Her Stubborn Cowboy

Andy shrugged. “Maybe this isn’t a great time to talk about this.”

“No, this is a perfect time,” Chet said. “This ranch needs land. You know that. I can’t run the place without it.”

Andy pulled out his phone and punched away with two thumbs for a few seconds, then passed the phone over. “This is the development company that is interested in buying the whole lot—yours included—for more money than we’d ever get otherwise. We’d be rich.”

Rich. That was what Andy wanted—cash? Rich was when you had land under your feet that you owned free and clear. Rich was when you could stand outside at dawn and watch the sun rise over fields you owned as far as the eye could see. Rich wasn’t about a fistful of cash; it was about something deeper, more meaningful. It was about roots and history, being connected to the living expanse of something bigger than yourself.

“I’m not selling,” Chet said. “This is ours. This means something. The Grangers have been on this land for generations.”

“Then maybe it’s time to try something else,” Andy said. “Think about it. There are more opportunities out there than you even know about, and with that kind of money—”

“I don’t need to think about it,” Chet snapped. “I’m not selling.”

“Okay, then.” But there was something in Andy’s tone that Chet didn’t trust, the same vibe he’d given off when he was planning to do something he knew he’d get in trouble for when they were kids. More often than not, Chet waded in to try to fix it and ended up in trouble, too. But not this time. They were adults now, and the consequences went far deeper than a month of grounding.

“Are you selling no matter what?” Chet asked cautiously.

Andy nodded. “Yeah, I am. I love this town, too. I know you think I’m some unfeeling jerk. You’re not the only one with childhood memories in Hope. Our parents are buried here, so don’t go getting all high and mighty on me about family and land and all that garbage that you love to lecture me about. I don’t want to stop here. I only get to live once, and I don’t want to regret turning down that kind of cash. It could really open doors.”

Chet had no idea how life could get better than what he already had, but this had always been their problem. Chet loved this land, and Andy just wanted to get a few bucks to escape to the city. Andy wanted fun and Chet wanted stability. They’d never been able to see eye to eye, not even as teens.

“Then sell it to me,” Chet said.

“Are you willing to match their offer?” Andy leaned over and pressed another button, pulling up an email. The number was far larger than Chet could possibly get credit for. He felt his stomach drop.

“You know I can’t match that,” he said. “But I’ll give you what it’s worth, fair and square.”

“This is what it’s worth now,” Andy said, slipping his phone into his pocket.

“What are they going to do with all that land?” Chet asked.

“They’re going to make a resort, apparently,” Andy said. “There are all sorts of rich people who want to pay good money for a ranch experience, but they want to be comfortable at the same time.”

The very thought turned Chet’s stomach. But his brother hadn’t sold the land yet. Andy tended to talk big, and while he wouldn’t put it past his brother, he still had hope. Maybe Andy’s mind could be changed yet.

“Don’t jump into it,” Chet said. “I’ll buy you out if you let me. Just...” He sighed and didn’t finish the sentence. His brother knew exactly what this would do to him and ironically—or obliviously—still wanted a place to stay.

“I’ll think about it,” Andy agreed. “But you do some thinking, too. This could be good for us—really good. You’re always so tunnel-visioned, but if you gave this a chance—”

“I told you. I’m not selling.” Chet couldn’t help the sharpness to his tone.

They fell into silence for a few beats. It had always been like this when Andy was around. He managed to take a calm, serene day and turn it into an argument.

“So when are you going to apologize to Ida and go home?” Chet asked, changing the subject.

“I’m not.” Andy sighed. “It’s definitely over. She gave me back the ring, and I’m hiring movers.”

“I’m sorry,” Chet said gruffly. He felt a wave of sadness. He’d miss Ida. She’d been a great addition to the family.

Andy nodded somberly. “Hey, you remember that girl Mackenzie—the one I was head over heels for?”

“Yeah.”

“I should have married her while I had the chance,” Andy said, his voice low.

