Claiming The Cowboy Read online

  She fiddled with her engraved letter opener to give her hands purpose. “My lawyer curiosity is piqued.”

  “Uh huh. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with Chase Meier cornering you at the bakery this morning.”

  She swallowed, tried to keep her voice mayoral. “How did you know about that?”

  Darcy shook her head. “Honestly, I sometimes wonder which one of us is from a small town. That gossip is already as stale as the coffee down in the break room.”

  “Chase Meier thinks he can use his fame and his bad-boy five o’clock shadow and his shoulders that could fill a barn and…” She was running out of invented demarcations, and the emerging grin on Darcy’s face wasn’t helping her train of thought. “And his bullish ego to sway the city council.”

  “But you won’t let that happen.”

  “Not on my watch.”

  “You’re impervious to the pitfalls of the political machine.”

  “Precisely.”

  “You’re holding your letter opener like you’re a serial killer.”

  “I know.”

  Gretchen dropped the office-supply-as-weapon onto her leather desk pad as if it had spouted a forked tongue and a tail that rattled. Ages ago, she realized she carried stress in her hands—clenched fists, cracking knuckles, fidgeting with rings. Luckily, Darcy knew her better than anyone.

  “You need something healthy to occupy those hands,” Darcy said.

  Her meaning was clear: no Twinkies, no rag mags from the grocery store checkout line, no all-night binges on articles about what other mayors around the nation were doing, no shopping online shoe sales.

  Gretchen reached for the current fiscal year’s budget projections.

  Darcy shook her head.

  Gretchen screwed up her face, totally not in the mood for a guessing game.

  Her assistant tapped the pencil back into her messy bun, closed her journal, and made for the door. She delivered her parting comment with her typical deadpan flare. “Try something broad enough to fill a barn.”

  3

  On the first Tuesday evening of every month, the gears of civil government turned in the manner in which they were designed. Citizens witnessed and participated in constructive discourse, the fruits of their democratic labors. Elected officials took their rightful place at the helm, ready to act in the best interest of their constituents. And in Close Call, Dale Euclid took up the second seat from the aisle during the city council meeting, leveled the mayor with a caustic stare, and recorded her every movement, massive and microscopic, for the Citizen’s Beat column in the subsequent edition of the Close Caller-Times.

  Gretchen had mentally coached herself over and over that she should be grateful for Dale’s consistent and excessively sweaty presence. His sour grapes from losing the election ensured she would always act and speak with utmost regard for the position entrusted to her. But for the grace of God and all that.

  But today she had asked for a tiny bit of divine intervention that Dale would come down with an intestinal discomfort that kept him away. Nothing like the sushi rolls that the Waffle Shack decided to serve to celebrate the Chinese New Year, of course. More like a few extra jalapeños in his chili dog kind of discomfort. Enough to keep him home and parked on his commode.

  All the way back from the day’s regional mayoral convention in Tyler, she had run town business: hands-free devices, math mentally sketched out on the inside windshield as the east Texas pines slipped past, pulling off into Dairy King parking lots that dotted the landscape to access important papers in her bag and, once, a triple-chocolate shake. She pulled into the back lot of the courthouse, mindful of negotiating her Prius at a law-abiding clip, with forty-five seconds to spare.

  Gretchen glanced at her satin-flowered business heels on the passenger seat and wiggled her toes inside the two little clouds of artfully and athletically engineered sneakers hugging her aching feet. And the time-crunch solution came to her like a gift-wrapped inspiration: multitask. Walking. Changing shoes. She had this. In spades.

  She made it as far as the first floor’s great hall and one peep-toe slingback before her idea backfired. At the drinking fountain corner, Gretchen collided with Chase Meier.

  Bowling ball-to-pins, vertical tango, ooof-from-his-pillowy-lips kind of collided.

  The stack of papers she had cradled against her chest exploded above their heads like a Xerox sparkler on July Fourth. When the fireworks descended, papers snowed the polished marble floor and skated everywhere—the water puddle beneath the fountain, the wooden bench outside the council room, the one-inch clearance beneath the nearest office doors.

  The nearest locked office doors.

  “No-no-no-no.” Gretchen chased after the topmost document—her preprinted council meeting agenda around which she had written vital facts and cogent counterpoints during conference breaks all day. The only document of its kind, essentially her blue-inked brain for the next two hours, swept beneath a darkened human resources door. In a distant galaxy, Chase Meier may have said something apologetic or sarcastic or something, but she was too busy letting curses fly.

  “Son-of-a-biscuit.”

  “Pluck it all.”

  “Awww…noodles.”

  “Oh my god,” said Chase. “You knocked me clear into a Disney movie.”

  She folded herself like a map, knees and right temple to the cold floor, behind up—her movement severely limited by her red pencil skirt—and leveled her one-eyed stare beneath the door. The agenda was a good five feet inside. Darn it but these slippery floors.

  One glance back at the reason for this catastrophe, and the blood that already filled her cheeks from her catawampus position pulsed like a heartbeat.

  Chase Meier stood in a suit and casually-loosened tie, hands slung low on hips, neck craned a good ninety degrees atop his shoulder, GQ grin on his face. Not offering assistance. Not collecting papers. Not doing anything but staring at her unladylike posture.

