The situation rapidly devolved into a screaming match. At one point, Cooper launched himself out of the crowd and pulled Gus back from swinging a punch at Will. I hadn’t noticed him there, but it was good to know that there was at least one neutral party among the cowboys. Will gave Cooper a nod of recognition tinged with guilt. I didn’t know whether the two had stayed in touch after Cooper left Wild Brook, but I knew that Will wouldn’t have been quick to forget the man who’d taken a broken jaw to save him from the fists of his father.
The few townspeople who’d been able to spare enough time to stick around this long probably regretted doing so. With no stake in the fight, they withdrew to the sidelines, some even mentioning that they needed to get home. I was happy that Stan and Meg had been too busy with the bar to turn up for this mess.
It was just the reminder that I needed as Dad drew Sam deeper and deeper into the workings of the ranch. If Will and I wanted to be together, there would always be collateral damage as long as our fathers were still around. They would mow over anyone in the way to keep us apart. It was just better we learned that lesson, too.
“Come on,” Will said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. “You don’t need to stay here and be disrespected like that.” I leaned on him as we walked away, ignoring the shouts and heckling from around us. For a moment, it was just the two of us again, that earthy scent of his that was better than any cologne.
“How do we ever get past this?” I asked, closing my eyes. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was referring to, and I couldn’t imagine that Will knew either. “It seems like everything is falling apart at once. I can’t even sleep. I just stare at the ceiling and think about the exact spot in the dining room where Dad collapsed.” I was vaguely aware that I was rambling, but I didn’t care anymore. “And now I just keep seeing Crystal’s face.”
Will rubbed the tops of my arms the way he used to whenever I’d get chilly by the lake. “Why don’t you and Sam come and stay at my place instead?” he suggested. “I’ve got two spare bunks. Tim hates being cooped up, so he usually pitches a cot in the barn.”
“I don’t know.” Would it be weird for us to spend all night crammed in that tiny trailer? Or would it feel safe?
“If nothing else, it means we can all get back to the search first thing in the morning,” Sam reasoned. “You’d have to go there anyway to get your truck and bring the horses back. The barn at the trailer park isn’t fancy, but it’ll do.”
“It is a pretty sad barn.”
“After the walking we did, I doubt the horses will mind. You could even keep yours turned out in the little paddock if you don’t think they’ll get along with ours.”
I nodded and called Sam over to ask his opinion. It did sound more practical since we were the only team on the reservation besides the tribal police. It was twenty minutes by car in one direction to reach Jessie’s ranch and twenty-five in the opposite to reach ours. “I’d be fine with that,” Sam said. “As long as you are, Sky. It’s a logical midpoint.”
“Sure.” If it turned out to be horrible knowing that Jessie and Will were only feet away from me, it would only be for one night. And with how tired I was, maybe my body could overrule my anxious imagination.
We spun the horses around, leaving Gus and his supporters to continue their screeching some other day. I couldn’t quite get his words out of my head. Incompetent drunk.
But before I could get too lost in that thought, Will opened the door to his trailer to reveal Bella crying on the lower bunk.
“What now?” Sam murmured, echoing my thoughts.
“Nothing good.”
Will guided Bella back to his small bedroom at the rear of the trailer to help her calm down. I went to the kitchen to find something to top off my flask. At a minimum, I knew that Will would have a beer around. It was perfectly natural to want a drink before bed.
I found some cheap whiskey and had my head stuck in the refrigerator when Jessie joined me. “Mixers are up here.” She reached up on her tiptoes and opened a cabinet. “I keep telling him to put things lower. He just tells me to get taller.” She laughed.
“Thanks.” The joke was a gut punch. I could hear the exact way he pronounced the words, see his lips forming them. It was the same thing he used to tell me whenever I struggled to grab onto the dock ladder at the lake or couldn’t get my foot in the stirrup on the first try.
“I’ll make us something sweet.” It was obvious that Jessie had been here often from the comfortable way she moved around. She poured us both a drink, then headed outside to take a phone call.
