Chapter 47
FORTY-SEVEN
MADDOX
Pretending that finding out I didn’t even make Austin’s list of reasons to stay felt like a slap in the face.
What’s worse was that she didn’t even throw it at me like a jab.
At least when she lashed out, I knew that the things she said couldn’t be trusted.
That she didn’t mean half of them and just said them to be hurtful because she was feeling trapped.
But her back had been to me when she said it, which spared both of us from her seeing what her words did to me. It was a small mercy.
“Right. Well, I’m going to let Dale know we’re heading back to the ranch.”
She grumbles, but doesn’t argue, and I have a feeling this little trip actually did a bit of good in showing her that she wasn’t nearly as mobile as she thought.
I knock on the door to Dale’s office and poke my head in. I’m not sure what I expected him to be doing back here, considering it was clear he’d only retreated to avoid the fallout of Austin’s anger, but it surprises me that he seems to actually be working.
“Take a seat for a second, Whittaker,” he tells me, hobbling over to the printer to grab a few sheets of paper from it.
“Actually, I just came to let you know I was taking her home.”
He looks at me over the top of his glasses. “Take a seat for a second, Whittaker,” he repeats pointedly.
Raised well enough to respect my elders, I swallow the huff that threatens to break free and take off my hat, hanging it from my knee as I sit in the chair in front of his desk.
He sets the papers down in front of me, but before I can take a look at them, he says, “I want to sign over Quitter’s to you.”
I gape, brows furrowed, as he slowly rounds the desk and sits back in the rolling chair behind it. “Sign over Quitter’s?”
He hums, nodding. “Actually, I want to sign it over to your little spitfire out there, but she won’t take it. I’ve tried probably twenty times in the last six months alone.”
“And I’m second in line to the throne?” I ask incredulously. “With all due respect, sir, I run a thousand-head cattle ranch.”
Dale snorts. “Aware, son. Well aware. But the way I see it, we have a common enemy in Austin’s stubbornness.” He’s not wrong. “You want something to keep her in Cedar Creek and I want to retire.”
I don’t ask him why he doesn’t just sell the bar. I know it’s not an option in the same way selling Whittaker Ranch to any of the businessmen who come through offering millions every year is. He built Quitter’s from the ground up before I was even thought of. He’s not gonna just sell it to anyone.
“She can’t work the bar right now,” I tell him, a bit stern.
“I know that. Can’t even prep sani buckets, but I figure she can do paperwork and make phone calls just fine. That’s the majority of what running a bar consists of, at least during the transfer of ownership,” he says and I hate the small hope that starts to form.
He’s right. She could do paperwork and make phone calls.
It may take her twice as long as usual, but she could even do it from my cabin.
Austin always calls Quitter’s her bar and I’ve always thought it was a bit of an inside joke that I was missing, but what if Quitter’s really was hers? Would this be a reason to stay?
“I don’t know that I’m gonna be any more successful in getting her to take it over than you have been,” I admit. Especially considering the conversation she and I just had.
Dale waves that away. “Don’t care,” he says with a shrug, nodding toward the papers on the desk.
“As soon as that’s signed, I’m making moves to go live with my daughter down in Florida.
I can rest easy knowing I gave Quitter’s to someone I thought was gonna take care of it.
Where it goes from here is something I won’t let myself wonder. ”
It’s batshit crazy, but that doesn’t stop me from signing.
Just like that, I own a fucking bar. On top of a thousand-head cattle ranch.
Fuck.
“I’m not gonna run off again,” Austin says, huffing as she plops down on the couch with a wince. “Besides, I don’t have a truck anymore.”
I ignore her, tossing her bottle of pills toward her when I pass by them sitting on the counter. I’ve just pulled away from the fridge with a can of Cold Smoke when they come whizzing past my ear, bouncing off the fridge before clattering on the floor.
“Jesus Christ, woman.” I grab them and set them back on the counter, looking through the hollow part of the wall that separates the kitchen and the living room.
Austin’s fuming on the couch and I know it’s really grinding her gears not to be able to cross her arms. “Did you play softball in high school?”
She rolls her eyes, but there’s a little twist to her lips that tells me she’s pleased with how impressed I am. “Why was that kind of hot?”
“Hot enough to fuck me?” she asks, perking up a bit.
“Hot enough to want to fuck you for sure,” I agree, heading back into the living room. I bend down to kiss her hair. “Your ribs are broken, baby. Panting and crying out when I make you come all over my cock wouldn’t be good for them.”
“Arrogant bastard.”
I don’t argue with that, cracking open my beer and taking a sip before setting it down on the coffee table. I take a seat on the other end of the couch and pat my thigh. “I’ll give you a foot rub to make up for it.”
She pouts, contemplating it but then props her boot up in my lap. Dirt knocks off the bottom of it and I snort. “Sorry about that. It's hard to take off my boots at the door with just one arm.”