Those words sparked anger deep inside Chet. Andy hadn’t appreciated what he had when he had it. Mack had been sweet and gorgeous, smart and funny. She’d been the whole package, and Andy had started up with another girl behind Mack’s back. When Chet told Andy that he knew what was going on and that it wasn’t fair to either girl, Andy had agreed to choose between them. Chet had been sure that he’d land on the side of Mackenzie, but he hadn’t. He’d dumped Mack with little ceremony and carried on with some girl he’d met at the county fair. And now he was looking back thinking that he should have married Mackenzie? Mackenzie was lucky to have gotten away relatively unscathed!

“You’re an idiot,” Chet said. “You cheated on her.”

“I was an idiot,” Andy said. “I was also seventeen, and I’ve grown up since then. If I had a chance with Mack again, I wouldn’t squander it.”

What terrible timing. He didn’t have the stomach right now to tell Andy that Mack was back, mostly because he was pretty sure he’d clock his brother if he even mentioned going on over there to talk to her. But he couldn’t keep Mackenzie a secret for long. Still, some things could wait for another day. He had his brother back, and irritating though Andy was, Chet had been hoping for a reconciliation every single day for the past year. Family mattered. So did engagements, come to that.

“Ida’s worth some effort,” Chet said. “Four years. That’s a lot to throw away. Go grovel.”

“She said she’ll really miss you guys, too,” Andy said, turning away from the window. “Hey, but this is what lasts, isn’t it? We’re brothers. Women come and go, but we Granger boys stand together, am I right?”

“Yeah, until some development company comes along,” Chet said, bitterness edging his voice.

“You could make a fortune, too,” Andy said, sitting down as Chet put a plate of sausage and eggs in front of him. “Try something new, Chet. Take a chance. I want to do this together.”

He glanced out the window toward the house next door, the roof of which was just visible from where he stood. Mack was back and so was Andy, and they were already resuming the old roles they used to play. Andy was breaking hearts, Chet was holding together the ranch, and Mack was—

Mack was what, exactly? Mack, still as gorgeous as she’d once been, with that ornery streak and the defiant way of facing him down that made his mind go into dangerous territory. And there was still a very solid line between him and Mackenzie. Only this time it wasn’t about being too principled to make a move or about keeping the Granger family united. It was now about keeping his ranch. Because if he ticked off his brother this time, Andy had the trump card—he had a juicy offer to buy his land, and he didn’t need Chet for that.

Chapter Two

The next morning, Chet got up earlier than ordinary and slipped out of the house to start his chores. He was eager to get outside again after an evening with his brother—at least, that was what he told himself. It would be ridiculous to get up an hour early to rush through his work so he could get to Mack’s place as soon as possible... Ridiculous, plain and simple.

That morning, he’d snuck around the kitchen like a ninja, not wanting to wake up his brother with the sound of cooking. Andy could get his own toast whenever he roused himself. The night before, they’d stayed up late, Chet listening as Andy made the case for selling their family’s land and starting fresh with some new venture. Andy had obviously put a lot of thought into this scheme, and his business degree hadn’t been wasted. There were statistics about profit and loss, land equity and... Chet couldn’t even remember all of it. All he knew was that he wasn’t selling, no matter how good the deal might be. This land wasn’t about cash; it was about roots, and Chet wasn’t about to be budged on that.

The chilly morning air mingled with the last dregs of his coffee. He drank it black and strong, the same way his dad used to take it. And when he pulled on his boots and dropped his hat on his head, he felt the same peace that flooded through him every morning. It was something to do with the smell of the barns and the sound of horses nickering before they could even see him. Or maybe it was the way the sun eased over the horizon as he lifted bales of hay into the back of the work truck—a twelve-year-old Chevy that was mottled with rust but still going strong. It was hard to pin down exactly what settled into his soul so perfectly, but this was the life for him.

He and Andy used to do chores together as kids, but there had been more than a few mornings when Andy was let off the hook—normally for a feigned stomachache—and Chet went out with his dad alone. He’d cherished that time. His father had been a quiet man who’d kept his own counsel, but when he and Chet would walk out to the barn together, his father would talk. Chet was the first to know about his mother’s cancer because his father had told him one morning in the field.

