Claiming The Cowboy Read online

  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.”

  “You got anything on the horizon?”

  Chase knew Yancy meant bull riding. The man had come to more competitions than Chase’s father. Hell, maybe even understood him better. Chase always told his father that bull riding was who he was, not what he did, to which his father would always say that no one is born with that level of mindless disregard. How many times had he heard “bulls are for breeding, not riding” and “you’ll put your mother in an early grave”?

  Turned out, the early grave was his.

  “Actually, I’m looking further down the road,” said Chase, pushing past the unpleasantness that always settled beneath his skin at the thought of his dead father. “Why I’m here. I could use your help.”

  “Oh?” Yancy brushed the last of the feed crumbs against his overall bib and pointed to the vinyl bench seat of an old truck he had positioned in the barn’s shade. “Let me get off my bad knee. You can tell me about it.”

  Chase waited until they were settled and he had downed most of the tea. Liquid courage as much as refreshment. God, it was humid for April. His pits sprouted moisture, nothing at all to do with the morning’s rain. He wanted Yancy to be proud of him like his father never was.

  “I’ve invested in a craft distillery. Caters to the same market as those who have a passion for rodeoing and bull riding. Consumers who aren’t afraid of a little danger in a bar glass, or at least the illusion of danger. No fruity bullshit, no lavender essence, nothing that shouldn’t be in a fine glass of whiskey. We’re looking for a place to set up operations. I want that place to be Close Call.”

  Yancy’s expression was all cowboy, squinting into the morning light. Gave away nothing.

  “You speak to the mayor?”

  “Just came from there.”

  “And?”

  Yancy was Yancy. The man knew sixteen ways to glitter up his favorite curse, son of a bitch, but Chase still knew politics enough to slice words carefully. “Let’s say she hasn’t warmed to the idea yet.”

  “Damned near blistered your ass, I’d imagine. She’s a pistol, that one.”

  Pistol wasn’t quite how Chase would describe her. A .50 BMG rifle maybe, his entire future in her crosshairs.

  Yancy added, “Best mayor this town has ever seen.”

  “A little narrow-minded for someone who wants growth. I could sure use your vote if it comes down to rezoning.”

  “Depends.”

  Chase’s mood blistered. He took a swig of tea to pull himself back from an ugly place he didn’t want to go. So much for a quarter of a mil and low-hanging fruit. “On what?”

  “If you’re running toward something or away from something.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Remember the day you came to me and wanted me to teach you to ride?”

  Chase slouched. Head leaned against the seat, he watched the morning breeze rope the yellow Indian grass. His patience was running out of idle, but he owed Yancy a lot. Maybe everything. What was the harm in a quick memory or
two between friends?

  “Yeah. My old man had just taken a belt to me for stealing baseball cards in town. He didn’t believe me when I said Austin Pickford slid them into my coat pocket.”

  “You were so mad at your father, I thought steam would come out of those ears. I told you there was no place in this sport for emotions—the first time the bull sensed that weakness, you’d be dead. That you should come back when you were here for the right reason. You kicked up half my pasture on your way back home that day.”

  Yancy slipped loose an amused chuckle that branded Chase’s nerves, already exposed from his showdown with the mayor.

  “Never did know if you took up bulls out of spite,” said Yancy. “But the next day, when you didn’t have your feathers all riled, you retraced your path across my pasture, counted out your savings into my hand—every last nickel—and said—”

  “‘I’ll turn it into a million if you believe in me.’” Chase remembered the conversation well.

  “I’d never seen that kind of passion. From then on, it was like you were born to ride those majestic animals. Floating like you did over the strap.” He finished his declaration with a grunt—half awe, half disbelief, maybe.

  “I’m long in the tooth, Yance. For a bull rider, anyway. I’ve broken damned near every bone in me at least twice, and some days I wake up with pain from my ears to my ankles and feel like I’m eighty. I’m eating caviar one day and cinnamon red hots the next and watching all the boys I came up through the circuit with snort half their earnings up their noses because there isn’t anything beyond that life for them. So yeah, maybe I am running away, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being too far gone to run at all.”

  “You married to the bottle?”

  “No. Nothing like that.

  “Why whiskey?”

  “I’d be invited to parties—rich guys, more money than they could spend in their lifetimes—and they wanted to hear what I had to say because they knew they’d never have the kind of guts it took to climb up on five thousand pounds of raw animal fury. And I wasn’t a stupid hick from the country anymore. They respected my opinion about things. They brought out their finest labels from far-off places and taught me about vintages and palettes and what kind of liquor they would make if they only had the guts to try.”

  “And you have the guts,” said Yancy.

  “I’ve done everything I set out to do, Yance.”

  “Everything but go for eight on Stalin’s Assassin.”

  Reporters had lobbed that softball at every one of Chase’s media junkets for the past year. That bull was like a death sentence—agile and smart as fucking hell. Never bucked the same way twice. Had crippled every single rider out of a career and any kind of quality of life. The purse matched the risk. Like the leading hype to an unprecedented fight at Madison Square Garden, speculators believed it was a foregone conclusion that Stalin’s Assassin would meet his match in Chase Meier. Problem was, no one bothered to ask Chase.

  “I’m not sure I can do it.”

  “You’re agile. Reaction time of a rattlesnake. Anyone can beat that bull, it’s you.”

  “Nah. The bull’s the easy part. I worry about what follows the dream. When there’s nowhere else to go. That moment after, that day and week and year after you get everything you’ve ever wanted. Do people even care what you have to say after that?”

