She shook her head, her soft hair brushing his chin. "Don't lie to make me feel better. I don't want to make you choose between me and your family!"
"But it's not like that—" he began to protest.
A hiccupping, gasping sob interrupted him. And then, to his horror, Michelle, his beautiful, strong Michelle, buried her face against his chest and completely lost it.
A few seconds later, she was crying so hard that she couldn't do anything but cling to him. Hot tears soaked into his t-shirt. The conversation was clearly over…for now, at least.
At least Carl knew that she hadn't changed her mind about being in love with him, not if she thought that sacrificing her relationship with him was the only way to save his relationship with his pack.
God, how I love this woman!
He just held her, stroking her back and kissing her hair while she cried herself out. He guessed that a dam had broken inside her, releasing months and possibly years of stress.
Once the storm had passed, he'd try talking to her again.
Maybe she was determined to sacrifice herself to save him, but he didn't need saving. He just needed to convince her of that.
"You're mine, you beautiful stubborn woman," he murmured, flattening his palms against her shaking shoulders. "And I'm not giving up on us."
◆◆◆
Michelle moved through the rest of the day like a sleepwalker, drained by the emotional rollercoaster.
It had taken an embarrassingly long time to get herself back under control, but Carl hadn't been angry about her outburst. He hadn't made fun of her either, the way that Beto did whenever he was able to drive her to tears.
Carl just held her and repeated his assurances that his parents hadn't been serious about making him give up everything.
"Hell, I'm going to phone them back first thing tomorrow morning and make you talk to them," he told her. "I'd call them right now, but they're working, and most of their pastures are out of cell range." He blew out a frustrated breath and took her face between his broad palms. "They invited you to Thanksgiving, Michelle! You don't get invited to Thanksgiving at the ranch unless you're part of the family, or about to become part of the family."
"Oh." She finally dared to believe him. "So it's really going to be okay? Are you sure?"
He kissed her then, long and tenderly. "Really and truly. Everything's going to be fine. Now, let's go eat some breakfast, and then you can tell me what I can do to help you around here."
Beto joined them for breakfast, silent and sullen.
He had pestered Michelle repeatedly for money to fix his car, but given the precarious state of the ranch's finances right now, she didn't have any to give him beyond the amount put aside for his weekly paycheck.
"What happened to all the money you earned this summer, working for me and Dennis?" she had finally asked in exasperation.
Beto had scowled. "I spent it. On stuff I needed. I didn't think that anything was going to eat my car!"
Then it was time to get started on the day's work. With the animals in the pasture, the barn didn't need to be mucked out today, so she put Carl and Beto to work harvesting the ripe apples and pears that had attracted the bear to her garden.
Then, with all three of them peeling and seeding the fruit, she began canning the pears and cooking most of the apples down to applesauce, spiced with cinnamon. She set aside enough apples and pears to make pies and her abuela's pear and almond tart.
After dinner, Beto retreated to his cabin.
Michelle and Carl began watching an old movie from her collection of DVDs, but she found herself quickly nodding off. She was exhausted and drained from the unaccustomed emotional storms of the day.
It didn't take long before she fell asleep on the sofa, her head on Carl's shoulder.
Carl must have carried her to the bedroom and undressed her, but she didn't remember anything until she became aware of Carl shaking her shoulder.
"Michelle, wake up!"
She groggily forced herself to open her eyes and became aware that Cookie and Biscuit were barking furiously somewhere outside.
It was three a.m., the middle of the night, but an ominous orange glow seeped in around her curtains.
"Fire," Carl said shortly. He was already dressed in his wildland firefighting clothes, which he'd retrieved from his landing site in the national forest a couple of days ago.
He headed for the bedroom door with quick, purposeful steps. "Call 911. I'm going to go check it out."
That jolted her fully awake. She made the call, then scrambled out of bed and dressed with frantic haste before running outside.
She halted, transfixed by the sight of the old wooden barn in flames. Coco and Tamarindo streaked by her, heading for the safety of the crawlspace under her porch.
"Fire department's on their way," she reported to Carl, who had donned his hard hat and was busily uncoiling her garden hose from its rack. "But it might take a half-hour for the tanker truck to get up here."
"Your barn's not going to last a half-hour," Carl replied. "Are there any animals inside?"
"No." Luckily, it was another clear night, so the goats and alpacas were out in the pasture, with Cookie and Biscuit to guard them.
"Well, that's a relief." He turned the spigot and began wetting down the cedar shingle roof and wooden siding of her house with the hose. "I'm sorry. I can't do much without real equipment, but let's make sure that the fire doesn't spread beyond the barn."
"Okay," she said numbly. "Tell me what to do."
