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We were part of the foundation of the town before the Pattons came along. They were cattle ranchers, known for rustling, thought themselves above the law. Legend went, they’d stolen Brent cattle and drove them to Wyoming, and when they came back, the Brents were waiting for them. In the scuffle, one of the Brent boys was shot by a Patton, and the elder Brent had the elder Patton arrested and hanged. With the law watching them, the Patton heirs decided ranching wouldn’t be lucrative enough. So they went into dairy, and they went in big, their number one goal seeming to be to put our farm under.
It was a miracle our farm had survived. But the feud never ended, passed down generation to generation, ad infinitum. My grandfather and the late Billy Patton had been at it since birth. James Patton and my father had nearly beaten each other to death over my mother.
I didn’t know where Chase Patton landed.
When I was nine years old and didn’t have a single friend, Chase was the one who sat next to me at lunch. He played with me at recess and told me he liked my red hair when the other kids teased me for it. He was my first friend in a time when I needed a friend. Until his father found out. And then he came to school, pushed me off a swing in front of his other friends, and sneered down at me as I lay crying in the dirt that I was a dirty, fire-crotch Brent.
I didn’t even know what it meant, only that it hurt brutally.
Pop did. James sported a black eye for a week as a result.
But I always believed Chase was only doing what he’d been told, not what he wanted. Quietly, he’d shown me kindness. Silently, he’d protected me more than once from ridicule from the girls and worse from a few of the guys.
And I couldn’t ever understand how the old feud still had teeth.
The old barn had been opened up to let the sunshine in, and I passed the threshold filled with sentimentality. The smell of hay and ancient wood, of livestock and barley. The horses nickered in their stalls when I passed, the wide floor covered in hay, and in the back corner with a mouthful of cud was Alice.
My smile spread when I saw the heart-shaped spot on her flank that set her apart from the rest of the herd.
The summer before I’d moved away, I’d helped birth Alice, which proved a harrowing affair. Her mother nearly died, and we thought Alice might go with her. But by some miracle, they both lived, and after my constant attention and the attachment that came along with it, Alice and I became best friends. She found me when I visited her herd, followed me around while I marked heifers for the vet. She’d nestle and nudge me with her snout until I paid her attention. When she started following me to the gate, I brought her up to the house with me to give her a good old-fashioned brushing. And when she wouldn’t go back to the pastures, nudging me back to the old barn instead, I asked Pop if she could stay near the house. He indulged me as he so often did, and forever after, that was where she preferred to be—in the old barn with the horses and hay.
She always pastured with the rest of the cattle, but then she’d come to the gate and moo her request for passage, which was always granted, sometimes simply because she’d stand there bleating until someone let her in.
I approached her with the fondness of an old friend. Her rear was to me, but she caught sight of me almost instantly, her three-hundred-degree periphery serving her well. She stopped chewing. Chuffed. Turned to me with her ears flicking in my direction, her big, sweet eyes full of recognition.
I could have cried at the sight of her.
“Heya, Alice,” I said with a trembling voice, reaching out to scratch the wide space between her eyes.
Those eyes closed, and she leaned into my hand.
“I missed you too. Are you mad at me for staying away so long?”
She mooed, and I laughed, glancing around to get a good look at her udders.
“Did you have another baby?” I petted her shoulder. “Lucky for both of us. I’ve got somebody to prove wrong.”
“And who might that be?”
I jumped about a yard at the sound of Jake’s voice, whirling around like I was being held up. “Jesus,” I breathed, pressing a hand to my thundering heart. “What are you doing in here?”
And shirtless.
Indecent was what it was. His body was chiseled and solid as stone and absolutely indecent. His broad chest was streaked with dirt and flecks of hay, the same tiny flecks that caught in the valleys between his abdominal muscles and that V his hips made.