  Gretchen attempted to scramble to her feet, but with one slung into a four-inch heel and one naked as the day she was born, she wobbled.

  His firm grip took hold of her elbow and steadied her.

  She yanked the bottom hem of her suit jacket into place and swiped at a crazy strand of hair that had broken free of its business curl and tangled in her eyelashes. In truth, she felt like crying. Going into a city council meeting woefully unprepared was the stuff that kept her awake some nights. That, and spicy pizza rolls. But she was not about to give this…this redneck rubbernecker the satisfaction. Besides, tears were most certainly not mayoral—especially from someone who wished to advance the notion that women had precisely the right temperament to lead government. Gretchen sucked in a greedy inhale of chutzpah, broke free of his rather ambitious hold on her sleeve, and mined for some decorum.

  “My only fully realized agenda for the meeting that starts—well, now—might as well be on the dark side of the moon.” She began collecting fallen papers and files at willy-nilly lightning speed.

  He crouched down and did the same. “So wing it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Wing it. I’m sure it’s inside that Harvard brain somewhere.”

  “Stanford.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Mayors, sir, do not simply ‘wing it,’” she said, with all the caustic disbelief she might have expressed had he suggested she replace the convocation with a pole dance.

  “Surprising things happen when you let loose of the reins a little. All I’m saying.” Chase held out the last of his collected pages and her other floral shoe dangling from his finger by the strap.

  The innocently intimate sight was so off, so something she would never allow under any circumstances, that it knocked the rebuttal clear from her tongue. Chase Meier had single-fingeredly silenced government but for one lame-duck utterance.

  “I’m late.”

  She rammed her bare foot into the heel in question and bustled—click-click-click—to the meeting room door
s. Door swung wide, Dale Euclid’s beet-faced complexion was there to greet her. His stare was already tight.

  Chase Meier crowded the doorway behind her.

  In her rush, it hadn’t even occurred to her why he was walking the marbled hall. Why he was dressed like a funeral director instead of a ruffian with a sundial on his belt. He held the door for her and flashed the same smile he had let loose in the hallway at precisely the moment someone could have parked a lawn implement up her backside.

  “Yancy added me to the meeting tonight. So, see? Agenda wouldn’t have been accurate anyway.” Jazz hands on a bull rider were definitely not jazz hands. More like a surrender before handcuffs to law enforcement. Still, the bad boy tried. “Surprise.”

  Chase Meier’s rezoning presentation was the stuff of legend. Not because it was flawless—far from it. He clearly had little business acumen and even less experience with electronics, as evidenced by his love-hate display with the laptop-fed projection screen. But when Darcy—traitor—came to his technical rescue and he made a joke about it being like getting back up on a bull after he’d knocked you off—to the tittering delight of the record crowd—Gretchen knew Chase could have insulted the beloved Texas governor and Mother Theresa and he still would have won favor.

  From everyone but her.

  She saw him as the snake oil salesman that he was. Selling debauchery under the guise of a sound and sizeable investment in a struggling local economy. Lining his pockets at the expense of city servants whose resources were already as elastic as taffy. But the dollar amounts were impressive and the conceptual drawings for a tasting and event room were Architectural Digest-caliber because his sister-in-law and resident world-class artist, Olive Blake-Meier, had sketched them. Despite her fervent intentions otherwise, Gretchen found herself daydreaming of being inside the finished distillery—a sleek nod to the industrial history of the space and everything that staked a claim as rustic Texas.

  “I move that we vote on the proposed zoning changes for the eleven hundred block of Main,” said Councilman Digger Owens.

  Because, really, what went better with smooth whiskey than admission to his still-not-yet-open farm implement museum down the road? Digger had a bigger nose for sniffing out paying tourists than an expeditious plan for actually opening.

  “I second that motion,” added Bettye Lindsey, who would as soon allow her spine to dissolve than put her good Christian common sense to work. She also hadn’t stopped staring at Chase since the meeting started. Gretchen knew sending out notices in the water bills about clogged sewer drains wasn’t the sexiest thing in the room—not by a long shot—but the woman had seventeen grandchildren, for Pete’s sake.

  “All those in favor…” added Yancy Roesen.

  The meeting felt like the final click of the front car at a rollercoaster’s crest, right before the stomach swapped with the brain. Gretchen felt sick.

  She leaned toward her microphone. “In the absence of a discussion, both amongst the members of this council and their constituents, a vote is aggressively and irresponsibly premature. I make a motion to table this vote until such time as the council determines sufficient consideration has been given to the long-term implications of such a zoning change.”

  “I second the motion to table the vote,” piped Ebba Howard, wife of Pastor Howard of the Marin Missionary Baptist Church.

  Finally, a second voice of reason.

  Gretchen jumped in. “All in favor of tabling the vote until the next meeting?”

  A majority raised their hands.

  The acid in her stomach returned to its normal simmer. “Motion to table passes, five to one.”

  Yancy and Chase exchanged defeated glances.

