Tempting the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers Book 1) by Leslie North (11)

He’s surrounded by darkness. She’s the one who can lead him into the light…

After his recent military tour, Wes Meier wants to hang up his helmet and focus on his family’s Texas ranch. But when he meets Olive, his focus shifts. The fascinating, gorgeous, and not-at-all-his-type artist wants to use him as inspiration for a local sculpture, but Wes just wants to retreat. He came back home for peace and quiet, not to be immortalized as a hero. Even worse, she’s the sister of one of his fallen comrades, and having her around makes him remember experiences he’s desperate to forget. Livie is challenging his grasp on civilian life, but she’s fast becoming an attraction Wes is powerless to resist.

Artist Livie Blake may not wear her emotions on her sleeve, but art is in her soul. She’s in Close Call, Texas for an important commission, and to explore the town her dead brother told her so much about. When she meets Wes, she doesn’t exactly hit it off with the rugged cowboy. He’s handsome, cocky, and completely closed off, but Livie’s sure she’s found her inspiration for the military memorial. Wes can try to keep his distance, but Livie is determined to learn the serviceman’s secrets. And the more she discovers, the further she falls for the wounded warrior.

Livie never trusts her emotions, and Wes wears his wounds where no one else can see. Can the tortured artist and the damaged hero ever open their hearts to love?

* * *

In isolation, Livie Blake’s eyeful was abstract: tawny hide against rich blue, curves defining the negative spaces in subtle but organic ways, a sculpture so foreign that it captivated her to distraction and made her wonder at the composition of it all.

Taken as a whole, the sun-bronzed art was a one-of-a-kind original squeezed into string-tied chaps that cinched a second-skin denim-clad package—front and back—into a surprising and tingle-inducing relief map of the male form. A cowboy, not of the shiny pleather, homoerotic variety that paraded outside her Long Island apartment every Pride Day, but of the dusty, nothing-fancy, mounted-on-a-genuine-horse-all-day-swagger variety. Until that moment, Livie believed chaps were the fringed shell of a mythic beast, an urban legend told to gullible city dwellers to conjure up the romanticism of the Old West…

“Only thing we stare at longer that that around here is Clyde Hammond’s extra toe when he’s had too much to drink and goes barefoot.”

The cowboy’s voice jaywalked the town’s two-lane Main Street, as subtle as a caller at a starving-artist auction.

Livie’s face incinerated. Busted. She glanced up and down Main to see if her embarrassment had an audience. The street was empty. At five in the evening on a weekday, a time Livie had been conditioned to traffic jams and subway crowds, the only movement in Close Call, Texas, was the blinking red traffic signal one block away.

And one cowboy’s disarming grin.

She unrolled the artist’s contract in her hand and stared at it. Two thousand words of fine-print legalese stared back. Not one word registered in her frontal lobe. The town’s mayor had given her until day’s end to make a decision on the commissioned piece. With five minutes left to study the chosen spot—the late-day natural light, the imagined spatial interaction between the bronze statue and those who came to view it, environmental concerns that might affect the patina in one way or another—Livie stood on an abandoned street corner, ogling a cowboy’s package.

Professional, Livie. Or as the locals would say, “Real professional-like.”

She had been in Close Call long enough for to fill up with gas, to eat, to check into her room at the Starlite Motor Lodge—long enough to saturate her brain with that ever-present Texas drawl. The town was Chuck Norris and Twin Peaks, with a sprinkle of Real Housewives of Podunk tossed in for charm.

Could she exist in this town the way her half brother had all those years back? Livie looked down the barrel of six months, maybe more, to the bronze’s completion, longer than some of Daniel’s deployments to Afghanistan, longer than most gallery shows in Soho, longer than the marriages of several friends.

“You lost?”

Same deep voice. Same loose, unhurried drawl. The cowboy crossed the road toward her. He didn’t glance up one side of the street and down the other for cars. No doubt the same complacency that had flattened a few armadillos Livie had seen on the drive up from Houston. The cowboy’s ambush wasn’t entirely unwelcome. He brought to mind the Dying Gaul, a Hellenistic sculpture that portrayed a brooding pathos, a superior physique, and prime-of-life sexuality. And heroic nudity.

Livie scuttled outside herself, her manners, and simply stared, speechless, her artist brain taking too many liberties with that last bit.

“You all right, ma’am?”

Ma’am made her feel as old as Elizabeth Taylor in the last minutes of Giant.

“Fine.” Curt. To the point. No danger of betraying her affectedness. She lifted her chin and mentally sketched a figure on a plinth.

The cowboy sidled closer, nearly a replica cast of her body position, and stared at the same strip of sky next to an impressive live oak.

“Cat in the tree?”

“No.”

“Biblical locusts?”

Her mouth pitched into a severe frown. Eww. “That’s a thing here?”

“Only every other year.” He gave her a side-glance to match his side-grin. “So, what are we staring at?”

