Page 1 of Oops, I Fell For The Ranch Hand Next Door

Chapter one

Jessie

My phone screen shows almost fifty missed calls.

Dr. Meekins’ name flashes across the display: my supervisor, my mentor, the woman who covered for me when I walked out of Mercy General’s ER mid-shift and didn’t look back. She’s probably calling this time to tell me the hospital administrator wants to file abandonment charges, or maybe she’s calling to ask if I’m okay. My thumb hovers over the power button. I silence the phone instead and toss it onto the passenger seat. It lands on top of three days’ worth of gas station receipts and a half-eaten granola bar from yesterday morning. Or maybe the morning before. Time’s gotten slippery.

The Honda’s air conditioning died somewhere in Oklahoma. I’ve been driving with the windows down ever since. The Texas heat pours through like something alive. It settles on my skin, thick and unrelenting, soaking into my clothes. The steering wheel is tacky under my palms. My lower back has started to seize from too many hours in the same position, but I can’t bring myself to care. Heat is just another sensation to catalog and ignore, like the hunger sitting hollow in my stomach or the way my shoulders have crept up toward my ears and won’t come down.

The road cuts through Texas Hill Country in lazy curves, flanked by twisted live oaks and rolling hills, vibrant green in the afternoon sun. Wildflowers bloom in dense patches along the roadside in purple and orange and red, bright and impossibly beautiful. I’ve been in fluorescent-lit hospital corridors for so long I’d forgotten what natural light does to the world, forgotten that color exists outside of bruises and blood.

The Granitehart Ranch sign appears out of nowhere, wrought-iron letters on weathered wood, the kind of craftsmanship that suggests someone cared enough to make it permanent. I’m past it before my brain registers what I’ve seen. Then there’s another sign, smaller, pointing down a dirt road: Wildflower Meadow - Ranch Access Road.

My hands turn the wheel before I’ve decided to stop.

The access road is narrow, rutted with tire tracks and lined with cedar trees that smell sharp and clean when the wind shifts. A quarter of a mile and it opens into a gravel parking area. There’s one other vehicle, a dusty pickup truck that looks like it’s been here a while, but no people. I kill the engine and sit in the sudden quiet. No monitors beeping. No overhead pages calling codes. No one screaming that their child is dying and why can’t I save him, why won’t his heart start again, what kind of nurse am I if I can’t do this one thing. There’s only the wind through the open windows. The creak of cooling metal. My own pulse in my ears.

I grab my phone out of habit, then open the door. The heat hits me first, dry and relentless, baking up from the gravel and pressing down from the cloudless sky. Then the scent of wildflowers and green growing things, mixed with dust and sun-warmed limestone. So different from antiseptic and recycled air that my throat tightens.

A worn path leads from the parking area toward the meadow. I follow it because stopping feels dangerous: If I stand still for too long I might have to acknowledge what I’ve done and that I have no idea what I’m doing now. The path curves through a stand of cedar and then opens up, and I stop breathing.

The meadow rolls out in front of me like a dream I didn’t know I’d been having. Bluebonnets carpet the ground in waves of color, so dense they blur together in the distance. Bright flowers blaze red between them, and scattered among the color are patches of yellow and white I can’t name. The flowers stretch as far as I can see, covering the gentle hills in a blanket of blooms that shifts and ripples when the wind moves through. I stand at the edge and try to remember the last time I looked at beauty just because it was there.

My feet carry me forward. The flowers brush against my scrub pants and release their scent with every step. They’re sweet and alive. I find a limestone outcropping maybe fifty yards in and sink down onto the sun-warmed stone. The rock is rough under my palms, solid in a way like nothing has felt in weeks. Months. Years, maybe.

I press my thumb into the center of my opposite palm, applying steady pressure. It’s a grounding technique I used to teach patients having panic attacks in the ER. Five seconds of pressure, then release. Breathe. Again. I taught it to dozens of people and can’t remember if it ever worked for me.

The meadow stretches out in front of me, impossibly beautiful, impossibly still. No one needs anything from me here. No one is dying. No alarms are screaming. I could sit and exist. That would be enough, except I don’t know how to do that anymore. I don’t know how to be a person who isn’t useful. The thought sits in my chest like a stone.

I try to cry. That’s what you’re supposed to do when everything falls apart, right? Release the pressure, let it escape. But my eyes stay dry. My throat stays tight. There’s nothing left to release. I gave it all away, shift after shift, patient after patient, until I was hollow.

The nineteen-year-old’s face flashes behind my eyes. Overdose, already showing the unmistakable physical signs. I spent the better part of an hour working on him. The attending called it at twelve, but I couldn’t stop. My hands kept moving, pumping his chest, counting the rhythm, because if I stopped then he was really gone and his mother was screaming and I was really the nurse who couldn’t save him. Another doctor pulled me off. I was in a daze for two hours before I just walked out.

The wind picks up, carrying the scent of wildflowers and cedar. It moves through the meadow in visible waves, bending the flowers in patterns that look almost choreographed.

“You with the ranch?”

The voice slices through the quiet.

My head whips around, heart slamming against my ribs, hands already rising in automatic apology. A man emerges from the tree line, maybe twenty feet away. He’s tall, broad through the shoulders, moving with an unhurried stride that suggests he has every right to be here and I don’t. My pulse kicks into overdrive. Heat floods my chest and throat.

“No, I’m sorry. I saw the sign. I’m not—I was just leaving.”

He stops a few feet away. Dark hair, dark eyes, something between mid-forties and mid-fifties. His face is all hard angles and sun-weathered skin with a stillness that makes me think he’s spent a lot of time waiting for things to come to him instead of chasing them. He wears a faded Henley stretched across his chest, jeans that have seen actual work, forearms marked with scars that catch the light when he crosses them. He’s looking at me like he can see straight through every defense I’ve spent my career building. My stomach drops.

“It’s not public access,” he says. His voice is low, rough-edged. It does things to my nervous system I don’t have the capacity to analyze. “But I won’t call you a trespasser.”

“Oh.” The word is small. I wrap my arms around myself, aware that I’m wearing the same pair of leggings as yesterday that smell like three days of car and sweat, that my hair is falling out of my ponytail in a halo of frizz, that I probably look like exactly what I am: someone two breaths away from falling apart. “Okay. I’ll—”

“When did you last eat?”

The question stops me mid-turn. “What?”

“Food.” He nods toward the parking area. “When?”

The granola bar. A drive-through. Gas station coffee, but real food? Maybe the day before yesterday? I stand. “I’m fine. I don’t—”

The world tilts sideways.