I grimaced at the taste of the flavored mixer and added some more whiskey for good measure. I sat in the old armchair by the window, faintly aware of Sam and Tim murmuring from outside as they dealt with the horses. I wasn’t usually one to let someone else take care of my mount, but Sam insisted that I needed a break and time to talk to my siblings.
What I really needed was someone to talk to without any strings. I couldn’t tell Hailey everything when Zane was beside himself about Dad. I’d tried to downplay the seriousness of Crystal’s disappearance, but judging by her panicked texts, Hailey had already found out the truth of it. Daniel wasn’t the type for drawn-out conversations about our feelings. Sam and Remy were too torn between their loyalties to Dad.
That left Will, but talking to him wasn’t possible when he was seeing Jessie. I couldn’t be objective about Will Blythe, no matter how much I wanted to be. When he was around, I felt like the world was just spinning too fast. He had his own problems to deal with, anyway, especially with Bella showing up in such a state.
I found a different bottle of whiskey and used that to top off my glass. I didn’t want Jessie to see how much I’d had. Sneaking around just furthered Gus’s point that I was worthless, too lost in the bottle to see my own reflection in it.
I placed my empty glass on the side table where Will had set out two matching coasters. His properness and manners had always made me smile. Even when he was covered in muck or wrangling cattle, he always struck me as someone born in the wrong century.
My eyes drifted to the picture frame at the edge of the table. It showed Will as a child with his mother, both of them making funny faces at the camera. It had that too-shiny look of an old photograph. As I set it down, I noticed a stack of papers on the shelf underneath where Will had left a notepad full of scribble.
It was wrong to snoop on him; I did it anyway. When I knew him, Will had never been the type to write out his thoughts. He’d always preferred to keep them in his head, brooding for long rides or staring out into space when he should have been listening to our algebra teacher.
It was a lease agreement for a one-bedroom apartment on another ranch. “Wyoming?” I whispered to myself as I read the address. Is he leaving? What does that mean for him and Jessie?
I returned it to the shelf before I got caught and went to rescue Will in case things were going poorly with his sister. He was usually good at calming people down, but if his own worries got out of control, he’d just end up making it worse. The door to his bedroom was slightly ajar. I knocked on the jamb. “Will? Bella?”
“Come on in,” Will called.
I pushed the door open and leaned against the wall. Will was sitting on the edge of the bed with Bella, a box of tissues held in his outstretched hand. She sopped up her tears. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t a good time.”
Will hugged her. “Don’t you even worry about that. You’re allowed to have feelings.”
I loved seeing this part of him, the soft-hearted tenderness at the core of his tough exterior. I supposed that I’d had it easier than Jessie. Will and I had known each other for as long as we could remember, and then some. But we’d seen each other before we’d built our walls and donned our armor. Maybe that was part of what I missed about him. “I’m sorry that you’re having a rough day,” I offered, even though I was still clueless about what had upset her in the first place.
Bella swatted away her tears. “It’s s
tupid. I’m probably just overreacting.”
“You’re not,” Will assured her. “Why don’t you lie down for a bit? I won’t be going to sleep anytime soon, anyway.”
Bella nodded and scooted further back on the bed. “Thanks for listening to me.”
“I hope you feel better,” I called to her as I stepped out into the hallway behind Will and closed the door. When we were out of earshot, I asked, “Is she okay?”
He sighed and grabbed a beer from the fridge. “Just history repeating itself.”
I groaned. “Boy trouble?”
“Dad just found out that she wants to go to California with her boyfriend to study music instead of going to Harvard for business school.” Will took the armchair I had been sitting in earlier, leaving me the loveseat. “And, of course, Dad hates her boyfriend.”
I pointed at myself. “This is my surprised face.”
Will didn’t drink his beer as much as keep the rim of the bottle between his teeth. The tension rolled off of him in waves. I knew this quiet, the struggle to let the stress leak out just enough to keep from exploding.
