Chapter Six
S eptember came in like honey, golden and blue. The nights got crisper and the mornings grew colder, but the days seemed to go on forever—holding on tight to summer even as it slipped away.
Maybe Cat over-related.
Wilder brought blankets when he came to find her in the woods on Lisle Hill and they huddled up beneath them in the back of his truck. As close as it was possible to get without crossing the boundaries he continued to keep high and strong.
They didn’t speak of what had happened on Labor Day weekend again. They fell into a rhythm instead, as if that night had made everything right.
When, deep down, Cat knew it hadn’t.
How could it have?
But as the days bled together, one into the next, they talked of other things instead.
It wasn’t that everything had gotten any less wild or electric. It was that that electricity seemed to… expand. Fewer lightning bolts, more simmering.
Or maybe it was that she was used to it now. It didn’t make it any less intense, but it also didn’t leave her too speechless to function.
Or not as often, anyway.
One night she lay there next to him, still fully clothed against her will, wrapped up in blankets while she used his bicep as a pillow. The stars were already looking autumnal, because the sky was so dark and the cold was pressing down, making her nose feel like ice.
He, on the other hand, was his own furnace. She thought that as long as she was holding onto Wilder, she could make it through whole blizzards if she had to.
Their breathing had only just now started to come back to normal.
Cat was beginning to think his hands were made of magic. Pure magic, and heat besides.
“What’s it like to have a twin?” she asked him.
Sometimes he laughed without making a sound and she felt him do it then, because she could feel the rumble inside his chest. “I don’t know that I can answer that, seeing as how I’ve never not had one.”
“But you have other brothers. Is there a difference?”
“People like to talk a lot about twin telepathy, and magical powers that twins have, and all that stuff,” Wilder said.
“That’s not true? How disappointing.”
“Oh, no, it’s real.” He laughed. “That’s the thing. I have brothers, and I have always been close to them. I would like them even if they weren’t my brothers. Ryder…” He did that laughing thing again, and she couldn’t hide the way it made her smile. Not from the stars. “It’s not really like thinking about a different person.”
She shifted so she could look at him, or really more at that exquisite line of his jaw. “Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing?”
“That’s another question I can’t really answer. I just know him. The same way I know me.” He shifted her weight on him, pulling her closer. “Like right now, I’m kind of pissed at him, because I think he should come home. We’re a little too old for him to be riding bulls the way he does and he’s almost certainly going to break himself into a thousand little pieces. But I also know why he’s doing it. We don’t need to talk about it.” His chest moved. “I may or may not send the odd text or two to define my position.”
Cat turned into him, her face immediately warming the closer she got it to his body. “I always wished I had a sister around my age. Or at all. Tennessee and Dallas are so much older than me, something they bring up as often as possible. If you ask Tennessee—”
“I make it a habit not to ask Tennessee anything.”
She grinned at that. “But if you did, he’d probably tell you that he was more father to me than our father ever was, and that’s true. That doesn’t make for a tight sibling relationship though. How could it?” She stretched out a little because she liked to experiment with how short she was compared to him, and how far down his legs were when they were lying side by side. Also, she just liked touching him. Any possible way she could. “And you know Dallas. He was never exactly approachable, even before the Army got ahold of him. And then, you know, after Ruthie left…”
She trailed off, because Dallas certainly didn’t talk about his young, brief marriage, and didn’t exactly encourage speculation on the topic, either. No matter how much Cat had liked the sister-in-law she’d only had for a little while after Dallas had come home from his last tour. So it felt vaguely disloyal to be talking about it at all, and much less to a person that she knew her brother wouldn’t approve of.
“Having a twin isn’t like that,” Wilder said after a moment. “It’s like if the part of you that you most wanted to control walked around and did what it wanted, so you got to be mad about it but never able to fix it.” But he was grinning as he said it.
“Does he feel the same way about you?”
“Oh, definitely. Obviously, he’s wrong.”
And he was still grinning when she crawled up and kissed him, until they both stopped talking about their families for a while.
More days slipped away, and things were busy in town. The annual rodeo was going on down in Marietta, and so the Cowboy Point businesses were staying open and still celebrating their summer hours, because everybody knew that they had long, cold winter months to look forward to—and soon. There were still tourists wandering around town despite the chill in the air, and Cat could always tell the ones who’d come in from far-off cities, likely through fancy Bozeman. They always wanted to stand about in the store, taking pictures of things like the bear spray near the toiletries. And they all but applauded when she spoke, a lot like they thought she was an actress in a play.
And maybe their brand of boundless confidence rubbed off on her, because one day on her lunch break she wandered over to the old homestead that Dr. Ramona Taylor was turning into her clinic. It was over by the library and the school, set a bit back from the main road, and a nice little walk on a pretty afternoon.
Though Cat could see the snow on the top of Copper Mountain, the same as everyone else. It would be piling up on the roads soon enough.
