Landon smiles but it’s sad. “He was always working so hard on the farm that he didn’t have time to take care of the house.”
“I wish he’d found someone to love him. Love the farm.”
He shrugs his broad shoulders and my mind buzzes at the way his muscles flex and bunch under the soft, worn fabric. “He never met the right woman.” He grins sheepishly at me. “Doesn’t mean that he didn’t enjoy himself.”
My nose crinkles and I glare at him. “Ewww. You could have kept that thought to yourself. I didn’t need to know that about my brother.”
“Karter didn’t regret his life. The only thing he regretted was feeling like he failed you.”
Jerking back, I stare at him. “He didn’t fail me. I just had to get away. Felt like there was more out there than this place for me. It had nothing to do with him or how I felt about him. I talked to him all the time. Even FaceTime’d him once or twice.”
Landon grins. “Yeah. He loved that. Lived for when he got to see your pretty face.”
Snorting, I hand him a plate of pancakes. “Here’s some food. You don’t need to shovel shit my way just to get fed.”
He chuckles. “Still the same old Kins. Don’t know how to take a compliment.”
“I know how to take a compliment. But I know my brother didn’t call me pretty.”
He shoots me a sparkling look as he sits with the kids. “I never said he did.”
My breath catches. Did he just call me pretty?
Did Landon Winters just call me pretty? I must have hit my head last night or I’m still asleep. There’s no way that he said that.
But yet as the kids chatter a mile a minute at him and he answers all their questions with a seemingly unending supply of patience, his blue eyes find mine over and over and he smirks at me like he knows something I don’t know.
Like he’s got a secret that I’m dying to know. No matter how good or bad it is.
CHAPTER 6
Landon
Trudging through the snow, I can see the outlines of each individual section of the farm. See where Karter had been planning to take trees from for this year’s sales. Some of the work has been taken care of by me.
The attorney let me know after Karter died that Kinsey wasn’t able to make it out here yet, although she was planning a trip. He told me that she was tied up in divorce proceedings.
And maybe he shouldn’t have told me that. Attorney-client privilege and all that.
But I knew that she was coming home and I wanted her to have something to come home to.
So between all my other commitments and my work at Wildwood Construction, I came out here to make sure the trees that were scheduled to go out did.
As a last gesture for the girl I grew up with.
Once upon a time, I relied heavily on Kinsey and Karter. After my mother died when I was twelve and my dad managed to lose himself in the business after that, I was on my own a lot of the time. The two of them had kept me sane.
We found trouble sometimes. But it was always kid trouble. Nothing bad. And I think if I hadn’t met them, I might havefound something way worse, fallen in with a bad crowd and lost any chance I had at a good life.
So I owed the both of them for that. For the good times growing up. For the happy times that kept me sane and grounded even when everything was falling apart.
For making me a better man than I otherwise might have been with just my dad as a guiding force.
But all that changed as soon as I saw Kins again. All five foot four of her.
She’s a tiny little thing. About a foot shorter than me and with soft, smoking curves that just about make my tongue fall out of my mouth every time she drifts by me and smiles.
I shouldn’t let myself want her like that. She’s Kinsey Martin. My best friend’s little sister and our partner in crime when we were growing up. The little girl that both of us took care of after her parents died.
