by Zoe York
At least calving, which had ended just two days ago, had gone much better this year. She’d lost two calves and a heifer last year. This year, she hadn’t lost any. That was something wasn’t it?
Sighing, she returned her attention to meal prep. When the spaghetti was done, she called Cody in to wash his hands for dinner. She set the table while he stood on his step-stool at the sink singing the hand-washing song her mother had taught him the last time they’d made it home to Alcova for a visit—six months ago. Annemarie was certain her parents thought she was nuts for trying to make this dusty ranch turn a profit rather than selling it, and they were most likely right, but there was something she wanted here for Cody that he wouldn’t have without this ranch—roots. In contrast to the Garretts, who were scattered across the country, the Grants had worked this land for generations, turning the high mountain desert land into a rich ranching empire. It didn’t matter that Tom refused to acknowledge that Cody was part of it. This was her son’s heritage, and if she had to work herself into an early grave so he could have it, so be it.
Is it really all for Cody? a cunning, venomous voice whispered.
As she glanced out the window again toward the main compound of the Grant Ranch, her traitorous heart fluttered. Despite everything, a faint glimmer remained of the naïve girl she’d been six and a half years ago when Tom Grant had sauntered into the restaurant where she’d waited tables to pay for college. He’d looked like he’d walked straight off the set of a cowboy romance, so devastatingly handsome with rich dark hair and fiery dark eyes topped off with a crisp black Stetson and the supreme confidence of someone who never failed to possess what he wanted. And during his two-month stay in Laramie to care for his uncle who’d undergone open heart surgery, he’d wanted a woman half his age to make him feel young and virile again in a way his high-maintenance wife couldn’t.
Of course, she hadn’t known then that he was married with two kids.
And she hadn’t found out that piece of rather important information until she’d tracked him down to tell him he had another on the way.
He’d done a flawless job of hiding the evidence. No wedding ring. Not even a telltale tan line or indentation of one. No pictures of kids in his wallet. No phone calls from home even when they’d spent the night at his uncle’s. She’d since figured out that the uncle had played along. Thomas Sr. wasn’t shy about sharing his distaste for Tom’s self-serving inclinations, and she suspected he hadn’t spoken to his brother in over two decades because Steven was the same breed of selfish swine as Tom.
She’d been sucked in like a simpering fool by his devilishly attentive charm and lavish praise of her plans and aspirations. He was a womanizer of the highest level, and he’d known all the things to say and do to conquer her reservations. He’d made her believe she was valuable… and then, when she’d informed him of the result of their affair, he’d shown her just how worthless to him she truly was.
A small hand tugged on her pants leg. “Mom? Are you okay?”
She glanced at him and smiled. “Of course I am, pumpkin.”
“But you’re crying again.”
She touched her cheek with her fingertips, surprised when they came away wet.
“How come you’re sad?”
She wiped the tears like they didn’t matter. Because they shouldn’t. She shouldn’t be crying at all over Tom Grant. He wasn’t worth it. “I was thinking sad things again, but I promise to put them away. Come on over to the table, and we’ll eat and talk about happy things. Like maybe you and me going for a ride tomorrow after I get off work.”
“Can we? Really?”
“Sure we can. And maybe we’ll invite your grandpa to come with us.”
The delight that splashed across his face at the mention of Thomas Sr. made every heartache and frustration of the last year worth it. That was what she wanted for her son, that connection.
As they ate, she listened to him chatter about their horses and his excitement over the impending arrival of Diamond Dot’s foal, who was due any day now.
Given the chance to go back and do it all over again, she might change the circumstances if she could, but she wouldn’t stop herself from getting involved with Tom Grant because the result of that union—this beautiful, bright-eyed boy—was her whole world.
When dinner was done and the dishes were washed, dried, and put away, it was time for bed. Annemarie stepped into Cody’s tiny bedroom and flipped on the light.
Nothing happened.
She doubted a burned-out bulb was the problem because she’d just replaced it three days ago, so she tried the teddy-bear lamp on the dresser. It remained troublingly dark, too. While Cody brushed his teeth, she descended into the basement again, but none of the breakers were tripped. She reset the ones for that side of the house anyhow, eliciting a yelp from her son when the light in the bathroom briefly darkened, then returned to Cody’s room. It was still dark.
“I guess we read our story by flashlight tonight,” she sighed as she climbed into bed beside him. She clicked on the flashlight she kept on his dresser beneath the teddy bear lamp.
He was out like the lights before she finished the story, and she kissed his forehead, then tip-toed out of his room. With a sigh, she snatched the cordless phone off the kitchen counter and dialed the main house of the Grant Ranch, praying Thomas picked up. No such luck. Tom answered.
“It’s Annemarie,” she said quickly. “Is Thomas around?”
“No. It’s Monday. He’s over at George’s.”
Right. Monday was “Bullshit Night” at the Sage Flats Ranch. She swallowed, willing her trembling hand to still. “I have an electrical problem. Can you spare Jack for a couple hours tomorrow?”
“No, I can’t. If you have an electrical problem, call a damned electrician.”
