by Maisey Yates
He couldn’t seem to look away from her. “What are you asking me?”
“I want you. Physically. Your body. Maybe I’m not saying this right. I haven’t done this in a long time.”
“Propositioned a guy or had sex?” He was not in the mood for any beating around the bush. He needed to know exactly what was being said. And his blood was still mostly drained out of his brain and pooled south of his belt, so he needed her to speak plainly and slowly.
“Well.” She hesitated. “Both, really.”
He had a hard time believing that. Because she was gorgeous, and she kissed like a wet dream. So he had no idea in all the world why she couldn’t have sex whenever she wanted it. Why she should be in any kind of dry spell, he didn’t have a damn clue.
“This shouldn’t have happened,” he heard himself say, and he could have kicked himself the moment he spoke the words. But it was true. He was still holding his phone in his hand, because his daughter had just called. His hungover daughter who needed him to come home and deal with her. Not just to help her because she was sick, but who needed to be disciplined. Who needed to be assured that he loved her. Who needed... Something. Something he didn’t know how to give, obviously, or they wouldn’t be in this situation.
And just a moment ago he’d been pissed off because she’d interrupted the kiss. Because he let himself get distracted, he let himself be more invested in what was happening here in this pantry than he was in what was happening in his house.
“Why not? I don’t want a relationship, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m really...busy. I have the bakery, and pie is really very demanding. Well, not as demanding as croissants. Croissants are one of the more demanding pastries.”
“I don’t even have time for this,” he said, wishing he could say anything else. Wishing it wasn’t true. “I can’t. My life is a shit show. You don’t want tickets.”
“I mean, that’s kind of the thing though. I have tickets. I’m involved. And, since I’m involved, it just seems like...” Suddenly, she trailed off. Then she blinked rapidly, the color leeching from her face. “Oh, my gosh. I almost had sex with you in my pantry. I have customers out there. I have employees out there.”
He cleared his throat. “Well, yeah.”
“I don’t do things like that.”
“All the more reason for us not to, I suppose.”
She nodded mutely. Then she took a deep breath. “Why don’t you leave? I’m just going to...hang out here. Until it doesn’t look like the two of us are walking out of the pantry together.”
“Well, we went in together.”
“Maybe people didn’t notice.” The color was returning to her cheeks now, flooding her face, brighter than usual. Now, she was getting embarrassed. And she was getting mad. So he had a feeling that he just needed to comply with what she was asking him to do, or he was going to get a canister thrown at his head.
“Violet works tomorrow?” he asked.
She nodded, biting her lip, clearly going out of her way not to say anything.
He nodded in return, held her gaze a beat longer than he needed to. Any longer and he would have pulled her back into his arms. He backed away, then walked out of the pantry. The two people that were sitting in the dining area of the bakery looked up, stared at him for a long moment. He grabbed the edge of his hat and tipped it firmly. “Good morning,” he said, striding through the small shop and out the door.
I made the right decision, he told himself as he headed toward his truck. He had to take care of the situation with Violet. And he couldn’t afford any distractions. And if his body still throbbed, that was all right. It was a sacrifice he was making for his daughter. Even if she would never know that he had made it.
Whoever had said virtue was its own reward had never kissed a pretty little redhead in a pantry and walked away aching. There was no reward in this virtue. No, this virtue felt a whole lot like a stick in the eye.
Or a crowbar in his pants.
Not for the first time, he felt like a man walking through an alien landscape. What the hell was his life? As he got into his truck and drove down the still somewhat unfamiliar streets, headed home to handle the aftereffects of his daughter’s night of drinking, he could only be grateful for his truck. The one he had driven out of Texas.
Right about now, it was the only thing that felt like it hadn’t betrayed him. The only thing that hadn’t changed beyond recognition. A small consolation, but he would take it.
He had to take what he could get, after all.
He thought of Alison, standing there all flushed, bright-eyed, her pink lips swollen. Yeah, he would take what he could get. And since he couldn’t get her, his old truck would have to be his consolation.
Which was about as rewarding as all his fuckin’ virtue.
* * *
“WHAT’S UP, BO?”
Cain didn’t bother to modify his tone when he entered his daughter’s bedroom. Even though he knew he would be met by a groan of pain. He was not disappointed on that score. He was caught between wanting to baby her and wanting her to feel the full force of her stupid decision—within the safety of her own home, of course.
“I’m sick,” she said, sounding completely miserable. She was buried beneath her blankets, only a few pieces of dark hair that looked like bedraggled antennae visible. “And don’t talk so loud.”
“You’re hungover,” he said, not lowering his voice one bit. “And, by the way, I would have figured that out even if I hadn’t caught you last night. Trust me, I know a hangover when I see one. I am, in fact, intimately acquainted with them.”
“Stop it,” Violet said, burrowing deeper beneath her blankets and pulling them up over her head.
“Consider this Consequences 101.”
