He Wanted a Wife to Feed 22 Starving Ranch Hands — She Turned His Empty Smokehouse Into a Fortune

Chapter 2

The frost crackled underfoot like broken glass as Josephine Cutler stood in the center of the muddy yard at dawn, an apron cut from a canvas feed sack tied around her waist and her sleeves rolled past her elbows to reveal forearms that carried a lean, shocking muscularity.

Lucien emerged from the main house, bracing against the biting wind, and stopped. She was already at work. She had not slept any more than he had. She had spent the night, it seemed, taking silent inventory of the ranch — the pastures, the timber, the smokehouse, the men — and she had come to a decision.

“Mr. Hatcher,” she called, her voice carrying with the sharp authority of a woman who had once commanded a room full of shouting men. “I need three fat heifers. Slim and Bo can rope them from the lower pasture. We butcher today.”

Lucien stood frozen, the echo of her demand colliding with the agonizing night he had spent wrestling with it. Slaying his breeding stock before the deep winter was a desperate, terrifying gamble. Those cattle were the last scrap of leverage he held against Amos Gentry’s foreclosure. Once they were dead, he would have nothing left to offer the bank but a pile of smoke and salt.

But then he looked past Josephine, at his men shuffling out of the bunkhouse with hollow cheeks and desperate, trusting eyes — and his resolve hardened into something cold and immovable.

He nodded to his skeletal foreman. “Slim. You and Bo take a pair of ropes down to the lower pasture. Call the three best heifers. We butcher today.”