Page 35 of Scent to the Feral Cowboys

I pictured delicate hands dipping into my jean pocket to pull out corn, and that same hand tossing it towards the pond. A laugh. A laugh as the ducks waddled nearer.

I pictured how my pack would react when Eros finally called with news.

I pictured my hands sliding over supple, soft curves.

My last conscious thought was of my Canvasback ducks. They were sleeping, coppery heads tucked beneath their pale wings. I loved those damn ducks. They always recognized me, no matter how long I’d been away. They always were waiting.

Like I was always waiting.

Waiting… for what was missing.

9

LEVI BRIGGS

Ten months ago... Pinedale, Wyoming

I stared at the bright yellow sticky note defacing the front of my pristine, recently cleaned monitor screen. I’d had one cup of coffee, not enough for this nonsense.

The handwriting was unmistakable—Cooper's chicken scratch, almost illegible. Apparently, he’d spent four hundred and twenty-eight dollars. Didn’t tell me what for, just sketched a smiley face beneath the price. He was driving me nuts with these random purchases, but I couldn’t yell at the guy who’d saved us from financial ruin.

Still, though, sometimes I wanted to shake him for forgetting what life used to be like.

Struggling to feed the horses.

Selling off fifty head of cattle at a time, just to stay afloat.

And then… a long time ago… my stomach growling in hunger, empty because there was no food in my house. Mom passed out on the sofa with a cigarette clamped between her slack lips. And Cooper, living only a block away from me, hisbody black and blue from beatings, too scared to eat even if there was food in his house. Because what if he took the wrong thing? What if his dad wanted the leftovers and they were gone when he came home drunk?

Things were good now, but they used to be fucking horrible.

I tried not to think about what might have happened if the Nelsons hadn’t let us move to Sagebrush, if they hadn’t become our ‘adopted’ parents.

I peeled the offensive paper square from my screen, crumpled it into a tight ball, and pitched it into the wastebasket with more force than necessary. The satisfaction was minimal, but it was something.

My office—though calling the converted bedroom an office was generous—was the only truly organized area in the entire rambler. Boone had sacrificed his private space when it became clear that trying to keep the books while sitting at the kitchen table meant constant interruptions, coffee spills, and me losing my temper every five seconds. In here, everything had its place. Receipts were filed by date and category. Reference materials were alphabetized. An old school rolodex sat waiting to save the day when the rural internet crapped out. The only scar was the wastebasket evidence of broken pencils and pens.

And then Cooper would barge in, slap sticky notes on everything, and leave the door open behind him. Every. Damn. Time.

At least there’d only been one this morning, not dozens.

With a sigh, I opened the accounting software and pulled my ledger closer. The ranch's operating expenses for last month were higher than I'd projected. We'd had to replace the pump on the north well, and one of the trucks needed tires. Normal unexpected bullshit, the kind we'd always had, but this stuff used to keep me up at night wondering if we'd make it another month.

Now? Now, we had a cushion. More than a cushion—a goddamn California king-sized mattress of financial security.

I pulled up the banking app on my phone, confirming what I already knew. A cool million still sat in the ranch's business account, untouched. More than enough to keep Sagebrush afloat. Cooper's broker had diversified the rest of his inheritance into a mix of high risk/high yield and low risk/low reward investments. Smart move, I had to admit. Even if the high-risk portion tanked completely, we'd still be secure.

All thanks to some great aunt Cooper had met exactly twice, who'd decided to leave a fortune to her “darling great-nephew who’d once made her an apple pie”.

For years, I'd agonized over every penny, working the books until my eyes burned, finding ways to stretch our resources further than they should go. I'd been the one who insisted we couldn't afford to replace the truck when its transmission went, who'd patched the roof of the barn myself instead of hiring professionals, who'd stayed up late calculating exactly how many head of cattle we needed to sell to make the bank payment.

And then Cooper's windfall had rendered all of it moot in a single day.

I should have been grateful. I was grateful. But gratitude was a complicated emotion when mixed with the knowledge that our collective lifetime of hard work and sacrifice hadn't been enough to save the ranch. It had taken dumb luck, a random act of generosity from a woman who barely knew us, to solve our problems.

My pencil snapped between my fingers as I punched numbers into the calculator. I hadn't realized I was gripping it so tightly. I tossed the broken pieces into the trash and reached for another.

The projected expenses for next month looked reasonable, even with the added costs of the new horse. A horse for an Omega we didn't have. A horse that might never have a rider.