Claiming The Cowboy Read online

  She told her mother about Chase. Asked if she remembered him from school—he was the one with the boots that weighed down his little legs, even in kindergarten, and the crazy hair. “It’s still wild, Mama, just has more product now.” She implored her mother to forgive her ambitions that clouded her judgment—for surely the town may not when they found out the deal she struck with Chase. And what would become of the secret the papers unearthed? The ethical thing was to reveal the original Meier claim to the property immediately, tonight at dinner with Chase. But the mere idea of that triggered a loss of control inside her, on behalf of the town, that made her queasy and unable to finish relaying the tale for her mother. Still, her mother’s advice surfaced: that the hardest internal struggle was always between what was felt and what was known. Not surprisingly, it sounded a lot like the advice Gretchen had heard from her father many times.

  She never stayed at the cemetery long. Gretchen preferred frequency to duration, but she usually waited for a sign that she had a job to do and less than zero time to stay any longer. On this day, that sign came in the form of a chatty starling with shiny black feathers squawking at her from a nearby branch.

  “His mayor, nothing more,” she said to the bird. But when she failed to convince the feathered visitor of her conviction and he continued to insert his opinion, she added, “What do you know? You keep the company of blackbirds and grackles.”

  On her way back to the office, she remembered Chase’s words: “Oh my God, you knocked me clear into a Disney movie.” And for the first time since yesterday morning, when Chase made that joke about strippers on the light poles, Gretchen laughed.

  Inside, the clash between what she felt and what she knew strengthened.

  Tanner’s Barbecue was a serious source of pride for Close Call. Niles Tanner had grown up on the oil rigs out in the Gulf for much of his young adult life. When one of them blew up, he faced years of rehabilitation. He promised himself that if he could get to rights again, he would walk until he found his passion. Niles didn’t find that passion in only one place. He found it clear west to Odessa and east to Memphis, north to Kansas City and south to Mexico. Niles gathered up the know-how to smoke any meat to perfection and the tenacity to ensure his twenty-six-ingredient sauce captured the best from every place his artificial legs carried him.

  And if Niles’s number one passion was barbecue tangy enough to make customers weep, his second passion was displaying the stuffed heads of his twin brother’s most accomplished hunts. Chase supposed he was equally proud of his brothers’ accomplishments—book writing and soldiering—but if Niles’s pride had crowded out the walls in Ted Nugent-fashion and involved a bull elk’s rack the size of a short bus, Chase would have celebrated family in a more understated way. Like a Burning Man effigy paired with a never-ending Carnival.

  Even where he waited on the front porch of the restaurant, country music at Tanner’s blared through the speakers—normally Chase’s vibe, but in retrospect, not the best place to hold a conversation. In truth, the loud twang triggered the headache that always set in when he felt crowded, with too many people wanting too many things from him. His manager wanted him back out on the circuit. Called him with an event that carried a heavy purse and a lock for Stetson sponsorship. His investors parted with their hundred grand along with some scathing consequences should Chase not deliver on the distillery’s location. Likely, though, the headache had a name: Widowmaker. The surly longhorn had damned near cost him his right eye. Chase pushed through the ache, settled on a bench outside the restaurant, breathed deeply of the smoke-tinged air, and locked in on the one thing, of late, that seemed to ease the ache.

  Gretchen de Havilland.

  She was right on time, a few minutes early, actually, but an elderly couple had stopped her in the parking lot. The woman was animated, gesturing so that her bat-wing arms drafted her husband, who fanned a folded copy of the Close Caller-Times. The same edition with two side-by-side, front-page photographs that had turned Chase’s stomach that morning over cold eggs and grits.

  Ranch hands had filtered through the kitchen to top off their coffee mugs and gave him attaboy pats on his back. January rolled her eyes then followed with a fist bump. And Mona? About his double-fingered photograph, she advised him to “cork those pistols” before they got him in trouble. Regarding the strategically-framed image that looked as if he was holding hands with the mayor instead of exchanging a hard hat? Mona thought it best that a horse thief not hang his wash on the sheriff’s clothes line. The woman had watched one too many Gunsmoke reruns.

