Chapter 3
Blood money does buy a lot of pleasure.
West wasn’t in the mood for apologies when his sister showed up looking contrite about a half hour before Cassidy Wilder was due to arrive.
Cassidy. Wilder.
Who had been entirely irrelevant to him until nearly three months ago, when his sister had started consorting with Wilders, and he’d encountered her at The Watering Hole. It had been like he’d never seen her before.
Impossible. It was a small-ass town, so he’d seen her around any number of times.
But not like that.
He couldn’t pinpoint why it was different. Right place, right time? Right moment? The right scene, the right jeans? Who could say? He didn’t really want to say. He’d wanted to ignore, and it should have been easy enough to do.
Except then his sister’s fake relationship with Flynn Wilder had turned real, putting Cassidy in his path more often than she ought to have been. And now this.
“Are you mad at me?”
He turned to Jessie Jane and didn’t bother to dignify that question with an answer.
“Yes?” she asked. Then, “No. And you’re mad at me for asking because of course you respect the fact that I feel overwhelmed, but you are a little bit irritated that you got saddled with training someone you don’t know and didn’t choose.”
“There you are. You didn’t have to ask.”
“West, I’m sorry. I mean, when I embarked on the whole running-for-mayor thing, I kind of just wanted to do it to give a middle finger to the town, but then it turned out that I actually wanted to do it, and now also I’m in a relationship and—”
“There’s no need for you to apologize to me,” he said. Which was true. He didn’t need Jessie Jane to feel contrite because she had gone and gotten herself a life around the same time he was trying to make one for himself.
The truth was, her new life was more time sensitive than his. She was going to be sworn in as mayor in January, and until then he knew she had a lot on her plate.
He was in the process of finishing his new house and trying to work out the best time to get his cattle.
He was ready to be done with the whole rigmarole of the Wild West Show.
But he also felt … responsible for it. Maybe it wasn’t his thing, maybe he wasn’t a born performer like his dad, but he had been helping the old man keep the place afloat for so many years now, he couldn’t simply turn off his feeling of responsibility.
The truth was, West was damned good at making money. Great at it, even. It had been a shock to him that in the stock market, his willingness to trust his gut and take a leap of faith—liabilities in almost every other part of his life—were assets.
He might not have graduated from high school, he might have a criminal record, but he could turn a thousand dollars into a hundred thousand, and that was a skill that had padded his bank account in ways he had never imagined possible.
The truth was, the show could coast through the season. He could inject some cash into the place, and they could give it a rest. But his dad would never allow that. West knew that his dad basically considered investments to be a con. His dad wasn’t opposed to a con. But he wanted to run his own.
The show was his stage. It was what got him out of bed in the morning.
West had no appetite to continue it once his old man was gone, and sometimes that made him feel guilty. But he had invested so much of his life into it that the guilt was minimal.
“We’re both bailing at the same time,” West said. “I owe it to Dad to make this a good season. So I’m willing to try with this girl.”
“She is good. I’ve seen her ride.”
God almighty.
“Great. I haven’t,” he gritted out. “And I’ll be the judge of her skill. If I have to go farther afield to find somebody, I will. I’m not going to take somebody in because of nepotism. Just because you’re getting married to her brother …”
“You don’t like her because she’s a Wilder, and you still don’t really like them, even though I am marrying Flynn.”
Didn’t like her? If only it were that simple.
Now, when it came to the Wilders as a family, Jessie’s accusation was fair enough.
He’d been in more bar fights with the Wilders than he could count. Though, never Flynn specifically. He and Austin had done rounds a time or two, and he had a clear memory of putting Carson through the window of The Watering Hole back when they were young enough to be using fake IDs.
And then there was the incident with Perry last year. She had given him her number and they’d gone out, and when he had made a move, Carson had rolled in and started a fight. West had decided to back the hell out of it, because he wasn’t throwing hands over a woman who wanted somebody else.
Hell no.
No, the Wilders weren’t exactly his biggest fans. And he wasn’t really theirs. But Cassidy was … He didn’t know her. She was too young for him to know.
Which was why it had been like seeing her for the first time back in August. Laughing and making eyes at Dalton Wade with as much subtlety as a doe during rut. His whole world had stopped moving. Just for a minute.
