Loving the Heartland

by Marjorie Jones

  “Good morning, Miss Williams. Sheriff.” The tallest of the men, Harold Mason, nodded his cold greeting with an empty smile. “Have you come to your senses?”

  “You’re not getting my land, Mason.”

  “Well, now, Miss Williams, it’s not really your land, is it? Some of it is government land and they can lease that land to whomever they see fit.”

  A flash of fury crashed over Kendra in a wave of heat. In her mind, she lunged for Mason’s throat, but in reality, she steeled herself for the real fight.

  Mac’s familiar gaze fell on her. Quietly he said, “Mr. Mason, I suggest you and your boys head on out before things get ugly around here.”

  “I’m going to get that land, Miss Williams. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “Yeah, and you’ll get my little dog, too, I’m sure. Bring it on, Mason.”

  Harold Mason grinned like a man who knew something she didn’t. “We’ll see, little girl. We’ll see.” The group sauntered out of the courthouse and onto the sidewalk like victorious kings surveying their spoils.

  Kendra lifted her Stetson to her head and ran one hand over her jaw. “That bastard is killing my livestock. He’s trying to put me out of business and I swear to God, Mac, I won’t let that happen.”

  After speaking with a member of the zoning commission, she turned and followed the path Casey had taken through the double doors, her cowhide boots echoing on the vintage 1963 tiles.

  Damn those citified assholes. She would never allow them to take her land. She had too much invested in it. Blood and sweat. History and honor. All of it wound through the lush pastures and hillsides like a breeze through the trees. She couldn’t touch it. No one could walk up and see it. But it was there, as real as the moonlight.

  A shining black, extended cab truck rumbled past her as she marched to her own vehicle. The tinted side windows offered no hint to the occupants, but Kendra knew who they were. Mason and his hired band of thieves – also known as lawyers – maneuvered their way through town like they already owned it. If they had their way with the crooked politicians in the state capital, they would own Randall City – the whole damn County – soon enough. The thought made her stomach turn sour.

  She pulled open the creaking door of her work truck and threw herself behind the wheel. Casey glared at her. “Did you see that? Those bastards actually smiled at me when they walked by. They smiled, for hell’s sake!”

  “Now, how the hell could I have seen that? I was in the courthouse until about ten goddamn seconds ago.”

  “What did the commission tell them?”

  Kendra offered Casey a grin. “They said, ‘no,’ of course. The only way the commission will change the zoning on our land from agricultural to commercial is if we lose the lease and they have no choice but to back that stinking resort. So long as the land has our cattle on it, the commission is on our side.”

  “And if our cattle aren’t on it?”

  Kendra turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the parking stall onto Main Street. “Don’t matter. Our cattle aren’t going anywhere.”

  “You know you can’t fight these guys like it’s some kind of range war, right?”

  “What would you call it?”

  “Times have changed, Sis.”

  Aw, hell. Here it comes. “I know what you’re going to say, Case, and you can save it. I’m not going to hire some person I’ve never even met to fight my battles for me. Do you have any idea how serious this is?”

  “We need the promotion and the publicity, Ken. You can be damn sure those assholes are using every bit of technology they have to make us look like relics.”

  “I don’t care. They brought the fight to me, and I’m fighting them right here. I stood up to the meat companies and the chemical companies, didn’t I?”

  Kendra made an easy right onto the highway on-ramp and mashed the gas pedal. Black smoke filled her rear view mirror as the diesel engine unwound. She hated this conversation. Last night, Lacey had called from Vegas again, trying to convince her to hire some friend of hers to build a website for the ranch. Kendra had turned the discussion to her studies, her job and her tuition like she always did and Lacey had clammed up tighter than a June bride. Instead, she’d talked to Casey for more than an hour.

  Kendra cast her gaze on Casey as she merged onto the highway behind a double semi-tractor trailer rig hauling coal.

  “What, exactly, did you two talk about last night?”