It wasn’t all heavy talk, though. His father would tell him stories about the Granger men who had come before him—working this very land under his feet. There was the grandfather who’d drunk himself into an early grave and a great-uncle who’d bought the most westerly section for ten dollars and a jar of preserves. One ancestor had been a ranch hand on this land and ended up marrying his boss’s daughter—Matilda Granger, if he recalled properly—and running the place for his father-in-law until the old man died. The ranch was then left to a Granger cousin instead. This land had been fraught with conflict and grit, and hearing the stories had made Chet feel as though he belonged with the rough group of men who had worked the land before him. As a kid listening to the family lore, he’d never imagined that he and his brother would be part of that Granger conflict, but remembering those stories now, he sensed the irony. Apparently, this land came with an ability to cause strife.

Chet’s chores went faster than usual, and after giving a few instructions to his ranch hands, Chet drove over to Mackenzie’s place. He didn’t know exactly what he was expecting today, but he was definitely looking forward to seeing her. This was different from before. She was a grown woman now, not a naive girl, and he found himself wanting to get to know her all over again. She was the same old Mack, and yet she was so much more now. Was it crazy of him to entertain these thoughts?

I’ll be her friend. I’ll help her out. That’s it.

That was what he kept telling himself, at least.

Mackenzie was waiting for him on the wooden steps. She cradled a mug of coffee between her hands, and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail so that her face was fully exposed. She looked more vulnerable that way, her blue eyes lighting on his truck as he pulled up. She put down her mug and waved.

“Morning!” she called as he turned off the engine and hopped out. “You’re earlier than I thought.”

“I got an early start,” he admitted. “I was pretty eager to get out of there. My brother showed up last night.”

“Andy’s here?” She frowned, and he wondered what that meant to her. She’d been pretty smitten with his younger brother back in the day. “What’s he doing with himself now, anyway?”

“He lives out in Billings,” Chet said. “Manages a car dealership.”

“And why did he come here?” she inquired, squinting up at him from her perch on the steps. She shaded her eyes against the morning sun.

“He, uh—” Chet cleared his throat. “He had a bit of a falling-out with his fiancée. He’s out here to cool off and I’m hoping they’ll patch it up.”

“He’s engaged.” It wasn’t a question, and she looked away when she said it. “I hadn’t realized that.”

Well, he had been. Close enough. Sometimes it was better not to nail down any definitions and give a couple the chance to fix things if they wanted to. He was still hoping his brother would change his mind.

“Helen never told you?” Mack’s grandmother had been very much alive when Andy had gotten engaged, and she’d had her own opinions about the relationship. Helen had declared Ida sweet but unsuitable, which Chet had never agreed with. Ida was good for Andy.

“You know Granny. She kept me on the need-to-know. I guess she didn’t think I needed to know that.”

Helen hadn’t wanted him to tell Mackenzie about Andy’s cheating, either. Helen’s son was Mack’s father, and he had been cheating on his wife for years—hence the divorce. Helen loved family fiercely, but not fiercely enough to cover her disapproval when it came to infidelity. She’d said that Mackenzie had enough to contend with in her parents’ divorce and she didn’t need to develop a complex over cheating men, to boot.

“Let sleeping dogs lie,” Helen had said.

“Except Andy isn’t a dog,” Chet had said pragmatically. Andy couldn’t just be chained up or taught to heel.

“Isn’t he?” Helen had fixed him with a demanding stare, and that was that. They’d agreed to never tell Mack about Andy’s cheating, and it looked as if Helen had taken that a step further and never mentioned him again, period. Helen was ferociously protective of her grandchildren.

“Yeah, Andy met Ida a few years ago and they’ve been dating for a long time. He finally asked her to marry him about a year—maybe a year and a half—ago. She’s this artsy yoga instructor, and she’s laid-back enough to deal with Andy. He can’t flap her. They’re good together.”

“I imagine they would be.” She nodded briskly and pushed herself to her feet. “Let’s get to work.”

Technically, his duty was done. He’d given her the pertinent information about his brother, and she could take it from there. But he wished that Andy didn’t have to be a part of this. When Chet learned that Mack was inheriting her grandmother’s ranch, all those old feelings for her had come back. And he wanted a chance to see her again without his brother in the mix. Maybe it would be a simple hello and that would be it, but Andy was supposed to have faded into the background of engaged bliss. He was supposed to be out of the picture.

