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“Damn that Liv Fairchild,” he muttered. Billy slammed the barn door shut behind him, and stomped to the house. She wasn’t Liv Fairchild anymore, now she was Liv Rice, but that didn’t change how mad he was at her.
When she came to him and asked whether he wanted to buy her ranch, the answer was obvious. Of course he did. His family’s ranch bordered hers, and they’d wanted to buy this land since he was a boy. His family didn’t begrudge Liv’s—the Pattersons had been leasing grazing rights since they bought the place. And her house, well, it was one of the nicest houses he’d ever seen.
She named a fair price, and he certainly could afford it. It was the side deal she made with him that was the problem. Liv had been boarding horses for years, and she didn’t want to let the families down who counted on her, so she made Billy promise to keep the boarding stables open.
How he’d do that, was beyond him. He traveled as a saddle bronc rider on the rodeo circuit, and sometimes he was away for two or three weeks at a time.
He told Liv’s daughter, Renie, she could keep her horse there for as long as she wanted. She had four years of school to finish before she got her degree and became a large animal vet. He wouldn’t have asked her to move Pooh, the fourteen-year-old mare she’d had since she was ten. But taking care of her horse, along with all the others, wasn’t something he signed up for.
Liv told him to hire somebody. Plenty of ranch hands worked Patterson Ranch, his parents’ place, but he doubted a job this small would entice anyone.
He was almost years old, and this was the first time he had a place of his own. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to before, he just hadn’t had any good reason. He was on the road so much, and when he was home, his parents’ place was big enough. His room was on the lowest floor of their tri-level house, and he had plenty of privacy, not that he’d ever taken advantage of it.
“You need to move out Billy,” Renie said to him. “You kinda seem like a loser, still living with your parents.”
He knocked her into the water trough when she’d said it. He thought that might teach her, pain in the ass that she was.
“You should hire Blythe,” she said, trying to help him come up with a solution for the stables.
“Blythe who?”
“Blythe Cochran.” Paige and Mark Cochran were her mother’s best friends. She and Blythe had been friends since they were five years old.
“Why would I hire her?”
“Because she’s home. She quit school and doesn’t have anything to do.”
That didn’t sound like the best reason he’d ever heard to hire somebody. The fact that she quit school didn’t fill him with confidence, either. The last thing he needed was to get a phone call while he was out on the road, telling him she was quitting. What the hell would he do then?
“Why’d she quit?”
“She decided she didn’t want to be a nurse. You shouldn’t look down your nose at her Billy. I quit school too.”
“You did? Since when?”
“I quit Dartmouth.”
“You transferred, you didn’t quit.”
“I quit the medical program.”
“You changed your major to vet medicine, because you decided you’d make a crappy people doc. That isn’t quitting, Renie.”
“Since when are you such an expert on college?”
Billy shook his head. He might not know a lot about college, but he did know a lot about her.
Renie switched fields from biomedical to veterinary medicine last year, in her junior year, and had transferred to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, a two-hour drive from the ranch. He told her she could stay at the house as much as she wanted. It was the house she grew up in, and with him away so often, they’d almost never see each other.
“What about when you bring girls home?” she asked.
“What girls?”
That elicited another “
loser” comment out of her. He supposed she was right. Plenty of girls would be happy to come home with him, even if only for a night. He wasn’t bragging, it was the nature of being a bronc rider, saddle, or otherwise. Having a one-night stand on the road was one thing—it was different at home.
“You’re a hot guy, Billy.”
