21. Carson James
21
CARSON JAMES
“B
rooke!” I shouted as I stormed through the stables. “Why are the horses rainbow?”
My sister-in-law had the good sense to look guilty as she clutched the hose in her hand. “We just finished horse therapy camp. The kids loved it.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose as Anarchy glared at me from her stall. “You painted my horse pink!”
“The pink paint showed up better on a black horse,” Brooke said with a smile. “And it’s safe for animals. I even ran it by the doc when she was out here last time.”
Pink, yellow, blue, green, and purple smears and handprints coated my horse.
“I don’t even know what I’m the most pissed off about: you bringing Anny around children, or the fact that you fucking painted her.”
Brooke shrugged. “They painted Dottie too.”
I huffed. “Dottie is basically a lap dog. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. She’s also not my horse.”
Brooke trapped her lip between her teeth. The innocent look made me feel like shit for yelling at a pregnant woman.
“You made the mess. You clean it up,” I groused.
“Sure thing,” Brooke said as she rested her hand on her belly and took a deep breath. “As soon as I can catch my breath.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Leave the hose. I’ll take care of it. Go sit down or something.”
Brooke didn’t hesitate to drop the hose and beamed. “Ten out of ten. My favorite brother-in-law. You’re the best!”
“I promise I’m not.”
Brooke sat on a bench pushed against the wall. “So, you and Chef Maddox, huh?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked as I started to hose down Anny, watching as the paint melted off in a pool of color.
She beamed from ear to ear as she flipped open the lid of a water bottle and took a long drink. “She was wearing your ranch jacket this morning.”
“So?”
“So!” Brooke squealed. “She’s the one, right? You get a jacket when you’re part of the ranch for good.”
I grunted as I scrubbed Anny down. “It was cold out this morning. That’s all.”
She rolled her eyes. “Please. You know as well as I do what those jackets mean.”
“You, Becks, and Cass don’t need to be getting any ideas.”
“Oh really? Is that why I’ve seen her sneaking out of the bunkhouse every morning?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“I think you should stop fighting whatever is going on between you two.”
I had stopped fighting it. I was trying to gain back the ground I had lost in the battles. There was something to be said for diplomacy over brute force.
Lennon had put her sword down and taken her armor off, but she was still gun-shy around me.
Brooke left me to finish cleaning off the horses and waddled back to her house for the evening.
I debated slipping into the restaurant for dinner, but I didn’t want to. The most face time I’d get with Lennon would be a minute if she came over to the table.
But when I left the barn and spotted her working outside at the smokers, I seized the opportunity.
Lennon jumped when I came up behind her and slid my hands around her hips. She was wearing my ranch jacket again, and it did something funny to my gut.
I needed to take an antacid.
“Geez. Don’t do that,” she gasped as she clutched the basting mop like a weapon. “You scared me.”
I pressed a kiss to the side of her neck. “Who else would come up behind you like this?”
Lennon stiffened. “Someone sneaking up behind me is generally a bad thing.”
“Smells good,” I said as I took in the black bark of the brisket.
She shrugged me off and went back to work, covering the briskets with the sauce in her pot before closing up the smoker again.
“How’s your day going?”
“Fine,” she clipped with no hint of emotion.
“Just fine, huh?”
I took the liberty of sitting in the lawn chair positioned beside the smoker and stretched out.
“Restaurant’s been busy.”
I let out a lazy laugh. “I don’t give two shits about the restaurant, Len. If I cared about the restaurant, I would’ve asked about the restaurant.”
The sun was setting, casting warm rays across us as the glow dimmed from daylight to twilight.
She huffed and crossed her arms. “What do you want from me?”
I scoffed. What did I want from her? How about for her to stop being so fucking hot and cold with me?
“I want you to be human for thirty seconds instead of a kitchen robot. How about that?”
Lennon’s features twitched the same way Anarchy’s did when she was pissed off, so I stayed right where I was.
“It’s been a long day, and I’m trying to finish work.”
“How much longer do you have?”
Her eyes returned to the pot as she mechanically stirred the sauce.
“Lennon.”
“I clocked out an hour ago.”
“Then why are you still out here?”
I knew the answer before I had even asked the question. She was hiding in plain sight. Pretending like everything was fine. But she was still in my jacket.
And that fucking meant something.