She resurfaced, opening one eye just slightly. “You’re being mean. If you’ve had a hangover before I don’t understand why you’re being so ridiculous about mine.”
“Because I wasn’t sixteen when I had them,” he said, this time raising his voice, because he was just in a mean-ass mood. “And this is how you learn. I learned. You’re the one who chose to make it lesson time, Bo.”
“You’re ridiculous,” she said. “Jade’s parents are the ones who got us the drinks. I don’t see why you care so much.”
“Great. Thank you. If you could provide a last name to go with Jade, I will happily report her parents to the local authorities. In the meantime, let me remind you that Jade is not my daughter, you are. Also, if you had asked me if you could have a beer in our kitchen, we might be having an entirely different discussion right now. You didn’t. Instead, you sneaked out. You put yourself in a dangerous situation. No plans to get back home, clearly no designated driver. And if something had happened,” he said, repeating himself from last night, and not caring at all, “I wouldn’t have known how to help you. Where to find you. I would have gotten a call from the police.”
“I don’t understand why you care so much all of a sudden,” she said, sitting up and wincing. “You never care what I’m doing. You never ask.”
“Fine. I’m asking now.” He was trying to remember some of the things that Alison had said to him. About Violet being older. About her needing more responsibility. And it was work—it cost him—to try to think of Alison without just thinking of kissing her again.
Remembering what it had been like to have her soft body pressed against his.
“I don’t want to talk now.”
“You don’t get to play this game, Violet. You can’t be angry at me for not asking, then say you don’t want to tell. Was that your boyfriend last night? Do you have a boyfriend, and I don’t know about it?”
“He’s not my boyfriend. And he is most definitely not my boyfriend after last night, since no boy wants to date a girl who has a psychopath for a dad.”
>
“Fine with me. Since no psychopath dad wants his daughter to date a little punk in skinny jeans who thinks an incapacitated girl makes for a great make-out buddy.”
“I wasn’t incapacitated,” she mumbled, grabbing her pillow and hugging it to her chest. “And this is why I don’t talk to you.”
“I thought I didn’t talk to you.” He remembered again what Alison had said about rebellion. And he did his best to use that to talk himself off his rage ledge.
Violet was sixteen. And frankly, getting into a shouting match with a sixteen-year-old was the height of idiocy. But he wanted to. Because she was angry, and that anger wasn’t rational. She was firing at him with verbal shotgun shells hoping that at least some of the shots would connect with the target—which at the moment was him. He knew that. Logically, he knew it. It didn’t make him less mad. Didn’t make him want to fight back any less.
Still, he took a deep breath, and he did his best to keep his cool.
“You don’t.”
Okay, she was completely committed to just being angry. Fine.
“Well, I’m talking now. Don’t talk back if you don’t want to. Really, I wouldn’t mind. You’re mad at me. I get that. I don’t get why, but I get that you are. You think I should have talked to you about this move, but this family isn’t a democracy, Violet. I made the best decision that I could for us. You weren’t happy in Texas either. Tell yourself whatever you want, but you were mad there too.”
“It was my home,” she said, scowling angrily. “We had a nice house there. Our own house.”
“Okay, so this is about sharing a house with your uncles? Because it’s only temporary. I’m building us our own place. You know that.”
“No, it’s not about them. They’re fine. It’s just... I don’t want to be here.”
“You didn’t want to be in Dallas,” he said, making his tone even more firm. Because if he knew anything, he knew that. “You hated it. You hated me, you hated everybody. This attitude isn’t new. You’re just blaming the move now. Blaming me. If you’re mad at your mother, I understand that. And I get that she’s not here to yell at, to abuse. And I am. But I didn’t leave you.”
She threw the covers back, still dressed in last night’s clothes, then cursed, pressing her hand against her forehead. “No,” she said, “I guess you didn’t. But she left you. She probably wouldn’t have left me if it wasn’t for you.”
He felt like she’d slapped him. Because it was every thought he’d already had thrown right at him, and there was no way he could dispute it. No way at all. He wanted to throw all the blame on to Kathleen, but every time he did that he remembered the way she had been with Violet when Violet had been a baby. When she had been a little girl. How much his wife had loved their child.
He had never been able to reconcile that woman with the one who had walked out the door one day four years ago, never to return. If her love for Violet had waned, he hadn’t seen it. But her love for him certainly had.
It was his darkest thought about the divorce. About Kathleen’s abandonment. He had never blamed Violet. Not even once. He had been afraid that she blamed herself. That had kept him awake at night. It had been the reason he had sent her to therapy.
But knowing she blamed him...
Some selfish part of him sort of wished she had blamed herself. So that he could comfort her. So they could be angry together. So that they could condemn Kathleen together. But that wasn’t it. She blamed him. And he didn’t know where to go from there. He couldn’t dispel it. Couldn’t defend himself. Not when he wasn’t sure if she would believe any of it.
