“This is some heavy burden you’ve been carrying around,” he says.
I shrug. “It’s no big deal. I just wanted to help Macey. That’s all.”
“That’s noble,” he says. “And it’s courageous. Ingenious. Very cowboy. But also like a cowboy, it’s stupid.”
I jerk my head up and glare at him. “I can’t believe I told you, of all people, the truth. You’ve always been such an ass to me.”
“About that,” Daddy says.
We end up talking about stuff I never thought he’d bring up. The drinking, the hitting, the way he criticized me for painting—attacked me really—all of it.
We walk in circles around the hotel and the Florida palm trees as he tries to explain he only wanted the ranch for me because the family business is all he has to give to his kids. I tell him that he can’t shove it down my throat like that because then it’s not a gift; it’s a prison sentence. He nods like he gets it.
“If I can’t give you the ranch,” he says, “let me help you with this pickle you’re in. Your heart’s so invested that you can’t think straight. However, I think between the two of us cowboys, we can come up with a darned good solution.”
Another hour later, we have a plan. Breathing freely for the first time in weeks, I tell him I’ll run it by Gigi after she returns from her hen party, and then I return to my room.
While I wait, I check my email.
What’s sitting in my inbox nearly sends me on a flight back to Darcy right then.
Macey Henwood’s first novel.
Fully finished.
And what’s inside it tells me more than I was expecting.
It’s not just a straight or even a flush.
It’s the full fucking house.
105
Macey
* * *
My phone rings at four-thirty a.m.
“Hey.” I feel more than hear Logan’s slow drawl come through the receiver.
“What’s wrong?” I say automatically.
“Nothin’,” he says. “I just wanted to talk is all.”
I struggle to wake up and clear my head.
“I’m in the lobby of the nicest freaking hotel any of us have ever laid eyes on,” he says to me.
“Oh, yeah?”
“My dad’s shitting himself,” he says.
I smile. “Better than the ranch life?”
“Just…different. He needed a change of pace after thirty years and no vacation.”
“How’s your mom liking it?”
