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CHAPTER ONE
Megan bit back the tears while brushing her great-grandfather's gray hair from his sweaty forehead.
“Mommy, can we play outside?” Ava said.
Megan peered through the smudged bedroom window, eyeing the endless green fields before she spotted a pond tucked away behind some trees.
“You and Abby can play on this floor in the other rooms, sweetheart. We’ll go outside later.”
Her great-grandfather opened one eye. "You and your girls shouldn’t hang around an old dying man."
Megan shook her head in denial, the prickling tears finally leaving the corner of her eye.
"I've just found you and now you're..."
Unspoken heavy words hung between them like a fire blanket, smothering the erratic hope that they would have time.
"The farm is yours, Megan."
Megan dropped her hand from his forehead and reached for the towel next to her great-grandfather's bed.
"W-what? But... how? Why?"
Her great-grandfather’s frail hand covered his ashen face while a nasty cough escaped his lips. Megan watched the home health nurse walk out of the bedroom with the empty glass from his bedside table.
"If it weren’t for that stupid fight over twenty-three years ago, your mother wouldn’t have snuck away from this farm. But now it’s too late and she’ll never know how sorry I am."
Megan used the rumpled end of the towel to dry her tears. She'd wasted years begging her mother for answers about her family.After her mother passed away from cancer two weeks ago, her will revealed the information Megan desperately craved through the address of one Vic Carlisle, who turned out to be her great-grandfather and only remaining relative.
"You’d make me so proud if you’d keep the farm in the family."
She brought a hand through her white blonde hair in despair. "But I know nothing about farming!"
Vic's watery eyes glistened. "Keep that fire, sweetheart. You're gonna need it. The animals aren't the only ones testing you at first glancearound these parts."
"They call me The General back home," she said with half a smile, since she didn’t really have a home at the moment.
Megan earned the nickname ‘The General’ after single-handedly throwing out a drunk that kept trash-talking Ivanka in her first week on stage at the Vegas strip club where Megan worked. Megan shared a sisterhood with most of the dancers since she couldn’t dance to save her life and always worked behind the bar.
The girls at the Puffy Lips urged Megan to pack all her things and start over on a Texas farm. Her best friend, Ivanka, even said that she wouldn’t think twice if the opportunity would present itself for her to leave Vegas.
Vic held out his hand for the glass of water the nurse brought back from the bathroom.
"General, eh? Good. Rocket definitely needs a general."
“Rocket?”
“He’s a mighty fine stallion, although a bit… headstrong.”
The idea of handling a headstrong stallion made her head pound. Megan was a city girl through and through, but she had her two girls to think about and would just have to deal with this ‘Rocket’.
Megan took in the dusty ranch bedroom with the dark wooden furniture, the reddish stained carpet and the brown flowery curtains. Moving from town to town, Megan and her mother didn't have a whole lot.
Megan had slept on the couch in the two-bedroom apartment she shared with her mother and Ava and Abby.Moving into this farmhouse meant that her five-year-old twins would have their own room. Megan would finally have a bed to sleep in and also a room all to herself where she could shut the door, sit down on her own bed and just… breathe.
Megan was under no illusion, however, that she would catch her breath while running this farm. The great responsibility of honoring her great-grandfathers dying wish mixed with the idea of managing those guys in the fields, handling the animals and repairing this old house made her hesitant.
How did her great-grandfather figure she could take over and handle all of this?
