The Rancher takes his Star Crossed Love

Chapter 1

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 promised 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.