The Cowboy's Baby: Devlin Brothers Ranch

by Joanna Bell

  And it's not like I didn't understand why my brothers might feel resentful. But would it have killed Connor to make an effort to understand that my actual day to day existence, outside of any future riches, was pretty grim? He still lived in the main house. Cillian – Jack Devlin's second-born son – lived in a brand new 2 bedroom condo in downtown Sweetgrass Ridge, the down payment for which was paid by our dad. And I lived out in a goddamned falling down trailer, working my ass off all day every day for nothing but the occasional grunt of begrudging approval from my dad.

  ***

  Things were on a course to come to a head around that time, and the only real reason they didn't was Hailey. Suddenly there was someone in my life I cared about more than I cared about my own circumstances. It was strange at first.

  Is this what it's like for girls?

  I caught myself pondering that thought one day on my way to pick her up at the Super Mart and drive her home. The way Hailey took up space in my head got me to thinking about all the girls I'd been with. It made me realize what a presumptuous asshole I was. I actually used to think less of them for having nothing more going on in their lives than me. And now I was that person. Now it was me thinking about someone else all the time.

  Wake up in the morning, eat steak and eggs at the kitchen table, think about what Hailey would think if she was there eating steak and eggs with me. Ride out to check none of the cattle had keeled over in the night, think about what Hailey would say about the sunrise. Drive into town to refill my stocks of canned chili, think about Hailey sitting there next to me and how much better everything would be if she was.

  Fuckin' karma, man. For all those girls who offered me their hearts on a platter only to be passed over for the next beguiling curve of an ass to catch my eye.

  ***

  "Where you been?"

  It was only a short time after I took Hailey to the canyon to listen to the wolves. My dad was standing at the entrance to the barn – blocking it, really. I had a new salt block in my arms that I needed to get out into the pasture.

  "Out." I told him. "I need to get this into the field, Dad."

  "Out where?"

  No one else on earth could have taken the tone with me that my dad took. And he took it all the damn time – almost like he enjoyed making me feel like a misbehaving child.

  "I already said. I need to get this –"

  "Jackson. Son, you can either tell me where you've been or we can stand here until all those cattle die of a salt deficiency. Your choice."

  "Town." I replied through gritted teeth. "The Super Mart."

  "The Super Mart, eh?" My dad replied thoughtfully, as if we were on the verge of a long, rambling discussion of Sweetgrass Ridge's only grocery store. "What were you doing there?"

  I'm not a liar. It makes me feel like shit to lie, and I didn't want to lie to my dad. I also didn't want to tell him what I was actually doing at the Super Mart, so I told him I was there getting groceries. It wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the whole truth.

  "Groceries, was it? That's odd, because I was just talking to Susan Jenkins and she reckons she's seen you in there almost every day for the past few weeks, picking up one of the checkout girls."

  Fucking Susan Jenkins. Every small town has to have a resident busybody, right? Sweetgrass Ridge had Susan Jenkins – and her husband George, who was in some ways even worse than his wife.

  "What of it?" I replied coolly, trying to pretend it was nothing even as I knew sniffing out a person's weak spots was one of my father's specific talents.

  "What happened to what's-her-face, the redhead?"

  "Dad, I have work to do," I replied in as diplomatic a voice as I could muster. "And Katia is blonde."

  "Yeah, the blonde. Katia. What happened to her?"

  "We broke up," I sighed, bending forward to set the salt block on the ground because my father was showing no signs of getting out of the way.

  "You mean you dumped her, right?"

  "We broke up."

  "She was a real nice girl, Jackson. Sweet as pie. I don't think you understand how helpful it is to have a sweet girl in your life. A girl who spends her time trying to solve your problems rather than adding to them."

  It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. Was he angling to start controlling my personal life now, on top of the rest of it?

  "She was from a good family, too. The Mullaleys are good people. Irish roots, just like us. John Mullaley owns 10 thousand acres."

