He opened his eyes and emotion stared back at her. She held her breath, caught in the intensity.
“I can’t stop thinking about you . . . us. Thinking about how you make me feel when we’re together. Right from the start, I think I knew this couldn’t be casual, and I fucking tried. I can’t do it anymore. I’d be lying to both of us.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. He was telling her what, exactly? She said nothing as his eyes studied hers. He leaned in, lips hovering over hers, heat ratcheting up between them as her hands slid over his shoulders. He kissed her gently and then leaned back, eyes fixed on hers again.
“Liz. I’m f—”
A horn honked, Brady yelled, and Jake straightened, pushing away from her.
“Finish your sentence, Jake,” she said. He frowned, looking away from her.
“Later, once we find Tan. You and I will talk more then,” he said as Brady beeped again, hanging out the driver’s side window, looking down the aisle to where they stood. “This isn’t how I want—”
Liz nodded silently, sensing he was desperately trying to control himself in the moment. Jake growled out a frustrated breath and then strode away, leaving her reeling, her hands braced behind her as she attempted to get her stupid heart to stop beating out of her chest. She took careful, deep breaths, the quiet in the stable yawning out after his heavy footsteps faded and the truck sprayed gravel as Brady peeled out toward the road.
“Well, shit.” She swore into the empty stable and picked up her fork to keep working. Her mother was right.
Burned. To a crisp.
Chapter Thirty
Brady took Jake on an unofficial tour of the ranch land as they looked for Tanner. They drove down access roads leading to the main pastures, over to the edge of several fields of corn and soybeans, up to an open pasture near a tree-covered rise in the land that Brady referred to as Sandstone Ridge.
Jake took it all in as they bounced past, wondering where his brother would have gone, wondering if it was futile to search for him in the thousands of acres of the ranch, if they should just wait it out. It seemed like needle-in-haystack odds of finding a man on a horse in all this open land.
When they were headed up the road toward the east pasture where they’d found the cattle thieves, both of them silently scanned the area. They hadn’t found a trace of Tanner or spotted him in any of the expected places. Jake could sense Brady was becoming agitated.
“Where the fuck are you, Tan?” Brady muttered as he slowed the truck down to ease over the uneven potholes in the gravel road, his eyes roving over the area ahead of them.
Jake was getting an inkling that Tanner didn’t want to be found.
“Would he have gone up to the family cemetery?” he asked, suddenly thinking of Brady’s offer to take him. He had no idea if his brother would be that kind of man, to wallow in a place like a graveyard when he was at rock bottom. Jake knew himself, and he would do just that, likely with a bottle of scotch to keep him company, similar to when he’d lost his restaurant. So, given they seemed to think the same way sometimes, it was worth a shot to at least check.
Brady stopped the truck and looked over at Jake. “I hadn’t thought of it. Worth a look.”
Brady turned the truck around and they bounced back over the potholes toward the main road a little faster, Jake holding on to the handle on the door to keep in his seat. Brady didn’t seem to notice how rough it was, but Jake’s teeth rattled until they reached the smooth asphalt of the main road.
The truck creaked as they swung onto the main road, and Jake relaxed the death grip he’d had on the handle. That road should be regraveled. They all should. Driving through ruts and potholes the size of a small pond couldn’t be good for the trucks, and he found himself wondering how much it would cost to bring in a dump truck of gravel to fill them, what roads were the most important to do first, and if they had one of those tractors that smoothed out dirt with a big blade.
He was about to ask Brady about it when it struck him that there was no reason on earth he needed to worry about that, since this wasn’t his ranch and he’d be gone soon. What did he care about potholes?
But a voice inside him said he did, and it was important, and like he’d been doing since he got here, he added it to the giant bag of issues he’d unpack when he was back in New York and he didn’t need to worry about anyone other than himself. Which was a world away from where he was right now, staring at fields his family owned, looking for his brother and a horse, and falling in love with a woman who would never follow him home.
He’d gotten in deep, and he didn’t know how to climb out.
“It’s just up here,” Brady said, and turned down another gravel road, this one a little smoother, with grass growing between the wheel ruts. An iron gate with the wordwestarched over it stood a little way up a hill, and Jake’s chest prickled, his heart kicking at his rib cage.
His family was buried here. His father, his grandfather, aunts, uncles . . . an entire side of his family. A legacy he had squarely sitting on his shoulders to make whatever his father had done right again.
Brady stopped the truck at the end of the lane and they looked up. Chip was quietly grazing around an old headstone just inside the gate, his mane and tail wafting in the breeze, a picture of peace.
“Son of a bitch. Looks like you have some sense,” Brady muttered, flicking a glance at Jake. “He’s here all right. He hasn’t visited once since Dad, I mean Brett—”
“He’s still your father,” Jake interrupted. “He raised you. He’s more your father than he could ever be mine.”
Bradyhmphed at that and stepped out of the truck, the squeak of the hinges loud compared to the quiet where they were. Jake did the same, apprehensive to walk under the metal bars with his name on it. But if Tanner was here, it was more important to suck it up and make sure his brother was okay. He could deal with his own emotions later. As Brady had indicated without saying, this was not normal grumpy-asshole Tanner behavior.
They climbed the slight rise to the middle of the small cemetery. Jake noticed faded names on the headstones, most of them West, but some names he didn’t recognize. Right in the middle was a large, black marble obelisk-shaped monument, withwestacross the top tier of the base. Underneath that were names, his father’s most recently chiseled into the polished rock.
