Her Stubborn Cowboy

by Patricia Johns

  “He’s engaged.” It wasn’t a question, and she looked away when she said it. “I hadn’t realized that.”

  Well, he had been. Close enough. Sometimes it was better not to nail down any definitions and give a couple the chance to fix things if they wanted to. He was still hoping his brother would change his mind.

  “Helen never told you?” Mack’s grandmother had been very much alive when Andy had gotten engaged, and she’d had her own opinions about the relationship. Helen had declared Ida sweet but unsuitable, which Chet had never agreed with. Ida was good for Andy.

  “You know Granny. She kept me on the need-to-know. I guess she didn’t think I needed to know that.”

  Helen hadn’t wanted him to tell Mackenzie about Andy’s cheating, either. Helen’s son was Mack’s father, and he had been cheating on his wife for years—hence the divorce. Helen loved family fiercely, but not fiercely enough to cover her disapproval when it came to infidelity. She’d said that Mackenzie had enough to contend with in her parents’ divorce and she didn’t need to develop a complex over cheating men, to boot.

  “Let sleeping dogs lie,” Helen had said.

  “Except Andy isn’t a dog,” Chet had said pragmatically. Andy couldn’t just be chained up or taught to heel.

  “Isn’t he?” Helen had fixed him with a demanding stare, and that was that. They’d agreed to never tell Mack about Andy’s cheating, and it looked as if Helen had taken that a step further and never mentioned him again, period. Helen was ferociously protective of her grandchildren.

  “Yeah, Andy met Ida a few years ago and they’ve been dating for a long time. He finally asked her to marry him about a year—maybe a year and a half—ago. She’s this artsy yoga instructor, and she’s laid-back enough to deal with Andy. He can’t flap her. They’re good together.”

  “I imagine they would be.” She nodded briskly and pushed herself to her feet. “Let’s get to work.”

  Technically, his duty was done. He’d given her the pertinent information about his brother, and she could take it from there. But he wished that Andy didn’t have to be a part of this. When Chet learned that Mack was inheriting her grandmother’s ranch, all those old feelings for her had come back. And he wanted a chance to see her again without his brother in the mix. Maybe it would be a simple hello and that would be it, but Andy was supposed to have faded into the background of engaged bliss. He was supposed to be out of the picture.

  As they made their way toward the barn together, Mackenzie stayed half a step ahead of him, and he wondered what had brought her out here, besides the inheritance. The last he’d seen of her was when she left the ranch after Andy dumped her. She’d given him this unreadable look, then gotten into the truck, and Helen had driven her to the bus depot. That was it. As far as Chet knew, her last memories of Hope, Montana, were of heartbreak—a heartbreak that Chet couldn’t even explain to her, because it would only hurt her worse. So why on earth would she come back?

  The small barn closer to the house was normally where horses and smaller livestock were housed, but when Helen sold off her herd, she’d moved the remaining cows—her bottle-fed babies—into the smaller barn, leaving the big high-tech barn empty.

  Mackenzie pulled the heavy door open, and it took all of her body weight to do it. She obviously wasn’t going to let him take the lead, and he liked that. The more seriously she took this, the better the chances of her succeeding on her own, and staying...

  Was he hoping for that? He told himself that he didn’t want to be wasting his valuable time teaching someone who wasn’t going to stick around, but it went deeper than that. He wanted her to stick around. The minute he saw her yesterday, something had sparked to life inside him that had lain dormant for a long time.

  Chet followed Mack inside the barn and looked around, impressed. Mackenzie had mucked the barn out that morning—it was obvious by the smell of new hay. The cows knew their way to the pasture, and they were already gone, as were the goats, who would never allow themselves to be left indoors in summer weather. The stalls were clean—a few details missed here and there, but an admirable job for a first-timer. This was several hours’ worth of work, and he looked over at Mack with new respect.

  “Let me see your hands,” he said.

  Mackenzie blinked at him twice, then held them up—gloves on. He laughed softly and plucked the gloves off. She held her arms straight, palms down, as if he’d asked to inspect her nails. He took her slender wrists and turned them over so that he could get a look at her palms. They were red with blisters—a sign of hard work. Her soft skin wasn’t used to this, and even through the gloves, she’d gotten some punishment.

  “That’ll hurt,” he said, his voice low. She bent her head, looking down at her skin, and her hair shone warmly in the dim light. He could smell the fragrance of her shampoo, in spite of the barn aroma around them. He pulled his mind back from those details. He needed to keep this strictly friendly if he knew what was good for him at the moment.

  Mackenzie closed her fingers over her palms. “I’ll toughen up.”

  She pulled her hands back, and Chet cleared his throat.

  “Looks like you got a good start on the day,” he said.

