Redeeming the Rancher Read online

  “I can’t think of a place more ideal for mental space and seclusion.” For Miss Blake’s benefit, Gretchen added, “The barn was the place the whole town got together at harvest time before Dietrich’s opened, so it has all the space you could want. Mona said the Meiers use it mostly for storage now.”

  Amsterdam’s mounting protest fizzled on something the mayor had said. Her pale, natural lips slackened. Behind studious, thick-framed glasses, her warm, brown eyes rounded, ripe with some emotion he couldn’t read. Wes rewound the conversation to puzzle what might have triggered such a change in her demeanor. The only new piece of information was his name. Miss Blake looked at him in a way he was hard-pressed to describe. Almost as if she already knew him better than just about anyone.

  Wes felt naked, exposed in a way that made no sense. He challenged her with a bold stare. Without doubt, he had never met her before. Wes would have remembered the blunt fringe of dark hair across her brow, the not-so-subtle contours of her cheekbones that fell away behind overly-large eyeglasses he was certain she used as a mask to keep the world at bay, the natural set of her mouth that puckered as if she had just been surprised by a kiss. Most definitely, Wes would have remembered the repressed, captivatingly aloof, and currently mute artist Miss Blake.

  Her eyes, though, stoked something familiar, out of his memory’s reach. He felt as if he’d been expecting them for a lifetime.

  In typical lawyerly fashion, Mayor de Havilland continued to plead her case. “And working in close proximity to a real Marine can serve as inspiration.”

  Inspiration? Oh, hell no.

  “A live model would help in terms of scale,” said Miss Blake.

  “Whoa, hold up—”

  “Always someone around for heavy lifting at the ranch,” offered the mayor.

  Amsterdam’s resistance to the idea was crumbling. He saw it in her slight nod, the thoughtful pucker of her lips. He had to do something to keep the Yankee from invading his sanctuary, but his shit-covered boots kept him at a geographical distance. It was as if the women had already reached a conclusion and moved on to the topic of where to grab a sangria afterward.

  “Logistically speaking, the ranch is fifteen miles out,” said Wes. “It would be impractical for Miss Blake to travel from the Starlite Motor Lodge each day to work on her art.”

  Gretchen’s pupils rimmed white with excitement. “Wes, that’s the kindest thing I’ve ever heard. Miss Blake will stay at the ranch house as your guest so she can be close to her art. Of course, the city will reimburse your family for your hospitality.”

  Amsterdam did a double-take at the newest development, more like a runaway train than the logistics of where to craft a town statue.

  “Oh, no…no. I couldn’t impose.” Miss Blake shored up her glasses closer to her face.

  “See? She couldn’t impose,” echoed Wes, in much the same note, not entirely accidental.

  “Nonsense. There are no impositions in Close Call. We’re family. One time, my granddaddy put up the entire Meier family and their herd on his land during the Great Flood of ’81. Remember that story, Wes?”

  Oh…Fetchin’ Gretchen was subtle. Real subtle. Resurrecting old favors, leaving Wes in no bargaining position but to say yes.

  “If it’s all the same,” said Miss Blake, “I’d like to keep my room at the Lodge.”

  God, yes. That would give him some time to scrounge up a better place for her to sculpt—somewhere more ideal than underfoot. “The Dolly Parton/Burt Reynolds-themed lover’s suite is the pride of Close Call. People come from a hundred miles away for the pillows, alone.”

  The joke was almost worth the price of admission to see Amsterdam’s stiff demeanor tossed off-center. Almost.

  “I’ll see if I can find you a truck to use while you’re here, then.” The mayor extended a hand toward Miss Blake. “Do we have a deal?”

  The artist glanced at Wes, as if her decision rested solely on the tracks her stare made across his shoulders, the length of him. Muscles in his neck tensed, edged out a warning. The statue wouldn’t be him. He’d as soon throw the Yankee out in a most inhospitable display of Southern manners than have anything to do with inspiring a hero’s statue in Close Call, Texas. Wes may have been military, but he was no hero. So long as she erected a statue that honored all those who had served, all those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, and kept him a distant afterthought, they’d be okay. Not great, but as okay as a Texan and a Yankee could ever be, sharing the same prized spot.

