4. Chapter 4
Raiford
She’s been on the ranch for two weeks and I’ve developed a problem.
The problem is Elise Carter.
She’s the best range manager I’ve ever worked with, she lives less than a mile from my house, and I’ve started arranging my day around seeing her.
I don’t arrange my day around anyone.
She’s at the north valley every morning by 5:45.
I know because I drive past the north gate at 5:50 on my way to the east pastures and her truck is always there, parked at the same angle, her thermos on the fence post, her notebook open on the tailgate.
She’s mapping the section. She’s walked every foot of the eight hundred acres in fourteen days and she knows the terrain better than hands who’ve been here for years.
She doesn’t just manage the section. She understands it.
She reads the land the way I read it, with her hands and her eyes and some instinct that can’t be taught.
She found a spring on the west boundary that nobody knew about.
A spring. Underground water source, clean, steady flow, positioned perfectly for a second trough that eliminates a half-mile walk for the herd.
She found it by watching where the grass was greener and following the logic downhill.
“There’s a spring here,” she said. Standing on a patch of ground that looked like every other patch of ground to anyone who wasn’t paying attention. “The soil is wetter. The grass is darker. The grade runs west-to-east. If you dig about four feet, you’ll hit the source.”
We dug. We hit the source at three and a half feet.
She looked at me with the expression of a woman who was right and knew she was right and wasn’t going to make a big deal about it because making a big deal isn’t her style. She just picked up her notebook and wrote down the coordinates and moved on to the next section of fence.
I stood at the spring for a minute after she walked away. Beckett was next to me, leaning on the shovel, looking at the water coming up from the ground.
“She’s good,” Beckett said.
“She’s good.”
“Boss.” Beckett looked at me with the expression of a man who’s been working for me long enough to say things other employees wouldn’t. “You’re staring again.”
“I’m assessing her work.”
“You’re assessing something.”
I walked away. Beckett is observant and annoying and correct and I don’t need my foreman cataloguing my eye movements.
The thing about working with Elise is that the work is good. The work is so good that I keep inventing reasons to check on the north valley because checking on the north valley means being near her.
I don’t have time to invent reasons to go anywhere. A twelve-thousand-acre ranch provides more than enough legitimate ones.
And yet, somehow, I keep ending up at the north valley.
“You’re here again,” she says. She’s on her knees in the dirt, checking a post hole, her hands in the ground, her braid over one shoulder. She doesn’t look up. She knew I was coming. She heard the truck.
“Checking the progress.”
“You checked the progress yesterday.”
“The progress changes daily.”
“The progress is on schedule. I sent you the update this morning. You read it. You replied with one word.”
“I said ‘good.’”
“Exactly. One word. Which means either the update was satisfactory or you didn’t read it. Since you’re here in person, I’m guessing you read it and came anyway.”
She looks up now. Blue eyes, dirt on her cheek, the ghost of a smile.
Her flannel has come untucked and there’s a strip of skin at her waist, tanned and warm, and my eyes go there before I can redirect them.
Her knees in the dirt, her waist where the flannel rides up, the way her body looks kneeling at a post hole…
It makes me think of another way I’d like to see her kneeling in front of me, those blue eyes looking up at me, her lips parted around my—
Jesus.
I look at the fence post.
I’ve almost forgotten why I drove out here.
She’s not fooled by the professional excuse. She knows why I’m here. I know she knows. We’re both pretending the other doesn’t know and that has become its own kind of conversation.
“The post holes look good,” I say.
“The post holes are perfect. I measured them twice.”
“Twice.”
“Once for accuracy, once because I don’t trust tape measures in wind.”
“That’s…”
“Excessive?”
“Thorough. I was going to say thorough.”
She stands up. She stretches her back, arching slightly, and her tank top pulls tight across her chest and I look at the fence line because the fence line is a safe thing to look at and Elise Carter stretching in the morning sun is not.
She wipes her hands on her jeans. She tilts her head back to look me in the eye.
“You want to walk the line?” she says. “I’ve got three hundred yards of new posts to show you.”
We walk the new line. The posts are straight, reinforced at the creek, and braced harder on the exposed section.
“You built for winter,” I say.
“You can’t build a fence for summer and expect it to hold in February.”
February.
She said it casually. She probably doesn’t even realize what she just did to me.
Because now I’m picturing February too.
Her truck at the north gate. Her coffee on the fence post. Her in that cabin while snow covers the valley.
Still here.
