Rancher's Forgotten Rival
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Maisey Yates
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One
Chance Carson couldn’t complain about his life.
Well, he could. A man could always find a thing to complain about if he was of a mind. But Chance wasn’t of that mind. Every day was a gift, in his opinion. The sun rose, the sun set, and he went to bed and woke up and did it all over again, and that was success no matter how it was measured.
Add in the fact that he got to work with his brothers, or take off and compete in the rodeo circuit as he saw fit, and he really did feel like he was living the dream.
And hell, he had to, right?
No one was guaranteed life.
Much less a dream. He knew well the tragedy of a life cut short. It was a different grief to the death of an older person. It changed you. That unfairness.
He’d tried to at least take some good from those changes.
“You look smug,” his brother Boone said from his position on his horse.
Five of the brothers were out, riding the range and looking for stragglers.
They had the biggest spread in Lone Rock, Oregon. Evergreen Ranch.
It had been in the family for generations, but had essentially been bare dirt until their dad had made his fortune in the rodeo, and further still as the commissioner of the Pro Rodeo Association. Now it was a thriving cattle ranch with luxury homes adding a touch of civility to the wildness of the surroundings. Courtesy of his family’s status and success as rodeo royalty. They competed together, and they worked together. They practically lived together, given that most of them had housing on the ranch.
Though the rodeo hadn’t always been a source of family togetherness.
Their sister, Callie, had nearly broken with the family over some of it, making inroads for women who wanted to ride saddle bronc, and now there was a blooming movement happening within the Association.
Chance was all for it.
Well, not as much when it concerned his little sister.
But in general.
He liked a little feminism. Who didn’t?
Right now, they were off for the season, and hanging around the ranch, which was a bit more togetherness than they often got.
Flint, Jace, Kit, Boone and himself, all together like when they were kids.
Almost.
Sophie was gone, and there was no getting her back, a pain that he’d had to figure out how to live with. Grief was funny that way. People talked about “getting over it” and he didn’t see it that way. It was just learning to live with it, learning where to carry the pain so you could still walk around breathing through it.
Then there was Buck. But his absence was his choice.
Being a prodigal in the Carson family—which was full to the brim with disreputable riffraff—was really something. But Buck had managed it.
But he was focusing on what he had, not what he didn’t.
Which was good, since tomorrow he had to head out for a few days, just to see to a meeting with a man about buying another head of cattle.
“I am smug. It’s another beautiful day in the neighborhood.”
“If Mister Rogers were a cowboy...he wouldn’t be you,” Flint said. “You’re an asshole.”
“I’m not,” Chance said. “I am the cheerfulest motherfucker out there.”
“That’s not a word.”
“Your mom’s not a word,” Chance said.
“Your mom is our mom,” Flint pointed out.
“Oh well. It stands. Anyway, I’m just enjoying the day. I’m heading out tomorrow, so I won’t be around.”
“Right. More cows,” Jace said, and if he was trying to look excited about it, he was failing.
“It is what we do,” he said.
“Sure,” he said.
“You going to have time to come over to the bar tonight?” Jace asked. “Cara has some new beer she’s trying out. She was wondering if we could all come taste it.”
“I wouldn’t mind having a taste of Cara’s beer,” Kit said.
And that earned him a steely glare from Jace. Cara was Jace’s best friend, and it was not like that. And hell and damn to any man who wanted to be like that with her. Especially if he was one of Jace’s brothers. Not, Chance imagined, because Jace was jealous, just because he knew how they all were. And that was shameless and not looking for a commitment.
“And where exactly are we putting the cattle?”
“You know where,” Chance said.
“So, I was just wondering, because I was trying to figure out how long it would be before one of the Sohappy sisters was up in my face.”
“Well, Boone,” Chance said. “I think you know that Juniper and Shelby will be right at us like clockwork.”
“It’s like four feet of fence,” Boone said.
“Doesn’t matter. She thinks our great-great-granddad tricked hers into betting that land in a poker game while he was drunk and she lays into me about it every time we’re near each other. And now it’s been a fight for...oh, three generations, and our grandfather literally died mad about it.” Not that their grandfather had been the most sterling guy, but it was the principle. “And I’m not moving the damn fence. And I’m not letting her badger me into signing something over to her just because of some tall tale that’s been passed around the families.”
“Well, yeah, because it’s like four feet one way and like a mile the other,” Kit pointed out. “Plus accusations of sabotage, cattle rustling and all manner of other bullshit.”