  You never knew what you were going to get from my dad – a boastful tale about his great-grandpappy arriving in America with nothing but the clothes on his back and building a successful ranching business on hard work and wits alone, or a snobbish comment about some Sweetgrass Ridge family with the temerity and plain bad character to own zero acres. At least I knew what he was getting at now. Gold-digging was one of his persistent worries when it came to his sons, and he was forever lecturing all of us on being able to spot one in the wild.

  Which was ironic given the fact that no one on earth except my dad himself believed my stepmother would have given him the time of day if he'd had anything less than a hundred thousand acres to his name.

  I nudged the salt block with the tip of my boot and said nothing.

  "So who's the checkout girl, then? She from a good family?"

  It made me angry to be questioned about Hailey. It was none of my dad's business what her family did. In fact nothing to do with her was any of Jack Devlin's business.

  "We're friends, Dad. That's it."

  "Friends is it? I've never known you to settle for 'friends,' Jackson. She got you wrapped around her little finger, is that it? I gotta be honest son, I never reckoned you to be one of those men who'd hustle back and forth running errands for some woman who won't even give up the p–"

  "Don't!" I barked, stepping towards my dad before he could finish the sentence in the way I knew he was about to.

  At once, he stepped right back up to me until we were eye-to-eye.

  I had 4 inches and about 30 pounds of muscle on my dad, but I also carried the baggage that the sons of domineering fathers always do. He looked like me. The eyes I looked into were the same ice-blue as my own, set deep in a face weathered by years in the Montana sunshine and winter winds.

  "What?" He asked, breaking into a mean grin. "You think I haven't heard you and your brothers talking? And now I'm supposed to believe you're some kinda white knight, is that it? Steppin' to your old man before he says a word against some little checkout girl?"

  A few seconds later, I blinked. My dad knew I was going to – so did I. He let out a low chuckle and watched me pick the salt block back up.

  "Just don't say I didn't warn you!" He called after me.

  "Screw you, Jack." I mumbled under my breath, red-faced and humiliated.

  One day, he was going to be the one to blink. One day he was going to go too far and get his goddamn block knocked off.

  But not that day.

  Chapter 8: Hailey

  Everyone at work thought I was in a relationship with Jackson Devlin. Hell, most of the people in town thought so as well.

  But I wasn't. He came to pick me up from work every day and drive me home. He said it was because I couldn't be trusted not to walk home in sub-zero weather, but then he kept doing it as the weather warmed up and the frozen winter ground turned into the muddy slush of spring.

  "So what's the deal?" Lili asked me one day as we hung out in her bedroom.

  "What's the deal with what?" I replied, even though I knew exactly what she was asking.

  "Hailey, you know what. He's so hot. I mean, how can you keep your hands off him?"

  And I couldn't really answer because I didn't know myself. It's not like I was holding him off. I was pretty sure there was something there, some spark or chemistry or whatever it's called. There sure was on my end, anyway. I couldn't even be near Jackson without feeling like I had a whole swarm of butterflies in my stomach. Did he feel the same way? I wasn't
sure. Maybe if I'd been a little more experienced with boys – but I wasn't experienced at all.

  There was also what I didn't tell Lili or my mom or anyone, and that was that I was a little bit scared of him. Not because of anything he did but because of something I sensed inside my own soul. Some capacity or potential to really lose myself. Whenever I was next to him I longed to be even closer, but the trembling that would set up in my body wasn't just desire. It was fear. Fear of what I might do if he did to me what he'd done to all the other girls before me. Fear of falling apart. Fear of having it made starkly clear just how much I was coming to rely on him – and not just for rides home from work.

  We spent most of them talking. There seemed to be no end to what Jackson and I could talk about. Sometimes we talked about out childhoods, the son of a rich man and the only daughter of a single mom comparing notes. He never went without anything material. They ate well in the Devlin household. They participated in expensive hobbies and took regular vacations to far-flung tropical destinations. They wore brand name clothing, the kind you had to order on the internet because Sweetgrass Ridge didn't have those kinds of stores.