As they made their way toward the barn together, Mackenzie stayed half a step ahead of him, and he wondered what had brought her out here, besides the inheritance. The last he’d seen of her was when she left the ranch after Andy dumped her. She’d given him this unreadable look, then gotten into the truck, and Helen had driven her to the bus depot. That was it. As far as Chet knew, her last memories of Hope, Montana, were of heartbreak—a heartbreak that Chet couldn’t even explain to her, because it would only hurt her worse. So why on earth would she come back?

The small barn closer to the house was normally where horses and smaller livestock were housed, but when Helen sold off her herd, she’d moved the remaining cows—her bottle-fed babies—into the smaller barn, leaving the big high-tech barn empty.

Mackenzie pulled the heavy door open, and it took all of her body weight to do it. She obviously wasn’t going to let him take the lead, and he liked that. The more seriously she took this, the better the chances of her succeeding on her own, and staying...

Was he hoping for that? He told himself that he didn’t want to be wasting his valuable time teaching someone who wasn’t going to stick around, but it went deeper than that. He wanted her to stick around. The minute he saw her yesterday, something had sparked to life inside him that had lain dormant for a long time.

Chet followed Mack inside the barn and looked around, impressed. Mackenzie had mucked the barn out that morning—it was obvious by the smell of new hay. The cows knew their way to the pasture, and they were already gone, as were the goats, who would never allow themselves to be left indoors in summer weather. The stalls were clean—a few details missed here and there, but an admirable job for a first-timer. This was several hours’ worth of work, and he looked over at Mack with new respect.

“Let me see your hands,” he said.

Mackenzie blinked at him twice, then held them up—gloves on. He laughed softly and plucked the gloves off. She held her arms straight, palms down, as if he’d asked to inspect her nails. He took her slender wrists and turned them over so that he could get a look at her palms. They were red with blisters—a sign of hard work. Her soft skin wasn’t used to this, and even through the gloves, she’d gotten some punishment.

“That’ll hurt,” he said, his voice low. She bent her head, looking down at her skin, and her hair shone warmly in the dim light. He could smell the fragrance of her shampoo, in spite of the barn aroma around them. He pulled his mind back from those details. He needed to keep this strictly friendly if he knew what was good for him at the moment.

Mackenzie closed her fingers over her palms. “I’ll toughen up.”

She pulled her hands back, and Chet cleared his throat.

“Looks like you got a good start on the day,” he said.

“I was up early, too.” She cast him a wry smile. “I remember Granny used to say that the animals needed to be clean and dry. I saw to that. Also, they looked antsy, so I let them out.”

“Did you find the feed bins?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“That’s fine while they can graze. But they’ll need food overnight. You’ll have to know how to mix it—especially for the herd, when you get one again. Basically, Helen was using a mix of chopped hay, corn silage, soybean meal and some fruit rinds that she’d been getting from a grocery chain for next to nothing. It’s just recycling for them. It takes a bit more to separate it out, so they charge a minimal amount...”

Mackenzie followed him as he walked down the aisles, pointing out how the place would work differently with a larger herd. He loved this stuff, and he found himself rambling about feed control, disease testing and signs of a sick animal. Cows had been his life for as long as he could remember. He’d grown up next to them, and while he worked on instinct a lot of the time, ranching was a science and it was absolutely teachable. It didn’t hurt that his student was so attentive and pretty...the soft scent of her wafting through the other smells and taking him by surprise when she stepped past him.

“I’ll have to give you a walk-through of the big barn,” he said, and when he turned, he nearly collided with her, and they were suddenly barely an inch apart. She sucked in a breath and looked up at him, blue eyes widened in surprise. Her lips parted as if she were about to say something, and he found his eyes moving down toward her mouth as if closing that distance would be the most natural thing in the world.

“Sorry.” He cleared his throat and stepped back. The thing was, this wasn’t his “turn” with Mack. Mack was a woman, not a hand towel, and the fact that he’d felt things for her back when she’d been dating Andy didn’t mean anything. People felt things all the time, and they didn’t act on them.

