AJ Ranch

By Sandy Grissom

A man raised as an orphan starts a ranch on a shoestring. Unbeknown to him he was spirited away from a rich home to save his life. He meets a woman who ran away from the wedding she was being forced into. This is the first of the stories about the single men who go to work on the AJ and how they long for love and eventually find it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandy Grissom
• Release date: Mar 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301094318

Sandy Grissom

Sandy Grissom has loved books all her life. That love began by listening to her older sister read when she was still too young to discover the magic for herself. She's read everything from history to the phone book but her favorite authors are James Michener, Agatha Christie and the mystic William Blake. Over the years, romantic novels became a favorite. The top of that list is Pride and Prejudice. When she retired she had too much time on her hands and spent too much money and trips to the library to get books in order to satisfy her restless soul. It was then she began to write herself. As an adult she held a variety of jobs, all of them grist for her imaginative mind. The occupations in Choppy Waters will hopefully inspire someone to fight for their own dreams, to never give up on themselves or on love. A widow, Sandy recently moved to southern Indiana where she lives near the younger of her two beloved sisters.

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AJ RANCH

By

Sandy Grissom

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 by S.K.G. Haag

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Cover image by Sdenny123: used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Chapter One

ADAM

Adam Carlton was home. Well, as much of a home as he ever expected to have. Not that he was complaining, not much, anyway. He’d accomplished a lot just getting this ranch. Adam had a lot to be grateful for. If something still seemed to be missing now and then, he supposed it was to be tolerated. Nothing was perfect in this world.

He turned his old rusty pickup onto the dirt road that led to a small run down house. Adam bumped along thinking that he could stand to level out and then gravel the road. He might as well add it to the list. There were so many jobs that needed to be done around the place that Adam wasn’t sure most days which ones to do first. Oh, he had a prioritized list. It was just that he didn’t have the money to do hardly any of the things on it.

More often than not he would barely finish one task on his agenda and before he could get to the next item, something would occur to blow the list all to smithereens. Some days it seemed he’d never see daylight. Even so, he’d made his choice of what he wanted his life to be. So Adam had no real regrets. This was what he wanted. All he could do was handle each crisis as it came along and hope that things would get better sometime down in the future. Surely they had to.

This would be his first full year on the place. Adam had spent the previous fourteen years working his butt off just to buy the ranch near Brownsville. He would have liked to have worked one more year before buying and moving onto the ranch. Then he heard that some big condo corporation had started sniffing around the property. They planned to use the place if they got it for vacation getaways for city folk who needed time away.

Adam didn’t believe that would work. Busy city folk might appreciate a few days of peace and quiet. But then they’d miss the excitement. He couldn’t imagine the small tavern in town overrun with folk wanting specialty drinks. Or the requests for lattes in the hometown café.

Besides all that and even if the idea was a bust, it worried Adam that he might lose the place he’d coveted. Forever it seemed to him by then. So he scraped together every nickel he could find and bought the long deserted place before the corporation, with all its red tape approval requirements, could put together an offer.

Then once he actually owned the place, Adam couldn’t keep working in the city. That meant staying away from where his heart longed to be. The ranch was quite a distance from the city. It was truly in cattle country. Only a few months went by before he quit his job and moved onto the place outright. Needless to say, money was extremely tight.

Adam parked his beat up pickup truck behind the house near the kitchen. He picked up two bags of groceries off the passenger floor board and carried them to the back door. He juggled the bag in his right arm so as not to spill anything while he turned the knob to open the door. When it gave, Adam pushed the door ajar with his boot and stepped inside.

He unloaded the sacks with the few things he’d bought in town. As he did with a lot of things these days, Adam scrimped on food. He ate just enough to give him the energy to get through the day, well almost. Most nights Adam was hungry when he went to bed. He told himself he could afford to lose a few pounds but the truth of the matter was, Adam preferred to use his scant funds on the ranch, the dream he considered more important to him than mere food.

He had fence that needed repaired, a corral with rotten posts and a barn that looked as if it was about ready to collapse on one side. He had started work on the barn right off. Adam couldn’t afford to build a new one, not for a few years anyway and that would only be if things went well. If not, it would be even longer before he could replace it. In the meantime, he’d do what repairs to it he could.

As for livestock, Adam bought a few cows, not a herd for sure, not even enough to say he ran cattle. The few he had, though, were top of the line. Adam began his herd with Dexter cows. They were smaller at maturity, around a thousand pounds. Adam felt that since he had less experience than a man who was raised ranching, he would be able to handle the smaller breed more easily. Especially since he’d have to do it all by himself. There wasn’t enough money to hire any help.

In addition, a smaller cow needed less pasture and feed in the winter. With his limited funds, that was an attractive alternative to Adam. In his research, Adam learned that the Dexter was easy to handle, very fertile and calved more easily than some other breeds. Their meat was leaner, a plus for some people, he thought.

It would take him a lot of years to produce a real herd, one Adam could be proud of but he had all the time in the world to do so. He would learn how to care for the animals slowly, as he grew the herd. By the time, he had a real herd, possibly Brangus, Adam would be a passable rancher, not as good as those men who’d grown up in that life with generations of knowledge behind them, but he’d make a living. When you thought about it, that’s all most people did anyway, live from paycheck to paycheck. At least this way, Adam would be doing what he loved.

His economy penny pinching ways had been a way to survive all of Adam’s life. So living on a tight budget the way Adam was doing now was no different. He hadn’t had hardly a dime to his name for the first seventeen years of his life. Adam was raised in an orphanage. He worked his buns off in there from the time he was able to hold a broom, but never received any pay for it. Yet it taught Adam to work hard so he was grateful for it.

