Chapter 19
JACK
Brax
We riding today or what?
Jack
Fuck yeah. I’ll be at Lodestar after lunch. I have a breakfast date with Maya.
Brax
I thought today was your day off?
Jack
Janie was so tired when she came home last night, I thought it would be nice to let her sleep in for once. We need to have a talk about that, by the way.
Brax
Yeah, fine. Park behind my cabin when you get here. I’ll have the horses saddled and waiting.
Jack
You make it sound like we’re sneaking around.
Brax
We are. If Adam sees us, he’ll put us to work.
“Blueberry pancakes and two slices of bacon, coming right up.” I slid the plate in front of Maya, who was ready to go with a fork in one hand and a knife in the other. I put my own plate down across from her and took a seat.
“Thank you, Jack,” she remembered to say after the first bite was already in her mouth.
“You’re welcome, scamp.”
She grinned at that, showing me a little too much of her food, but I let it slide.
Normally her table manners were impeccable—her grandmother was a stickler about it, according to Janie—and anyway, I didn’t want to spend every moment correcting her.
That would exhaust us both. Better to pick our battles.
No one wanted to fight a war on a Sunday morning.
“Scamp,” she repeated with a mischievous giggle that reminded me of her mom. Maya loved her nickname—maybe a little too much. I hoped she didn’t feel the need to earn it every day.
I watched her saw clumsily at her pancakes while I tucked into mine.
Her fingers and hands were so small that using a fork and knife together was unwieldy for her, but she was getting it.
The first few times I had tried to jump in and help, but Janie had put a stop to it.
Now I knew that I should give Maya a chance to do it herself. If she needed help, she’d ask.
“What are we doing today, Jack?” Maya asked around a bite of bacon.
I swallowed my own food before replying, then took a sip of orange juice. “Well, it’s Sunday, so that means your mom doesn’t have to work. She’s going to take you with her to the library for her embroidery club, and I’m going to go for a ride at Lodestar with Brax.”
“You’re going to Lodestar?” Maya’s eyes went wide. “Will Essie be there?”
I wasn’t surprised she asked. Kids loved my sister. Essie was colorful and loud, and that tended to make her a favorite. “No, she’s part of the embroidery club, remember? So you’ll see her at the library.”
Maya nodded. This time she waited to swallow her food before speaking. “Right. Okay. And then you’ll come back home? Here?”
The anxious note in her voice made me squint. “Of course. I live here, remember? All my stuff is here.”
“Okay.” She stuffed another bite into her mouth and chewed, those unusual eyes of hers darting this way and that. “Even though I tricked you about the tadpoles?”
That was what she was worried about? The tadpoles had been in my room all week since we moved them there Monday night.
Maya had been great about changing the water and feeding them to prove she was responsible.
She’d been scrupulously truthful. Too truthful, even.
I didn’t need to know that my shirt was ugly and my singing along to the car radio made her want to rip her ears off.
But then I remembered what Janie had said. None of Maya’s babysitters had lasted very long. She was a smart kid. Observant. She had to have known why they left. I could only imagine how that made her feel.
I leaned back and rubbed a hand over my mouth. “Are you kidding? I’m having a great summer with you. I’m not happy you tricked me, but you’re not going to do that again. Right?” I added pointedly, and she nodded vehemently. “Good. So I’m staying. You’re stuck with me until September, scamp.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. She finished another bite and hopped to her feet. “Can I go look at the tadpoles now?”
“Sure, go ahead.” I didn’t mind her in my room. I’d left my firearms at my mom’s place, and there wasn’t anything else for her to get into.
She darted from the kitchen just as Janie entered. “Pancakes, Mom!” she shouted as she made for the tadpoles.
Janie blinked her dazed doe eyes at me. Her copper hair was piled on top of her head with a silvery blue scrunchie that matched her miniscule silky pajama shorts. Bare feet. No bra.
No bra.
I knew she wasn’t wearing a bra because her perky tits had that soft, floaty look to them and her goddamn nipple piercings were outlined clear as day against the white cotton T-shirt that was sliding off her shoulder with not a bra strap to be seen.
I blinked back at her, feeling as dazed as she looked.
“Pancakes?” she echoed. She looked around like she expected them to appear out of thin air.
I jolted to my feet. “Right! I put a plate in the oven for you to keep them warm. I wasn’t sure when you’d be up.”
“What time is it?” She shuffled over to the coffee maker with a yawn.
“A quarter to nine.”
“Nine?” she yelped, spinning around on her toes. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
I arched a brow at her. “It’s not my job to wake you up. Anyway, you looked wiped when you came home last night. I figured you could use the rest.”
“Maya usually wakes me up around seven to make her breakfast. I’m so sorry. I know it’s your day off from kid duty.” She looked genuinely distressed.
“Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m an early riser anyway. Can’t shake military hours no matter how hard I try. It was fun.” Making pancakes with Maya hadn’t felt like work. It had felt like a great way to start a day that I was really looking forward to.
She kept staring at me with that baffled, sleepy look, her body blocking me from my second cup of coffee.
Instinctively, I squeezed her hip to encourage her to move.
