Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
He leans in and kisses me. My cheek, my neck, my breast. Then he looks me in the eyes, smiling. "She won't need to be here to photograph it. Because you'll be here to do that yourself."
I'm just about to respond to that when the sound of heavy bootsteps draws my attention to the door.
Then poundin'. "Savannah," Cash growls from the other side. "It's fuckin' dinner time. Put your damn clothes back on and come downstairs."
Which makes Legion burst out laughing so loud, I have to cover his mouth with my lips.
Legion puts himself together quickly and goes downstairs, but I take my time. Thinking about Eleanor has got my attention. And it occurs to me now that Legion is the only person who isn't family who was ever allowed to come upstairs.
Well, Mercy was the first. Cash gave her a bedroom down the hall. But a child comin' up and a man like Legion Kane comin' up are two very different things.
That's probably why Cash pounded on my door. Obviously, this is not the first time Legion's been in my bedroom. There were frequent visits when he was recovering here.
He was a resident of the house. No part of it was off limits. He lived here.
But recovering resident and steady boyfriend—public boyfriend, at that—are two very different things.
At least in Cash's mind.
Of course, Cash cannot forbid me to bring Legion up here. The estate, after all, is still mine. I am the woman of the house.
Can't run the damn ranch. Can't even run the damn house.
But it's still mine to command from a distance.
I'm sittin' at my vanity touching up my make up when this thought hits. Because command, Savannah? Do you?
No.
I don't even try to command it.
If Cash and Wyatt left the way Colt did—just packed up their egos and their ambitions and drove off toward something shinier—I'd be in a hell of a spot. And I know this. I know it the way I know the water table under this land, which is to say I know the fact of it without understanding the mechanics, and that gap between knowin' and understandin’ is exactly the problem.
The ranch isn't how this family creates wealth. Not really. The wealth is intrinsic—it's in the aquifers, and the water rights, and the mineral leases, and the shell corporations.
It's in the land itself, forty-seven thousand acres of leverage that just sits there appreciating while the rest of Drybone dries up and blows away.
The money was here before the cattle, and it'll be here long after the last head ships out.
But it is a real working ranch. That part isn't performance. We do sell cattle for meat. Not because we need the revenue, just because… that's what a ranch does. That's what this land demands. You don't sit on forty-seven thousand acres and pretend it's a museum. You work it, or it works you, and either way the earth gets what it wants.
We even have our own little private-label branding now, thanks to a wild idea Colt pitched a few years back. I'll give him that one. The branding was smart. Designer beef with the Ashby name stamped on it like a promise, sold at five times the market rate to people who care more about the story on the packaging than the steak on their plate.
Eleanor would've loved it, actually.
Turning product into mythology. That was always her gift.
The whole operation would collapse if Cash wasn't here.
We have hands. Good ones, too. Men who've been workin' this land since before I could sit a horse, and they could take over most of the day-to-day animal work if they had to.
The feeding and the moving and the checking and the mending.
But not the business.
Not the contracts with the steakhouses in Bozeman and Billings.
Not the negotiation with the water board when somebody downstream starts askin' questions about our senior rights.
Not the quiet phone calls with the lawyers who keep the shell corporations breathing.
Cash does all of that with his Stetson on, and his boots planted, and his jaw set like he was born knowin' the difference between a handshake and a threat, and maybe he was. Maybe that's what being the eldest son of Eleanor Ashby does to a person—turns you into a diplomat who could break your arm if the diplomacy fails.
And once again, just like earlier, I have this sick feeling settlin' low in my stomach. This creeping, awful recognition that I wasted my childhood focusing on things that have nothing to do with this land.
Nothing to do with the operations, or the water board, or the calving schedules, or any of the machinery that actually keeps this empire turning.
And it bothers me.
It bothers me more than I want it to.
Which is the worst part. The wanting it not to matter and the mattering anyway.