The Trouble With Cowboys

by Melissa Cutler

  “The hows and whats of Kellan’s inheritance don’t matter,” Amy said, “because nothing changes the fact that we’re being sued for breach of a contract that doesn’t make any sense. I can’t believe Dad signed something so outrageous.”

  Jenna picked an orange from the bowl. “Let’s save the Dad grumbling for later. It’ll make Rachel even crankier than she already is. She doesn’t like it when we get critical of Daddy dearest.” She and Rachel scowled at each other, then she handed Tommy the orange and took his other hand. “Come on, buddy. Let’s see if Mr. Dixon would mind if you ate lunch in the kitchen with him today.”

  With a chirp of agreement, Tommy did a happy skip and pulled his mom through the swinging kitchen door.

  Amy met Rachel’s gaze. She looked weary, with pallid skin and tired eyes. And no wonder. The night before, after Amy told her the truth about Kellan, she’d lit off like a rocket, shouting curses and stomping from the porch to her truck. Amy tried to stop her, but she was beyond reason, hell-bent on driving to Kellan’s ranch and cutting him down to size.

  Amy waited up for her, and when she returned, she looked much the worse for wear. She refused to discuss what happened at Kellan’s ranch, and tried to shoulder past Amy through the front door, announcing, “I’m done with this place. If Amarex wants it, they can have it.”

  “Like hell they can,” Amy had shot back.

  The argument grew more heated from there. They fought fervently, debating in circles for a solid hour before finally reaching an agreement on one crucial point—Jenna had the right to be in on the fight as well. Grudgingly, they decided to wait until after the morning chores to hold a family meeting.

  “Have you changed your mind about giving up?” Amy asked in her most civil tone.

  “No. You?”

  “No. If anything, I’m not so sure Kellan’s the enemy anymore.”

  Rachel gave an incredulous head shake. “Oh, please. Spare me your bleeding heart mentality.”

  “I do not have a bleeding heart.”

  Jenna pushed through the swinging door. “Who has a bleeding heart?”

  “No one,” Amy said.

  “Amy does,” Rachel amended.

  Jenna snickered.

  “I’ll prove it to you,” Rachel went on. “When I went out back this morning, I found a stray cow by the pigpen. Looks like a heifer. Slipping Rock branding. How about I butcher it up and we have ourselves a nice, steak dinner tonight?”

  Amy wrinkled her nose. She’d grown up on a farm and understood with perfect clarity the process of killing livestock for food. Heck, she was a chef—and not remotely a vegetarian one, either. But the thought of looking an animal in the eye and then ending its life still turned her stomach. She liked her meat to come wrapped in butcher paper, thank you very much. “Not fair, Rach. You know I’m squeamish about that.”

  With an acerbic laugh, Rachel got busy peeling her orange. “See what I mean, Jen? Bleeding heart. She probably wants to do the right thing and return the cow to Reed’s ranch.”

  “It’d be good karma,” Amy countered, fully aware she’d scoffed at Lisa Binderman for using that same argument. Rachel didn’t need to know that, though.

  “That’s not karma. It’s called being a doormat.”

  Amy balked and shot to her feet, too riled to stay in her seat. “I’m a doormat? You’re the one who wants to give up and hand our land over to Amarex without a fight.”

  “Time out, you two,” Jenna said. “You’ve obviously talked about the Amarex situation without me—which I hate, for the record—”

  “We know you do, that’s why we saved the discussion for today.”

  Jenna rolled her eyes. “How kind of you. Why don’t we sit and talk about this rationally?”

  “Rationally? That’ll be impossible for Amy,” Rachel said. “The closest she’d ever come to rationality is if she had the word tattooed on her arm.”

  Jenna shot her a chastising glare, but Amy took another tack. If Rachel thought she was so irrational, then she might as well act the part. She grabbed Rachel’s half-peeled orange and threw a segment at her face. It hit her cheek with a satisfying splat and fell in her lap.

  “Are you insane?” Rachel hollered, wiping her face.

  “Just living up to expectations.” She pelted her with another segment that hit her on the nose.

  “Oh, it’s on, little sister. It’s on.”

