29. Logan
I stripped off my clothes and climbed into the shower, grateful to be back on the ranch with my family for a few days before I took off again. I’d been in ten countries in less than a month and had finally reached a point I never thought I’d see. I was sick of my job. I loved the art I’d created, and the landscapes and people I’d captured for posterity. But my hands cramped when I held my Nikon up to my face. I was sick of glad-handing celebrities who had zero fucks to give about anything I believed in, who gushed about how I inspired them and clung to me like burrs until the paparazzi went away. Once the lights weren’t on me anymore, all those soulless beauties disappeared like smoke, and I was all too grateful to see them go, now more than ever.
The hot water poured over my neck and back, washing off the travel dust and loosening the knots in my shoulders and back. Heidi had stopped answering my messages when I was somewhere between Pakistan and Morocco, but Juliette had let me know her daughter was moving in with her, rather than pay for a place, while she got back on her feet. The truce between Juliette and I was tenuous, to say the least, but she knew that her daughter’s long-term happiness was my primary concern.
For that, I had a plan in motion. Now, I needed to have the patience to let Heidi make her choices and faith that they would lead back to me.
Hard banging on the bathroom door brought me out of my thoughts with a curse.
“I almost broke my hip in here, Danny. What do you want?”
“It’s George, not Danny, and what I want is your skinny white ass in the saddle in ten, y’hear?”
“For your information, my ass got a lot of sun in Egypt. No tan lines.” I wrapped a bath sheet around my waist and threw the door open with a jerk, grinning as George cursed and looked away. “What, are you afraid of that my awesome tan will put your lumpy dad bod to shame?”
He scoffed, and I threw my towel at him, sauntering to my closet naked while he swore at me again. I tugged on some Wranglers and my boots and emerged from the closet with my t-shirt half on, peering out the neck hole to see if George was still by the bedroom door.
“Are you coming, man?” he asked, and pushed the towel across the floor with the top of his cane. He saw me looking at the carved wood and lifted it toward me. “My buddy does great work. We could probably come up with something that looked like a flower, or with like, trees and vines up the shaft for your girl, if she gets that far.”
I nodded and sighed. “Yeah. Something that looks like birds and flowers in a tree would be cool.” I slid my belt through the loops and cinched it up. “However, since she’s stopped taking my calls or returning my texts, I’ll leave that between you and her.”
“She’s going through stuff. You know how it is.” He clapped me on the back, and we headed out through the quiet house toward the stables. In the distance, I could hear Patty moving around in the kitchen, taking care of the herculean task of feeding a couple dozen ranch hands plus the family. Every day, she put two meals on the big table for us, and though I thought it would be the worst part of her job, she seemed to love feeding us all.
I couldn’t hear my parents, but if they weren’t out riding the fences or spending time with their new race horses and Pete Call, our horse master, then they’d be in the office, looking over Danny’s shoulders as he took over running the ranch. They’d handed the business over to him almost five years before, but neither of them could completely let go, and Danny had the patience of a saint.
It was good that he did, too, because I’d spent the last few weeks emailing him every chance I got about what I needed to do to own land and not starve to death. It was Heidi’s dream, but the more I thought about it, the more I loved the idea of creating the same kind of place I’d grown up in, but for my own children and grandchildren.
I glanced in the office on our way out the door, and there were my parents, heads close together, muttering as they stared at the computer screen. I nudged George and nodded toward the open doorway.
“Oh, boy, we should probably let Danny know they’re at it again. He’s getting the horses saddled up.” George limped down the stairs, and I looked out over the sprawling lawn that stood between the main house and the ranchhands’ quarters. Trees created a natural barrier between the house and the winding drive that led up to the property, and the flower-lined circular drive made the massive log house look even more majestic.
I took a deep breath of air that was uncorrupted by city life and traffic, and smelled the fragrant magnolias from my mother’s garden on the breeze. Danny and Rachel and their children would one day be the sole residents of Lago Colina. As far as I knew, the rest of my brothers were as happy with the arrangement as I was. The land belonged to all of us, but as much as I loved my brothers, I couldn’t imagine having one of them banging on my bathroom door whenever they wanted or gathering around the big table with my family and the ranch hands every morning and evening.
This land was worth more to me by giving it up to my brothers than it was to hold onto. I’d taken a parcel to help George start his construction business. I’d already talked to Tucker, and was about to make an offer to George and Danny based on his suggestions. I jogged to catch up to George and settled into an easy pace next to him.
The smell of the stables and the bustle of the trainers hit me simultaneously as we came around the corner. Our longtime horse master, Pete, was waiting with Danny, and I got a huge one-armed hug from my old friend as he handed me the reins to my big docile buddy, a chestnut stallion named Dudley. When he was a foal, he’d let the other foals eat before him, watching over them like the herd leader he would one day become.
