Chapter Two
C olton felt tension migrate up his spine the minute he walked in and saw Lily.
He should be over it.
He would never get over it.
Because the thing about Colton Carson was, he didn’t let go of a damn thing. He kept careful record of every transgression that had ever been committed against him. By somebody in the system, by anyone he had met when he had spent time on the ranch for troubled youths, where he had first met his adoptive father, Buck.
By any kid who had ever been mean to him at school.
Yeah. He kept track of that shit.
He never let them know it. It wasn’t his style. But he didn’t forgive, and he didn’t forget.
His stepsister, Lily Rivers, was at the top of the list of people who had transgressed against him.
The way she had broken up with him the night of their fall dance senior year had fucking devastated him.
Not because he didn’t have real problems in life. He sure as hell had known enough suffering by seventeen to make grown men cry.
But that was the problem.
He had thought he’d finally found everything he’d ever wanted.
A girl who really saw who he was. Who thought he was worth whatever trouble he came with.
But she had bailed the minute things had gotten complicated. And the worst thing was, he still had to see her. The worst thing was, he had to smile at her, and he had to pretend that everything was all good when it was actually all bad.
It was just that he was very, very good at pretending.
He hadn’t shown her how badly she had hurt him, not the moment she had broken up with him, not ever.
He was good at that. He was good at it from years of being bounced around the system. He was good at it from years of having people treat him like garbage to be taken out to the curb and picked up and dumped at the next waste site. That was foster care, at least that was his experience of it. It was a shit show. And he had gotten real good at being the ringmaster.
He acted unbothered. He acted like he didn’t care.
It made you believe your own bullshit sometimes. Made you buy into the idea that maybe you didn’t care. And that made things a hell of a lot easier.
So he smiled. Because he knew it would confound her. Because it always did. “Lily. Great to see you. No one else is here yet?”
“No,” she said. “Actually, no one else is coming.”
He stopped. He had had dreams like this. Fuck. Those dreams were not anything he needed to think about right now. Those dreams were X-rated. And he tried very hard to never telegraph that he had an X-rated thought about his stepsister... Ever.
Sadly, he did have those thoughts, all the time.
That was why he was still so angry.
Because in all these years, he had never met a woman who fired up his imagination quite like her.
And he had seen her first. He had seen her before Buck had ever seen Marigold, who had ultimately become his stepmother, and the only real mother figure he had ever known. It wasn’t that he resented their relationship. How could he? It had created this wonderful stable home environment for him, on the one hand.
On the other hand, it had taken the woman he wanted most in all the world and placed her off-limits.
Or maybe, she had placed herself off-limits and that had just been a convenient excuse.
His mind often toggled between those two potential truths.
He mostly thought she just must not care. Because she had cut things off, and it had been so easy. That had been her first solution. Not just talking to her mom.
That, he would never understand. Not when they had been...
Well. He had thought he was falling in love. Clearly she hadn’t been. That wasn’t his issue to sort out.
“Why not?”
“The roads are closed.”
“What the hell?”
“Weren’t you driving the same roads?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m actually coming from Portland. I had some things I had to pick up.”
“Well, the road from Lone Rock is blocked. There are downed trees, inclement weather. Apparently it’s a whole snowpocalypse.”
“They promise one of those every year and it never happens.”
“I’m aware,” she said.
He chuckled. “Right. Nothing out there really looks like snowmageddon to me. A lot of hysteria and no white stuff.”
“Sure, but this isn’t Portland, city boy.” A silly jab, and yet one she couldn’t resist making. Made extra silly by the fact that he now chose to live in the mountains in Lone Rock and she was the one who lived in Eugene. “The fact of the matter is, the ground here is soft, and when you add heavy, wet snow or ice, the trees just kind of crumple like wilting movie starlets in the 1930s. Across the roads.”
“There’s an image.”
“Anyway. Guess we’re here.”
“Yeah. Guess we are.” He looked around. “So.” He was determined not to make it weird. She didn’t get to be the one that looked cooler and more collected.
He really wished he could get it together and find somebody else. But he couldn’t help but notice she hadn’t either.
She’d never brought home a man for Christmas. That was something he thought about more years than he didn’t. But someday, Lily was going to swan into a family event with a guy on her arm, and he was going to have to figure out what the hell he was going to do about that. He blamed his psychological trauma on the fact that he hadn’t managed to let go of her. Part of him had wanted so desperately for all the good things he got when he first moved to Oregon to be permanent.
At least that was what he told himself.
Because there was no way he was just still in love with her.
Hell, a seventeen-year-old didn’t even know what love was. And perhaps, the case could be made that a twenty-three-year-old maybe didn’t know what it was either, but that meant he certainly hadn’t been in love. And he could hardly claim to be in love with a girl he hadn’t even fucked.
Not that any of the women he’d been with since had done anything to erase the memory of her kiss. He had tried to jump right back into what he knew.
