“If we execute it, then it’s a crusade. Maybe even a quest.”
“We?”
Jessie looked out at the mountains, at the jagged line where the pine trees met the wide blue sky. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to involve you in anything. Yet.”
“What I would like to involve you in is a perfectly executed trick-riding routine where you don’t break your neck.”
“I can do that.”
She urged her horse forward, but she couldn’t keep the idea from turning in her head, over and over again.
She had lied to her brother. This was more than just a scheme. More than a plot.
She had a feeling that before the day was out, it was, indeed, going to become a quest.
And when Jessie Jane Hancock went on a quest, she didn’t come back home empty-handed.
Flynn Wilder was happy that his brothers were happy. He really was. But there was some complexity to that happiness on his end.
Austin and Carson being happily hitched changed the dynamics at the family ranch. It was all good. Of course it was.
It was only that it meant things were different. They didn’t all go down to The Watering Hole in a big group anymore. Most days it was just Dalton, his lifelong best friend, and his younger sister Cassidy. And he was getting a little tired of Cassidy hanging out with them.
She had a crush on Dalton, and everybody knew it. It was damn near embarrassing to witness. He never wanted to say anything about it, but it wasn’t like Dalton didn’t know. It was impossible to not know.
Though he was pretty sure Cassidy didn’t know, or rather, she pretended not to know.
“Your sister’s a nice girl,” Dalton had said just the other day. “But I have literally known her since she was a snot-eating child.”
“She was nine when she moved here. She wasn’t exactly a snot-eating child.”
He wasn’t sure if calling what Cassidy had done “moving here” was the correct choice of words. She had been abandoned by her mother at Christmas, brought to live at the Wilder Ranch when she had never met her father’s side of the family.
He was well aware of the complexities of family issues. He might have different ones from his younger sister, but he had plenty.
Hell, they all did, really. His older brothers were actually his half brothers. Their mother had taken off when they were young. His mother lived in town but …
She’d married into a real family. The right one. All respectable and rich, and definitely nothing to do with their dad and his bad reputation and all of his issues.
Flynn had gone to visit his mom, even though his dad had primary custody.
She had always made the custody arrangement out to be a kindness. She had wanted Flynn to stay with his brothers. But … after his dad had died, when he was still a young teenager, she hadn’t rushed to get him.
He had continued to see her on some holidays. Sometimes over the summer.
When his grandpa, James Parker, had died, he’d left Flynn Lonesome Ridge, a rocky, nearly inhospitable mountaintop where Flynn had had a house built. He hadn’t seen the point of turning down this acknowledgment from his mother that he was connected to her family.
But he had always been a Wilder. That was the thing.
No one thought of him as part of his mother’s new family, and certainly not his stepfather’s family.
Not even now that his half sister was the mayor.
She was also a deeply unpleasant human being, so he basically wanted nothing to do with her. It went both ways. Fine with him.
His younger half brother, Mike, was a douchebag who sold insurance. Yeah. He was happy with their lack of interaction. He knew he made Mike and Danielle uncomfortable, and that was wild to him, because he didn’t makeanybodyuncomfortable. The Wilder family outlaw reputation had been difficult for Carson and Austin. Flynn had sunk right into it. Maybe it was because he had a whole other respectable family to rebel against. Maybe that made being an outlaw feel good.
He had actual enemies to flaunt his bad boy reputation at.
