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The easement option would be ideal in that it would carry the traffic through town and possibly bring business to everyone, but that meant getting Levi to allow them to use his land directly.

She hadn’t realized both options would end up involving him.

A complication she hadn’t considered, and Quinn considered almost every complication almost every single time.

Quinn Sullivan was book-smart and she was proud of it. She thought of it in those terms because most of the people in Pyrite Falls were often proud to declare that they were street-smart instead. Quinn had never felt that one should be forced to choose between different kinds of intelligence. Be well-rounded, she had always thought. And while it couldn’t be claimed that she was overly street-smart, she had been away to college. A rarity both in her family and within the broader scope of Four Corners.

Because Four Corners was the kind of place where you grew up knowing exactly what you’d do when you grew up. The nature of the job was handed down from parent to child—at least it was ideally.

Where you would work the land until you were buried beneath it.

And while Quinn could see the appeal of a legacy, and of working land, she’d still wanted to know.

Why she should work it. How to work it best. Other methods one could use.

Both she and her sister Rory had been more interested in outside education than either Fia or Alaina had ever seemed to be. But while Rory had opted to go to school in neighboring Mapleton, to get a more traditional education, Quinn had wanted to go to the one-room schoolhouse on Four Corners land, because she wanted to be connected to the land in everything she did.

The ranch itself had been established by four families back in the late 1800s. Technically, it was four different branches, but it was operated as a cooperative. There was Garrett’s Watch, McCloud’s Landing, King’s Crest and Sullivan’s Point. Each named for the families who had first settled them and who continued to run them today.

And while Quinn felt that the wisdom handed down from her father—before he had left—and her mother—not that she had been big on the ranch itself—was valuable, she had decided to go away and get a degree in agribusiness. Because she believed so firmly in all the smarts.

It was why she considered herself a great candidate to deal with the current situation.

Sullivan’s Point was the portion of Four Corners that Quinn ran with her sisters. Their parents had left all the responsibility of the place to them when they were very young.

Quinn’s oldest sister, Fia, had figured out inventive ways to keep the place running. By and large, they leased the ranch land while they tended a very large garden filled with fruits and vegetables, which they had turned into a very profitable business. They’d just taken some houses that had historically been used to house ranch hands and turned them into short-and long-term rentals, which were now being managed by her sister Rory.

They did canning and baking and sold things fresh at a roadside stand, at farmers markets and the store in town. But the latest bid for expansion was the farm store that they were building right on their property.

Of course, the sticking point to getting the farm store open was making sure there was an access road from the main highway. But in order to get an access road directly into that side of Sullivan’s Point, and avoid sending people down miles of dirt road to get right to the heart of their store, they were going to need to strike an agreement with the neighboring rancher.

And the problem with that was the neighboring rancher was...Levi.

Levi was a whole thing. Difficult, some might say.

Well, the Sullivans, Garretts, McClouds and Kings found all neighboring ranchers to be somewhat difficult. That was the problem when you were the biggest dog in town. People often took your mere existence as an invitation for a fight.

“Yes, you’ve remarked on his being an arrogant bastard,” Rory mused. “Four or five times now, in fact.”

“Well, it’s true.” Quinn scowled at her own reflection in the mirror.

“Do you not think...?” Quinn looked over at her sister, who had rolled onto her back on the bed, a book clutched to her chest. “Do you not think that maybe he has a point?”

“No, Rory, I don’t think he has a point. We are not trying to hurt the town. If anything, we’re going to help the town. I put in all kinds of projections. If a certain number of extra people come out to visit our store, it’s not taking anything from John just because they decide not to go to a store that they wouldn’t have gone to anyway. They’re different demographics, and the whole thing is a straw man.”

“Do tell.”

“It’s a straw man because the whole thing isn’t actually a thing. It’s simply a fake boogeyman erected to distract from—”

“I do know what a straw man is,” said Rory. “But thank you.”

“I didn’t say that you didn’t know what it was,” said Quinn.

“No, you just sounded like it. You have a way of coming across as a bit superior, Quinn.”

Quinn and Rory had grown closer in the last couple of years, but even though they were next to each other in age, they hadn’t really been close growing up.

Their home had been tumultuous. Fia and their mother had been at each other’s throats all the time, to the point where Fia had even run away for a while at the peak of it all.