Crossing Lines with the Cowboy Next Door

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

PIPER

The cabin is smaller than the photos.

Not in a bad way. In a way that makes my chest loosen for the first time in six months.

Two bedrooms, a stone fireplace, a kitchen with butcher block counters that have seen better decades.

The porch sags on the left side where one of the steps has cracked clean through, and the whole place smells like pine and dust and something faintly sweet, like the last tenant burned a candle and never opened a window.

It's perfect.

I drop my last box on the kitchen counter and press both palms flat against the wood.

Cold seeps through my fingers. Outside the window, the Bitterroot Mountains are doing that thing mountains do at four in the afternoon when the light goes amber and the whole world looks like it was painted by someone who actually gave a damn.

Denver never looked like this. Denver looked like traffic and fluorescent lighting and Cole's apartment where I kept my toothbrush in a holder shaped like a cactus because he thought it was funny, and I thought it was fine, and fine turned out to be the most dangerous word in the English language.

Two years of fine.

Two years of rearranging myself to fit into a life that wasn't mine. Shrinking my voice, my opinions, my goddamn wardrobe. Cole never told me to change. He just stopped noticing me until the version of Piper that showed up every day was someone I didn't recognize in the mirror.

So I quit my office job, kept the remote contract, packed my car with everything that mattered, signed a year lease on a cabin in a town where nobody knows my name, and drove north until the mountains swallowed the highway.

Grizzly Ridge. Population eight hundred and something. One diner. One general store. Zero ex-boyfriends.

Heaven.

My phone buzzes on the counter.

Mom:

Did you make it? Are you alive? Send proof of life.

Me:

Alive. Cabin is cute. Mountains are stupid beautiful. Stop worrying.

Mom:

I'll stop worrying when you're 50. Maybe. Love you.

Me:

Love you too.

I slide the phone into my back pocket and lean against the counter, surveying my kingdom.

Boxes stacked along the far wall. My laptop bag on the couch.

A suitcase open on the bedroom floor with three flannels and a pair of boots I bought the week I decided to move here.

My grandmother's silver ring on my right thumb, catching the light.

This is mine. All of it. The creaky floors and the drafty windows and the porch step that'll probably eat my ankle if I'm not careful. Mine.

The word feels foreign. Good foreign. Like tasting something for the first time and realizing you've been hungry your whole life.

I pull open the back door to check the yard situation and stop cold.

There's a cow in my yard.

Not metaphorically. An actual cow. Brown and white, big as a small car, standing about twenty feet from my back steps with her head down, chewing grass like she pays rent here.

"Excuse me," I say out loud, because apparently I talk to livestock now. "This is private property."

The cow doesn't even look up.

Behind her, three more have wandered through what I now realize is a gap in the fence line along the eastern edge of my lot. The wire is sagging between two posts, and the posts themselves are leaning like drunks holding each other up after last call.

Great. My first day in Montana and I'm running a bed and breakfast for someone else's cattle.

I step off the porch carefully, avoiding the broken step, and walk toward the fence.

The grass is tall enough to brush my calves.

Beyond the property line, the land opens into rolling pasture that stretches all the way to a tree line half a mile out.

A creek cuts through the middle of it, shallow and bright, catching sunlight.

Pretty. Really pretty.

Also clearly not my land. The fence marks the boundary, and on the other side of it, cattle are scattered across the field like they've been there since before this cabin was built. Which, based on the condition of the fence, might actually be true.

I'm crouching by the sagging wire, trying to figure out if I can push the posts back into place myself, when I hear the horse.

Hooves on packed earth. Steady, unhurried. Coming from the north along the fence line.

I stand up, shading my eyes with one hand.

The rider comes into view around the tree line, and my brain does something unhelpful.

He's big. That's the first thing. Broad across the shoulders in a way that has nothing to do with a gym and everything to do with years of physical labor.

Dark brown hair pressed flat where a hat sat all day, the hat itself pushed back on his head now, revealing a face that looks like it was carved from the same rock as these mountains.

Square jaw. Dark stubble. Hazel eyes that land on me from fifty feet away with the precision of a man who's been scanning his property line for trespassers since before breakfast.

