by Amy Aislin
Windsor Ranch had luxurious rooms and rental cabins; boasted casual dining in the café as well as a high-end restaurant; included an athletic facility, heated outdoor pool with a view of the mountains, and a small spa; offered guided hikes and horseback rides, fishing, mountain climbing, white-water rafting, year-round bird-watching and wildlife-viewing tours, kids activities, and shuttle service to the nearby national parks; was a thirty-minute drive to the nearest ski slopes; catered to family getaways, romantic weekends, and corporate retreats alike; and had been consistently voted the number one guest ranch in Wyoming in Travelers’ Digest Yearly for the past four years.
And all of that while capping the maximum number of guests at thirty to ensure the family vibe the ranch was known for.
So yeah. It wasn’t glass and chrome. It was understated elegance and casual luxury. Las had no patience for guests who complained about the Wi-Fi that turned spotty when it rained or the lack of satellite television or the inadequacy of the nightlife in town. One of the many reasons he didn’t work in guest services.
“It’s amazing,” Marco said. “It’s like you brought nature indoors.”
“Oh.” Momentarily speechless, Las scratched his chin. “Yeah. My great-great-grandfather—the founder of Windsor Ranch—was a bit of an environmentalist. Tried to disturb as little of the land as possible when he built on it, and every generation that’s expanded it has done the same. That’s why it looks like the trees are about to grow into the house.”
And if Las had his way, the ranch would, one day, add another accolade to its long list of accomplishments by becoming a working ranch that respected biological diversity. Windsor Ranch had an opportunity to partner with the United States Nature Conservancy—the leading land conservation organization in the country that protected habitat for both wildlife and future generations of children—to test the best cattle grazing practices that would also enhance wildlife habitat on their land. Las just had to put a proposal together that his mom would actually listen to.
“Is this what you’d call a dude ranch?” Marco asked.
Las weaved them through the employees-only back hallways. To their left, a wall made almost entirely of large picture windows gave them a view of the horse barn, a long red and white structure straight out of a children’s picture book.
“I suppose,” he said. “But it’s also a working ranch. All the fun stuff happens on the other side of the highway.” Fun, meaning away from anything related to the guest services side of their business. Las had no interest in it; he spent ninety-nine percent of his time on the other side of the highway, working on the ranching side of the business that his mom managed.
The doors to the barn were open and a small crowd milled in front while a couple of ranch employees in jeans and black Windsor Ranch T-shirts gave instructions. Las didn’t see his sister but knew she was there, most likely inside the barn in her closet-sized office, and he made a mental note to introduce Marco to her as soon as they were done in HR.
“Really?” Marco’s eyes—a dark blue that reminded Las of the Wyoming sky at night—blinked at him in confusion. “I must’ve missed that on your website.”
“We’ve got some of the best cattle in the state.”
One corner of Marco’s lips lifted. “You’re boasting.”
Las shrugged. “When you’ve got something to boast about…” He bumped their shoulders. “Not you, though. You don’t boast.”
“I don’t have anything to boast about.”
“That so?” Las stopped them in front of a door with a gold plaque that read Maeve Seymour, Human Resources. “You don’t think helping the Glen Hill College Mountaineers win at the Frozen Four this year is anything to boast about?” It was Marco’s turn to shrug, awkward and pleased. “And didn’t you tell me Washington’s NHL team invited you to their development camp in DC? Why aren’t you boasting about that?”
Another shrug. “There’s nothing to boast about. I’m a goalie. With the small amount of opportunities in the big leagues for my position, I know not to get my hopes up.”
Las knocked on the door. “Maybe you should have more confidence in your abilities.”
“Maybe I’ll just keep being a realist.”
The door flew open. On the other side stood Maeve, white curls cut close to her head. “Lassiter.” She turned to Marco. “This must be your friend from college. I’m Maeve.” They shook hands. “Come in.” Waving them in, she returned to her desk. “I’ve got the paperwork ready.”
