The Rancher Who Swore Off Love

Prologue

New York, New York

Something tugged at Grace’s hair.

A pull, right at the temple, close enough that whatever did the pulling brushed against her cheek. She swatted at it without opening her eyes, the way a person does when half-asleep and too stubborn to wake, and her knuckles connected with something soft. Furry. Moving.

A squeak. A skitter of tiny claws across the pillowcase.

Grace launched upright so fast the threadbare quilt tangled around her knees and nearly pitched her off the cot.

The rat sat three inches from where her head had just lain with a tuft of black hair between its yellow teeth, and its beady eyes caught the thin gray light from the window.

It chewed. Casual as anything. Like it’d paid rent.

The scream tore out of her before she could clamp her mouth shut.

Feet pounded down the hall. The door banged open hard enough to bounce off the wall, and Jonah filled the frame in his undershirt and trousers, raising a cast-iron skillet above his head like a battle axe.

He’d grown tall and lean these last few years, all lanky arms and sharp jaw, with the same dark hair as Grace’s.

His eyes—brown like hers but without the honeyed edges Ma used to say the sun put there—swept the room.

“Where is he?” He brandished the skillet at the shadows. “Show me the son of a gun.”

She jabbed a finger at the cot. The rat, stuffed full of her hair and wholly unbothered by the commotion, took its time hopping off the edge of the pillow and disappearing through a crack in the baseboard that could’ve fit a house cat.

Jonah lowered the skillet. He stared at the crack. Then at Grace.

“A rat.”

“It ate my hair, Jonah.”

“A rat. That’s what all the hollerin’ is about?”

“While I slept! It sat on my pillow and ate my hair like Sunday supper!” She yanked the quilt free from her legs and swung her feet to the floor, then immediately pulled them back up because Lord only knew what else scurried around down there in the dark.

The boards always creaked at night with things she’d trained herself to ignore.

Jonah pressed his lips together. His shoulders hitched.

“Don’t you dare.”

“I ain’t laughin’.” He coughed into his fist. “I ain’t. Dead serious over here. A hair-eatin’ rat. Downright terrifying, that is.”

“I will take that skillet from you and put it to good use on your thick skull.”

He held up both hands in surrender, swinging the pan on one finger. “All right, all right. Easy now, Gracie.”

But the laugh, or the almost-laugh, or whatever had just passed between them cracked something open in her chest. The kind of fracture that starts thin and runs deep, like ice on a puddle in March, and all the freezing water underneath comes rushing up at once.

Her eyes burned. Her throat locked tight.

Because it wasn’t just the rat. Of course, it wasn’t just the rat.

The rat perched on top of everything else the way it’d perched on her pillow; one more horrible little indignity stacked on a pile so tall she couldn’t see over it anymore.

The leak in the roof that had spread a brown stain across the ceiling like a bruise.

The window in the front room that wouldn’t close all the way, letting in the stink of low tide and fish guts from the docks until the whole house reeked of the Hudson at its worst. The garden out back, where she’d coaxed beans and squash from the sorry excuse for soil, only to find the mice had chewed through the burlap sacks where she’d stored last month’s dried harvest. And now a rat.

In her hair. On her pillow. In the one place she’d convinced herself still belonged to her.

A sob hitched out of her, and she pressed her fists against her eyes to shove it back down. No use. Another followed, and another, and before she could get any kind of hold on herself, she’d curled forward with her forehead nearly touching her knees, and her whole body shook with sobs.

The cot dipped. Jonah’s arm came around her shoulders, and he pulled her sideways into his ribs the way he’d done since she’d come up to his elbow, back when Ma and Pa still filled the front room with the lilting cadence of the old language, and the house smelled like cardamom bread instead of river rot.

“Hey now.” He gave her a squeeze. “Hey, hey. C’mon, Gracie, don’t do that.”

She shook her head against his shoulder.

“Gracie. Look at me, now.”

