Chapter 1
Zane
I didn’t expect wet dreams to make an abrupt return to my life at the ripe old age of thirty-two, but here I am, doing illicit laundry right before heading into town on a kale delivery run.
This is not how I saw my cowboy era going down.
For one thing, I thought there would be more going down, and I can’t remember the last time I had the pleasure of kissing my way up under a sundress.
The mud room door swings open, and I jerk away from the washing machine as if I’ve been caught doing something I shouldn’t have.
“Oh, there you are.” My mother smiles at me brightly. “Ridge is in the truck. All the produce boxes are loaded. He’s growly today, so good luck with that.”
Excellent. The snarl of my oldest brother is exactly what I need to distract myself from thoughts of the weird, horny dreams I’m suddenly having.
Waking up aroused and irritated that I’m all alone in my bed is for the birds—even though that’s a choice I continually make for myself for stupid reasons.
It’s not because I don’t want to have sex. I’m as hotblooded as they come. Nothing feels better than making someone feel good and then chasing that release for myself.
But Dragonfly Creek is going to be my home for the rest of my life. Nothing could ever make me want to leave it again. Did that once, got the t-shirt and trauma, and when I finally convinced my brothers to all move back home and go in on this ranch together… that was it.
And for five years, that made me happy enough.
Even if my cowboy era turned out to be more kale-oriented than I expected, I still get a good amount of time on the range, on horseback, herding cattle. Feeling the wind on my face and the sun on my back.
We have the freedom we always wanted. We’re building an empire nobody will be able to take from us.
I should be on top of the world.
Instead, I’m waking up every day with a hard dick, an empty bed, and a sinking feeling that I’m missing something important. Someone, with soft tits and a wet mouth and—
Fuck me.
I just need to head somewhere, anywhere else for a weekend. Hit up a rodeo and bang a buckle bunny or something. Get this fever out of my system so I can re-focus on the summer ahead of us. It’s going to be a busy one.
Busy with cattle.
Busy with fucking kale, too.
Especially because my brothers always find a way out of helping with the weekly produce box deliveries we do for our mother.
The cows take up most of Ridge’s time, and our oldest brother is such a menacing dark cloud when he descends out of the foothills that he makes a terrible delivery boy at the best of times.
Cash’s tattoos and criminal record make him equally unappealing to most of our customers, despite his natural charm—and the fact they don’t mind him repairing their vehicles. Navigating the small town hypocrisy is my least favourite part of being back home.
And Dax is often away on the rodeo circuit.
Which leaves the vegetable deliveries to yours truly most weeks.
This week, though, I’m not completely alone in the task—because my truck is at Cash’s garage on Main Street, so Ridge has no choice but drive me, and the kale, into town.
“I thought we were just going to load the boxes into your truck?” he growls after I point out our first stop is on the way, at Dr. Tailfeather’s medical practice on the edge of town.
“Sure. The ones we don’t get to first.” I glare back. He doesn’t scare me. Never has, never will. It helped that I was almost as tall as him when I was twelve and he was fifteen—and he thought he’d inherited the monster gene from our father.
My brother is no monster. He’s just misunderstood. By himself and most other people.
With a sigh, he pulls into the parking lot.
I don’t ask him to get out and exchange pleasantries with the doctor. That’s asking too much. In exchange for letting him stay in the truck, he agreeably stops at five more houses on our way into the heart of town.
But when I point to The Friendly Table, the diner that orders a triple-sized community share box every week, that’s where he draws the line.
“You’ll probably want to go in and have lunch.” He jerks his cowboy hat down low over his brow. “Let’s get your truck. I’ve got fencing to check this afternoon. As it is, I’m going to have to continue it tomorrow already.”
I don’t argue. I’ve pushed him enough today.
At the garage, he helps unload the remaining boxes, then he peels back onto Main Street without saying goodbye.
Cash rolls his eyes. “See you later, sunshine,” he calls to the dust in Ridge’s wake. And then to me, “What’s his problem?”
“I may not have told him that the last delivery was to Mercy at the diner.”
“Ah.”
Twenty years ago, we arrived in Dragonfly Creek (the first time) as a family barely holding itself together.
We were tired, scared, and miserable. A traumatized mother and four angry young boys.