  Chapter 15

  Jenna snagged an orange and dove under the table.

  Rachel got to peeling her orange at warp speed. Amy lobbed a segment at the vee of her T-shirt and squealed when she made a bull’s-eye, right into Rachel’s cleavage.

  Rachel gave up peeling and chucked the whole orange Amy’s way.

  Amy countered with rapid-fire throws of her remaining orange pieces. Two landed in Rachel’s hair.

  “I need backup,” Rachel called to Jenna.

  “I’m on it,” she answered. A hand appeared and deposited a pile of orange on the tabletop.

  “No fair. You can’t team up on me.” Amy grabbed a fresh orange and used a chair as a shield, peeling it as fast as her fingers would work. Rachel managed to hit her in the forehead. Juice dripped down her nose. She swiped at it and finished prepping her ammunition. This time, she began her assault with bits of rind. With a yelp, Rachel ducked behind the table.

  In her periphery, Amy saw Jenna worming her way out the far end of the table. “Oh, no, you don’t.” Grabbing a chair cushion as a shield, she stood and hammered Jenna with her remaining orange pieces.

  Jenna squealed and returned fire.

  Hearing a great roar, Amy turned in time to see Rachel flying at her. The next minute, she was flat on her back, with Rachel straddling her. Rachel lifted a whole peeled orange over her head and squeezed. Juice and pulp rained on her face, hair, and neck. Amy was laughing too hard to care.

  “Uncle! Uncle! I give up,” Amy said between giggles.

  Rachel was laughing too. Jenna dropped to her knees next to them. Both looked terrible, with bits of pulp and juice everywhere. Their hair and clothes were a mess. Amy could only assume she looked equally ridiculous. She blinked some juice away from her eyes and licked the corners of her lips. The juice was sweet. She picked a segment from Rachel’s shirt pocket and ate it. Both her sisters wrinkled their noses at the move, then dissolved into a fresh round of chuckles.

  Jenna lay on the floor next to Amy and took her hand. “Mom would’ve loved this.”

  Amy squeezed Jenna’s hand and patted Rachel’s knee. “Yes, she would have.”

  A throat clearing got their attention. Mr. Dixon stood near the kitchen door, a bread basket in one hand and a covered pot in the other. His shoulders shook with silent laughter. “I see you ladies found a way to work through your differences.”

  Rachel stood and helped Amy and Jenna up.

  The juice that had pooled on Amy’s chest trickled into her bra. Gross. “You missed the fun, Mr. Dixon. You could’ve been on my side, since Jenna and Rachel double-teamed me.”

  He set the dish and basket on the table. “You’ll forgive me for leaving you to fight on your own once you taste this gravy. And the biscuits are the same as my mother made. The recipe hasn’t changed in sixty years.”

  Jenna hummed. “Smells divine. Let me wash up, then maybe we can get to that rational conversation over lunch?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Rachel said.

  The sausage gravy made concentrating on any kind of conversation nigh impossible for Amy. She shoveled another huge bite into her mouth and stifled a groan. If someone had been standing outside the window, they would’ve thought something naughty was happening in the room, the moaning from Amy and Jenna was so enthusiastic. Rachel didn’t make a peep, but was the first to pile a second helping on her plate.

  After taking a bite of biscuit number two, Rachel tossed her napkin on the table and got the conversation rolling. “I know you two don’t want to admit it, but Amarex has backed us into a corn
er. We don’t have a good choice, only bad or worse. Either we cut our losses and leave now, with a little money left in our pockets, or we leave bankrupt after giving all our money to a lawyer to fight Amarex’s suit.”

  “I hate that idea,” Jenna grumbled.

  The idea of giving up made Amy sick. “This land has been in our family for three generations. Our dad was raised here. It’s worth saving.”

  Rachel raised her arms in an impassioned gesture. “Do you think I don’t know that? This farm is my life. Do you think I want to live in some crappy apartment in the city?”

  “What would you do for work if we moved?” Amy asked Rachel. “All you know is farm life. You’d hate a desk job.” More than hate, Amy knew if Rachel left the countryside, she’d languish. Her inner light would extinguish, Amy was sure of it. If nothing else, she’d fight to keep the farm for her sister’s health and sanity.