“And I don’t care if she has her panties in a twist about it, it’s not my problem. If she wants to try and retroactively prove that her great-great-grandfather wasn’t fit to sign over the land, that’s on her, she’s welcome to do it.”
“She?” Boone asked. “I thought we were talking about both Sohappy sisters. Weird how it ended up being about the one.”
And Chance wasn’t at home to any of that. His brother liked to tease him that there was more than just rage between himself and Juniper. But no. Sure, she was beautiful. Both of the Sohappy sisters were beautiful. But ironically named, as far as he was concerned, because he had never seen them do much of anything other than scowl. At least, his direction.
Women loved Chance. He was a charmer. He loved women, so long as it stayed casual, and physical only.
But Shelby and Juniper Sohappy did not love him. And Juniper in particular.
Hell, yeah, Juniper was beautiful.
Long black hair, eyes the color of bitter chocolate, golden-brown skin, high cheekbones...
Shame about her personality.
She’d been a spiteful little scorpion since they were in school. And he didn’t call her that to be hollowly mean; she’d once put a scorpion in his backpack when she was ten and he was twelve.
She’d hated him from the time his family had moved to the ranch when he was ten, taking over for his grandfather after his passing.
She’d hated him just because he was a Carson.
And hell, if he’d sometimes responded in kind to her provocations, who could blame him? And if he’d once bid on her at a charity auction and used her to do menial ranch tasks and carry his books at school—which she’d walked out on in the middle of, thanks—again, who could blame him?
Well, she could. And did. But that was beside the point.
And the fact that he’d do it again, even with all the sparks and spite it earned him, well, that was a whole other issue.
He liked sparring with her as much as he wanted to tell her to leave him the hell alone and never come back.
It was like a disease.
Like wanting to pull a girl’s pigtails in second grade.
Except his other feelings about her were not remotely childish. Not at all.
“It’s pretty bitter,” Boone said. “Don’t you think we should just get some surveillance done and see if that solves the issue?”
“Our grandfathers didn’t. Our fathers didn’t.”
“Yeah,” Boone said. “Grandpa also took cold showers because he thought that instant hot water bullshit made a man soft. I’m not sure ‘because it’s always been this way’ is a good reason to do anything.”
“You know,” Chance said, “I would like at least one of them to ask nicely.”
“And I would love to be standing there when you told her that,” Flint said.
“Whatever. Juniper Sohappy and her bad attitude isn’t my problem. She knows exactly what she can do if she wants to escalate it. But she isn’t interested in that. She’s just interested in being in a family feud that seems to always center squarely on me.”
Because she could yell at any of his brothers. And never seemed to.
Almost as if she liked yelling at him.
Maybe yelling was an overstatement. When they’d run into each other at the market, in the cold beer fridge, each of them picking up some brews, she’d hissed. Like a feral weasel.
Gotta burr in your britches, Juniper?
Just a burr under my saddle. For life. That’s you, Carson.
Yeah, I got that.
Flint shrugged. “All right, you may not want Juniper to be your problem, but I have a feeling she’ll make it her goal to be.”
Chance chuckled. “I’d like to see her try.”
“Sure you would.”
“You drinking later?” Boone asked.
“Nah. Gonna get an early night in so I can get on the road first thing.”
They finished up their work, and his brothers trickled back home. And for some reason, Chance found himself riding toward the fence line, to the part of the property that bordered the Sohappy family’s ranch.
It was just a shame, really.
A shame that he didn’t see the rattlesnake. A shame that his horse chose to freak the hell out. A shame that his horse was a dirty deserter and ran off somewhere.
And it was a shame that when he fell, he hit his head directly on a rock.
It was raining. Of course it was raining.
Visibility was shit. Juniper had a feeling that she might end up taking calls tonight, whether she was supposed to or not. When the weather got like this, accidents happened. On these windy rural roads it was unavoidable. She wasn’t supposed to be on shift tonight. She was supposed to be getting a good night’s sleep. She’d gone for twelve hours in a row already.
Then there wasn’t enough energy drinks in the world to keep her going at this point.
Maybe she was just being grim.
But it was that damn Chance Carson. The Carsons in general were a pain in the butt, but Chance specifically had gotten under her skin for years. She was two years behind him in school, but it had been enough for them to be in each other’s paths quite a bit, and every time they’d ever crossed...
It had been bad.
Then there was the general Carson-ness of it all.