  “I was up early, too.” She cast him a wry smile. “I remember Granny used to say that the animals needed to be clean and dry. I saw to that. Also, they looked antsy, so I let them out.”

  “Did you find the feed bins?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “That’s fine while they can graze. But they’ll need food overnight. You’ll have to know how to mix it—especially for the herd, when you get one again. Basically, Helen was using a mix of chopped hay, corn silage, soybean meal and some fruit rinds that she’d been getting from a grocery chain for next to nothing. It’s just recycling for them. It takes a bit more to separate it out, so they charge a minimal amount...”

  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. Famil
y 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.

  But this was better than her life in the city had been. What with all of her friends having left for other more exciting opportunities and working a job she truly loathed, even if it did pay moderately well, being responsible for something of this magnitude woke her up in a way she’d never experienced before, not even when visiting here. This was going to be hard—really hard—and somehow she knew it could also be worth it.

  “So what happened between Andy and his fiancée?” Mackenzie asked. She’d been wondering what the details were ever since Chet had mentioned it when he arrived.

  Chet shrugged. “I don’t know too much, but if I had to guess, I’d say it was Andy’s fault.”

  Mackenzie chuckled at his bluntness. “What makes you so sure?”

  “Ida’s great.” Chet glanced in her direction, one arm out the open window, drumming an absent rhythm on the side of the truck. “She’s good for him. She settles him down and makes him think. Ida isn’t the difficult type. And I know my brother. If there’s friction, it’s not because of Ida.”

  The difficult type. Was that what Chet thought of her? And she absolutely could be, especially if he tried to manipulate her out of her ranch. Still, Mackenzie found herself feeling a tiny bit envious. Maybe Andy hadn’t been the right guy for her, but Ida had managed to earn Chet’s respect, and Chet wasn’t easily charmed. Granny had been the same way. She’d been hard to impress, but when she liked someone, that meant something. Perhaps Ida was just a better fit for the family in Chet’s eyes than Mack had been.

  Difficult. She suppressed the urge to roll her eyes.

  Chet looked grim as he drove, the tall, lanky bulk of him filling up that side of the truck. He smelled like hay and hard work, and she realized there were some issues between the brothers that Chet wasn’t eager to talk about.

  “You and Andy always were pitted against each other,” Mackenzie said. She’d meant it as a joke, wanting to defuse the tension, but Chet didn’t even crack a smile.

  “We’re just different.” He said the words low enough that she wasn’t entirely sure that they were meant for her. “Look, I should probably warn you. There’s a developer sniffing around, looking for land to buy up.”

  “Oh.” Mackenzie raised an eyebrow, caught off guard by the sudden declaration. “Granny would have hated that.”

  “Yeah.” The tension in his shoulders eased. “It’s not good for Hope. I just wanted you to know so that you could think it through before someone starts trying to sweet-talk yo
u into a sale.”

  How much were they offering, exactly? She had to admit she was curious. But the old guilt welled up inside her again. This was Granny’s ranch, and Granny hadn’t left it to her to sell it—of that, she was absolutely certain. Granny had loved this land. She would have known that if she’d left it to Mack’s father, he would have sold it without once setting foot on it again. Maybe that was part of why Granny had willed it to Mackenzie, in a hope that someone would love this place as she had.

  Chet brought the truck to a stop in front of the house and put it into Park. “I care about this place. If that developer is successful and manages to buy up land around here, it would change Hope...take away some of the heart here. We’ve got to keep them out.”

  “I can see that,” she agreed. She noticed that he hadn’t mentioned her selling to him yet. Maybe he was timing this, gauging her willingness to sell before he made his offer. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  They were silent for a couple of beats, and she could tell he was still brooding about something.

  “And if you could just be careful around Andy—”

  “Careful?” She laughed. “Why?”

  “Because he dropped himself on my doorstep last night, whining about the woman who was two months away from marrying him, and I don’t want to give him any ideas. I have every intention of sending him back home to Ida ASAP.”

  Mackenzie frowned. What was Chet more worried about—the big developers or his brother’s broken engagement?

  “What ideas, exactly?”

  “Ideas about you.” The statement was loaded, and after he’d said it, silence and implication stretched between them. Andy was barely single again, and Chet thought she’d swoop in and scoop him up? It was insulting.

  “Is that what you think of me?” she demanded.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You think I’m back here looking for romance?” Anger bubbled up within her. A woman inherited four hundred acres of Montana ranch land, and he thought she’d wander off after Andy Granger? “I’m here to run a ranch, and you and Andy can work out your family issues on your own. You and Ida can rest easy, Chet. I have no intention of selling out to some faceless corporation, and I have no intention of starting up with Andy again, either.”