  “I’m not qualified for a desk job, even if I wanted one. But I could hire on as a ranch foreman somewhere. And you could find work at a restaurant, easy. We were lucky to have our dream jobs for as long as we did. Not many folks get that opportunity, even temporarily.”

  She was right. They’d lived a charmed life compared to most people in the world. Even Jenna, who’d had the luxury to stay at home with Tommy, despite being a single mom.

  Rachel continued, “There’s nothing tying us to Catcher Creek. We don’t have any family left here anymore, and our true friends would understand.”

  Amy wondered if Tommy’s father, whoever he was, would care if he and Jenna left town. Or if he even knew he was a father in the first place. She thought about Mr. Dixon and Sloane. It would be so painful to turn them out, when they were beginning to feel like a part of the family.

  “I hate to pick sides,” Jenna said, “but Rachel’s right—something’s got to give. I know our bank accounts inside and out. We can’t afford a lawyer to defend us against a suit of this magnitude. We poured everything we had into funding the restaurant and inn, and Mom’s nursing home and doctor bills. There’s a good chance that if we fought the lawsuit and won, Amarex would be on the hook for our lawyer fees. But that’s a pretty huge risk to take.”

  Rachel crumbled her napkin and threw it on her now-empty plate. “The suit was filed in Texas so it would go to court there, right? How are we going to run a farm, restaurant, and inn while we’re holed up in a Texas courthouse?”

  Despite Rachel and Jenna’s readiness to give up, Amy wasn’t convinced. Maybe it would be the most dignified course of action, but no one had ever made the mistake of calling Amy dignified. She was no doormat, as Rachel surmised, but a fighter—a scrapper. The cutthroat culinary world had toughened her hide and steeled her spine. And she knew, without a doubt, that she and her sisters would never find lasting happiness if they gave up without fighting for their way of life.

  She may be an irrational bleeding heart, but even more importantly, she was resilient.

  Rummaging through the pile of paperwork, she found the oil rights lawyer’s card. Matt Roenick. Kellan’s note said he did pro bono work. It was time to set aside her pride and accept the help Kellan seemed to be offering.

  She dropped the business card on the table between Jenna and Rachel. “This was in Kellan’s briefcase. It’s the business card of an oil rights lawyer who does pro bono work.”

  Rachel shoved the card away from her. “I wouldn’t take Kellan Reed’s legal advice if he were the last man on Earth.”

  Amy flipped the card to the back. “There’s more to Kellan’s involvement than I originally assumed. Does this note look like the move of an Amarex spy?”

  Jenna lifted the card and examined it. “No, it doesn’t.”

  Rachel scoffed in protest.

  Amy rested her hand on Jenna’s shoulder. “Will you call this lawyer? Talk to him about our situation?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “We’re going to fight this. True, we might lose everything, but at least we won’t have any regrets because we’ll have done everything we could. No what ifs. Are you with me?”

  Jenna patted Amy’s hand. “I’m with you.”

  They looked to Rachel.

  She cradled her head in her hands. “I don’t know if I have it in me. Honestly, you guys, this last year has been hell on me. I’m worn to the bone.”

  Amy walked around the table and draped an arm across Rachel’s shoulder. Jenna did the same. Together, they pulled Rachel into a hug.

  “We know you are, Rach. We’ll hold you up,” Amy said.

  “We’ll hold each other up,” Jenna added.

  Rachel squeezed her eyes closed and when she opened them again, she seemed stronger, if only a little. “Okay. I’m in.”

  Sloane’s finals were going great, which was about the only bright spot in Amy’s week. With two exams down and two to go by Wednesday morning, Sloane’s face was starting to reflect her fatigue, but she powered through it valiantly. She’d set up camp in Amy’s front room, with books and papers scattered over every flat surface and the sofa turned into a makeshift bed. To maximize her study time, she’d taken to rising when Rachel and Amy did before dawn.

  Amy was impressed. She’d written Sloane off early as an immature, dingy young woman, but she’d proven herself the opposite. There was probably a lesson in there about not making assumptions about people, but Amy was too busy with lawyer meetings and hospital visits to think hard on the matter.