  Buoyed by the invigorating scent of Robert’s Rules of Order played out in her favor, Gretchen returned to the blank and uninspiring agenda copy Ebba had passed her at the top of the hour. Sure, it was functional, but her lost personal notes were what made city business uniquely hers. The room quieted, all eyes on her to do what she did best. Lead.

  And the high she rode not a moment earlier stalled.

  Digger took a healthy swig from his water bottle. Dale Euclid wrote something in his notebook, rather like a razor blade to her stomach with each wounding stroke. Would he call her out on being woefully unprepared? For stretching out the meeting unnecessarily because—as he once claimed—"Mayor de Havilland preferred the sound of her own voice time and again.” Bettye still stared at Chase as if he were a super-sized éclair to her always-on diet.

  And Chase?

  Instead of scrunching up his expression in a bitter display, as one might expect after such a dismissive vote, he gave her a slight nod of encouragement and understated jazz hands in his lap. His invitation to “wing it.”

  Gretchen considered something she had lacked the courage to do since the first city council meeting. Without her notes, her mental organization was crippled anyway. She took a fortifying breath.

  “Now that the critical business has been addressed, I’d like to change things up a bit for the remainder of the meeting. Your city council works tirelessly to prioritize issues that have the greatest and most immediate impact on Close Call and its extraordinary people, but that means, at times, concerns of everyday citizens fall through the cracks. I’d like to invite anyone here tonight who has something to share—a need, a concern, a compliment—to step up to the microphone in front of Councilwoman Lindsey. And if anyone can offer a solution or a respectful rebuttal to what is shared, I invite you to step up to the microphone in front of Councilman Owens.”

  No one moved. She was pretty sure no one breathed. Dale alternated glancing around and feverously scratching notes in his book.

  No-no-no. Shoot.

  Chase rubbed his hands against the wool-blend tailored to fit his thighs as he, too, looked around. And when silence stretched to awkwardness, he unfolded himself from his chair and approached the first microphone.

  Councilwoman Lindsey tittered.

  “My brothers and I would like to put together a volunteer task force to address the needs of the area’s large animal populations in times of disaster. They’re often overlooked in floods and wildfires. The team would work with local emergency managers to get livestock to safety. We’ve already spoken to area vets and identified ranches with capacity to secure extra herds, if necessary. If anyone here would like to be part of that team or can offer assistance to that end, well, we’d sure appreciate it.” Chase added a slow-drawl “thank you” before he returned to his seat.

  Gretchen was pretty sure every pair of ovaries in the room melted. Hers were a little slower to thaw. That was, until Chase’s first-up encouraged others to step forward. Soon, the line at each microphone was three or four people deep.

  Over the next hour, council members took a back seat to the community. The animal shelter expressed a need for dogs to be exercised, and the high school’s cross-country coach offered to make running with the dogs part of his team’s conditioning. The bakery owner expressed a desire to start a baking pan library—similar to a lending library for books—in which townspeople could try their hand at special desserts that required unique pans. By meeting’s end, she had several promised donations. The lack of affordable housing for young adults in the area was met with an idea to start a bulletin board for seniors who had rooms to offer in exchange for a little help to keep them independent. And Lon Smith from the What the Hay feed store told everyone about a fancy new picnic table on the market that accommodated a large family, adults all the way down to babies, and how he would match any donation made at his register to purchase one for the town park. Nothing that came from opening the floor to the public was particularly earth-shattering in importance, but by the time Gretchen made a motion to close the meeting, the energy and comradery in the room was palpable.

  Dale slunk out the door. Ebba congratulated Gretchen on a fruitful meeting and “what a great idea.” And Chase, chatting up his strong nuclear and extended ranch family, ga
ve her a thumbs-up across the room that zinged through her tired muscles, all the way to her toes.

  Gretchen hoped he didn’t make niceness—and buckle-less sexiness—a habit. A lethal combination, to be sure. Ambitions that took her all the way from Close Call to the attorney general’s office in Austin left no time and no room for a significant other, most especially to someone with a questionable reputation. Political suicide before the first kiss ended was what that would be. Besides, niceness couldn’t buy Chase Meier the distillery he wanted. He had just tipped his hand in their game, and her Ivy League brain was prepared to cross-examine it until she’d uncovered every weak point.

  “A volunteer task force?”

  Wes’s voice was all eye roll.

  Chase knew the family had conspired to send him riding back to the ranch with his brother. The two-seater 1939 pickup left little room to squeeze in bullshit. And Wes could extract it with the best of them.

  “Why not mention the knitting and drum circle on the north pasture to benefit Nigerian orphans?”

  Chase gave a middle-finger scratch on his left cheek. Totally unimaginative, given their creative history of flipping each other off, but he felt off his game. Had been ever since the flame-haired mayor made it her personal mission to keep his business out of town and drive his brain to distraction. The double-team of her mesmerizing physical display in the hall of the municipal building and the glint of moisture in her eyes when the meeting took on a spirited life of its own desensitized him to the realization that she had completely hosed his business timeline and made him look bad to his investors—as if he wasn’t up to the task he’d so confidently taken on.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Wes. “The volunteer team is a good idea, and it’s about damned time we had one, but this one has sophomore year-Chase all over it.”