Lennon’s phone rang, cutting the tension between us. She fished it out of her pocket and tensed at the number on the screen. She swallowed and steeled herself, summoning her courage.
“Hello?” she answered, flexing her hand. “Yeah, I can talk. Why are you calling?”
I snapped a blade of grass out of the ground, wrapping it around my finger over and over again as her tone turned more and more serious.
“How much time do I have until...” she rasped as her breathing picked up. Lennon swallowed and licked her lips. “Okay. I’ll figure it out.”
She hung up without saying goodbye.
“Len—”
I barely caught her arm as she grabbed the pot off the metal work table beside the smoker and spun. Sauce sloshed over the rim as we collided.
“I have to go,” she begged as she glanced all around, descending into a manic spiral. “Please, let me go.”
“What the fuck happened?”
“Let me go,” she whispered in desperation. Her eyes were pleading and terrified. “Please, Carson.”
It was my name on her lips that did me in, twisting and pulling at my heartstrings. “No.”
She jerked away, stumbling backward and looking at the sky. “I should’ve known.”
“Should have known what? ” I was growing more and more irritated by the second. If people didn’t start looping me in, I was going to lose it. “Lennon, you have to talk to me. I’m not a mind reader. What the hell is going on?”
Lennon’s eyes were glassy. “That you...” She let out a laugh of despair. “That this place...It was all too good to be true.”
The swish of a horse’s tail could have knocked me over.
“Come on. I’m not going to let you run off like a tattooed Cinderella.”
I dragged Lennon through the kitchen, not caring that anyone saw me holding her hand. I stood guard as she dumped her utensils and got everything squared away for the next day.
There was no way I was letting her go.
I kept a tight hold on her, lacing our hands together as I walked her to the bunkhouse and made her change out of her chef’s whites. While she shimmied into jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, I loaded up a pack.
Lennon hadn’t said a word since I dragged her off, but she broke when I took her to the stables.
“What are we doing?” she said as she eyed the horses warily.
“Getting out of here.”
She let out a soft laugh. “Let me guess. You were always the kid who ran away from home?”
I grinned as I dropped the pack on the ground and started tacking up Anny. “Yep. My folks would even let me camp out all night until I tucked tail and came back the next morning. They didn’t get worried until I started liking it.” I grunted as I hoisted the saddle onto her back. “I guess that was the beauty of us being the only people out here when I was a youngin’. It was safe. We were raised with the understanding that this land was here before we were, and will exist long after we’re gone. We’re visitors. I was taught to respect the wild. I think I became one with it. Any mistakes I made that led to me getting hurt were my fault. Not the land’s.”
Lennon kept a safe distance but didn’t seem scared. She wasn’t as skittish as Cassandra or as reckless as Brooke when they were first introduced to the horses.
“This is Anarchy,” I said as I checked her over. “She’s mine.”
Anny made a little snap at Lennon when she reached out to touch her nose, but Lennon didn’t flinch.
It was like living a fever dream as Lennon held her palm out for Anny to sniff it, then pressed it to Anny’s nose. Lennon looked her in the eye as she warned her. “If you bite me, there’s no coming back from that. Understood?”
Anny seemed to agree to that and went back to ignoring Lennon.
I moved to the next stall and went through the motions of getting Indy ready to ride. “This is Independence. She belongs to Ray and Brooke, but I work with her since neither of them ride much these days.”
Lennon snorted. “Anarchy and Independence. How poetic.”
She was coping with humor. I could smell it a mile away. Whatever had been said to her on the phone had rattled her.
I grabbed her hand. “Up you go.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Lennon stumbled back. “You expect me to ride that thing?”
“Yes.” It was as simple as that.
She argued a little as I braced my hand on her ass to boost her into Indy’s saddle. Frankly, I just wanted to grab her ass.
We moseyed out of the stables and headed into the field. I had put Lennon on Indy since she typically deferred to following Anny around when they were out together.
“My jacket looks good on you,” I said as we dodged the beams of light flooding out of the bunkhouse and the lodge and headed deep into the pasture.
Lennon bobbed back and forth beside me as she tried to get used to the sway of the saddle. “Cassandra and Brooke saw me in it this morning. They made it seem like it was a thing. What did you rope me into, cowboy?”
I found her eyes in the moonlight. “As long as you wanna be here, you wear that jacket. You put it on, and you’re not alone anymore. You get me?”
She was silent. The only sounds floating between us in the night air were the grunts of the horses.
