“So, we all agree?” Walker asked.
Everyone nodded.
“Yeah,” Court replied. “But how much of the money are you going to use?” he asked.
Walker frowned as he picked up the checkbook. “Why?”
Court shifted in his seat and glanced at Seth then back to their oldest brother. “Because we need some, too,” he replied.
Walker’s brow furrowed. “For what?”
Chapter Thirty-Four
‡
Rowan heard a truck pull into the driveway the next morning but couldn’t wash her hands from cleaning the kitchen fast enough to see who it was before there was a knock at the front door. Drying her hands, she peeled back the curtains to find Court standing on the front porch. Even through the windowpane it looked like the man was sporting a brand-new shiner. Not entirely surprising. Court could piss anybody off.
Next to him was a second, burly shape. Her heart knocked in her chest, thinking it was Seth. Certainly the large build and dark hair peeking out from underneath a white Stetson was familiar.
But he turned, and she saw it was Walker standing beside him. And then her heart knocked again for an entirely different reason.
“Rowan?” asked Dad from his chair.
Not knowing what to say about who their visitors were, she turned the knob slowly and eased open the door. In the gray morning light, they both looked serious, intense.
“Can we come in?” Court asked.
Rowan wanted to say no, for a whole host of reasons but she stepped aside anyway and let them pass into the entryway, then into the living room once she closed the door behind them.
“Daddy!” Willow cried and flung herself at Court’s legs.
The man bent and picked her up. He kissed her on the cheek, but he looked nervous, and Walker looked fierce, as always, Rowan supposed. The eldest Barlow’s face had the same sharp eyes, the same slightly downturned mouth that Rowan had come to associate with him. She braced herself for anything: damning accusations, threats, lectures, but the eldest Barlow brother only gave her a simple nod before he turned to her father.
“Mr. Archer,” said Walker in his deep-chested rumble.
Dad grunted. “Walker. Guess we’ve had ourselves a fair bit of trouble lately.”
Walker grimaced. “We have.”
Dad cast Rowan a furtive look then sighed. “I understand how things look, ’specially to folks in town.”
Rowan wanted to melt into the floorboards all over again remember the looks in church.
“And I’m not taking sides,” Dad continued. “Not badmouthing your brother there, to anyone, or silently. I’m not taking sides except to say that Rowan’s made up her mind about not marrying Court. I’m not going to try to change it for her, and frankly, it’s none of your business.”
Walker looked startled, caught entirely off guard. He glanced back and forth between Court and Rowan.
“We’re not here about that,” Court said quietly.
An awkward silence descended until Walker cleared his throat to break it. “We were thinking about your health problems. And about how difficult it will be to run this place for you now, under the circumstances.” He shifted a bit uncomfortably. “Given our…connection…to each other, we think we should sit down and discuss the future, of your ranch, and ours.”
Rowan’s jaw dropped.
“Realistically,” Walker continued, “keeping up with this place is going to be hard. Our dad was having trouble, there at the end,” Walker told them. “Could hardly mount his horse some days.”
Dad grunted. “Don’t have a horse,” he snapped, but she could see understanding in his eyes as he spoke. Dad may not have a horse, but lifting feed bags, filling troughs, shearing, lambing—it was more than enough for one able-bodied man. She could only imagine the way Dad had been struggling a bit more each year to get the chores done in his advancing age.
He didn’t want to talk about it, though, or even have it pointed out to him. That much was apparent. Walker must have sensed that he’d said as much as maybe should be said on the subject, because he switched gears. “We’ve all fallen on hard times, Mr. Archer. We’ve all had the same three winters in a row. I think if we band together, we can make the best use of what we have. Rowan can’t do it on her own, and it’ll just continue to get more difficult for you. We’re not offering to buy your spread. God knows we couldn’t afford to make a decent offer on the place, even if we wanted to. But we don’t want to buy it. We’re not interested in taking your land from you.”
Dad frowned. “So, what do you want?”
