Tempting the Rancher Read online

  Mona nudged January’s elbow at the rather ambitious opening fiddle strains of a stripped-down “Cotton Eye Joe,” a favorite group dance of the kid-set because it was the only time their Bible-hugging parents allowed them to say bullshit. Scream it, really.

  “I’m good,” said January. “You go.”

  Mona shot to her feet and linked shoulders with those already in formation.

  As if Mona needed her permission. Her mother had been especially clingy since they bonded over styling MooDonna’s tuft of white hair that afternoon. The cow snorted, the women giggled, and all three of them considered a rather brazen coat of quick-dry Making Whoopee purple on her hooves until Willie broke up the girl party. January smiled at the recent memory.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re enjoying your time in Close Call.” Nat said from a spot near the tree trunk.

  Stumbling dance lines and howls of laughter provided the perfect cover for her newfound contentment.

  Nat took Mona’s place. He folded his long cowboy legs on the bench in front of them like a giraffe styled in a starched button-down shirt and Wranglers. His cologne didn’t hit her like the others that had wafted her direction that night—peppery, in-your-face excuses for masculinity. Nat wore his scent to perfection. Aged leather. Woodsy, like the balsam fir in a Christmas candle. Virile without trying.

  “Forget the steps?” He motioned his longneck Shiner bottle toward the dancers.

  “I needed time to pop my shoulder back into alignment. Bud might have mistaken my arm for a tire pump.”

  Nat tossed his head back, his laughter throaty and warm. “Old Man Goff never dances. He’s a little out of practice since his wife died.”

  “He’s sweet.”

  “He’s not the only one.” Nat pulled a swig of his beer and took his time swallowing. “I’ve seen you out there, dancing with old toughies and widowed women who never get asked and red-haired twelve-year-olds with freckles and bad teeth.”

  “That kid’s going to be a looker. Give him a handful of years.”

  The band eased from the rollicking folk tune to a slow number.

  A guy sporting a Texas-flag snap-button shirt and reptile boots approached. Apart from his questionable fashion sense, he was a dead ringer for Superman—the recent Hollywood version she’d caught on a flight from Sydney to London a few years back. He had spun every other eligible female on Dietrich’s dance floor like a pennant caught in a hurricane.

  “Would you like to dance?” he said.

  Beside her, Nat straightened. May have even stopped breathing.

  January grabbed Nat’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she told Superman. “He asked first.”

  She tugged Nat toward the dance floor, a little like a giraffe hesitant to enter a limbo contest. But they fell into an easy rhythm, a forgotten alliance, a soft place. His body picked up the beat and telegraphed it to hers through their joined hands, the slight pressure of his touch at the curve of her spine, his close proximity.

  “What was that?”

  January shrugged.

  “That was Eric Pickford.”

  “Should that name mean something?”

  “Cousin to our beloved banker, Austin, and sole heir to the Dyed And Gone to Heaven chain of hair salons?”

  “The one that used to be the gas station on Main, with the wigs on the pumps?”

  “And the one in Hickory that used to be a funeral home. It’s a three-county empire.”

  “Nathaniel James Meier, you sat there and watched me turn down a shot at marrying into a pedigree. Shame on you.”

  His chuckle resonated between them. A warm buzz danced along the nerves in her neck and arms, sans alcohol. She had forgotten the single most pleasurable part of being around Nat—making him laugh. At first, a challenge. Then, as he opened up and let her in, a salve when her parents’ marriage festered, when her father left, when her mother struggled with two mouths to feed. Leaving had been the only relief January could think to give her.

  “Seems everyone wants to dance with the world traveler,” said Nat.

  “What about you, cowboy? You’ve been here long enough to keep tabs on my dance card.”