  By the time Gretchen joined him, her mayoral armor was firmly in place: polished appearance with flawless makeup; a subtle spritz of cologne that was both feminine and powerful; a buttoned-up suit jacket, navy with military-style buttons; and a pageant smile that Chase had come to know was not her most beautiful. He much preferred her tentative, thoughtful smile that came on the cusp of something revealing, and he decided that, headache or no, fake animal heads and good food were the best route behind her masquerade.

  “My apologies.” She nodded toward the old couple now pulling out of the parking lot in their economy coupe. “I encouraged a private appointment, but they have difficulty getting out.”

  Even her speech was podium-worthy.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  One note, too pitched, too enthusiastic. Most certainly not fine.

  Inside, they grabbed a clean table by the window. From her bag, she pulled out a fancy notebook, a voice recorder, and three pens—presumably second- and third-string contingency plans should the first fail—and opened to the first clean sheet that followed crowded, inked-to-hell pages. She titled the page Sesquicentennial Plans – Meeting then followed it with the place, date, and time and two bold underlines. By the time she had chronicled what hadn’t yet happened, Chase was exhausted.

  He took the pen from her hand, gave the journal a one-eighty turn, and wrote What would you like for dinner? My treat.

  She glanced up. He caught a ghost of her best smile—shy, without planning or foresight—but it was a little like the second the rodeo chute door opened: blink and it was gone. Just like his words. With a tidy box-like pattern filled in with Xs, quite artistic and wholly efficient, she concealed his handwriting, maybe all evidence he had ever been present.

  “Whatever Niles has on special today,” she said. “I’m not particular.”

  That was like saying ropes didn’t fray or coon dogs didn’t hunt. Chase was about to call out the absurdity of her statement, but she glanced around, intermittently blinking back at the stares and whispers and the occasional not-so-covert pointing of the other patrons, and his wise-ass comment died on his tongue.

  Some of the restaurant patrons held newspapers.

  Chase damned near lost his appetite. The music knocked around his head. His right temple throbbed.

  He went up to Niles at his butcher block counter and ordered two specials. To go. Armed with a paper sack of the best meal in the county cradled in the crook of his elbow and a cup of iced tea in each hand—one sweet, one unsweet so that he covered his bases whichever way her not-particular opinion swayed, he returned to the table and said, “Grab your things.”

  “What? Why?” Her voice was a one-alarm blaze, still unaccustomed to winging it.

  Still, she packed her notebook, voice recorder, and three pens and followed him out the door.

  He couldn’t tell her the real reason—that he wanted to take her somewhere she could be Gretchen, not Mayor de Havilland. That she deserved time to spend somewhere she wasn’t on display, measuring every word. Hell, he wasn’t entirely sure where that place was; he simply knew it wasn’t at Tanner’s.

  Chase put the to-go bag behind the passenger seat and the teas in his cup holders.

  “Where are you going?”

  “We are going someplace I can hear myself think and you won’t be embarrassed to add my name to your meeting notes. A
n April sunset in Texas screams for a picnic, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not embarrassed.”

  “You have two shades to your cheeks. One is a dusty pink that’s pretty perfect and looks a little like a redhead spent a few extra minutes out in nature. The other I call Chase red, and it’s the color you turn when you’re caught pulling a varsity letter jacket through a crack in a locker door the thickness of a quarter. And right now, your color couldn’t be any more Chase red than if I had spread Niles’s barbecue sauce on them and went in for a taste.”

  Chase could have fit a barbecue wing in the opening between Gretchen’s lips. Her podium-worthy speech could have gone any number of directions after that outburst. She surprised him when she chose the Gretchen route over the mayor route.

  “You remember that day?”

  “The jacket? Hell yeah. My favorite day in high school.”

