Taming Her Cowboys (Three Times the Cowboy #1)

1. Nora

CHAPTER 1

Nora

I t’s always at the first sign of fenceposts that my heart starts to feel like I’m home.

I smile, looking at the bluebird houses that my dad still puts along the drive to line the way up to the house. When I was little, it was a fun project we did together. Every spring, we’d clean them out so that a new crop of baby bluebirds would emerge, and every summer, we’d enjoy the bright flashes of electric blue as the birds took to them for their nests.

I press my foot down on the gas, my trusty 4Runner roaring as it eats up the dirt road that leads back to the ranch.

Home. Foster Ranch, named for my family. There’s no place like it in the world.

Rounding the last little hill, the house comes into view. Set against the backdrop of the picturesque Montana mountains, it makes my chest ache every time.

It was a fantastic place to grow up. This place gave me everything. Now, it’s time for me to return the favor.

I throw the SUV in park, and I’m just about to grab my stuff when I hear the screen door squeak. Mentally, I add it to the list of repairs that need to be done—a list that’s growing longer by the day.

“Hey, college girl! ”

I smile at my dad, who jogs over to me to grab my bag. “Hi, Dad.”

He swoops in close, tugging me in for a hug. His smell, sweat and hay and horses, fills me with happiness. I refuse to let the worries that have been plaguing me since I left Boulder get in the way of that.

He grabs my bag and lifts it up, hefting it onto his shoulder. “How was the drive?”

“Uneventful,” I say, barely stifling a yawn. The drive between Montana and Colorado isn’t one to shake a stick at, but I usually manage it without stopping. “Did you know they put in a whole new bridge between Buffalo and Sheridan?”

“You don’t say.” My dad raises his eyebrows. Wyoming choosing to build a new bridge is definitely cause for shock. “Must be all those Greenies coming up to get a taste of the real West.”

I shake my head, laughing. The nickname, crafted not exactly in kindness, comes from the green mountains on the Colorado plates. “Dad, Colorado is just as Western as Montana.”

“So you say, Bluebird. So you say.”

I follow my dad into the house. It’s exactly the same as it always is. Our living room is to my right, the kitchen beyond it. Bedrooms up at the top of a staircase that has enough squeaky steps to discourage any teen from sneaking out. I look through the living room, my fingers trailing over the familiar pieces of furniture. The faded floral couch, placed by my grandmother twenty years ago. The little chair by the window, so that I could read in the sunlight in the winter. My dad always teased me a little about being so studious, but at the time, my dreams had been a little bigger than the Foster Ranch.

Now, though? It’s less about my dreams, and more about the reality that the ranch brings.

I nibble my bottom lip. There’s no good time to do this. Maybe I should just rip off the band-aid. I take a deep breath and turn to where the living room leads to the kitchen. “So, Dad, let’s talk about?—”

“Surprise!”

I blink.

In the kitchen, there are balloons. My dad never even comes near balloons. Until right now, I wasn’t sure that he had ever seen one… ever. They’re sparkly and big, and he must have gone into town to get them. CONGRATS GRAD is emblazoned over them, and there’s a buffalo-shaped balloon as well, representing Ralphie, the university mascot.

My heart sinks. I open my mouth. “Dad, how much did all this cost?”

My father stiffens a little. “Well, I figured since I couldn’t be there with you to celebrate last week, we could have a little party here.”

I let out a small sigh. “We decided to do that because the ranch?—”

“Can spare the cost of me running into Stone Hollow to chat with Susan at the florist for some balloons. They’re not just from me, they’re from your friends in town, too,” he says softly.

My dad is a proud man. Richard Foster raised me on his own after my mom passed, and he hasn’t done a half-bad job. He doesn’t ask for help and doesn’t admit failure, so when he called me about a month ago to tell me the ranch wasn’t doing very well?

I took it seriously.

The timing was good. I was graduating, and while I was accepted into an MBA program, I haven’t told him about that yet. I was also coming off of the heels of a bad breakup, so, fueled by ice cream and sadness, I decided to prioritize the ranch. I deferred my MBA program, which I was set to start at the University of Colorado, my now alma mater, in the fall. I found a new roommate for my friends that I lived with, and I changed everything to come back here to be with him after graduation.

The balloons are really sweet, though. “Thanks, Dad.”