I scratched his big head, and he hung his face over my shoulder so I could rub down the sides of his neck and give him a big hug, too. He sniffed around my pockets, looking for treats, and Danny tossed me a carrot for him to munch on while we walked out to the exercise pen. I watched George pull himself up into the saddle and took note of how he used his legs. The saddle he left here for riding was specially designed to accommodate his bad leg, and the stirrup on his weak side had a quick release cuff that wrapped around his ankle so his leg wouldn’t slip out.
He saw me watching and twisted his foot, unlocking the stirrup and releasing his foot. He slid it back in and I heard the click as it locked in place. “It’s based on the pedals that cyclists use. It won’t hang me up if, say Dolly here bolted at a snake and somehow managed to buck me. The leg would come loose as soon as my foot twisted, and I’d be free.” He snapped it out and back into place with that same ease a couple more times.
I nodded, thinking. “Just keeping things in mind.”
“I know. Tucker called and suggested that we ambush you, since you took off so fast for your whirlwind trip around the world, you didn’t get a chance to talk to us about your plans before you left.”
“Well, as I’ve learned, I’ve got all kinds of time,” I replied. “Heidi’s still ignoring my attempts to get in touch with her and having to use Juliette as a go-between is chaffing.”
Danny threw back his head and laughed. “All those women who would never tell you no, and you want the one who lost interest the moment you walked away.”
“I didn’t walk away,” I snapped. “She asked for space, and I gave it to her. Then, suddenly, she changed her mind.”
“It was probably all that publicity you had with what’s-her-face, the scream queen,” George suggested.
I pulled Dudley up to a stop, gaping at him. “The publicity for the fundraiser for the World Wildlife Fund?” I asked, confused. I never paid attention to the image the media painted of me. I wanted my work to be remembered, not me.
“No, the Entertainment Weekly articles and viral videos where your little friend tells the world that the two of you are ‘very close,’ which implies…” George left the sentence hanging in the space between us.
Danny shrugged, a sympathetic look on his face.
“That implies I’m sleeping with her. Gross.” I urged Dudley into a trot, eager to get out into the wild and leave the lying, backstabbing, selfish world behind.
“Hey, it could be worse, Logan. You actually could be sleeping with her. It would seem to me that would be a whole lot harder to come back from.” Danny pulled up next to me and grabbed my reins. “Look around you. Isn’t this beautiful? This view is why I asked for this parcel, back when Dad brought us all out here.”
I looked out over the valley and breathed the fresh air in deep. It was beautiful. The hill was just high enough that you could see over almost all of Lago Colina from that point. Far below, trees lined the big lake, and the house and outbuildings looked like miniatures on a thick green carpet, with dividing lines of the fresh red bark that had been laid twice a year for as long as I could remember.
I turned toward the sun and looked out at my remaining parcel of land. It was heavily forested and not much use for grazing, but the cattle and the mustangs appreciated the cool shade of the trees in the heat of summer, and there were animal paths that led to swimmable lake shallows. Some of my first photos of wildlife had been the mocking jays and pheasants I found in the forest when I ran around alone in my free time as a kid.
“I’ll sell that land back to you at half market value. Tucker’s agreed to it, Jackson thinks he can manage it, which leaves the two of you.”
“I can’t agree to that, Logan.” George looked out over the valley and pointed toward the wild mustangs we’d adopted to save them from culling. “Remember when we got that herd?”
“Yeah, Logan cried for a week.” Danny laughed.
“It was my first hunger strike,” I recalled. “I’d forgotten that those guys being here was my fault.”
“Well, they’re your mustangs. We’d have to buy them, too.”
I glanced at Danny, then at George. “I’ll find them a new home. I’m not asking for more than is fair.”
“No, Logan, you’re asking for a whole lot less,” Danny snapped. “We’re not charity cases, Logan. We’ll pay the full price for the remaining land and buy eighty-seven mustangs off your hands. It should be more than enough to start the next phase of your life. Now all you have to worry about is getting that girl of yours to remember that you can’t believe hardly anything you read in the tabloids, even if they’re online.”
The breeze picked up and blew my hair back from my face, reminding me that I’d been meaning to get a haircut. I’d held off because Heidi liked it long. There were a lot of things I’d started doing because Heidi liked them. I had grown up loving the land my father had saved for us. With Heidi, I saw a future where I could do the same for my own future children.
“Danny, I’m selling the land, not the horses. I want at least twenty head to take with me.”
Danny nodded and reached across his saddle. I shook it, and a deal was struck. All that was left was to get the girl.