Page 1 of Desired

CHAPTER ONE

His father wanted him to manipulate a grieving stranger into handing over her own land, and Mason had every intention of doing no such thing.

He just hadn't said so yet.

Clay laid it out in the kitchen, which was a choice, because the kitchen at that hour had all four of his sons in it. Jace sat with a chair tipped back on two legs and a coffee he was treating like the greatest thing he had ever tasted. Owen stood at the counter with the paper folded to the cattle prices, frowning at the numbers the way he frowned at most things, like they could be talked into doing better. Knox was eating cold chili straight out of the pot at the stove, standing up, a thing their mother would have had his hide for, which was exactly why he only did it once she'd left for town. Mason had come in for coffee and gotten halfway to the pot before he understood he'd walked into the middle of something.

“Merritt place.” Clay said it by way of good morning, thumbing the mail. “Old man finally died, three weeks back. That little spread down on the seam, hundred and sixty acres wedged between us and your uncle's outfit, nothing worked on it in years. The deposit runs clean underneath the whole thing, and now it's sitting empty with a dead man's name on the deed.”

Jace's chair came down onto four legs.

“There's an heir,” Clay went on. “Granddaughter, back east, hasn't set foot in this county since she was knee-high. She's not going to want a falling-down ranch two thousand miles from her life. She'll want it gone, quick and painless, sold to whoever makes it painless.” He looked up, and only at Mason. “So you make it painless. Go out there and be neighborly. Get her easy with the idea of selling to the family next door before some Midland realtor talks her into an auction or your uncle John gets sentimental and turns the place into a shrine. You've got the face for it.” A beat. “Go woo her.”

The kitchen lit up.

“Woo her.” Jace said it like a present had landed in his lap. “He said woo. Tell me you all heard him say woo.”

“We heard him.” Knox, around a mouthful, not bothering to look up.

“Best morning of my life.” Jace aimed his coffee at Mason. “Dad's putting the famous Mason charm out in the field. Do we warn the poor woman, or is it kinder as a surprise?”

“Nobody's that lucky twice,” Knox said. “She'll take one look and ask for Owen.”

“She'll take one look and ask for the realtor,” Owen said, and he didn't say it like a joke. He set the paper down, and there was a line between his brows that had nothing to do with cattle prices. “Seems like a hell of a thing to do to somebody who just put her granddad in the ground.” He said it to no one in particular, and that was Owen all over, the one who said the quiet true thing once and then let it lie.

“It's called being good neighbors.” Clay had already moved past it. “And the rest of you have a fence down in the south section that won't mend itself. Go on.”

They went, because nobody sat in Clay Royston's kitchen once he'd said go. Jace still grinning, Knox wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, Owen last out the door with that line still cut between his brows.

Mason waited until the screen banged shut behind the last of them.

“I'm not wooing anyone,” he said.

Clay looked up.

“It's not a dirty word.”

“It is the way you mean it.” Mason set his coffee down untouched. “I'll go introduce myself, and I'll put that gate of hers back up, because it's hung off one hinge for a week and it needs doing and I'm a decent neighbor. If she asks me straight what the land's worth and who wants it, I'll tell her the truth, all of it, ours and Uncle John's both. That's the whole of what I'll do. I'm not going out there to work a woman who just buried her last living relative out of the one thing he had to leave her. You want that, you do it yourself.”

Clay studied him a moment. Behind him, out the window, the works sat humming in the flat morning light, the pump house and the holding ponds, the whole machine that had paid for this kitchen and every easy year Mason could remember. Then his father shrugged, the way he shrugged off anything that wouldn't cost him by sundown, and went back to the mail.

“Fix her gate, then. Woo her, don't woo her, recite the phone book at her for all I care, long as it ends with her name off that deed and ours on it before John gets there first.” He turned an envelope over in his hand. “Sentiment's a luxury, son. Costs more than the land, every single time. Go on.”

He'd known it was coming, and that was the part that sat worst.

Three weeks ago he'd been at the county desk waiting on a brand transfer when Nathan Greene's clerk came through and pulled the Merritt file, and a lawyer doesn't pull a dead man's deed for the hell of it. That same afternoon his father had come in from town wearing the look he wore when something had finally gone his way, and Mason had put the two together standing at the sink and said nothing, because there wasn't anything to say yet. Then he'd gone on not saying it for three weeks.

Yesterday he'd cracked. Drove the long way around to his uncle's place on a Sunday and stood on the gravel with Dean and said it low. He hasn't said anything to me directly, but I thought you should know.

A dead man, a piece of ground nobody had loved in years, his father already signing the deed in his head. He couldn't have said why that combination got under his skin. It just did.

What he could have done, standing right there in the kitchen, was go to the door and call the others back. Four words across the yard, the same four he'd spent on Clay. I'm not wooing anyone. Jace would have lost the thread by lunch, Owen's frown would have eased, the whole misread would have died before it drew a breath.

He didn't. Every one of his brothers had heard their father tell him to go woo the Merritt girl, and not one of them had stayed to hear him refuse, and it never once crossed Mason's mind that the gap between those two things was the kind of thing a man ought to close out loud. He had never been one to explain himself to a room. Saying a thing twice had always felt like asking to be believed, and Mason would sooner be misjudged in silence than caught angling for the room's good opinion.

So he let them drive off to the south section believing what they'd heard, and he got in his truck, and he went.

He'd think about that morning a good while, later. But that was later.