entirely different matter.

  Her gaze tracked lower on the page. The reporting date was in red. “Four days.”

  “Don’t give you much time, do they?” said Mona.

  “Letter is dated last week.”

  A million details flooded her brain. She had to call the agency travel rep to get a flight booked and email her updated immunization record and file her work plan and the name of her contact with the nearest embassy and pack—God, it would be winter, and her boots weren’t warm enough—when all she really wanted to do was crawl back into the trailer and finish the curtains for Nat’s surprise.

  What the hell was wrong with her? She should want to run through her mother’s guinea fowls, scattering them with all her dancing and carrying on. At the very least, she should want to move. Work travelers sat on waiting lists for years to draw dream places like Nepal. She wanted peace and Zen-like serenity and prayer flags and rickshaws and all the things that promised complete detachment and a life-altering adventure. But she also wanted Nat, and the two were mutually exclusive. As much as he said he would give it all up, that would be like asking the sun not to rise. His light was here.

  January remembered what Nat had told her: Agnes is more your mother than me. She had never confided in her mother before, but if Mona gave advice like the kind January read in the column, January had waited twenty-eight years too long to ask.

  “What made dad want to leave? I mean, why weren’t we enough?”

  Mona inhaled deeply and looked out over the pasture. “When we first met, he was like a cool drink of water on a hot day, better than any high found in hand-rolled paper or at the bottom of a bottle. He had this restless curiosity that was always there, at the edges of everything we did together…” She gave a gentle shoulder bump to January. “Even parenting. Being out of his element was his element. It was a part of him I accepted in exchange for the most exhilarating love I had ever known.”

  “I’m afraid that’s who I am for Nat.”

  Mona’s expression squeezed into a maternal, poor-dear smile. January wasn’t sure if it was a poor-dear-you’re-just-like-him smile or a poor-dear-you’re-deluded smile.

  “Your father ran from a childhood of pain. His father—your grandfather—abused every substance he could get his hands on and ran into trouble with the law, which is why you probably don’t have many memories of him. To deal with that, your grandmother began another life, had more children, pretended her first life—and son—didn’t exist.”

  January tucked her hair behind her ear and watched sweat trickle down her glass. Her father’s past had always been weak tea to her—diluted, mostly sweet, because who wants to tell a little girl her grandparents were messed up?

  “J-Rose, your father told lies to himself, created stories about how he wanted to remember his past, not how it had been. And he believed them. After a while, I couldn’t believe in him anymore. His wanderlust came from pain. But yours? Well, I’d like to think you got the best of him.”

  January’s awareness split, like the part of her who had always believed her father, who still wanted to believe, scooted beside her, and the truth left her behind inside a cavernous shell.

  Her mother took her hand and squeezed.

  “This world needs fearless people,” said Mona. “People who take a hard look at their own biases and limitations and have the courage to move past them. Just be careful that you don’t get to the end of your life, alone, and have to create stories about how it had been.”

  January’s throat tightened. She squeezed Mona’s hand back. A million things filled her brain, but all January wanted was to pass time with the woman beside her. A woman she never really took the time to know, distracted as she was by the noise and the fanfare of her father.

  “I should clean up for my date tonight with Harlan. Man’s been asking me out for five years. Then you come in, wanting some fix-it man favors, and I’m stuck in my heels and Sunday best going for ribeye over in Hickory, trying not to notice his teeth slipping in and out when he chews.”

  January giggled. “Nat’s worth it. Have you seen it, yet? It’s almost finished.”

  “I’ll get over there after the sale.”

  After January was on a plane to Bangkok, her second of three flights. The thought turned the tea in her stomach sour.

  “I’m sure it’s special. Everything you touch seems to head that direction.” Mona’s direction sounded more like die-rection.

  “Thanks, Mom.” January clenched her into a side-embrace.

  “You’re welcome.” Mona’s cheekbones lifted on a grin. After one of those great Southern hugs that zinged all the way to the toes, her mother stood and made her way into the trailer. Her voice drifted back to January as she pulled a swig of drink past her lips.

  “But if you tell me you need plumbing for something, you’re out of luck. Oswald Graf squeezes a quarter so tight the eagle screams, and his ears look like the open doors to a Buick.”

  Tea sprayed all over Mona’s geraniums.

  * * *

  Nat whipped into a choice parking spot in front of What the Hay feed store, the only name Close Call’s city council would approve after the Marin Missionary Baptist Church came to blows with the sto
re owner—once an opening comedy act for Lyle Lovett—who had originally named it Roll in the Hay. Locals took to the old name. Even came up in a Google search that way. After a while, the preacher moved his righteous crusade on to the Lord of the Wings chicken place over on Birch Street.