Ridge didn’t want to go to a new school.
Or any school, for that matter. Cash and Dax were still in elementary, but I was newly in high school, and cajoled my older brother into coming with me.
The first student we met was Mercy Lane—who was helping out in the principal’s office as we were getting registered.
She was in my grade, two years younger than Ridge, but she took one look at him and fell desperately in love in that innocent way only a thirteen year old girl can.
And we became the best of friends, despite the fact that my brother couldn’t return her feelings like that.
“Too many feelings for the big dumb ox to handle,” Cash mutters now.
“Stole the thought right out of my head.” I jerk my thumb across the street. “Can I buy you lunch?”
The Friendly Table is still a bit busy, right at the tail end of the lunch rush. Cash walks in like we own the place, ignoring the stares and the drop in volume at our arrival.
At the counter, Jasper Lane adjusts his black sheriff’s hat and gives Cash a hard stare. From behind him, his sister rolls her eyes and gives us a friendly wave.
Most of the booths are open, but Cash deliberately slides into the one next to one of the remaining customers, a woman who was in Cash’s year at school, and who now comes into The Friendly Table every single day for lunch because she’s a real estate agent and considers herself the town gossip—as a mark of pride.
Cash can’t fucking stand her, and enjoys running her out of the place on the regular.
“You can’t be polite?” I ask him once we’re sitting and she’s hustled out.
He shrugs. “Polite is overrated. And she was malingering.”
Fine. Direct it is. As soon as we’ve placed our orders, I bring up the kale harvest.
“This was a trap,” my younger brother sighs.
“Mom needs help.”
“I can’t close the garage every morning. She needs to hire someone for the season.”
That pulls me up short, because of course he can’t. “What about just an hour or two? Stay at the ranch overnight, do a bit of work in the morning before you come into town.”
“No can do, you know that.” Twice in the last year, someone’s broken into Cash’s garage. He now sleeps in an apartment we built for him above the office so he can be his own on-site security.
He’s right, and we both know it. I take a deep breath and scrub my hand across my moustache. But he also thinks I can work miracles.
I pride myself on an ability to make impossible shit happen, but it’s late in the season to find the right kind of workers for Kincaid’s Refuge. And that’s assuming we could convince Luna to accept help from anyone other than her sons.
I’m still stewing on the problem when I head home after lunch.
As I turn off the range road onto the township road that leads to our ranch, I see an older model compact SUV pulled off to the side.
The breathtaking view from this gravel road never gets old—it leads into the lush valley just north of Dragonfly Creek that my family has called home for the last five years—but this isn’t a safe place to pull over.
Worry tightens my brow. I slow to a stop behind them, noting the British Columbia license plate, and hop down to the dusty road.
A tall blonde woman in lightly tinted, rose-gold sunglasses jumps out of the driver’s side and waves me off.
She’s wearing rolled up jean shorts and a tie-dye t-shirt, with Birkenstock sandals at the end of strong, shapely legs.
If I hadn’t noticed the out-of-province plate already, I’d have clocked her as not from around here from the gorgeous city girl vibes alone.
Her strawberry blonde hair tumbles around her shoulders in messy waves, and her mouth—have I ever seen such a perfect mouth? Lush, ripe. Pink.
Hello, sexy.
But just as I have that primal reaction to the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in the flesh, a flash of bright green fur pulls my attention to the back seat.
A stuffed animal being waved out of the window by a tiny fist. A little girl.
Something cold slides down my spine.
A pretty young mother, alone, scared, stuck on a back road with a kid and nowhere to go. I know this story. I was born into this story.
And I know what kind of man stops for a woman like this. A man like my father. And countless other men who tried to “help” my mother once she was on her own with us.
So I suppress the deep tug of unexpected and inappropriate arousal, and I try to look past the distraction of that mouth, and those golden waves.
Not a walking wet dream, Zane. Get your mind out of the gutter.
I am not my father.
And what I see when I look at her again is a forced smile and visible unease as I approach.
“Hey there! I’m—We’re fine,” she says quickly, getting between me and her child, the owner of the stuffed animal. A green frog, it looks like. “We’re having lunch and then we’ll be on our way.”
I stop with a good deal of distance between us.