Sex with no connections.
He had become sexually active at far too young of an age. But he basically ticked every box for youth engaging in risky activities. And he had engaged in most of them. It was how he had landed himself at the ranch for troubled youths. He had been a youth. Who was very troubled.
Like you are in trouble now.
Maybe he was. But he didn’t do or sell drugs anymore. So there was that. In fact, he’d left all petty criminal activity behind.
He was a respectable rancher. He had a good job. He had a great family. It was just Lily. Lily was the only thing that reminded him that he didn’t have everything. That things weren’t perfect.
And he was stuck here with her.
Well, he could leave. He could head out and go to a motel in town, but that would violate his sworn internal oath to never let her see him sweat where she was concerned. Acting unbothered by her presence was his biggest skill set.
Well, one of them.
When he was in bed with other women, he might not feel half as much as he once had innocently kissing Lily, but he knew how to make them see God.
Detachment was the primary header most of his skills could be filed under.
He could do a lot of things without feeling much of anything, and no one with him would be any the wiser.
A blue-haired girl at his college had told him it was a trauma response.
Beth was one of his best friends now. He’d stayed with her and her girlfriend when he’d been in Portland. He liked to tell her men didn’t have trauma. She liked to tell him he was gender essentialist. He pretended he didn’t understand what that meant, like they hadn’t gone to the same college and listened to the same people shouting into megaphones.
She said his enjoying making her mad was him testing boundaries, which was also a trauma response.
His eternal response was that people were too goddamned traumatized these days.
Who had that kind of time?
Secretly he wondered if she was right. But what did it matter if she was? What was the alternative? To lie down and cry about it?
Not likely.
It was best to just put your head down and get on with things. He didn’t hope for the best or the worst; he just dealt with the reality of it.
Whining about it wouldn’t have helped him back when he’d been a legitimately traumatized kid, and it would seem damned ungrateful now that he was an adult who was privileged as hell. Another word he’d learned from Beth.
He didn’t lie down. He didn’t weep. He wouldn’t be leaving this fucking privileged house to get away from his stepsister.
“Well,” she said.
And he wondered if she was going to admit it was awkward or uncomfortable. For her. He didn’t feel awkward. No, that wasn’t the word that applied here.
But she didn’t admit anything.
She wouldn’t.
Which also annoyed him. Maybe that was the game. Maybe it was why he was so dedicated to not reacting to her. He was the one who deserved a reaction. She’d broken up with him and she tiptoed around him like a little church mouse, like she thought he was a cat who was going to eat her.
In many ways, he wouldn’t be opposed.
The wreckage would be epic.
He did his best not to think about that too deeply.
“Well what ?” he asked, in spite of himself.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just...we don’t hang out much.”
“No,” he said, deadpan. “We don’t.”
“Mom said grocery delivery was coming.” She looked expectantly toward the door like she expected the delivery to come at any moment. Like she hoped it would.
“Did Marigold say when?”
He called his stepmother by her first name to emphasize the fact that she wasn’t his mother. To emphasize the fact that Lily wasn’t his sister.
“Uh. No,” Lily said, skipping over his intent, because that was what they did.
They didn’t call each other out, not ever. They didn’t talk like they’d ever dated.
But it was there between them. Always. The biggest thing in the room.
“I’m starving,” he said, moving past her and into the kitchen, slinging his bag onto the counter, along with his truck keys. “I might go out and grab something.”
Not because he needed a break from her.
“Oh. Okay. I’m hungry too, actually.”
“Do you want to come with me?”
He felt prodded into saying it. Like there was an unspoken dare in her proclamation of hunger.
She looked at him, her golden eyes round, her lips pressed into a flat line. “Yes. Yes I do.”
“Don’t sound so excited about it.”
“I’m very excited,” she said blandly.
“Come on, Lily, I’ll get you some clam chowder.” He turned away from the counter, grabbing his keys again, and he could hear her footsteps behind him.
“I need a coat,” she said, and he heard her footsteps depart, scampering up the stairs.
He heard her come back down, and he challenged himself not to turn to her. He did that way too easily.
Turned to her like he was a plant looking for the sunshine.
If he said that to Beth, she’d say he had unresolved feelings.
He fucking knew that.
He opened up the door and didn’t close it, and she walked out behind him, closing it. He got into his truck and she got into the passenger side. He knew he was being resolutely unfriendly in his friendliness. But it was how they were.
He started the engine and backed out of the driveway. “I really love clam chowder,” she said, far too brightly.
“How nice,” he said.
They weren’t going far. There was a little local place their family always went to on the edge of town. The parking lot was packed. Unsurprising. The weather was terrible and the place was lit with a welcoming glow that warmed him just by looking at it. It stood to reason quite a few people in town had the same idea about where to get dinner.