“I’m just sorry there’s nothing I could get you for a present,” he says gruffly.

Oh, Lord. “That doesn’t matter to me, and you know it.”

“You could have your pick of foals if you want.”

I turn. “How many foals?”

“Thunder and Joan are both fit to pop any day.”

I nod. Thunder is the meanest chestnut mare in the world, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m more than a little scared of her, but Joan is my sweet angel. She’s perfect. I didn’t know that they were pregnant.

“Any idea of the sires?”

My dad shakes his head. “I thought about letting Thunder pair up with the Weinbaur’s stallion to help them repay us for me helping fix their fence last year, but she was already pregnant. They’re both mysteries, and I don’t like it. Probably someone who got out of that herd over at the Wild Spur next door,” he mutters.

“Wild Spur?” I frown. Next door is a very relative term out here, but I know every farm that’s even remotely close, and Wild Spur is ringing no bells. “I thought Tim and Barbara owned Lazy Blue Acres?”

My dad sighs and gestures to the table. “Come on. This is a conversation best had with some food.”

“You cooked?” I raise my eyebrows, steeling myself for my dad’s admittedly terrible cooking. It would be sweet if he did, but… secretly, I’m hoping he didn’t.

He laughs. “Don’t worry, Bluebird. I picked up some barbeque when I was in town, too, and there’s cake, courtesy of Annie at the café.”

“Love you, Dad, but Annie makes a better cake than either of us.” I grin. I sit, helping myself to the bottle of wine he left out on the table. Glass in hand, I wave it at my father. “Start with the Wild Spur.”

“Right about when you left for college,” my dad says, moving around the kitchen while he speaks to heat up the barbeque in our sad, ancient microwave. “Tim and Barbara moved to Florida. Sold the ranch, the land, all of it, to the tune of a nice fat packet of cash, to three hotshot cowboys.” His voice drops on the word ‘hotshot.’ It’s not a good endorsement.

“Cowboys, huh?” I sip my wine and lean back.

Cowboys are something of an enigma, even among those of us who grow up in the ranching community. It’s not exactly a title that has a lot of respect, especially among fathers who spend a lot of time and effort warning their daughters about them. Cowboys are somewhat transient by nature, since they follow the work that they need to do. They’re hired help, usually never running the show, but a necessary evil when you need someone to move your cows from pasture to pasture or to make sure the herd stays safe. It sounds archaic, but honestly, it’s the best solution to the challenges of ranch life out here. Most people I met in Boulder didn’t understand the sheer scope of the problem; ranches are thousands and thousands of acres. Miles of land, most of it without cell signal or any kind of services. If you’re working, you might be out, isolated in the wilderness, with only a couple of people for weeks, only to rotate out for a couple of days and head back for weeks again.

It takes a particular type of person to handle that lifestyle. Someone who doesn’t put down roots. Someone who can fall into a job just as easily as they fall out of it. No one expects a cowboy to do something like commit to a job for longer than a season.

And cowboys? They like that. Commitment isn’t exactly what they come to the work for, after all.

My dad’s frown deepens. “They never worked a ranch that I’ve heard of,” he grunts.

Which means that, whether they’re actually cowboys, my dad’s assessment of them is that they’re no-good drifters who have the ability to drop in, raise hell, and disappear at a moment’s notice after their check gets paid. It’s not a good look.

I bite into the brisket that my dad sets in front of me, nearly moaning with bliss as the flavorful cut practically melts on my tongue. “I missed this.”

“No good brisket in Boulder?”

“Not unless it’s made of anything but beef,” I laugh. I liked the food in Boulder, the adventure of it was fun, but this tastes so good. It tastes like home.

My dad settles in next to me with a sigh. He looks down at his plate before cutting his meat into neat, even cubes. “Anyway. They’ve taken over the Lazy Blue, renamed it Wild Spur.”

“As any good cowboy would,” I say with a little sarcasm.

My dad rolls his eyes. “It seems to be… working.”

“What do they raise?”

“Don’t raise nothin’. They have horses. Hundreds of head.”

“Horses?”

He nods. “They worked out a bunch of arrangements with little trail ride places. Every two-bit trail horse from here to Helena comes from them. Every tourist who wants to sit on the back of a horse and put on a hat? The horse comes from Wild Spur. Rich folk who want to have horses on their land, but don’t know how to care for ‘em? Horses belong to Wild Spur.”

