The Cowboy Who Lost His Ranch to a Size 20 City Girl novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Half a Ranch
At the reading of her aunt's will, Nadia learns she owns half a Montana ranch, and the furious cowboy who expected it catches her by the hips and does not let go.
The lawyer read my aunt's will in a room that smelled like coffee and old boots.
I had driven fourteen hundred miles for it.
I sat in a plastic chair with my purse on my knees, wearing the black dress I'd bought for funerals.
I had missed her funeral by three weeks, because nobody had known where to find me.
Then the door banged open and the hottest man I had ever seen walked in late.
He had to duck under the frame.
He was six foot four, maybe more, with sun-bleached hair so pale it looked white under the cream hat he took off and held against his thigh.
His jaw was long and dusted with stubble, and his eyes were a light gray that went straight through me.
His shirt was worn thin across his shoulders.
His hands were huge, and the palms were crossed with old rope scars.
He looked at the lawyer, and then he looked at me.
He didn't look at my face first.
His eyes went down my dress, over my chest and my hips, and slowly back up.
I'm a size 20, and I know what it looks like when a man is measuring me.
This was not that.
This was a man who liked what he saw and did not hide it.
"Ma'am," he said. His voice was low and rough.
Then his jaw tightened.
"Jace Ransom," he told the lawyer. "Let's get this over with."
He sat by the window with his boots stretched out into the aisle.
The lawyer cleared his throat and started to read.
My aunt Lottie had left me a plain farmhouse, a bank account with eleven thousand dollars, and her half of Ransom Fork Ranch.
I heard the word half and my brain stopped.
"Charlotte Haddad's half," the lawyer read, "to her niece Nadia Haddad, who is going to be the best thing that ever happened to this ranch."
I'd met Lottie three times.
She sent me a postcard and a hundred dollars every birthday.
The chair by the window scraped.
"That's a mistake," Jace said.
"It is not," said the lawyer.
"Three thousand two hundred acres, and she gives half to a woman who's never held a halter."
"I've held a lot of banquet trays," I said.
I don't know why I said it.
He turned his head and looked straight at me again, and this time it wasn't a stare.
It was a slow, hungry sweep that stopped at my mouth.
My face went hot.
"Hell," he said quietly, to himself.
The lawyer read the last clause.
Neither half could be sold to anyone but the other owner.
Not to a rancher, not to a company, not to a bank.
Jace could buy me out one day, if I ever wanted to sell, and I could buy him out.
Nobody else could touch it.
"Lottie wanted you two to talk," the lawyer said, and he looked very tired.
"We're talking," Jace said. "Name your number, Ms. Haddad."
I stood up, because I didn't want to be sitting when I said no.
My heel caught the leg of the chair.
I pitched sideways.
He was across the room before I finished falling.
His hands closed on my hips, both of them, hot through the thin dress.
My whole body stopped, because it was the first time in months a man had touched me without hesitating.
He didn't loosen his grip.
His thumbs pressed into the soft curve above my hip bones, and I felt the heat of him down the front of me.
He smelled like leather and cut grass.
"Careful," he said.
His voice had dropped.
"Let go," I said, and it came out way too breathy.
He held on for another moment, then let go slowly, with his hands sliding off.
"Four million," he said. "Cash. By Friday."
"No."
His eyebrows went up.
"Five."
"I just got here," I said. "I haven't even seen the house."
"It's not a house you'll like."
"Mr. Ransom, you haven't asked a single thing about what I like."
His mouth moved, almost a smile, and I saw his front tooth had a small chip in it.
It was a terrible time to notice how much I wanted to touch that tooth.
"I'll see the house," I told the lawyer, and picked up my purse.
Behind me I heard Jace say something low and rough that sounded like a prayer and a curse at once.
I drove out of Elk Bend with black clouds piling up over the mountains.
The road to the ranch was gravel, then dirt, then two ruts through yellow grass.
Lottie's farmhouse stood alone at the end of it, white with a green roof, a porch wrapped around three sides.
There was already a dusty pickup parked in front.
The first drops hit my windshield as I climbed out.
The front door wasn't locked.
I walked down a hall of coats and boots into a big kitchen with a long pine table.
A man was standing at the sink with his back to me.
He was shirtless, with a towel around his neck, and water was running down his spine.
It was the same white-blond hair, the same wide shoulders, crossed with sunburn lines and old scars.
He turned around.
It was Jace Ransom, and he didn't even try to cover up.
"Welcome home, half-owner," he said.
Behind me thunder cracked over the roof, and the lights went out.
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