  Her expression looked like the fiftieth page of a spreadsheet that made no sense. Chase loved it.

  “But you were Homecoming King. And you won your first rodeo that year. And you dated Ivy Makepeace, head cheerleader.” As if all those artificial moments added up to anything close to the real moment of someone wanting to talk to you so much she was willing to leave her dignity right there in the English Honors hallway. He couldn’t explain it, so he didn’t try.

  He held open the passenger door for her. “Hop in.”

  “I should take my own car.”

  Chase laughed by way of a broad smile. His gaze trailed to her tin-can, plug-in mainstream hybrid, the size and color of a ladybug.

  “Rained yesterday. Where we’re going, you’ll get stuck in the mud.”

  “You never said where we’re going.”

  “Do you plan everything?”

  “Yes.” She crossed her arms.

  He was losing ground; he had to think fast.

  “If you come with me now, you can have your Tour of Homes.”

  Gretchen dove into her bag and produced her voice recorder in less time than it took for him to realize he had just sabotaged the premiere event for the distillery. “Again, please. With more specifics.”

  She pressed the red button.

  “I’ll add Clyde Hammond’s double-wide to the tour if you don’t get in the truck now,” said Chase.

  Gretchen hopped up into his 4x4 cab faster than two-forked heat lightning. No voice recording needed.

  Chase laughed.

  Clyde Hammond was the most notorious hoarder and herper in Marin County. The kind who collected a crazy number of reptiles, not the STD kind—though Clyde did enjoy dropping a story or two about his R&R trips to Bangkok during the Vietnam War.

  On his front-bumper route back to his driver’s side, he realized that somewhere between her infuriating notebook and Burmese python threats, the pain in his head had vanished. Chase was the sort of reckless to reach back to that authentic moment in childhood and hang his hopes and dreams on the one person who wasn’t dazzled by his tired reputation, the one person in authority he could muster up an ounce of respect for, the one person who was on a first-name basis with pain of a different sort. She just so happened to be the one person hell-bent on banishing him from her town for good.

  7

  Turned out, Gretchen de Havilland was a sweet-tea kind of mayor.

  Who knew?

  Chase hadn’t even reached the end of Main Street, and coincidentally, the old welding warehouse, before he hung a right and realized where his truck was taking them. Mention of the day he’d caught her with his letter jacket brought to mind the perfect place to offer her an explanation about why that day had been so pivotal. On a blanket in his truck bed, over brisket and honey-roll sandwiches and enough side dishes to feed their captive audience—a handful of Meier cattle in the northernmost pasture—Chase confessed to Gretchen how he had come home from school that day, straight here, to the place Yancy had set up for him to practice on a saddled drum barrel and pressure coils years earlier, and decided professional bull riding was his future. She had wanted to speak to him that day, and when he was a rider, people would care what he had to say.

  “It wasn’t so monumental as all that,” she confessed. “I just had a crush on you.”

  She popped a piece of fried okra in her mouth. A fetching side-grin followed, and he had never wanted to taste something more.

  And that’s the moment Chase knew the mayor had left the building. The pasture, really. The confession that she had liked him over a decade ago delighted him more than it should, mostly because it meant she had laid down her guard. Sure, she had spent the better part of their meal making list after list inside her notebook—his wild ideas, her fiscally-conservative and snooze-inducing ideas, and ideas upon which they both agreed—but now, as talk of the sesquicentennial wound down and the sun slipped lower on the horizon, confessions seemed to be the order of the evening.

  “So how does an Ivy League-bound valedictorian end up mayor of her hometown?” Chase asked.

  She shrugged as if she genuinely didn’t know. Gretchen was the smartest person he had ever met. And he already knew she had an aversion to winging it.

