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I hurt her because I was hurting. She’d come to me untouched, a virgin—but I convinced myself maybe she wasn’t so innocent. She knew who her mother was to my father, knew what her mother had done to my family, and still, she’d laid down with me. If Mama had found out, she would’ve lost it—and I would’ve lost her.
“So, what you’re sayin’ is that she’s stayin’?” I knew the answer to that. Hunt was the foreman of the Wilder Ranch, and he knew that I’d be outta bullets in the middle of a shootout if he walked out on me.
“Oh, yeah, she’s stayin’, you jackass, and you make sure not to?—”
I raised a hand to stop him from losing his temper, which I knew he was close to doing since I’d been riling him up by going after Elena.
“It was a knee-jerk reaction,” I repeated.
“Yeah, it was you being a jerk, alright.” With that, he got up and left the ranch house.
I sat for a while, looking around the officewhere my father had spent much of his time, either here or riding around the one hundred-odd thousand acres that stretched across two counties.
The large pastures were divided for different purposes: cattle grazing, horse training, and hay production. Wilder Ranch was an impressive operation, and I knew selling it would take time. Not everyone could go ahead and buy this much land, twenty-thousand head of cattle, thirty stalls for working horses, including breeding stock, valuable bloodlines, and a remuda of working horses.
I worked in land development and knew the best option was to divide the land and sell it according to its zoning—maybe even push for rezoning. Some parcels could be flipped from agricultural use to high-end residential, others for commercial developments like resorts, retail centers, or even industrial projects if the logistics made sense. Hell, with the proper permits, some of it could even go toward infrastructure expansion—roads, airports, whatever the highest bidder wanted.
Back in Texas, it had seemed simple. Split up the land, sell it off piece-by-piece, and turn the mountain acreage into something profitable—maybe resorts, maybe high-end developments. It made sense on paper. But standing here now, with the dust in my throat and the ranch stretching wide around me, it didn’t sit right. I’d told myself I didn’t care and didn’t owe this place a thing, that I owed Nash nothing.
But the truth I’d been running from for ten years washitting me square in the face—ranching was in my blood, whether I wanted it there or not, and desecrating the land wasn’t coming as easy as I thought it would.
CHAPTER 3
elena
"You heard him," I told Hunt as I packed my things.
The bunkhouse wasn’t much, but it had been home for a long while for me. A long, low-slung building with weathered wood and a tin roof that rattled in the wind, it sat a good walk from the main house, closer to the barns and the cattle pens. Inside, it smelled of sweat, leather, and old coffee, the kind of place where boots were always muddy and no one cared.
There were ten bunks total—five on each side—but only four of us lived here full-time. The rest were left open for seasonal hands who drifted through during branding or roundups. My space was at the far end, by the window, where I could catch the first light of morning and listen to the horses shift in their pens at night.
I didn’t have much—a trunk at the foot of my bed, a small shelf where I kept a few paperbacks, and an old picture of Mama. My three pairs of boots stayed lined upbeneath the cot, and my hat hung on a nail by the door. It was tight quarters, with no privacy, but I’d gotten used to it. For me, a bunk and a roof were enough.
Hunt had often asked me to stay in one of the guest cabins or, at least, use the extra bedroom in the foreman’s cabin, but I’d refused. Already, there were murmurs about my relationship with Hunt. If I lived with him, it’d just feed that fire until it was a blazing inferno. So, I’d chosen to stay in a bunkhouse, picking the one with the least amount of troublemakers.
There were three bunkhouses in total, spread out near the barns and main work areas. Mine was the smallest, home to four full-time hands, including me. The other two were larger, each packed with eight cowboys and ranch hands, not counting the part-timers who rolled in during branding and roundup season.
The living arrangement for the hands wasn’t fancy, but it worked.
The largest bunkhouse had a common room centered around a long wooden table, its surface scarred and worn from years of hard use. At night, hands gathered there to play poker and drink their fill after a long day’s work.
A small kitchen sat in the corner, but we didn’t use it much—Miss Ida took care of the cooking over at the mess hall that was next to the bunkhouse. She’d been running the ranch kitchen for a few years now since she shacked up with one of the hands, feeding an army of hungry cowboys three times a day, and God help the fool who complained about her biscuits.
Cleaning was on us and a couple of the wives of thehands helped out as well. Nobody had time to live messy when you were up before dawn and dead on your feet by sunset. You kept your space clean, your boots outside, and if you stank too bad, you used the communal showers in the back.
So, it wasn’t the freaking Ritz, not by a long shot, but it was my home.
And now, I was being told to leave it behind like I was nothing.
Fuck, it hurt when he asked me to pack up and get out. It hurt even more that he thought I was still staying at the ranch house. I hadn’t been there since he left, since I found out what his father meant to my mother. Duke could think all he wanted that I knew about our parents’ relationship, but I didn’t. I’d always thought Mama was just the housekeeper and cook, and that as part of her salary, we got to live in the ranch house. I never questioned it. I should’ve. I was old enough. But I didn’t. It was naïve of me.
“I told him you’re not goin’ nowhere,” Hunt announced. He was sitting on a chair, his booted feet on my trunk, his Stetson on my bed.
I should’ve guessed something was up when Ben kept bothering me, not allowing me to pack, and right after Ben left, Hunt was on my ass.
“I don’t want to be here,” I murmured.
Hunt nodded somberly. “He’s selling the ranch, Elena.”