“You’ll feel better if you just blow up,” I promised. “It’s just us. Not like we haven’t been ranting to each other about our fathers for our entire lives.”
Will slammed his beer on the table, oblivious to the froth spilling over the side. “He hit her,” he said as quietly as he could, his chest heaving. “Told her not to come back until she was ready to make the right choices. His choices.”
I gasped and pressed my fingers to my lips. “He didn’t.”
Will shook his head, his fists shaking in the air. “He did. And I swore that I’d… I’d kill him if he ever touched her. That’s why I moved out here, Sky. He’d get so angry at me that he was like a bomb. I thought it would be less… something… if I wasn’t around.”
“Volatile?”
“Yeah. That.”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” I pleaded. “If you go after your father, he’ll have you thrown in jail, and then there won’t be anyone to look after Bella.”
Will deflated a bit, his shoulders slumping. “I know. But it’s like I’m only good at two things: fighting and being a cowboy.”
“That’s not true. That’s just what you think about yourself. You can be anything you want to. Just because you want to be a cowboy doesn’t mean that it’s something you settled for.”
He reached up to nudge the hat on the shelf above him. “It makes me happy.”
I used to make you happy, too.
I picked at the edge of the duct tape holding part of the window blinds together. “And broke, apparently.” Or at least the appearance of it. The Blythes had amassed such a fortune that I couldn’t imagine Will had been cut off completely. For Will, I think the money symbolized power and walking all over people. It was dirty.
“As long as we’re confessing,” I said, grinning, “I might have looked at your lease there. You’re moving to Wyoming?”
He shook his head, sending his long hair flying in random directions. “Always were so nosy, Sky Wentworth. But yes, I’m trying to save up enough to buy my ranch. There’s a gentleman out in Wyoming who’s looking for someone to mentor for a few years before he hands over, well, the reins.”
“You did not just make a horse pun,” I deadpanned.
“Couldn’t help it.” He glanced towards the hallway. “I only ever stayed in Texas for Bella. She’ll be eighteen in a month. As soon as she’s gone, I am, too.”
In some ways, hearing that Will was leaving made the loss of him easier to bear. It meant that I wouldn’t be haunted by his presence anymore. At every stage of our lives, there has always been something pushing us apart. We just weren’t meant to be.
Chapter 9
I woke at 4 a.m. in a confused daze. I blinked my eyes in the low light until the ceiling of Will’s trailer came into focus, and I remembered why I was here. It all came back in a jumble of memories: the fight with Gus, Crystal’s disappearance, Bella crying, Will’s anger.
I peered over the edge of the bed at Sam’s sleeping form. The whole place smelled like fresh coffee and something sweet. I swung my legs onto the ladder and crept out into the main house, scowling at the fact that the T-shirt and shorts Will had loaned me for pajamas fit wrong in all the wrong places.
“What’s that smell?” I asked as I stumbled into the kitchen.
Will looked over his shoulder. “Got some coffee brewing. Pancakes are just about done.”
I mustered the energy to drag myself over to the table. Mornings were not my style. “Chocolate chip or nasty blueberry?”
He pointed at me with his spatula. “First of all, don’t you insult blueberry pancakes in my house. Second of all, I made both.” He grinned. “Mostly because I knew you’d complain if I didn’t. Coffee?”
“Please.”
“Want anything in it?”
Yeah, some rum would be nice. “Just black is fine.” And honestly, humor aside, I didn’t feel the urge to go grab the flask from my jacket or make some excuse to convince Will that a shot in the morning was okay. I was content just to be around him, to pretend that we were alone and this was our life. Maybe, in knowing I’d lost him for good, I could at least appreciate these last days together.
“You know how they say some things never change?” Will asked as he passed me coffee, a plate of pancakes, and a glass jar of real syrup.
“Yeah. What about it?”
He shook his head. “You are still as grumpy as anything when you wake up.”
“Don’t you even,” I warned. “Because when you’re asleep on your feet at 7 o’clock in the evening, I’m still bouncing off the walls.”
