The Rancher takes his Star Crossed Love Read online

  The Rancher takes his Star Crossed Love

  The Rangers of Purple Heart Ranch Book 4

  Shanae Johnson

  Those Johnson Girls

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Also by Shanae Johnson

  Chapter One

  "Rosalind just broke up with me."

  David Porco flicked at the propeller of the drone at his feet. The rotor gave a buzzing whirl of sympathy at his pain. The whir was short-lived as the drone wasn’t powered on. Without the engines in gear, the blades barely made a full rotation. Had the device been ignited, Porco was certain he’d get a more resounding response from the drone. He was barely getting a hum out of his friend.

  “Didn’t you tell me you were going to break up with her two days ago?” Jordan Spinelli’s fingers picked over the fuses in the exposed belly of the drone’s controller box. “Because you no longer felt the spark.”

  Spinelli’s last two words were said with a sneer of his lips and roll of his eyes. The man’s mind was far too scientific to believe in the power of true love, or what Porco’s mom called the spark. The flare of feeling across the spine and down to the fingertips. The rise in temperature that wasn’t hotter than a fever, and at the same time cooled the entire body. That spark was what let her know that Porco’s father had been the man of her dreams. His father had admitted to the feeling too.

  Nelson Porco had told his son that the spark had been a racing of his heart. He’d heard his pulse pounding in his ears. His mouth had gone dry, but he’d drooled all the same when he’d caught sight of Hailey Baker, the woman who would just a few days later become his wife.

  Porco had been chasing that feeling since he learned that thumping in his chest was called his heart. Anytime it raced or skipped a beat, he investigated the cause to determine if it was the spark. When he’d sat next to Willow Conway in his parents’ basement, his heart had raced, but they had been watching a horror movie at the time. He hadn’t been scared of the monster rushing at the victims with his bloody blade. No, Porco had caught sight of Annalee Walton sitting - on the floor, and his pulse had quickened to her.

  In the skate park, he’d caught Shawna Welsh watching him do a kickflip, and his heart had raced. When he landed, Terri Clarke had winked at him, and he’d drooled after her for a couple of days.

  He’d chased that spark of feeling from girl to girl. Sometimes it was strong, and he’d feel heat down in the base of his spine. Other times it was a weak tingling in his fingertip. It was never all-consuming, and the feeling never lasted like it had with his parents.

  With Rosalind, his mouth had gone dry, and he’d drooled over the woman at the same time. She was a looker, easily the prettiest girl in the whole town. Although Paige Wiley, who had just moved to town, was giving Rosalind a run for the money in the looks department. Porco had chatted Paige up the other day while he was in town. He’d gotten her number and had asked her out for the weekend. He’d planned to break up with Rosalind before the date, of course. But then Rosalind had gone and dumped him first.

  “Why are we even having this conversation?” asked Spinelli. “Just move onto the next one like you always do.”

  “Like I always do?”

  “You’ve dated three different women since we’ve been here.”

  Here was the Vance Ranch in a small town in Montana. Though Porco wasn’t sure how the town could be called small when a small ranch spanned farther than the eye could see. Porco and five of his Army Ranger buddies had opened a bootcamp training facility that bordered the Vance Ranch and the Purple Heart Ranch, a rehabilitation ranch for wounded veterans and their families.

  The original plan had been to set up living quarters on the Purple Heart Ranch. That was, until the soldiers had learned of a little loophole that bade any man or woman who wanted to live on the Purple Heart Ranch for more than three months be bound in holy matrimony.

  The regulation hadn’t scared Porco. He wanted to get married. But only to the right girl. Whom he’d only find once he waded through all the firecracker dates and found his final, life-starting Big Bang.

  “Your problem is you’re always looking at the grass on the other side,” Spinelli was saying. “You need to tend your own yard first.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re out here doing, isn’t it.”

  Spinelli closed the drone’s controller box and handed the device to Porco. There were two drones on the ground, each housed a canister at its underbelly. The canisters were filled with chemical fertilizer for the barren pasture before them.

  The two Army Rangers were helping out the owners of Vance Ranch. One of those owners being their former unit commander. Though they weren’t on the lands of the Purple Heart Ranch, Sergeant Anthony Keaton had married Brenda Vance the same day he’d met the female rancher. It had been a marriage of convenience at first, one that allowed practical-minded Brenda to cut through the red tape of transferring land ownership of a parcel of Vance Ranch to tactical minded Keaton. Those two individuals had burned through their practical-tactical motivations a few moments after they said I do and were fast-tracked on the path to love.

  Porco had asked Keaton what it felt like the moment he saw Brenda. Keaton had said he’d seen stars. Spinelli had pointed out the fact that Keaton had just been in a car accident with a ramming bull when he’d looked up to see Brenda racing towards him on a horse. As far as Porco was concerned, that still proved that there was a spark when The One stepped onto life’s stage.

