family truce was temporary at best given their continued water rights and cattle disputes. They’d be fortunate to get through the wedding peacefully without outside pressure riling simmering tensions.
Tomorrow Cole would ask the loan officers to postpone the foreclosure until after summer. A rainy season might turn things around and help them replenish the herd. Despite the long-shot odds, he had to try.
He’d devoted his life to Loveland Hills, sacrificed all, including his heart, once. He’d never leave it voluntarily. Not while he still breathed. Lovelands stood by each other. His father gave up his happiness for his kids’ sakes. He’d earned their loyalty, no matter how it’d nearly broken Cole when he’d had to let go of the one person who’d meant everything to him.
The calf ominously stopped bawling, and its movements slowed to mere twitches. An arctic gust billowed Cash’s mahogany mane like a sail. Another five minutes in these conditions and the newborn would die. Cole’s fingers clenched around the reins.
“Let’s bring ’em in.” Boyd patted the rope looped on the side of his saddle. “She’s not keen on being a mother.”
Cole watched the now listless calf. His heart went out to the youngling. A mother should care for her offspring, dang it.
“Got one last idea.” He whistled for their cattle dog, Boomer. The black-and-white border collie sprang from beneath the calving shed’s eave, ears up and forward, eyes on his master. Cole ordered Boomer into the field and held his breath.
The clever dog crept across the white ground, body low. The newborn’s eyes rolled, whites showing, as it struggled to drag itself away from a perceived threat. The stream of its frantic bleats whipped the heifer’s head around. White huffed from her flaring nostrils when she spied Boomer.
“Get him, girl,” Cole urged the Brahman beneath his breath, leaning forward in the saddle. Hopefully, his gamble paid off and the “predator” nearing her offspring would arouse her maternal instincts.
“Boomer’s got her attention,” Boyd observed quietly as they watched the tense standoff.
The collie crept closer, and the heifer stamped her hooves.
Fueled by terror, the calf surged to its feet and trembled in place, its strength expended. Boomer advanced a couple more steps, and the heifer issued a loud warning bellow.
“You gonna call that dog back?” Boyd asked out of the corner of his mouth. “He’s likely to get trampled.”
“I trust him,” Cole replied firmly. As the ranch manager, he trained all their cattle dogs, including Boomer, to herd, load and drive. Despite everything gone wrong in his life—a called-off wedding, failed love life and looming foreclosure, Cole excelled at commanding his working dogs.
Cole watched as Boomer eyed the thousand-pound Brahman, sliding another paw forward, then another, drawing within bite distance of the terrified, braying calf.
Then the mother charged, fueled by maternal fury, surging at Boomer. The cattle dog expertly dodged her deadly hooves and scuttled clear.
Cole held up his hand, halting the collie’s retreat. They weren’t out of the woods yet. Best keep pressuring.
One eye on Boomer, the heifer sniffed her calf. Her tongue darted out and her rough lick tipped the newborn’s head.
“Atta girl,” Cole muttered, his chest loosening as he dragged in his first full breath in hours.
“Nicely done, son,” Boyd said and the rare praise from his stoic father caught Cole with unexpected warmth. Living life on the edge of personal and financial disaster had a way of threatening a man’s pride. He took his victories where he could. They’d saved the calf whose mother now lavished it with a thorough bathing.
Could they save the ranch, too?
“Looks like our work’s done.” Pa wheeled his horse around and nudged it into a walk down the rutted lane to their stable.
“I’ll keep checking on them.” Cole brought Cash up alongside his father’s mustang. Boomer kept pace.
Only the twittering of waking birds, and the clip of hooves striking hard ground, broke the silence. Overhead, the iridescent sky glowed. Light now striped the fallow fields awaiting this year’s planting, and their shadows rode ahead.
“I’ll stop down to First National at nine,” Cole said once they’d reached the stable and untacked the horses. The sweet smell of grain rose as he poured cornmeal into Cash’s feed bucket, a treat for the exhausted horse.
“No need to waste your time, son.” Cool water misted the air as Boyd filled the water troughs. Several horses hung their heads outside their stall doors, nosy about the early activity, nickering to the new arrivals.
“It’s not a waste.” Cole doled out halved apples to his siblings’ mounts. “If I can convince them to hold off a couple months, and we have a good season, we could turn things around.”
“I figured out another way without including the bank.” Boyd pulled the stable door shut behind them once they finished.
“Good to hear.” Cole glanced at his frowning father from the corner of his eye. Why didn’t Pa seem pleased?
“Not sure you’ll think so.” They ambled closer to the two-story homestead built by their ancestor, Colonel Archibald Loveland, an army veteran. He’d deserted from the Colorado War, married a Cheyenne interpreter and settled here over a hundred and thirty years ago, breathing life into the first of many Loveland scandals.
Must be in their blood.
“Why would I object?” Cole noticed a few green shoots alongside the fieldstone walkway to their front porch. With any luck, they might get three hay crops...
Boyd paused on the porch’s stairs. “Was approached by an outfit to do a story about our feud with the Cades. They’ll pay enough to cover our mortgage through the season if I give them access to the property.”
Cole leaned against the pine banister, absorbing his father’s news. Like the rest of the home, it’d been culled from the distant forests and hauled over great distances. Their ranch was a bastion against a landscape of forbidding mountains, its warm hearth and hand-hewn timber beams communicating self-reliance, simplicity and lack of pretentions. His heart swelled at the thought of what his ancestors had wrought.
They’d fight to their last breaths to safeguard their family’s legacy. But a story dredging up old scandals? It’d upset the tenuous peace between them and the Cades and jeopardize his father’s wedding. His hard-won happiness.
“What kind of outfit? Something local?” Cole’s hands tightened around the banister as he recalled the frenzied media who’d hounded his family after his mother’s death.
“Cable show.” For some reason, his pa seemed to have trouble meeting Cole’s eye.
“National TV?” Cole squinted into the strengthening sunshine and glimpsed an approaching black car bumping down their drive. “We don’t want them sniffing around the place, dragging out old skeletons.”
“Better than being thrown off our land before the wedding,” Pa countered.
Cole