“I can’t afford one right now, Tom. Please, can’t you—”
“Not my problem, and no, I can’t. My family has already done more than enough for you and your son.”
“Done enough for me and my son? He’s your son, too.”
“No, he isn’t.”
“I didn’t ask for any of this, Tom. I just—”
He hung up on her. She gripped her phone so tightly her knuckles ached, and she tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and counted to ten so she didn’t hurl the thing across the living room. The last thing she needed was to wake Cody up or to give herself one more thing she couldn’t afford to replace.
With her eyes burning and her chin quivering, she took a deep breath and dialed the one friend she had in this corner of Wyoming. With pencil and notepad in hand, she waited for Jamie to answer.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Jamie. It’s Annemarie.”
“Hey. Is everything all right?”
“Sure. I hope I didn’t wake Caleb.”
“No. That kid sleeps like the dead. What do you need?”
“An electrician. A while back, you mentioned one who’d done some work for your parents.”
“Yeah. Gabriel Collins. Dad says he’s the best. Hang on. Lemme get his number.”
Annemarie wrote the man’s name down, amused. Her mother would approve of his angelic name.
After a short pause, Jamie was back on the phone. “Ready for it?”
“Yep.”
She jotted the number under the name, thanked Jamie, and promised they’d get their boys together again soon. When it warmed up, Annemarie hoped to have Caleb and his mother and his new stepdad out to go riding. That’d be as good for her as it would be for Cody, who would undoubtedly be delighted to spend a day riding the range with his best friend.
The idle daydream was a stark reminder of how she’d exiled herself out here. It couldn’t be healthy.
She set the phone on the counter, tore the sheet off the notepad, and stuck it to the refrigerator door with two of Cody’s colorful magnetic letters. Her eyes skimmed over what she’d written. Even if her electrical problem turned out to be a quick fix, it would still be
expensive. And what if it wasn’t something small? How was she going to afford it?
Suddenly, everything crashed down on her like a landslide. She crumpled to the floor with her back against the fridge, curled her arms around her knees, and sobbed silently. If ever she’d needed a shoulder to cry on or someone to tell her everything would work out, it was now, but she had no one.
She was miserably, achingly alone.
Chapter 2
“Thanks again, Gabe. Sorry you had to clean up Halverson’s mess, but I got tired of waiting. This’ll be great for the guests.”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve had to come along behind him and pick up the slack.” Gabe shrugged. “More money for me.”
“Speaking of money, I’ll drop a check by your office tomorrow morning, if that’s all right.”
“That’s fine. Just drop it in the mail slot if I’m not there.”
Gabe glanced at his watch. Four-thirty. Running the wires for the new theater system in the attic of the Masons’ bed and breakfast and cleaning up Halverson’s mess of an installation had taken longer than he’d expected. He should probably call Ms. Garrett and reschedule for tomorrow.
Instead, he bid farewell to Matthew Mason and drove north out of Cody toward the Garrett Ranch. The drive to and from her place alone would add at least an hour to his day and who knew how long it would take him to locate the problem if the woman’s wiring was in the kind of shape her description led him to suspect, but he ignored his weary body’s complaints and turned up the radio.
He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t curious about the young woman the Grants had mysteriously given five hundred acres to. She kept to herself, so no one knew much about her other than she was relatively new to town—she’d hired on as an accountant in Stan and Delanney McCoy’s office a year and a half ago—and had a young son. Curious though he was, that wasn’t the reason he couldn’t bring himself to reschedule. The weary resignation in her voice when she’d called first thing this morning had strummed his heartstrings like a fine guitar.
Following her directions, he turned left off the highway onto the paved road that ran between the sprawling Grant Ranch and its considerably smaller southern neighbor, the Sage Flats Ranch. After a mile, he turned right onto Grant Ranch Road, which was only paved for the first twenty yards until it passed through a massive log gateway adorned with an exquisite metal sign proclaiming the lands beyond to be the Grant Ranch.
He knew there was some serious money tied into this operation, but as the Grant Ranch employed its own maintenance crew, he’d never been called out to do any electrical work, and what he’d heard about the ranch’s wealth didn’t come close to the truth of it. His family’s spread at the feet of the Owl Creek and Absaroka Mountains near Meeteetse was a drop in the bucket compared to this place. The compound, comprised of the main house, at least a dozen employee cabins, several barns and silos, and an enormous indoor arena, was easily five times the size of his family’s, which had only a main house, his two eldest brothers’ houses, a couple cabins for visiting family, and one big barn.
Longing stirred. It didn’t matter how long he spent away from it; ranching would always be in his heart.
“Not in the cards, though,” he murmured.
The road flirted with the river for a mile before he came to the intersection Ms. Garrett had noted, and he turned right as instructed. Gravel pinged the undercarriage of his truck and crunched beneath the tires in a long-familiar and cherished song as the road twisted and dove and climbed through the gullies eroded into the plain by snowmelt and runoff.