That was a mistake. I’d spent a lot of time since I moved in struggling to keep my hands off her, and now that I was actually touching her, I didn’t know how to stop.
“Jack,” she said plaintively. I thought she was going to push me away, but instead her forehead met my chest with a soft thump. “I’m just so fucking tired. Thank you.”
I traced soft circles on her lower back. “I know you are, honey. Go sit down and I’ll get us both a cup of coffee, okay?”
It felt so good to take some of the weight she caried like she had done for me in our poker game.
So right. Like we were in this together.
I hadn’t felt this kind of comradeship since I’d left the military.
And somehow I’d found it here, in the unlikeliest of places, with a precocious kid who had wiggled her way into my heart and her mother I couldn’t make myself stop touching.
“How’s the mannying going?” Brax asked as we moseyed down a trail where Adam was unlikely to follow. “You surviving okay?”
“More than surviving. I’m having a blast.”
Brax turned in his saddle just enough to give me a look of pure disbelief over his shoulder. “With a seven year old.”
“Yeah. Maya’s great.”
Brax faced forward again, shaking his head. “I have to say, I thought you would be bored to tears, but as long as you’re having fun, it’s not a bad summer gig until you find something permanent. You deserve that. Have you started thinking about what you’re going to do when summer is over?”
“Maybe,” I hedged.
Truthfully, I’d been avoiding thinking about that at all. Not because I didn’t have options. Mercy River Ranch was a possibility. I hadn’t given Jeremiah an answer yet because I was still waffling on it.
Mercy River was a different kind of ranch than Lodestar. Both raised cattle and horses, but Mercy River was a nonprofit with a mission to give former military men and women a healing place to ease back into civilian life. Most of them had physical trauma or PTSD to work through.
Horses, mountains, and a cause I cared about. It should have been a no-brainer. So why was I still hesitating?
“I have to ask you something,” Brax said.
“Go for it.” We came out of the copse of trees and the view opened up. There was no better place to admire it than between a horse’s ears, in my opinion. Shit, I’d missed this. I nudged my gelding into a quick trot to pull even with Brax. “What’s your question?”
“Is something going on with you and Janie?”
I stared him down. “Why do you have to ask me that?”
“Essie said I have to.”
“Well, it’s none of your damn business.”
“So, that’s a yes?”
“It’s none of her damn business, either.”
Brax sighed. “Yeah, that’s definitely a yes.”
Shit. “Don’t tell Essie that.” I scrubbed a hand over my jaw. “Nothing is going on. There was a time when it felt like we were heading in that direction, but she put a stop to that when she hired me.”
Brax nodded. “Makes sense. Can’t go around fucking your kid’s nanny. That’s the rule.” His gaze tracked over my frown. “Maybe it’s really more of a guideline than an actual rule.”
I grunted. Some people chafed at rules. Felt caged in by them.
That wasn’t me. My whole life, I’d been a rule-follower.
Rules weren’t a cage, to my way of thinking; they were freedom.
People concentrated so hard on the one thing they couldn’t do that they never opened their eyes to all the other possibilities.
Rules established the fence line. But I was damn good at finding a gate.
I hadn’t found a gate through Janie’s rule yet, that was all.
But right now, I wanted to have a different conversation with my friend.
“You know she doesn’t get home until two-thirty or three in the morning after her shifts on Friday and Saturday?” I asked.
Brax shrugged. “I never thought about it, but it makes sense. The bar closes at one, and she still has to clean up before she can leave. That’s why she needs a live-in nanny, right?”
“She’s fucking exhausted. It doesn’t matter what time she gets to bed, she still has to get up at seven to take care of Maya. Closing two nights in a row is too much. She looked like a zombie this morning.”
Brax tugged the reins, signaling his mare to stop.
He turned to me, eyes narrowed. “What’s with the tone?
She asked for those shifts, and I gave them to her because I like her.
She works six days a week because that’s what she wanted, but most of the money she makes comes from closing the bar Friday and Saturday. That’s when she gets the good tips.”
“She can’t keep burning herself out at both ends,” I insisted.
Brax threw up a hand. “What do you want me to do about it? She’s never said a word about wanting different shifts.”
“Take her off the closing shifts. She can work Monday through Friday and be home by six. Give her the manager position.”
Brax rolled his eyes. “There isn’t a manager position. I’m the manager.”
“You’re barely there,” I argued. “Who makes the schedule for the other employees? Who does the inventory so you know what to order?”
“Janie,” Brax admitted. He sighed. “All right. The bar is doing fine. We can afford it. I’ll talk to her about it tomorrow.”
“Good.” I nudged Captain with my heels and we moved forward.
Brax scratched his jaw. “It’s a good idea, actually. I hate all that paperwork shit. Did Janie come up with it? She could have asked me herself. She’s never been afraid to speak her mind to me before.”
“I don’t think it occurred to her, and I figured I’d see if it was even a possibility before I got her hopes up. If she doesn’t want the manager position, she’ll tell you.”
“Huh.” Brax eyed me speculatively. “So you figured you’d get yourself involved in something that isn’t your business.”
“The bar is my business.”
And so is Janie. But since that was more a feeling than a fact a reasonable person would agree with, I kept it to myself.