Kitabı oku: «Slow Burn Cowboy»

CHAPTER ONE

“ANOTHER CASSEROLE?”

“You’re welcome,” Lane said, crossing the threshold into Finn Donnelly’s house carrying a disposable tin pan that looked like it was full of enough food to feed a small army.

“I can’t eat all of this, Lane,” he said, watching his best friend’s petite form disappear as she made her way from the expansive entry into the kitchen.

“But your brothers can,” she shot back.

He followed her path, his footsteps echoing on the stone floor as he entered the kitchen behind her.

“I don’t know how long they’ll be staying.”

His brothers. The entire Donnelly clan was theoretically showing up any day now. To collect an inheritance none of them deserved. Who knew that his grandfather—possibly the most difficult old bastard on the planet—possessed such a sense of fairness from the great beyond?

Finn had dedicated the last twenty years to working on the Laughing Irish Ranch while his brothers had gone off and made their own way. Which was fine by him. At least, it always had been. It was much less fine now that the old man was dead and his three brothers had been left with equal share in a property they had no blood, sweat or tears invested in.

But Finn figured they would come to pay their respects, and then he could offer them monetary compensation and send them on their way.

They’d never been interested in the ranch before. He didn’t see why they were acting like they wanted to be involved now.

“I imagine they’ll be staying long enough to eat a meal,” Lane said, her tone dry. She flipped her dark hair over her shoulder as she opened the fridge and bent down, examining the available space. “I have brought you a lot of food,” she said, looking back over her shoulder.

“Yes. A lot.”

“Well, most of these dishes you shouldn’t have to cook while you’re dealing with all of this. But some of them are also the result of my testing various sauces and spices that get sent to me. So I can figure out what I want to stock in the Mercantile.”

“Lane of Copper Ridge,” he said drily, “the patron saint of self-serving charity.”

She made a scoffing sound as she straightened and closed the fridge, then set the pan on the counter before turning away from him again. “No one else is cooking for you, Finn. Because you’re a cranky asshole. So maybe you should show a little more appreciation.”

She jerked the fridge open again, bending back down and starting to rearrange the contents. She made a little humming sound, her back arching as she reached deeper inside.

He looked at her ass. He didn’t even bother to try and stop himself. He had accepted the fact that he was attracted to Lane a long time ago. And around the same time he had accepted that he was never going to do anything about it.

He had a host of reasons for that, all of which he’d spent the past several years reinforcing. She was younger. Her older brother would kill him. But more than that, it just wasn’t worth messing with their friendship, no matter how fine her ass was.

Lane was special to him. Important. There was also something fragile about her that he’d sensed from the first, when she’d turned up in Copper Ridge to live with her brother. Finn was the wrong man for fragile.

The first time he’d ever felt attracted to her had come as a shock. Like getting hit in the chest with a bolt of lightning. She’d been eighteen to his twenty-four and he’d been at her and her brother Mark’s house for dinner. Mark had gone to bed, citing an early morning, and he and Lane had ended up staying up to watch a movie.

It was a comedy, and Finn could barely remember what it was. But he remembered Lane laughing. It had been the sweetest sound, and it had done something to him. Then she’d leaned up against him and placed her hand on his thigh to brace herself, and that something had become abundantly clear.

He’d been so disgusted with himself he’d made a thousand excuses and gone straight home. It had never gone away. Not after that. Not once he’d seen her as a woman.

But it had dulled to a vague ache now, instead of that sharp shock of heat. And that was how it had to stay. Repressed. Controlled.

Given that he’d made his decision early on, normally, he made a show of controlling his desire to check her out. Right now, he didn’t see the point. Right now, his grandfather was dead and he was going to be invaded by family that he hadn’t seen in longer than he cared to admit.

Right now, his focus was dedicated to dealing with that.

Amid a host of unenjoyable things, he was going to go ahead and enjoy the sight of Lane’s ass in those jeans.

“I’m sorry, Lane,” he said. “I will try to be more appreciative of the fact that I’m going to die buried beneath a pile of bereavement foods.”

