The Rancher Needs A Wife

He, too, had been caught helplessly in her orbit, too attracted to ignore her but too pulled back within himself, too locked away inside his problems to match the ease of her manner or respond to the effortless flash of her smile.

Even in those rare and precious times her smile had been aimed in his direction.

He tipped his head beneath the water and closed his eyes as it ran down his face like tears, remembering now in agonizing detail how she’d stood to one side of the game field, moments before accepting the home-coming queen crown, dressed in her sapphire-blue gown, leveling her sapphire-blue eyes on his. There’d been no pity or disgust in her expression—none of that for Maggie Harrison.

Maggie Harrison Sinclair. She’d always been out of his league, beyond the limits of his possibilities.

Unlike Ellie, the girl Maggie’s mother had taken in a few years before. Wayne had always suspected he shared a secret, silent kinship with Ellie. They’d been two lost souls longing for family and tied to the land. While he’d labored to rebuild the ranch his father had left in ruins, he’d dreamed of the day he’d call on her and invite her for a ride, to head out toward the aching beauty of the mountains and discuss…something. Possibilities of some kind or other.

He hadn’t known how to talk to a girl, how to make that first move toward a first date. He’d never figured he’d had a good opportunity, not with schoolwork and ranch chores and sports schedules eating up his time, not with his father sick or staggering around or passed out on some convenient horizontal surface. He’d never believed he had the right, not with the family finances edging near disaster and the future looking like a mighty flimsy enterprise. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to make a future with Ellie. But he figured he’d better start somewhere, or he’d end up alone.

But then old Ben Harrison had fallen ill, and his prodigal son Tom had come back to help out. Tom had taken one look at Ellie—all grown up, confident and capable—and he’d won the race for Ellie’s hand in marriage before Wayne had had a chance to stumble out of the starting block.

Suddenly restless, Wayne dressed and prowled through the silent house, past shapes graying in the dawn, rooms waiting for family and spaces wanting womanly touches. His ex-wife hadn’t cared about putting her own mark on this place. Maybe that was a good thing, since her personal style had never meshed with his. He knew his friends had been surprised when he’d proposed. They’d warned him that Alicia didn’t seem the type of woman to put down roots or to consider her man before herself.

But they didn’t understand his gnawing need for someone to move through the spaces of this house with him, someone to share a meal at his table or to visit with at night. Someone to give him the children he wanted, children who’d learn to tend the land beside him and inherit it when he was gone.

Someone who didn’t come from Tucker, someone who didn’t know the hurting, frightened person he was in his dream. Someone who’d see only the man he’d learned to pull from the deep, still, secret center of himself.

Battling back the torment of this waking, yearning dream and the ache of desires that chased him through the sleepless nights, he walked into his office and forced himself into the leather chair behind his desk. Now that his cattle had been brought down from summer’s mountain pastures and spread along the valley, it was time to turn his attention to preparations for hunting season. He tapped a command on his keyboard and waited for the computer file listing the first group of lodge guests to appear on the monitor screen.

And he ignored the loneliness squeezing him in its iron fist.

CHAPTER THREE

MAGGIE FINGER-COMBED her short, layered hair in the Granite Ridge guest cabin Friday morning and then paused, staring beyond her reflection to the log walls and beamed ceiling that had once seemed to press in on her. She gripped the edge of the dresser, remembering last summer’s plunge into failure and anxiety, the dizzying spiral drop that had left her gutted and clumsy with a case of the shakes.

Her first panic attack had sent her scurrying from Chicago. Her second had tempted her to extend her stay in Granite Ridge indefinitely. But Harrisons didn’t cry or crumble. And now her life had purpose again.

No more shakes, not today, not tomorrow, not next week or next month. “I’m back,” she told the Maggie in the mirror.

Behind her, one of her grandmother’s quilts spread across the tarnished brass bed, and a braided wool rug lay over pine plank floors. She smiled at the comforting familiarity and the sense of timeless belonging. The snug place was earthy and warm, and as different from the bedroom in her Chicago condo as it was possible to get while remaining on the same planet.

Her former Chicago condo, that was.

She pulled a cashmere sweater over her silk camisole top, adjusting the neckline to let a bit of lace show in the front vee. The ache of loss seemed duller this morning, and the fingers fastening a string of beads around her neck were steady.

Now she could admit that her rush to sell her share of the furnishings to her soon-to-be ex-husband during the divorce proceedings had been a mistake. At the time, all she’d wanted was to get clear and get out, but she missed her French mantel clock and the wide-mouthed majolica vase, the art deco bronze and the signed Konopacki print. When she’d quit her job and fled the city, she hadn’t known where she’d land. And her things certainly wouldn’t match the decor in this cabin her brother Tom had built for his wife and their baby girl.

A ripple of sorrow caught her by surprise. It seemed she’d done more grieving for her brother in the three months she’d spent here at Granite Ridge than she’d done three years ago, when the pain of his death was fresh and raw.