He hadn’t heard anything but the sound of his own breath, his own heartbeat pounding in his head.
His pulse as well as all his blood rushed south.
He couldn’t see anything but her. The flick of her dark hair and the way the lights shone on it. Her mouth. Her body. She was also pretty enough to be a problem. A big problem.
He wasn’t quite sure why he found her so attractive, but he did.
There was something about her sharp little chin, about the challenge that was always lurking in her eyes.
She was tough. But there was a softness to her that didn’t usually go hand in hand with that Teflon attitude.
She behaved as if nothing would stick to her.
As if nothing affected her. It was also clear that wasn’t true.
Not that he was concerned about it, not really. He wasn’t going to fuck around with the Wilders’ baby sister. His sister’s future sister-in-law. Hell no. That would be sticky and complicated in a way he never wanted his sexual relationships to be.
He was a cliché, and he knew it. He hoped self-awareness made it a little more forgivable.
But he didn’t do romance. He didn’t do relationships.
He was still too tied up in dealing with his own family to want to add anyone else to the mix.
And after he disentangled himself from the family business, he intended to be selfish.
To run his ranch, to do his own thing, and to stop …
Helping raise his damned parents.
Just thinking about it exhausted him.
He knew that Jessie Jane was in the same boat. Except she had leapt out of the boat. Before he could. Honestly, he was proud of her for that.
“Get on out of here,” he said. “The whole point is to give you more time to do what you need to do.”
He was sincere about that. If he was going to do the show without her, then it might as well be for a purpose. For a reason. He didn’t need her lingering around with sad eyes and unresolved guilt.
“West …”
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t look at me like I’m a sad puppy dog you’re leaving at the pound, Jessie. You’re my little sister. I don’t need you trying to look after me.”
“Right. Well. It’s just …”
“I’m serious. If I’m going to help you out, then you need to get out of here. You don’t need to linger around feeling guilty.”
“Okay. I have to go check in with Danielle.”
“Oh,” he said, chuckling. “You don’t feel bad for me, you just don’t want to go deal with the wicked witch herself.”
“Can you blame me? She sucks.”
“Yeah. She does.” A realization struck him just then. “She’s going to be your sister-in-law, technically.”
“Half sister-in-law? She and Flynn don’t have any relationship really. And it’s only gotten worse since all of this.” The all of this being Jessie Jane’s beating Danielle in the election, with Flynn’s unwavering public support.
“Sometime, I’ll have to sit down and get the whole story about all of that.”
“There’s not really a story. I mean, it’s just that his mom left and started a new family right down the street from her old one. And none of them get along.”
“Well, Danielle does suck, and I’m not going to dispute that. But in my personal experience, the Wilders aren’t exactly easy people.”
“Are we?” she asked.
The Hancocks? Easy. Hell. No. Not even for each other. But he wasn’t going to give his sister the satisfaction of agreeing.
He shrugged. “Not especially. But I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.”
“Maybe the Wilders feel difficult because you’re difficult.”
“Maybe,” he said.
Though that wasn’t why Cassidy felt difficult. He wasn’t going to get into that in front of his sister, not even in his own mind.
“Call me. After.”
He grunted. Then his sister really did leave, which kind of surprised him.
Mainly because it was so difficult to imagine doing all this without her.
They had both been here to protect their parents, to preserve their livelihoods, their whole lives.
And now Jessie was moving on, creating a life of her own.
He felt something strange in the air. A quiet that didn’t feel entirely natural. He couldn’t quite put a finger on it. Like the calm before a storm.
The aroma of the pines seemed more intense than it ought to, the air already heavy with the scent of wet oak leaves, and it felt as if his boots were planted more firmly on the ground. There was a bite to the air, which was normal in late November, but this felt more pronounced than usual.
As if the wind was about to change. Which direction he couldn’t say.
His gut was never wrong. That was the problem. So he had to listen to it. Even when he didn’t especially want to. Even when he couldn’t quite pinpoint exactly what it was trying to let him know.
The silence was almost oppressive. Nothing but the sound of pine needles whispering in the wind. Then he heard the rumble of tires coming up the long dirt road, and his whole body reacted. He knew exactly what this was. Who it was.
Cassidy Wilder.