LITMIR.BIZ

      SO THIS WAS DUNDEE, where he’d been born and lived with his mother for the first six years of his life.

      Conner frowned as Roy, the foreman of the Running Y, who’d picked him up just after breakfast in Boise, drove him through the center of town, where several buildings rose out of the surrounding mountains, leaning on each other like old men. Built of wood and painted red, brown or white, they ran along both sides of the street, fronted by a covered boardwalk that extended for several blocks like something out of an old western. Only the gas station down the street and the new A&W looked out of place or the least bit modern.

      Modern? He thought of the spacious, Spanish-style villa he’d grown up in, with its expansive wings and gardens, inside swimming pool and tennis courts, and knew he’d been banished to hell.

      Where he’d rot, if his uncles had their way.

      Swallowing a bitter sigh, he glanced at his companion. Tall and lanky, Roy had red hair and a mustache that entirely covered his top lip. His freckled, sunburned complexion gave his face a leathery appearance and made him look older than the fifty-five or so he probably was. And he wore, like most other men within sight, a parka with a pair of Wranglers that were so tight his chewing tobacco stood out in marked relief.

      Conner considered his own jeans, which were loose fitting by comparison, his Doc Marten loafers and Abercrombie sweatshirt, and knew he was going to blend in about as well as his clothes did.

      “How much farther to the ranch?” he asked, breaking the silence that had fallen between them almost immediately after their brief greeting in Boise. He needed to dispel the lingering sense of loss and confusion he’d experienced since Delaney’s sudden departure, and after a twenty-five year absence, he remembered the ranch and the cemetery where they’d buried his grandma, but not much about the town or surrounding area.

      “’Nother ten miles or so round that mountain.” He pointed to their right before slinging his arm casually over the steering wheel.

      Conner gazed off in the distance. “Who lives there these days?”

      “Only a handful of us. Ben, Grady, Isaiah and me live in the cabins behind the barn.”

      “No one stays at the main house?”

      “Just Dottie. Least during the week. On weekends she stays with her son and his family in town.”

      “And just what does this Dottie do?”

      “The cookin’ and cleanin’ and stuff. Takes care of the dogs and chickens, too.”

      “So there’s just the five of you?”

      Roy cast him a sideways glance. “Now there’s you.”

      Conner was painfully aware of that fact. “I think I heard one of my uncles say that the Running Y is twenty thousand acres,” he said. “Is that about right?”

      Roy spat out the window as they rumbled to a stop at what appeared to be the town’s biggest intersection. A brick municipal building with the date 1847 carved above its arched entry stood on one corner, across from two stately homes that looked as though they hailed from the same era and a redbrick building designated as the city library.

      “Give or take a few,” he said. “Not that twenty thousand acres is very big, far as ranches go. You want big, go to Texas.”

      “Where they raise Longhorns.” Even Conner knew that. “What kind of cattle do we stock?” he asked. He’d been too angry at his grandfather and his uncles to reveal the slightest interest in returning to the Running Y by asking even the most basic questions.

      The light turned green, but his companion squinted at him for a second or two before giving the pickup enough gas to roll through the intersection. “We’ve got about two thousand Bally-faced Herefords.”

      Bally-faced? Conner hadn’t heard that term before, but he did, thankfully, recognize Herefords. Unless he was mistaken, they were the common reddish cattle seen in so many places. “Is the entire ranch fenced?” he asked, trying to imagine how one might manage such a large chunk of land.

      Roy accelerated to their usual traveling speed of about forty-five miles per hour. Because of the load of hay Roy had picked up in Boise before appearing at Conner’s hotel, Conner doubted the truck could go any faster.

      “Parts are fenced,” Roy said. “But some of the land is open range leased from the BLM, and I doubt they’d like us fencing it off.”

      “The BLM?”

      Another squinty gaze. “The Bureau of Land Management. It operates state land. We hold the grazing rights for about ten thousand BLM acres down along the south pass.”

      “I see,” Conner said, but he didn’t see much. He’d thought owning a twenty-thousand-acre ranch meant owning twenty thousand acres of deeded property. Evidently that wasn’t strictly the case.

      What are the grazing rights worth? he wanted to ask. How do we keep our cattle from straying if our property isn’t completely fenced? How do we stop thieves and predators from stealing and slaughtering our Bally-faced Herefords? Did a few cowboys keep a constant vigil over them?

      There were hundreds of things he’d need to know. But he didn’t ask anything more. His lack of knowledge wasn’t exactly inspiring confidence in his foreman, and he was still too disgruntled about what had happened with Delaney this morning to handle the situation diplomatically.

      There’d be plenty of time to learn how to run the ranch once he arrived, he supposed. At this point, he preferred his unhappy thoughts to Roy’s resentment. But Roy wasn’t ready to let the conversation lapse.

      “Ever been out on a horse?” he asked as they rumbled along.

      “On occasion,” Conner told him.

      “For work or for pleasure?”

      It didn’t take a crystal ball to see where Roy’s questions were leading, and the implication of his words

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