I shrug.At least my shoulder works.“Maybe if you show my sister some of your more charming habits, she’ll see you for who you really are and you can start getting along.”
West drops me. “Well, shit.”
“Fuckingow.” I stare up at him from my place in the dirt. Everything stings, but nothing seemed to have rebroken. My toes wiggle in my boots. “What the hell was that for?”
Overcast gray eyes meet mine in a war of wills that, on a regular day, I probably wouldn’t win, the stubborn ass. But today…
“Focus on healing up and fixing your own house, Rand,” West mutters.
I smirk. “But your lovesick drama is so much more fun.” My smile drops as his hands shove under my armpits. He hauls me up, heedless of whether my knees play ball for this round. My feet hit the ground and I grab for traction with anything that would stick. “Seriously, though. You’d be good for Winnie. That douche she married is the definition of a sinking canoe. She and Sally need a stable influence in their lives, and for fuck knows what reason, my sister actually seems to like?—”
“I’m not the marrying sort, Rand, but thanks. You already tried to give shit away before you died. Don’t do it again. Besides, people can make their own choices.” He pauses, hands pinching my armsas he steadies me, both of us breathing hard from the exertion in a swirling dust devil of our own making. “I mean, look after your sister and niece, for sure. Hell, look after Lanie. That’s your fight with her, even though she’s gone. But I’m doing just fine on my own, thanks. Don’t need no handout from a lonely rich man who needs to buy his friends.”
That stings, and he has to know it. Lanie’s absence is something we don’t talk about. I can’t force myself to face the fact she’s not in the homestead anymore, or in my bed each night when I shuffle back along the darkened corridors alone to my room.
Winnie and West have taken up residence in rooms opposite each other in the previously unused wing of the house where Sally usually stays. But that leaves the rest of the homestead to just me. No matter how full the house seemed when I first came back after the Invitational, how much I held back on my pain so I wouldn’t bother her, Lanie still packed up and took her grant back to Alaska without a single word to me. Or maybe she did say something, and I wasn’t listening at all.
Now, my end of the house is just bare walls and empty halls.
And me to haunt them.
I twist in a way my surgeon would slap me for, just to see West’s face. Harsh lines pull taut, deepened from working shoulder to shoulder with me beneath the Montana sun and wind for the past decade.
“I was trying to protect you. Both of you.” What starts as a shithouse, snarky comeback emerges as something more honest and quiet.
West’s lip curls as the truth in my words hits home. “Then pick up the damn screwdriver and get this job done. Because we’ve got a whole helluva lot more to do if you want to go chasing your girl across another country to find her.”
My heart lurches as denial bubbles up in my chest. “She left.”
He barks a laugh as harsh as his face. “And you’re gonna take that shit? Cordell Rand, giving up because a girl walked out onyou? Who the fuck are you, man? Give me that damn thing.” He snatches for the screwdriver that I clutch in stubborn fingers.
“No.”
“Give,” he snaps at me, impatient. “We don’t have all fucking day.”
“Mine.” I’m less than a toddler with a toy I shouldn’t have, but his words strike home as intended. “She’s mine, too,” I insist.
“Then move your behind, get the job done, and go get her,” he grates.
“Fine,” I snap back.
Silence falls between us, charged and brittle.
“Yeah, I told Jed I could, so I did.”
“Did what? You’re full of shit. You know that.”
Something clangs, and someone else swears as voices drift back to us on the other side of the barn. West and I both freeze, our ears perking up like a pair of biddies eavesdropping on the hottest town gossip at the adjacent table come bingo night.
“Yeah? Well, maybe I’ll be working for Jed next season. Seems like he’s got a good idea what he wants from the town.”
I frown, trying to work out who’s talking between the younger pair.Is that Jesse?I mouth to West.
Tripp, I think, he mouths back, eyes wide.
“And maybe you’ll be coming back here. Have you seen the boys who turn up on Cord’s doorstep, broke or pissed because Jed’s screwed them?”
“Yeah, that won’t happen. He’s got something up his sleeve.”
