Rodeo Christmas at Evergreen Ranch (Gold Valley #13)(11)

She just wanted to be herself, as much as she wanted. Why was that so hard?

“I just want to be able to be everything I want. As a woman. And it makes me angry that it’s so difficult. I don’t want to change who I am. But I want the other people around me to stop acting like I can’t be all that I am. I mean, it’s sad. That you would have to think I don’t like being a woman just because I want to do these things.”

“That isn’t what I meant. I didn’t mean it’s not—”

“Ladylike? My mom does. My mom despairs of me.” She tried not to let those words hurt. “Her only daughter, out of all those kids, and I was supposed to be something different. I was supposed to want to dress up like her, be a rodeo queen. Big hair and lots of sequins. I was supposed to be shiny. And probably married by now with lots of kids.”

“You’re too young for that,” he said, frowning.

“My mom was married when she was nineteen, with her first kid by twenty. It’s what she cares about. And that’s fine for her, but it’s not what I care about. I know that it hurts her. I know she figured I was her one great hope for a child that she could actually understand. Identify with. I know that she wanted me to be the one that painted my nails with her and all that.” She looked down at her hands. At her dirty, busted-up hands with chewed-on, ragged fingernails. “You know she doesn’t have any other daughters.” The words felt like a lie. “I was her hope.”

She did not have the hands of a lady.

Good thing she wasn’t interested in a real marriage. What man would even want those hands on him?

The thought was strange, so dissonant and off-key to her usual line of thinking that she paused. And tried to imagine her hands on a man’s skin.

His face.

His chest.

She looked up and her eyes collided with Jake’s, and she felt...suddenly uncomfortable. Guilty.

“Ladylike’s not a real thing,” he said. “Bottom line, this whole conversation is regrettable. You should be able to be who you want to be. You should be able to have your dreams. But you know, the people that care about you are going to worry. Because... I do not want to say this without upsetting you, Cal, but your dreams are going to be more challenging for you because you’re a woman than they would be if you were a man. And they’re more dangerous.”

“Well, maybe I’m twice as brave to make up for it.”

He said nothing, then huffed a laugh a moment later. “Maybe twice as stubborn.”

“Only twice?”

She realized that she’d been so lost in their conversation she hadn’t looked at any of the scenery at all. And at this point, the sun was coming up over the mountains, a brilliant, golden glow casting a stringent yellow filter on the scenery around them. Turning evergreen trees into gilded bottlebrushes and making the meadows around them look like they’d caught fire. It was a beautiful ranch. The fields empty right now, the outbuildings they passed dilapidated.

“What exactly are you going to do with this place?”

“I’m going to breed horses. Horses are what I know. My cousin has beef, my dad did beef—I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do the same thing.”

“The same thing is bad?” she asked.

He didn’t look at her. “I never wanted that life. This is a hell of a lot closer to it than I ever thought I’d get.”

So there were things he didn’t tell her, because he’d never told her this before.

“So why did you leave the rodeo?” It had hurt her when he’d left. She’d felt abandoned. And he’d done it in the weeks following her injury. It had felt personal. It had hurt worse than the bone fracture.

“You haven’t spent a lot of time here, have you?” His face was carefully blank when he said that and she had a feeling she was being redirected.

She shook her head. “I mean, obviously I’ve been all over traveling with the rodeo, but not any more notable time here than anywhere else, no. Mostly, just Lone Rock. It’s beautiful here.”

“It’s home,” he said. But he didn’t sound... He didn’t sound warm or affectionate when he said it. There was something else to his tone, and she couldn’t quite sort it out. But before she had a chance to linger on it, he was ready to move on. “Hope you brought your work gloves.”

“Who do you think I am?” She reached into her pocket and took out the battered pair of leather gloves. “I’m ready to go.”

“Good. Because we’re stringing barbed wire.”

“Somehow I knew it would be fences,” she said. “I hate putting up fence.”

“Yeah, well, a whole lot of this life is fencing.”

“I’m aware. Do you think my dad doesn’t put us to work on his ranch? You know full well he does. Puts me to work the same as the boys.”

Her dad had always treated her like the boys. And the better she did on the ranch, the faster she ran, the heavier things she lifted, the more attention she got. She’d learned to drive a four-wheeler at nine so she could help haul equipment around. She’d gotten good at barrel racing at ten and her dad had thought it was a revelation.

Her mom had watched distantly and she’d seemed fine with it for a while. But as Callie had gotten older, the more it became clear she’d expected Callie to stop loving ranch work, to stop loving the same things as her brothers and father and get more invested in cooking and baking and nail polish.