The staff, to their credit, tried to discern what attributes their growing residents had and steer them toward a job they could take up when they left the place. The babies and kids less than three years of age mostly got adopted but not the older ones. Adam would be forever grateful that some staff member chose the job they did for him.

He was loaned out to a ranch at the age of twelve. It was there that Adam discovered his love of horses and then cows. Adam worked initially keeping the barns clean including the horses’ stalls. He unsaddled and rubbed down the horses when the cowboys came in from riding herd on the cattle. He also did whatever other jobs were assigned to him. As he performed well, more and more tasks were given to him. Adam eventually was taught to ride and then after that how to help with the cattle.

Though it was a fully operational cattle ranch, the owner also rented out stalls in one barn for weekend riders. Those were the well off men who kept a horse there for a beloved daughter or son. A few rode themselves but didn’t want the responsibility for the daily care of the animal. In fact, most of those men didn’t know how to properly care for their horses.

It became Adam’s job to make sure each and every animal was well fed, well groomed and healthy. Since the owners only rode their horses on weekends, Adam rode them during the week so the horses wouldn’t get fat and lazy. Some of those owners began giving Adam tips for the good care he gave their horses. He saved every penny.

Adam worked at the stable until he was released from the orphanage at the age of seventeen. It was only a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday when an influx of children arrived at the facility. His bed was needed so they let Adam go early.

The ranch owner Adam worked for couldn’t afford to keep him on. He used orphans to do the work for that very reason. They weren’t paid. He did give Adam a written recommendation and sent him off to a larger ranch who could pay Adam a decent wage.

He worked hard there but unlike some of the other hands who laid around in the winter doing what had to be done but no more, Adam took on extra jobs, some on the ranch and others in town…and he saved his money.

Adam knew almost nothing of his parentage. He knew his last name was Carlton but little else. He was told that he’d been dropped off at the orphanage when he was three years old by some distant cousin. The older lady told the staff member that his parents had perished and she was too old to care for him. She claimed there was no other family.

He didn’t know if being wrenched from his parents at that early age was the reason but whatever it was, Adam had always felt alone. Lonely was a better word. Unwanted even. His orphanage years simply added to that feeling. Eventually, Adam came to believe that that was the way it would always be. He’d even learned to accept his fate. Most days.

All that was left for him was to make the best he could of his life. That would mean doing what he loved to do. He would be a rancher, a small one but even so, it was the job he wanted. For the first time in his life, Adam felt in control. He took orders from no one. If he was lonesome, he was also free.

Adam made himself a small portioned supper which he ate slowly to make it last. Afterward, he posted the money he spent in town to his expense account. Every penny counted. Adam couldn’t afford to make a mistake.

He sat in front of his computer with his budget spread sheet program playing the ‘what if’ game. What if his first year went better than he anticipated, where would he be when it came time to sell the few fully grown cows he would have? Conversely, what if he lost a cow or two?

After several hours of unproductive worrying, Adam turned off his computer and moved out of the room he used for an office. He locked the door to that room as was his habit and turned to go into his bedroom.

His stomach growled with unappeased hunger. Adam turned the other direction then and moved to the kitchen. He satisfied his pangs with a few crackers spread with peanut butter. It would do until morning. Adam’s most satisfying meal was breakfast. He always looked forward to that meal. These days, Adam splurged only on breakfast. He needed the energy it gave him to accomplish his day’s work.

Chapter Two

Jessica Cartwright slipped the ring off her finger and laid it on the small circular table. Jessie was alone in the side room of the church. She had sent her bridesmaids out of the room, saying she needed a few moments alone. Once they were gone, she hurriedly threw off the white bridal dress and slipped back into the jeans and sweater she’d worn to the church. Jessie laid the dress across a brocade chair next to the table.

Her wedding was supposed to take place in just a few minutes but it would never happen. Jessie smiled, pleased with herself for the first time, possibly forever.

She grabbed her purse and dashed out the back door. She ran to the car she’d parked in the church parking lot the day before. Jessie told her father she’d left her car at the repair shop and he’d believed her story. After all, she wouldn’t need it until after the honeymoon. And the car had needed a new quarter panel on the back where someone had backed into it at the mall where Jessie was supposed to be shopping for her trousseau.

Unbeknown to her father, though, Jessie had already had the fender fixed the week before. When that was accomplished, Jessie drove out of the city to a smaller town some hundred miles away and sold the expensive Bentley. Jessie replaced it with a used car she bought at a different tiny one owner car lot in that same town. That was the car she left in the parking lot a day earlier.

Jessica’s father had bullied her into accepting Brad’s engagement ring the year before. Jessie didn’t love Brad but he was her father’s heir apparent at the department store. So he was Jessie’s father’s choice for a son in law. The two men had big plans to turn that major store in New York into a chain, whatever that was. Jessie didn’t know much about her father’s business and she didn’t care to know, either.

The only thing Jessie did care about was that she didn’t want to marry Brad. She talked until she was blue in the face but neither Brad nor her father would listen to her protestations. As the days and weeks went by, Jessie was dragged further and further into their plans for her life, a life no different than she already had, a life she didn’t want, in fact hated. Truthfully, Jessie had never been happy in the protected, almost obsessive way her father had raised her. She was sure a marriage to Brad would be no different.

Jessie’s mother had died when Jessie was ten. Jessie wondered whether that lady would have had more success arguing with Jessie’s father than