Stripped Down

by Anne Marsh

  “Plenty to do back on the home front,” J.J. agrees cheerfully, kick-starting his own ATV as if he’s getting ready to hit the arena on the rodeo circuit where he dominates, but the sound of the motor instead of applause fills the empty air.

  Only the driller stays put. Since I paid in advance, as I always do, for a thousand feet, the man isn’t looking to settle the bill. Nope. He’s waiting for my next move. “You want me to start the first well on the old Jordan place? I can do it tomorrow. Test drills there hit water at nine hundred feet. Four, five days tops, to get her flowing good, unless I break a bit.”

  He’s a businessman, and our wells—and our water problems—make him good money.

  “Pick your drill spots, and get your boys lined up and ready to go. We’ll start in two weeks.” Fourteen days is more than enough time for me to take care of my business with Rose.

  J.J. leans on the handlebars of his ATV. “Heard Rose finally made it back last night.”

  He drops the name casually, like it’s not a BFD. He’s messing with me, and we both know it. I ignore him and set the date with the drill engineer so the man can get on with his day. No point in burning more money out here. Since there’s only one way to fix the problem, I’ll drive the ten miles into Lonesome, show up for my meeting with Rose Jordan at the lawyer’s, scheduled—again—for that afternoon, and do what I have to do.

  I run cattle. That’s who I am, what we Mendozas built our reputation on for centuries. I won’t lose that tradition, not on my watch and not when there’s a solution at hand. I’m an asshole and a cold-hearted bastard, or so I’ve been assured by any number of people, male and female. Buying out Rose Jordan should be easy.

  J.J. grins. “You think she’ll show at the lawyer’s this time?”

  She’s shown me plenty already. I can’t wait to cup her boob again. “She’ll be there.”

  J.J. flashes me a thumbs up and guns the motor, tearing off down the road.

  “We good?” I ask Axel, when he doesn’t move.

  Axel nods absently, staring after J.J.’s dust cloud as if he wouldn’t mind running up that trail instead of driving the distance. Axel did two tours with the Army Rangers before deciding not re-up and returning to the ranch. He also ended his military service with a six-month stint in the disciplinary barracks at Leavenworth. I haven’t asked why, and he hasn’t volunteered. Whatever he did, whatever fucker he assaulted or offended had it coming. The military’s good to most of its sons and daughters, but sometimes dark shit happens and then rules get broken. People get hurt.

  Prices get paid.

  We don’t talk about our service—about what might or might not have happened during those deployments—but more than once I’ve made the late night walk down the hallway between our bedrooms to shake my brother awake from the nightmares. Next day, like clockwork, J.J. goes on one of his runs, fifteen miles through the arroyos and along the game trails. Just running and running until he comes on back and heads out to the range to work.

  That’s our past, though, and I’d prefer to leave it there.

  “You ever talk to Rose?” I ask him, already guessing the answer. J.J. must be half way back to the house by now, given the speed at which he took that trail, and Axel only talks when he’s good and ready. He’s the king of one-word answers. The man can pack more meaning into yes and no than most.

  “Talking to her was your thing.” Axel’s slow drawl carries just fine. “But, yeah, I’ve talked with her since she left. Not as much as I’d have liked, but she needed the space, had some things she wanted to work out.”

  What could Rose Jordan have to work out? She followed her momma here to Lonesome and then stayed behind when the woman left. She was the apple of Auntie Dee’s eye, which just goes to show that love is really fucking blind.

  “You ever reach out to her?” Axel examines the ribbon of trail in front of us with a rock steady gaze as he swings a leg over the seat of his ATV. The nightmares that keep him up at night don’t show in the daylight.

  “She wouldn’t have wanted that.” I fight the urge to take the ATV off the trail and into all the wide open around us and just open her up. Go somewhere or nowhere, but feel the wind pulling at my face.

  “You don’t know that,” Axel points out. He won’t speak for a week after all this talking. Shit, he’s probably used up his quota for the goddamned month. But Rose brings out the best in my brothers—along with their wild sides. She makes them be different. “You ever ask her what she wants?”

