Page 1 of Wannabe in Wyoming
Prologue
The hard plasticedges of Willow’s cell phone dug into her palm painfully, and the sharp sting brought her back to reality in a rush. She couldn’t believe it. After thirty long years, she finally knew who her father was. The blank spot next to that title on her birth certificate was no longer a mystery.
Jason Hillcrest.
He’d been a little older than she’d imagined. For some reason, she’d always figured he’d been her mother’s age, and that they’d been a pair of young lovers unable to handle the burden of an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. Everything had been assumptions on Willow’s part since her mother had never given her any information about her father, other than he couldn’t be a part of their lives. No further explanation had ever been offered and Willow had long ago accepted it, albeit reluctantly.
In reality, Jason Hillcrest had been six years her mother’s senior. He’d died alone of an aggressive pancreatic cancer at the age of fifty-six—unwed, and for all intents and purposes, childless.
Mr. Howard Smith, Esq. had called Willow a little over an hour ago to inform her that not only was her biological father deceased, but as his only living relative, she was his sole heir. Without warning, she was now the owner of a small cattle ranch in Antelope Rock, Wyoming—wherever the hell that was. Her heart pounded in a mixture of shock, fear, and pure excitement. There was also a heap of disappointment in there—her father had obviously known about her but had never reached out to her. She would’ve given anything to have been able to meet him and have a chance to get to know him.
Her own life was empty and hollow. Her mother had died three years ago from complications due to diabetes. And now, two years after her divorce, Willow had no boyfriend or close friends or relatives to spend time with. She worked, read, watched TV, and slept—not an exciting life at all.
Her tiny, one-bedroom, rented apartment had come fully furnished. All her worldly possessions would easily fit in her ten-year-old Chevy Colorado, with room to spare. As for employment, she stocked shelves at a local grocery store during the day and cleaned houses a few nights a week for extra money. She could quit both jobs at that very second and not be missed. Not to mention she’d be getting further away from her smarmy ex-husband, who couldn’t seem to let her go even after being divorced for several years. Maybe putting half the country between them would finally beat it into his thick skull that she no longer wanted anything to do with him. It wasn’t that he wanted to get back together with her. He only called or came by when he needed something—which, ninety-nine percent of the time, was money.
Could she do this? Drop everything, pack her stuff, drive to Wyoming, and start over with a clean slate? The lawyer had explained a lot in a short period of time, but one thing had stuck with her. She needed to go there to sign papers and make a decision on the property. Fix it up and sell it, or sell it as-is, had been his question. But another possibility had occurred to her. Up to that moment, her life had been boring, something she’d been regretting more and more as she got older. Maybe it was time to take a chance. Glancing around the apartment that’d never felt like a home, something sparked within her. If she had to put a name to it, the only two that came to mind were courage and…hope.
Chapter One
Drivingfrom Pennsylvania to Wyoming was no joke. Thanks to scattered bouts of traffic, it’d taken a little over four days, more tanks of gas than Willow wanted to think about, and the last of her nerves. She’d left Nebraska and entered Wyoming late last night. After catching up on some sleep at a cheap but clean motel off the main highway, she was now on the final leg of the journey. Over 1,600 miles and countless hours in her beat-up truck, she was downright gleeful to see the GPS marking her destination as less than twenty minutes away. She’d remembered to get her Chevy a tune-up before leaving the City of Brotherly Love, and thankfully, it hadn’t given her so much as a hiccup on the long trek.
She was in a bit of landscape shock. She’d been born and raised in Philadelphia, surrounded by the concrete, steel, and glass buildings and paved roadways that’d been erected in the city that still harbored some of the country’s most historical sites. It’d always amazed her how quaint buildings from the 1700s sat peacefully among the monstrosities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Between the traffic, construction, trains, and local residents coming and going at all hours of the day and night, her section of the city had never been quiet. The walls of her apartment had been ultra-thin, so she’d constantly known what her neighbors had been up to. The ones above her apartment often sounded like Bigfoot and his family dancing to loud music even when they weren’t throwing wild parties. The ones below her would have loud arguments about the stupidest things just so they could have wild makeup sex that’d left little to the imagination. And the kid who’d lived in the apartment next to her smoked weed and bounced a ball off the other side of her bedroom wall whenever his parents weren’t there. Philadelphia was definitely a huge difference from the open air of the upper Midwest with its flat landscape shadowed by buttes and snow-covered mountains in the distance.
When the GPS indicated she had to get off at the next exit, Willow changed lanes and slowed down to take the offramp. The rest stop looked like just about every other one she’d taken a break at along the way. Gas and air pumps, a few parked cars, and a store where you could buy cigarettes, lottery tickets, beer, condoms, coffee, soda, chips, and a hot dog in one two-minute shopping spree. According to the Google Maps directions she’d printed out at the start of her trip, she was in Butterfield, Wyoming—10 miles east of Antelope Rock, her new hometown, temporary as it might be. Maybe she was showing her age a bit, printing the directions out, but she’d been paranoid her GPS would break and she’d get lost.
