She went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of white wine, popped the cork, poured herself a glass, and then poured a little bit more. Tomorrow she was going to have to start looking for new job. But tonight, she was going to get as drunk as she could.

  She sipped on her wine and ordered a pizza. Rose generally didn’t eat junk food, but she thought that tonight warranted an extra-large pizza with everything and an entire bottle of chardonnay.

  She was halfway through the third glass of the evening when the pizza arrived. She tipped the driver more than she should have, considering she was now broke. But ever since working her way out of poverty to the top position at her investment firm, she’d had a policy of being a good tipper.

  Rose had always been generous. She knew exactly what it took to get yourself out of a bad situation, and she wanted to support anyone who had the guts and the motivation to try. But as she put the pizza down on the table, she realized that she would probably have to dial back on her generosity like everything else.

  That was when it really hit her, and she started to cry as she slid a piece of pizza onto a paper plate. It was really happening. She was going to be poor again. She was going to have to count every penny like she had growing up.

  The tears streamed down her cheeks, then she sniffed them away, grabbed her pizza, and sat on her couch. At least she still had a roof over her head. She had her education. She had ten years of experience under her belt. Nothing could take those things away from her. Not her ex. Not her boss. Not the lawyers. Rose was more than the possessions she'd accumulated and the money she’d made. If she could do it once, she could do it again. That was what she told herself as she ate pizza and cried.

  As she was finishing off the pizza and drinking another glass of wine, the commercial for Mate.com came back on TV. She'd been watching a cop show about a serial killer and didn't think that advertising a dating website was probably reaching the best audience. But something snapped inside her, and she picked up her phone. She wanted her dreams to come true.

  The men in the commercial were devastatingly good-looking. Rugged and outdoorsy. She didn't see that kind of guy in the city very often. She was feeling loosened up from the wine she'd been drinking. Not exactly drunk, since she'd spread it out over the entire evening and had eaten an entire supreme pizza with everything. But she was definitely feeling loose. Her inhibitions were down.

  Rose Winter did something she would normally never do. She downloaded Mate.com, filled out the profile, and waited for her matches to load.

  A moment later, the loading screen filled with the profiles of the shifter men whom she'd been matched with. Evidently, a hundred-percent match was a fated mate. She was scrolling to the bottom of the screen when she got a phone call. She didn't recognize the number, but she answered it anyway.

  “Is this Rose Winter?” the man on the other end of the phone asked.

  “This is she.”

  “My name is Greg Stone. I was the attorney for your late grandfather.”

  “Grandfather? I didn't even know my grandfather.”

  “Oh, that makes sense. He informed me that he was estranged from your father. They'd had a falling out when he was young, and they hadn't spoken since.”

  “This is the first I'm hearing of it. How can I help you?”

  “You see, Ms. Winter, your grandfather just passed away. And he's left his entire estate to you.”

  Chapter 3

  “He's just going through a phase,” Austin said as he sat across the table.

  “It's more than that. There's something going on with him,” Heath said.

  “I think it's normal. He's a young man. He’s just moved out for the first time. There's going to be an adjustment period.”

  “I didn't act like that when I was Gunner's age.”

  “You and Gunner are very different people. Everyone deals with things in their own way.”

  Heath was starting to get frustrated with his brother’s blasé attitude about Gunner. Austin had already let Shane out of his farmwork for half the week. If Gunner stopped pulling his load, then the rest of them would have to pick up the slack.

  “We need his help on the farm. We’re falling behind schedule. We’re going into the harvest season, Austin. Without everyone pulling their weight, we'll get behind on our orders.”

  Austin took off his reading glasses and rubbed his face.

  “You're right. I'll talk to him. With the baby and everything, I've already got a lot on my plate.”

  “I get it,” Heath said. “I can try to pick up the slack for him for a while. At least until he gets over whatever phase he's going through right now.”

  “No. I have something more important I need you to do.”

  “What is it?” Heath asked, a growing curiosity building in his chest.

  “You know old man Winter? Down the road?”

  “Yes, the one with the goat farm.”

  “Well, he passed away, and he asked me years ago, that if anything happened to him, I’d look after his goats for him.”

  “What about his heirs?”

  “As far as I know, the lawyer told me the heir is coming down soon to pick up the key to the place. But in the meantime, those goats need tending to. Berry’s been gone for three days already. As far as I know, nobody's been out there. The lawyer is ready to give the key to the temporary caretaker, so you can go down there and pick them up now.”

  “I'm on it,” Heath said.

  The thought of those poor milk goats being left without care for three days drove Heath into a panic. They'd be suffering already, and he didn't want to think about what he would find when he arrived.

  He made his way into town and stopped at the lawyer's office, as per Austin’s instructions. He hurried into the office with all thoughts of his wayward brother far from his mind. They were replaced by thoughts of those poor suffering goats. He'd known old Berry Winter all his life. His Nubians took first place at the county fair every year.

