Slow Burn Cowboy

“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.