“I can’t keep doing this.” The words came out waterlogged and muffled against his undershirt. “I can’t. I wake up every morning, and I fight the mice, and I fight the damp, and I fight the cold; it just keeps getting worse, and now they’re eating me, Jonah.”

“Gracie—”

“The vermin are literally eating me in my sleep.”

His arm tightened. For a stretch, he just held on, resting his chin on the top of her head—easy enough, given that she barely cleared his shoulder even standing straight—and the rhythm of his breathing worked against her like a current she could float on if she let herself.

Jonah always ran warm. Even in January, in the drafty wreck of the house their parents had left them, he radiated heat like a stove.

When she’d been small enough and young enough and scared enough at night, she used to crawl into his bed and press her cold feet against his shins, and he’d grumble but never once kick her out.

She rubbed her sleeve across her face.

“I got somethin’ for you.” Jonah shifted beside her, reaching into the pocket of his trousers. Paper crinkled. “Been carryin’ it around a few days now, waitin’ on the right moment, and I reckon a rat chewin’ on your hair at the crack o’ dawn more than qualifies.”

He unfolded a scrap of newsprint and held it out.

The ink had smudged at the edges from riding around in his pocket, but the words stood clear enough in the growing light from the window.

An advertisement. Small, tucked into a column alongside notices for patent medicines and farm equipment, the kind of thing a person would skim right past unless they knew to look.

Seeking a dependable woman of good character for a marriage of convenience. Room, board, and steady income provided in exchange for housekeeping on a working cattle ranch. Pitkin, Colorado. Inquire by letter to L. Foster, Pitkin Post Office.

Grace read it twice. Three times. The words rearranged themselves in her head like furniture in a new room, and she kept bumping into them.

“A mail-order bride ad.”

“A marriage-of-convenience ad,” Jonah tapped the paper with one long finger.

“There’s a difference, and it’s right there in black and white.

He ain’t lookin’ for love and daisies, Gracie.

Man needs someone to cook, clean, and keep house.

That’s a job. A job with a roof that don’t leak and a pantry that the rats ain’t laid claim to. ”

She stared at the newsprint. Pitkin, Colorado. She’d never been farther west than the end of the dock. Jonah sometimes took her to watch the ships come in as they carried people who looked just as tired and hopeful as her parents must’ve looked stepping off their own vessel all those years ago.

Colorado. She might as well have read the moon. “You want me to marry some stranger.”

“What I want is for you to stop livin’ like this.” He gestured around the room. “Take a real good look at this place, Grace.”

She did.

She already knew every inch of every miserable detail, the way a person knew the map of their own skin, but Jonah’s voice carried urgency that made her see it fresh.

The plaster crumbled off the walls in patches.

The floorboards were so warped they’d started pulling apart at the seams, leaving gaps wide enough to lose a spoon through.

The ceiling sagged in the corner where the leak had softened the beams, and one good storm—one really good soaking rain—would bring the whole thing down on top of wherever she slept.

“Pitkin’s got mountains,” Jonah offered, like mountains solved anything. “Clean air. Wide open country. No docks stinkin’ up the place, no fish guts.”

“No brother, either.”

His mouth twitched. He rubbed the back of his neck the way he always did when he worked through a problem he wouldn’t share.

“I’ll follow you out there.”

“Jonah—”

“Give me a few months to square things up here. When I’ve only got my own mouth to feed, I can save faster. I’ll be out before winter.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know it sure as I’m sittin’ here.”

He ducked his head to catch her eyes, and the teasing had drained out of him now.

Just Jonah underneath, her brother, the boy who’d learned to cook proper stew at fourteen because someone had to, and mended her shoes with twine when the cobbler cost too much.

“You deserve a damn sight better’n this, Gracie. You know that, don’t you?”

The advertisement curled at the edges between her fingers.

Room, board, and steady income.

She thought of her mother’s hands kneading dough on the scarred table that used to sit in the front room, before they’d had to burn it for firewood two winters back.

