Road to a Cowboy (Windsor, Wyoming #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

The landscape on the other side of Austin MacIsaac’s camera was jaw-dropping. Gently rolling green hills dotted with cattle and, in the distance, the jagged snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains. A few wispy clouds hovered midway up the mountainside, and at this elevation in northwestern Wyoming, Austin could walk right through them if he wanted to.

He was sure there was a joke in there about having his head in the clouds, but as he adjusted the ISO setting on his camera, he couldn’t be bothered to find it. Sunset was imminent. If he wanted to capture the panorama of colors that were about to erupt above the mountains, he needed to concentrate.

Adjusting the settings on his beloved Nikon was second nature after a decade as a professional night sky photographer and after almost all of his thirty-three years spent with a camera in his hands. Somewhere in his parents’ house was an album full of the photos he’d taken with the instant camera his grandfather had gifted him as a kid. Most were of roughly cut grass and cracks in the sidewalk and the bits of trash that got blown onto front lawns on garbage day—what his mom lovingly referred to as “his natural talent to see the beauty in imperfections.”

Sure, Mom . Whatever you say.

He just liked taking pictures of things from unique points of view, and if those pictures inspired awe, all the better.

And what was more awe-inspiring than the Milky Way chasing stars across a darkened sky? Or the Orion Nebula swirling with pinks and purples? Or a full moon haloing puffy clouds?

There were stories to tell in the night sky that painted themselves across his camera lens.

This evening’s assignment was all about the sunset, and although it wasn’t as exciting as the vast canvas of a night sky, it would still be pretty. Besides, he liked hanging out on Windsor Ranch. Always had.

The owners were longtime family friends. Whitney Windsor-March, the matriarch, was close friends with Austin’s mom, and Austin used to accompany his mom to the ranch when he was a kid whenever she had lunch with Whitney. Austin had often brought Cal along, because it was much more fun to make a nuisance of himself among the ranch hands with his best friend. The ranch hands had been endlessly patient though, showing them how to saddle a horse or muck a stall or milk a cow and making sure they stayed out of trouble.

Years ago, Whitney and her husband had hired Austin to take pictures of the ranch for their website, for social media, and for brochures. Sometimes Austin got down into the nitty gritty and snapped photos of a cow’s hoof or the dirt clinging to a cowboy’s boot heel or a calf suckling its mother.

Windsor Ranch was both a working ranch and a guest ranch. Three thousand acres was bisected almost right down the middle by the highway. On the east side: the cattle ranch, barns, and the Windsor-March homestead. On the west side: the number one guest ranch in Wyoming, according to Travelers’ Digest Yearly , for the past five years.

Even though Austin currently stood on the ranching side, the photos he was preparing to take tonight were for Windsor Ranch’s guest services business. Photos to post on social media to entice families, young couples, and solo travelers to take a trip here instead of heading to Florida or wherever people vacationed during the summer these days.

Early in his career, Austin had photographed the night sky in central Florida in July and vowed never to go back. Why anyone chose to live in a place that made a person sweat their pants off just by sticking a toe outside was beyond him.

On the flip side, he’d often been asked by fellow photographers how he could possibly live in a place that often saw snow in June, so...

To each their own.

There was no snow on the ground currently in this second week of June, although it was chilly enough to warrant his shearling jean jacket, especially as the sun dipped, throwing the first touches of pale pinks across the sky. An off-white cowboy hat with a black-and-white checkered band and a pair of fingerless gloves kept his head and fingers warm as he raised his tripod slightly, aiming for less hilly foreground and more mountain and sky background. Pale pink quickly morphed into the color of watermelons, then into bright fire-like orange and deep blues. Austin adjusted his camera settings on autopilot to account for the diminishing light source, his pulse thrumming like it always did when he knew he’d captured something good. Something that would move people. That would encourage them to set aside visions of beaches and palm trees for mountains and bonfires.

As the sound of hoofbeats thumped against the grass behind him, Austin’s pulse thrummed for an entirely different reason. He was friendly with all the ranch hands, but there was only one cowboy who would take time at the end of his day to seek him out.

Austin’s pulse had only ever thrummed for two people.

The first was quickly making his way up to him, the hoofbeats getting louder.

The second had died five years ago, but if his wife’s death had taught him anything, it was to grab life by the balls and take a chance where others might retreat.

Which was why, someday soon, Austin was going to sit the approaching cowboy down and tell him how he felt about him. How he’d always felt about him.

Cal Anderson was Austin’s childhood crush.