  Amsterdam took the mayor’s hand, effectively sealing an arrangement that promised to be the longest season Wes had ever encountered, on the ranch or a tour of duty.

  * * *

  Pillows in the Dolly Parton suite of the Starlite Motor Lodge may have been plump enough for sweet slumber, but they did little to drown out the sounds drifting through the paper-thin walls from the room next door at two in the morning. If the historically-challenged didn’t know what fate befell the lovers who inspired the room’s theme—Bonnie and Clyde—the notion that they died while having sex seemed reasonable. Livie had heard enough crashing furniture and shout-outs to God to constitute one cataclysmic, law-breaking climax. Even one dollar and fifty cents shoved into the mattress’s magic fingers massage option was but an imperfect, teeth-chattering reprieve to the savage rutting next door.

  A guest room at the Meier ranch was starting to seem like heaven. At least there, every other thought wouldn’t track in the direction of sex.

  More than likely.

  Well…

  Wes Meier certainly wasn’t what Livie had pictured all those years ago when Daniel wrote her about his new basic training buddy. By the time her half brother had finished describing Wes, Livie had conjured up some backwoods, slow-strutting, silver-tongued cowboy who was good with his hands. No doubt Livie’s cultured upbringing had supplied the rest of the disparaging image—just this side of Hollywood cliché. But as an artist, she trusted her eye. In reality, Wes Meier was a man whose life experience chiseled him, whose natural environment informed everything from his dress to his self-confident gait, whose modest upbringing prevented him from seeing himself as striking—beautiful, even—under all that facial growth and dirt.

  Livie rolled onto her stomach and reached for her sketchpad and coal pencil. In the light filtering through the window sheers—an odd combination of natural moonlight and artificial vacancy glow—she sketched Wes’s face from memory: tall, straight forehead; tight skin at his cheekbones; thick, dark hair pinned back from captivity in a hat all day; shadowy beard surrounding a firm mouth that seemed ever on the verge of laughter. And the eyes. She erased and redrew and smudged them with her ring finger twenty times, unable to properly convey the story they hinted.

  A story that included Daniel’s death.

  She darkened the lines, reaching for sadness, only to erase them again.

  Next door, the modern-day Bonnie and Clyde went outlaw on their intercourse.

  Livie squeezed her eyes shut, groaned, and slogged out of bed. She pulled on her ankle-length duster and boots and left the Starlite Motor Lodge for the innocuous safety that only remoteness brings. Perhaps a walk would inspire a half-ton sculpture. She headed toward the sculpture’s designated spot—alone, detached, the way she operated at her creative optimum—to become acquainted with the space in darkness.

  Nearly a mile and a good dozen or so of Daniel’s memories into her walk, the distant strains of music curled inside her ears and settled into her awareness. The beat was steady, even—not the frenetic stomp to which she had grown accustomed from her amorous neighbors, nor the unhurried strains she expected from a sleepy town. She matched her strides to the downbeat, crossing over patches of grass and gravel stretches and wet asphalt from the late-November shower that had passed an hour before, producing a kind of synchronicity in her mind that always delighted her and made her feel as if she was precisely where she was fated to be. Soon, the puddles reflected the red and yellow neon of a beer sign
.

  Livie stopped. Above the lit collection of alcohol logos, the bar’s name: The Gritty Somewhere. A horrible name for a dive, but she loved it. She couldn’t possibly go in, could she? Her couture, vaguely call girlish with barely a stitch on beneath a raincoat, wouldn’t leave the right impression of a respected and cultured artist in the place she had to call home for the next six months. Still, liberties in the immersion phase often resulted in the most surprising inspiration.

  She headed for the bar’s entrance.

  The door blasted open. The previously muffled one-two beat charged out into the night on brash, grating notes, followed by raucous cheers. Draped around the shoulders of a rather busty middle-aged woman, the cowboy she had been trying to draw took a handful of tipsy steps toward the ghost town’s puddles. Propped as he was, the overly-painted woman couldn’t have been closer to his lips had she found a crawlspace beside his molars.

  Livie stepped into the shadow of an adjacent building.