When the lodge and houses had disappeared behind us, I asked, “Who was on the phone?”
I watched as she stared at Indy’s mane.
“I can’t fix it if you don’t tell me, Len.”
“You can’t fix it,” she croaked. I realized that I had never heard her get emotional before. She always kept her true emotions carefully locked up behind bars of strength and self-reliance.
“You don’t know that unless you tell me what it is.”
Lennon took a deep breath. “My brother is being released early.” She swallowed. “My old parole officer called to tell me since I don’t qualify for victim services. Apparently, there’s an overcrowding problem. He’s been recommended for parole based on good behavior.”
I swore at the sky, trusting the stars above us to hold our secrets. The breath I exhaled clouded around us. “And you want to pack up and hit the road to hide.”
She had that thousand-yard stare as we trotted along. “Someone slashed my tires. Chances are, he already knows I’m here.”
“Or maybe that punk from the kitchen thought he’d slash your tires instead of going up against you in a dick-measuring contest. Yours is bigger by a long shot.”
Lennon let out a quiet laugh.
The shadow of my favorite tree loomed ahead. Anny knew where to go. She and I had come out here thousands of times.
My boots hit the ground before Anny had come to a complete stop. “Give me your hand.”
Lennon slid her palm into mine and dismounted.
“What are we doing out here?”
I grabbed the pack I had strapped onto Anny and shouldered it. “If you’re going to run away, I’m going to give you a good reason to stay.”
While Lennon and Anarchy had a staring contest, I unfurled the thick quilt I had snagged from the house and spread it on the ground.
“Come here,” I said as I toed my boots off and stretched out on the blanket.
Lennon followed, but kept a watchful eye on Indy and Anny. “You’re not going to leash them up or something?”
I laughed. “Leash them up?”
“You know. So, they don’t run away.”
I patted the spot beside me. “They’re not going anywhere.”
She didn’t seem too convinced. “How are you so sure?”
“Because they’re loyal. They’ve been on the ranch for a long time. They know they’re safe and cared for here. They weren’t before.”
Lennon sat beside me and hugged her knees. “You rescued them?”
I nodded. “Dottie was abandoned. Now she’s spoiled to shit and gets painted with fucking rainbows for horse therapy camps. Independence and Liberty came from a hoarding situation. We agreed to foster them while Animal Control looked for a permanent home, then we didn’t want to let them go. And Anny—” I looked over at my girl “—she was abused. Getting her in the trailer to bring her out here was a pain in the ass. We couldn’t keep her with the other horses because she’d act up. It took a lot of gentle pressure to get her to trust me. The new horses we got in for the equine program are retired racehorses. They have a pretty good life out here.”
“I think everyone has a pretty good life out here,” Lennon said. Sadness and regret danced along each word.
“Then stay.” I shuffled behind her and bracketed her body between my knees.
“I can’t. I have to go.”
“Len—” I brushed her hair over one shoulder and pressed a kiss to the side of her neck.
That was when I noticed the tears.
“C’mon, slugger,” I soothed as I wiped her tears away.
Lennon curled into my arms and closed her eyes.
“Ain’t nothing that serious,” I said as I cradled her head to my chest. “He’ll be on parole, right? He can’t come here.”
She let out a caustic laugh. “That won’t stop him in the slightest. I sold him out to try to avoid being charged.”
“How much money was it?”
“One and a half million. Apparently, you can fit it in a backpack when it’s in hundreds.”
I let out a slow whistle. “Jesus.”
“Yeah.” Lennon’s voice was raspy. “And he thinks I have it.”
“Tell me something,” I said as I stretched out on my back and pulled her down with me so we could stare at the stars together. “Are you happy here?”
A lazy laugh slipped free. Lennon exhaled at the sky. “Yeah, I am. Especially now that a certain asshole cowboy stopped fucking with my job.”
I grinned against her mouth as I turned and cupped her cheek. “I like fucking you better than fucking with you.”
“I’m happy here,” she admitted as she rested her forehead on mine. “It’s safe. Quiet. I get to run The Kitchen. It seems like it’s too good to be true. I guess it is.”
“What if I promised that you’d be safe here?” My eyes met hers. “Would you stay?”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I can.”
“Carson . . .”
“Nothing happens on this ranch without my say-so.” I cracked a smile at the anomaly in my arms. “Well, except you.”