Sage had lived in the house all of her twenty-six years and very little had changed, so she didn’t have any problems going from the kitchen, across the living room floor, and to her bedroom without tripping over anything. There had been a couple of new sofas, but they’d always been put right where the old one had been, under the bar and facing the entertainment unit located to the right of the fireplace. The kitchen table was the same one that had been there when Sage and her mother came to live in the canyon. Grand wasn’t one much for buying anything new when what was already there was still usable. She made her way down the hall to the bathroom and out of habit tried the light again. It didn’t work either.
“That was stupid,” she whispered.
The propane heater put out enough heat to keep the bathroom and the bedrooms from freezing, but it meant leaving the doors open a crack. Grand’s door was ajar and she wanted to see her so badly that she was on her way to peek when she stopped. If Grand woke up there wouldn’t be any deciding about when the fight would take place.
Grand was not a morning person even though she crawled out of bed at six every single day, Sunday included. Sage had learned early on not to approach her until she was working on her second cup of coffee, so there was no way in hell she was going to start the argument right then.
She turned around and went straight to her bedroom, kicked off her boots, and hung her wet shirt and jeans over a recliner in the corner of the room. She pulled an extra quilt from the chest at the end of her bed and tossed it over the top of the down comforter before she slipped into bed wearing nothing but her panties and bra.
She was asleep before her body had time to warm up the sheets.
* * *
The wind was still howling like a son-of-a-bitch when Creed awoke at daylight. Why in the hell had he decided to buy a ranch in the middle of the winter? Sure, he’d liked the land when he looked at it a week ago and he’d seen potential for raising Longhorns and growing hay come spring. No sir, it didn’t look bad at all at fifty degrees and with the sun shining on the winter wheat.
And God only knew the price was right. Right, nothing! It was a downright steal and he’d felt an inner peace that he hadn’t known in a long, long time when the owner had showed him around and made the deal with him. But he hadn’t planned on the canyon filling up with snow on his first night in the house.
The weatherman said that the blizzard was going to stall out right above the canyon and wouldn’t move on toward the east for at least three more days. That was the last thing he’d seen on the television the night before because the electricity had flickered and then gone out for good.
The phone service had gone out before the electricity. His cell phone’s battery would soon be dead and the battery in his laptop would have bit the dust during the night. So there he was all alone in a blinding blizzard with a hundred head of cattle corralled in a feedlot behind the barn.
He wasn’t very well acquainted with the house, so he moved slowly when he slung his legs out of the bed and made his way across the bedroom floor. He shivered and opened the door wider to let in more heat. At least he had the little two-bedroom house all to himself until the blizzard came and went and things thawed out.
He put on three pairs of socks, long underwear, jeans, and a thermal knit shirt. He topped that with a thick flannel shirt and peeked out the window. There was nothing but a chill from cold glass and thick falling snow beyond that. But rain, snow, sandstorms, or heat, cattle had to be fed and taken care of, and the lady had said that if he wanted to buy her ranch, he’d have to take good care of it for the next three weeks. She’d be home the day before Christmas to see if he qualified as a buyer. If she liked what he’d done, she’d sell. If she didn’t, he’d only wasted three weeks.
Her words, not his!
It was December, so he didn’t expect eighty-degree weather, but he sure hadn’t figured on eight inches of snow coming down in blizzard-strength wind either, and that’s what the weatherman predicted. Two inches of snow or sleet crippled folks in Texas as much as two feet so they’d be a while digging out from under eight inches for sure. At least he wouldn’t have to contend with the granddaughter. No way could she get into the canyon in a storm like this. She could just hole up in her fancy hotel in Denver where the gallery was showing her paintings. La-tee-da, as Granny Riley used to say about all things rich and famous.
The stipulation for the sale was that Sage Presley could live on the ranch as long as she wanted. Well, Creed could live with the painter in her own house on the back forty of the Rockin’ C to get the ranch for the price Ada Presley quoted. She could play with her finger paints and take them up to Denver and Cheyenne every year. Their paths might cross once in a while and he’d tip his hat to her respectfully. He’d never heard of her, but that didn’t mean much. In Creed’s world a velvet Elvis was art and pictures torn out of coloring books held up with magnets graced the front of his mother’s refrigerator.
Creed didn’t care what Sage did for a living or what she looked like as long as she stayed out of his way. Miz Ada had said that he’d best be prepared for a shit storm as well as the big blizzard because Sage did not want her to sell the ranch. At least the storm had kept her away from the canyon, and by the time she could get to the ranch she would be cooled down.
He made it to the bathroom, illuminated only by the fire in the open-face wall heater, and then down the hallway and halfway across the living room before he stumped his toe on the rung of a rocking chair.
“Shit!” he muttered.
His coveralls, face mask, and hat were hanging on a rack beside the back door, and his boots waited on a rug right underneath them. He zipped the mustard-colored canvas coveralls all the way to his neck, pulled the face mask over his head, and pushed the bottom behind the collar of the coveralls. Then he stomped his feet down into his work boots and crammed an old felt hat down on his head. It was a tight fit with the knitted mask, but a cowboy didn’t even do chores without his hat.
He leaned into the whirling wind on the way to the barn located only a football field’s length from the house. He’d run that far lots of times when he was quarterback of the Gold-Burg football team and never even thought about it. But battling against the driving snow sucked the air out of his lungs and by the time he reached the barn he was panting worse than if he’d run a fifty-yard touchdown. The barn door slid on metal rails and they were frozen. At first he thought muscles, force, and cussing wasn’t going to do the trick, but finally he was able to open it up enough to wedge his body through.
The air inside wasn’t any warmer, but at least it didn’t sound like a freight train barreling down the sides of the canyon. He shook off a flurry of white powder, grabbed his gloves from the bale of hay where he’d left them the night before, and pulled them on.
“Won’t make that stupid mistake again,” he said.
He hiked a hip onto the seat of the smaller of two tractors and planted a long spike implement into a round bale of hay and drove it up close to the double doors at the back of the barn. He got off the seat, opened the doors, and ran back to get the hay out before the cows came inside. They had crowded up under the lean-to roof and eaten the last of the bale he’d put out the morning before. It took a lot of hay to keep them from losing weight in the winter. He just hoped he’d hauled enough big round bales from the pasture into the barn to make it through the storm.