Brady let out a frustrated sigh. “You know what? I don’t care.”
She shook his shoulder, and he looked back to her once more. “You do care,” she murmured quietly. “And you’ll figure it out.”
Brady thinned his lips, his face betraying his normal happy attitude, and adjusted the beat-up ball cap on his head. She waited for him to say something, but when he stayed silent, she quickly leaned in and impulsively pecked him on the cheek.
“Let’s get back to work,” she said. Maybe now was not the right time to send him off by himself to tinker. The look in his eye all but gave away that his gears were turning. She handed him a fork and tilted her head toward a stall.
“Need a hand in the stable?” he said, catching on.
“Anytime,” she replied. They all had some heavy decisions to make, and she did some of her best thinking while cleaning a stall.
And she had alotof thinking to do.
* * *
Jake and Tanner were on their own for dinner.
Liz had stayed at the barn late to catch up on month-end invoicing, and Peony had gone into town to eat with friends. The house was strangely quiet, which Jake decided wasn’t unwelcome.
He and his brother had slapped together sandwiches standing side by side at the kitchen counter, unceremoniously eating them over scrounged-up Christmas napkins to catch the crumbs.
Jake learned that he and Tanner both had an aversion to sliced tomatoes on sandwiches. When Tanner had made a particularly awful face at Jake handing him a tomato to slice, they had laughed at the similarity, and the tomato had gone back into the fridge.
Brady had texted Tanner to eat without him, and Jake wondered if today had reignited the hurt Brady felt about not being a true West.
“He okay, you think?” Jake asked as he fired his balled-up napkin at the paper garbage bin at the side of the kitchen. Tanner had poured them each a beer, and Jake picked his up, watching the light bounce off the glass onto the counter like a reverse shadow, wavering across the polished stone.
“Dunno. He said he needed some space. When Brady needs space, I give it to him; he doesn’t ask for it often,” Tanner replied, and leaned back against the island.
Jake worried the glass a bit, then took a large pull. It tasted good after the day they had had, which had started out with making love to Liz in a field and ended with him and his family wrestling with a solution to what had brought him here in the first place.
The decisions he and Tanner were going to have to make were clouding his brain. It was hard to think about what to do when he was so confused about what it was he truly wanted.
“So I’m thinkin’ about what Frank offered,” Tanner said. Jake looked up at him and set his glass down.
“All right,” Jake said slowly. “And?”
“I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes to run this place like some animal rescue. I mean, it’s been a cattle and horse ranch for as long as it’s been owned by a West. If we gotta fold that to run some sort of foundation just so I can own it—”
Tanner stopped speaking and leveled his gaze at Jake, unwavering. That was one of the longest speeches he’d heard from Tanner without a swear word thrown in. It seemed he was having doubts about Peony’s idea.
No matter what, they needed to talk it out. Jake had wondered how to broach the subject with him all evening, considering Tanner wasn’t the most talkative man on the planet. One-word answers and a razor-thin temper were not ideal for discussing big things like this, and tonight had been relatively easy, just the two of them.
Tanner was calm and seemed in control of what he was thinking and saying, so Jake tilted his head and made some assumptions about what Tanner had indicated with that statement, furrowed brow and all.
“Are you saying you don’t want to do that?” he asked carefully.
Tanner gestured at him and sighed. “I’m sayin’ that you are doin’ a good job learnin’ and runnin’ the business end. With a bit of experience, getting through this fall’s weaning, and Brady to help through next spring’s plant, you’d be fine to run this place for the year Dad put in the will.”
“You think so?” Jake asked, honestly shocked at his brother’s compliment. That had been hard won, and he wondered if it was his resistance to change and worry for the simple survival of the ranch that was pushing Tanner to keep things the same, or if indeed that was a genuine compliment on Jake’s ability to muddle through an entirely new industry.
That fear of change had put them on the wrong foot at the beginning. Now that they had figured each other out, and the world hadn’t imploded without his name on the deed, maybe Tanner was having a change of heart?
“I do,” Tanner added and took a sip of his own beer, then tipped the glass in Jake’s direction. “You’ve got a head for this. You’re—”
Tanner swallowed the last of his beer instead of finishing the sentence. He looked away from Jake, thinned his lips as if trying to decide what to say, and then blurted, “Dad would have liked you.”
Jake bowed his head, absorbing the impact of that statement. Tanner had no idea what those words meant to him. It was profound, at least from this side of the conversation. Since Tanner didn’t do platitudes, he took it at face value.