Las sat in the chair next to Marco’s while Maeve went around her desk, tuning them out as Maeve handed over emergency contact forms and personnel forms and whatever else Marco needed to sign. Probably some waiver that said he wouldn’t sue them if he broke an ankle on the trails.
Las had no reason to be here. Typically, Maeve would escort a new hire on to wherever they were going next—usually to the office of whoever would be their supervisor. It was probably why Maeve kept shooting him an eyebrow raise, but it’d been several weeks since he’d seen Marco and he wanted to drink his fill. Look but not touch.
That should be his personal tagline for the next three months.
He tuned back in when Maeve mentioned the vacation policy.
“Uh.” Marco scanned that sheet of paper. Vacation Policy for Contract Employees it said at the top, and then a full page of legalese that could be summed up in one sentence: contracted employees are entitled to two weeks unpaid vacation. “Did Las mention that I’ll need a few days off early next month?”
“He did.” Maeve gestured in Marco’s direction. “If you flip that sheet over, there’s a form on the back you can fill out to claim any vacation days. Your supervisor will need to approve it.”
Those few days off were for the NHL development camp. As good a reminder as any that Marco was temporary. Even if Washington didn’t add him to their roster, he’d be heading back to Philly, or wherever his job next took him, inside of three months like every other seasonal staff member Windsor Ranch had employed as far back as Las could remember.
And not only did Las not do temporary, his place was here. On this ranch. At the end of the summer, he’d be starting grad school in Laramie, but after that? He was coming right back home and he wasn’t leaving again. His future partner had to love this place as much as he did.
Twenty minutes later, Marco had signed his life away and was the owner of one employee handbook and three brand new black T-shirts with the Windsor Ranch logo stitched in white on the upper left. Las led him out of the building’s back exit and hung a left. Outside the early afternoon sun was high, not quite warm enough to beat the chill in the air, a leftover from a cold spring.
“What’s next?” Marco asked.
“I’m going to introduce you to the assistant manager of outdoor guest activities.” The guests who had previously milled in front of the barn were gone, off on a trail ride led by one of Windsor Ranch’s seasoned wranglers. “She’s got an office in here.”
As they entered the barn, Marco’s lips pursed. “Am I going to be working with horses? Because I have to be honest, I don’t know anything about them.” And then, seemingly to himself, he muttered, “Thought I’d be leading hikes.”
“You are. My sister oversees the seasonal employees contracted to work in outdoor guest activities. And because she’s a weirdo, she’d prefer an office in the barn instead of the house like everyone else.”
“Psht.” His sister exited her office as Las and Marco approached. “Says the guy with a tent in the woods.”
Marco turned to him. “What?”
Las crossed his arms. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s his hideout,” Alice said, a smile playing around her lips.
“Oh,” Marco said. “I thought you lived there.”
Las opened his mouth to respond; Alice beat him to it. “He goes there when he needs to be away from people.” A beat, then, “Which is basically all the time.”
With a sigh, Las glared at his sister. �
��You suck.”
Smiling broadly, she held a hand out to Marco. “Alice Windsor-March. Nice to meet you.”
“Marco Terlizzese. Same.”
Alice’s eyes narrowed. “Say your last name again?”
Marco did so, slower, no doubt used to people stumbling over its pronunciation.
“Huh. Good thing you’re the only Marco here this summer and I won’t have to learn how to pronounce it.”
Marco’s shot of laughter was loud in the relative quiet of the barn. So loud that, several stalls down, a horse poked its head over the door and snorted, a loud huff through his nostrils.
“Oh wow.” Marco’s voice was soft, a little reverent. “He’s beautiful.”
“She,” Las and Alice corrected.
“Can I go say hi?”
Las shrugged. “Sure.” Alice raised an eyebrow at him.
Marco set his employee handbook on the floor against the wall and piled his T-shirts on top of them before heading for Harriet’s stall.
Keeping Marco’s admission that he didn’t know anything about horses in the back of his mind, Las kept half an eye on him while he spoke to his sister. “What?”