He's on a paint horse, dark and white, and the horse moves under him like they share the same nervous system. One hand on the reins. The other resting on his thigh. Calloused fingers. Weathered denim. Sun on his forearms where his sleeves are rolled to the elbow.

He looks like a ranching magazine cover that got rained on and left in the sun.

He also looks pissed.

The horse stops about ten feet from the fence, and the man looks down at me the way you'd look at a speed bump on your own driveway. Slow assessment. Zero warmth.

"You the new tenant." Not a question.

"Piper Langdon." I stick my hand out over the fence wire. Smile. Full wattage. "Just moved in today."

He looks at my hand like I'm offering him a live snake.

"Your fence is down," he says, ignoring the handshake entirely. His voice is low, rough, the kind of voice that sounds like it hasn't been used for casual conversation in a long time. "Those are my cattle in your yard."

I pull my hand back. Let the smile cool by about ten degrees. "I noticed. I was trying to figure out the post situation when you rode up."

"Post situation." He says it flat. Like I just called a transmission a car thingy. "That fence has been sagging for two years. Last owner didn't care because I had an understanding with him about creek access."

"Creek access."

"My cattle water at that creek." He nods toward the bright ribbon of water cutting across the far end of my property. "Have for a decade. I run them through this section twice a day. Never been a problem."

I look at the creek. Look back at him. "That creek is on my property."

Something shifts in his jaw. A muscle tightens just below his ear, and those hazel eyes go from cool assessment to something harder. "That creek has been part of my water rotation since before that cabin had indoor plumbing."

"Okay, well, it has indoor plumbing now. And a tenant. With a lease."

He swings down off the horse in one fluid motion. Lands on his feet like gravity is just a suggestion. Standing, he's taller than I expected. Six two, easy. The kind of tall that makes my five seven feel specifically noticed.

He steps up to the fence line. We're separated by sagging wire and about two feet of charged air.

"Ma'am." The word has zero gentleness in it. "I've been ranching this land since I was twenty-two years old. That creek is the only reliable water source for my east herd in the dry months. I'm not rerouting two hundred head of cattle because someone signed a lease three days ago."

"I didn't reroute anything. I just pointed out that the creek is on my side of the fence."

"The fence is wrong."

"The fence is the property line."

"The fence is wrong," he repeats, slower, like I might not have heard him the first time over the sound of my own stubbornness. "The property line according to the original survey runs fifteen feet east of where these posts are."

"Then take it up with the surveyor. Until then, your cattle are in my yard, and I'd appreciate it if you'd get them out."

His eyes drop. Just for a second. Down from my face to my bare feet in the grass, my leggings, the oversized flannel that's slipping off one shoulder. Something moves through his expression. Something he shuts down so fast I almost miss it.

Almost.

When his gaze comes back to mine, the scowl is firmly in place.

"I'll get the cattle," he says. "But this conversation isn't over."

"I didn't think it was." I cross my arms. "I didn't catch your name."

He's already turning back toward his horse, gathering the reins.

"Rawlins," he says over his shoulder. "Tate Rawlins."

He mounts up in one motion, settles into the saddle, and clicks his tongue. The horse turns, and he rides along the fence line toward the gap where the cows wandered through. He doesn't look back.

I watch him go because I'm human and because the view is objectively worth watching, and then I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding.

Tate Rawlins. My neighbor. Six foot two of weathered denim, calloused hands, and a scowl that could curdle milk at forty paces.

Welcome to Grizzly Ridge.

I turn back toward the cabin, stepping carefully over the broken porch step, and close the door behind me. Lean against it. Press my palm over my sternum where my pulse is doing something unnecessary.

He was rude. Dismissive. Didn't shake my hand. Looked at me like I was an inconvenience standing between him and his creek.

Also looked at my bare shoulder like he wanted to put his mouth on it.

"No," I say out loud to the empty kitchen. "Absolutely not."

The cow outside moos.

"Nobody asked you," I tell her.

I push off the door, pull my laptop from its bag, and sit down at the kitchen table. The sun is dropping behind the mountains, painting everything gold. My first sunset in my new home. My new life. Quiet, simple, mine.

Somewhere beyond the fence, I can hear Tate Rawlins whistling his cattle back through the gap in the wire. Low, sharp. Commanding.

I open my laptop.

I don't think about his hands.

Much.