4. Jax
jax
Colorful curses fly out of my mouth when the fencing pliers slip, and my hand goes busting into the post I was fixing the wire to.
Ripping my hand away, I pull my glove off and see blood pool on my knuckle.
I suck on it, trying to stop the blood. I toss my glove by the pliers on the ground, pissed off that I was hurt now after doing my least favorite thing in the world, fixing a fence.
I take a minute and walk away from it, trying to breathe through what I now know.
Felicity is home. City Girl is just twenty minutes away from me at all times, and I am about to lose my mind.
Last night, I had done my absolute best to leave her alone. To not go after her, but I couldn’t help myself. I had followed her out the door, trailing her about twenty feet behind like a damn stalker and watching her walk, head down as she made her way to her mom’s car and drove away.
I had to physically restrain myself from following her even more.
Why is she here? I don’t understand it. The woman is a huge star in Hollywood, probably makes more in a day than I do in a month, has tours and shows, has been on TV and in a couple of movies. She is a freaking superstar.
So, that begs the question: Why is she back here in our tiny no one knows we exist town?
And how long is she staying?
I shake my head at my internal tirade. I don’t need—nor want—to know how long she’s here or why or anything else to do with Felicity Vogel. She left me years ago, and nothing she could do would change that fact.
The sound of an ATV coming up has me turning my head, my hand still up against my mouth. I eye my little brother, Stetson, and lean against my own ride, wondering how I’ve fallen so far. I have no fucking idea what I’m doing anymore.
“Hey,” he calls, swinging his leg over and hopping on the ground. I’m surprised that Bonnie isn’t with him. It seems they’ve been attached at the hip lately, not that I blame them after what they’ve been through.
“Hey,” I call, pulling away my hand and wiping my knuckle on my jeans.
“What happened?” He gestures to the now clean knuckle, a little bit of red seeping through.
“Nothing.” I stand, making my way over to the pliers and gloves. I pick them up, find my line again, and continue to work on the fence. Last night there was a storm, and it seems something broke down this line. Could have been debris or animals. It’s hard to say.
“I would have come with you,” Stetson says, reaching into his back pocket for his own gloves, grabbing the fence from my hands, and holding it tight against the post so I can reattach it.
“You were busy,” I say with a grunt, clipping off the wire that held it down and moving on to the next post.
He follows me, his brows furrowed as he watches. “I could have stopped. We’re working with that mare all the time. We can take breaks.”
“It’s not just the mare that needs you,” I reply, knowing good and well that his girl is needing some reassurance from him right now.
“Yeah,” he agrees, nodding his head and taking a deep breath before grabbing the line and holding it for me again. “It’s been a crazy few days.”
I nod but don’t say anything. My little brother is the optimist of the four of us boys. Stetson is the baby of the family and the one who always sees the silver lining in life. It is annoying at times, but it also has its place.
Logan is the realist, the one who tries to have control over everything. Well, maybe he’s calmed a bit since he married his wife, but it is still true.
Then there is Mitch. He is the quiet but friendly one. Or at least, he used to be. He would be the first to help someone in a bind but the last to ever admit he did it.
I look to my baby brother, concern on his features, and ask, “You really care about her, huh?”
Stetson eyes me with something like anger in his gaze, and I raise a hand in surrender. “Yes. I care about her. I love her.”
“All right, all right.” I swipe a hand over my head, wiping the sweat on my jeans. “I guess I don’t blame you. She is gorgeous.”
Stetson stands up straighter, his mouth pursed as he looks at me. “She is gorgeous and smart and funny and mine .”
I gape at my baby brother, my hands falling down to my sides. “Stets, you don’t seriously think I would do anything.”
“I don’t know. You’ve built quite the reputation, and frankly, I don’t know you very well anymore.” He crosses his arms, his unwavering gaze still trained on me. Fuck. When did my baby brother grow up? “I don’t really have a fucking clue what you would do.”
“You do know me, baby brother,” I insist, digging through the bucket of fencing supplies to occupy my hands.
“Do I?” he says, coming closer. Damn. When did he get bigger than me? “The Jax I know would have heard that his childhood sweetheart was back in town and gone running. Not pretend she didn’t exist.”
I lift my head to look at him, a frown pulling at my brows. “I’m not pretending she doesn’t exist.”