  “She was your friend, not mine.” I tighten my fingers on the grips.

  He gives me a look. “Only because every time the two of you shared space, you listed off all the things she’d done wrong.”

  “Not every time,” I counter defensively. “And you can’t tell me that the three of you weren’t up to your eyes in trouble whenever I looked.”

  “It made you look,” Axel says calmly. “You were busy whipping the ranch back into shape and don’t think I didn’t appreciate that. J.J. and I, we were never worried about having a roof over our heads, but the ranch kept you damned busy. You were all work, work, work and no play.”

  “Someone had to be responsible,” I growl as the ATV roars to life.

  Axel just watches me. “And you’re real good at it. J.J., he gets all over the place on the rodeo circuit. He’s raising Cain in a different state each week. He can’t ever sit still for more than a day or two at a time. He knows that, eventually, he’s going to have to change something, but he’s not sure how or why—but he does know that you’ll always be right here, waiting for him when he’s ready to come home for good.”

  I feel that same surge of emotion for my brother that I felt the night my five year-old self tiptoed into the nursery to sneak a peek at the newest Mendoza. I don’t need to slap labels on my feelings to have them. “What does that have to do with Rose?”

  Axel shrugs. “Maybe, nothing. But she had things hard before she came to Lonesome, and she always worried that she was screwing things up here.”

  “She spent every minute of every day looking for trouble,” I snarl. Jesus. She’s not here and she still gets under my skin. “That’s not worrying too much.”

  “Sometimes it’s easier to get the screwing up over and out of the way,” Axel points out calmly. “If the worst has already happened, there’s not as much left to worry about.”

  I get the feeling he’s thinking about Leavenworth now, because his face tightens up. I eye him speculatively, because I should find out what went down there. I can kick some asses, make the payback hurt. Or I can leave it alone like he clearly wants.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say finally. “Auntie Dee loved Rose. This was— is—her home. She had nothing to worry about.”

  “Try telling her that. You think she knows the details of Auntie Dee’s will?” Axel tosses the question out there.

  “You want to play twenty questions now?” Rose’s face the last time I saw her at the swimming hole is burned into my memory.

  It doesn’t matter. Can’t matter.

  I need those water rights. Hell, I already own half of them. I just have to claim it all.

  “She has no fucking clue,” I admit. “You know Rose. She’s not picking up.” Or answering her e-mail or any of the three registered letters I had the lawyer send. Auntie Dee apparently kept her intentions secret. Hell, I had no idea she’d leave me half the place to thank me for everything I’d done over the years. Doesn’t matter now. Rose doesn’t know and that gives me one more weapon. I’ll take it. While I’m going to win, Rose is also going to fight me. Taming her will be a fucking battle of wills, but in the end I’ll have my wells, my ranch, and my girl.

  Laughter chokes Axel’s voice, his earlier impatience forgotten. Rose has always made him laugh, made him happy. Part of me envies him that casual intimacy. She likes him and enjoys his company. She doesn’t give him shit, push him, or defy him. Of course, the two of them also have no chemistry, which is what makes things sim
pler for them. I was the only one thinking about having sex on my kitchen table when she was sixteen.

  “She’ll get here when she gets here. Our Rose never was an early bird. Plus, if she knows how badly you want her to come, she’ll just take twice as long.”

  That’s true shit, right there. Rose is a tease. I considered calling her on it, but even more than the age gap, there was a look in her eyes when she was flaunting her tits and her ass that reminded me of some of the US Navy SEALs I’d served with. Her boobs were weapons she used, and I couldn’t tell if she was setting an ambush or defending her territory. Something happened to my dirty girl before she got to Lonesome, and that something fucked with her head. I’d needed to leave her alone until she got things straight.

  Didn’t stop me from fantasizing, though. I fucking wore calluses on my dick whacking off to the dirty thoughts of what I could do to her. With her. The Jordan women were like a master class in how to tie the Mendoza males into fucking knots, because while Rose was tormenting me, her mother proceeded to do a job on my dad.