  But for all the material abundance of his childhood, it in many ways seemed to lack things I myself would have been lost without. His mother, for one. Jackson's mother died in a car crash when he was 8. I was as close to my own mother as it's possible to be.

  He wasn't happy living in the trailer on his dad's property and I got the feeling he didn't talk about it with anyone else except me. Some days he would be quieter than usual and his eyes would stay fixed on the road ahead of us when I asked if he was OK. Sometimes he would talk about whatever power trip his dad was on that day. Other times he wouldn't say much at all.

  It made me feel good to have him in my life. Even if my lust seemed at the time to be unrequited, it made me safe and cared for and special to have him pick me up after every shift at the Super Mart. After all, I was just plain old Hailey Nickerson. He was Jackson Devlin, son of Jack Devlin. He was somebody.

  ***

  I was at Lili's one day as the summer wound down to the beginning of my final year of high school when my phone rang. It was Jackson.

  "I've got to get the fuck out of here," he said when I picked up. No greeting, just 'I've got to get out of here.' He sounded out of breath. Something was wrong.

  "What is it?" I asked, worried because I'd never heard him sound like that before. "Is something wrong? Jackson, what –"

  "Can you meet me at the canyon? Now?"

  The canyon, where he'd taken me to hear the wolves howling. We used to meet out there a lot in those days, him rolling up in his shiny red truck and me in my mom's little beater. Often, we'd sit on the hoods of our respective vehicles and watch the Yellowhead river flowing below us, talking a lot or barely talking at all.

  "Uh," I replied, freaked out by how urgent he sounded. "Yeah. Now? Yeah, OK. I can do that. What's wrong? You sound like –"

  "Just meet me at the canyon right now, OK? Can you do that?"

  "Yes."

  ***

  Stopped at a red light on my way out of town, I took my hands off the wheel and saw that they were shaking. My entire body was taut with anxiety. What was wrong with Jackson? Why did he sound so strange on the phone? Why wouldn't he tell me what happened? And since when did I freak out like this?

  The first thing I saw when I pulled up 20 minutes later was Jackson, sat on the hood of his truck the way a tiger might lounge in a jungle clearing. At once, a small measure of relief washed over me. All his limbs seemed to still be attached to his body. Blood wasn't gushing out of him. Physically, he was fine.

  "Jackson!" I practically yelled as I jumped out my car and ran around it to where he was sliding off the truck. "What the hell? What – what's wrong?"

  He must have seen how worried I was because the very first thing he tried to do was downplay it.

  "Hailey, I didn't mean to upset you. It's nothing, really. It's –"

  "Nothing?" I cut him off, leaning back against my mom's car, my body limp with relief. "Nothing? You scared the hell out of me! You never sound like that!"

  Almost at once, though, I could see that it actually wasn't 'nothing.' Jackson's jaw had a certain set to it when he turned to look out over the canyon, and when he took his phone out of his pocket I noticed his right hand was swollen and the knuckles bloodied.

  It took my brain a second to figure it out.

  "You were in a fight," I whispered, reaching out without a thought to my own self-consciousness and taking his hand in my own so I could get a better look at it. And as I did, as my eyes ran over each cut and scrape, a murderous rage began to build in my chest, a fiery defensiveness that surprised even me with its strength.

  "Who did this?" I asked, my voice high and squeaky because my throat was tight with emotion. "Jackson! Who did this to –"

  He let out a quick barking laugh before I could finish. "Who did this to me? Those are my knuckles you're looking at. You'd be better off asking who I did it to."

  "OK. Yeah. Who did you do it –"

  "Hailey?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Can we not talk about it just yet? Will you – will you just sit with me for a bit? I just want to sit."

  He offered me his good hand and pulled me up onto the hood of the pick-up, where we sat next to each other and cast our eyes out over the valley and the river.

