Patricia Johns - Her Stubborn Cowboy

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.

If there was one thing that her father’s infidelity had taught her, it was that men could lie. Before her father’s affairs came out, she’d trusted in a man’s good intentions, but not anymore. If her father could look her and her mother in the eye and tell them that he was so sorry, but he had to work late... It had been a painful lesson, but a valuable one. Men lied. Men looked out for their own interests, and a woman should never rely on a man to care about hers. Chet had wanted this land for a long time, and she doubted that would have changed just because she showed up.

As they bumped along the gravel road that led back up toward the house, Mackenzie watched the familiar landscape roll by. Out the left, low hills rolled out toward the horizon, cut off by a strip of trees. If memory served, those trees lined a creek that meandered through the pasture, complete with a swimming hole and a rope swing. To the right was the Grangers’ land, a wooden fence slicing between the properties. The place looked different now that it was hers, though. She felt as if she had to memorize it, figure it out, protect it from a Granger takeover.

When Andy told her about Chet’s dislike of her, that he thought that she wasn’t the kind of woman who would fit in with them, she’d been doubly hurt. Not only had her father lied to her face for years, but now Chet had been hiding his own bias. She’d never suspected that he felt that way in the few conversations they’d had, and she certainly didn’t deserve it. So now that she was the sole owner of this ranch, she couldn’t help but feel wary of other people’s devious intentions, Chet’s included. She’d be responsible for all of this, and that weighed rather heavily on her shoulders.