  The feed store was also the most reliable place to ship packages.

  His gaze fell to the passenger riding shotgun: a fat, manila envelope addressed to his college professor. The first hundred pages of his manuscript. Sure, finishing the damned thing last night was a high in itself. But a crazy-impulsive rush came as he typed out a cover letter and sealed it up, not unlike those moments on the cabin roof. He felt the inertia of his life shifting, like a train switching tracks. If the rest of his existence made no room for spontaneity, his writing could be the place that provided that rush.

  He grabbed the envelope and went into the store.

  Lon Smith broke his conversation with Close Call’s resident gossip queen and buckle-chaser, Miss Bess Scandy, to greet Nat, shake his hand.

  “Hey there, Nat. What can I get for you?”

  “Need some dog food. Fifty-pound bag, Active Wilderness brand.”

  “Sure thing, sure thing,” said Lon.

  Lon sent his son to the back room to haul out the requested bag while he rang up the purchase.

  “Hear you got some help out there for the sale,” said Lon. “We’re real blessed to have such a hometown hero.”

  Inwardly, Nat cringed. Wes always wanted to go stealth for a few days before word got out that he was home. People meant well, Nat knew. But too many questions, mostly ignorant ones, while Wes was just starting to remember what it’s like to piss in a toilet instead of a tube set Nat’s teeth to gnashing.

  As if Lon could read Nat’s mind, he added, “Mack was in earlier for some last-minute stuff before you head out tomorrow.”

  Right. Nat made a mental note to talk to Mack about the Meier brother code.

  “Nice to see you, Nat.” Miss Bess toyed with items in the “gauntlet of riff-raff,” as Clem called it when Nat was little and begged for something stupid like a plastic top. Wire baskets lined the register with everything a body didn’t need and nothing it did—in Clem’s mind, the typical cowboy vices—booze, bullets, and ’baccy, as well as toys. Miss Bess, known to most as the horniest divorcee in town, took special interest in a kids’ Tarzan drink cup with a phallic straw. “You tell your brother I said hello.”

  Nat’s attention was slow to pull away from her testing the ease with which Tarzan’s straw slipped through the lid. The suggestive sight made him want to ask Lon to add bleach to his purchase. Give his eyes a good wash. Miss Bess may have been stacked, but she was twice Wes’s age, nearly his weight, and ten times the drama of any other woman in town. He knew for a fact that Wes would rather jack Tarzan.

  “Will do, Miss Bess.”

  “I hear someone else is heading outta town tomorrow. Way outta town.” Bored with Tarzan, Miss Bess had moved on to lip balm wrapped in a Holstein pattern. “Senegal, Resistol, something dirty like that…”

  Nepal.

  Fuck.

  “Shame the girl couldn’t stay longer, but that one’s always been hard to catch. Guess you’d know a little something about that, huh?”

  Nat’s lungs felt like a water balloon hit with an arrow, tip pierced, a split second before it burst. This was news to him. Why hadn’t Mona told him?

  Lon gave him a sympathetic look and said, “Forty-eight seventy.”

  Might as well have been the shrapnel count of Nat’s heart for all the number meant.

  Lon pointed. “You want to mail that, too? Pick up don’t come for another hour.”

  Nat remembered the envelope in his hand.

  His breath came on quick. The room slipped a little. Miss Bess looked at him with shiny gizzard lips, still rubbing them together from sampling the lip gloss.

  “You all right, son?” Lon had known Nat since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. Son wasn’t a loose term, it was an endearment born of concern. “You want to mail that?”

  “No,” said Nat, too fast, too fucking sharp.

  Lon blinked and finished the transaction. “I’ll have my boy load your dog food into your truck.”

  “Thanks,” Nat might have said. He wasn’t sure.

  “See you tomorrow night, Nat,” said Lon.

  Nat nodded.

  Miss Bess said something snarky about January by way of goodbye. Something about her waiting another ten years to come back to Close Call. The thought made him damned near lose Mack’s leftover chili he’d had for lunch all over some Texas-sized cleavage, but punishing the messenger would only feel good for as long as she startled. Nat had a problem. A five-foot-six, energetic, magnificently sculpted and joy-filled fireball of a world-traveler kind of problem.

  On the way out to his truck, he shoved the envelope in the trash can. That’s what came from being spontaneous.