  "Do you hear that?" He asked a few minutes later, cocking his head to the side.

  All I could hear was the breeze and the sound of the slowly moving river. "What?"

  "The cottonwoods. Listen to the wind in the leaves – do you hear that sort of dry, rattling sound?"

  I tilted my head towards the stand of trees that stood on our side of the river and listened. "Yeah. I can hear it."

  "It sounds different at the end of summer – drier. My grandpa used to take me out on the ranch – way up in the foothills – when I was a little kid, and make me listen to the trees. He said if a man can't tell what season it is based on the sound of the wind in the trees, that man has no business calling himself a rancher. And now I can't ever hear wind in the trees without thinking about what season it is. Now that I've told you, you probably won't be able to either."

  He was probably right about that last part, but not for the reasons he thought. He was probably right because I was pretty sure I remembered everything Jackson ever said to me. So maybe I was going to think of the season now whenever I heard wind in leaves – but mostly I was going to think about him.

  "He died when I was 7 – my grandpa. Just a few months before my mom. It fucked me up at the time but now I think it was probably for the best."

  I turned sharply towards him, studying his face to try to figure out what would prompt him to say such a thing.

  "I don't mean it's good he died," he continued, refusing to meet my eye. "I mean maybe it's good I never got to find out what he was really like, you know? Because these past few years I'm starting to see what my dad's really like, and I can only imagine what kind of man raised him."

  Jackson was spitting his words more than he was speaking them, as if he couldn't stand the feeling of them in his mouth.

  "Maybe your dad's just like that?" I suggested, embarrassed that I didn't have anything more meaningful to say. "Sometimes people are just the way they are. No one made them that way."

  He shrugged. "Maybe."

  The conversation fell briefly away and I found myself paying new attention to the way the wind sounded blowing through the cottonwood branches. Maybe Jackson was right? Maybe I was never again going to hear a breeze in the leaves and not think about the season?

  "I don't know what to do," I said a few minutes later. "I don't know what you want me to say. I don't even really know what happened."

  "It doesn't matter what happened. It makes me feel better just to sit here with you."

  "It does matter," I replied gently. "I know you don't like to talk about this stuff. I can always
tell when you've been fighting with your dad, though."

  "Can you?" He asked, turning to really look at me. "How?"

  Damn. Why did I say anything? A prickly heat began to rise in my cheeks. "You just, uh. You look different sometimes. Your mouth looks different. Or your – your eyes."

  "You look at my mouth, Hailey Nickerson?"

  I glanced back at the cottonwoods, embarrassed. "Shut up, Jackson. Why do you always have to make a joke out of everything? All I said was I could tell. People can tell when other people are upset, you know. That's all I meant."

  "I didn't fight with my dad," he replied quickly. "I fought with my brother. Cillian. An actual fight. We haven't had one of those since I was a teenager. It took the rest of them to break it up. I think I broke his nose and I – I feel like shit about it."

  I hadn't met any of Jackson's brothers at that time. I just knew there were a lot of them.

  "We were fighting about my dad," he continued. "I can't say a single bad word about my dad in front of any of them, because I'm going to inherit the whole ranch so apparently anything he does until then is just A-OK. I'd like to see one of them live out in that goddamned trailer for 4 years and come out of it thinking Jack Devlin is some kind of great guy."

  I already knew about the Devlin Ranch and the strange inheritance situation. I knew it was something that weighed on Jackson's mind. The Devlins weren't the royal family, there was no actual law in place to make it so only the oldest son could inherit, but it wasn't my place to give my opinion on another family's business.

  What I wanted to do was ask him why he put up with it. Why he stayed out in the trailer and not in a nice apartment in town like his brothers that had already moved out. His dad wasn't the King of Sweetgrass Ridge, was he? He couldn't just order people not to rent to his son. Could he?

  "Hey Jackson?"

  "Yeah?"