He was Austin’s teenage obsession.

He’d been Austin’s rock during the hardest time of his life.

And he was the man Austin wanted to build a life with.

The hoofbeats came to a stop. There was the sound of fabric against fabric, a soft thump as boots hit the ground, then footsteps approaching, muffled by the grass.

Austin’s heart did a sideways flip when Cal stopped next to him, his broad shoulders as intimidating as the Rockies to anyone who didn’t know him.

“Welcome back,” Cal said in a slow drawl that dragged along Austin’s senses. “How was Montana?”

“Beats me,” Austin said with a grin, keeping his eyes on the image on his camera’s display. “But Kootenai National Forest was gorgeous. You should see some of the shots I got. The night sky there is spectacular.”

“Doesn’t it look the same as everywhere else?”

Austin gave him the stink eye. “Don’t sass me, Calvin.”

Cal didn’t smile—his smiles were as rare as a sighting of Halley’s Comet—but his lips twitched.

“And no, it doesn’t look the same everywhere.”

“If you say so.” Cal looked off to the right. “What’s with the second camera?”

Austin jerked his gaze to where he’d set up an additional tripod several feet away. “That one’s recording so I can make a time-lapse video.”

Cal grunted.

His presence was nonintrusive as the sun sank and the stars began to emerge, yet Austin was always aware of him. He was as aware of Cal as he was of the location of the moon or the image in his camera’s viewfinder.

A few minutes later, shadows bathing the landscape, Austin began packing up his equipment under a sky quickly turning to dusk. The mountains had turned nearly invisible—when it got dark out here, it got dark —and Cal was almost a silhouette against the sky. Something about him standing silently with his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, gazing out into the distance, screamed of both contentment and loneliness, making Austin’s heart clench.

The first memory Austin had of Cal at Windsor Ranch was of him falling into a puddle near the corral on a rainy summer day when they’d been seven or eight. Now, as the foreman of that same ranch, Cal was basically running the place. The juxtaposition between kid-Cal, covered in rain and mud as he’d blinked up at Austin with big gray eyes as though wondering how he’d fallen into the puddle, and adult-Cal, tall, strong, coolly confident, and carrying the weight of the entire ranch on his shoulders, was sometimes jarring in that strange twist-of-fate kind of way.

Austin brought the camera up to his eyes, adjusted the settings, and snapped a photo, framing Cal in the right third of the shot while he gazed off to the left, making the viewer wonder what he was looking at. Austin would call it Cowboy Against the Night. He might even put it up for sale in his gallery instead of keeping it for himself.

Maybe.

Cal must’ve heard the shutter, because he turned with a raised eyebrow.

“Smile,” Austin said, aiming his camera at him again.

Cal did the exact opposite, making Austin laugh as he took the picture anyway.

Finally, Austin packed up his equipment and shouldered his camera bags, muttering a quick thank-you to Cal when Cal grabbed the tripods, then walked over to Cal’s horse and gave his neck a scratch. “Hey, Dash.”

Dash nosed at his shirt.

“Sorry,” Austin said with a laugh. “No treats for you today.”

Dash huffed.

“Please.” Austin kissed his muzzle. “As if you’re starving.”

Cal snorted a laugh. “You’d think, with the way he’s always looking for handouts.” He grabbed Dash’s reins, and the horse fell into step next to him as the three of them ambled toward Austin’s SUV parked on the dirt access road nearby. Cal bumped their shoulders together. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Austin replied.

“Austin.”

In the light of day, Cal’s eyes were a gray so light they were almost silver. Under a twilit sky, further shaded by his tan cowboy hat, they were a fathomless charcoal and currently narrowed in concern.

Austin returned the shoulder bump. “I promise I’m fine.”

“It’s okay if you’re not.”

“I know that. But I am.”

June eighth. The five-year anniversary of his wife’s death.

He’d married Lindsay knowing she was sick, knowing that their time was finite.

Neither of them had expected her to take a turn for the worse so soon after their wedding, nor for the brain cancer to take her only three weeks after they were married. Twelve months after her diagnosis, and poof—the brightest soul Austin had ever known had been taken from him.

There’d always be an ache in his chest where her loss would sit like a hole carved out with a rusty spoon. But he’d done grief therapy and had had tons of support from friends and family. He could talk about her now without feeling like the ground was going to swallow him whole. He could remember the first time he’d seen her across the room of his English 101 class his freshman year of college—blond hair spilling out the back of a baseball cap, mud-caked purple Vans on her feet, and a smile that rivaled the sun—without getting a lump in his throat. She’d seemed down to earth and fun, a theory that had proven right when Austin had sat next to her during their next class and introduced himself, forming the basis of a friendship that would eventually turn to more.

