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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. Knox was eating cold chilli 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 with their sister Ainsley. 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 the one drives past it. 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 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 seen it coming.

Three weeks earlier he'd watched Nathan Greene's girl pull the Merritt paperwork from the county office and caught the look on his father's face before Clay had said a word. It had bothered him enough that Sunday he'd driven over to his uncle John's place and warned Dean.

"He hasn't said anything to me yet, but I thought you should know."

Why it bothered him, he couldn't have explained. Maybe because a man wasn't cold in the ground a month before somebody else was already measuring his land.

What he didn't do was call his brothers back.

"I'm not wooing anyone."

Four words and the whole thing would've died right there.

Instead, Jace drove off thinking he'd volunteered for the job, Owen probably wondering what the hell he was doing, and Mason let them.

He'd never been a man who explained himself twice.

So he got in his truck and headed for the Merritt place.

Later, he'd think about that decision more than once.