  Heartbreak. Pure and simple.

  9

  January had to be at LAX at an absurd hour the next morning, which meant her flight left Houston at an ungodly hour. Long about noon, she decided it was best to leave for the city tonight.

  The ranch had been eerily quiet all day. Auction day. January tried to belt out her favorite country tunes while she packed, but it ended up being noise and provided zero distraction from Nat’s predicament. Something Mona said over ice cream after her date last night had January thinking. Hard. If Nat didn’t make his numbers, the bank would seize the ranch house and every single acre and reduce Nat to nothing more than a ranch hand on his own land. And, well, that didn’t sit well with her. January had learned to ride horses here, be part of an extended family here, love here. This land was more than a healthy strip of Texas. It was her home, too. That realization had her tearing up at every loving-n-leaving tune that came over the airwaves. By the time Mona knocked off her work early that afternoon and crossed the trailer’s threshold, January had decided to do something about those numbers.

  While Mona showered, January endorsed the cashier’s check she had intended to deposit at her international bank and added Pay to the order of Nathaniel James Meier. Thirty thousand dollars, less some travel cash and the money she had used for Nat’s surprise. She placed it inside a plain envelope. She wrapped a note around the check that read: For MooDonna. Take good care of her. Love, J. January doodled a cow for good measure. And because her mother was taking forever to shave her legs. Clearly Mona had not anticipated action with Harlan the previous night.

  January was zipping her pack when Mona reentered the room, wearing a towel turban and a god-awful shirt that had been bedazzled to say Bitch, please. I’m from Texas.

  “Well, you’re not leaving yet, are you?” As if leaving was the equivalent of lying down in front of a moving bulldozer.

  “I was thinking about it.”

  “You’ll miss the party.”

  “What party?”

  “Every year after the auction, Nat hires a company to set up one of them gigantic blow-up screens and a fancy sound system in one of his unused pastures for a drive-in movie. Everyone for three counties comes with their popcorn and snacks. Nat’s way of thanking his staff and the community, keeping the Meier name at the front of their minds when it comes to the cattle business. He puts aside all his column money each year to fund it.”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I still need to put the finishing touches on Nat’s gift. And I’m not really in a party mood.”

  “It ain’t about mood, J-Rose. It’s about being part of something. Being together, instead of wandering through this life alone. Then if you need to head out, you’ll have a memory to pack with you. Besides, I told Wynona you’d be there.”

  January clicked her tongue. “Aw. You didn’t. Ma, she squeezes my boobs every time to see if I’ve grown.”

  “I know she’s got a gaping hole in her screen door, but she means well, and she did give you a handsome sum for graduation that got you all the way to Paris.�
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  “She’s a closet lesbian.”

  “Well, she is a preacher’s daughter. Figures if she’s going to hell in a handbasket, she’ll grab a few things along the way.” Mona made busywork of straightening up, which took all of ten seconds in a trailer the size of a shipping container, then rummaged through a drawer in the kitchen nook. “Now where is that extension cord I promised the event people?”

  January wanted to talk to her mom about the ranch, the money, the overwhelming sense of doubt that set in sometime between packing and unpacking twice and writing a goodbye letter then flaming it over the gas range burner. “Mom?”

  “Aha, your map pins.” Mona shook the box and presented it to January, lid open. “Time to mark the next part of your journey.”

  January studied the cluster of multi-colored pins. Nepal wasn’t red—her father had never been there. Nepal wasn’t green, for a place Mona read about at the beauty salon, or yellow, a place January couldn’t spell. Nepal was blue because she was running away. She couldn’t repeat the mistakes of her father. She couldn’t be the flaws Nat tolerated in exchange for their most exhilarating love. She wouldn’t do that to him.

  Blue pin in hand, she found Nepal on the map and traced her finger along the fuzzy seam that cut right through Kathmandu. The print, once crisp, was now almost unreadable. Her fingers shook; her face twisted on an ugly-cry.

  Mona rubbed lazy circles on January’s back and softened her voice from the truck-pull decibel level it had been moments earlier. “What’s wrong, baby?”

  “Leaving…has never…been a problem for me.” January hiccupped her way through her declaration. “I’ve always…relied on my…instincts.”

  “That you have. And they’re damn fine instincts, J-Rose.” She wrenched the pin from the hand January had fisted at her forehead. “What’re those instincts telling you now?”

  “They’re telling me not to go. I’m all mixed up, but it’s clear Nat doesn’t recognize the real me when I let my guard down.”