“You’re sure?” Bob asked. “You are the oldest, and your mother said before she passed that it should go to you.”
His mother had never really known him very well. She hadn’t understood how hard it had been on him to move away from Willow Creek to the big city. She’d never understood how badly he’d wanted to move back west. And she certainly hadn’t realized that he wasn’t the one who would carry on whatever family tradition she might have been hoping to start.
“I’m sure,” he said.
But in his head, along with the image of Trish, he heard a familiar voice whispering, “Liar…” But that voice wasn’t hers; it was his.
* * *
Trish wasn’t sureexactly why she’d chosen today to visit the cemetery, but she stood now at her father’s gravesite, staring down at the tombstone that Maci had chosen for him:Beloved father, uncle, friend and rancher.
Father had come first. Was that Maci’s choice? Or had it been yet another of his last wishes that, as executor of his estate, she had carried out for him?
Trish would have thought that he would put rancher first. Because of her mother’s lie, she’d believed that he’d put the ranch before her. But now she knew the truth.
“Ah, Dad, I am so very sorry,” she murmured. “If I could have come to see you while you were in the hospital, I would have. But I was so afraid I was going to lose these babies if I did. I want to bring your grandchildren into the world, and I figured you would want that, too. I’ll raise them on the ranch like I wish I had been raised full-time.”
The only way she could ensure that they were raised full-time in any one place was to have them on her own. No shared custody with anyone.
Maybe that was why she’d chosen today to visit his grave, after she and Brett had kissed on the hayride wagon. She’d needed to remind herself of how much her dad had suffered, of how much he’d lost when he’d divorced and only been granted limited visitation with her.
He’d nearly lost the ranch, too. He would have lost it had Brett Lemmon not helped rescue it just as he kept rescuing her. She’d gone over the books herself, so she knew that was a fact, not just Maci, Frankie and his brothers singing Brett’s praises.
He had sacrificed so much to keep the ranch going, and he’d vowed to always put it first in his life, before love and marriage and children. It might matter even more to him than it did to her. But like her, the other heirs cared about the Four Corners, too.
“You did the right thing, Dad, with your will,” she said. While her lawyer probably still doubted it, Trish had no more doubts, except that maybe the others deserved their share more than she did. “I will respect your wishes.”
In order to do that she had to make sure that she didn’t mess up the partnership she shared with Brett and the others. She had to make sure that it didn’t get awkward and weird because of her attraction to the bachelor cowboy.
She couldn’t kiss him again. And she had to keep her distance from him. Maybe she was mourning that decision almost as much as she was mourning her father.
“I miss you so much, Daddy,” she whispered, her throat burning with the sobs that were threatening to bubble up and out. Some tears slipped down her cheeks.
Then an arm slid around her shoulders and a tissue was pressed into her hand. Blinded by the tears, she hadn’t seen him walk up to join her, but she felt Brett in every tingly nerve ending.
“How do you always know?” she murmured.
“What?”
How did he always know when she needed him?
But she couldn’t ask him that question because then she would be admitting that she needed him. And she didn’t want to admit that, even to herself.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I swear I’m not stalking you. I came into town to talk to my dad, and any time that I come into Willow Creek, I stop by here to talk to Frank, too.”
“Of course you do.” Because he was good and loyal and kind. And it wasn’t fair, not to her heart that was fighting so hard to keep him out.
“I was surprised to see you here,” he said.
She sniffed back the tears that kept trailing down her face. “Because I’m a horrible daughter and you didn’t think I even knew where his gravesite was?”
His arm around her gave her a gentle squeeze. “No, Trish.”
“I had to ask Frankie,” she admitted. “I am a horrible daughter.”
“When Frank had his accident, you’d just gone through IVF with a high-risk pregnancy,” he said. “You couldn’t travel then or for his funeral. And you were going through your divorce, too. You had your reasons to stay away.”