  Heath hurried into the office and told the secretary who he was. She handed him a brown envelope with keys inside. He hurried back toward the ranch and hustled down Berry Winter’s driveway. When he arrived, he found the goats in a desperate situation.

  Producing dairy goats needed to be milked twice a day. The goats hadn't had a milking in three days. Heath hurried them into the milking pen and tried to relieve them, but it was quickly clear that several of them would need veterinary attention.

  He made a call to the local large-animal vet as he worked. Luckily, they'd been left out on pasture, otherwise, he would have arrived to find an even worse situation than he had. With the vet, he worked into the night to treat the goats. Some of them needed antibiotics from infection and wouldn’t be able to continue as organic certified producers. But by the time the moon came up, they had the situation well in hand.

  “I told him he needed help out here,” the vet said as she climbed into her truck. “But he wouldn't listen. Berry always was a stubborn old coot.”

  Ronnie Myers had tears in her eyes, and Heath felt just as saddened by the death of old man Winter. Now that the emergency had been averted, his feelings were catching up with him.

  “Thanks for helping me with this, Ronnie. Just send the bill to the Wilde Ranch.”

  “This one’s on the house, Heath. See you around town.”

  Heath made sure the goats were bedded down properly for the night. As he was getting ready to return home, he felt his cellphone vibrate in his back pocket. He checked the text message, and he saw something that made his heart stop.

  “Congratulations. We’ve found your fated mate.”

  He smashed the screen to open the application as quickly as he could. Then he went on to read the profile of his fated mate. There was very little information there. No picture. All it said was “Rose.” But as he was reading the profile, there was an error on the website. He refreshed the app, hoping that it would fix itself so he could send her a text message. But when it refreshed, Rose’s profile was gone.

  He drove back home, completely dumbfounded. She was there, and then she was gone. How could that have happened? People didn't just disappear into thin air. But it did say she was human. Maybe she’d changed her mind and didn't want to be matched with a shifter.

  His mind ran through all kinds of scenarios to explain why his fated mate had suddenly disappeared. He felt like maybe he was hallucinating. The woman he'd waited for twenty years to find had appeared and then disappeared just as suddenly. His heart hurt, and his head throbbed. He wanted to call Austin, but he knew his brother already had too much on his plate.

  When he made it home, he opened his fridge and pulled out a steak. He needed to talk to somebody, so he dialed his brother Dylan. He wasn't sure if Dylan would even answer.

  Dylan showed up for work every day and took care of a lot of the responsibility in the warehouse, packing orders for shipments and handling customer service. But Dylan was something of a loner. Even still, Heath felt like he could trust his difficult feelings with his sensitive brother. The phone rang several times and then went to voicemail. He hung up and sighed. But then Dylan called him back almost immediately.

  “What's up, He?” Dylan asked.

  “I have a problem, and I needed to talk to someone about it.”

  “What is it?”

  “I found my mate on Mate.com.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “But then her profile disappeared.”

  “It's probably just an error,” Dylan said.

  “No. I refreshed the page multiple times. The error message says, ‘This user is no longer a member.’”

  “Oh…”

  Heath sat down on his couch and clicked on the TV. There was a football game on cable, and he halfheartedly watched it.

  “I don't know what to think or feel.”

  “It's an unfortunate situation.”

  “Do you think she changed her mind?”

  “Probably. Did you read her profile before it disappeared?”

  “Yes. And it said she was a human. I know that humans can get scared about things like finding their fated mates. I just don't know what to do.”

  “You know what they say about fate, right?”

  “What's that?”

  “That it works in mysterious ways.”

  “How do you think this is gonna work out for me?”

  “Well, that will be the exciting part, won't it?”

  “I suppose you're right,” Heath said with a laugh.

  “If you need anything,” Dylan said, “I'm always here to talk.”

  Heath hung up and sighed then took another sip of his beer. He watched the Broncos game on TV and tried to take his mind off his problems. He got up from his chair and went to the kitchen to throw his steak in the air fryer. He was overwhelmed and couldn’t do much else for his supper. Having his mate disappear was throwing him for a loop, and he didn't quite know how to take it. Had she seen his picture and gotten scared?

  He grabbed his steak when it was done cooking and looked at himself in the hall mirror as he walked back into the living room.

  He was a good-looking man with broad shoulders and a full beard. Stocky and strong, not quite as tall as Cal and Cash. He didn't have that movie-star handsome quality that Dylan had, all mysterious and brooding, but he'd been told he was a handsome man.

  Maybe she just didn't like the idea of being attached to a rancher for the rest of her life. She’d said she was a financial planner from Denver. A woman like that was probably used to the high life, with luxury and fancy things. He was just a good ol’ boy from Fate Rock, Colorado. Born and raised.

  He’d lived in the country all his life, and he’d probably die there too. He sighed, thinking that his fated mate had rejected him. He ate his steak and drank the rest of his beer. He couldn't let himself get down in the dumps about this. Maybe there was a perfectly good reason why she'd removed her profile that had nothing to do with him.

