Mustang River was home to one of the only remaining wild mustang herds in the state of Oregon.
The Painted Ridge herd was a controversy. The state Bureau of Land Management was in charge of managing all the wild mustang herds, and the total number in the state wasn’t meant to exceed a certain amount before the excess population was rounded up. In reality, the wild horse population was often double the size it was supposed to stay at, and the Painted Ridge herd had grown in the past few years, with several smaller herds banding together to create a larger, fifty-horse herd.
A whole lot of ranchers wanted them to be rounded up so they didn’t have to compete with them for resources. Not Cody.
When he was a kid, there’d been maybe ten horses in a small band around the area. He liked watching them thrive.
Not just because they were a great tourist draw, but because he related to them in some ways. Which he would never admit to anybody under torture or even threat of death, but he felt a kinship to them.
To turn scarcity into a life of freedom, and to be constantly at odds with the people who wanted to turn you into something tame, to make themselves more at ease.
“As long as it’s done. The bears, get those done at yourleisure. They’re just going in the back. When people drive into the parking lot, I want them to see the big mustang.”
“I could’ve done it,” Lila said.
Another way in which they were both alike. Wood carving as a hobby.
Though Lila liked to do small things. Little trinkets, and they were cute, but they were nothing like what Nolan did. He wasn’t being mean or biased just because she was his sister or anything and he was minimizing her accomplishments. Even she would have to admit she was a tinkerer, and Nolan was a master.
But Lila was a master at a great many other things.
“I’ll challenge you to a carve off,” Nolan said.
“Oh, Nolan, that just feels like an invitation to carve off –”
“One big happy family,” Walker said. “Just one big happy family as always. So excited to start this new venture with you guys. Can’t wait for you to take this show on the road, maybe in front of our guests.”
Walker pushed past the bickering duo and grabbed a plate. “I’d like to eat.”
“Same,” Cody said gruffly.
He took his plate and a bottle of beer and went and sat down at the table.
Everybody else filed in, plates loaded with hamburgers and potato chips. Nolan had a can of Diet Coke, and Lila had water. Walker had a Coke in one hand and a beer in the other. Which was just like Walker, honestly. Why choose, after all? He liked excess.
Cody couldn’t help but feel proud as they sat there around the table, and that was another thing that he wouldn’t admit under threat of anything less severe than death or the loss of his masculine appendage.
But sitting here right now, he felt like maybe they had actuallysucceeded.
Like they had actually done something. Like they had really broken a cycle.
It irked him, for sure, that the boost had come from his dad dying. But not all of it.
He and Walker had gone out and made a ton of money in the rodeo. They had done that, in spite of the fact that they had grown up with nothing.
And they might be eating hamburgers, just like they had done back then, but this was their own beef from their own ranch.
He wasn’t going to get sentimental about it, but he did lift up his beer bottle. “To us. And to the fact that this is our motherfucking place and nobody can ever take it away.”
Everyone around the table raised their glasses. “To us.”
For the first time all day, Cody had a little bit of a respite from thinking about Marlowe. But, as soon as he took another sip of his beer, he thought about the way their fingers had brushed earlier.
And he was right back to thinking about her.
Chapter Five
Marlowe woke up bright and early in her brand-new apartment and cried again. She made coffee, and cried in the shower, and then she took herself on a little tour of the grounds and kept on crying.