  “Nothing. Everything. We’re twins, remember? We don’t have to talk. We read each other’s minds.”

  Kendra snorted.

  Casey stretched his long legs in front of him and grimaced when his motorcycle boots refused to fit beneath the lowest part of the ancient truck’s dash. “When are you getting a new truck?”

  “Never. Now, what did you two hash out?”

  Casey grinned. “She’ll be here in about three days.”

  “I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you don’t mean Lace.”

  “Nope. Her name is Michelle Loving and she’s one of the highest paid PR reps and graphic designers in Las Vegas. She’s going to build a site for the ranch and develop an entire marketing and promotional campaign for those political folks upstate. Our spread will look so damn good, they’d be crazy to shut us down.”

  Kendra gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white and threatened to break the weathered skin. What had she done in her previous life to be saddled with a family who ignored her? Left in charge of her younger siblings when she was barely twenty had been hard enough. Now, at thirty-five, half of her brood had turned on her.

  The twins had always been her biggest challenge. Single-minded and determined, they tended to get their own way. Casey, more at home on a motorcycle than a horse, had rented a small house in town when he’d returned from his Navy hitch a few months ago. He rarely showed up at the ranch more than a few days a month. Lacey, Casey’s elder by twelve minutes, had left home almost three years ago, following a loser named Barry to Vegas. She didn’t know that Kendra knew her boyfriend had abandoned her there. To her credit, though, she’d never asked for a handout and had made a life for herself. She found a job and enrolled in school almost right away. In a year, she’ll be the first Williams to ever graduate from college.

  Kendra sighed. Her brothers and her sister meant more to her than any piece of land. Maybe the fact that the ranch had been their home their entire lives prompted her to fight so hard to keep it.

  Hell, she didn’t know why she hated change so damn much. Not that it mattered. The world had changed plenty around her and she just plain didn’t like it. To Kendra, the world peaked when Armstrong walked on the moon and had careened on a downhill slide ever since. The last thing she needed in her life was some uppity city girl following her around, worried about stepping in something unpleasant for the sole purpose of pulling her into the new millennium. She had enough to worry about just keeping her family and her employees safe. She didn’t need some woman underfoot mucking things up even more. “I still don’t like it, Casey.”

  “Can you just trust our judgment, this once? I know you hate the idea, but if we’re going to fight these guys on our turf, we have to fight them on theirs, too.”

  Kendra grunted. She pulled the truck off the main road and onto a small dirt drive. She parked in front of the original homestead, several miles west of the main house her grandfather had built in the forties for her grandmother. The family currently lived there, but they had been fixing up the original house for about three years or so, hammering the nails themselves. Later, they would build another house or two. Eventually, Brent and Brad would get married and have families of their own. Neither of them planned to leave the Heartland, and they’d need places of their own. As serious as Brad and Lenise had become, it wouldn’t surprise her if her youngest brother beat the other two down the aisle.

  She yanked the manual brake and tossed open her door, which squealed in protest. “I don’t l
ike it, but I’ll do it.” She continued with a bark, “Not that I have a choice! I just don’t want her getting in my way, you got it?”

  “Aye, Aye, Captain.” Casey threw her a mock salute.

  “Get out and help me unload the tiles.”

  Casey slid out of the truck and studied the old Victorian house before joining her at the battered tailgate. Together, they unloaded a dozen cases of ceramic tiles onto the porch. The old wood creaked beneath the weight.

  Casey smiled. “It’s coming along.”

  Kendra grinned. “It’s livable. I hope your friend doesn’t mind a little sawdust.”

  “You’re going to make her stay… here!”

  “I hadn’t planned on making her stay anywhere, if you’ll recall. This is your brainstorm. So, unless you want her to live with you, she can stay here. I don’t want to change my life any more than I absolutely have to. Hell, I don’t even want her to come here, at all.”

  “So much for being hospitable and courteous, right? You’re going to relegate a guest to living in a half-built relic instead of the perfectly empty room in the main house? Does this place even have running water, yet?”