  He orchestrated a braiding of their arms and a complex turning maneuver, likely to keep from answering. January closed her eyes to the cool wind lifting her hair, the heady spin of being in his arms again. She felt…safe. Nat was that rare specimen of man able to suppress instincts and exalt the wellbeing of others. Muscles beneath his crisp shirt were larger, firmer, more defined than she remembered, no doubt due to the hours beyond ranching that he spent volunteering for the Marin County Fire Department. He has saved seven folks in that capacity—not that anyone is counting, wrote Mona in one of her letters. For January, after being solely responsible for her safety for so long, shifting the burden to another, even for the duration of a dance, felt liberating.

  “Thank you...” said Nat, “for today. Cows looked good going up on the auction site. Should bring a higher starting bid.”

  Until now, January assumed her day’s chore held little importance beyond keeping her off a horse and away from herding. Probably a good thing Mona talked her out of the Making Whoopee nail polish.

  “You’re welcome.”

  The polite between-space Nat had held onto as a gentleman at the dance’s opening all but disappeared. His freshly shaven jaw teased her temple.

  “I’m surprised you’re here, with so much to do on the ranch,” she said.

  “Willie threatened to quit if I didn’t show.”

  “He does like to dance.” She recalled Willie’s instructions on her first dance of the night: I’ll bring the moves, you steer the car. Moves wasn’t quite what she would call them. He had perfected the perfect blend of the Texas two-step and the jitterbug, all with an infectious smile. If Willie started a religion, January would be his first disciple.

  “Willie’s good for you. Keeps you light and spontaneous. The way you used to be.”

  Their easy rhythm broke. Nat ended the dance before the band.

  “When your decisions support ten families and a hundred years of family history, light and spontaneous doesn’t cut it.” Nat’s face flushed beneath his brim, nothing at all to do with the heat they had generated together. “We can’t all chase dreams, J. Some of us live in the real world.”

  He mumbled out something close to an excuse me and headed for the trees. Even angry, Nat found his manners.

  Her chest felt bruised. She shouldn’t have come. To Dietrich’s. To Close Call. All she ever seemed to do was spread hurt.

  The song ended. Another up-tempo one began. Superman swooped in with a second offer.

  January glanced at the tree line that had swallowed Nat.

  “Knew I’d find you here.”

  Where a tiny tributary of the Brazos River, barely more than a trickle most seasons, joined an oasis of cypress trees, grassy knolls, and sixty-eight-degree spring-fed water, Nat sat on a cluster of boulders known as Tull’s Teabags. Affectionately named after Colonel Ulysses Tull, who discovered the spot to water his volunteer Army-Corp-come-late-to-the-Texas-revolution, the rocks were smooth and abundant, which raised questions that rarely held January’s attention long enough to find out anything further about anomalies in the male anatomy or history. Or maybe—just maybe—the Colonel had a fondness for the hot beverage.

  Knowing the locals of Close Call, not likely.

  Nat didn’t answer her. He tended to stew, hold things inside, his granite, cowboy exterior on full display. She remembered that about him. Mostly, she remembered the best way to knock him loose was a strategic kiss to his neck. Her rabbit libido scampered down that fantasy trail before her turtle common sense kicked in. By the time she sat beside him on the rock, the air was the least of the dampness clinging to her skin.

  “Eric Pickford isn’t used to being turned down. Twice, no less. I told him I have back problems that don’t allow me to dance with short men.”

  Though the ful
l brilliance of the moon had come and gone the previous night, enough light reflected off the water for her to see the corner of Nat’s lips threaten a smile.

  “I’m sorry, Nat. I didn’t mean anything—”

  “It’s okay.”

  Water beneath the rocks gurgled through their silence.

  “You should really stop doing that,” said January.

  “What?”

  “Being so nice all the time. Filtering out what you really want to say.”

  “Because hurting people is so much easier?”

  This time, the bruise spread to her whole body. “I deserve that. Worse, really. But at least honesty gives people something real.”

  She slipped out of her boots and socks and reclined on the rock, fingers linked behind her head. Stars blinked. Crickets spoke. Her sundress inched up her thighs. The night was welcome there.

