Taking On The Cowboy

Part 2 - Chapter One

Chapter One

For better or worse she was here. No doubt about it. Burrowing Owl Ranch, read the cast iron sign arched across the entranceway. A smaller wooden sign hung from the gate, which stood open - Burrowing Owl B&B ~ enquiries Elizabeth Mason.

Tara had waited three long years for this. For most of that time Gage Mason had been in prison, beyond her reach. He was free now. He had been for six months. Home now for six months. She'd wanted to confront him earlier, but her Grandmother had needed her.

Sarah Blake's slow decline had begun right after her grandson, Daniel, Tara's brother, had been killed. With every passing day there had been a little less of Sarah, until finally she wasn't really there at all. By the time Tara admitted that she could no longer give her grandmother the care she needed, Sarah no longer recognised her. She had let go of the last threads of life only a few weeks after she'd moved into the residential care home, leaving Tara alone to face the world.

Now Tara was finally here, in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, to confront the man who had taken her brother's life and her grandmother's will to live. Gage Mason was about to learn that two years six months in prison didn't even come close to atoning for what he'd stolen from her.

Her friend Juliette had worried it could be dangerous, not knowing how Gage might react, or how Tara would deal with coming face to face with him. It was one thing talking about meeting the man responsible for your brother's death, it was an altogether different thing doing it.

"Why put yourself through that when you don't have to?" Juliette had pleaded, suggesting Tara write a letter instead.

"That's just it. I do have to. I need this to move forward. I owe it to Dan. Gage Mason does not get to just pick up his life from where he left off and move on. Not when my brother doesn't have that option." Tara's blue eyes had flashed with a fire that Juliette recognised from Law School. Juliette had raised her hands in surrender. When Tara got that look in her eyes she was unstoppable. She'd graduated top of their negotiating class and come away with a collection of scalps from inter college debates, many belonging to Ivy League gentleman who had underestimated her, usually on the basis that beauty and brains were mutually exclusive. Juliette was pretty sure talking her friend out of going to Burrowing Owl Ranch was not going to happen.

In the end Juliette had reluctantly given her blessing, even offering to come with Tara to the ranch. Tara had refused. She needed to do this on her own.

Tara sucked in a big breath of Hill Country air and moved her foot to the accelerator. Her little city car bumped up the rutted entrance road to the ranch. The fields out to either side of her were flush with bluebonnets, echoing the bright Texas sky. Not an apartment block or traffic light in sight. Out here she could almost understand why her brother had quit college and run away to play rancher. He'd pleaded with Tara to come visit him at Burrowing Owl in the year he'd spent here, but she'd been reluctant to leave their Grandmother alone, even for a weekend. She felt the familiar dull ache of regret. Nothing she couldn't keep down by stamping all over it. How could she have known that she would lose Dan, when it had been her Grandmother they'd both been concerned about?

"I'm here now." Tara spoke to the empty car, unbuckling her seat belt and stepping out into the mid-summer Texas heat.

She pressed the security button on her key chain out of habit as she headed towards the house, the little car flashing its lights twice to show it was locked.