I arrived home hot and agitated from my trip into town. It was that girl's fault, although I wasn't quite sure why she'd gotten to me the way she had – lord knows I was used to hostile locals. So why had she put such a bee in my bonnet? Maybe it was Ranger and his uncharacteristic docility. Ranger doesn't really let anyone touch him – anyone except me, anyway, and even then it's only when he feels like it. But I'd seen the girl before she saw me, I'd watched her reach out and put one of her little hands on my mercurial stallion, and then I'd watched him react with what almost looked like contentment.

Jealousy, that must have been it. I'm a possessive man and I'd be lying if I said I didn't like the fact that the only person Ranger deigned to tolerate was me. He'd let her touch him, though. Let her pet him. Like he was some soft-ass gelding up at the Henson's riding school.

The cupboards, after I'd neatly stacked the cans of soup on the shelves with all of their labels aligned and facing outwards, looked marginally less bare than usual. There was cold beer in the fridge, too, but I had cattle to water and a fence to check before I could even think about drinking beer. Beau, my cattle-dog cross, was at my feet looking up at me hopefully.

"Alright boy," I addressed him, scratching his thick ears. "Let's go see about getting those critters watered."

It was quarter past four in the afternoon when the three of us – Ranger, Beau and myself – headed out onto the Corbett Ranch property to check on the livestock. The sun was just beginning to sink down towards the horizon and the light was golden, illuminating the wings of the insects that flew up in front of us as Ranger made his way across the dry grass.

"Did you like that girl?" I asked my horse – because yes, I talk to my animals all the time. In my experience, they're generally much better listeners than people. "Huh? Did you? You got a weakness for city girls that I don't know about, Ranger?"

You might think it was a lonely life out there in a small town nestled right up against the edge of the Rockies. I wouldn't use the word 'lonely.' Peaceful, maybe. As peaceful as it was possible for my life to be. Quiet. I like peace and quiet. Two tours in Iraq will do that to a man. I left the States for the first time at eighteen, craving action and excitement in the way only teenage boys can. When I came back my fiancée was gone, her belly already swollen with another man's baby, and my family didn't exactly cover themselves in glory trying to understand that the world was, for me, a very different place after the war.

Maybe I'm being ungrateful, I don't know. They tried, in their own way, but so much of it rang hollow. The yellow ribbons on the trees at the family estate and the 'My Son Is A US Marine' Facebook posts sat uneasily with the memories of my parents balking whenever I tried to talk about the war in a way that didn't fit their simplistic narrative. After my second tour, after seeing things that no man can fail to be changed by, and after losing my best friend to a sniper's bullet, it was like the United States was no longer a place I recognized. Like the fragility of life was something no one around me understood.

I tried. I tried for quite a while. After an incident at a family party that ended with me shoving one of my dad's best friends up against the garage door and nearly choking him out, it was time to leave. My family had owned the ranch in Montana since before I was born, and it had been willed to me by my great-grandfather, to be signed over on my eighteenth birthday. It just seemed obvious that River Bend was the place to go. Somewhere where no one knew me, somewhere I could be alone with my animals and my thoughts, a place where life moved at a slower pace.

So did I get lonely? Sometimes, maybe. But there was a bar in town, a bar that always had a couple of single women – usually tourists on their way to somewhere else – in it. I got my needs met when they arose, let's put it that way. Mostly, though, River Bend and the Corbett Ranch were a sanctuary to me.

In the distance, I heard the sound of cattle. Beau heard it too, taking off like a shot across the rolling ground as I dismounted Ranger and got to refilling the water troughs.

"Easy boy," I called as the dog ran circles around the steers. "They're already thirsty, they don't need any more convincin' from you."

When the troughs were filled and the cattle were drinking their fill, I lay down in the shade of a tree and looked up at the sunlight filtering through the leaves. It was a hot afternoon, which was fine by me – I like the heat. Usually, I'd have myself a nap before heading back to the cabin. That afternoon, something else was keeping my mind occupied. That girl – the one outside Parson's Grocery. Why had Ranger seen fit to be so sweet with her?

I thought of the surprised look on her face when I'd spoken to her like she wasn't a pretty girl and chuckled to myself. Women, man. Turns out you can live without them, as long as you schedule brief visits every now and again.

Half an hour later I woke up suddenly, instantly alert the way I always am upon waking. I'd been dreaming. The kind of dream that makes it so you have to stay in bed for a little longer than you expected, if you know what I mean. It was her – and the image in my mind's eye, of her sweet, curvy little body perched on my lap as I buried my face in her tits hadn't fully faded yet. I glanced down at the hard-on straining against my jeans, and surprised the hell out of myself by considering a jerk-off session under the tree, in full view of the cattle.

That wasn't like me. My life was pretty well-regulated by then, and that definitely included sex. When I needed it, I got it. When I needed it and the bar was empty or closed, I did it myself. But I wasn't going to do it out there, in the middle of a goddamned field. Still, though. It was a close one.

I got to my feet and tried to will the beast to stand down, but he wasn't having any of it. So that's how I rode back to the cabin, with a hard-on that refused to settle in my pants and a distracting ache in my balls.

When I got in I dumped one of the cans of soup into a saucepan and put it on the stove, trying to think about anything but the way that girl's tank top had clung to the ripe curves of her body. Soup. That's what I could think about. I ate too much of the stuff, because the truth was, if it was anything more complicated than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I couldn't do it. Domesticity is not my skill-set. Still, I should have made an effort to eat more food that didn't come out of a can and smell vaguely like something you might feed a cat.

Fuck. Thinking about my nutritional needs wasn't helping. I stirred soup with one hand and tried to adjust my cock into a more comfortable position with the other. A couple of minutes later I gave up, turned the oven off and climbed up to the loft, unzipping my jeans before I'd even hit the bed.

I thought about her lips – full, sensuous and curved into an offended pout. Just the kind of lips you want to think about parting slightly as a helpless little sigh escapes from between them. I thought about the tone of her voice, too. Feisty and confident. How sweet would it be to hear that voice dissolve into a soft moan as I slipped my hand into her panties? I wrapped my hand around my own thick length and closed my eyes, concentrating on that thought, on how she would sound, on the wetness I would discover there, warm and slippery and inviting.

It didn't take long. In fact it was so quick it surprised even me. I lay there afterwards, catching my breath and feeling for a brief moment like I was fifteen again and so horny I couldn't even think about taking my time. Then I cleaned up and went back downstairs to my soup, my stomach growling with hunger by then. Whoever that girl had been, with her dark eyes and her luscious body, I knew the odds were I was never going to see her again. She was probably halfway to Washington State already, or northern California or wherever it was she was heading – and none the wiser about the effect she'd had on me.