  All she knew was that Mom wasn’t waking up. The doctors continued to run tests, but had begun to hint that there was little likelihood she’d have any quality of life if she emerged from the coma. Amy, Jenna, and Rachel, each in their own way, were coming to terms with the choice they knew they’d need to make soon, to say good-bye to their mom and allow her to go to a better place.

  Amy found it difficult to concentrate for long stretches of time. After multiple failed attempts at planning the Local Dish’s dinner menu, she gave up. She sharpened her MAC blade to a deadly point and took to dicing every vegetable in the house. Mr. Dixon, who had quietly taken over all meal duties after Mom’s stroke, worked alongside her in comfortable silence.

  After a solid hour of dicing, Amy ran out of vegetable options and hauled the bowls full of celery, onions, carrots, and potatoes to the hog trough. A nudge from a cold nose reminded her to save enough celery to share with Tulip, the heifer waiting not-so-patiently for her fair share. Amy emptied the remains of the bowl into the cow’s makeshift trough and massaged its silky ear in her fingertips. It grunted in pleasure as it snarfed its meal.

  She should’ve called Kellan about his runaway cow already, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak to him yet, even though she no longer thought of him as the enemy. She’d found too much evidence to the contrary in the waterlogged papers from his briefcase. He’d created a spreadsheet template for the farm’s finances, along with ideas on how to pay the bank while her family contended the Amarex lawsuit. She’d found oil maps of the area that clearly illustrated her family’s property was dry, along with reports by Amarex engineers that stated the same thing. It was as though Kellan was helping her build a case against his uncle’s company for some unfathomable reason.

  What she needed to do was hear him out about his role in the Amarex mess. But as emotionally drained as she was over her mom, she wasn’t ready to talk to anyone, much less apologize. So instead, she named his cow Tulip and took to feeding her.

  Rachel thought the idea of assigning livestock anything other than an identifying number preposterous, which is why Amy had not only named the cow, but strung flowers through its ear tag and around its neck. Daisies, not tulips, but still, she was a cute thing. And Rachel was annoyed beyond measure. Amy found Rachel’s reaction so amusing, she was considering hanging a photograph of Tulip in all her floral splendor in the bathroom.

  “I see she likes celery.”

  She turned to see Mr. Dixon, walking her way with a bowl of kitchen scraps in his arms. He divided the goodies between
the troughs, then propped a foot on the pigsty fence.

  “You’re probably wondering why I haven’t returned this cow to Kellan.”

  He shook his head. “Not at all, honey. She won’t be missed at his ranch for a while longer. And she’s awful purty with these flowers. My kids used to do that with goats around our farm when they were little.”

  “Plus it aggravates Rachel.”

  He let out a whoop of laughter. “’Course it does. Which is as good a reason as any not to return the cow.” He patted the cow’s haunches. “I’ve been meaning to talk with you, but I could tell you needed some time to yourself. How about now?”

  Amy quirked a brow at him. “You’re not after me for a raise already, are you?”

  He caught on to her joke and grinned before getting serious again. “Naw, I want to talk to you about the Amarex lawsuit.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, if it’s all the same to you.”

  He was quiet for a minute and Amy grew hopeful that she’d staved off an awkward conversation. “I knew your parents from way back. They were good people. Had their faults, sure as I do, but good people. Raised three fine daughters.”

  She couldn’t see what rehashing the past had to do with their Amarex troubles. “I suppose they did.”

  “Kept a roof over your heads and food on your plates. Not many people in the world can say that, when you think about it. I’ve traveled all over this godforsaken planet with the Navy and I’m telling you, by world standards, your parents were saints.”

  Saints? Amy wouldn’t go that far, but Mr. Dixon had a point. “I know they loved us the best they could.”

  “They did. I’m glad you can see that.”

  “What are you getting at, Mr. Dixon?”

  He sighed. “One thing I will say about your folks is that they didn’t care about keeping this farm up. Farming wasn’t in their blood. Back in the day, Dixon Farm and Sorentino Farm were competitors in the alfalfa industry. I’m sure you knew that. My brother and your grandfather were rivals, through and through. Our families played fair, but we played to win.”