Her Stubborn Cowboy

Mackenzie was waiting for him on the wooden steps. She cradled a mug of coffee between her hands, and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail so that her face was fully exposed. She looked more vulnerable that way, her blue eyes lighting on his truck as he pulled up. She put down her mug and waved.

“Morning!” she called as he turned off the engine and hopped out. “You’re earlier than I thought.”

“I got an early start,” he admitted. “I was pretty eager to get out of there. My brother showed up last night.”

“Andy’s here?” She frowned, and he wondered what that meant to her. She’d been pretty smitten with his younger brother back in the day. “What’s he doing with himself now, anyway?”

“He lives out in Billings,” Chet said. “Manages a car dealership.”

“And why did he come here?” she inquired, squinting up at him from her perch on the steps. She shaded her eyes against the morning sun.

“He, uh—” Chet cleared his throat. “He had a bit of a falling-out with his fiancée. He’s out here to cool off and I’m hoping they’ll patch it up.”

“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. Family 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.”