“The future.” Cryptic. Deep. Conversation-ending, hopefully.

“That the same future you were staring at a few minutes ago?”

Once again, he snatched her words. How absurd for him to insinuate that he was her future.

She blinked away the flurry of interference in her thoughts. It was like standing inside a jar, swarmed by fireflies—not wholly unwelcome but dizzying, nevertheless. “I’ve just never seen anyone wearing chaps before.”

“Chinks.”

“Excuse me?”

“Chaps go all the way down. Course, you’d probably know that if you were from around here. Short dress, combat boots, ankle-length duster, educated but dismissive tone. I’m guessing you’re a Yankee.”

She might have taken offense had her history professor father not traced their lineage back to Thaddeus Blake, pride of the New Hampshire militia during the American Revolution.

“I’m from Amsterdam…”

His brows lifted, concealed by his hat brim.

“…by way of New York.”

He nodded as if to say I knew it.

“And from your gregarious inability to mind your own business, I’m guessing you’re a native.”

“Born and raised.”

“Proud of that, aren’t you?”

“Hell, yeah. Besides, we’re not without sophistication around here. We’ve got a Baptist preacher who once met the King.”

“Spain? Belgium?”

“Memphis. And Close Call has a cemetery where the most notorious Texas outlaw in history is buried. Met his tragic end on the wrong side of a Ranger’s gun at a bar that’s now the five and dime. Also, we’re in the Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest pluot.”

“Is that a flash mob of farmers? Because I can totally see that.”

“It’s a plum-apricot hybrid.”

“Sounds…”

“Sweet?”

“Unnecessary.” Just like this conversation. “I don’t mean to be rude…”

“But you’re going to be anyway.”

They exchanged abrupt smiles.

“I have less than two minutes to decide my next creative year,” Livie said. “Pluots don’t really factor into that decision.”

“Shame. They probably should. Likely the best thing to ever cross your lips. Unless you’ve been exceptionally kissed.” He pinched the brim of his hat so briefly it must have been an afterthought. “I’ll leave you be.”

The cowboy walked away, headed in the direction of the old courthouse, the easternmost component of the park-like town square. The building surprised with Romanesque Revival architecture, a worthy counterpoint to a formidable sculpture, not unlike the juxtaposition of the rigid limestone steps to the cowboy’s easy gait. After their stimulating but slightly dizzying banter, the void felt like fireflies escaped from an opened jar—not wholly unwelcome but empty, nevertheless.

Her gaze trickled back to the live oak. At the base was a historical marker, decayed with time, mostly unreadable but for intermittent words that hinted at a much longer tale: Augusta and Mildred and white patron and colored.

Livie called after him. “What happened here?”

From across the road, the cowboy turned back her direction.

She pointed to the worn sign.

“It’s a family marker from the days of segregation. Two beautiful girls’ lives cut short simply because they wanted a drink of water on a hot afternoon. Darkest day in Close Call’s history. Be nice to see this spot replaced with something positive. Something that resembles the future.”

Livie’s heart swelled not only from him wielding her words but also because she had always found inspiration in that intersection of history and humanity. That he had known why she was there, who she was all along, made her realize she had underestimated him.

“I don’t pretend to know what factors into your decision,” he said. “I know we’re not Amsterdam or New York. We’re nothing like what you’re probably used to—some ten-dollar word you used and unable to mind our own business because we don’t ever want to see another dark day in our town like the one in 1966. But I don’t really see caring about each other as a bad thing. In fact, the world could use a little more of that.”

He gave her a weak smile, as if he hadn’t meant to fly his flag of vulnerability, then took the courthouse steps two at a time and disappeared inside. Across Main, a few shop owners turned their signs, emerged from their storefronts, and locked up. Livie glanced at the courthouse’s impressive central pediment surrounded by four conical copper towers. The clock hands stood at a split, twelve and five.

Livie took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Away from distraction, in that moment of centeredness, she sought the sensation that always accompanied her artist decisions—that peaceful inevitability, as if she had already completed a work of art and looked back on it with favor and gratitude. What he said—the rawness, the honesty, the creative oddities already present in the environment, the subtextual hunger for something to unite observer and artist on a transcendental level—made her want to stay, to take the commission, to believe that this statue had the possibility of becoming the defining piece of her legacy, despite feeling like a New York minute stuck inside a country decade.

But when she opened her eyes, she didn’t think of her brother, who never had the chance to settle in this town he loved because an IED robbed him of his future, or the sizeable sum she would receive from a town that clearly couldn’t afford to pay respects to Augusta and Mildred’s memory with proper signage. She didn’t consider her off manners to the handsome stranger, which would have made her socialite mother go apoplectic, or pouring her heart into a piece that only a handful of people would ever see or how the blissful quiet might affect her creativity. When Livie opened her eyes, she wondered only what it meant to be exceptionally kissed.

She pulled out a pen and signed.