“At least you won’t die of starvation,” she said, straightening and turning to face him, her smile brilliant, her brown eyes glittering. She picked up the casserole pan and put it in the newly cleared space in the fridge, then closed the door.

“Well, that’s a small comfort.” He crossed the kitchen, making his way over to the sink, pressing his palms flat on the countertop and gazing out the window. The house—which was a giant monstrosity that Finn had never understood, given the fact that for as long as he’d known his grandfather the old man had lived here alone—was nestled into a hillside, overlooking interlocking mountains covered in pine trees that stretched on into the distance until they faded from deep green to a misted blue.

The back of the house faced the ranching operation. The fields, containing herds of dairy cows, and the barns.

His blood, sweat and tears were there. Soaked into the ground, the wood and basically every other damn surface in the place. Like the rest of his brothers he had spent summers here as a kid. Unlike them, when he was sixteen he had decided that he was here to stay.

Finn had never felt anything quite like the peace that came from working his body boneless out in the field. And after a life spent with his volatile mother and completely unreliable father, he had liked finding something that he could control.

If he did the work, he got a result. If he spent the day fixing a fence, at the end of the day he had a functioning fence. It was tangible. It was real.

It completely boggled his mind that his grandfather had decided to give any of the property to the grandsons who had never showed an interest. But there was no arguing with a dead man. Hell, there had been no point arguing with the old man when he was alive.

“Do you want to stay and eat?” Finn asked, now that Lane had put the food away.

“Don’t mind if I do,” she said. “Of course, I spent most of the day tasting different products that came into the store. I got some pistachio cream from Italy. You have no idea. It was amazing.”

He frowned. “What do you do with pistachio cream?”

“Eat it with a spoon? Bathe in it?”

“As long as the food you made me is normal.”

She waved a hand. “Normal. Dull. Your palate needs work.”

“If loving chicken nuggets is wrong I don’t want to be right.”

“You’ll be pleased to know that the casserole I brought tonight is mostly pasta-based, and is in no way in violation of your steak and potatoes philosophy on food.”

“Pasta-based and steak and potatoes? That sounds weird.”

“I meant that in the metaphorical sense. The metaphor being that you like boring food and it grieves me.”

“I think you’re adventurous enough for the both of us, Lane.”

“Well, tonight I think we’re going to have a combination of potpie and pot roast. There’s a theme.” She took two containers out of the fridge and set them on the counter. “I shall commence warming them.”

“Why don’t you let me take care of that?” he asked.

Lane arched a brow. “Oooh. You mean I don’t have to microwave my own dinner? And they say chivalry is dead.”

“I am a chivalrous bastard, Lane Jensen.” Something about the way the corner of her mouth turned up just then caused a tug low and deep in his stomach.

“You’re a study in contradictions, Finn Donnelly,” Lane said as she continued to assemble the dinner as though he hadn’t offered to be the one to do so.

But this was how things went. He took care of everything in her house that she considered to be man’s work. Any kind of plumbing or wiring issue, arachnid-related concerns and the extermination of the odd errant vole in her yard.

In return, she often took care of things like feeding him, or buying him clothes when she went into Portland or Eugene. He never even had to ask. She just appeared with things. Usually after noticing that he had worn a hole through his boots or something like that.

Basically, Lane was his wife. But with virtually none of the perks a man actually wanted from a marriage.

But, considering he didn’t ever want a wife, that was fine by him.

A blow job. Sometimes he would like a blow job. But a friendship was hardly worth detonating over that.

“That’s me, a walking contradiction. Complicated and shit,” he returned, his voice a little harder than he’d intended it to be.

Due in large part to the fact that he had just been thinking about Lane’s lips on his body. Always a mistake. One he didn’t usually make.

“Yes, a man of deep complexity. And steak and potatoes,” she said, a laugh hovering on the edges of her words.

The sounds of domesticity settled around them, and he let them wash over him just for a moment. There was something nice about watching her bustle around the kitchen.

Probably because he had never really experienced that growing up. His father had taken off when he’d been little, making a new life with another woman, and for a while with the two kids that had come from that union—Liam and Alex.

After his father had left, his mother had been more concerned with the drama in her love life than dealing with her son.

