Tempting the Rancher

by Leslie North

“Thanks.”

  After trimming as much hair as possible close to Mae’s wound, Nat drizzled the medicine into the bottle, capped and shook it, then poured the concentrated stream on the injury. All the while, January stroked the donkey and told Mae in cooing tones how lucky she was that she was cared for by the best cowboy around. Nat didn’t know who benefitted more, him or the donkey.

  Once he had wrapped Mae’s leg, he stood.

  January was close.

  He brushed the back of his hand against hers, loose and drawn to her side. Both of their hands were dirty, a little damp, a little chilled. He wove his first two fingertips through hers.

  Instant warmth.

  An exhale past her lips told him everything he needed to know. He knew that landscape intimately: the shape of her not-quite-flawless teeth behind a bowed upper lip; the muted stain of her flesh there, close to the shade of a blood orange he once sampled at the farmer’s market; the slight pout of her bottom lip when she forgot herself; the taste of their union.

  She adjusted his loose hold to something with intent. Her intent. A sensation reverberated low in his abdomen, fiery and thick, and he almost stopped caring that she would leave. His brain rewrote it all in a flash: ripping the raincoat from her shoulders, scooping her to his waist against the cabin’s weathered oak and feeling more wetness than just the storm press against the impossible strain his cock had become, her asking—no, begging—to feel him inside her again. Ten years of soul-snatching want, cresting to a finish that split the heavens more than the lightning. But at the moment of rewrite, Nat knew it wouldn’t be enough. Hot, mildly angry fucking was the furthest thing from what she deserved, from who he was. He pumped the brakes while he still recognized himself.

  “Let’s find something to put that rainwater in,” said Nat.

  He tugged her into the cabin. Night had come. Nat pulled out his phone and turned on its flashlight.

  The one-room shack was musty and close and smelled vaguely like Clem’s pipe tobacco. Nat was certain the air he pulled into his lungs was the same that once breathed life into his grandfather. He felt him there—in the antlers holding threadbare cloth that was once a curtain to the cabin’s shuttered window, in the iron clips that used to hold his grandfather’s .22 Remington, in an old copy of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, one of Clem’s favorites, the pages yellowed with time. Most of the cabin’s contents had been salvaged to the main house or sold off but for a rocking chair with broken runners, an empty crate, a few old tools hanging on the walls, and a shelf near a frontier stove with a few chipped enameled pots and wooden boxes.

  “This place is amazing,” said January.

  Not the word he would have chosen. Rubble, more likely.

  “Be careful. Floor might have wood rot.”

  He might have said the floor was made out of military-grade steel for all she heeded his warning. She set down her pack and browsed the interior, exploring everything with a reverent touch and a thorough examination.

  “Clem lived here?”

  “Built it himself after the war.”

  “Why didn’t you ever bring me?”

  “I don’t know. Not really the kind of place you’d bring a girl to—”

  “Have sex?”

  Nat squirmed, given the recent foray of his mind. “I was going to say impress her. And that wasn’t all we did, J. Not to me.”

  “I know,” she said, pausing her study of the room’s contents to study him. “To me, either. But you have to admit, we got pretty good at it.”

  He was grateful for the darkness. His cheeks flamed like a fucking schoolgirls. Always the exhibitionist, always adventurous with her body—and his—always comfortable with her sexuality. She beamed. If she wiggled her ass and did a striptease to christen the place, it wouldn’t shock him. Put him in the grave trying to resist every urge pulsing through him? Definitely.

  Wood. What they needed right now. The stove kind, not the kind siphoning blood away from the self-preservation part of his brain.

  “I don’t see a lantern. We should find some matches. Light a fire.” Nat crossed the room gingerly because he was convinced some misfortune would mess with what was fast turning into a prospect far more enticing than a decade of nighttime acquaintances with his hand. A spilled box of matches lay behind the stove. He gathered the few dried out logs stacked near the wall, examined the stove pipe as best he could to ensure ventilation—another possible misfortune—and crafted a healthy fire. At last, he turned off the harsh artificial flashlight and shoved his phone into his back pocket.

