Page 8 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

Angie laughed, a low, honest sound. Then she stood and scanned the nearby pasture, where some dwarf goats were headbutting the hell out of a battered plastic tub.

She pointed. “Are those the mini goats?”

“Yes, but if you say ‘mini’ around Dean, he’ll start reciting breed histories, so… fair warning.”

“Noted.” She grinned. “Does Dean work with the animals?”

“Yes and no. We all do a little bit of everything. He helps out if we are short-staffed or if he gets a wild hair, but his official role is CFO. He went to Princeton and did his undergrad work in business management and hospitality.”

“What about you? What’s your official role?” she asked.

People thought that just because our name was on the gate, my brothers and I were handed our positions. The truth is that we’ve worked every miserable job there is here, from mucking stalls to painting cabins to unclogging toilets to serving as unwilling child wranglers at the petting zoo. But now we all hold official titles in the company. “I’m the CEO, Dean is the CFO, Damon is the COO and Dylan is the G.M. We all work really hard to hold up the standard my mom and dad have set.”

We moved on to the next enclosure, which was a fenced field with a pair of bored-looking hooved creatures, one zebra-striped and the other dun. “That’s Zonk and Luna,” I said. “Zonk is half-zebra, half-donkey. Mom liberated him from a petting zoo that wasn’t treating him well. She thought he looked sad.”

“Liberated him? Like stole him?” she asked by way of clarification.

“We don’t ask,” I told her. “I learned the term plausible deniability when I was eight thanks to my mom and her rescues.”

She broke into a man’s backyard who had dogs chained up to a tree with no food and water to “liberate” them. When the police showed up and started asking me questions, I told them I didn’t know where we got the dogs from. It was true, I hadn’t. My mom told me later. When I asked why she hadn’t told me so I could have helped her, she explained plausible deniability.

“Your mom sounds like a legend.”

I nodded. “She is.”

The tour continued, past the pig pen and the sheep fold, where Angie spent a long minute telling a particularly majestic ram that he was, in her words, “an absolute king.” Then we hit the cattle paddock, where the longhorns grazed with slow, heavy dignity, and Angie took in the massive, spiraling horns with something close to awe.

“They’re like dinosaurs,” she said.

“They’re jerks,” I corrected.

Her eyes twinkled with delight. “Even better.”

While we watched, one of the calves ambled up to the fence, eyes enormous and ears on high alert. Angie stuck her hand through the mesh and let the calf sniff her fingers. “Do they all have names?”

“Yep, that’s Cowlvin. Mom names every animal on the property. Even the chickens.”

She smiled, but there was a softness to it now. “That’s sweet.”

“She believes every living creature deserves to feel seen and respected. This is her way of doing that.”

Angie nodded, I could tell she was genuinely impressed.

We left the animals and cut back toward the main house, shoes dusted with hay and dirt. She paused at the vineyard’s edge and looked back over the patchwork of fields and barns, the silvered underside of the bay beyond, and the hills cradling the whole crazy operation.

“I don’t think I’d ever get tired of this view,” she breathed in awe.

We walked through the first two rows of grapevines—the pinot noir block—while I filled in the basic story of the ranch. Four generations, starting with my great-great-grandfather ran longhorns up and down the coast until the price of beef collapsed. The family pivoted to a working dude ranch for city people looking to cosplay as cowboys for a weekend. My grandfather saw that was doing well and wanted to expand. So he did. The problem was, he was smack dab in the middle of expansion/renovations when he passed away from a brain aneurysm. Then it was my dad’s turn to take hold of the reins. Sadly, he nearly ran the entire business into the ground. He’s great at big ideas, not so much day-to-day tasks that need to be done. Thankfully, my mom saved it by transforming the business into the vineyard/luxury resort/animal refuge it was now.

Angie listened, shifting her gaze from row to row. Her eyes widened when she caught sight of a wild turkey waddling through the cover crop between vines.

“So you grew up here? On all of this?”

“I did.”

“And now you work here every day, with your brothers?”

“I do.”