Finn had learned early on to make peanut butter sandwiches and hot dogs.

Cain, the oldest Donnelly, was from their father’s first serious relationship, Finn from his second. His brother Alex had been part of an affair that had occurred around the same time as the marriage to Finn’s mother, which put the two of them close in age.

Then Finn’s father had left and married Alex’s mother and produced one more child, Liam. Making the youngest two the only full-blood brothers in the crew.

Which left Finn with his mother. Until she’d left him too.

Family fun with the Donnelly’s was rarely all that fun, for all of those reasons.

He had never really been close to his brothers, for very obvious reasons. And now, they were all going to descend.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen your brothers?”

“Well, Alex was deployed for eighteen months, and then he went back to base rather than Copper Ridge when he got out. So it’s been a couple of years. Probably about the same for the rest of them.” He was pretty sure. He didn’t keep track. “Hell, I think I talk to your brother more than I talk to any of mine. And I don’t even talk to him that much.”

She let out a short, one-note laugh. “When you do, can you get more than a one-word conversation out of him?”

“Not really,” Finn said, not seeing the issue.

Lane laughed. “He’s so cranky.”

“That’s probably why the two of us get along.”

Mark Jensen was one of his oldest friends, and even though he’d moved down to California a few years ago he and Finn still kept in touch.

The two of them had gotten acquainted after high school, both of them young and away from their parents. Mark had moved to Copper Ridge at a young age and taken work on a fishing boat. And Finn had been working the ranch.

Eventually, Mark had moved away and gone to college for a while, but then he had come back and taken on engineering work on the same fishing boats he had started on as a grunt laborer. Finn was still a laborer. In fact, that was what he intended to be for the rest of his life. That was what he liked. There was honesty in it, working the land.

You couldn’t bullshit the earth. He liked that. You had to work, and the rewards were merit-based. Sometimes the weather swept in and messed things up, but living on the coast in the relatively temperate Oregon climate and with modern conveniences, that was not the biggest concern for a dairy farmer.

He had good contracts with one of the major dairies in the state, and additionally had been working on developing some other avenues for selling their products. Yeah, he was a laborer, but he had always been proud of it. Better to be like that than like his father. Running around the country screwing anything that moved and trying to get out of having to work for a damn thing. He had never understood how his grandfather’s only son had managed to turn out that way.

The old man was a hard-ass. Possibly because he was compensating for what had happened with Finn’s father. But either way, he had taught Finn the value of an honest day’s work. And he was grateful.

It had also shown him the value of staying. Investing. Which neither of his parents had managed to do.

And it had given him a way to have some control in his life. After spending his childhood being jerked around by the whims of adults, figuring out he could actively affect the world around him had been a revelation. That he could work at something, cultivate the land. Build up something that no one could take from him.

Except, apparently, when his grandfather died and left the land to his brothers. That felt much closer to losing his foundation than he would have liked.

“I don’t know about that,” Lane was saying, pulling their food out of the microwave. “I don’t actually think you’re as grumpy as Mark is.”

Lane turned around and nearly ran into him. Finn reached out to steady her, gripping her shoulders and holding her there. Her shirt was soft, and so was she, and it made it hard to pull away as quickly as he should.

He cleared his throat, releasing his hold on her. “Maybe I’m just not as grumpy with you.”

The moment extended, her blue eyes locked with his, then slowly, a tight smile curved her lips, slackening as the air between them seem to clear. Some of the tension loosening. Then her expression turned amused.

“If that’s the case, I really would hate to see you with other people. You might not be as cranky as Mark, but you’re not exactly rainbows and sunshine.”

“If I were rainbows and sunshine you wouldn’t like me. Anyway, without a thunderstorm you wouldn’t have a rainbow.”

“You are my very favorite thunderstorm, Finn.”

He ground his teeth together, still feeling the effects of his earlier lapse in self-control. Still feeling the impression of her warmth beneath his fingers. She did not seem similarly affected. “Happy to be the dark cloud in your life.”

“Stop scowling at me. I’m making you dinner.”

He did his best to relax the muscles in his face and to give her something that looked a little bit less surly. He would only ever do that for Lane.