  A yellow glow illuminated the room’s surfaces, none more captivating than the soft curves of her face.

  She removed her raincoat and stood, waiting, watching, wrecking.

  His toes curled inside his boots.

  Don’t fall, she’ll leave again.

  He reached for a pot on the shelf. “I should water the animals.”

  January nodded.

  Nat thought she might stop him. She didn’t.

  Just as well. Making love to her only to lose her a second time would leave a hole in his heart the size of Texas that even a New York Times bestseller couldn’t fill.

  Dear Agnes…I’m fucked if I do, and I’m fucked if I don’t.

  6

  The least January could do after not following through on her wants, her needs, for not going to Nat when it was clear he wanted her again from his attentiveness, his smoldering stare she had come to know as desire, his monumental erection, was to make their forced night of proximity comfortable.

  He stayed with the animals for the better part of an hour. In that time, she shook out a moth-eaten quilt and laid it before the stove, found and cleaned a cast iron skillet, heated up the roasted vegetables she had brought with her, and fetched two fresh water bottles from her pack. One “belly” down—food and water. The other bellies, the one of the enemy—this time, herself, for wanting freedom—and the one that grounded her—Nat, always Nat—were a little harder to manage.

  Her inheritance was scheduled to hit her bank account tomorrow morning. No other reason to stay. Her time here had been good, cleansing, like a reboot of the soul, but it only served to exacerbate the itch she had to move again. Nat wasn’t a casual lover. He was old-fashioned in his commitments—one thing that drew her to him all those years ago after she found out her father had no intention of reuniting with his family. One night to recapture the way she and Nat were with each other—generous, enamored, voracious—would keep him right where Mona had written to her that he remained: stuck. January wanted him so very much that the remembered taste of him sat on her tongue. But she loved him even more.

  When he returned, he gave her a run-down on the animals. He had adopted her nicknames for the cow and donkey. For the first time, she understood the imprint of her being here. The realization was a heavy coat lined with burrs. She had hoped to drift in and drift out again. No emotional footprints, no evidence she had been back at all. Nothing had gone as planned.

  “Are you hungry?” she said, feigning a brightness she struggled to pull off past the guilt.

  “This is why you took forever to pack.”

  He smiled, for the first time since things between them became so weighty outside, and settled across from her on the floor. Without his wet ball cap, his hair was untamed and sexy. January sensed another shift in their dynamic, both times inside the cabin. Clem’s hands on every nook and cranny. Meier descendants conceived and reared inside these walls. Love that stretched the span of lifetimes. January felt sure that if the great flood came and washed the cabin into the gulch, Nat would have his third “belly” here—his legacy. Forever, this stretch of earth would be his center point when things didn’t go as planned. God whispering in his ear.

  A tsunami crashed through January’s body. In an instant, she flared hot and cold and wanted to be anywhere but inside her skin. She had no center point. Hadn’t for a long time. Quite possibly, wouldn’t recognize it if it showed up. S
he didn’t belong here. She didn’t belong anywhere. She was her father, both of them experts at disconnection. Adrift on conflicting tides of resentment and admiration, she rummaged in her pack for the utensils she kept there—one set because she so often ate alone—and fought back hot tears.

  “Are you okay?” he whispered.

  Of course he knew. Nat always knew. He was the most perceptive man she had ever known. The man all others pale in comparison to.

  She nodded, not daring to speak. One stubborn tear made itself known. She brushed it aside with a casual swipe of her sleeve cuff. But, of course, he knew.

  “Will the others worry?” she asked, handing him a fork and keeping a spoon for herself.

  “They know there’s no cell service out here. Probably guess one of the animals was hurt in the storm and come at first light with a trailer. Willie knows about this place. And Mona knows you’re with me.”

