Wild Ride Cowboy

He’d park his truck on the side of the road and they’d hike down the sandy trail together and sit on the rocks for hours. Talking while they sat there mostly not landing any fish.

And when she’d complain, Jason had always said, “This is why they call it fishing, not catching.”

The image of her brother standing out by the river with that carefree grin on his face felt like a stab to the chest.

Alex shifted, rapping his knuckles on her table. “He wrote me a letter.”

“What are you talking about? He wrote you a letter that was like... Open in case of my eventual death?”

“Something like that.”

“Wow.”

She didn’t know what else to say. Somehow, the fact that there was a letter almost made it worse. Of course, Jason had known that his death was a possibility. Every soldier knew that. But Clara had never allowed herself to think about it.

Somehow, it was less disturbing to imagine he hadn’t really given it much consideration. Envisioning him sitting down and writing a letter about what Alex should do if he died... It... It enraged her. Even if it was unfair. The fact that he had thought it through that deeply, but had still been in the military, had still put himself in that kind of danger...

He had fully imagined a future in which he might be gone and she might need help. Where she would be left alone and he might have to assign somebody the responsibility of taking care of her.

He had known he could die. Known enough to prepare for it. It made her furious. Absolutely furious.

“He loved you, Clara,” Alex said, his soft, apologetic tone worse than the arrogant tone he had used when commenting on her dinner.

“If he loved me so much, he shouldn’t have reenlisted in the military after our father died,” she said, finally giving voice to the small, useless, mean thoughts she’d been having ever since she’d gotten the news of his death. “If he loved me so much, he would have stayed here. He would be here helping me with the ranch. Rather than sending a surrogate in his place. Did you all love the military so much that you couldn’t stay away? Is it better than this ranch, this town?”

“He believed in the military,” Alex said, his voice rough. “He believed in the ideal of serving something bigger than himself. No matter whether it was perfect or not, he believed in doing something. He died for that belief, and he knew that was the risk.”

He had died across the world, away from her. He had left her alone. Had truly left her without any family at all. And whatever ideals Alex spoke about, she couldn’t share them.

Somewhere beneath the grief and anger, she was proud of her brother. Of his service. Of his selflessness.

But mostly... She just wished that he had applied that selflessness to her. If he was going to sacrifice his life, why couldn’t he have done it in Copper Ridge, near the only family he had left?

Then she wouldn’t be alone.

Those thoughts swirled around in her head, caused tension to mount in her chest, a hard little ball of anger and meanness that she couldn’t quite shake. Didn’t really want to.

“What exactly do you think you’re going to do with the ranch that I can’t do?” She crossed her arms and cocked her hip to the side, treating him to her hardest and meanest stare.

“What exactly have you done with it?” He looked around. “As near as I can tell, you have a bunch of old, rusted-out equipment that isn’t going to do you any good.”

“I’ve been living here and I’ve been running this place ever since Jason reenlisted. And yeah, maybe I haven’t managed to keep up on everything. But I’ve been shifting my focus. We did beef for a long time, but an operation this size... It isn’t sustainable. Especially not with so much local competition. The beef thing... That was my dad’s. And Jason kept it up from a distance. But a couple of years ago we decided to sell.”

“Great. What do you do now?”

“We invested the money back into the house. And also in bees.”

“Bees?”

She sighed. “Yes. The goal was to start producing our own honey. It’s something that I could easily handle on my own. I don’t need to hire workers to help with that, and I can also maintain a job away from the ranch while the hive is getting established. For the first year, you can’t actually take their honey, you know.”

Alex rocked back on his heels. “No. I don’t know that. Because I don’t know anything about bees.”

“Bees are fascinating creatures, Alex,” she said.

Alex just stared at her. Her eyes clashed with his, and her stomach lurched unexpectedly. She looked away from him, counting the mugs on the shelf behind him.

“Bees,” he repeated finally.

“Yes.”

“What else?” he asked.

“What do you mean what else? What do you expect me to do?”

“Your brother was pretty clear in the instructions he left. He wanted the ranch to be an asset to you, not a liability. He wanted me to help you out until this place is solvent. Or until it’s sold.”

Those words made her heart slam against her breastbone, made abject terror race down her spine, flooding her veins with a spiky kind of horror. “I don’t want to sell,” she said, the words sure and certain.

The house was small, and it was definitely in rough shape in some ways. But this house contained the story of her entire life. This was the only place that had memories of her family all together. And, yes, there were memories of losing those family members here too. But she’d gotten pretty good at living with those.

This house contained every feeling she’d ever experienced. Good and bad. Her mother had scrubbed this place until it was spotless. Until she had been too ill to clean anymore. Her father had worked the land until his body gave out on him.

Jason had joined the military to help support the place financially, and then when their father had died he had come back and worked until Clara had been old enough to handle herself and keep the house on her own. Even then, all his money had gone right back into this place.

The Campbells were dead, by and large. This ranch, this land, was all that was left.

She would be damned if she walked away from it. She had already given up a lot to be here. And she owed it to her family to keep the ranch going. So that the legacy could live on, even if the rest of them didn’t.

“If you don’t want to sell, then what do you want?”

“I could... I can keep working at Grassroots. It’s not hard. And I’ve been managing. There’s a small garden here and it produces well. I basically have all the resources to get a good farmers’ market booth together. In between the two things, I should be able to make it all work.”

“And what about having a life? Working a farm, doing a booth at markets, working at a winery... When do you expect to take a breath, Clara?”

“I don’t want to take a breath, Alex,” she said, the words harder, more brittle and honest than she intended them to be. “Because breathing hurts.”

Silence fell between them, no sound beyond the persistent ticking of the kitchen clock. The one that Clara never looked at, that was never right. It had just always been there, so she had never moved it.

“Then that’s what I’m here for,” he said, his voice rough. “To help out until it quits hurting.”

Something about those words made her want to strike out at him. Made her want to push him away. Mostly because she didn’t know how to do this. Didn’t know how to be taken care of. Not that her father hadn’t been there for her—not that Jason hadn’t been. But always, always, they’d had their own grief, equal to her own. This was different. Not that Alex wasn’t sorry his friend was dead, but Jason wasn’t his brother. The grief was hers. And Alex was offering to take care of her until it passed.

Alex was giving her permission to collapse.

She wasn’t going to take it. She couldn’t.

“What do you propose?” she asked, gritting her teeth and doing her best to recover from that little moment of honesty.