  “Take, for instance, a column in the paper I read over breakfast. Mom said it was all the buzz—runs in all the small-town papers. It was different from any other advice column I’d ever read. This columnist—Agnes? She dug deep. No one or two liners of you-should-do-this talk. Sounded young but with an old soul. She was honest and real—a little conservative in her advice—but it all came from a place of genuine concern for complete strangers. Made you want to tell her everything, you know?”

  Nat shifted but settled in the same spot, same position.

  “She had a way with words, like poetry and life all twisted together—hard to tell where one ended and the other began. Then she said, ‘never look down on anyone unless you’re helping them up,’ which is weird because someone else I know says that all the time.”

  “That so?” His voice held disinterest, distance, like he aimed to let the conversation die right there.

  “You’re Agnes, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  A squeal of delight slipped free of January’s lips. She knew it.

  “Agnes is more your mother than me.”

  “I don’t know. She can drop advice six ways to Sunday, and it doesn’t sound like that.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re on the receiving end.”

  “Maybe. So how did you become a granny ghostwriter?”

  “As a favor to Clayton Stokes when he took over the paper from his father. He needed someone. I needed extra money for my double major. Told him I’d help him for a while. When other papers picked up the column, he asked me to stay on.”

  Their voices matched in softness, in the place of confidences and secrets.

  “What was your double major?”

  “English. I never finished that degree, either.”

  “You were always an amazing writer. That story you wrote in high school about the group of friends who got on the wrong train and learned they were in a parallel universe when the train was held up by outlaws? God, I loved that story.”

  Perhaps it had been his ultimatum: the next chapter if—and only if—she was in his arms. Preferably naked.

  “Why can’t you be as honest with me as you are in your column?” she asked.

  For a long stretch, she believed he wouldn’t answer, that truthfulness would remain the great unanswered question of their relationship, then and now. Mona always said, “still waters run deep.” Except where his writing uncovered hidden truths, Nat Meier was the Marianas Trench.

  “Because hurting you the way you hurt me would be easy.”

  Her nose stung. Constellations swam. She had walked right into that trench. Asked for it. In the spirit of honesty, she pulled him into the depths alongside her.

  “I’m sorry, Nat, for the way I left. It was a shit-coward thing to do, leaving you waiting in that field, headlights on, radio playing low. I tried, for thirty minutes, I tried to walk out into the clearing, but I knew if I climbed up on that blanket in the truck bed beside you, I’d never have the courage to leave.”

  “Not even a note, J. Not one fucking word for years. Jesus, I thought you were dead.”

  A rogue tear slipped loose, lashes to temple. January swiped it away before more followed.

  “Mona should have…”

  “You should have.”

  “I know. I’m sorry for not writing. I’m sorry for the way I left, but I’m not sorry I left. At eighteen, all I wanted was the freedom my father had, to not be a burden to anyone.”

  “And now?”

  She didn’t know. Her desires were one Texas-sized blank, at a crossroads between navigating her dreams and being unable to recall why those dreams belonged to her. The past and future weren’t here. Not this night. All she knew was the present.

  January stood, swiped the moisture from her cheeks, and mustered all the brightness she could into her voice. “Let’s go swimming.”

  “What?”

  “Like we used to. It’ll be…”

  “Light and spontaneous?” This time, the two words had lost their bite.

  January grinned, her mood buoyed by his snappy response. “I was going to say therapeutic. You can pry yourself out of those jeans before you’re sterile, and I can pretend I didn’t become Dear Agnes’s latest subject matter.”

  “J—”

  “Come on. I’ve been in a hundred different watering holes, all over the world, but this one is still the best.”

  “One condition.”

  “Anything.”

  “You stop trying to work the ranch. Stay out of the way, here on out.”

  She weighed this against the promise she’d made Mona. Nat was the boss. How could Mona argue with that?

  January grabbed her hem with crossed arms, wiggled the cotton dress over her head, and draped the garment across her boots.

  Everything but Nat’s eyes turned back to granite.