  As if that knowledge was synonymous with being safe. January didn’t mind the assumption. Largely, it was truth. She backtracked to a topic that didn’t involve her faltering sense of autonomy.

  “So tell me about college. I want to hear everything I missed.”

  Her question caught him at his first bite. Most people who spent an inordinate amount of time with animals would have lapsed in manners. Nat clenched a loose fist at his lips and waited until he had swallowed to answer.

  “I studied ag sciences, worked on a few projects researching the intersection between technology and ranching. My roommate was a computer science major. We teamed up and wrote software that tracked herds, measured the vital signs of certain marker animals, and sent data back to a phone app. We were even able to pinpoint the precise window for Clem’s bull to breed that season based on the animal’s optimum body temperature.”

  “That’s huge, Nat. Revolutionary. Did anything ever come of it?”

  “Not really. Until they launch more and better satellites into space and rural networks improve, any kind of software to track in real time is useless. That project was really the only thing that held my attention, except…”

  January was afraid to ask, but she had never held anything back from Nat. “Girls? Surely a few of them held your attention.”

  “Are you asking if there were others after you?”

  “Yes.”

  He savored another bite, likely to give himself time to consider. Nat’s greatest gift and biggest downfall was soul-baring honesty, but he had a way of wrapping that trait in word packages tied with ribbons to distract from the message. Her stomach clenched.

  “Three.”

  January felt deprived of oxygen. That was it? The guy could rub sentences together that made her weep from joy and laughter and sorrow, but all he gave her was a number. Three. She was mildly horrified with herself that she should take that number to be three too many. He deserved companionship and intimacy and all the love she hadn’t shown him by staying.

  “You?”

  “Hoo…” January said on a gusty exhale. She reeled from the crippling entitlement her heart still held for him.

  “That many, huh?”

  Her turn to take a bite. “No. I mean, not really. No place has ever really been permanent for any length. And no one wants to love the girl who leaves.”

  He swallowed. Visibly. Then became preoccupied with pushing a cooked carrot around with his fork. He had given her honesty. The least she could do was reciprocate. Trouble was, how to be honest about something she had been scared to tell anyone?

  “Dear Agnes…”

  He made eye contact. His mouth stretched, a ghost of a smile.

  Her stomach recoiled as if she’d eaten habaneros, not cooked potatoes. “I’m afraid a certain person will think differently of me if he knows I was once intimate with a woman. Signed, One Time, Never Again.”

  Nat didn’t flinch. He didn’t reclaim interest in the meal or unfold his long legs or even glance away from her confession. The consummate advice professional.

  “Dear One Time, Never Again…”

  Already she loved him. Before he offered up whatever gift-wrapped words he had for her, she felt a tingly rush of acceptance from across the blanket.

  “Experimentation is natural. That you were honest with your certain person makes it more than okay.”

  The rancid turn of her stomach eased. She realized he, as Agnes, shared that same acceptance with others. His column wasn’t just a silly diversion. Agnes allowed Nat to do what he did best—bring comfort to others.

  “In retrospect, it was nothing,” she said. “Crazy, really. I thought I had feelings for her, but it turned out that loneliness is an insidious bastard. It masks itself as other emotions and tries to change you in ways you can’t imagine.”

  He poked at his food but didn’t eat. “You’d be surprised.”

  That they shared this maudlin state of loneliness all these years apart had to mean something. That she hadn’t felt it once since coming back had to mean something important.

  Nat pushed his meal aside and reclined on the quilt, hands laced behind his head, knees bent and wide. “What did she look like?”

  January wasn’t sure why he should want to know until his lips twitched in amusement. He ignited a playfulness that danced through her entire body. She came at him knowing full well he dissolved to liquid at the onset of the first tickle.

  “Why? So you can picture it?”

  “Purely…to keep the conversation…going,” he said, dissolving into unguarded laughter at her touch—first her hands, then her knees bumping his hips, then her hands pinning his wrists to the floor in total surrender.