  An odd sensation reshaped her stomach, first as if she had no right to spy on such an exchange, and second that someone—anyone—should occupy the intimate space she had only just tried and failed to capture on paper. Absurd that her response felt territorial. Wes Meier was nothing to her but a shared memory from Daniel and an annoying welcoming committee to Close Call.

  Sexed up and primed as she was from the sensory input from the Starlite, despite all reason, her imagination went into overdrive. No longer the appearance of a mishap in the mud, she had him stripped to the basic sculptor’s lines of human anatomy before reason took hold.

  The woman helped him into the passenger seat of an old powder-blue truck, taking more than a few moments to cushion him against a potential tumble into the street before retreating to the driver’s side. Door propped, Wes reached for sloppy handholds until his hat brim tipped back and he looked Livie’s direction.

  A thread of arousal curled low in her abdomen. She held her breath.

  His spine lengthened; his limbs stiffened to stone. In that moment, his neon-lit face sobered. He didn’t smile. He didn’t wave. Such a bold stare might have been disturbing, awkward, inappropriate. It wasn’t. Somehow, in that moment, his connection to her was precisely what eluded her when she tried to sketch him.

  Reaching.

  The woman said something, broke the spell. He glanced away then spent the time it took the vehicle to pull away trying to reestablish the connection lost. But the moment had passed, and he was simply a drunk cowboy this side of Hollywood cliché, no more inspiration than the dirty water beneath her soles or the sad light that squeezed beneath the bar door.

  Livie changed her mind about the drink. By the time she walked back to the Starlite Motor Lodge, she knew two things with absolute certainty: Wes Meier and his fully-fleshed companion occupied the building’s far room, as evidenced by the hastily-parked, powder-blue truck at the remote end of the parking lot—the thought kept her awake later than it should have—and the flash of inspiration for her sculpture, somewhere at the intersection of humanity and history, was not on a darkened street in the middle of the night but locked inside Wes Meier.

  To risk attachment to anything, anyplace, or anyone was to risk her creative edge that was fast slipping away. She hadn’t created anything of acclaim in years. A child prodigy who hit her artistic peak too young, critics wrote. A bold, bronze statement that carved a destination out of nowhere was the opportunity to prove she could still detach observers from their comfort zone, move people to surprising mental spaces. To accomplish that, her art required room, emotional distance, distrust of things that came easily. If she wasn’t careful, Wes Meier was just the sort of thing to come easily, crowd her space, trample intentions. Even if it was only in the fertile, lonely ground of her imagination.

  3

  Wes’s palm touched a breast. A naked, ample, sweaty breast attached to none other than Miss Bess Scandy, exposed in all her glory from the waist up. In full REM sleep, her painted-on lips slackened wide enough to call an entire ranch to supper. An unearthly, hog-like noise ricocheted around her vocal cords and rumbled up through her nasal cavity.

  His stomach rolled.

  Jesus Christ…he hadn’t.

  Had he?

  Fuck if he could remember anything past his sixth round. Or was it his tenth? No…wait. He did remember something. Amsterdam wrapped in a raincoat, damned near staring through him. Had he dreamt that?

  His skull felt bashed in by a surly bull’s hoof; his dry mouth was a vast wasteland of sour death. Wes shifted enough to realize he still wore his pants, the underwear beneath—a most unusual state for him, usually reserved for his deployment days when sleeping commando could get your pecker fired clean off your body. He drifted into the comfort of knowing nothing had happened between him and Bess then drifted right back out again knowing he had come close.

  He had to get out of there without waking her.

  The Elvis and ’Cilla-themed room gyrated in a dizzying circle of cheap memorabilia that chronicled the King from sexy to bloated and every phase in between. Wes peeled his hand from Bess’s skin with slow delicacy, the fleshy mound like flypaper in the too-hot room. Her snoring quieted. Inch by meticulous inch, Wes extracted himself from her limbs, the sheets, the bed, until one hand gripped his boots and the other rested on the door. He gritted his teeth and turned the handle.

  “I’ve tried everything I know.” Bess’s voice was as sharp as a rap on the shoulder, not at all slurred from slumber.

  Wes’s pulse slipped out of rhythm. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Throwing myself at you don’t work.”

