“And you?” Blake asked.
“I hate living in limbo, but I understand now that she has her reasons.” The babies she carried. Since becoming Lucy’s father, Liam knew that children had to come first. They had to be protected because they couldn’t protect themselves.
“Hopefully Frankie and Brett can accept that, too,” Blake said.
Liam wasn’t all that hopeful that would happen. Even though Frankie and Brett loved Lucy, they were determined to never become parents themselves. They didn’t understand how parents thought.
He followed Blake up the steps to the front door. Then he followed him inside the house. As he turned to pull the door closed behind them, he noticed someone else walking toward the house now.
It wasn’t Frankie. She was probably still inside the barn with Cocoa.
But the woman walking next to his brother Brett looked a lot like Frankie. If her hair was a little longer, her eyes a little darker and she wasn’t pregnant, Trish would have looked like Frankie’s twin. Despite how much they looked alike, their personalities seemed very different, though.
Frankie was decisive and strong and an open book with her thoughts and feelings. Trish was harder to read.
But as they drew closer, Liam noticed the glances she kept shooting at his brother. Maybe he’d been spending too much time around his grandparents because he found himself wondering where they’d been and what had happened between them and if there was any chance of more than a working relationship between the two of them.
CHAPTER EIGHT
She was gone. Brett knew it even before he glanced out the front window and saw that her truck was no longer parked in the driveway.
In the time it had taken him to shower off his work day plus their expedition into the run-down bunkhouse, she must have slipped out of the house. He wondered where she was going.
To her lawyer’s?
If not for her trailer still being in the driveway, he might have figured that she’d taken off for good. That he’d scared her away from ranching. It wasn’t as easy and fun as she seemed to think it was.
Didn’t she realize how hard her dad had struggled?
She should have gone over the books with Blake. Instead, she’d taken off.
Maybe she’d gone to see Maci. But then Maci’s little SUV appeared in the driveway, heading toward the house. She would have passed Trish on the road if Trish had been going to see her.
He waited for her at the front door.
“Hey, Brett,” she greeted him. “What’s going on?”
He shrugged. “I really have no idea. Did you pass Trish on the road, by any chance?”
She shook her head. “No. Was she coming to see me or heading to town?”
“If she’d been doing either of those, you would have passed her,” he pointed out. “So she must be going to seehim.” He thought as highly of Stokes as Frankie did, which wasn’t very high at all despite his sterling reputation as a champion of the underdog.
He hadn’t considered Trish an underdog. But now, knowing the struggles she’d had with her mother and her ex-husband, Brett realized that she might have been in those circumstances. That wasn’t the case with the ranch. At the moment, it definitely felt as if she had the upper hand.
“Hey, beautiful,” Blake said as he walked out of the kitchen to greet his girlfriend at the door. He passed Brett and pulled Maci into a hug.
A jab of envy hit Brett like an elbow. He’d felt that before when he’d seen how happy Blake was with Maci and Liam with Elise and Lucy. At the time he hadn’t realized it was envy, though. He’d just figured he was concerned about his brothers, worried that they might wind up getting hurt like Frank Dempsey had been. And their dad, when their mom died.
Was love worth that kind of pain?
Hopefully, his brothers and his sister, who was engaged, would never know that pain, only the love and happiness they were experiencing now.
Was he jealous of that love and happiness?
He shook his head at the thought. Absolutely not. If they wanted to put themselves at risk like that, that was their choice. It wasn’t one he was ever going to make for himself. And that was good, because one of them had to put the ranch first.
“You okay?” Blake asked when he noticed that Brett was still standing there.