  “Change the subject before I die of mortification. Right here.”

  “We can’t have that, now, can we?” he said, as soft as a secret. His gaze mapped her expression.

  They were breathless. His chest filled strong and proud; his exhales mingled with hers, inches apart. She had two choices: lean in and fill the vacancy, if only for a time, or take the high road.

  January backed away but curled up beside him, fingers linked. She propped her neck against his rigid bicep, and they settled into a comfortable silence. The occasional crackle of a flame to dry wood curled through her ears and eased her muscles. She struggled to recall a time she felt more content.

  “Nothing held your attention in college, except…” she prompted, snagging the dangling thread of conversation to get her mind off of rolling over and straddling him, to distract her from her hunger for his hardness at her apex, his palms discovering what time had done to her body.

  “Writing.”

  “And you never did anything with it?”

  “I had an English professor who went on to open an independent publishing house. At the top of my final work he wrote: Let me know when your first book comes out. That sentence? Man, he had no idea what that did. He was the first one who made me believe I had talent.”

  “You should send him your manuscript.”

  “Nah. His house acquires stories that preserve the Southern way of life. He’s also old-school. Only takes paper submissions.”

  “You can’t get any more old-school and Southern than Nat Meier.”

  “He’s not going to publish cyborg cowboys, J.”

  “You don’t know that. He believed in you once. And if nothing else, he may have a connection to someone who would publish cyborg cowboys.”

  “I don’t know.”

  She did, but she knew enough not to push the subject after his resistance in the stable office. Instead, she turned into him, burrowed against his side, his heat. Her body felt light, grounded by their nodes of contact. Sleep would have come easily had arousal not had a formidable hold. She closed her eyes to it, the way a Hopi elder had taught her on an outcropping of red rock in Sedona. Alone isn’t a test, he said. With others, we know our truths. Right now, her truth came in the form of a beehive sensation at her core. Dizzying, spiraling sensations took flight, up her inner thighs, behind her navel, deliciously stinging all the spac
es between. She breathed through it, as the elder had instructed.

  The truth came stronger.

  His lips nestled against her hair. Heat from Nat’s unsteady exhales against her scalp penetrated and slipped south to join the chaos.

  Stronger…

  Her knee moved of its own accord, to his body’s front plane, up and over and atop his button fly, a complete and unapologetic offering of her hips.

  His free hand reached for her knee, gripped it in place. Through two layers of denim, his and hers, his dick pulsed.

  Stronger still…

  God help her, she wanted to make every inch of this space theirs and only theirs. Walls, broken chair, passages from the book punctuated by intimate explorations of the tongue. Her ability to give two fucks about tomorrow and beyond was close to shattering.

  “J?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I can’t go through it all again.”

  She stiffened, her muscles toxic, her body immediately plunged into an icy bath of rejection. The buzz at her core died. This time, when tears scorched, she didn’t try to hide them. On some level, she wanted him to hurt, too. And therein was her truth. She was broken. Nat brought comfort to others. She brought pain.

  And loneliness really was an insidious bastard, hell-bent on changing everything.

  “I know.”

  He slipped free of her and stood. “I’ll sleep with the animals tonight.”

  She closed her eyes to his retreating footfalls, hollow against the century-old wood. The moment the door closed behind him, a decade of regret leaked out. Against the quilt, her muffled sobs took the rest of her.

  * * *

  January didn’t know the hour, but she had to escape the four walls, find space, feel cool air against her heated face. A few hours of sleep had remedied the worst of her brain’s heaviness after a cathartic cry. She wrapped herself in the quilt, fetched her journal from her pack, and slipped on her boots before heading outside.

  The night showed signs of lifting. Lighter blues encroached on the horizon. The moon made its return, post-storm, to illuminate nature’s surfaces. She found an oak tree near the cabin’s corner with blushing autumn leaves and plenty of footholds. The cabin roof seemed like the perfect place to add to her travel journal.