"Hey, Mica, what's going on?" Beto came running up, wearing a parka hastily donned over the sweatpants and t-shirt that he slept in. He came to a halt and stared at the barn. "Holy shit."
The next twenty minutes passed in frenzied activity as the three of them fought to keep the fire from spreading to the house and Beto's cottage via floating embers carried on the wind.
Then the first members of the area's volunteer firefighters came roaring up the narrow gravel road that ran up from the valley, a sleep-rumpled Dennis Dooley among them, followed shortly thereafter by the fire department's bulky tanker truck.
Michelle retreated out of the way to let the trained firefighters work, but Carl, distinctive in his bright yellow shirt, worked shoulder to shoulder with her neighbors as they connected hoses to the fire engine and battled the hungry flames consuming the old wooden structure and its contents.
She and Beto kept busy making sandwiches and brewing endless pots of hot coffee and tea for the firefighters as the remaining hours of the night passed.
Dawn was a band of silver-gray over the mountains when the fire was finally declared out.
One wall of the barn was still standing among the charred, soaking-wet timbers of the otherwise-collapsed structure. The remains were surrounded by mud churned up by booted feet and huge puddles of dirty water.
Michelle and Carl made more pots of coffee and cooked everyone breakfast before the volunteers dispersed and headed home to get ready for their jobs or farming work.
Beto declared himself exhausted and staggered back to his cabin to sleep.
"This was a hell of a way to meet some of my neighbors," she said to Carl, trying hard for humor as she washed the coffee mugs and plates after the last of the volunteer fire department members had departed.
The scorched ruin of the barn was clearly visible from the window above her kitchen sink.
"I'm sorry," Carl said, coming up behind her and putting his arms around her. "I know you probably lost a lot."
"Yeah, you could say that." She fought the urge to laugh bitterly. "All the feed I'd bought for the winter. All of the equipment and supplies I used for shearing and combing my flock. And all of the unsold raw cashmere and alpaca wool from my spring shearing. My boxes and bags for mailing out orders. Everything's gone except my house, my truck, and the Kubota."
The loss of her wool was a devastating blow. Last spring, she and Beto had spent days combing her goats and shearing the alpacas.
Her business plan for her ranch had included the formation of a mail-order business to ship her raw, sustainably produced wool directly to hand-spinners, dyers, and other textile hobbyists, so she had invested considerable time and money in a professionally designed website with payment processing, as well as shipping materials with which to fulfill orders.
She'd even bought a spinning wheel and taught herself to spin, documenting her efforts on her ranch's social media channels, where she also faithfully posted videos of her goats and alpacas.
Her efforts had been paying off, with additional income streams from third-party advertising when several of her baby goat and baby alpaca videos went viral and people began subscribing to her ranch's video channel in droves.
Now her inventory was all gone, and she couldn't harvest more wool from her livestock until spring. Her goats and alpacas would need their warm fleeces to survive the winter snows here in the mountains.
And without the mail-order business, she couldn't make ends meet with just the social media income.
"I don't know what I would have done without you here tonight," she said, her words muffled by his shirt. She closed her eyes and leaned on him, letting his strength support her. "You kept things from getting even worse."
"I couldn't do much without equipment. I'm sorry about your barn." She heard frustration in his voice. "What about insurance?"
She shook her head. "I'm still going to have a hard time replacing all of my equipment. And that's not even counting the difficulty of raising a new barn before the first snow falls…which could be really soon." She turned and slipped her arms around Carl's waist. He smelled like smoke and sweat, but he was strong and warm, and she needed his strength right now. "Without a barn, all of my livestock is going to freeze pretty quickly. They're a tough breed, so the first few snowstorms might not harm them, but after that…who knows?"
With an effort, she stepped back out of his arms. "Speaking of livestock, I'd better go check on mine. I'm sure that they were pretty upset by all the commotion here."
Carl nodded. "I'll go take a look around the barn and see if I can spot where the fire started. I'm not a trained investigator, but I do have a lot of experience with fires."
◆◆◆
Michelle's first indication that something had gone terribly wrong in the pasture was when Cookie and Biscuit both came racing to meet her Kubota as she drove it up the steep hill from her house.
She had left the pasture gate latched. She was sure she had. So how had the dogs gotten out?
A bad feeling began to form like a lump in her gut.
Then, as she rounded a stand of trees and the pasture came into sight, she saw that a large section of her fence had been flattened.
Her stomach gave a sickening lurch, and the blood began to pound in her temples as she realized that the pasture was completely deserted.
All of her livestock had vanished.
She parked the Kubota next to a fallen section of the fence and stared at the empty enclosure in disbelief.