  "Why'd she do it?" asked Spinelli. "Why'd she break up with you?"

  Porco just stopped himself from asking Who? Had he forgotten about Rosalind so quickly? "She said I have a short attention span. She said she wanted to get out before I dropped her."

  Spinelli pushed his lower lip up to meet his upper lip as though he could fathom that reason. "She has a point."

  Spinelli had a scientific mind. He'd likely think a woman’s spine was a looker or her brain had the tempting curves of a backroad. It wasn't that smarts weren't Porco's speed. Nothing made his heart skip like the sparkle of a woman's eyes. Nothing made his hand's itch more than running his fingers through lush curls. Nothing made his mouth water more than the tug of a plump, heart-shaped lip just begging to be kissed.

  He’d felt all those things with Rosalind. If given time, could those flares feed into a bigger fire? “There was something there. We did have a spark of… something.”

  "You and that spark. You do realize that if you light a match, eventually it burns out."

  That was Spinelli. The man always had to get scientific and ruin the emotions of the situation.

  “Forget about Rosalind,” Spinelli called as he mounted his horse, the controller to his drone in one hand, the reins in the other. “We have work to do. Remember, don’t get too close to the border. That’s the Verona Commune. We don’t want any issues with them. Their crops are organic vegetables and…”

  Spinelli droned on with his scientific talk as Porco mounted his own horse. They’d promi
sed Brenda that they’d get the west pasture fertilized. The cattle ranch operation was growing, and this field had been running fallow too long. If the expansion was going to continue, they needed this field to produce so the cows could graze.

  With a flick of his thumb, the drone lifted up into the sky. Porco kept himself and his mare a good distance behind the craft. The fertilizer wasn’t toxic to humans, but he wasn’t interested in having the chemicals for breakfast. He’d already had two plates of bacon. If he was lucky, there’d still be some on the stove when he got back.

  It might have been a coincidence that he’d been born with that last name. Or it may have been a divine plan. Whatever it was, it was a happy accident that David Porco had grown to love all things pork.

  Thinking of the greasy, crispy, sweet delightfulness that was bacon, Porco noticed too late that the drone had veered slightly off course. The craft hovered just over the border, where a wooden fence divided the two ranches. But the fence wasn’t necessary to identify the boundary. The grass on the other side was definitely lusher, greener.

  The drone flew for another few yards over the lush pasture, raining down the chemical compound. Porco gave the controller a couple of whacks until finally, the drone obeyed his commands and flew straight.

  From his vantage point atop the horse, Porco couldn’t see any damage that the drone had left on the fields. Just a small spray of fertilizer. With the overgrown weeds in the field, he doubted any of the hippies on the commune would even notice.

  No harm, no foul.

  He turned his horse away from the green pastures of the neighbors and continued on his journey. His mind was set on how to win back the woman who just might, maybe, possibly be the one. But first, he’d have to call and cancel his date with Paige.

  Chapter Two

  "Ay, me." Jules Capulano sighed as she looked down at the thriving plants in her garden.

  Her woeful sigh wasn’t over the abundance of green life surrounding her. Her beloved soybeans had grown nearly tall enough to reach her knees. The leaves stretched out as though to wave at her. The bulbous pods hung heavy as though the beans inside were ready to drop and harvest themselves.

  Life was good for the crops on the Verona Commune. Her belly was full every meal from the fresh fruits and vegetables her fellow vegans harvested each day. Her ears were filled with the laughter of the third generation of children running wild and barefoot across acres and acres of land. It was only her heart that was empty.

  “Ay, me.” She sighed again.

  “Oh, no,” came a withering sigh that mirrored the tone and tenor of Jules’s own voice. “Are you about to enter into a longwinded monologue filled with Elizabethan slang?”

  Jules pushed her long, interwoven locks back off her forehead to look up at Romey. Unlike Jules's coiled twists that reached down her back toward the earth, her sister's hair was short and springy, her curls reaching for the sunlight. Romey’s butterscotch skin had tanned to caramel under the sun’s constant attention.

  Since their shared birthday, the Capulano twins woke up with the sun and spent all day in its rays, coming in only once the moon rained its dark light on their parade. While out in the fields, Jules would sprinkle flower seeds as she danced barefoot in the dirt. Where Romey would trough equidistant lines and space out her seedlings in neat little rows.

  Their planting methods weren’t the only thing different about the twins. Although born identical, it had always been easy to tell the two apart. Jules dressed in colorful sundresses every day of her life, where Romey tugged on funny t-shirts and shorts.

  Today’s graphic tee displayed two atoms. The bubble over the first element said I lost an electron. The second element asked, Are you positive?

  “If you’re going to recite Shakespeare, at least cite Cymbeline,” said Romey. “There’s science in that play.”

  Jules had heard enough of that little-known Shakespearian play recited by Romey and their historian father, who specialized in the Elizabethan era, when she was younger. The play mentioned a few references to cosmology, which the two would debate endlessly on whether the playwright had read Galileo. Jules retreated to the corner of their cottage home, preferring to read the bard’s sonnets instead.