  Honestly, I’m not sure Rose had a clue what she did to me. What I wanted to do to her. She saw me as a loaner brother, as temporary, safe, and older. The words bossy, boring, play-by-the-rules, and too-strict also got tossed around a whole lot. The boobs may have been weapons, but I couldn’t tell if she knew that. She could have been reacting on instinct. Later, after shit went down on that second tour of duty in Afghanistan, I understood where she was coming from better.

  I have so many lessons to teach my Rose.

  “This can’t wait any longer,” I growl. Fuck, I sound like an animal.

  “We’ve still got a couple wells left,” Axel points out, laughter gone from his voice. That’s another side effect from Afghanistan, although I prefer pretending it doesn’t exist. I’m not fun anymore. People respect me or they fear me, but Axel is almost the only one left who laughs when he’s around me. That’s one thing I never want to kill.

  “Two. We had four.” The prospect of even one inch of the ranch becoming a dustbowl makes me grit my teeth. This place, this land, is my family legacy. I’ll damn well hold on to it, keep it together. My cowboys and their families depend on me for a living, and since I’ve come home, I’ve poured myself into building the ranch one acre at a time. No one can take us down because I’ve created a fucking empire. If I could build a wall around the place like the Chinese emperor did, I’d probably do that, too.

  The truth sucks, but my father took and took, bleeding cash from the ranch and giving nothing back. After my mom (who was not Rose’s mom, who was the arm candy and bonus woman in my dad’s life) died in a car accident, the levels in our bank accounts resembled the water levels in the wells. For all his whoring around, Mendoza Senior apparently loved my mother, because he threw in the towel after she died, at least ranch-wise. He knocked back beers with his cowboys, pointed his horse aimlessly around the ranch, and didn’t give a fuck what happened next. Rose’s mom was one of those don’t-give-a-fucks. She came, he enjoyed her, and then she left. My dad repeated the whole pattern again. And then again.

  The heart attack was one of those blessings in disguise. Afterwards, I came home from Afghanistan and I was in charge.

  I held things together.

  Axel and J.J. played backup when I asked, but my brothers had their own lives off the ranch. That was okay. Not everyone finds everything he needs on fifty thousand acres or from horseback. I do and that’s enough.

  Rose Jordan doesn’t get to undo all that work now.

  She procrastinates. She leaves the important things undone, rushing in at the last minute when someone rides her ass. In other words, she’s pure trouble.

  “She’ll turn up, Angel,” Axel repeats. “She always did. Eventually.”

  “She’d better.”

  Just remembering Rose drives me crazy, and I need to be in control when I meet her again. I point the quad toward the closest road. The raw power of the ATV motor matches my mood, the primal vibration devouring the sound of Axel’s curse. Another day, I’d have ridden a horse out to the drill site because it’s easier to feel that connection between the ranch and myself when I’m on horseback.

  “Rose won’t like it,” Axel bellows from behind me. Dust puffs up in small clouds as he takes the lead. “She’s always had a thing for that crazy little house.”

  Yeah. I tug my Stetson down farther as the ATV crests a lazy roll of field. No fucking surprise there. I’ve ranched all my life, and sometimes that means watching as good men are forced to give up the land their families held for generations because they can’t make the note and can’t force a living out of their place. In her own way, Rose Jordan is every bit as passionate as those men—and the best spot to drill for water on Auntie Dee’s ranch is right smack underneath the house. I’m gonna have to knock it down to get at my water.

  Rose will fight me, but she spent just a handful of years living in Lonesome. She ran, first chance she got. Does she ever think about what it takes to keep up a property? This isn’t a game, and she can’t just come back and play house. Ranching is serious business, and it takes a cash commitment she simply can’t make.

  She might not want anything from me, even though part of me aches to learn every sweet inch of her, but she’s going to take that damned check.

  And then she’s gonna take me. This time, Rose is mine.

  ROSE

  My VW Bug rattles up Lonesome’s main—and only—street, making it clear that the car is only going this far because I’ve insisted. It’s fortunate parking is never an issue in Lonesome because the engine wheezes to an undignified stop when I spot the lawyer’s office.