Friday night. The Burning Tree Bar & Grill.
The ranch crew comes in on Fridays. Not the whole crew.
A handful of the younger guys, plus Beckett, plus whoever’s off rotation.
It’s tradition. My father used to take the crew to The Burning Tree on Fridays and buy the first round and listen to the week’s stories and I do the same because some traditions are load-bearing and you don’t remove them.
Elise is there. Not because I invited her. Because Beckett invited her, because Beckett has apparently decided that Elise is crew and crew comes on Fridays and if the boss has a problem with it, the boss can take it up with tradition.
She’s at the bar. She’s in a clean flannel (not the work flannel, a different one, her hair is down for the first time since the trail ride) and she’s talking to Mark, one of the younger hands, about the spring she found. Mark is twenty-two and impressed and trying not to show it.
He’s also looking at her more than the conversation requires. I don’t like that.
The thought arrives clean and immediate. I have absolutely no claim on Elise Carter.
Apparently nobody bothered to explain that to the part of me currently considering assigning Mark to the south pasture for the next six months.
Elise is beautiful. I’ve been avoiding this word because using it, even internally, feels like opening a gate I can’t close.
But she’s standing at the bar with her hair down and the bar light on her face and she’s explaining underground water tables to a twenty-two-year-old cowboy and she’s beautiful.
I’m watching her laugh at something Mark says and her head tips back and her throat is long and the skin there is pale because the sun doesn’t reach it and I think about pressing my mouth to that spot.
The hollow at the base of her throat where the pulse lives.
I think about this in a bar full of my employees and then I order bourbon because bourbon will help (I hope) with whatever is happening to me.
I sit at my usual table. I order my usual bourbon. I watch her how I watch everything on my ranch: with attention and the growing certainty that this is something I need to manage before it manages me.
She comes over. She sits across from me with a beer and the easy confidence of a woman who has earned her place at this table and knows it.
“Beckett says Friday is crew night,” she says.
“Beckett talks too much.”
“Beckett talks exactly the right amount. Unlike some people who talk approximately seventy percent less than the right amount.”
“I talk when there’s something to say.”
“You have things to say. You just don’t say them.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” she says. “It’s not.”
She takes a drink of her beer. She’s looking at me with those blue eyes and they’re amused and warm and something else. Something that makes the bourbon taste different. Something that makes the bar feel smaller and louder and the table between us feel like a fence I should have built higher.
“Tell me something,” she says.
“What?”
“Anything. Something you wouldn’t normally say. Something you’d keep to yourself.”
“That’s a strange request.”
“You hired me to manage your north valley. You gave me a cabin. You check on me every day even though I send you updates you reply to with one word. I think I’ve earned a sentence.”
She’s right. She’s earned more than a sentence.
She’s earned a whole damn conversation. The problem is I don’t have conversations.
I have directives and updates and one-word replies.
I’ve been running this ranch alone for five years and somewhere in those five years I stopped talking to people and started talking at them.
“The cabin has a leak,” I say.
“What?”
“In the bathroom. The roof. It drips when it rains. I noticed it when I inspected the place before you moved in. I patched it but the patch won’t hold through winter. I need to reshingle that section.”
“You’re telling me about a roof leak.”
“You asked for something I’d normally keep to myself. I’d normally just fix it without telling you.”
“You’d fix my roof without telling me.”
“It’s my property. The maintenance is my responsibility.”
“Raiford. I’ve reshingled a roof. My father taught me when I was twelve.”
“I’m not asking you to reshingle your own roof.”
“I’m not asking you to either. I’m saying I CAN. If something’s wrong with the cabin that I don’t know about, tell me. I’m not a guest. I’m crew.”
Crew.
The word hits harder than it should. On this ranch, crew means belonging. Somewhere between the spring and the post holes and the north gate, Elise became part of this place. I’m not sure when she became part of me too.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “I’ll bring the shingles. We’ll fix the roof together.”
“Together.”
“That a problem?”
“No.” She takes a drink. “That’s not a problem at all.”
The bar is loud around us. The crew is laughing. Beckett is telling a story. Mark is playing pool badly. The Friday night rhythm of a working ranch unwinding for a few hours before the Saturday morning starts it all again.
Elise sits across from me and drinks her beer and the quiet between us isn’t silence. It’s contentment.
I finish my bourbon and she finishes her beer. We don’t say much else. We don’t need to. The conversation already happened. The roof. The Saturday. The together.
It’s enough.