After parking the truck, she climbed out and stretched her legs. Two vehicles were at the pumps, and she noticed the drivers gaping at her as they got their gas. One was a tall, lanky kid in his late teens who smirked at her with untamed lust in his eyes, while the other was a lady in her fifties whose eyes widened in horror as she took in the younger woman’s appearance. Willow glanced down, wondering what might be wrong. She had on a loose pair of jeans, her favorite pair of pink Converse high-tops, and a black tank top that showed off the sleeve of tattoos on her right arm and the ones covering her shoulders. A peek at her reflection in the rear passenger window showed there was nothing on her face other than the tiny crystal stud on her nose. Her short, brown hair was perfectly spiked in its usual fauxhawk with hot pink tips a near exact match to the color of her shoes. Nope, nothing was out of place.
It wasn’t the first time Willow had been on the receiving end of both of those looks, and as usual, she chose to ignore them. Hurrying inside, she located the restrooms and took care of business. Before leaving the store, she grabbed a Pepsi from one of the refrigerators and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. The stoned clerk at the register didn’t give Willow a second look after he took her money. It was just after one p.m., and although she wasn’t starving yet, she knew she would be if her meeting with Mr. Smith went longer than she anticipated. The last thing she’d eaten was a ham, egg, and cheese burrito and coffee at seven a.m., after checking out of the motel.
Thankfully, when she exited the store, the two vehicles and their drivers had disappeared. Before leaving the lot, Willow double checked the gas gauge on the dashboard—it showed two-thirds full. That was more than enough to bypass the pumps.
Climbing back into her truck, she followed the GPS, eventually turning down a long dirt road, dust kicking up behind her in a long trail. That was one way to announce her presence, she supposed. She passed under a wooden and metal arch that read “Skyview Ranch” in letters that had rivulets of rust running off them like blood. Way to be morbid Willow, she thought to herself. The lane cut through fields surrounded by leaning barbed wire fences. The disrepair was obvious to even her inexperienced eye. She didn’t have a good feeling about this. Her sinking stomach dropped further as she pulled up to the ranch style house. Several barns and outbuildings were scattered around the property, but her eyes remained glued to the sagging front porch and peeling paint of the house she’d be calling home for the foreseeable future. She parked her truck between a white F-350 and a dark blue sedan. A man dressed in jeans, a navy-blue polo shirt, and a sport coat waited near the porch steps. She was unsurprised to see he wasn’t on the porch itself, considering she was nervous about walking across it herself.
She climbed down from her truck, deciding to leave her bags for the moment. Who knew if it was even safe to stay there for the night?
“Mr. Smith, I presume?”
“Yes. Are you Ms. Crawford?” His furrowed brow, and his suspicious gaze sweeping her from head to toe and back up again told her she looked like a far cry from the woman he’d expected. When she nodded, he quickly recovered and smiled. “It’s nice to finally meet you. Welcome to Antelope Rock.”
“Thanks, and Willow is fine.” Her gaze moved past Mr. Smith and strayed across the front of the house. The old-fashioned wooden screen door hung slightly askew, with its mesh ripped along the bottom.
“Then I’ll have to insist you call me Howard.” He put his hand out for her to shake, which she did firmly— just as her mother had taught her. You could tell a lot about a person by the way they shook your hand. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“While I appreciate that, it doesn’t feel like a loss when you never had it to begin with. I never met my father or even knew his name until you contacted me. Curiosity, more than anything else, brought me here.”
He didn’t look the least bit surprised at her admission. “I can understand that. Would you like to go inside? I have a few papers for you to sign, transferring ownership of the property to you.”
“Is it safe? Frankly, this place looks like it’s about to fall down.”
“Safe enough. I wouldn’t worry about the roof caving in on your head, but it definitely needs some TLC, huh?”
She let out an unladylike snort. “More than that, I think. I’m assuming you have the keys?”
“Yes, but it’s not locked. Most folks around here don’t bother to lock their doors.”
Shocked, she looked sideways at him as he carefully strode up the porch stairs. They creaked ominously like something straight out of a horror movie but held his weight. “I’m from Philly. We have multiple locks on our doorsandwindows. What if someone breaks in?”
“There are more guns than people in Wyoming. You break into a person’s home, and you can be expected to be greeted by buck shot. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a twelve-gauge leaning in the corner just inside this door.” The words she thought were a joke had been delivered with such deadpanned straightforwardness that she couldn’t help but realize he was absolutely serious. She came from a city where, for the most part, the only people with guns were cops, gang members, and criminals. This was going to be a bigger adjustment than she’d thought.