Her widowed sister-in-law had recovered and remarried, and her niece seemed delighted with the development. Even her mother, Jenna, had found herself a new husband. Now it was Maggie who was on her own, who was taking her turn to make a fresh start.

She intended to make the most of it. She believed in making the most of everything.

“Everything,” she said with a nod. “I’m back, and soon I’m going to be back on top.”

She smoothed her slim wool skirt over her hips and stepped into snappy heeled pumps with contrasting oxford-style top-stitching. Dressing as if she were heading to her former position at a private college-preparatory academy gave her the illusion of normalcy, even if she was about to climb into a mud-splattered sports utility vehicle and travel narrow county roads toward her temporary job teaching English classes at Tucker High School.

She collected her leather briefcase, slung a tweed overcoat over one arm and stepped into the knife-edged chill of a Ruby River valley morning. Sticky-fingered yellowed leaves clung to the willows edging Whistle Creek, and the serrated mountain peaks that seemed to hang close above wore a dusting of early snow. Overhead, geese called in their nasal tones, and underfoot the frosted ground crackled beneath her heels.

Memories floated about her like field haze as she bumped along the track leading to the creek bridge. She supposed it was the sharp bend in the gravel road that made her think of her first kiss with that fast-moving preacher’s boy behind the snack stand at the barrel racing tournament. And it must have been the faint scent of alfalfa in the cargo section that brought back the night she’d had one beer too many and let a Sheridan shortstop feel her up in the back of his daddy’s horse van.

Or it could be the eleven-month stretch of sexual deprivation that had her system keyed up over reruns of adolescent experiments in foreplay. Sentiment didn’t usually kick up her pulse rate and warm her from the inside out.

And dwelling in the past wouldn’t solve the problem of her future. There wasn’t a simple or convenient method to fill in the blanks, but she wouldn’t let that fact trigger another episode of shaky self-doubt. The divorce settlement had provided enough money to get her settled in the next place—wherever that might be. In the meantime, she had a roof over her head and time to spend with her family. Time to find a challenging placement, in an academically focused school in a stimulating urban setting.

Time to plot her steps and strategies, to win the battle she’d set in motion at the school board meeting.

She tightened her grip on the steering wheel, ready to transform all her frustrations into motivation and to focus her energies on her goals for the school theater. When she’d accomplished all she intended, sleepy little Tucker High wouldn’t know what had hit it. If there was one thing she knew how to stage, it was a campaign.

Around the last bend in the creek, perched on a knoll above the stumps of cottonwoods charred by last summer’s fire, she glimpsed the tall, white house where she’d spent her childhood. Constructed in the Victorian era responsible for its jutting angles and fanciful trim, the house had sheltered Harrisons for one hundred and twenty-five years. She loved its rambling wings and wide porches, the gables and bays, the nooks and crannies that still held her girlhood secrets and dreams.

She parked on the graveled side yard path and climbed the back porch steps, wincing when the screen door slapped the mudroom jamb. The aroma of the coffee kept fresh and waiting on a brightly tiled counter beckoned from her mother’s cheery kitchen. Beyond yellow-checked curtains at the sink window, puffy hydrangeas fading to mauve and the autumn-tinged leaves of hardy lilacs framed a view of freshly painted outbuildings and pasture land rolling on a grassland carpet toward the Tobacco Root mountains.

“Morning, Maggie.” Will Winterhawk, the Harrison ranch foreman, entered from the dining room and poured a mug of his own before settling at the oversize kitchen table. It still seemed odd to see him take his place there so casually, though he’d been an unofficial part of the family for over twenty years. Last month he’d made it official with a wedding, and he’d moved his small bundle of clothing and his dozens of boxes of books into Jenna’s lavender-scented bedroom suite at one end of the second-floor hall.

The fact that her mother had received a marriage proposal from a younger man—a certified hunk of a younger man—was deeply satisfying.

“Morning, Will.”

“You’re up early.”

She turned to face him and leaned back against the counter. “You know what they say about the early bird.”

“It catches the school board’s approval?”

She lifted her mug in acknowledgment. “You heard about that, did you?”

“News travels fast around here. You should remember that.”

She cocked her head. “Was that an observation or a warning?”

One of Will’s slow smiles spread across his dark features. “Take it any way you choose.”

Fitz Kelleran, barefoot and damp around the edges, jogged down the narrow service stairs and dropped a grade-school spelling text on the kitchen table. Even in worn work clothes, the man was ridiculously handsome. His golden-boy features and devilish charm had given him his start in the movies; his talent kept him on Hollywood’s A list. “Morning, Will.”

Will nodded a greeting.

Fitz headed for the coffee and nudged Maggie aside with his hip. “Morning, Margaret.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Margaret?”

“Oops. Sorry. I forgot that’s what your ex calls you.”

“You didn’t forget. You don’t forget a thing. In fact, you seem to have an annoyingly efficient instant recall of most conversations, word for word.”

“It’s not instant,” he said with one of his dazzling grins. “It’s permanent.”