“Really?” He tilts his head as if he is studying me. “Mitch says you walked right past her last night and didn’t say a word.”
Ah. So…Mitch recognized her too. Of course he would. Not only is the bastard observant, but he was the third wheel to my and City’s dates for a long time. She was always trying to set him up with her friends, and he never cared. He dated them, for sure, but he never wanted a girlfriend.
Then she left, and I was sitting around, not knowing what the hell to do with myself, when Mitch announced he was joining a group of guys heading out on the rodeo circuit. I was shocked and confused because that didn’t seem like something I thought he would do.
Work with horses? Yes. But ride broncs to earn money? No.
But because I’d just been left by the only girl who I ever loved, I had made the impulse decision to join him and, well, as they say, the rest is history.
“So what? I’m supposed to fall to my feet?”
“No,” Stetson says. “But don’t you want to figure out what she’s doing home? She hasn’t been here in years, and now, she seems to be back.”
I halt my actions at his words, keeping my head down as I process what I think he’s trying to say. “Back?”
“That’s the word,” Stetson says, leaning an arm over a post. “Someone saw her at the high school with her mama setting up the classroom. Looked like she settled in for a while.”
I pause, thinking over this new information. Back when we were in high school, and hell, middle school too, City always went and helped her mom set up her classroom every year. It was like their little tradition.
“Maybe she came home to help her with that, and she’ll be gone come Monday,” I say, knowing in my gut it’s not true, but fuck. I can’t even think about talking to her, much less seeing her around town again.
“Maybe, but she’s been home for like a month.
Why would she come back so long just for that?
” Stetson shrugs and moves the conversation to other topics, helping me finish up this fence so we can get to other work.
By the time we’re done, the sun is making its way back down the other side of the mountain.
The Trevors were kind enough to hire me on as a hand when I came back. Now that the injuries I arrived with are gone, I’m able to really help out. When I got home, my foot was in a boot from a partially broken foot, and my arm was still in a sling from the surgery I had to fix my elbow.
It was when I woke up in a hospital, all alone with no friends or family around me, that I knew I needed to stop the trajectory that my life path was on and head home before I got killed.
Nothing was keeping me anymore.
Mitch had already quit and come home, so there wasn’t any family left in the rodeo arena, and no one knew I was laid up in a hospital for weeks before I finally made it home.
My mom had been pissed I never called, but what would she have done?
Coddled me while everyone was already taking care of me?
It didn’t seem fair to disrupt her life so much.
But when I got here, Stetson was in the middle of falling in love with Bonnie, Logan was off living happily ever after with his wife, and Mitch had found his own place in our small town, leaving me the odd man out.
Now, she was back, and it was making my head hurt from what it all meant. If it meant anything, which I wasn’t sure it did.
Finishing up for the day, I say good night to my family, declining invitations to dinners that I knew were more polite than serious, and make my way to the tiny apartment that sat back off the property over an old storage barn.
The barn now held things that the Trevors used for the festival every year, and it looked like they were already getting ready for it again. Between that and Graham Trevors’s wedding, it was a busy ranch to live on.
Rumor was that both Trevors brothers have lived in this apartment before, which meant when I got to it, it wasn’t the rundown office it was when we were kids but a kept-up place to lay my head at night.
I didn’t mind sleeping in the bunkhouse with the rest of the wranglers, but after sharing hotel rooms and tack rooms with guys for years, it was nice to have a place I could call my own.
I finish my shower and fall onto the bed, my head spinning with thoughts and memories and shit I can’t seem to turn off.
Felicity did that to my brain, made it spin, made it obsess over her. Always had.
There was no chance of ignoring her once she got famous, and every few months, when a new single of hers would release, people would be playing her songs nonstop.
There had been many times when I would be in the arena ready to outrun a bull when one of her songs would come on and distract me. Something about her voice made every hair on my arms stand on end, made my heart freeze in my chest, and my soul wish that things had been different.
I sigh, rubbing a hand over my face and thinking about how I should get up and eat something, how I should stop thinking about Felicity—as if I could. As if I could stop thinking about the woman I loved leaving me behind.
But instead, I grab my phone, plug in her name, and press play, letting myself drift away to her stupidly gorgeous voice.