This time, whatever had attacked her fence hadn't stopped with tearing away the wire panels. It had pushed over the thick fence posts as well. Three of them lay like fallen tree trunks, split and splintered at their bases, as if something enormously strong had just snapped them like Popsicle sticks.
Her two dogs ran around the Kubota, barking furiously, then darted off towards the road.
Not daring to hope that perhaps her flock had only wandered a short way off this time, instead of high-tailing it for the high mountain meadows of the national forest, Michelle put the Kubota in gear and followed Cookie and Biscuit down the brushy slope.
As Michelle drove with slow caution, she noticed signs that her flock had passed this way—fresh poop, a set of distinctive two-toed alpaca footprints in a patch of bare dirt, and wisps of long white goat hair caught on the twigs of bushes.
The dogs led her steadily downhill, until they emerged onto the gravel road that climbed the mountainside in a series of switchbacks from the highway down in the valley up to the Dooley Ranch and her place.
And there, the trail went cold.
Cookie and Biscuit cast around on the other side of the road for a considerable distance, and so did Michelle, but without success. All the prints and other signs vanished at the road. Her livestock was just…gone.
Just like someone loaded them into a trailer and drove them away, said a voice in her head. Pashmina goats are valuable, and so are alpaca.
But who would have stolen her livestock?
Her neighbors had been nothing but generous and kind to her, helping her when she needed it, offering well-meant advice, and even getting up at oh-dark-thirty to come and fight the fire.
Her eyes stung and hot tears began to roll down her cheeks, cooling almost immediately and leaving icy tracks on her skin, dripping from her chin onto her lap.
And here I thought I'd gotten all my crying for the year out of the way yesterday, she thought with disgust. But she couldn’t help herself.
It was all just too much.
Cookie leaped into the passenger seat of the Kubota and began to lick Michelle's face.
Grateful for the comfort, she draped her arm over the big shepherd mix's back and just let her tears flow.
Without either her livestock or the wool from the spring shearing, she knew she would lose the ranch.
She had worked so hard over the past two years, tried so hard. And she still failed.
I'm such a failure. Why was I stupid enough to think that I could do this on my own? What would Abuela Consuelo say if she knew how I had wasted my inheritance?
"That's it. It's over," she said out loud. "I'm done. I've lost everything now."
She sat there for a long time, watching the morning light over the mountains she loved so much.
What am I going to do now? How can things possibly get any worse?
She should have known better than to ask the universe that question.
Sometime later, she heard Carl calling her name somewhere on the hill behind her, back towards the pasture.
"Down here, at the road," Michelle called back and quickly wiped her eyes on her sleeves.
He's going to think that I do nothing but cry my eyes out.
Carl came jogging down the hill.
"Arson," he said as he approached her. "That fire wasn't an accident. It was arson, and the obvious kind. I smelled gasoline on some of the boards that survived. Do you know anyone who might have wanted to harm you?"
"Probably the same person who rustled all of my livestock while we were all busy fighting that fire," Michelle said bitterly.
Chapter 18
Baby, Baby
"It's over, Carl," Michelle said. "I've lost everything. I'm done."
"No," he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Don't say that."
She felt a small burst of warmth at his touch, but it wasn't enough to counter the cold desolation of this hour.
She shrugged. "It's the truth. I'm out of money. I mean, things were really tight before this. I couldn't even afford to help my little brother fix his car, and I sure as hell can't afford to buy more goats or alpacas. And even if I do get enough money from my insurance policy to make it to spring, just making the mortgage payments on this place will bankrupt me if I don't have any fleeces or wool to sell." She drew in a deep shuddering breath. "They're all gone, Carl. Every last one of my goats, not to mention Alfred and his ladies."
His eyes widened, then began to turn gold. "Those assholes," he growled. "I'll track them down."
Then his expression softened, and he drew her into his arms. "Don't give up, my love. It's not over until it's over. We'll find a way to recover your animals and keep your place going. I'll help you."
"But why? Why do you even care about this place?" she asked bitterly.
He kissed her then, his lips warm against her temple. "Because you love it so much. And I want to see you happy." He paused. "What makes you happy, my love? I m
ean, if you didn't have to worry about anyone else's feelings, or being a burden, or money, what would you want?"
I'd want to stay here. And have you here, with me. She found herself shying away from the possibilities raised by his question. "But it's selfish to only consider what I want. Especially if it means making someone else give up something they care about."
"And I'm telling you that it's okay to be selfish once in a while." His arms tightened around her. "I'm deeply, madly in love with you, and I want you to make you happy. But first, I need to know what 'happy' looks like for you."
Hard Landing Page 16
