Page 13 of Desired

"Here she is," Pearl announced, to both of them at once, as though she'd arranged the whole morning, which, Lauren would think later, she may as well have. "You two are drinking the same coffee. Sit."

The woman was somewhere in her late twenties, light brown hair up off her neck, jeans, a canvas jacket, and she looked at Pearl, and then at Lauren, and then at the booth, with the expression of a person weighing the cost of resisting.

"She does this," the woman said. "There's no fighting it. Lara Baxter." She put her hand out. "For a few more weeks, anyway, then there's paperwork. I'm marrying Dean Royston."

"The Lara." Lauren shook it. "Marge came out of the kitchen for you. I was told that's the local knighthood."

"She came out for you too. I heard about it by suppertime the same day, so let that tell you what you're living in now." Lara slid into the other side of the booth, and Pearl poured her a coffee she hadn't asked for either and withdrew to the register at a range that was technically out of earshot and practically nothing of the kind. "I was coming out to your place this afternoon anyway. There's a casserole in my truck with your name on it. Helen's chicken and rice. Helen keeps house at the Royston place and doesn't believe a woman living alone remembers to eat. Fight her on it and lose, that's my advice."

"Why does everyone here feed me?"

"It's how they claim you. I put on six pounds my first month and I've made my peace." Lara wrapped both hands around the mug, and looked at her over it, friendly and level and missing nothing. "So. You're the one Mason Royston's been rebuilding a ranch for?"

"He fixed a pump."

"He put a four-inch pump down your well, braced your windmill, and drew your fence line up singing, and Earl's told everybody what went through on his ticket, twice, and you and I both just watched Pearl move to the register so she could hear us better." Lara said all of it without a shred of judgment, the flat pleasant tone of a woman reading numbers off a page. "I'm not asking anything. I'm telling you the water level. I got here in September and nobody told me the water level, and I've decided to be the person for you that nobody was for me."

Lauren looked at her, and liked her, all at once and against her whole policy.

"In that case," she said, "can I ask you the thing I can't ask anybody named Royston?"

"That's the spirit."

"What am I in the middle of? Because everybody in this room said the word Merritt like it had a file attached, and Mason talks about his father's place and his uncle's place like a man walking between two fences, and nobody will draw me the map."

"That's because they've all lived on the map their whole lives. Okay." Lara set the mug down and dusted her hands, a woman getting down to figures. "Two brothers. John and Clay. John's the older one, Dean's father, my nearly father-in-law. Cattle all the way down, six generations of it, and he had a stroke in September, so Dean runs it now. That's your east fence, more or less. Clay's the younger one. He married a Wainwright, which out here is roughly marrying a bank, and their place runs cattle on top and lithium underneath. Brine ponds, a pump house, trucks. Real money, the kind that hums at night."

"That's Mason's father?"

"That's Mason's father. And the two of them, John and Clay, have been at odds thirty years, give or take. Money, land, things nobody says at the table. About two years back they quit speaking altogether. They'll share a fence line and a funeral and that's the size of it. I quit trying to audit it, and I audit everything, so that should tell you the condition of the books." She picked the mug back up. "The cousins all get along, which nobody out here finds as strange as I do. There are ten of them. Dean's the oldest of five, then Brody, he works for Burchall, some big mining outfit, overseas somewhere, nobody's seen him in years. Then Chase, Jett, and Remi, who you'll meet Saturday, and you'll like her, everybody does. Clay's side is Jace, Owen, Mason, Knox, Ainsley. There'll be a quiz."

"I've met Owen. And Knox, at the feed store."

"Then you're ahead of where I was at a month." Lara glanced out the window, at the wide brown nothing past the parking lot, and back. "And your hundred and sixty acres sits square between the two of them. You know that part, right? You're the hallway between two houses that don't visit."

Pearl arrived to refill two cups that didn't need it, slowly, and departed.

"She's going to do that every time it gets good," Lara said. "Pace yourself accordingly."

Lauren turned her mug a slow circle on the table. Something old in her had sat up at the hallway line and was looking around, and she let it look, because it always got a vote, and then she asked her question anyway.

"And you? Boston to a ranch office. How does that go?"

"I answered an ad." Lara said it in the flat tone of an auditor confessing an error she'd decided to stand behind. "Office assistant, room included. John had his stroke my first week, and I stayed, and somewhere between the filing and the hospital I went and fell for the boss. You're allowed to laugh. My sister's been doing it since October, and she's flying in at Thanksgiving to do it in person."

"I'm not laughing." She wasn't. There was something in the shape of it that sat close to home, a woman two thousand miles off her own map, standing on land she hadn't planned on. "You're the first person since I crossed the state line who hasn't already known everything about me."

"Give it till the picnic." Lara checked her watch without urgency. "Which reminds me. The picnic. The women are collecting you at ten, me and Elena, she's the town doctor and my old landlady, probably Remi. It got settled at this counter without either of us present, so you can skip the part where you fight it."

"I was going to paint."

"I said that once. About a dance," Lara said, and the bell over the door went, and the counter sat up, and Lauren knew before she turned around, by nothing she could have testified to, exactly whose boots those were on Pearl's floor.

Mason had his hat off before the door shut behind him, and he was three strides in, aimed at the counter and whatever he'd come for, when he saw her, and stopped, because the room had rearranged itself around one booth.

"Well," he said.

"We're talking about you," Lara said pleasantly.