Her parents told her that she was overreacting to the whole border situation, but it mattered to her.
It mattered to her grandpa, who had hated the Carsons for as long as she’d been alive, and had told her stories of how they’d set out to undermine the Sohappy family from the beginning. And most of all how Chance’s great-great-grandfather had gotten her great-great-grandfather drunk, and conned him into betting a portion of the ranch in a card game.
The legend went that he’d cheated. And he’d taken a valuable piece of the Sohappy ranch away, for nothing.
Your father doesn’t love the land, not like you do. And I have no grandson. You’re the firstborn of this generation. The ranch is going to go to you.
But Shelby is getting married. Shouldn’t Chuck...
You know what happened. When a man was prized over blood. When the ranch passed from our direct line. It has to be you. You must care for it. Nurture it like it was your child.
So she’d taken it on. Rearranged her ambitions. It had been easy, actually. To put off pie-in-the-sky dreams like medical school and pretend they’d never really mattered.
The truth was, it had never been a particularly attainable dream.
So she’d thrown herself into Lone Rock. Into the ranch. Into life here. When she’d decided, at seventeen, that she’d stay, she’d rearranged every thought she’d had about the future.
She’d let her roots go deep.
She was one of the ranchers down at the Thirsty Mule, hanging with the guys and telling tall tales. She’d earned that place. She could castrate calves and move a herd with the best of them. And could drink most of their sorry asses under the table.
She worked hard, she played hard and she didn’t accept double-standard bullshit.
What was good for the goose and all that.
She’d made a life she was proud of, and she’d taken on the EMT job to pay the bills and satisfy the medical itch she’d had when she was younger.
Now she’d educated herself on ways to expand the ranch into something more lucrative.
A horse breeding and boarding facility. And while she liked ranch work in general, horses were her passion.
And if she got the facility going and got people to pay for boarding, then she wouldn’t have to work two jobs.
She was having to pay for ranching like it was her hobby, and the only thing that her family just had was this land.
Everything else was an expense. Everything else came out of all the hard work that she put in.
Her dad’s soul just wasn’t in the land the way it was hers. He cared, but he was devoted to his business, his career.
It was why Juniper had decided against pursuing medical school. Against leaving. Being a doctor was a calling, a vocation, and...
She wouldn’t have been able to do both.
So she’d knuckled down and focused on what she could do. And now she was grateful she had. She’d figured out what to do with the ranch that excited her, made her happy.
And she was just fine. Just fine. And she didn’t even want things to go differently.
Maybe don’t think about that when you’re angry and gritty and half-asleep.
Maybe. Yeah, maybe that was a good idea.
The dirt road that led up to her cabin was mud now, and she was feeling pretty annoyed. And when her headlights swept the area as she rounded the corner, she might have thought that her irritation and exhaustion played a role in what she saw.
It looked like a body. A body out there in the field.
Sprawled out flat. But it couldn’t be. She slammed the brakes on in her truck and stared.
Yes. The rain was pouring down on what was very definitely a male form sprawled out there on the ground.
But why?
How?
She looked around for a second, evaluating the risk level of the situation, because if something had wounded or killed this man, she didn’t want to be next.
She wasn’t about to be the first fifteen minutes of a crime scene investigation show.
But she didn’t see anything, and there were no points for sitting there wondering about it. Juniper got out of the truck and ran out to that spot in the field. And her heart hit her breastbone.
It was Chance.
Chance Carson.
She knelt down and felt for a pulse. She found one. Thank God. He drove her nuts, but she did not want him to die. At least, not on the border between Carson and Sohappy land. That would be unforgivably inconvenient.
She could call someone, but not here. There was no cell service right out in this spot in the ranch.
But she had her truck.
She rolled him onto his back and did a quick assessment for spinal injuries. None of that. But he was out cold. And what the hell was he doing out here anyway?
She couldn’t tell what the hell had happened. But she had some medical equipment in her truck.
She ran back to the road, then pulled her truck out to the field, getting it as close as possible to him. He didn’t rouse.
Shit.
She had a board in the back of her truck, and with great effort, she rolled him onto it, strapped him to it and used it to drag him over to the bed of the truck. He was strapped securely in like a mummy in a sarcophagus, so she propped the top up against the tailgate, then lifted up the end by his feet, and pushed him back into the bed of the truck.
“Sorry,” she said, slamming the tailgate shut. Was she, though? She wasn’t sure.
Well, she was sorry that he was hurt.
