Slow Burn Cowboy

Though it was a strange thing to have the common ground between yourself and your brother marked by all the things you didn’t have in common. Where you were raised. Who you were raised by.

But in his family those strange connections were all you had anyway.

“You don’t have to enjoy this so much.” Cain leaned back in his seat, resting his head on the back of the chair. “I’m thirty-seven, not seventeen. And I feel every year of it right about now.”

“You own a ranch, Cain,” Finn said, looking at his older brother. “Why are you acting like you haven’t been on the back of a horse since the dawn of time?”

“It’s probably been a couple of years,” he said. “I paid other people to manage the actual day-to-day stuff. At least, that’s how it’s been since my wife left.”

“So you just turned everything over to other people?” That was unfathomable to Finn. He liked to have his hand in every aspect of the ranch. Sure, he had people who worked at the Laughing Irish other than himself and his grandpa, but he was in charge, unquestionably. And he went out and rode the perimeter of the place almost every day. It was in his heart, in his blood. And he didn’t possess the ability to let go of even a piece of it.

“I had too much to hold on to in my personal life.” Cain swore, setting his beer down on the table. “I love being a father, but I can’t say that I ever thought I was the best one. But now I’m all Violet has. And I felt like... How could I possibly be out working on the ranch when there was more than enough money coming in if I never touched it? Someone had to make sure everything was all right at school. That all of her homework was getting done. And I could let the work go, so I did. Anyway, there was still paperwork. And I basically buried myself in that, plus doing the legal work of making sure I got sole custody. So that Kathleen could never just walk back into our lives and decide she wanted to try and take Violet from me. Not after she left the way she did.”

“Why did she leave?” They had never talked about this. But then, they had never talked about much of anything. Finn hadn’t even fully realized that Cain’s ex-wife had removed herself so completely from the picture.

“Probably for a million stupid reasons. And a couple of really good ones.” He paused, looking down at his hands. “But the worst part about somebody leaving you like that is you can’t shout it out. I mean, I know enough to know she wasn’t kidnapped or anything. Because trust me, that was my first thought. Your wife disappears on you and the first thing you want to do is call the police. Because there’s no way she’d leave her thirteen-year-old daughter, right? I mean, sure, maybe she’d leave the husband she could hardly say a civil word to. But Violet? That’s the part I don’t get.”

He stood, pacing the length of the kitchen before he paused at the window over the kitchen sink, just as Finn had done a few days ago. He looked out at the view, taking it all in, and Finn felt a strange mixture of irritation and pride as his older brother surveyed everything Finn had worked to make this ranch over the past nearly two decades.

“It’s the part I can’t forgive,” Cain said heavily. Then he turned back to Finn. “If you think a full day of work, day in day out, scares me, you don’t know what I’ve been through. I’m raising a teenage girl, Finn. I’m not scared of jack shit except all the ways I might fuck that up.” He took a weighted breath. “But I need something new. She needs something new. Otherwise, we’re just going to sit there mired in old memories and drown. I need your money even less than Alex does. My ranch was big, and when I sold it I got more than I’ll ever spend. I can invest it back into the Laughing Irish. I can invest in Violet’s future. That’s what I want. But this isn’t about needing property, or needing to earn a living. Not for me.”

Cain didn’t have to get into a deeper explanation than that. Mostly because Finn recognized exactly what Cain needed this place to be. It was the same thing Finn had needed when he’d showed up, angry and lost at sixteen.

He didn’t need money. He needed salvation.

“I’m warning you,” Finn said. “This ranch will drag a whole lot out of you before it starts putting anything back. And then, it’ll always be that way. Give and take. You and the land.”

“That’s all right,” Cain said. “I kind of want it to hurt.”

Finn didn’t want to understand Cain. Because that was perilously close to being on his brother’s side. To wanting to help him out in some way. He bristled against his growling conscience.

He should want to help his brother, he supposed. It was much easier to oppose his presence when he imagined that Cain wanted to be here for the wrong reasons. That it didn’t matter. That a payout would make things square.

This made it a whole lot more difficult. It made Finn feel a whole lot more petty.

“Violet doesn’t seem very happy to be here,” he pointed out. Which was maybe the lowest blow he’d tried to land yet.

Cain laughed, but there was no humor in it. “She’s not happy anywhere. I don’t know what to... I mean... It’s like she’s a different person now. She used to be this adorable, little bitty thing. And I can remember her with two missing front teeth and a big smile so clearly that half the time that’s still what I expect to see when I look at her. Instead she’s this sullen creature that will barely make eye contact with me. She was mad at me in Texas. I figure she can be mad at me here. But at least maybe with a little less baggage hanging around.” He shook his head. “I could never shake the feeling that she was waiting for her mother to come back. And the longer we stayed at the ranch, the more I felt like that was why. That it was why we were both still there. It had to stop.”

