Page 2 of Desired

The Merritt place sat down on the seam, that low strip of in-between country a few miles out of Soluno where his father's land ran out and his uncle's began, two big West Texas outfits shouldering up against a hundred and sixty acres of forgotten in the middle. Mason took the ranch road down with the windows open and the ‘woo her’ comment still rattling around his brain, and he'd have liked to be more offended by it than he was.

Here was the part Jace had right, and it was the worst of it. The charm was real, and it had always come easy, and it had never once cost Mason a thing. Women liked him. They'd liked him since before he had any idea what to do about it, and somewhere along the line that had quit being a prize and turned into a sort of joke he was in on by himself. He could walk into Harvey's on a Saturday and walk out with a number he wouldn't call, and he'd done it, plenty, and liked the women just fine, liked their laughs and their stories and the warm easy run of a few weeks. He'd just never felt the other thing. The thing that made him want to quit looking.

He was thirty-one. He'd watched it land on people he knew like weather coming over the basin, sudden and total and not asking anybody's leave. Watched it land on Dean of all people this past while, his hardcase cousin who'd buried himself for four years and then gotten knocked flat by an accountant out of Boston and walked around since like a man hit by a truck who couldn't stop thanking it. Mason had stood at the edge of all that happiness and felt, underneath the glad-for-him, the smallest cold draft of a question he never said out loud to anybody. Where's mine? What if it doesn't come? What kind of man gets to thirty-one with every easy thing in the world and not the one that matters.

He'd about made his peace with it. Decided it was fine. Some men got the lightning and some men got the long good steady life, and a long good steady life was nothing to cry over, and he'd take it and be grateful.

He turned in at the cattle guard, and the place spread out in front of him exactly as bad as he'd figured from the highway.

The house needed paint it hadn't seen in a decade and a roof it would need before spring. The garden was a square of dead stalks. A windmill stood crooked over a stock tank gone to scum, and the barn doors hung open on the dark, and the whole place had the look of a thing that had been waiting a long time for somebody to either come back to it or come bury it for good.

He let the truck slow and got his face ready and his speech ready, short and plain and honest, the one that ended with him handing her his number and going home. Some city woman in the wrong boots, he figured, out here to flip a dead man's house and be gone by Christmas, the kind who'd take the first offer that crossed the table and never look back, and good luck to her.

He'd be polite. He'd hang her gate. He'd be home by dark.

Then he saw her, and every word of it went straight out of his head.

She was down at the front gate, the one he'd watched hang off its top hinge from the road for a solid week, and she had both arms wrapped around the thing and her whole weight set against it, trying to heave it back onto the pin by main force and losing the war handily. She was swearing at it. A low, steady, inventive stream of swearing, genuinely some of the better cursing Mason had heard in a good while, the kind that took commitment, and her hair was down and loose and everywhere, long and the color of wheat gone gold in the sun, sticking to her mouth where she kept blowing it out of her face and it kept coming back.

The gate won. It dropped off the pin with a screech of tired iron and came down across her foot, and she said a word that would have gotten her marched straight out of the Soluno Baptist congregation, and Mason, sitting there in his idling truck with both hands on the wheel like a fool, felt the corner of his mouth go before he could do a thing about it.

Then he noticed the shirt.

It was a man's flannel work shirt, three sizes too big on her, the sleeves shoved up off her forearms and the tails hanging near to her knees, soft and washed thin and worn through at one elbow. A working man's shirt, gone to nothing over a lot of years, and it was not hers, and there was only one man it could have belonged to out here, and that man was three weeks in the ground.

She'd put on her dead grandfather's shirt to go fight his broken gate.

It went through Mason quiet and went deep, and the grin left him with it. He sat another second looking at a woman he'd never met wearing a dead man's clothes to do a dead man's chores on a dead man's place, and he thought about the speech in his pocket and the deed already drawn up in his father's head, and he was, all at once, ashamed of every Royston who'd said the word land in that kitchen, himself first for driving out here at all.

He killed the engine and got out. She didn't hear him. She was too busy informing the gate, with feeling, of everything that was wrong with it and its mother.

“You're losing,” Mason said.

She came around so fast her hair whipped across her face, one hand flying up to shove it back, the other still gripping the gate like she might swing it at him, and Mason got his first clean look at her.

And the thing he'd decided wasn't ever coming for him came.

It didn't ask and it didn't ease in. It dropped on him the way the gate had dropped on her, all at once and with weight, low in the gut and certain as sundown, a pull so total and so unfamiliar that for one second he could not honestly have said his own name. Thirty-one years of liking women just fine, and not a single one of them had ever once done this to him, and here it was, finally, found him standing in the dead grass of a ruined yard, set off by a furious woman in another man's shirt.

Of course it was. Of course this was how it would find him. He'd have laughed if he could have gotten the breath.

She was a wreck. There was dirt down one cheek and rust on both hands, and she was breathing hard and braced like she'd already decided he was one more thing out here that was going to need fighting. And she had the palest blue eyes Mason had ever seen, startling in all that sun-warm, freckled skin, fixed on him like a dare.

“Can I help you?” she said, in a voice that made it real clear she expected the answer to be no, and would prefer it.

Mason stood there in the dead grass of a dead man's yard, the speech gone, the number gone, the easy be-home-by-dark version of the whole afternoon gone with it, and understood with a sinking, lit-up certainty that he was in a good deal more trouble than one leaning gate.

“Yeah,” he said. “Reckon you can.”

CHAPTER TWO

By her ninth day on her grandfather's ranch, Lauren Merritt had a list of things she couldn't fix as long as her arm, and she'd picked a fight with the only one that could fight back: the front gate.

The list began at the cattle guard, the day she rattled across it in a rental loaded with everything she owned and the muffler came loose on the far side, which she decided to take as a welcome. It grew all the way up the drive. The house needed paint outside and a roof before spring. The garden out front was a square of dead stalks. A windmill leaned over a stock tank gone green and thick and the porch had a loose step that grabbed her heel on the way up like it was checking her ID. She stood on that porch with her keys in her hand and her whole life in a rental behind her and understood, clearly and all at once, that she had inherited something like a language nobody speaks anymore.

She'd driven two days to get here and spent most of the second one watching the country flatten and empty like somebody was pouring it off the edge of the world. Denver kept its sky where you could manage it, propped up behind the mountains, a thing you checked in the morning like a forecast. Out here there weren't any mountains and nobody had told the sky, so it came all the way down to the ground on every side of her, enormous and dry and rinsed to bone at the edges, and the wind moved through the brown grass like it had somewhere better to be. The land didn’t care that she'd come. That was the first thing she liked about it.

The inside of the house was worse than the outside, because the inside remembered her.