  Yancy stroked his knee through the denim, absent circles that traced the same circumference over and over. He was old school, not much for anything deeper than horse shit. That included emotion. But Chase could tell he was thinking, thinking, thinking, just like that pivotal moment in both their lives when a nine-year-old boy put him on the spot with childish exuberance and unbridled ignorance. When he spoke, his words struggled through the undeniable notes of something deeper.

  “You show up at a city council meeting and present your case with as much passion for this as I saw that day you kicked up dust in my pasture, and I’ll give you my vote. Even if you never climb into another chute, I’ll always care what you have to say.”

  Gretchen knew two things with absolute certainty when she entered her office that morning. One, that she was eternally grateful for her assistant, Darcy, whom she had brought with her from an internship in Atlanta because of her attention to detail, her mad genius research skills, and her history of not Close Call. Politics was nothing if not fertile ground for buried skeletons and time capsules filled with stale perspectives. And two, staying ahead of developments that impacted her community was the reason Gretchen’s term as mayor had been so successful.

  Chase Meier’s plan to turn this little slice of country into highball heaven was no exception.

  She settled in her chair, asked Darcy to hold all calls unless Liam Hemsworth came to his senses and wanted to propose, sight-unseen, then thumbed through the dusty files Darcy had resurrected from the basement archives. The collection was a town bible of sorts: loose-leaf notes scrawled on official stationery that captured moments of worry and triumph from past leaders, including generals dating back to the battle for independence; bombshells regarding events in the town’s history, most notably redacted parts of the investigation conducted by the FBI during the racial firestorm in the 1960s; hidden pools of money and resources for natural and unnatural disasters; sensitive research and projections for everything that would put a town mayor on the offensive side of the political football. The file was a jackpot for a history nut like Gretchen, and she had spent hours poring over the contents during her days between election and inauguration. Most certainly, Gretchen remembered mention of the property in question; she just couldn’t mine specifics from her memory.

  The file was organized chronologically. Gretchen worked backward until her eyes crossed, her morning coffee metabolized out of her blood stream, and the dust had turned her sinuses to a faucet. Close Call, Texas, wasn’t big or especially noteworthy, but the town had a meandering and colorful history that dated back to Colonel Ulysses H. Tull and his volunteer Army Corps sent to aid revolutionaries in their quest for independence from Mexico.

  Tucked inside the official narrative of the town’s genesis, she found a copy of the official account of a case before the closest judge in the territory—the Honorable James Marshall of the Confederate Court in Austin: a land dispute involving a parcel at the “critical junction of a farm road to the Brazos watering hole and the settlement of one Andrew C. Clark, recent transplant from St. Louis, Missouri.”

  The hand-drawn map looked more like Darcy’s recent margarita-fueled sketch of her fallopian tubes twisting and drying up on the eligible dating prospects in Close Call, but the natural markers were there: the unmistakable bend in a Brazos tributary that looked like an arm flexing its bicep, the limestone cliff and watering hole at the paper’s edge with a scribbled estimation of ten miles, the intersection where a major north-south trading route from the Gulf met the settlement that had been the county’s first on record, not Clark’s, but Oscar Pettigrew’s property.

  On the back of the map, Judge Marshall wrote, “The claimant, Andrew C. Clark, with only circumstantial and insufficient proof, has failed to satisfy original ownership of the land in question to this court. A man of considerable means, Clark attempted to use that wealth to intimidate and manufacture witness testimony of said incident away from the defendant.”

  Gretchen flipped a few pages back. Said incident? Nothing further.

  She pressed the clear button at the bottom of her desk phone. Darcy called it the mayday button—a vehicle for everything from need an excuse to get this person out of here to must have food before I gnaw off my arm. For some things, Gretchen preferred old tech. Less of an inadvertent trail.

  “Room service,” answered Darcy, who rarely answered the call of duty in the same way twice. Darcy’s all-time favorite? “A-hoy-hoy,” after Alexander Graham Bell’s original idea before hello took hold.

  “Research field trip,” said Gretchen. “Take the rest of the day.”

>   The door opened. Darcy entered, nomadic journal in hand, pencil rammed through her messy bun. “Ooooh. Does it involve finding out where the eligible Prince Guillaume of Luxembourg will be staying on his trip to Houston next month?”

  “No. But good luck on that one—on your own time.” Gretchen smiled. This is what they did—why she loved Darcy so much. She was effervescent, but when it came down to her job, her skills were unsurpassed. If an answer existed or something needed attention, Darcy wrestled the task in record time.

  “And you said politics would be fun.” Darcy plucked the pencil free and opened her book, poised to write.

  “I need whatever you can dig up on the parcel of land where the old welding warehouse is at the end of Main—deeds, land surveys, maps, 1830s to present day. You may have some luck at the Texas State Archives in Austin, but I suspect the more reliable information would be local—in the Marin County records. There was a fire—1945-ish—but they managed to save some records.”

  “What am I looking for, exactly?”

  “Any evidence Andrew C. Clark was the rightful owner of the property at the town’s origin. Also, trace his family lineage along with the descendants of Oscar Pettigrew, the original owner of record. We could have a legal fight with a lot of money behind it on our hands.”

  “This have anything to do with why you came in this morning in a snit?”

  “I was not in a snit.” Gretchen’s objection was too forceful, gave away too much. Obscure facts weren’t the only things Darcy was adept at uncovering. Darcy once deduced Gretchen had acquired a concealed handgun license based purely on the proximity of safety glasses to a pack of Bazooka gum—notoriously given away at the local firing range—in Gretchen’s purse. Also, Gretchen had been unusually tense during reruns of Law & Order that night.