  “I knew I wanted to do law, and I interned at a bunch of firms—divorce, family, criminal. I guess I grew tired of the cyclical nature of it. Repeat offenders. Parents who hadn’t learned a single lesson. Marriages falling apart for all the same reasons. It was a little like treading in wet sand, never getting anywhere. I wanted to make a real difference, for the greatest number of people. So I set my sights on state attorney general. But first I have to prove that I can lead large numbers of people. Win over an electorate. Respect the office I hold. Turn things around.”

  “Most politicians I’ve met are jaded.”

  “It’s easy to slip into that mindset. The nature of government, by its sheer size and complexity, defaults to complacency. The path of least resistance. But if I remind myself, every day, that this isn’t a job, it’s a privilege, that people believed in me enough to exercise their inalienable right to vote for me, who wouldn’t feel special?”

  “Sounds like a lot of pressure.”

  “You must know something about pressure.”

  “Not really. If I fail in the arena, no one to blame but me. Can’t even blame the animal. He’s reacting, what comes naturally. I’ve never considered anyone else. Not until this investment came along.”

  At the mention of their point of division, the conversation stalled. Chase wanted to bite back his words, but he had already shoved her back into her mayoral role. Desperate times called for desperate measures. He brushed crumbs from his hands and vaulted down from the truck bed. Boots in the dirt, where he felt most stable.

  “Time for you to try your hand at being a bull rider.” He pointed at the rusted, coil-spring “bull” inside a cluster of trees, which he had mastered at six. It didn’t have a proper saddle, just a weathered old bull rope.

  “Ohhh, no. No-no-no-no.”

  “Because that would be winging it.”

  “You don’t understand. I’m the least coordinated person in Close Call. Maybe on Earth.”

  “You walk on those stilts all day.” He nodded toward the sexy heels she had slipped off when she crawled into his truck bed. Nearly gave him a hard-on just looking at them there.

  “I walked into the glass divider inside the library once,” said Gretchen.

  “The barrel is completely safe. No broken bones. I promise.”

  “I’m not exactly dressed to straddle that—that death trap over there.”

  His most immediate, practical solution? Take off the skirt. That was also his second, third, and fourth solution.

  “I have a pair of overalls behind the seat.”

  “And where do you propose I change into said overalls?”

  Chase shrugged. “Tint’s dark. I won’t see a thing.”

  “Your tint is likely illegal. As is the decibel level of your muffler.”

  “Do you ever stop being mayor?”

  “No
.”

  “Best stress relief you’ve ever had.”

  “Yoga works fine for me.” Her voice was straight party line, convincing until she added, “And the occasional round of darts where I envision Dale Euclid’s nose as the bullseye.”

  Chase matched her smile. Even Gretchen’s wickedness was pure Disney.

  “You think the current Texas attorney general does yoga?” he asked.

  Chase knew, of course, that he didn’t. Guy was a die-hard PBR fan with a hunger for rich-man adrenaline sports. But Gretchen took the bait. Chase witnessed the epic spark of challenge in her eyes. So that was the way of it. Tap into her hidden tendency to accept dares, mix in a little gender-against-gender shade to speak to her feminist side, and she was putty in his hands. Nearly.

  “There’s something carnal about it. Unlike anything else. Except sex.”

  Yep. There it was. Chase red in all its glory. They had definitely crossed into unchartered territory. He delighted that he possessed the power to completely disarm her proprieties; he was getting damned good at it, too.

  And his dad thought he only had a talent for mindless disregard.

  Chase Meier was in full regard mode now.

  “Come on. I’ll lean my back against the passenger door. Won’t see a thing. You should let loose more often. Look what it did for you in the city council meeting.”

  In typical counselor mode, Gretchen gave none of her thoughts away. Complete poker face but for the flush.

  Chase went for his closing argument. “Besides, there’s no one here to snap a photo. When was the last time you had that kind of freedom?” He stretched his arms wide to drive home his point.

  She crawled, hands and knees on the blanket, toward the tailgate. Her feet hung a crazy distance from the ground. He had never been so happy he got the lift kit on his tow package.