I tug it off and set it down on the floor by the couch, tossing her sock inside it a second later. “Easy to put them on to run away from me again though.”
“I wasn’t—” She cuts off with a moan that goes straight to my dick as my thumb presses into the arch of her foot. “I wasn’t running from you,” she argues. “I was going to get my job back.”
I hum, focusing on massaging what I can reach of her calf now. It’s quiet, just the barely-there clanking of the ceiling fan’s chain sounding through the space. The TV remote is beside Austin but she doesn’t turn it on, which surprises me. She hates an uncomfortable silence.
“Can I ask you something? Your dad…” I start, half expecting her to wince or change the subject, but she doesn’t.
When I look up at her, she’s eying me warily.
“This wasn’t the first time something like this happened, was it?
” I ask her quietly, looking back down at her foot because I know she won’t answer me if I’m watching her.
I almost give up on an answer in the time it takes her to compose one. “It’s the first time I’ve wound up in the hospital.”
That’s not what I asked, but I get it. He’d broken her ribs before—the doctor had damn-near plainly said so—but she hadn’t gone to the hospital. “It’s the first time it’s been this bad?” I ask her, looking up when she doesn’t answer right away again.
She nods reluctantly.
“When was the last time?” I ask her, and I’m starting to learn this is going to be a one-sided conversation unless I ask questions she can answer noncommittally, so I rephrase. “When you canceled all your shows?”
I’ve thought about it a lot. The new lingerie that covered her entire torso, the heavy makeup she’d worn to supper that Sunday, the hollowness of her eyes in the hallway when she asked me if I’d told anyone about her camming. It all added up.
She nods again, finally, and I let out a sigh, hands stilling on her feet.
I have to turn my head to the side so she doesn’t see the tears welling up, because god fucking dammit, I’d known something was wrong and I’d taken Kenny’s advice to let it lie instead of pushing.
Austin had ended up nearly dead because of it.
Her other foot hits my thigh, still in its boot, close enough to my cock that I’m jolted back into awareness as I flinch to cover myself. “Not your fault, Rancher. Quit that.”
“I should’ve paid closer attention,” I tell her, taking the other boot and sock off.
“Arrogant bastard,” she says again. “You think your powers of deduction are stronger than my stubborn ability to purposefully keep that shit from you? I’m a bit insulted, actually.”
I snort. “Of course you are.”
“I am.” I see her nod from my peripheral and turn my head toward her. “I was really good at hiding it. My best friend of seventeen years didn’t even know but you think you know me better than her?” She rolls her eyes.
“Looking back, I can definitely see everything I missed, so—”
“Yep. Hindsight’s 20/20 and all that. I didn’t want you to know, Maddox,” she says, voice gentler. “I didn’t want anyone to. I was ashamed—am ashamed,” she corrects herself.
Defensiveness floods me on her behalf and I open my mouth to tell her off for feeling ashamed, but she pulls her foot from my lap, face stern. She cuts me off before I can begin.
“I appreciate that you’re trying to be compassionate and I know you feel guilty, but it’s misplaced.
Acting like you could’ve stopped this from happening to me if you’d only ‘paid closer attention’ infantilizes me and the choices I made, so you need to let that go.
If you’d known what was happening to me, you would’ve stepped in and stopped it, but you didn’t know because I didn’t want you to. ”
I blink, taken aback. She’s shut down any and every argument I could have had, and I hate it because if I can’t blame myself for this, who can I blame?
Austin? Fuck no. Wayne, definitely, but he’s in prison and there’s not much I can do to him while he’s in there.
I wish I would’ve at least shot him in the dick while I had my gun drawn on him though.
Ever since Dad got sick, my sole purpose has been to keep the ranch running and to take care of the family.
It had been the last thing he’d asked of me, and every single night, when I laid in bed and closed my eyes to fall asleep, I ran over the day in my mind and tried to decide if he would’ve been proud of me.
I kept Mama happy and calm.
I kept Colt out of jail as much as I could.
I bought Bailey a dog when I got worried about the depression she went through after the whole thing with Chase and its aftermath.
I provided an ear for Jameson to rely on, and practically became Kenny’s wallet.
Admittedly, I’d let Tatum fall through the cracks when I brought Austin into the fray, but Tyler picked up my slack.
Tate could take care of herself and didn’t need me or Tyler to do it for her, but it was just easier on my nerves to either be there for her just in case or delegate someone else to do it.
Austin was right. All of this was arrogance. The belief that I had any control over anyone else’s life but my own.
Her foot jiggles in my lap, pulling me from my head again and reminding me that I still owe her half a foot rub. “Alright, alright, I hear you. Prop your other pretty foot back up here too.”
“You think they’re pretty?” she asks, obeying. “Because I’m taking a hiatus from camming for a while and I hear there’s a market for feet pics.”