2. Weight of a Wylde Woman
Weight of a Wylde Woman
Colt Calhoun
A day like today reminded me I was alive, and I should be glad for it.
The clear blue sky and a cool breeze coming off the mountains provided the perfect setting for the late August evening that made Montana feel like something God built on purpose.
The whole ranch staff and friends and family had gathered in the clearing on the hill behind the main barn, sitting on hay bales and overturned buckets, or on tailgates and picnic tables, or in folding chairs dragged up the slope and circled in loose clusters.
This was our “church.” No hymns or sermons, but what we’d come to know on the Off-Duty Rescue Ranch as a gathering of souls on the hilltop, being thankful for another week of living and working.
Every Sunday evening during good weather, the same ritual occurred.
Occasionally, even the pastor from the church in town joined us for the meal.
Everybody brought what they could. Eldon had already set out his famous potato salad and a vat of baked beans.
Anson had contributed a bin of tomatoes and cucumbers from the ranch garden.
Willow had brought cornbread, still warm.
I went in with the other ranch hands, pooling our money for some bags of chips and containers of dips.
Knox manned the grill, keeping an eye on the lineup of hot dogs and burgers with the tongs in one hand and a beer in the other.
He wore a clean snap-button shirt and enough aftershave to season the food.
Eldon had already teased him twice that if his cologne interfered with the meal, he’d be eating alone on the far side of the pasture.
I leaned against the pergola post a few feet from the grill and watched the clearing fill up.
Later, Knox would build a fire in the ring for light once the sun dropped.
It was too warm yet for a bonfire, but the ring was where everybody gravitated after the food was gone and the sun went down.
Where some of the guys pulled out guitars and sang songs to stretch the evening out.
Ash caught Willow up in his arms and twirled her around. I’d watched him the day they married, how his jaw worked when she came down the aisle. The man who’d once told me he didn’t deserve good things had married the best thing that ever happened to him.
I was happy for them. But watching it sometimes made me uncomfortable, so I looked somewhere else.
Somewhere else was the food line, where Daisy Wylde was shouldering past Knox with a pie in each hand and her auburn hair catching the last of the sun. Sage followed behind her with a third pie, and Poppy brought up the rear carrying a basket of cookies covered with a cloth.
“First pies of the season,” Daisy called out as she set them on the picnic table with the rest of the food. “Early apples came in. Sage and Poppy picked them this morning.”
“First pies?” Knox called from the grill, leaning back to look at her. “You save me a slice, Daisy?”
She didn’t give him any satisfaction with even a glance. She arranged the pies next to Eldon’s potato salad as if placement was a matter of national importance. “There’s three whole pies, Knox. I think you’ll manage to get a slice.”
“Yeah, but I want a slice you cut for me. Specially.”
“Then you’ll be waiting a long time.” She said it flat, but I caught the corner of her mouth twitching. Knox kept an eye on her with the tongs frozen mid-flip, and a burger started to smoke before he remembered it existed.
I shook my head. Since the day I arrived at the ranch, Knox had been running this routine, and Daisy had been pretending not to notice him.
Clearly, to any of us watching, there was chemistry between them, but they weren’t acting upon it.
I had stopped trying to figure out which one of them was more stubborn about it.
Ash drifted over toward the grill and grabbed a beer from the cooler at my feet. “Good turnout tonight.” He nodded toward the far end of the clearing, where Dusty’s truck was pulling up the hill with his son, Eli, hanging out the passenger window and waving at Ro.
“Always is when the weather holds,” Knox commented.
“I heard from Chris this week. He’s talking about expanding the corporate retreat program in Virginia.
But he wants to double the corporate bookings by next spring here, too.
Talking about building a village of cabins and maybe even a small hotel here.
The man is full of ideas.” Ash shook his head and took a drink and looked at me with that steady, measuring gaze he had, the one that made you feel like he was deciding whether to give you an order or trust you to figure it out yourself.
“Gonna need someone I trust who can take his vision and manage build the ranch up here. Colt, have you given any more thought to what comes next for you?”
The question landed exactly where he’d aimed it.
Ash didn’t waste words. He was sounding me out, seeing if I’d commit to staying.
Honestly, I’d stayed here longer than I originally intended.
The ranch was only supposed to be a temporary stopover, a place to regroup after I left the Navy, before I headed back to upstate New York to reunite with my mom and sisters.
“Still figuring that out,” I said, which was the truth and also a dodge, and Ash knew it. He nodded once and let it go, because that was also what he had done. He planted the seed and walked away, then rejoined Willow and Ro at the hay bales.
Knox grunted. “He’s offering you a good opportunity.” It was easy for him to stay, to think of this as home; his family was from around these parts. He had a younger brother who played hockey for the Montana Frostbite and a little sister in nursing school in Billings.
I focused on my beer, and the smell of charcoal and Knox’s aftershave, and the sound of this community doing what it did every Sunday evening, being together because they chose to be. Like its own close-knit version of a family.
Then, before I could sink too deeply into my thoughts, I heard the unmistakable rattle of Ivy’s old truck making its way up the hill before I saw it.
We were just about to eat; she was late, which wasn’t unusual.
She took Sundays off from the Wylde West Outfitters, and she always arrived at “church” just as the food was ready, as if she’d timed it down to the minute.
When she killed the engine, I could see through the windshield that her hair was down, that sun-touched blonde that she let go loose and a little wild now and then.
She opened her door, revealing her white cotton top had slipped off one sexy shoulder. I looked around, and it seemed every man with eyes zeroed in on her. I shifted off the pergola rail and set my beer down.
She stepped out onto the running board in a long denim skirt, buttons running all the way down the front.
I didn’t allow myself to linger on those buttons too long.
