Page 1 of The Cowboy’s Reckoning

Chapter One

Jordan Matthews rested his hands on the horn of the slick fork saddle and hunched his back against the cold late spring wind. His gelding stretched his neck to the ground, taking advantage of the long stop to grab a mouthful of new grass, while Jordan studied the ranch nestled in the valley below.

It had taken well over an hour to ride high enough onto Turner Ridge to get a decent view of the Willow Creek Ranch, a property he’d studied multiple times on Google Earth. But seeing the land with his own eyes rather than through satellite imagery made it real. Or as real as an unreal situation could be.

He was still having trouble wrapping his brain around the fact that he owned the place, and try as he might, he couldn’t move past bitter feelings toward the man who’d blessed him with two hundred and fifty acres of prime Montana real estate. He wasn’t foolish enough to not take advantage of his windfall, but that didn’t keep him from seeing the inheritance as a slap in the face. A message he hadn’t needed to hear. You weren’t worth acknowledging while I was alive, but you can have a consolation prize now that I’m dead.

Jordan had to admit it was a pretty good consolation prize, but he would have rather not gone through life thinking that his father was a thief who had died of pneumonia while incarcerated. Imagine what it would have been like to know that his dad was a different kind of asshole. The kind who ran a Chicago business and refused to acknowledge his offspring rather than the kind who went to prison for stealing cattle.

Behind him the brush rustled. His horse jumped at the unexpected sound and Jordan nearly came out of the saddle. He regained his balance, then pulled his horse around to find a woman mounted on a big red roan staring at him from the opposite side of a gully.

“Hey,” he said, wanting her to know he was friend rather than foe, but a crash in the brush to her left brought her head around.

A cow, followed by a calf, bulled her way through the thick bushes at the edge of the creek. The woman shot another quick glance at him, then turned her horse and took off after the cow-calf pair, her long blond braid bouncing on her back as she disappeared into the trees.

He debated following, helping her guide the animals down the hill to wherever they needed to go, but decided against it. Even at a distance, there’d been no missing the tension in her expression as she’d studied him, which Jordan chalked up to unexpectedly finding a stranger in an area where she assumed she was alone. He was probably trespassing. His father knew a guy who knew Tom Baxter, the owner of the grazing land that pushed up against Jordan’s inherited ranch. The friend had assured him that even though Baxter was notorious for kicking people off his property, he wouldn’t mind Jordan taking a trail ride. Jordan decided to take the man at his word. He wanted a full view of his ranch before ridding himself of it. He had to admit to being impressed, but that didn’t sway his decision to sell.

He turned his horse toward the trail leading to his truck and trailer. In the distance, he could hear the crashing of the cow as the brush thickened, and when he reached a clearing, he stopped to watch the rider, now a good half mile below him. Instead of turning the cow and calf toward the country road as he’d expected, she hazed the pair along the fenceline toward the open gate near the creek. His gate.

Shit.

He let out a low breath as he realized that he’d probably spooked Lil McAllen, the ranch tenant, whom he was scheduled to meet tomorrow.

Normally, he wouldn’t have cared about first impressions, but this meeting decided his future in both the short and long term, and the last thing he needed was for her to see him as a creepy trespasser.

*

“A guy was spying on the place?” Lil McAllen followed her sister as she lugged the heavy saddle into the tack shed.

The stab of anxiety that had followed Meg’s stark announcement was dissipating, and now she wanted facts.

“I don’t know that he was spying spying. He was there for a long time, just staring at the place, like he was casing it or something.” Meg gave Lil a look. “The ranch isn’t that captivating.” She hefted the saddle onto the saddle tree and set the damp pad upside down on top of it to dry. “I watched him for maybe four or five minutes, waiting to see what he was up to, then my mare moved and he heard us. That was when the cow-calf pair decided to make an appearance and I took off after them.” She gave a careless shrug before pushing her blond braid over her shoulder. Lil’s hair was pulled into an identical braid, but her hair was dark, like their mother’s had been. She was the outlier of the three McAllen sisters in that regard.

“At least the cows are back where they belong, and Baxter didn’t call to bitch at us,” Meg said.

That was a plus. Their neighbor to the north was finicky about who or what was on his grazing land. Yesterday evening the cows had breached the fence for the second time in as many weeks and Lil and Meg, with the help of their part-time ranch hand, aka a teenage neighbor kid, had managed to find all but one pair before it grew too dark to ride. Today Meg rode Turner Ridge alone looking for the missing cow while Lil waited for a client to drop off her horse for a two-week tune-up.

“Freaking Shane,” Meg said, more to herself than to Lil, who’d wondered if her sister was going to put a name to her reaction. “I know it’s not him,” she added with a quick glance at Lil before hanging her bridle, “but I hate jumping at shadows.” She let out an exasperated breath. “Whoever that guy on the ridge was, he must have thought I was nuts.”

“Big deal.” Lil was a proponent of the better-safe-than-sorry approach to life. “I’ll help you fix the fence this afternoon, after I evaluate the mare,” she said as they left the shed.

Normally, they took turns with fence repairs, but having a guy possibly watching the place changed things.

Meg latched the door and turned to Lil. “I can handle it.”

“You’re sure?”

Meg lifted her chin. “This has nothing to do with Shane. I overreacted.”

Maybe so, but Lil had a hard time tamping down the need to protect her sister, even when her sister didn’t want to be protected. “Meg—”

“He’s in Alaska.”

Lil’s mouth tightened. “As far as we know.”

“Trust me,” Meg said grimly. “He is. I’ve become very good at cyberstalking.” She pulled in a breath, squaring her shoulders. “I’ll see to the goats, then the fence.”

As her sister walked away, Lil glanced up at Turner Ridge. The man Meg saw probably had a very good reason for being there. He could be a new cowboy working for the herd district. That said, there were no cattle on Turner Ridge this time of year, so there wasn’t much reason for a cowboy to be on the hill.