Her cabin was the closest place that she could get him dry, warm and examined. She was a medical professional, after all, and he certainly wasn’t the first person with a head injury she’d ever dealt with.
The road to the cabin was bumpy, and she winced every time she hit a big pothole. She really didn’t want to kill Chance Carson. He might think so, but not even she was that petty. At the end of the day, land was land, and it wasn’t a human life.
It might feel like it was sometimes. It might feel like looking at this place was the same as opening a vein and letting all her hopes and dreams run red and free.
But it was land.
He was a human being.
Even if he was the human being who left her angrier, hotter, more stirred up and just plain trembly.
She hadn’t realized quite how tense she was until her little cabin came into view, and then her shoulders relaxed immeasurably.
She just didn’t like driving with him in the bed of the truck like that. It was unnerving.
She got as close to the front door as she could, and felt a little bit exhausted and sweaty staring at his inert form in the back of the truck, still on the board.
She could get him down there, to the front door, but it was just going to be a little bit of a trick. She eased her shoulders upward and rolled them, then grabbed the end of the board, doing her best to lower it gently down to the ground, getting him out much the same way as she had gotten him in. And then she... Well, she dragged him. Up the front steps, slowly, methodically, careful not to jostle him.
She got him into the front room of the house and looked around. Then she took all the cushions off the couch and laid them down on the floor. She unstrapped him from the gurney and rolled him onto the cushions.
He groaned.
Well, at least there was a sign of life.
His clothes were soaking wet, but she was not stripping him naked. No. She had lines, and they were definitely around stripping Chance Carson naked.
Her heart bumped up into her throat.
Well. Dreams weren’t anything to get too worked up about. Granted, her grandmother would disagree.
But that didn’t matter. Juniper didn’t put any stock in them. And the fact that she had dreamed a time or two about what it might be like to rip Chance Carson’s clothes from his body at the end of an invigorating argument was... It was immaterial. She didn’t think about it consciously. She didn’t marinate on it or anything. It was her subconscious mixing up its passions. That was all.
She opened one of his eyes and shined a flashlight in it, then the other. “You are concussed,” she said. “Sorry, my friend.” She was going to have to observe him. Well, someone would.
She could take him down to the hospital...
Suddenly, a hard, masculine hand shot up and grabbed her around the wrist. “What’s going on?”
His voice was rusty and hard. And she was...
On fire.
Her heart was racing, her skin suffused with heat. He had never...touched her before. In a panic, she pulled away and he released his hold, but the impression of his hand on her skin still remained.
“I...”
“Where am I?”
“You’re at my house. I found you in a field. Can you tell me what happened?”
“I don’t know what happened,” he said.
“You don’t know what happened?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Right. Okay. You don’t know what happened.”
“Yes,” he said.
“That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what happened. Can you see all right?” She put her finger off to his left, then his right, and watched as he tracked the movement. “That seems to be fine.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“No double vision?”
“No,” he said.
“You definitely hit your head,” she said.
“Right,” he said.
“I’m just trying to figure out how serious it is.”
“You a doctor?”
“No. I’m an EMT...” He knew that. Chance Carson knew that she was an EMT. Everybody did. “Do you know who I am?”
“No. Should I?”
Oh. Well. Holy crap. Chance Carson didn’t know who she was.
“Juniper,” she said slowly. “Juniper Sohappy.”
“Name doesn’t mean anything to me. Sorry.”
“What’s your name?”
His brow creased. “You know... I don’t know.”
He didn’t know his name? Juniper couldn’t wrap her head around that. He could be lying, of course. Though, to what end she didn’t know, but how could you ever know with a Carson?
Wasn’t her whole family history a testament to that?
If he was lying, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of tricking her. She...
She stopped herself just as she was about to open her mouth.
If he was lying, it might be funny to go along with it, see how long it took him to reveal himself.
And if he wasn’t?
She thought back to the humiliation of when he’d had her working his land. Of every insult over the years, of everything.
She was going to keep an eye on him tonight, make sure he didn’t lapse off and die of his head injury. And she was more than qualified to do it. She also knew if he really was suffering from some temporary memory loss from the fall he’d taken, it would resolve quickly enough and you weren’t supposed to go heaping facts on people while their mind sorted things out.
What would it hurt if she taught him a little something in the meantime?
“You don’t remember your name?” she pressed.
“No,” he said, his eyes blank, and she looked hard to see if he was being genuine. “I don’t remember anything.”