Right when Lane took his plate out of the microwave, there was a knock on the door. He let out a heavy sigh. “If it’s another casserole...”

“Who else is bringing you casserole?” Lane asked, her tone full of mock offense. “I’m just kidding,” she said, smiling. “I know that no one else is bringing you casserole. At least, no one under the age of eighty.”

“Maybe I like older women,” he said, lifting a shoulder.

She arched her brow. “To each his own, I guess.”

His scowl returned and he walked out of the kitchen, heading toward the front door. He jerked it open without bothering to look and see who was on the other side. And when he saw, he froze.

“Hi, little brother. It’s been a while.”

As Finn stared at his older brother, Cain, he had to concede that it had probably been more than a couple of years since they had seen each other. Cain’s dark hair was longer than the last time he’d seen him, his face a little more lined. Around his eyes. Around his mouth.

When a girl who could only be Cain’s daughter started to make her way toward the door from the car, her expression sulky in that way that only teenage girls could accomplish, Finn amended that timeline to way more than a couple of years.

The last time he’d seen Violet, she had been a little girl. This half-grown young woman in front of him was definitely not the child he remembered.

Her hands were stuffed into her sweatshirt pockets, the hood pulled up over her head, her shoulders hunched forward. She came to stand beside her dad, looking incensed.

“It was a long drive,” Cain said.

Finn looked past his two relatives to the beat-up truck with the Texas license plates that was parked in the driveway. He hadn’t realized Cain was going to drive. The very thought of driving halfway across the country with only a teen girl for company made Finn want to crawl out of his own skin.

Though, actually, the idea of driving halfway across the country with his brother made him feel that way too.

But more concerning than any of that was the trailer hitched to the back of the old truck. Suspicion lodged itself in Finn’s chest.

“Why didn’t you fly?” he asked.

“Wanted to have the truck.” Which didn’t answer the unspoken question about the trailer. Cain looked past him. “Aren’t you going to invite us in?”

As if it were an option to leave him out there on the porch. A large part of Finn wished it were.

Finn fought against the desire to say something confrontational, and focused on the reality of the situation. No matter how he felt, Cain had a right to be here.

But that didn’t mean he had to like it.

“You own exactly as much of this house as I do, Cain,” Finn said, the words sticking in his throat on the way out. “You don’t really have to ask my permission.”

“That’s how it is then,” Cain said, walking past Finn and into the house.

Violet remained stubbornly rooted to the porch.

“Violet,” Cain said, his tone full of warning. “I thought you were going to like, freeze to death. Maybe you should come inside so you don’t die of exposure.”

Violet rolled her eyes and crossed the threshold into the house. She pulled the phone out of her pocket and immediately busied herself by tapping her thumbs on the touch screen.

“Say hi to your uncle Finn.”

Finn had never gotten fully used to the idea that he was somebody’s uncle. But then, it was difficult for him to believe that his brother was a father. Actually, it was even stranger now that Violet wasn’t in diapers.

The last time Finn had seen her she had been maybe seven or eight, looking at Cain and at all of her uncles like they were gods. And Cain had still been married. Maybe that was another reason this was so strange. Seeing Violet as something other than the bright-eyed imp who worshipped the ground her dad walked on.

And being treated to her total and complete ambivalence when before his very existence had made him as unto a god.

He supposed he didn’t really have a right to feel much about that either way. It wasn’t like he had been very involved in her life.

Though in fairness to Finn, Cain hadn’t made much of an effort to involve him.

“Hi, Uncle Finn,” Violet said, not looking up from her phone. “My, how you’ve grown.”

Her response stopped him short. “I wasn’t going to say that,” he said.

“Sure.”

“I wasn’t,” he returned.

Finally, Violet looked up, a long-suffering expression on her face. “They all do.”

Not him. He was thirty-four years old. He wasn’t somebody’s elderly relative.

“Do I have a room or something?” Violet asked, directing the question at her dad.

Finn could tell that Cain was about to lecture her for being rude, but as far as Finn was concerned getting rid of the teenager as quickly as possible was optimal. “Up the stairs. First room on the left,” he said.