  As Dylan had said, fate works in mysterious ways. They’d found each other once. Chances were, if fate had anything to do with it, they would find each other again.

  Chapter 4

  Rose packed her bag and put it in the back of her twenty-year-old Honda Accord. She’d purchased it that morning at a used car lot down the street with the two-thousand-dollar transportation budget she'd received in the bankruptcy settlement. She slammed the trunk closed and climbed into the driver's seat.

  She couldn’t believe this was to be her life, but it was. The call from the lawyer the night before had come as a shock. She hadn’t known her grandfather, let alone that he would leave her his estate.

  The attorney couldn't divulge the contents of her grandfather's will over the phone, so she had to go to him. She pulled onto the freeway and headed south toward a little town deep in the mountains called Fate Rock.

  She’d never even heard of the place, much less had any compulsion to ever go there. The attorney had called her right after she’d signed up for that shifter dating website. Luckily the interruption had saved her from the inevitable embarrassment of getting involved with some poor man who she was not ready to get involved with. God only knew how long it would take before she was ready.

  She'd uninstalled the app almost immediately after getting off the phone with her attorney. Part of her did wonder if she could have potentially met someone better than her ex, but that was a pretty low bar.

  The drive down to Fate Rock took several hours. She was meant to meet the lawyer at three. She'd spent all morning in the car dealership, trying to talk down the used-car salesman to a reasonable price. The entire time she’d felt so humiliated she finally gave in.

  The day before, she'd been driving a brand-new Mercedes. But she'd survive. She had survived this far in life, and she would find her way back to the success that she knew she could achieve.

  Her curiosity about the contents of her grandfather's will continued to play through her mind. What could this mystery grandfather possibly have left her? When she finally turned off the freeway in Fate Rock, her curiosity had reached a boiling point. She parked in front of the attorney's office, grabbed her purse—the only designer bag the bankruptcy attorney had allowed her to keep—and walked into the attorney's office.

  “I'm here to see Mr. Boyd,” she said to the receptionist.

  The woman checked her computer. “He will see you now,” she said, standing from her desk.

  The receptionist opened the door to the office, and Rose stepped inside. There was an older man in a gray suit with wavy white hair and a kind face sitting behind a mahogany desk. He stood and took her hand.

  “Rose Winter, nice to meet you.”

  “I'm dying to know what's in my grandfather's will,” she said, taking a seat across the desk. “I didn't even know my grandfather.”

  “The value of his estate is fairly substantial,” Mr. Boyd said. “You see, Berry Winter owned a fairly large tract of land with a three-bedroom house and multiple outbuildings. The land itself is estimated at roughly five hundred acres. In today's market, it’s valued at approximately one million dollars.”

  Rose’s mouth dropped.

  “The land is currently operating as a dairy farm. There's over one hundred head of dairy goats and all of the milking equipment. The business itself brings in about seventy-five thousand a year after taxes and expenses. You would have to get some additional appraisals on the market value of the goats and milking equipment. Then there is his truck. A 2015 Ford F150. It was valued at forty-five thousand new and would be substantially less today. But it's fully paid off. And he had a small savings account in the total of twenty thousand dollars.”

  Rose was at a loss for words.

  “It is quite a substantial estate. Mr. Winter had very little debt and ran a tight ship. The house is old. It could probably use some remodeling. But knowing him, it is all well maintained.”

  “Just yesterday I was in an attorney's office declaring bankruptcy and getting a divorce. Then I lost my job. And now you're telling me I have inherited this goat farm worth over a million dollars…”

  All Rose could think about was selling it as quickly as possible and starting a new life back in the city.

  “The stipulation is that you keep the farm in the family.”

  Rose’s heart dropped.

  “What am I going to do with the goat ranch? I don't know anything about goats.”

  “The current caretaker, Heath Wilde, is an extensively experienced rancher. I'm sure that he could help you run the ranch.”

  “What happens if I don't want to keep it?”

  “I'm afraid the entire estate goes to the Wildes.”

  “But why? I don't understand.”

  “What Berry told me was that his son, your father, left Fate Rock on bad terms. He was a drinker. Which you probably know.”

  “My father left my mother when I was five years old. He was never around.”

  “And he never even told Berry about you. Now the ranch has been in the Winter family for over a hundred years. It should have gone to his son. But instead, it's going to you. And if it doesn't go to you, he wanted it to go to the Wildes. The families have been on good terms for generations, and they helped him out a lot in his old age. So that's about the gist of it.”

  Rose sat back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap. How the hell was she supposed to run a goat ranch? She'd never even seen a goat up close in her life. Unless you counted that one time in the petting zoo when she was a child. She’d left screaming because she was terrified of the animals. She knew her mom was embarrassed. But when that goat started nibbling her hair, it was over.

  “I guess I should go take a look.”

 

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