  She jumped rock to rock until she reached the spring’s pool and dove in. Water sluiced warm along her scalp and embraced her with a familiarity she had craved for so long. When she surfaced, she blinked to clear the dampness from her eyelashes and glanced up at Tull’s Teabags.

  Nat’s boots and hat already stood out in sharp relief against the moon-drenched rocks.

  A grin nearly split January in half.

  “Mona has a crowbar in her truck,” she called out to him.

  “They’re not that tight,” Nat said as he nearly toppled removing his pants.

  “Those put Dwight Yoakam to shame.” Not that she was complaining. Not one bit.

  4

  Nat expected a bra. Panties at the very least. But in ten years, he had forgotten the single most important truth about January Rose.

  Expect the unexpected.

  The moment she peeled off that dress, January was as naked as the day she was born. And all fucking reason trickled away between the rocks, headed for the Gulf of Mexico.

  January called out something about the water temperature. God’s honest truth: Arctic Circle or Yellowstone’s magma pits, he wouldn’t have cared.

  When they had taken a turn on the dance floor—for old times’ sake, he had convinced himself—he dismissed his inability to see past her unbuttoned neckline as an unfortunate angle and dim bulbs. He spent the rest of the two-step chastising himself for being a pervert with a razor-sharp memory to fill in the blanks.

  For all he knew about her worldly ways, she probably had guys around the globe on the hook—a tan guy in Barcelona dumb enough to run with pissed-off bulls or a backpacking do-gooder in Nepal. Hell, she could have promised the plastic shrimp guy with the neck beard that she’d let him drive her wild if he swung back by to get her when she was done with this town again.

  She wanted light and spontaneous? Like he used to be? He would punish her with the thought. Make her wonder if she ever really knew him at all. His thumbs hooked the waistband of his briefs…

  And he promptly chickened out on the skinny-dipping part.

  Nat climbed down the rocks in his underwear and entered the pool more like his grandmother than the free-balling companion January no doubt wanted. It wasn’t unheard of to bu
st a tailbone or a skull on a hidden rock in the pool. A broken bone would simply add insult to the injury of January’s inevitable exit, right when the ranch needed him the most. Light and spontaneous required some boundaries.

  They swam for a time, the intermittent movement of water the only conversation between them. Distant strains of a fiddle circled the canyon-like alcove. A truce—even temporary—felt as good as the water working against his skin. Nat had done nothing but take his frustration out on the land since the day she came back. The punishing pace was good for business, an endurance marathon on his muscles.

  “You’re thinking about the ranch, aren’t you?” Her voice skipped across the water’s surface like smooth stones.

  “Hard not to, with the auction coming.”

  “All that worrying is going to put you in an early grave.”

  “Means I’m invested. Sticking around long enough to see the outcome.”

  She skimmed her arms on the surface, mimicking movement only to stay in the same spot. Moonlight bathed her shoulders. Darkness pooled in the hollows of her collarbone. It took every ounce of willpower he had to fight his internal tide to move closer, to gather her lips against his and drink her optimism, to slide against her, nothing more than carelessness between them.

  Water-logged cotton around his erection had him rethinking his no-skinny-dipping policy.

  “I worry, Nat. I just don’t allow it to consume me.”

  “What do you worry about?”

  “Sometimes I don’t know where I’ll sleep from one day to the next. I worry that all men aren’t you—that they’ll think nothing of treating a woman like an entitlement. I worry sometimes that the things I eat or drink or do have the power to change my life in an instant, because I don’t always have control. And until Mona moved onto your land? I worried about her being alone. Thank you for all you do for her.”

  “Timing was good. My mom is gone more and more. Mona picked up the slack.”

  “Where does your mom go?”

  “To places where she can ‘find herself.’ Whatever the hell that means. I swear I don’t know her anymore. One minute she’s at a commune in Arizona, embracing a clean life, stringing prayer beads and teaching yoga, and the next she’s working as a bartender in some dive in Ireland.”