It had always struck Finn as odd that his grandfather had designed the house to hold so many people, when the old man had few friends and little contact with his family in the broad sense. But the place was big enough to house a small army.

Most of the bedrooms had gone unused since the house had been built five years ago. And when Finn had gotten a look at the will after the old man had died, he’d wondered if they’d been put there for this purpose.

Which had made him feel like a damned idiot. Thinking any of this was for him. Was for a job well done. Hell no.

He’d busted his ass, worked his fingers to the bone—literally in some cases—and they would reap the rewards.

“Thanks.” She shoved her phone back in her pocket and tried to force something that looked vaguely like a smile before walking up the stairs. It was strange to see somebody come into the house for the first time and not be completely awed by the sheer scope of it.

The custom-built cabin, with its high beam-crossed ceilings and breathtaking views of the misty green wilderness, was usually enough to stop people in their tracks.

Apparently, that reaction did not extend to surly teenagers.

After Violet disappeared, Finn turned to his brother. “Well,” he said, “she’s gotten—”

“Impossible?”

“Not what I was going to say. But, you’re the expert.”

Cain pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m not an expert on anything, just ask Violet. But that’s not really relevant to why we’re here.”

“Okay,” Finn said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “You’re here because?”

“Why do you think? It’s not like this is some random appearance you weren’t expecting. Our grandfather died.”

“And per his wishes there was no service. He wanted his money to go back into the ranch, and his body to go back to the mountains. I spread his ashes and didn’t make a deal out of it, just like he said to do.”

Cain set his jaw. “Grandpa left part of the ranch to me, and I’m here because I want it.”

Tension crept up Finn’s spine. He’d known his brothers would come for their inheritance. Hell, who wouldn’t? But he’d imagined they would be discussing money. Finn had been prepared to issue payouts—or make arrangements for them anyway.

What he hadn’t thought was that anyone might want their share of the ranch itself.

“In what capacity, Cain? Because you’ve never paid much attention to the ranch or what goes on here before. In fact, you never even came to visit in the past eight years. It has to have been that long. The last time I saw Violet she was a kid, now she’s...that.”

“I’d apologize to you about that, Finn, but I was kind of in the middle of dealing with my life, which hasn’t been easy for the past few years.”

Finn knew that his brother had been going through a hard time. With the divorce and all of that, but he’d also figured if Cain was having trouble handling it, he would have said something.

He wasn’t sure why he’d figured that, since he would rather die than go to one of his half brothers for help.

Which made him feel like a jackass. He resented that something fierce. Feeling like a jackass in his own damn living room when he was the one being invaded.

“Right,” Finn said, unable to make his tone anything other than hard.

It wasn’t that he didn’t care about Cain’s issues. It wasn’t that he didn’t have some sympathy. It was just that it was all buried beneath the mountain of resentment he felt over this situation.

Cain shrugged. “Now I figure I’m going to deal with it here.”

The sound of a feminine throat clearing caused both men to turn. “Hi,” Lane said, a sheepish smile on her face. She was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, her hands clasped behind her back.

“Cain,” Finn said, doing his best to school his voice into an even tone, “this is Lane.”

“Is she your...”

“Oh, no,” Lane said, a note of incredulity running through the denial. “I’m just his friend. I came to bring casserole, because I knew that you would be coming. At least, I assume you’re the person that I thought would be coming. You’re his brother, right? You do look like him,” she said, rambling now at that full-tilt pace that he had only ever seen Lane accomplish.

Cain looked slightly surprised by the avalanche of words he had just been subjected to, but then he seemed to recover quickly enough. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Cain.”

Lane looked at Finn as if she was waiting for additional information. Well, Finn didn’t have any. At least any he felt like giving. The silence stretched on, and he could sense Lane getting increasingly twitchy, since silence was an enemy she typically made it her mission to defeat.

“Cain and Lane,” she burst out. “That’s funny. And you probably won’t forget my name.”

She stood there, looking no less uncomfortable. As uncomfortable as Finn was starting to feel.

“How long are you staying for?” Finn asked.

Cain glanced around the room, studying the surroundings intently. And then his blue eyes fell back to Finn, looking far too serious for Finn’s liking.