Page 1 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
Prologue
New York, New York
1880
Something tugged at Grace’s hair.
A pull, right at the temple, close enough that whatever did the pulling brushed against her cheek. She swatted at it without opening her eyes, the way a person does when half-asleep and too stubborn to wake, and her knuckles connected with something soft. Furry.Moving.
A squeak. A skitter of tiny claws across the pillowcase.
Grace launched upright so fast the threadbare quilt tangled around her knees and nearly pitched her off the cot. The rat sat three inches from where her head had just lain with a tuft of black hair between its yellow teeth, and its beady eyes caught the thin gray light from the window. It chewed. Casual as anything. Like it’d paid rent.
The scream tore out of her before she could clamp her mouth shut.
Feet pounded down the hall. The door banged open hard enough to bounce off the wall, and Jonah filled the frame in his undershirt and trousers, raising a cast-iron skillet above hishead like a battle axe. He’d grown tall and lean these last few years, all lanky arms and sharp jaw, with the same dark hair as Grace’s. His eyes—brown like hers but without the honeyed edges Ma used to say the sun put there—swept the room.
“Where is he?” He brandished the skillet at the shadows. “Show me the son of a gun.”
She jabbed a finger at the cot. The rat, stuffed full of her hair and wholly unbothered by the commotion, took its time hopping off the edge of the pillow and disappearing through a crack in the baseboard that could’ve fit a house cat.
Jonah lowered the skillet. He stared at the crack. Then at Grace.
“A rat.”
“It ate my hair, Jonah.”
“Arat.That’s what all the hollerin’ is about?”
“While I slept! It sat on my pillow and ate my hair like Sunday supper!” She yanked the quilt free from her legs and swung her feet to the floor, then immediately pulled them back up because Lord only knew what else scurried around down there in the dark. The boards always creaked at night with things she’d trained herself to ignore.
Jonah pressed his lips together. His shoulders hitched.
“Don’t you dare.”
“I ain’t laughin’.” He coughed into his fist. “I ain’t. Dead serious over here. A hair-eatin’ rat. Downright terrifying, that is.”
“I will take that skillet from you and put it to good use on your thick skull.”
He held up both hands in surrender, swinging the pan on one finger. “All right, all right. Easy now, Gracie.”
But the laugh, or the almost-laugh, or whatever had just passed between them cracked something open in her chest. The kind of fracture that starts thin and runs deep, like ice on a puddle in March, and all the freezing water underneath comes rushing up at once.
Her eyes burned. Her throat locked tight.
Because it wasn’t just the rat. Of course, it wasn’t just the rat. The rat perched on top of everything else the way it’d perched on her pillow; one more horrible little indignity stacked on a pile so tall she couldn’t see over it anymore. The leak in the roof that had spread a brown stain across the ceiling like a bruise. The window in the front room that wouldn’t close all the way,letting in the stink of low tide and fish guts from the docks until the whole house reeked of the Hudson at its worst. The garden out back, where she’d coaxed beans and squash from the sorry excuse for soil, only to find the mice had chewed through the burlap sacks where she’d stored last month’s dried harvest. And now a rat. In her hair. On her pillow. In the one place she’d convinced herself still belonged to her.
A sob hitched out of her, and she pressed her fists against her eyes to shove it back down. No use. Another followed, and another, and before she could get any kind of hold on herself, she’d curled forward with her forehead nearly touching her knees, and her whole body shook with sobs.
The cot dipped. Jonah’s arm came around her shoulders, and he pulled her sideways into his ribs the way he’d done since she’d come up to his elbow, back when Ma and Pa still filled the front room with the lilting cadence of the old language, and the house smelled like cardamom bread instead of river rot.
“Hey now.” He gave her a squeeze. “Hey, hey. C’mon, Gracie, don’t do that.”
She shook her head against his shoulder.
“Gracie. Look at me, now.”
“I can’t keep doing this.” The words came out waterlogged and muffled against his undershirt. “I can’t. I wake up every morning, and I fight the mice, and I fight the damp, and I fightthe cold; it just keeps getting worse, and now they’reeating me,Jonah.”