Her fancy boots were definitely not made for the mud surrounding her truck from the mid-afternoon’s rainstorm.
The grass was torn up by truck tires, and standing water pooled in the ruts.
As she peered down, I could see her expression even from this far away. I stalked toward her.
“Don’t you dare get out and step in that, Wylde,” I said.
“My boots, Calhoun.”
“I know.” I reached past her and grabbed the dish from the passenger seat, a strawberry jello salad, and set it on the roof of the truck. Then I turned back to her. “Arms around my neck, or I’m throwing you over my shoulder. Your call.”
“You are not throwing me over your shoulder.”
“Then arms around my neck it is. If you can handle it.” I laughed.
She narrowed her eyes at me, that look she gave when she was deciding whether to fight or cooperate, the one that involved her mouth pressing flat and the mole above her lip disappearing into the tension.
Then she cooperated, which was not her default setting, and I pulled her out of the cab, one arm under her knees and the other around her back. She weighed nothing, but nothing sure smelled good, like honeysuckle. The way her fingers connected behind my neck turned my pulse up a notch.
“I could’ve walked around,” she said, her face close to mine.
“I saved you the trouble.”
“You always save me. Nasty habit of yours,” she said, light and grinning, the way she’d been saying it all summer since that kiss at the wedding.
Each time I opened a door for her, or carried a box, or reached something off a high shelf at the shop.
It was like an inside joke between us. An easy, safe joke between two people who’d agreed they were friends and nothing more.
“That’s what friends do.”
“That’s right.” Something flickered behind her eyes, there and gone, and then she was grinning again, and I was setting her down on the dry grass by the picnic tables, pretending my arms didn’t feel empty without her in them.
I ran back to her truck for the food and when I passed Knox, he looked up. “Smooth, Colt. Real smooth.”
I glared at him.
“I’m just saying. If Ivy ever needs anything around here, you’re Johnny-on-the-spot.”
“Shut up, Knox,” Ivy teased, moving toward the food table with her dish reclaimed from my hands.
She set it between Daisy’s pies and Eldon’s beans and fell into conversation with Sage like nothing had happened, like being carried through a field by a man who was decidedly not her boyfriend was the most ordinary thing in the world.
I went back to my spot against the corner of the pergola and picked up my beer. It was warm. I drank it anyway.
The evening settled into a rhythm as it always did. People ate. Talked. Laughed. Ro and Eli chased around the fire ring until Willow called her back. Dusty sat with Ash and talked horses and fence lines. Eldon bitched about Knox’s aftershave contaminating his potato salad.
Ivy moved through all of it like she belonged at the center. Talking to Dusty about the recent arrival of horses here at the ranch, complimenting Eldon’s beans in a way that made the old cook puff up like a rooster, checking with Willow about next week’s chamber of commerce meeting.
Ivy touched people’s arms when she talked to them and remembered the names of everyone and asked questions that made people feel seen.
When she broke away from Willow and wandered toward the pergola with an empty cup, she reached past me for the lemonade.
Close enough that I caught the honeysuckle again.
“You’ve been standing in that same spot all night,” she said, filling her cup without looking at me.
“Pleasant spot.”
“You can see everything from here.”
“Exactly.”
“And is there something or someone who catches your eye in particular?”
The fire crackled. Ro squealed at something goofy Eli did. I ignored it all, focused on Ivy. “Just grateful for the view. It’s not bad.”
She studied me for a moment, then nodded and pushed off the post and went back to her sisters.
I watched her from the pergola. Ash’s question haunted me. What comes next for you?
If I were a man looking for a home, Ivy Wylde would be the woman I’d stay for. But when she looked at me, she saw a friend, arms that could lift and hands that could fix. A mouth she could kiss only when it suited her need to make her ex walk away.
Once in a while, I caught Ivy staring at me like she was curious about what I was thinking, which was more temptation than any of the rest of it.
But Ivy didn’t seem the type to want a relationship either.
For all the gossip that still followed her around town about her wild years, the Ivy I knew was all passion and drive.
She poured everything into the Wylde West Outfitters, the Chamber of Commerce, her sisters, this community. She didn’t date anyone.
There was no room in her life for a man, and she made that clear. If she ever thought about our kiss at the wedding, she treated it the same way I did. A funny story. A onetime thing. Nothing that needed to be examined too closely.
So, what was next? Holly Creek was waiting for me.
My mother was waiting. My sisters kept calling, asking me to come home, and my father’s grave kept growing over.
I’d left my hometown for the Navy, thinking I’d build a life everyone could be proud of me for.
But what happened out there on the ocean, on that aircraft carrier… How could I be proud of it?
I was supposed to head home by now. Maybe by Christmas I’d have my head on straight enough to go back. Maybe by then I’d feel like I deserved to go on living my life.
It was time I figured things out. Time I faced what had happened on that ship. I grew tired of the memory coming to me nightly in my dreams.
The sun dipped behind the mountains, and the sky went from gold to purple.
Knox finally lit the fire. He tossed kindling into the ring and coaxed a flame while Ro watched from Ash’s lap.
The light jumped and flickered across the faces of the people gathered around it, this strange and accidental family I’d found at the end of a bus route to nowhere, and for a moment I had to look away.
Of course my eyes landed on Ivy’s, who sat across the fire from me, her boots tucked under her skirt, her face glowing like amber. She laughed at something Poppy said, her head thrown back, and the sound of it carried across the clearing like something I wanted to catch and hold.
It was all temporary, though. The ranch.
The crew. The Sunday “church” on the hilltop and Knox’s burgers and Daisy’s first apple pies of the season.
The way people in this town had begun to recognize me when I walked down the street.
The woman across the fire, pretending like she wasn’t watching me.
All of this was temporary.
I couldn’t get too comfortable. One fake kiss didn’t make a home.