Walker took off his hat, revealing the same wavy, dark-brown hair that Seth had—all the Barlows, really. He cradled the Stetson carefully in his hands before he looked back up at Rowan’s father. “I think we should throw our lots in together.”
Dad’s brow furrowed. “How’s that?” he asked. “You’re cattle ranchers. I don’t know anything about cattle. And you don’t know anything about sheep.”
“We’d like to lease your land, Mr. Archer. All of it. We’d like to split up our herd, keep some of them here to give our grazing lands time to fully recover from this nasty weather. This cycle of freeze, drought, freeze, drought has just about killed off our hayfields entirely. We’ve got a new venture, too, to try and solve our feed problems.”
“Lease,” said Dad, leaning back in his chair.
“Yes, sir,” replied Walker quietly, because everyone in the room knew what meant.
“Archers have raised sheep on this land almost as long as you’ve been raising cattle.”
“But we’re not just cattle ranchers, sir,” Walker countered. “And you’re not just sheep ranchers. Not at our core. At our core we’re pioneers, going back more than a hundred years. And not just our ancestors, Mr. Archer. Us, too, even now. We change. We adapt. We do what we have to because the bottom line is, we love this land and we don’t want to leave it.”
Walker cleared his throat and glanced at Rowan, then back to Dad. “Your granddaughter, my niece, one day my own children—this is what we’re leaving to them. What matters is that there’s something to leave, sir.”
Everyone was silent then, waiting for the old man to consider it all. Even Rowan, not a rancher by trade these days, knew there would be no going back. Sure, they could cancel the agreement, kick the Barlows off their land if they changed their minds. But selling the flock, all of the sheep, along with the ceramic heaters and the other equipment would be a point of no return. To buy it all back in the event of a falling out between the families just wouldn’t be possible.
Finally, Dad said, “I need a moment to consider it. Alone.”
Despite his failing health and old age, it was as though an emperor had spoken. Both Walker and Court jumped to their feet and shuffled out the front door to wait in the cold without so much as a complaint between them.
Rowan shut the door firmly and turned to her father.
He sighed and finally collapsed back into his Barcalounger.
Rowan knew he’d been struggling to maintain the appearance of a strong, virile man in the presence of younger bucks. Now that he was relaxed, he seemed pale, more wrinkled, more tired than ever before.
This time it was Rowan who sighed. With no source of income, they’d have to sell the spread and move into town. And even if Rowan gave up nursing altogether, she wasn’t certain that she could take on the lion’s share of running the Archer farm for the rest of her life. All her earlier bravado about working two jobs and saving the place had been slowly collapsing under the weight of reality these last few weeks.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked quietly, startling Rowan out of her reverie.
“Me?” she asked. “It’s still your ranch, Dad.”
He nodded. “It is, but you’d have to stomach the Barlows. Far more than you probably ever thought. More’n you want to, I suspect. It’s one thing to see them at Easter, at Christmas, on Willow’s birthday. It’s another thing to see them every day.”
“I’ll do it,” Rowan vowed fiercely.
“Now,” Dad warned, “this isn’t something you just—”
“I’ll do anything for Willow,” Rowan declared. “Anything for her future. We don’t lose the land this way. Things…” A hard lump settled in her throat, and she swallowed it down. “Things’ll change.” Which was exactly what she didn’t want, but they were barely hanging on at this point. Change was inevitable, apparently.
“Rowan—”
“Court wants to do the right thing. Even if he’s hotheaded and not quite sure of himself. And…well…we are all family now, like you said, like it or not. Walker’s right, we’re connected. And we all want the same thing.”
Dad pursed his lips and peered at her closely. “Does the fact that you and Court have been spending so much time together these last few days have anything to do with you being okay with this? Are you…warming up to him?”
Rowan gaped at him. “No!” she hissed. “It’s not like that, Dad. Court and I are just trying to find a way to parent Willow together, to be on the same side. We are not getting closer. We are not back together!”