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“He did?”
“Yup. Wanted to modernize the stables like he did the barn. Fix up his house so it ran on the power of the Austin sun. Heck, he was even thinkin’ of a way to keep the fields safe from fire.”
“Those are good ideas.” Her eyes burned and her throat constricted.
She and her dad had conjured up all those ideas together over steak and whiskey dinners on her balcony. To her, they’d been foregone conclusions he should’ve already put into place. Conclusions that could have saved this place from becoming the wasteland it was. “Why didn’t he ask for my help?”
“Can’t answer that. He called OM a couple times, but they were backordered. My guess? He didn’t wanna burden you. You have quite the life in San Antonio.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Carl was a goofball, but no one loved this lifestyle more than him. He’d have done it all if fate’d seen to give him a little more time.”
Maggie let that seep into her skin as she said bye to Mitch and thanked him again for the food. What he’d said about her father’s love of ranching made sense—they shared that love even if they both agreed she’d be better off putting her talents to use helping the ranching community and not just a single ranch.
“This place isn’t for you, MagPie. It’s hard living, tough to break even, and awful lonely,” her dad had said just after graduation. A year to the date after Bennett broke her heart and left Deer Creek.
“But I love it here, Dad. The stars, the land, the trails…”
He’d looked wistful, his gaze focused on something she wasn’t privy to. “Yeah, but working like this has a way of stealing the love right out from under ya. Trust me. You’ve got such incredible talent for building and that would be a shame to waste. The ranch’ll always be here, but the wide world is ready for you now.”
When he’d told her about seeing Bennett with the woman from the rodeo, she’d never looked back. It was Houston for school and San Antonio ever since. School, work, then more work until feelings like the guilt tickling her throat stayed away. She hadn’t come back to Deer Creek with any regrets, but one or two were wriggling past her defenses.
What if she’d ignored her dad’s lament that he needed a break from the ranch and instead she’d come back to visit here at the holidays? She could have helped knock out her father’s vision for the ranch. Could have put their plans to action before it looked, well, like this.
But then, would she have seen Bennett? Would they have picked up where they left off?
No. How could they have? Another regret slipped in, but she pushed it under the rest of them. That wouldn’t do, the what-if game. Even if her life was a strung together list of what-ifs at the moment.
There was no way she could have simply said “yes!” to his proposal back then—they were too young, their vision too marred by youth and its infallibilities. Even if he hadn’t taken up with the rodeo woman, Bennett had been an eighteen-year-old kid; she’d been only seventeen. Thinking they could slip back into that simple time was not only impossible it was unhealthy—she didn’t want to go back to the girl she was back then any more than he wanted to be that boy. They’d moved on, and painful as it was, it was also good.
She sighed and cracked her knuckles.
Time to call it a day. She’d barely made a dent in the chores she needed to accomplish and hadn’t even thought to swing by the bank, but there was always tomorrow. That much she remembered about being on a ranch. What wasn’t done would keep.
She washed her face, brushed her teeth, then skipped over her old room and went straight to her father’s. The stroke had claimed him in the middle of the day in the north field, according to the coroner, but she felt that loss in every nook and cranny of the house. Except his room. It was the one place on the ranch she could still feel him wrapped around her.
She crawled into his bed. How on earth was she going to do this all over again tomorrow? Her plan echoed in her mind. Fix up what her dad let go when he got sick, list the property, sell her birthright, and hightail it back to San Antonio. She added something that had been on her mind since talking to Mitch—check out the canyon to see about putting in the fire suppression system she and her dad had designed. It’d worked well enough on the prototype she installed on a ranch outside Houston.
Good idea, Dad. I’ll make it happen.
After today, it was obvious, though. There was no way anything on that list was happening without help. It was time to look for reinforcements.
As she fell asleep, she imagined one of those reinforcements as a tall, chiseled cowboy with a smile that made her feel like she was sixteen all over again. The smile on her face and steady beat of her heart led her through dreams where it had all worked out for her and Bennett.
*
The next morning, Maggie awoke to the sound of pounding on the front door, and any hint of her slumber-induced happily ever after vanished. The knocking continued and the creak in the old wood door was unmistakable. If whoever was making all that racket didn’t stop, the thing was going to break in half. She swung her feet out of bed and noticed two things immediately.
Her father’s house was an icebox, for one. Topping the growing to-do list today was going to be figuring out the furnace. And while she was at it, she could empty the closet the furnace was in and start renovations there. Maybe if she had time, she’d make her way to the kitchen.
Second, the creak in her bones and muscles made her feel as old as her father’s aging door. And about as ready to give. Good god, it’d been a while since she’d done so much manual labor, and her body sure was pissed at her for it.
“I’m coming!” Sheesh. Wasn’t patience supposed to be a virtue in small towns?
She cracked her back and donned the robe hanging on the back of her father’s door. It still smelled like him—campfire smoke and Werther’s candies. Inhaling deeply, she opened the front door.
What she noticed first was the frigidity of a Texas spring morning—certainly not for the faint of heart. But then she looked around.