The confidence of those hands. Ma had built a home out of almost nothing, and she’d done it singing, filling the cracks between the walls with melodies Grace still hummed when she hung the washing.

And here sat Grace. Twenty-one years old, five foot three and some change of sun-browned, freckle-dusted stubbornness, crying over a rat.

“All right,” she gulped. “All right. Let’s write the letter.”

The tightness around Jonah’s jaw loosened, and he broke into that crooked grin of his, the one that’d gotten him out of more trouble than any man had a right to escape.

He squeezed her shoulder and pulled a stub of pencil from the same pocket the advertisement had come from, like he’d known all along she’d say yes.

Of course, he knew.

“Right.” He smoothed the advertisement against his knee and flipped it over to the blank side. “Let’s see. Dear Mr. Foster. No. Too stiff.”

“That’s how letters start, Jonah.”

“Hush.” He chewed the end of the pencil. “To the rancher seeking a wife. Sounds like a dime novel. Sir. Just Sir?”

“That’s worse. I’m not writing to a schoolmaster.”

“Fair enough. Keep it simple, then. Dear Mr. Foster, my name is Grace Linton, and I am writing in response to your advertisement. Straight to business. Man like that’ll appreciate a woman who don’t beat around the bush.”

Grace tugged the pencil from his grip. “Let me do it.”

She pressed the paper flat against the cot’s thin mattress and started writing.

Dear Mr. Foster,

My name is Grace Linton. I am twenty-one years of age and currently reside in New York. I am responding to your advertisement for a wife and housekeeper.

“Tell him you can cook.”

“I can cook.”

“Well then, put it down! Man’s livin’ on a ranch with who knows how many hands. They’re probably eatin’ beans cold outta the tin and callin’ it supper. You gotta sell yourself here, Gracie.”

She swatted at him with the back of her free hand and kept writing.

Dear Mr. Foster,

My name is Grace Linton, and I am writing in response to your advertisement for a bride.

I will not waste your time pretending to be anything fancy or particularly accomplished.

I can cook plain food and keep a house clean and mend clothes so they hold together for another season.

I have no fortune and no family name worth mentioning.

But I will tell you what I do have.

I have a brother who is the only soul left in this world that shares my blood, and keeping him safe and fed has been the purpose of my days since I was ten years old.

So I understand what it means to hold a family together when everything around you tries to pull it apart.

I know what it costs, and I know what it’s worth, and I would not trade it for all the comfort money can buy.

If you will have me, Mr. Foster, I promise you this.

I will not just keep your house. I will make it a home.

I will bring what happiness I can to your family, and I will treat your people as my own, because I know what it is to lose the people you love, and I would give anything to belong to a family again.

Yours respectfully, Grace Linton.

She held the scrap up. “Anything else?”

Jonah took it from her gently, holding it by the edges the way a person holds something precious, and read through her words with his lips moving just slightly. He’d learned to read later than she had, and the habit had stuck. After a moment, he nodded.

“That’ll do just fine. Real fine, Gracie.”

“Now what?”

“Now we scrape together the postage.” He folded the letter with careful creases and tucked it into his shirt pocket. “And then we wait.”

Grace pulled the quilt around her shoulders and looked toward the window.

The morning had brightened enough to show the roofline of the building next door, the rusted gutters, the gray sky pressing low over the city like a lid.

Somewhere below, the docks groaned and clanked as the early workers started loading freight, and the smell of brine and tar filtered through the gap in the glass.

Pitkin, Colorado.

A place she couldn’t picture. A man she’d never met. A life assembled from a scrap of newsprint and a prayer, which, come to think of it, described just about every life her family had ever built.

She turned from the window.

“Jonah.”

“Hm?”

“If that rat comes back tonight, I’m sleeping in your room.”

He laughed, loud and warm in the little, cold house, and the sound of it bounced off the crumbling walls and filled up the empty spaces the way only her brother’s laughter could.

“You got yourself a deal, darlin’.”