Untamed Cowboy

He blamed himself, in part. For the fact that what had happened seemed to have damaged her in ways she couldn’t come back from.

So of course when Olivia said she didn’t want to have sex until they were engaged he had honored that easily. He would never, ever pressure a woman into doing something she didn’t want to.

And he would never act out of control again in his life. The consequence for that kind of thing were too grave.

But nobody knew about that. They would all think he was acting weird because his ex was pregnant. They had no idea he’d nearly been a father once. And that this made him think of the baby he would have had fifteen years ago. That it made him wonder about what that might have been like. What that life might have been.

It hadn’t even been a life he had wanted. It had just been the life he was coping with.

But it was hovering there now. And he couldn’t even explain it to anyone.

“Well, maybe at the barbecue I can set up a free vet check booth,” he said drily.

“Yeah, not sure we want you doing any of that near the food.”

“Like having hayrides near a barbecue is any less problematic? I don’t think it is.”

Jamie sniffed. “Horses are not dirty.”

“Just because you love horses more than you love most people doesn’t mean other people love them near their burgers.”

“Well, then, they’re not people I want to know anyway,” his sister said.

Sometimes Bennett wondered if Jamie had suffered the most from losing their mother at a young age. Jamie had been a newborn when their mom had died, and their dad had done his best with her—with all of them—but he’d had four kids, a working ranch and a shedload of grief to contend with.

Ultimately Jamie had been left to go a little bit wild, running around outside and doing her best to keep up with her brothers from the time she was barely knee-high to a grasshopper. But then, Jamie was happy. Normal shouldn’t matter.

But it did to him. That was the problem.

It clearly did, because his entire set of goals had centered around having some version of a normal life. The house, the job, the wife, the kids.

And it had all crumbled down around him and he didn’t know how he felt about it.

But then, when push came to shove he hadn’t proposed to Olivia.

Now that her pregnancy news was rolling over him slowly, and he was dealing with various ghosts from the past, he wondered if that was why.

If, in the end, his past was part of what had held him back. The fact that he had known marrying Olivia and making a family with her was going to dredge up things he didn’t want to think about.

But when it came to Jamie, he only cared about her happiness. And that much was easy. When it came to himself, it was a lot different.

Sometimes he wondered if he deserved to be happy.

Whatever, he had to quit sitting here feeling sorry for himself. He needed to go home. Now that he had given up on the idea of getting blind stinking drunk, he needed to get his ass in bed so that when tomorrow morning’s wake-up call came it didn’t feel like such an assault.

“Well,” he said, “thanks for the... This little version of support that you all are able to give.” He tilted his half-consumed beer bottle upward. “I think I’m going to call it a night.”

“You’re not too drunk to drive,” Grant said, his tone dry, “are you?”

“I don’t know how you’re ever not too drunk to drive,” Bennett returned.

“I might not be,” Grant said. “But, seeing as I live here, it doesn’t really matter.”

A couple of years ago Grant had sold his house in town and moved back onto the ranch. There were so many outbuildings and dwellings on the property that it was easy for them to all cohabit there and not see each other.

Bennett preferred to have his own space.

“Fair enough. Now you can just stagger across the property.”

At least Grant wasn’t drinking alone. He wasn’t going to say that, but he was grateful for that. They all worried about Grant. They had thought that in a year, two years, five years, he would have done something in the way of recovering from Lindsay’s death. But Lindsay had been his high school sweetheart, his first and only love, and the fact that he had married her even knowing their marriage wouldn’t be a long one, knowing that eventually her terminal illness would take her, had made them a kind of tragic love story for the ages in Gold Valley.

And unfortunately, Grant, it turned out, excelled at existing in tragedy.

“I’m sure I’ll see y’all tomorrow,” he said. “If you end up needing any help on anything specific let me know.”

He stood up and went back outside, feeling a little bit like an unsettled boomerang not sure what target he was hoping to return to.

His hand itched, and he wanted to reach for his phone to call Kaylee.

But it was late now, and she had probably gone to sleep.

He had already interrupted her date, he didn’t need to wake her up too.

Part of him wondered if she had called her date back, if they were resuming activities now. At her home. In her bed.

He gritted his teeth. What the hell was wrong with him? He didn’t think about Kaylee and sex. He didn’t think about Kaylee showering. Didn’t imagine pale skin and her curves. Never.

He blamed this whole thing on Olivia because he didn’t think of Olivia as being the mother of someone else’s children either.

She was supposed to be the mother of his.

And whether or not he had a broken heart, he felt...

Well, thwarted plans were never fun.

Having built an entire life in his head that was now permanently crumbled around him was not fun.

He had encouraged Luke to go after Olivia, when the man had shown up at the ranch looking brokenhearted and generally hangdog. Because Bennett hadn’t felt that broken when Olivia had left him. And he knew that Olivia deserved a man who did. When push came to shove, he felt like he had done the right thing.

But he kind of wished that he hadn’t now. And in this moment, by himself, he was going to go ahead and feel petty.

Yeah, and he was going to take that home by himself. All of his anger, all of his unsettled feelings. All of the weird thoughts he had about his best friend tonight.

Tomorrow would be a new day. And he would start making a new plan. There wasn’t another option.

CHAPTER THREE (#ud9cbd981-cf4a-5971-abd2-905948ff5127)

BEFORE TEN O’CLOCK Kaylee had already dealt with a parakeet that had a fever, a ferret with a bad skin condition and an old dog that had gotten into some foxtails.