Alice waited until Marco was out of earshot and said, “That’s mean.” She leaned back against the doorjamb to her office and caught his eye. At nearly the same height, it wasn’t difficult for her. “We both know your horse hates everyone but you.”
He shrugged again. “I have a good feeling about this.”
Alice’s eyebrow went up. “You never have a good feeling about anything.”
That was true.
“Remind me again why you invited him to work here?”
“I just…” Las scratched his cheek. “He didn’t have anything planned after graduation. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Oh, I see.” Her eyes, the same near-black as his, widened. “You like him,” she whisper-shouted.
“What? No. I don’t like anyone.”
Her snort mimicked his horse’s at a lower volume. “Well, that’s certainly not true. You just pretend you don’t.”
“What? That’s not… No, I—”
“Look.” She squeezed his forearm. “I know Ben hurt you—”
He stiffened, his back going ramrod straight. “I don’t want to talk about Ben.”
“Fine. I’ll talk about him.”
“That’s not what I—” meant, but she was already steamrolling over him.
“I know he hurt you, but you can’t let one idiot hold you back.”
“I’m not—”
“Get back out there. Meet someone new. Start dating again.”
“Meet who, Alice? I’ve known everyone in this town forever and I’m not interested in any of them that way. And everyone new I meet is only coming through for a season. What’s the point of dating someone who will be gone in four months or less?”
“Hey.” She pointed a finger at him. “You can have a lot of fun in four months.”
“I’m not interested in a fling. I don’t want the fun without the—” He broke off. Clenched his jaw.
“Without what?”
The romance. The heart. He’d had it once, with Ben. He wanted that feeling again, where the room lit up when his partner walked into it. Someone who didn’t just make his heart jump but made it perform a circus routine in his chest.
He shook his head at his own foolishness.
Marco’s voice drifted over to them. Las and Alice turned to look and found Marco petting Harriet between the eyes as he spoke to her.
“Huh.” Alice nudged his shoulder with her own. “Guess your horse doesn’t hate everyone.”
Something funny tumbled in his stomach, the sight of man and horse etching itself forever in his long-term memory. “Told you I had a good feeling,” he said weakly.
Later, after Alice and Marco had spoken about schedules and training, Las and Marco headed out of the barn side by side. Las paused briefly at Harriet’s stall to give her a kiss on the muzzle. “Don’t get too attached to him,” he whispered.
And wasn’t sure if he was cautioning his horse or reminding himself.
MARCO WAS OUT OF HIS depth.
“This here is Idaho fescue,” his trainer said, massaging a tall stalk between a thumb and forefinger. A stocky woman two decades older than Marco’s own twenty-two, she knew more about grasses than Marco would’ve ever thought possible. Grass was grass was grass.
Apparently not in Wyoming.
Having not expected to be taking notes on his first training session as an official employee of Windsor Ranch—a hike of one of the ranch’s beginner-level trails—he was stuck thumbing them into his cell phone as Cherie explained why this was Idaho fescue and not Rocky Mountain fescue or spike fescue. As if anybody would be able to tell the difference between grasses. But he’d be leading hikes once he was finished with his training and he’d be expected to know one grass from another in case one of his hike participants asked, so he took notes and he snapped pictures and he made a mental to-do list.
1. Buy a plant book.
2. Buy proper hiking boots.
3. Buy some kind of insect shield or mosquito netting that will help keep moths out of his room.
That last one was especially important as Marco had recently discovered a dislike of moths—especially the ones as large as his hand, one of which had infiltrated his cabin his first night here. Thank god no one had been around to hear his manly shriek.
The staff cabins were rustic compared to Windsor Ranch House. Not primitive, by any means, but certainly not luxurious. He had a bathroom, a mini-fridge, a small sitting area near the front window, and two twin beds and two night tables. Apparently, his roommate was arriving later this week. In the meantime, he had the place to himself. It was so infinitely boring that he’d taken to joining the rest of the employees at the base of a small hill for a nightly campfire that mostly included bad beer and mosquitoes with a side of socializing and s’mores. After three nights of this, he was dying for a vegetable.
