Busy with cattle.
Busy with fucking kale, too.
Especially because my brothers always find a way out of helping with the weekly produce box deliveries we do for our mother.
The cows take up most of Ridge’s time, and our oldest brother is such a menacing dark cloud when he descends out of the foothills that he makes a terrible delivery boy at the best of times.
Cash’s tattoos and criminal record make him equally unappealing to most of our customers, despite his natural charm—and the fact they don’t mind him repairing their vehicles. Navigating the small town hypocrisy is my least favourite part of being back home.
And Dax is often away on the rodeo circuit.
Which leaves the vegetable deliveries to yours truly most weeks.
Thisweek, though, I’m not completely alone in the task—because my truck is at Cash’s garage on Main Street, so Ridge has no choice but drive me, and the kale, into town.
“I thought we were just going to load the boxes into your truck?” he growls after I point out our first stop is on the way, at Dr. Tailfeather’s medical practice on the edge of town.
“Sure. The ones we don’t get to first.” I glare back. He doesn’t scare me. Never has, never will. It helped that I was almost as tall as him when I was twelve and he was fifteen—and he thought he’d inherited the monster gene from our father.
My brother is no monster. He’s just misunderstood. By himself and most other people.
With a sigh, he pulls into the parking lot.
I don’t ask him to get out and exchange pleasantries with the doctor. That’s asking too much. In exchange for letting him stay in the truck, he agreeably stops at five more houses on our way into the heart of town.
But when I point to The Friendly Table, the diner that orders a triple-sized community share box every week, that’s where he draws the line.
“You’ll probably want to go in and have lunch.” He jerks his cowboy hat down low over his brow. “Let’s get your truck. I’ve got fencing to check thisafternoon. As it is, I’m going to have to continue it tomorrow already.”
I don’t argue. I’ve pushed him enough today.
At the garage, he helps unload the remaining boxes, then he peels back onto Main Street without saying goodbye.
Cash rolls his eyes. “See you later, sunshine,” he calls to the dust in Ridge’s wake. And then to me, “What’s his problem?”
“I may not have told him that the last delivery was to Mercy at the diner.”
“Ah.”
Twenty years ago, we arrived in Dragonfly Creek (the first time) as a family barely holding itself together. We were tired, scared, and miserable. A traumatized mother and four angry young boys. Ridge didn’t want to go to a new school. Or any school, for that matter. Cash and Dax were still in elementary, but I was newly in high school, and cajoled my older brother into coming with me. The first student we met was Mercy Lane—who was helping out in the principal’s office as we were getting registered. She was in my grade, two years younger than Ridge, but she took one look at him and fell desperately in love in that innocent way only a thirteen year old girl can.
And we became the best of friends, despite the fact that my brother couldn’t return her feelings like that.
“Too many feelings for the big dumb ox to handle,” Cash mutters now.
“Stole the thought right out of my head.” I jerk my thumb across the street. “Can I buy you lunch?”
The Friendly Table is still a bit busy, right at the tail end of the lunch rush. Cash walks in like weown the place, ignoring the stares and the drop in volume at our arrival.
At the counter, Jasper Lane adjusts his black sheriff’s hat and gives Cash a hard stare. From behind him, his sister rolls her eyes and gives us a friendly wave.
Most of the booths are open, but Cash deliberately slides into the one next to one of the remaining customers, a woman who was in Cash’s year at school, and who now comes into The Friendly Table every single day for lunch because she’s a real estate agent and considers herself the town gossip—as a mark of pride.
Cash can’t fucking stand her, and enjoys running her out of the place on the regular.
“You can’t be polite?” I ask him once we’re sitting and she’s hustled out.
He shrugs. “Polite is overrated. And she was malingering.”
