“After the six months, you can buy her out, sell, or renegotiate. But in the meantime, make it work. Hollis Ranch matters—to your family and to this town.”
Unfortunately, he’s right.
There are no other choices but to suck it up. Though if I’m lucky, she won’t come at all.
“Now, if you’ll sign that you understand everything laid out before you,” Monty says, gesturing toward the dotted line.
“Like hell I do.” I walk out of his office door and slam it behind me. This is nonsense—complete and utter insanity.
I have to get to the bottom of this.
I storm down to my truck, the edges dusted with dirt kicked up from the ground, and hop inside. Immediately, as I rev up the engine and pull out, the sound of gravel crackling under the tires comes alive. When I speed out of main street, my contained rage only simmers hotter.
My hands tighten around the steering wheel; any tighter and I’m sure it’d break in my grasp.
I still am in disbelief that this is all happening. Uncle Sam never alluded to there being some type of agreementwith this Miss Carter, but then again, there was no mention of me gaining sole ownership either.
I always assumed that it’d be the case simply because of our name. No one else wants to step up for this place under our family name, so why shouldn’t it be me?
The frustration only grows the farther outside the town limits I go. The ranch is the largest in the county, so it has high supply and demand. We built it to withstand growth—hence the sprawling acres of pastures, the kind of infrastructure that supports more than one side of the operation year-round.
It was always meant to grow and expand as the town did, but lately there’s been a decline.
I won’t deny it—things were looking good for a while, but when Uncle Sam passed, suddenly, bills began to grow. It was odd because nothing changed aside from who was running the place.
Which makes it worse—because whatever’s bleeding us dry was already in motion long before Uncle Sam ever died.
Feed costs hadn’t spiked. Contracts were steady. Labor was consistent. On paper, the ranch should’ve been solid. Instead, accounts drain faster than they should, like someone has quietly pulled a plug I didn’t know existed.
One line item keeps catching my eye—an old escrow notation tied to an Austin address, dated years before Uncle Sam ever mentioned trouble. Environmental mitigation. Land-use collateral. Legal language thick enough to choke on.
The important thing is finding the answers about who Sloane Carter is, why she has a fifty percent stake in the ownership, and how exactly either of us is going to get through this.
***
I rush into the office not long after I got back to the ranch. I head straight for the bar and pull out Uncle Sam’s favorite bottle of whiskey. After what he’s done, I plan to drink every last drop of it just to piss the man off from the grave.
The glass bottle comes down on the desk with a hard clunk as I start sifting through the file cabinet. I organized it years ago, but something tells me Uncle Sam doesn’t want me to find what I’m searching for so easily.
Sure enough, as I reach the back, I find a whole folder dedicated to documentation for his estate.
I pull out the hefty sucker and place it on the desk, then crack open the bottle. I get to work sifting through thedocuments, one by one, and it isn’t long before I realize how much he has tucked away.
“Where is it, old man?” I grumble under my breath before taking a generous sip. I drop the bottle back down and shuffle through more pages.
I check the clock. Two hours go by and I’m almost through the file when I stop. My eyes burn and my shoulders ache, the weight of the day finally catching up with me. I pull a document out and look it over.
The address is based in Austin, and I roll my eyes immediately. “Great, just what we need.” Down at the bottom is her name, but her signature isn’t attached to it.
But there it is.
Her name.
Clear as the range just beyond these walls—on the dotted line is Uncle Sam’s signature, and Sloane Carter’s name is printed beside it.
What possessed him to do something so insane? He may as well have sold his soul to land developers. Lord knows they’ve been eyeing this place for decades. But why this?
I lift the bottle of whiskey to my lips and take another generous swig. The sun has set, and all the ranch hands have settled into their beds with their letters, along with the request to leave me be.