The trail was two miles of dirt path that was mostly flat and mostly dry, except in places where the tree cover prevented sunlight from hitting the ground. Earlier, he’d spotted a frog in a swampy pond created by a previous rainfall.
“That’s a northern leopard frog,” Cherie said when he pointed it out. “It’s sometimes mistaken for the Columbia spotted frog, but the northern leopard frog has bigger spots that are fully colored in.” She contemplated it for a second. It croaked at her scrutiny. “We don’t often see them out here since the river’s a couple of miles in that direction.” She gestured vaguely west. Or maybe it was south.
4. Buy a book on amphibians.
5. Also a compass.
Definitely out of his depth. About as out of his depth as that time early in sophomore year when he’d thought he wanted to switch majors to kinesiology and had taken Human Anatomy and Physiology I. He’d regretted it before the first pop quiz on anatomy and physiology of embryonic development in the second week of class.
The Wyoming country was beautiful though. He snapped pictures with his phone that didn’t do the landscape justice and posted in the group chat he had with his sisters. His way of ensuring they felt included in his life despite being so far away.
Their hike concluded shortly before lunch. He walked with Cherie to the staff dining room, which was a long building perpendicular to the row of staff cabins…
And didn’t see Las among the employees already there. In fact, he hadn’t seen Las since his arrival on Friday. He knew Las worked on a different part of the ranch. He didn’t expect their paths to cross often, but was not seeing him at all going to be the norm? It kind of defeated the purpose of Marco’s entire reason for being here.
Okay, not the entire reason. He needed the job and the money and something to do, but still. They were friends, weren’t they? Wouldn’t Las want to come say hi once in a while, see how he was settling in?
“Hey, man.” One of the guys occupying the ca
bin to the left of Marco’s waved at him from the end of the long table. Marco made his way there, noticing that, once again, today’s lunch consisted of meat and carbs.
“That’s . . . a lot of carbs,” he’d commented on Friday evening to Las after they’d left Alice. Las had shown Marco around the ranch and, finally, to the Staff Quarters on the southern tip of the property, which housed the staff cabins, dining room, and the fire pit where they held their nightly socials. Incidentally, it was the last time he’d seen Las.
The table had been so covered with food that only random inches of the wooden table could be seen where platters didn’t cover it. Beef cooked three different ways, chicken for the non-red meat eaters, something called Rocky Mountain oysters that didn’t look like any oyster he’d ever seen, roasted potatoes, mashed potatoes with garlic, rice, some kind of veggie medley consisting of corn kernels and tomatoes, and bread. Lots and lots of bread, several varieties, spread out on a side table for everyone to help themselves.
“Trust me,” Las had said, clamping a hand on Marco’s shoulder, presumably in solidarity but it just made Marco extremely aware of that shoulder and the pressure of Las’s fingers. “With the hard work you put in on the ranch, you’ll need it.”
If this was how he was going to be eating for the next three months, he’d need a workout regime to go with all the hikes he’d be leading. Seriously, he’d kill for a vegetable. He’d eat raw fucking asparagus if it was available.
“Is anyone here vegetarian?” Marco couldn’t help but ask as he’d stared at all the meat.
“No,” Las had said with a small laugh. “But we’ve accommodated all sorts of dietary requirements before.”
The staff dining room, Marco noticed today, was cliquey. The old-timers—the few men and women who worked in guest services all year long—sat together on one end of the table. The seasonal servers and bartenders who worked in the two restaurants in Windsor Ranch House always arrived together, scarfed down their meals, and then ran off for their shifts. Guest services staff—housekeepers, reservation agents, front desk officers, concierges—stuck to themselves. The horseback riding instructors and guides—animal tenders? wranglers? handlers? ranch hands?—were never far from each other, emoting an air of superiority like everyone else was beneath them. And the outdoor workers, like the hiking guides like Marco, commandeered the other end of the table, as far from the old-timers as possible. On purpose?