All of this, the emotion, the understanding, scraped against Finn like a particularly splintered board on bare skin.

“I don’t know what to say,” Finn responded finally. “Mostly because there’s nothing I can say that won’t make me sound like an ass.”

Cain lifted a shoulder. “Maybe because you are one.”

“Maybe,” Finn agreed.

“I’m not the easiest person to get along with,” Cain said. “Every woman who has ever passed through my life will attest to that. Particularly, at the moment, my daughter. I’m not one to promise that we are not going to butt heads here. But I can tell you that I’m not here to ruin your life. I’m just trying my damnedest to fix mine.”

CHAPTER SEVEN (#udbd83345-e894-5bdf-8835-3bfa8ab29052)

A DAY OFF was exactly what Lane needed to get her head on straight. She was tired, that was the thing. Overtired and emotionally taxed. It was why she had acted like such a weirdo last night when Finn had touched her.

And why she had been persistently weird about it all the way home, and while she was trying to go to sleep.

What he had said had continued to play over and over in her mind.

When a woman spends the night with me, I don’t do any of that.

She was a curious creature by nature, and his saying something like that forced her to try and imagine all the things he might do. Which had ended very quickly because the images she’d conjured had been awkward and strange and had left her stomach feeling tight and flipped inside out all at the same time.

Normally, she did her best to never imagine Finn doing anything remotely sensual. He was a constant in her life. And he was a man, yes, and she wasn’t blind. But when she’d met Finn she’d been in such a terrible, vulnerable place, and he’d been the friend she’d needed. She’d spent the ensuing years resolutely keeping him in that category.

It had taken Rebecca’s almost hooking up with Finn to jolt Lane into finally acknowledging that he was, indeed, a man.

And then there was what he’d said last night. About what he did and didn’t do when a woman spent the night. It left a lot to the imagination. And her imagination was a bright and inquisitive thing.

So today, she was doing her best to keep it dampened by puttering around in the garden. She had kept herself outside, and all forms of media shut off. No internet. No radio. No TV. No chance of upsetting images infiltrating her home.

Being on the ground, up to her elbows in dirt, was much more satisfying than catching a glimpse of the Ghost of Teenage Mistakes Past on the news.

Anyway, she had plenty to do. There was enough lettuce that she was going to have to bring it to the store if she had a hope of using it all. Picking and processing that, separating it out into individual plastic bags so it was ready for people to take home as premade salad mix, had eaten up a good portion of her time.

Then she had gone to wander around in the thicker part of the woods around her property. Her knee-length lace dress kept getting snagged on sticker bushes, but she didn’t mind. She minded more when the raspberries and blackberries twined around her legs and left little teeth marks in her skin.

But there were no prizes for timidity when it came to picking blackberries. The good ones were typically on the very top of the bushes, reaching up toward the sun. She hummed as she dropped the plump fruit into milk jugs she had cut the tops off.

They made for handy berry buckets, and they were cheap and disposable so if the juice stained the inside it didn’t much matter.

She didn’t mind the typically gray weather on the Oregon coast, but she very much prized the summertime. She closed her eyes, allowing the sun to bathe her in gentle warmth as she continued her work.

The mild weather through the winter and slightly earlier warmth of the summer had ensured that the berries ripened a little bit earlier than usual. And she held out hope that even more would ripen between July and August.

Little containers of the berries would fetch a decent price in the Mercantile, and anything extra would go to Alison, for pie and pastries and maybe for that jam she was thinking of asking Alison to supply her.

She wondered if Cassie would want any for The Grind, for a kind of special scone or biscotti. The thought had Lane humming to herself, imagining all of the baked goods she could talk her friends into making for her.

She liked her own baked goods too, of course. But sometimes things just tasted better when they were made for you.

She bent, grabbing her half-full container of blackberries by the handle, then scooping up the one she’d managed to fill most of the way up with raspberries, as well. With her free hand, she held on to her dress, trying to keep it away from the sticker bushes as she picked her way back through the thick foliage until she got to the well-worn path that would take her back to her house.

She paused for a moment in a clearing, allowing a shaft of sun to fall over her bare arms. She relaxed, holding the heavy buckets down low at her sides as she closed her eyes and tilted her face up. She listened then. To the birds, and the faint sound of the breeze ruffling through the treetops.

She breathed in, that heady mixture of soil, wood and pine that was only headier in the damp forest as the temperatures rose.

Then she heard the sound of car tires crunching on the gravel driveway that led to her house. She paused, frowning. She wasn’t expecting anybody, and unless they had gone too far and needed to turn around, no one had any reason to be driving up to her place.

She mobilized, walking up to the back door of her cabin and letting herself inside, passing quickly through the small house and peeking through the front window so that she could get a glimpse at the driver, without him seeing her first.