Gradually, the road narrowed and deteriorated, forcing him to reduce his speed, and a mile and a half from the intersection, it curved sharply to the left and his truck rumbled jarringly over a cattle guard. The fence post on the left bore a hand-painted wooden sign announcing his arrival to the Garrett Ranch. He figured he was less than half a mile from the highway now, and judging by the angle of the road, it would take him all the way out to the highway. So why the wandering route across the Grant Ranch?
He turned left onto the driveway just beyond the cattle guard.
Driveway was a loose term. It was barely more than a pair of parallel ruts through the sagebrush choked with flattened, winter-dead grass that was the only sign of recent use. She hadn’t been living here long—a few months at most. The track started down a shallow, narrow gully littered with the sun-silvered skeletons of dead cottonwoods, and when it leveled out and widened, the small cabin Ms. Garrett called home came into view beside a spring-fed pond all of twenty feet in diameter. It was idyllic with a copse of young cottonwoods, willows, and quaking aspen clustered around it and the cabin—a beautiful oasis in the middle of the sagebrush and desert.
The cabin itself was a quaint, whitewashed log structure that probably dated back to the very beginnings of the Grant Ranch prior to Wyoming joining the union as a state. It was in need of a lot of work, but it showed some minor improvements like fresh, cheerful sky blue and sunny yellow paint on the shutters and trim and flower beds recently tilled and waiting to be planted.
What was a young mother doing out here so far from… anyone?
There was no vehicle parked in front of the cabin, so he continued down the trail to see if maybe Ms. Garrett had parked down by the small barn. She’d given him permission to go inside if she didn’t make it home from work before he arrived, but he’d never liked entering someone’s house when they weren’t home; it seemed too much like an invasion of privacy.
Sure enough, there was an older pickup parked by the barn, so he pulled his truck in beside it and climbed out. The unmistakable sounds of a horse in trouble had him jogging inside. He located the horse—a paint mare in labor—and a young woman with a sweaty, smudged face and blood-smeared hands in one of the barn’s two stalls. A little boy he guessed was her son perched on the rails of the stall with tears brimming in his big blue eyes.
The woman glanced up when she heard Gabe’s approach, and the worry widening her eyes was a punch to his gut. Something was wrong with the delivery.
“Ms. Garrett?” Gabe asked.
She nodded. “You must be Gabriel Collins. The electrician.”
The catch in her voice triggered a primal need to alleviate her concern, and he climbed over the railing to join her in the stall. “Yes, ma’am, but Gabe will do. What’s going on here?”
“She can’t seem to get the foal out. I thought I could try to pull, but I can’t even feel the foal.”
“Is Diamond Dot and her baby gonna be okay?” the little boy asked.
“I hope so,” Gabe replied before Ms. Garrett could. “How long has she been in labor?”
“I don’t know. She was acting funny this morning before I went to work, so I put her in here and called Jim to ask if he could check on her a couple times today, but I called him again as soon as I got home and found her like this—fifteen minutes or so ago—and he’s been tied up with calving all day.”
Gabe glanced over the mare, noted the gleam of sweat and the labored breathing and didn’t waste time asking who Jim was. The worry in Ms. Garrett’s eyes ignited into panic when the horse folded her legs and lay down in the straw with an exhausted groan. Gabe shed his button-up shirt and draped it over the railing beside the boy and offered the kid a reassuring wink.
He recognized the problem quickly upon closer inspection—the placenta had separated prematurely and was being pushed out first, blocking the foal. Gabe strode to the sink across the barn from the stall, hoping that the new bottle of hand soap sitting on the upturned bucket beside it meant it was operable. Cold water spilled from the spigot, and he quickly scrubbed his hands and forearms and the blade of the Leatherman he always kept on his belt.
“If you haven’t already called your vet, I suggest you do it now,” he remarked as he climbed back into the stall and started cutting away the placenta, careful to avoid nicking the foal.
“I called her before I called Jim. She should be here any ti
me. I actually thought it was her when you came in. Um… do you know what you’re doing?”
“This ain’t my first rodeo, Ms. Garrett. We had this happen with a couple of our mares, and since I was the one on foaling duty both times, I got to be the one who helped.”
“And did everyone… survive?”
“Yes, ma’am, they did. But I don’t know how long she’s been like this, so you might want to do a little praying, if that’s your thing. Even if it isn’t, it probably wouldn’t hurt.”
“Is Diamond Dot’s baby hurt?” the little boy asked. “How come he isn’t coming out?”
“I don’t know if he’s hurt or not yet, squirt,” Gabe replied, “but the stuff that fed him and helped him grow in his mama’s belly came out first and he’s stuck behind it. Don’t you worry, though, okay? We’ll get him out, and hopefully he’ll be just fine.”
“You’re gonna do your best to help them, right, Mr. Collins?”
“You bet I am.”
He cleared the placenta out of the way, and as soon as that was done, he slid his hand into the birth canal, ignoring Ms. Garrett’s grimace and her son’s gasp of concern. He found the foal’s front hooves and let out a breath of relief. The little guy was facing the right direction and still kicking. With a firm grip, Gabe pulled with the mare’s next contraction, and the foal’s nose appeared.