Page 22 of Christmas Music
Who the hell fought to stay for a boy they barely knew, and a boy who had just told them he didn’t have time to talk to them? Not me, that was who.
I had a song to finish and, just maybe, a contest to enter.
CHAPTER14
Connor
Iwaited two days for Olivia to come back again.
News flash: She didn’t. Probably because I’d told her to leave me alone and that I would handle things myself. Or maybe because she’d seen the look in my eye and realized that I wasn’t in any shape to be a good writing partner.
I wasn’t in good shape to beanything. I’d heard the tail end of the meeting my mom had with the assessor and I knew what she was planning—or if not planning, then at least considering. I didn’t know whether she’d talked to my dad about it or not, but she definitely hadn’t talked tome. She was getting ready to sell the ranch right out from under me, and she hadn’t even bothered to confer with me about it.
Look, I knew how much pressure she was under. The bank was on the verge of taking the place if we didn’t make our payments on time from here on out and she was watching my dad die in front of her because we didn’t have the money to pay for the more successful treatments. He was already only half the man he’d been—in weight, at least—and he was wasting away by the day. We were literally losing him one inch at a time.
And when it came down to it, what was a ranch when that was happening? I didn’t blame her for seeing it as an easy way to make the money she needed in order to save my dad.
I just would have liked to have been part of the decision. Especially if she was volunteering me to stick around and run the place for whoever bought it.
I shook the thought out of my head and tried to focus on what I was doing. The best way—the only way—out of the whole mess was for me to win that contest. There was a large cash prize for winning, plus the signing bonus on the contract, and it would be enough to not only make a year’s worth of payment on the ranch but also pay for my dad’s treatments.
There was the small matter of me needing to move to Nashville to fulfill the terms of the contract—namely writing music and recording a record—while also trying to run the ranch, but I wasn’t looking at that part, yet.
“Win the contest first, my boy,” I whispered to myself. “Figure out how to do everything afterward.”
There were, of course, a couple of problems with this plan.
I only had a piece of a song, and I wasn’t sure how good it was. And Olivia had taken the recording of the song we’d done together—the one that was nearly finished—and left me with nothing to show for it.
I mean, I hadn’t been planning to use it or anything. That was a song we’d done together, just playing off each other. It wasn’t mine to use and I didn’t begrudge her taking it.
Its existence, though, and its absence from my recording studio, was just a big old spotlight shining on the lack of any other music in my catalogue. I had a pretty good melody without any lyrics, and that wasn’t going to win me any contests. Normally, I would have said I’d be fine. Lyrics came to me pretty quickly, and I’d jot them down as I thought of them.
Except that the contest was tonight.
And I was running out of time.
* * *
When I went up for lunch, still lacking a complete song, I found my mother in the kitchen. Her eyes were red and swollen, her lips still trembling a little bit, and when she looked at me, I saw a woman who had come to some sort of decision, and didn’t like it.
But was going to do it anyhow.
“Connor, I need to talk to you,” she said quietly.
I dropped into the closest chair, wondering whether the world could actually throw any more at me. I’d come home to save the day, and instead I was sitting here watching my mother come apart at the seams as she made a decision no one should have to make.
Her home and livelihood or her husband.
“You’re selling the ranch,” I said numbly.
She nodded once and gathered herself, biting the inside of her cheek and firming her jaw. “I am. But not to any old stranger. Dev is buying it, and he’s invited us to stay on. And you. Says he’ll need help running it and as long as we’re not doing anything else...”
My stomach dropped right out of my body and onto the floor. “Dev?” I whispered. “He doesn’t know the first thing about ranching.”
Dev was one of my best friends, and had been since he and his mother moved to this town when we were in junior high. But he’d been a city boy the whole time I knew him, and when we graduated, he went right into the military.
He didn’t know how to handle cows or farm equipment. I didn’t even know if he knew how to ride a horse.