  He exhaled, not wanting this conversation but knowing it was a long time coming. She was big-hearted, always making the wrong choices that put her last, as if she didn’t believe she deserved better. Wes turned to find the sheets pulled high to her chin, a layer of armor against what she had to already know.

  “Thank you for taking care of me, Bess. I wasn’t myself last night. I’m sorry if I led you to believe anything more would happen.”

  “It’s her, ain’t it? The new girl.”

  Bess might have been talking about the new German shepherd down at the precinct for all the sense her words saw fit to clear his fog-addled mind. “What new girl?”

  “One minute, you’re telling me all about how you just aim to have fun and that my hair looks like sunshine and the next, that gloomy artist girl looks your way and you’re going on about some foreign city all night. Rotterdam.”

  “Amsterdam?”

  “Whatever.”

  He remembered none of it. Truth was, the sculptor was nothing close to his type. He didn’t typically…well, ever…go for the serious, inwardly-tortured vibe. “Look, she’s just become my problem out at the ranch. That’s all.”

  “You could have said no.”

  “Refuse the mayor? When she insisted on a welcome home parade after my last deployment? That would have looked real good.”

  “Word around town is art girl took this job because her brother wanted to move here, he liked it so much. Died before that could happen. Soldier or something. Hey, maybe you knew him.”

  Wes’s limbs quaked, as if the gossip was an eighteen-wheeler barreling down on him and he felt powerless to move out of its way. He didn’t want to ask—he shouldn’t—but somehow, he suspected that he already knew. “Who’s her brother?”

  “Daniel. Same last name, but he’s supposedly a half brother.”

  Daniel Blake.

  His insides dropped out, like the footholds in the decayed buildings eight thousand miles away, where each step had the potential to give way or detonate. Wes braced his palms against the motel door to stop the room from spinning, yeah, but to also remind him of his place—Close Call, Texas, in a shit motel. Not at the enemy’s gate. Not the ambush that had eviscerated his Marine brother.

  No. No, the gossips had it wrong. No way Amsterdam was related to Daniel, though the similarities discharged through his brain like f
ully-automatic rounds—European boarding schools in childhood, Daniel’s knowledge of culture and art, the entirely-too-proper mannerisms Wes had spent the better part of a summer leave trying to deprogram out of him, and—oh, God—the eyes. Why Wes had been so drawn to Amsterdam’s. On some level, they reminded him of his dead friend. The very same friend who would be here today if it weren’t for Wes and his insatiable need to keep things balanced.

  He really was going to be sick.

  “You okay?” Bess sat upright. The sheet nudged lower to reveal outward-facing, gourd-shaped breasts, a little like catching an accidental eyeful of your aunt changing her clothes.

  Wes opened the door and emptied his stomach behind a nearby bush. Twice. A fitting punishment. Bess appeared at the door wrapped in a sheet. Away from the neon lights, in the unforgiving light of morning, she looked like a hundred miles of bad road, all of them leading nowhere. He was certain he looked worse.

  “I have to go.” He snatched his hat off the side table.

  “How’ll you get back?”

  His truck. Shit. Where was his truck? Two full earthquakes of his gut later, he realized his truck was back at the bar. Wes retreated to the next door and beyond before he had his toes good and solid inside his boots.

  “Take care of yourself, Miss Bess.” The men of Marin county always added the Miss more as a mental note of her advanced age and extensive experience than as a polite nod to formality.

  Bess saluted him.

  He fucking hated that. Not so much when kids and vets did it—they were the innocents who meant well. As for the rest of them? They hadn’t earned the right, couldn’t even fathom all that went into the privilege. Bess was no different. If it had a uniform, she chased it. Even Burl Makepeace, senior milkman from the Happy Heifer Dairy could attest to that.

  Wes passed fifteen motel doors before he came to the Parton-Reynolds suite clear at the other end of the building. The door was open. He hesitated, breathed a gusty exhale into his hat and nearly gagged on what came back to him, then chided himself. For God’s sake, he didn’t want to date her—bro code withstanding. He just wanted to read her the riot act for not telling him who she was and the real reason she took this job. She owed him that much, at least.