“Wow.” I nod. “That’s… ”

It’s a freaking amazing business plan.

Tourism to Montana has skyrocketed over the last decade, as has the number of rich people who buy up places for summer cabins or ski chalets. When they’re here, they want to experience ‘Montana,’ which, inevitably, is a caricature of what it actually means to live here, but it’s one they’re willing to pay top dollar for.

Anyone can make some money running trail rides. If you grow up around horses, you know how to work with them, and you’re probably a better rider than the average tourist. It’s not a bad business plan, if you want to capitalize on the boom.

The problem is the horses. They’re expensive. Care is costly. They need space. Hay. Barns. With the rising cost of property taxes, people are losing their land to developers left and right. If someone else took on the expenses of the horses…

My dad grunts. “Don’t know how they keep those horses looked after when there’s so many of ‘em.” He frowns.

That would definitely be the downside. “Still, it’s pretty smart.”

“Yeah well. Smart is not going to keep them at bay.”

I freeze. “What?”

My dad sighs and pushes back his plate. I note with growing apprehension that while he’s chopped his food into many tiny pieces, he hasn’t eaten any of them. He wipes his lips with a napkin, then looks at me. “They want the ranch, Bluebird.”

I blink. “Our ranch?”

“Yup.”

“But… we… they…” I can’t get the words out. “What do you mean, they want the ranch?”

“I mean, they come by at least once a week. One of them shows up with his hat that’s so new you can still see the steam coming off of it, takes it off, and asks how business is.”

I pale. “Dad. Do they know?”

“That we’ve lost all the winter wheat? That the herd had brucellosis two years ago? That the price of alfalfa is down? That the spring blizzard this year made us lose half of the new calves?”

We have a pretty wide spread of ranching and farming that we do, because we’ve always tried to make ends meet in multiple places. I knew about the brucellosis because we had to sell nearly all of the cows quickly before they died, but I didn’t know that the wheat was lost this year or about the snow and the alfalfa. Doing a quick calculation, my heart skips a beat.

Dad told me that the ranch was in trouble. That we would need to do some creative thinking to make ends meet. I think it might be worse than that.

“Dad…”

He sits back, his eyes shut. “Sorry, Nora. I just…”

“You told me that it was bad,” I say gently. “How bad is it?” I can tell he’s fighting himself, so I prompt him. “I need to know.”

My dad nods sharply. “Well. I guess you’re the one with the fancy business degree and all. So. Here,” he says, pushing the ranch’s accounting book toward me.

I take it, looking up at him. “Dad?”

“I’ll just… I need to go check on the horses,” he says, his voice tight.

With that, he leaves. I hear the screen door slam, the familiar creak of the porch, and then he’s out to the barn.

I sigh. Opening the book, I start to go through the numbers. With every line, my stomach sinks, and my heart leaps further into my throat.

My dad told me that the ranch was struggling. But this—this book doesn’t show a ranch that’s struggling. This shows a ranch that has about one month left before the bank comes calling, and we lose everything.

There are more losses in here than I’ve ever seen. I’m beginning to wonder if the ranch has actually ever been in the black, or if we’ve been existing purely on vibes and good luck, with a few strategic government grants sprinkled in.

I slam the book shut and close my eyes. Twenty-four hours ago, I was a college grad. Fresh out of a breakup, but healing. Coming home to help out my family’s business. For just a heartbeat, I’m jealous of that girl. She could probably have done it. Fixed the issue. Made the family farm profitable again. My dad told me that it had been a couple of bad seasons, and that it could be managed if I came back to help.

I don’t think this can be managed. The only option is to sell …

I stop that train of thought right in its tracks. Selling can’t be the only option.

Looking around, my heart feels like it’s going to collapse.

This is my home. It’s been my home, and the home of my parents, and their parents. This is the only place I’ve ever felt like I can be myself. I know these rooms; I know this land better than I know myself. This isn’t just a place. It’s part of who I am.

I have to fix it.

My fingers drum on the accounting book, and I feel resolve harden me. This ranch is mine. I owe it to myself, to my family, to save it.

Come hell or high water, I’m going to make sure that Foster Ranch makes it out of this. If I have to sell my own soul to do so, I will.

Because selling the ranch?

Yeah.

I’d sell my soul to the devil himself before I did that.