The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge (Gold Valley #14)(111)

The legend went that he’d cheated. And he’d taken a valuable piece of the Sohappy ranch away, for nothing.

Your father doesn’t love the land, not like you do. And I have no grandson. You’re the firstborn of this generation. The ranch is going to go to you.

But Shelby is getting married. Shouldn’t Chuck…

You know what happened. When a man was prized over blood. When the ranch passed from our direct line. It has to be you. You must care for it. Nurture it like it was your child.

So she’d taken it on. Rearranged her ambitions. It had been easy, actually. To put off pie-in-the-sky dreams like medical school and pretend they’d never really mattered.

The truth was, it had never been a particularly attainable dream.

So she’d thrown herself into Lone Rock. Into the ranch. Into life here. When she’d decided, at seven-teen, that she’d stay, she’d rearranged every thought she’d had about the future.

She’d let her roots go deep.

She was one of the ranchers down at the Thirsty Mule, hanging with the guys and telling tall tales. She’d earned that place. She could castrate calves and move a herd with the best of them. And could drink most of their sorry asses under the table.

She worked hard, she played hard and she didn’t accept double-standard bullshit.

What was good for the goose and all that.

She’d made a life she was proud of, and she’d taken on the EMT job to pay the bills and satisfy the medical itch she’d had when she was younger.

Now she’d educated herself on ways to expand the ranch into something more lucrative.

A horse breeding and boarding facility. And while she liked ranch work in general, horses were her passion.

And if she got the facility going and got people to pay for boarding, then she wouldn’t have to work two jobs.

She was having to pay for ranching like it was her hobby, and the only thing that her family just had was this land.

Everything else was an expense. Everything else came out of all the hard work that she put in.

Her dad’s soul just wasn’t in the land the way it was hers. He cared, but he was devoted to his business, his career.

It was why Juniper had decided against pursuing medical school. Against leaving. Being a doctor was a calling, a vocation, and…

She wouldn’t have been able to do both.

So she’d knuckled down and focused on what she could do. And now she was grateful she had. She’d figured out what to do with the ranch that excited her, made her happy.

And she was just fine. Just fine. And she didn’t even want things to go differently.

Maybe don’t think about that when you’re angry and gritty and half-asleep.

Maybe. Yeah, maybe that was a good idea.

The dirt road that led up to her cabin was mud now, and she was feeling pretty annoyed. And when her headlights swept the area as she rounded the corner, she might have thought that her irritation and exhaustion played a role in what she saw.

It looked like a body. A body out there in the field.

Sprawled out flat. But it couldn’t be. She slammed the brakes on in her truck and stared.

Yes. The rain was pouring down on what was very definitely a male form sprawled out there on the ground.

But why?

How?

She looked around for a second, evaluating the risk level of the situation, because if something had wounded or killed this man, she didn’t want to be next.

She wasn’t about to be the first fifteen minutes of a crime scene investigation show.

But she didn’t see anything, and there were no points for sitting there wondering about it. Juniper got out of the truck and ran out to that spot in the field. And her heart hit her breastbone.

It was Chance.

Chance Carson.

She knelt down and felt for a pulse. She found one. Thank God. He drove her nuts, but she did not want him to die. At least, not on the border between Carson and Sohappy land. That would be unforgivably inconvenient.

She could call someone, but not here. There was no cell service right out in this spot in the ranch.

But she had her truck.

She rolled him onto his back and did a quick assessment for spinal injuries. None of that. But he was out cold. And what the hell was he doing out here anyway?

She couldn’t tell what the hell had happened. But she had some medical equipment in her truck.

She ran back to the road, then pulled her truck out to the field, getting it as close as possible to him. He didn’t rouse.

Shit.

She had a board in the back of her truck, and with great effort, she rolled him onto it, strapped him to it and used it to drag him over to the bed of the truck. He was strapped securely in like a mummy in a sarcophagus, so she propped the top up against the tailgate, then lifted up the end by his feet, and pushed him back into the bed of the truck.

“Sorry,” she said, slamming the tailgate shut. Was she, though? She wasn’t sure.

Well, she was sorry that he was hurt.

Her cabin was the closest place that she could get him dry, warm and examined. She was a medical professional, after all, and he certainly wasn’t the first person with a head injury she’d ever dealt with.

The road to the cabin was bumpy, and she winced every time she hit a big pothole. She really didn’t want to kill Chance Carson. He might think so, but not even she was that petty. At the end of the day, land was land, and it wasn’t a human life.