“No,” he said. “You make it sound like I am a raging tyrant. I’m not. We just went through the fact that I would never fire any of you, but you think that I would throw a woman out into the cold when her husband just left her?”
“So, she’s hot,” Walker said.
“What makes you think that?”
“Because you haven’t said she isn’t.”
“Fine. She’s hot,” Cody said, because denying it was going to make it weirder. “She also just got left by her husband, and she works for me. For all of us. So it doesn’t matter how hot she is. Stay away.”
“I’m good,” Walker said. “I don’t need to go fishing amongst the employees.”
“Well, thank God for small miracles,” Nolan muttered. “I didn’t really know you had a limit, Walker.”
“Yeah, Walker,” Lila added.
Oh, now they were forming an alliance. That was even worse than them shouting at each other.
“Where is ZB?”
“I don’t know,” Nolan said. “I didn’t get the impression he was in the mood to deal with people.”
“He’s never in the mood to deal with people.”
Cody had made friends with Zane on the rodeo circuit, and when he had inherited the ranch, he’d asked if he’d be interested in partnering with him. Zane bought a plot of landnext to the ranch and lived in a small, ramshackle cabin he could update, but didn’t. He’d invested some of his rodeo money in the start-up of the resort, and he didn’t have to work for Cody at all – but chose to.
Which mystified Cody, since Zane never seemed happy about any of it, but showed up all the same.
Zane was another misfit. Another one whose life had been marked by tragedy. He’d been orphaned when he was young, Cody wasn’t sure how, because Zane didn’t like to talk about it, and later had gone into the military. Then, after that, he’d gone into the rodeo.
He was a survival skills expert and one of the least friendly human beings Cody had ever met. Which of course meant that Cody liked him.
Everybody did, honestly, because they all knew what it was like to live rough.
They all knew what it was like to have it hard.
And they might be a dysfunctional band of misfits, but they never judged each other for being exactly that.
Nolan and Lila might be at each other’s throats, but it was just because they were too much like each other, not because they expected the other to have some kind of emotional maturity the other one didn’t have.
“Do you want me to do a wellness check on him after dinner?” Walker asked.
He wasn’t really kidding.
“I mean, if you wouldn’t mind. Hopefully, he’s just off in the woods somewhere. You never know.”
“I did have a question for you,” Nolan said.
“Yeah?”
He started to build his burger. He wasn’t going to stand around yapping while the food was getting cold.
“You wanted three carved bears for the back, and the Mustang is for the front?” Nolan asked.
“Yes. If you’re not most of the way through the Mustang at this point, it’s not going to be ready for the opening.”
“I know how fast I can carve,” Nolan said. “Don’t worry about it.”
Nolan did exceptional wood carvings. Not the rough chainsaw wood carvings that were popular on roadsides, but polished carvings that had fine detail. He was working on a mustang for the front of the hotel, and it was the perfect emblem for the area.