He’d been in love with Cal for most of his life.

He’d been in love with Lindsay for a handful of years, but it had been no less intense. Just different.

Cal was steadiness and familiarity. He was the Rocky Mountains in the flesh.

Lindsay had been light and humor. She’d been a ray of sunshine highlighting a spud in the ground.

And as a young adult who’d been too afraid to rock the boat by telling his best friend how he felt about him, Austin had convinced himself that there would never be anything between himself and Cal other than friendship—especially since Cal had never shown a lick of romantic interest in him.

And there never would’ve been anything between them had Lindsay lived. Austin had been as happy with her as he could ever imagine being.

But life had an end date. He’d learned that the hard way. Risks not taken were opportunities missed.

Was he still afraid of rocking the boat?

Sure.

But he liked to think he and Cal were more mature at thirty-three than they’d been in their late teens, when awkwardness and hurt feelings might’ve derailed their friendship. Now, if things didn’t work out, they wouldn’t let it come between them.

Austin needed Cal in his life too much for that.

In the weeks before Lindsay died, she and Austin had talked often about what Austin’s life would be like without her. She’d encouraged him to move on and find happiness again, a concept that he’d scoffed at then and that he’d scoffed at for several years after she’d passed.

Austin wasn’t sure what had changed in him over the past few months, but he was finally in a place where he could envision living the rest of his life with someone who wasn’t his wife. And of course that someone was Cal. It could never have been anyone else.

Austin just had to figure out if Cal was open to the possibility of them dating, a conversation he hoped to have with Cal very soon.

“I spoke with her family earlier,” Austin said, storing his gear in his back seat.

Cal held out the tripods. “How are they doing?”

“They’re not bad, considering. They were going to hold a five-year memorial. A celebration of life type thing. But they decided to take the money they would’ve spent on that and donate it to Lindsay’s favorite horse rescue instead. Lindsay would’ve liked that better, anyway.”

Austin slammed the car door closed, the sound echoing in the silence of the landscape. He rounded the car and found Cal opening up the trunk, two beers held in one big hand that he must’ve plucked out of the cooler in the footwell of Austin’s passenger seat. Austin unfolded the blanket he kept in the trunk for just such an occasion and spread it out—because after a day of ranching, Cal was always filthy as fuck. Austin wasn’t a stickler for cleanliness by any means, but Cal sometimes had wet patches on his jeans that weren’t water, and it was gross as hell.

A minute later, they sat side by side in the back of Austin’s SUV with the door open and the dome light turned off to deter mosquitoes, their feet sticking out the back, eating Twizzlers from the bag Cal pulled from somewhere. Cal clinked his beer against Austin’s. “To Lindsay.”

“To Lindsay,” Austin repeated softly, his chest tightening.

“Want to talk about her?”

Shifting closer so that his left shoulder and arm rested against Cal’s right, Austin said, “No. But thanks. I talked to Lindsay’s family today, my family, Las and Marco and several other friends who called. I’m talked out.”

He could practically feel Cal’s disbelief. “ You’re talked out?” Cal chuckled, and the sight of one of his rare smiles hit Austin right in the gut. “That’s rich.”

“Shut it.”

“Remember that time you told our eighth-grade class about how you overheard your parents taking a bath together?”

“The topic I pulled out of the hat for my improv speech was Things that scare you .”

“You didn’t have to bring your parents into it.”

“I got an A.”

“Could’ve just talked about your fear of cicadas.”

“They should not exist on this planet,” Austin muttered into his beer.

“Do you know there are more than twenty species of cicada found in Wyoming?”

Austin’s jaw dropped. “Why would I need to know that, Cal? Why ?”

Cal’s lips quirked. “Knowledge is power?”

“Asshole,” Austin said without heat. “And you overheard my parents taking a bath together too once. Remember? It was shortly after you moved in with us.”

“Sure. But I didn’t tell twenty other people about it.”

Austin probably shouldn’t have either. But it had been the first thing he’d thought of when he’d pulled the slip of paper out of the hat.

“It really wasn’t as traumatizing as you made it out to be,” Cal added.

“Lies.”

“You see, Austin, when two people love each other?—”

“Oh, fuck you.”

Cal’s laughter bounced off the sides of the car, settling itself in Austin’s bones like an old friend. Austin clinked his beer against Cal’s again and grinned out into the night.