  “There’s romance, too,” Jules insisted. Though she quickly regretted taking the bait.

  “Sure there is; adultery, incest, attempted rape, attempted murder, more lies, and deception. I keep telling you, romance belongs on the page and not in real life. That stuff could get you killed. You should be practical about these things.”

  Practical? Nothing in their lives was practical. Everything had been to the extremes.

  Take their parents, for example. In what world would an African American man from the south who was obsessed with all things from Queen Elizabeth’s reign fall in love with a radical, white feminist, from a small town in Maine, who’d tried—in vain—to join the Black Panther Party. If their parents had been practical and hadn’t believed in the power of true love, neither Jules nor Romey would be here today.

  “Paris said he’d give us a ride to the county fair,” said Romey.

  “Ay, me,” Jules groaned. She should’ve known this was where the conversation would head.

  Paris Montgomery wasn't a bad guy. Far from it. He was kind and jovial. Any girl would love to have his attention. Jules was one of them.

  She’d loved playing with Paris when they were kids. The three of them, Paris, Romey, and Jules had grown up close; practically brother and sisters since their parents had founded this commune over twenty years ago. From a young age, Jules remembered the adults joking about one of the twins and Paris falling in love and marrying.

  Early on, they’d ruled out Romey. Jules’s twin was far more interested in books than boys. And not the romantic books. Romey preferred the nonfiction section of the commune’s library. That left Jules. But Jules had only ever seen Paris as a brother. Not a lover.

  Love was fireworks in the heart. Love was the eyes shining bright when looking upon the one meant for you. Love was an itch in the palm of the hands to reach out and hold on forever.

  Jules's hands met with a hairy back and wrinkled flesh. When she turned to face the newcomer, she had to immediately turn away and wrinkle her nose at the smell.

  “Hamlet, how did you get out?”

  In response to her question, Jules got an enthusiastic oink, along with a wiggle of his fat rump. Hamlet, their pet pig, thought he was a dog. His three-hundred-pound weight slowed him down as he tried to race after them all over the commune, but it never lessened his enthusiasm to catch up to them. What surprised Jules the most was that the pig never seemed to lose an ounce of weight despite how much he trailed after humans and the fact that he was on the same vegan diet as the rest of the families who lived on the lands.

  Jules gave the pig a scratch behind the ears and was rewarded with hearty squeals of delight. The pig’s murmuring of appreciation was accompanied by a buzzing sound. Bees weren’t too common in this part of the commune as soybeans were self-pollinating plants. Listening harder, Jules noted that the sound was coming from above.

  Looking up, she quickly found the source of the buzzing. Off in the distance, beyond their property line, a small aircraft flew.

  “Is that a toy airplane?” said Jules.

  Romey used her hand to shield her gaze before announcing, “Looks like a drone. I guess the soldiers are out playing at war this morning.”

  There were three ranches in this part of the valley beyond the town. The Purple Heart Ranch was filled to the brim with soldiers, most of them wounded veterans who’d come to the ranch to heal from their time in combat. Jerome Capulano had been a pacifist, but his wife Mariam had been a full-on antiwar advocate. Even though Mariam, along with most of the commune, had waged a decade's long war with the ranch that sat between the Verona Commune and the Purple Heart Ranch.

  The Vance Ranch.

  The Vances were cattle farmers. The fact that their trade was in
meat was bad enough. What was worse was that for years the Vances had been using fertilizer to grow their pastures for their cows to feed on. They had no care for their neighbors who abhorred the use of unnatural chemicals in their foods or near their homes.

  Words had been exchanged. There was a rumor that a couple of blows had been thrown between Paris’s dad and old Mr. Vance. Jules could easily imagine it. Heathcliff Montgomery had a fiery temper, a booming voice, and meaty fists. Eventually, lawsuits had been filed. Now existed a fragile peace between the current Vance head rancher, who was a woman, and Paris, who’d taken over the leadership position of the commune.

  Paris was nothing like his father. The young man had a quiet voice that people hushed to listen to, a ready encouragement for any child he came near, and a thumb greener than the plants that he tended.

  He really was a catch. Jules only hoped that someday the right woman would snatch him up. She was not the one to cast that net.

  The drone continued zigging off course, heading back deeper into Vance Ranch territory and out of Jules’s sight.

  “You’re trying to change the subject,” Romey was saying. “Papa and Paris’s dad thought you two would marry. You two have gotten closer these past few months working on the organic certification.”

  Romey was right about that. Jules and Paris had gotten closer as they’d begun preparations to have the commune’s lands certified as organic by the USDA. But working that closely with him day in and out made things crystal clear to Jules.

  "I don't love him, Romey. I mean, I love him, like a brother. But I've never gotten goosebumps when I see him. He's never made my heart speed up. Or put butterflies in my stomach."