He did the same routine going into the restaurant that he’d done to get out of the house. Got out of the truck, heard her but didn’t look at her, and they walked into the restaurant with her a few paces behind.
The woman at the podium barely looked at them. “Booth okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” they answered at the same time.
Of course, when they were seated in the booth, they were directly across from each other, and he couldn’t avoid looking at her anymore.
She was so damned beautiful, with her red hair and freckles, those golden eyes that had always made him think of her as a tiger. So gorgeous. So dangerous.
She always had been the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. And he was sure he must have seen women who were more beautiful by now. He must have.
But for some reason she was burned right into him. His appreciation for her beauty was branded into his soul and he couldn’t seem to do a thing about it.
“What were you picking up in Portland?” she asked.
He was about to answer when the waitress came over. “Drinks?”
“Diet Coke,” she said.
“Is Pepsi okay?”
He watched her chew her bottom lip. “Sure...”
He could tell it wasn’t.
“Water is fine,” he said.
The waitress was clearly annoyed that he would be a cheap bill. A lot of times people saw him in his ranch gear and expected him to start ordering beer. But Buck didn’t drink, and given Colton’s own background and the issues his birth mother had with substances, he’d always thought it was better to go ahead and abstain.
Before the waitress could clear out, he stopped her. “I think we’re ready. I just want a clam chowder and a fish-and-chips.”
“Me too,” Lily said.
The waitress nodded and walked away.
“I think she might spit in the food,” he said.
“Why?”
“I think she’s annoyed her tip isn’t going to be as big as it might be if we were drinking alcohol.”
“Oh,” Lily said. “I don’t think so. I think she’s just busy.”
Lily had a kinder view of the world than he did. But she always had. She just hadn’t lived the kind of life he had. Not that she’d had it easy. Her dad hadn’t been in the picture or anything when she was growing up. She’d had a kind of stability he hadn’t, though.
“Sure,” he said.
The waitress returned a moment later with their drinks and with two bowls of clam chowder. She’d given him two bags of oyster crackers so maybe Lily was right and she wasn’t mad.
Double oyster crackers was a pretty nice gesture.
Lily only had one bag.
She opened it up and poured her oyster crackers into her soup and stared at his extra bag.
“I was wrong,” he said. “She thinks I’m cute.”
She let out a harsh breath. “Oh sure.”
“Women like me, Lily.”
“Yeah, I know.” She held his gaze for a beat, and it felt loaded. “So, why were you in Portland?”
“Picking up some supplies. I got a good deal on materials.”
“For what?”
“As it happens, I’m getting chickens.”
She frowned. “Why?”
“Eggs,” he said.
“Why?” she pressed.
“I like eggs, Lily.”
She sniffed. “Oh. So you had to go to Portland for that?”
“I got a deal on some supplies and I got to go and see Beth.”
Her eyes sharpened. “Beth?”
Oh. She didn’t know who Beth was. He hadn’t intended to be vague or leading in any way by mentioning her, but the reaction to her name was...interesting.
“Yeah. I know her from college. I stayed with her.”
Her shoulders shifted slightly as she took a bite of her soup. “How nice.”
“It was,” he said, slowly. “Very nice.”
He was being a dick. He didn’t care.
She ate her soup with more focus than it strictly required, and when their bowls were cleared and their fish-and-chips were put in front of them, she paid just as close attention to her fries.
“So you’re working at the ranch.”
“Yeah. My degree is in agribusiness, you might recall.”
“I do.”
“Unless I end up packing up and going elsewhere, I don’t see why I’d work anywhere else. I’m making a smaller farm on my property, though. For my personal use. Hence the chickens.”
She nodded. “That’s great. Did you...buy a place?”
“Did Marigold and Dad not mention it?”
She pursed her lips and looked down, then back up. “Uh. Maybe they did.”
He wanted to shake her. He wanted to yell at her and tell her it shouldn’t be this awkward eating with a damned family member, and it wouldn’t be if they were actual family members or didn’t have unresolved sexual tension between them.
But he didn’t say any of that because that would be breaking his personal set of rules.
They finished eating and when the check came, they reached for it at the same time. “Let me get it,” he said.
“We’ll split it,” she said, frowning.
“No, we won’t.”
He picked up the receipt and put his card on it, then waved for the waitress, who came by and took it from him.
“Oh for God’s sake,” she muttered.
He signed the receipt quickly when the waitress brought it to him and got out of the booth. He returned to not looking at Lily, as they walked back through the restaurant and outside.
“I didn’t know you bought the house,” she said. “Because Mom and Buck don’t talk to me about you because they know that we can’t handle each other.”
He turned to her, his heart rate picking up. “We can’t?”
“No.”
“And why is that, exactly, Lily?”
He wanted to hear her say it.
“Because we never recovered from our breakup. Because we don’t act like stepsiblings, we act like exes. Because no matter how hard we try, it’s what we are.”