He let out a hard breath, then pushed his hair back off his head. He had to go do something before he said more things he was going to regret later. “I’m going to make you some eggs.”
Violet wrinkled her nose. “What?”
“Eggs and onions and a bunch of spicy shit to help with your hangover. I know how to do that. That’s about the only thing I know how to do. Just wait here.”
He walked out of the room, making his way downstairs and into the kitchen. Hangover cures he had a lock on. It had been a long time, but he had spent his college years in something of a haze. So, since he was at a loss for words, since he was at a loss for just about everything, he figured he would scramble some eggs.
He opened up the fridge, not bothering to be gentle with the ingredients, not even the eggs.
He was so in over his head with this. With her. And about the only time in the past twenty-four hours he had felt like he knew what he was doing, what he wanted, was when Alison’s lips had connected with his. At least he understood that. At least he knew where that was going.
Here, in his own house, he felt like a raging asshole. Like an idiot. Like he didn’t know which end was up.
With Alison, he had felt like a man. And he hadn’t realized just how disconnected from that feeling he had been. Purposely, he had to admit. Because his brothers were right. If he’d wanted to go out and hook up, he could have.
Apparently, half the time he had been at home, using Violet as an excuse to stay in while the rest of them went out, she hadn’t been here anyway.
Kathleen had left, and it had been the most convenient excuse in the world that he had a daughter at home and that he couldn’t get back out there. Hell, he didn’t want a relationship anyway. And still, the idea of engaging in random hookups bothered him. Not so much because of him. There had been a time in his life when he had done it, after all. But because of setting an example for his daughter, and things like that.
The idea of hooking up when he was drunk and sad with women who were drunk and sad seemed... Sad. But that wasn’t what Alison was proposing. She wanted him, she had been straight up about that. And she didn’t want a relationship.
He cracked three eggs into the pan and started to scramble them furiously. It was just the kind of arrangement he had been telling Finn he wished he could have.
Except that damned complication of her being his daughter’s boss.
“Well,” Alex said, walking into the kitchen. “Good morning.”
“It’s not and you know it,” Cain returned, knowing he was growling while scrambling.
“How’s the kid?”
“Lucky I didn’t lock her in the root cellar.”
“We don’t have a root cellar.”
“How about a dungeon? Because that sounds perfect right about now.”
“I’ll tell you what, you make a man glad he’s childless,” Alex said. “You make a man glad he never got married either.”
“Always glad to be your cautionary tale.”
“You make a great one. Though honestly, if any of us was going to be a cautionary tale, I would have laid money on Liam. Maybe me. Because God knows I could have come home from Afghanistan in a coffin. Fortunately, I’m fine.”
Cain eyed him neutrally. “I have my doubts about that.”
“What are you talking about?” Alex lifted his hand, curled his fingers. “Everything intact.”
Cain had a feeling there were injuries he couldn’t see. But, considering he couldn’t sort out the problems that were already on his plate, he wasn’t going to take Alex’s on as well. Not unless his younger brother offered. And he had a feeling that was about as likely as Violet coming downstairs with a smile on her face to let him know she thought he was Father of the Year.
“Well, great. Somehow, I’ve managed to be the biggest mess of the four of us.”
“Don’t think that gets you out of ranch duty,” Alex said, pouring himself some coffee. “Are you ever going to come out and do work? The cows were taken care of already. Hours ago. But Finn said something about needing help moving some of them from one pasture to another.”
“Are you going to head out?”
“I’m done for the day. I have some ot
her things to take care of. Stuff I’ve been avoiding for the past month. But I can’t let it go anymore.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Alex’s face went rigid. “Just stuff.” He shook his head. “Do you remember Jason Campbell?”
Cain frowned. “No. From where?”
“Here. He and I hung out sometimes in the summer when we were growing up. Enlisted together. Met up at basic. We ended up being deployed at the same time.”
“I didn’t know about that,” Cain said.
“Yeah. Well, anyway, he’s dead.”
Alex said it so matter-of-factly. So flatly. And there was no offer of elaboration. So Cain didn’t ask for it. Instead, he offered an apology. Which was—he’d learned—one of the safest things someone could offer you when you told them a piece of particularly sucky information. Usually, though, people offer platitudes and advice. Which almost never helped.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“He left me some land. I’ve been avoiding going and collecting all of the details. But I’m going to have to.”
“He left you land?”
“I told you all when I got here that I didn’t need this ranch. I meant I didn’t need it because I needed more land. Or more money, or anything like that. I have a fine income. Plus, apparently I have a small farm or whatever somewhere on the outskirts of town.”
“Then, and don’t take this the wrong way, why the hell are you here?”
Alex laughed shortly. “Damned if I know. Something to do with family. Brotherhood, and things like that. But I need to get started handling this. I need to figure out what exactly Jason wanted from me. I have a meeting with his lawyer. Not even the same one Grandpa used. Who knew Copper Ridge had more than one lawyer, right?”