  There are more than enough spots for cars, although horses are a different story. I’ve never seen so many horses before. Or horse poop. Lonesome could definitely smell better. Picking a place, I park and get out. When I unhitched the Bug from the back of the RV and consulted the trunk earlier, looking for something clean to wear, I’d settled on a purple chiffon sundress that floats above my knees in a tease of airy fabric—make-you-look clothes leftover from my days on the tattoo parlor reality show. The producers dressed me like a living Barbie doll, but I also scored a new wardrobe that I’ll use to my advantage now.

  “I know what I want. I deserve it.” Saying the words out loud doesn’t help, so I settle for slamming the car door hard. I’ve never mastered the Zen-ish art of affirmative mantras.

  The only thing standing between me and Auntie Dee’s legacy is Angel, and no matter how hot he is, he’s my own personal bad news. Worse, everyone here knows everyone else, and not just on a first-name basis or a hi-how-are-ya exchange. Lonesome’s finest know who your parents are, where you were born—every detail spread through the local grapevine. From first word and first tooth right on up to and including first date and firstborn, Lonesome doesn’t keep secrets. Doesn’t need to. Lonesome’s families are born here, die here, and pretty much do all their living either on the surrounding ranches or on the handful of streets.

  That doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for an outsider girl like me. The label the town’s gossips put on me was trouble. That label still isn’t wrong. I came to Lonesome with my mom, and she was trying to put as much distance between us and the L.A. trailer park that was our last known address. We’d been all but broke, one step away from living out of her car, when she’d met Mr. Mendoza at a casino. He’d fallen in love or in lust—the jury was still out on that one—but he’d agreed to move us both into his fancy ranch spread. I hadn’t wanted to leave Los Angeles for good, despite the shit that had happened there, but a sixteen-year-old girl doesn’t have many choices, and I was smart enough to realize, even then, that there are worse destinies than time spent in Lonesome.

  After my mom bugged out, I met Auntie Dee. The good residents of Lonesome might not have been sure about me, but Auntie Dee had been. I’d had several good years with her before I’d finally packed my bags and left. I’d headed for college and San Francisco, then m
ade a detour for a career as a tattoo artist.

  I hadn’t come back since I’d left—and that was intentional, because I’d been avoiding Angel even though he, of course, had no clue how I felt—but I’d convinced Auntie Dee to make the bus ride down to San Francisco, and I’d shown her the city. I should have come back. I shouldn’t have worried about running into Angel or any other member of my non-fan club.

  Angel probably would have looked me square in the eye, given me a polite meet-and-greet, and even offered me a cold longneck. I was a friend of his brothers, and Angel valued his family. Me? Not so much. I was the bonus accessory, the free gift with purchase that he accepted because it came with the people he really wanted around. Namely, his brothers.

  All of which made me want to plant my brand-new cowboy boot in the middle of his equally fine ass and shove.

  I’d never had brothers. The six months I’d spent on Blackhawk Ranch had been educational. I’d been one of the boys. Sort of. While my mother canoodled with their dad and tried to work the old man up to a wedding ring (good luck with that), I’d followed the younger Mendoza boys around from one piece of mischief to the next. Naturally, as soon as he came home on leave from some super-secret, really patriotic Spec Ops unit, Angel dogged our heels disapprovingly. He’d never once looked at me and seen a girl. Or a potential girlfriend. And by the time we’d been halfway through his leave, I’d wanted him to look at me. I’d made just one move. Once. One attempt to kiss Angel and make him see me as someone more than his brothers’ friend or an unwanted stepsister. I’d done it because I’d wanted to own him, to take control, and it had backfired on me.

  He’d been standing by his truck of his, looking serious and focused as he examined a fledgling olive tree. I’d never been sure why he’d added olives to the ranch but Angel had always had a vision and a plan, so there was probably a damned smart reason behind the change. The ranch looks good these days, and God knows, the economy did a number on too many of my former neighbors. Auntie Dee complained frequently about how tight times were getting.