  “Yes, it has running water. And electricity. And four finished rooms, including the kitchen, except for the stove which is on order and will be here in a couple of weeks. It’s perfectly livable.”

  “It’s banishment, Kennie. You can’t just put Michelle in a corner and hope she goes away. We invited her to come here. She’s going out of her way to help us because she’s our friend. She’s not staying in the back forty.”

  Kendra’s blood threatened to boil over and she shoved open the front door just to get away from Casey.

  The more she thought about the waste of time the twins had planned, the more she wanted no part of it. Lace and Case had no idea what they were dealing with.

  People like Mason didn’t care about the law, or about lobbying government agencies and committees to get what they wanted. They put up a good front, and if they got their way it was a bonus. In the end, though, they would stop at nothing in pursuit of their own greed. They proved it every time one of her cows came up missing. When Kendra failed to agree to sell her land to Harold Mason, things got real ugly, real fast. They would only get worse. Why couldn’t anyone else see it? And now, against her better judgment, she added a whole new set of problems to the already crowded list.

  The simple truth lay in the fact that lives could be lost in this thing. Some folks might think she lived in the past. They shook their heads when she insisted on riding the fence lines on horseback instead of using the ATV her brother bought for her. Even the neighboring ranches told her to join the twenty-first century and hire a helicopter to help during the round-up.

  Not this cowgirl. She preferred the solitude found in the mountain passes on cool summer nights, tempered by the heat of a camp-fire. Damn it, she liked riding the fences and sleeping with a saddle under her head and the stars winking down on her. Nothing in the world matched the exhilaration of running down a stray, roping her and bringing her safely home.

  The hair on her arms stood up. Something told her – no matter what happened – all of that was about to change.

  Chapter Two

  Michelle stretched her legs, careful not to touch the brake and dislodge the cruise-control. According to the GPS in her dash, the Williams’ ranch should come into view any time. She’d been driving for nearly nine hours, including rest stops, and she was ready to call it a day.

  Not for the first time, she shook her head at her current situation. Why had she agreed to do this? She’d never met, or even talked to, Kendra Williams, but the image she carried in her mind – based solely on the descriptions from Lacey and Casey – made her want to turn the car around. How was she supposed to create a marketing and promotion package for the ranch when her client wanted no part of it? It was hard enough to please someone who actually had faith in her!

  Cooperation on Kendra’s part would be a huge benefit; but Michelle decided not to hold her breath. Rumor had it, held long enough; a person could turn blue and die. But Michelle knew nothing of the cattle business, or land leases, or what rules applied or didn’t apply. She’d be working closely with Kendra Williams, whether Kendra liked it or not.

  The car drifted easily around a bend in the highway. Glancing over the passenger side door as the convertible traced the curve of a high, rugged canyon wall, she caught her breath. The Heartland Ranch sat in a wide valley, dotted with stands of stately Russian Olive and squat Joshua trees. A stream wound from some hidden crevice in the distant, snow-capped mountains and split the valley floor with a silver tongue. The sky seemed to go on forever with only a few puffy, white clouds lazing near the horizon.

  From this distance, she couldn’t make out any livestock, but if what Lacey had told her held even a shred of truth, thousands of cows lived in this little slice of what she could only describe as Eden.

  Her eyes followed a fence line until she found the main compound. Three huge structures, two barns and a house, sat in the center of a ring made from ancient oaks. She could barely make out the roofline of the house through the late spring foliage, but it must be enormous. The barn loomed even taller, at least a full three stories high. When she drove up the main drive, she couldn’t help but smile at the whimsical weathervane twisting atop the cupola. A dish, holding hands with a spoon, skipped over a full moon that wore a delightfully cheeky grin. A cow formed one end of the crossbar while a laughing dog clenched its belly on the other.

