CHAPTER 1
RENNA
Coming home was noton my to-do list. Especially when the reason I left is still here.
Oliver Torres, my pre-college crush. The man who slept with me, then vanished the next morning.
After four years, I’m no longer letting a broken heart keep me from home.
My heels ache the moment my shoes hit the gravel driveway. Slamming my car door shut, I grab my suitcase out of the trunk. Cursing myself as I walk up to the house in four-inch heels, knowing damn well I live on a ranch.
Swinging open the front door, cold air conditioning washes over me. The smell of cow manure is blocked by the insane amount of air fresheners my mom has placed around the main house, and for once I’m grateful for her overwhelming pressure to be perfect.
Dragging my suitcase behind me, I dart to the one place I know my dad to be at six in the morning.
“Welcome home, Pumpkin,” my dad says with a mouth full of scrambled eggs. He smiles, and gross as it is seeing all that chewed up egg, it’s these moments I miss.
The moments where my dad seems human. My dad is the ranchman of Winehouse Ranch, and his work ethic alone is the reason it’s become as big as it is. The long hours he works are impressive to the untrained eye, but everyone here knows the cost of being successful in this business.
He would never neglect Winehouse the way he neglected his family. As much as I would love to harbor resentment over it, he’s truly happy with the ranch being his top priority, and at my ripe age of 26, I’ve finally accepted that.
His deep brown skin, which I inherited, glistens with lotion; he must be fresh from the shower. He is in his uniform, a plain t-shirt and jeans, as he always is. He’ll be covered in mud and dirt the moment he walks out the door for work, but here, at the table, everyone must be clean. A rule my mom set, probably before I was born.
The elongated table had a number of chairs that were rarely occupied, which added to the constant state of loneliness in the house. Being an only child made this overly big house echo, and it’s probably why Dad is rarely here.
“Hey Daddy,” I sing, sliding into the chair two down from the left side of him. The chair directly to the right is for his ranch foreman, who also happens to be the reason I left, even when he isn’t here. The same rule applies to my mom’s chair on his left.
“You came home?” he asks, scrunching his thick eyebrows.
Oh, right, I didn’t tell anyone I’d be coming home at the ass crack of dawn on a random Tuesday in the summer. Being off to college in the city, I haven’t seen my family in a year.
It’s actually been a year and seven months since I didn’t come home last summer either. They probably thought I was never coming back. I wonder if they even missed me if I never did.
“I missed you,” I say. It’s not a lie, but it’s not the whole truth, not that he would ask. Or care.
“The ranch missed you too.” That is probably the closest thing I’d get to a I missed you too, Renna from him. My dad doesn’t view himself as a person; he is the ranch, and the ranch is him.
He wanted that for me too. Instead, I became his biggest disappointment. I went to college for marketing. What I’m doing with that marketing degree, I don’t know yet, and that just about angers him as much as me leaving for college did.
At least it’s better than him being indifferent.
“I’ll see you later, Pumpkin. Make sure to say hi to your mom,” Dad says, leaving the table.
“Yeah, okay.”
“Sorry, didn’t hear you.”
“Yes, sir,” I say leaving the room. Carrying my suitcase up the stairs, I nudge my old bedroom door open. My mom’s been dusting, and I can tell since the wood surface of my dresser is shiny and the bedframe sitting across from it doesn’t have a speck of dust.
Light purple walls bring me back to when I pissed off my mom by painting my once stark white walls this bright saturated purple, and I nearly chuckle at the memory of my dad and I holding back our laughs as she went on and on in hysterics.
I plop my bright pink suitcase on my bed and start unpacking.
For a girl in marketing, I had close to no clothes, but for a girl on a ranch, I had too many clothes.
All you needed on a ranch were seven T-shirts and two pairs of jeans. That’s all anyone else had.
Well, seven shirts would be a lot, but I hated wearing dirty clothes.