Will scraped the spatula clean on the edge of the pan and poured in more batter. “I couldn’t stop thinking about our families last night.”
“Oh?”
“Bella left after you went to sleep. She went straight to her boyfriend’s house. The more Dad wants to break them up, the more determined they are to stay together.” Will talked at the pancakes, either unwilling to leave them unattended or unwilling to look me in the eye. “But I was just thinking about how we did exactly what they wanted and still ended up getting the short end of the stick.”
My heart somersaulted in my chest at the thought of Will lying awake last night thinking of our ill-fated history. We’d been destined to fail, but that didn’t make it fair. “It was always a lose-lose situation.” I cut into my stack of pancakes with more force than necessary. “Maybe Bella will find a loophole.”
Will fell silent, his mouth closing with a word half-formed on his lips. I looked up and saw Sam standing behind me. For just a moment, I caught a glimpse of his expression. It was the same look he’d had the day I’d told him about going on a date with Will in secret. I’d always thought it was his frustration showing through, that he resented being stuck in the middle with my father sniffing around. But now I wondered whether I’d misjudged Sam Davis. Was he… jealous?
After we’d eaten and Jessie returned from checking on her ranch, we headed out to see a family on the reservation who’d claimed to have information about Crystal. The tribal police hadn’t been able to get anything useful, but Jessie thought it was worth another shot.
As we drove, I couldn’t stop looking over at Sam, trying to understand that look from breakfast. A voice in the back of my mind kept reminding me that Sam had dropped his whole life in Silicon Valley to be here. I knew that he still worked—I could hear him chatting about business from time to time—but he was clearly prioritizing the needs of my family. Is he here for more than just loyalty to my father?
I locked those concerns away for later as we drove up to the house of the potential witness. Will and Tim pulled around and parked beside us with Jessie following in her pickup. We’d decided to bring the vehicles since we’d already covered most of this area on horseback. Plus, as much as I was loath to admit it, I was sore from that many hours in the saddle. Sitting in an air-condition
ed cab felt like luxury by comparison.
We let Jessie, Tim, and Will go up and ring the doorbell. A man in his forties greeted them, completely ignoring Sam and me. “Thanks for calling,” Jessie said. “Any little bit helps.” To us, she added, “This is John.”
His eyes never left me. “It’s my nephew, Robert, that you’ll want to talk to. He’s out back.” John came outside and closed the door, beckoning us to follow as he walked around the side of the house. “He pointed to the TV last night and said he’d seen your friend. He wouldn’t tell me hardly anything. Told the police even less. But he’s not the type to make up lies.”
Robert was about ten years old. He kicked around a soccer ball while John tried to convince him to repeat what he’d seen. “He’s shy,” John explained. “His parents are maybe splitting up. It’s been rough on him.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, no stranger to parental drama.
John grunted. “No great loss for my sister. Her husband thinks he can do no wrong. He’s not from around here. Thinks our traditions are stupid.” He took a step forward like he might try again but thought better of the action. “Can I get you anything to drink?”
Will must have answered for all of us because John disappeared for a minute and reemerged with cans of soda. He handed them around, too polite to avoid getting one for Sam and me but rude enough to let Jessie pass us ours.
Sam set down his soda and approached the boy. He crouched down until they were on the same level. “Your parents breaking up when you’re young has to be so hard. You know, when I was your age, I lost my father. And my mother wasn’t much of a mother. I felt lonely.” Sam hung his head. “But I had someone who was just like your uncle to me. He took me in and taught me how to be a cowboy at Black Gold Creek.”
Robert looked up at him with interest. Even the people who didn’t like us knew that our ranchers were like family, and that Dad would protect them however he could. If only he’d ever felt that way about me. “I used to play cowboys with my brother and say that I was going to work there!” Robert exclaimed. “My mom doesn’t like that place. She says bad people live there.”
The Cowboy's Promise: Love Triangle Billionaire Romance (The Wentworth Cowboy Billionaire Series) Page 8