  She brought her car to an unintentional skidding halt on the loose gravel beside a black motorcycle covered in chrome that would have been shining flawlessly had it not been covered in a fine sheen of orange dust, obviously collected during the drive up the long, dirt lane that led to the house. Closing her eyes, she inhaled the pungent air of a working ranch. The aroma of manure mixed with the scent of hay, leather and grease enveloped her. Funny how individually, the scents would not be necessarily kind, but together they smelled of freedom, history and honor.

  Still, no matter how serene the surroundings, this job wasn’t going to be any nursery rhyme.

  “Well, look what the cat drug up!”

  At the familiar sound of Casey Williams’ voice, Michelle turned. Dressed in a white tee-shirt, black leather vest and black jeans covered with black riding leathers, Lacey’s twin brother cut a forbidding image. Michelle knew him well enough to know he had more in common with a kitten than a bear, however, and she rushed from behind the wheel to accept his proffered hug. “Hey, stud. How’s the world been treating you?”

  “You know me – living the dream. How was your drive over, and how many tickets did you get?”

  “It was nice,” she replied before adding, “Just one.”

  Casey reached into the back of her car and pulled her largest suitcase free. “Yeah, but you charmed your way out of the rest, I’m sure.”

  Michelle laughed and followed him toward the wooden steps leading to a wide porch. “Well, you know me…” She paused as the full façade of the house registered to her tired brain. “Wow. This is a great place. How old is it?”

  “Our grandfather built it for our grandmother just after World War II. You’ll be staying in Grandma’s room.”

  “I thought the ranch was older than that? Lacey said over a hundred years?”

  “There’s another house about four miles up the road.” Casey nodded to a dirt road leading away from the compound. “It’s even older than this place. Kendra actually thought you might want to stay out there, but we’re remodeling it. Slowly. It’s not really livable yet, no matter what she thinks. Hell, she’d live in a tent full of holes, if she had to. You’ll be here for a couple of months, so if we hurry, you may want to move over there for privacy and such.”

  At the mention of Kendra’s name, Michelle remembered her reasons for being at the ranch in the first place. For a moment, she’d allowed herself to think she was on vacation. The surroundings and the a
tmosphere coupled with the sprawling main house, complete with leather-clad bell-hop, made for a great fantasy getaway.

  “I don’t want anyone going to any trouble on my account, Casey.”

  “No trouble.” Casey opened the front door and led Michelle through a large foyer. Her sandals clunked on the hardwood floor; real hardwood, not laminate. An antique sideboard sat against one wall, covered in silver-framed photographs and accented with a huge, beveled mirror.

  She caught her reflection and noticed her sunglasses still perched on her nose. She pulled them off and tucked them into the pocket of her wrinkled, pink sundress.

  “I had no idea I looked so terrible. Gads.”

  “You look great. Considering,” Casey added with a shrug.

  She smacked his arm playfully and laughed. “Thanks a lot.”

  

  Kendra waited until the Loving woman and Casey reached the top of the stairs before she moved from the sitting room to the foyer. She scanned the second floor landing as if searching for a sign that the she had actually been there.

  Lacey had failed to mention that her little friend was closer to Kendra’s age than her own. She’d also neglected to mention that the woman was drop-dead gorgeous. Long, golden hair – folded and tied with a pink, fabric-covered elastic tie at the base of her neck – promised to fall more than half-way down her back when set loose. Kendra’s fingers itched to try out the theory. Curved hips swayed beneath the modest sundress. Her tanned, shapely legs called to Kendra and more than her fingers responded.

  Kendra spun away from the stairs and headed to the kitchen. Trembling fingers met the handle of the old percolator on the stove.

  Damn. What the hell was she thinking? She didn’t have time for this. Her body argued that fact with spiraling, moist heat and incessant throbbing. She poured a cup of coffee, leaned her backside against the kitchen counter and ran a hand over her short-cropped hair. Shit. The last thing she needed was a straight-girl crush on top of everything else. Sure she did – because straight-girl crushes always ended so fucking well.