“So what brought you out here?” he asked, mostly to change the subject.

“You know why. I inherited it,” she said simply.

“It’s more than that, though,” he said. “I mean, you only visited for a couple of summers, right? Most people would have sold it and taken the money.”

She moved a coiled hose aside with her boot. “The timing just all came together in the right way. I hated my job. I’ve been working at an insurance company that paid pretty well, but the job was just soul sucking. I missed air and rain and land and—” She blushed. “You always thought I was a city slicker, huh?”

“Yeah, maybe.” He grinned.

“And I am. I admit it. But even people in the city miss a connection with something real...”

He was real, and what he’d felt for her had been real, too, but he’d never let her see that. Family was real, too, as were irritating younger brothers who moved in on every available woman.

“And these city slickers go to resorts to find it?” he asked drily, his mind back on the sales proposition his brother had shown him. What a load. Connecting with the land wasn’t quite so sterile as some people hoped.

“Maybe,” she said with a shrug. “But when I got the news that Granny had died and left the entire ranch to me, I just had to try it, you know. I don’t think this is a chance I’ll get more than once in my life, and I think Granny left it to me for a reason.”

“Helen was like that,” he agreed. The old woman hadn’t done anything without praying on it, as she put it. “But when you left, things weren’t...exactly on great terms.”

“Andy, you mean,” she concluded.

“Yeah, Andy. We Grangers don’t hold pleasant memories for you, I’m sure.”

He couldn’t quite decipher her expression. “What makes you think that my most meaningful memories were with Andy?”

She meant her grandmother, of course, and Chet nodded. “Good point.”

“I mean, he was my first real love, and that’s special, but I wasn’t going to walk away from a chance like this because I happened to date a boy the next ranch over.” She shrugged. “That would be stupid, wouldn’t it?”

* * *

AFTER THEY CHECKED on the animals in the field, Chet provided the promised walk-through for the big barn. Chet was helpful and informative. That in itself was suspicious. Why would Chet, the man who’d never thought her good enough for a Granger, put his valuable time into her ranch unless he had an ulterior motive? He’d offered to buy this property repeatedly over the years, and she had to wonder if his interest in keeping up her land was more selfish than he was letting on.

Chet opened the front door and gestured her outside first. Her arm brushed against his taut stomach as she passed by him and back into the sunlight, the warmth of his body just a little too comforting for her liking. But then, she’d always been attracted to Chet. He’d been the silent, brooding sort, but as it turned out, connecting with a man like that was difficult, especially when his more outgoing younger brother was pursuing her like crazy. If Chet had felt anything for her at all, he’d hidden it well, and she’d let her feelings for him go when she’d started dating Andy. As it turned out, she’d done the right thing—he’d never thought she was good enough, anyway. She’d only have made a fool of herself, and no woman in her right mind courted rejection.

Granny had made this all seem a whole lot easier, and she’d hired and fired her workers without apology. She’d had some simple rules on this ranch—no booze, no sleeping around and no cursing within her hearing. She knew that ranch hands had a rare talent when it came to profanity. Far be it from her to tell them what to do on their own time, but if she was even around a corner, she expected them to clean up their language pronto. There was something about the sight of that slender woman with gray hair and gum boots that made the men stand up straighter and doff their hats. Every single ranch hand Mackenzie had ever seen around this place called her Granny “ma’am,” and while she wasn’t sure how exactly, she had the distinct impression the old lady had earned it.

Granny, I wish you were here to give me some advice...

Granny wasn’t, but Chet was. He’d have to do.

“Come on,” Chet said as he led the way to her truck.

“Where to now?” Mackenzie asked.

“The house. We’ll take care of those blisters.”

He got into the driver’s seat, and she felt a pang of annoyance. He was already acting as though he owned the place, but her hands were quite sore. A couple of blisters had popped. She’d let this one go. For now. But she wouldn’t back down, and she wouldn’t let Chet push her into any corners. This was her land now, and if she was forced to sell, she’d sell to anyone but him. On principle.