“I thought this house was empty the entire time I was growing up,” Cat said when she went inside and found Ramona sitting there, cross-legged on her wooden floors, going through boxes. “Then I found out that someone was living here, but he didn’t come out much. I like the idea that someone is actually living here again. I was beginning to think it was haunted.”
“If it was, they settled down,” Ramona replied. “But then I always was my grandfather’s favorite.” She smiled at Cat. “And only, to be clear.”
“I’m glad ghosts have favorites just like everyone else,” Cat said. “Makes them more cuddly, almost.”
“I’m going to have to take your word for it,” Ramona said. “Having never spent much time trying to cuddle ghosts.”
“Your loss.”
Ramona jerked her head in the vague direction of the back. “I’m almost finished moving in myself.” Cat must have had the same look she’d had on her face that night at Mountain Mama over Labor Day weekend, when Ramona had announced her plans, because the doctor laughed. “It’s not that I disagree with what you said about how making a clinic a live and work space is almost certainly not ideal. But it’s a nice house. And I don’t know how to renovate the shed out back into anything livable, so why not make this house a home too?”
“The important thing is that it feels like a home,” Cat agreed, and it was easier to say that while in the house, because it looked less haggard than it had her whole childhood. Everything was bright and clean. “That’s what my mom always says. You can live anywhere. But there are only a few places a person can call home.”
“She sounds like a wise woman.”
“Probably too wise for her own good,” Cat said with a laugh.
Ramona stood and brushed off her jeans. She was still effortlessly beautiful, which was probably never going to stop being annoying, but her gaze was direct. And after dealing with so many people in a retail situation for the whole of her life, Cat had always prided herself on having an excellent sense of who people were.
This person, she would have sworn to it, was genuine.
“I know how to do the medicine part,” Ramona told her. “I’d even venture to say that I’m good at it, and I have to think that’s a big part of the battle. But I can already tell you that I’m going to be terrible at managing my time in my office. Can you help me?”
Cat looked around the rooms again, all cleared out and waiting to become a waiting room, exam rooms, and the like. What she personally knew about medicine was that she’d never liked getting a shot. She was a Lisle and Lisles stayed on Lisle Hill or left Cowboy Point altogether—they didn’t go and find other things to do.
And yet here she was.
Because she’d liked Ramona immediately. And it felt good here, in this revamped old house that spoke of history but promised a better future.
Maybe she over-related to that, too.
Or maybe she’d discovered her true feelings just lately, and now she felt duty-bound to let them lead her.
“I have an idea,” Cat said after a moment. “I’m going to work for you for a week, for free. I’m going to organize your office—but not your home, if that’s all the same to you—and at the end of the week we can see how we feel about the potential of working together. What do you think?”
“I think that it’s nothing short of a miracle that you were getting pizza at the same time that I was, and I’m in,” Ramona said, and they shook hands on it. “Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” Cat agreed.
And she took her time walking back to the store, feeling pretty pleased with herself. She stopped to play with Matilda Stark’s usual collection of strays, all rolling around in puppy splendor in the back of her friend’s antique red pickup. When she got back to the store she was grinning ear to ear, but both of her brothers were standing behind the counter, glowering at each other.
Though when she walked up to the counter, they shifted all that glowering to her.
“Where have you been?” Dallas asked, in his typically surly way.
“That’s none of your business,” she replied cheerfully. She ducked past him and ignored Tennessee, too, as she walked over to the schedule that hung on the wall. “We’re going to have to rearrange some shifts.”
“We don’t rearrange shifts,” Tennessee said immediately.
“Why?” Dallas asked, looking at her more closely. “You going somewhere?”
“First of all,” Cat said, turning to her oldest brother, “I’m going to need you to stop acting like you’re managing a roster of twelve hundred employees with competing scheduling nightmares you have to juggle. You work at the diner. Mom and I work here. No one knows what Dallas does, I grant you.”
“Hey,” Dallas protested. “ I know what I do.”
“Second,” she continued, “if I tell you that I’m taking a week off, I’m taking a week off. Whether you cover my shifts or not. Just so we’re clear, this is our store, not yours.” She looked at Dallas. “Maybe I am going somewhere. Maybe I decided to take a page out of your book and do whatever the hell I want, as secretively as possible.”
Cat didn’t often get mouthy with her brothers. Not because she was afraid of them. She didn’t like it that Wilder had suggested that and she had been stewing on it ever since he had.
But the truth was, there really wasn’t anything to argue about, because usually everything was always the same here. Tennessee probably was controlling, but then, they all did the same things every day anyway. Whether he controlled them or not. Did he still take his supposed parental role too seriously? Sure he did.
She usually went along with it. Because most of the time she was fine with that.
Just as most of the time, she didn’t pay the slightest bit of attention to what Dallas was or was not doing with the span of his days. She figured he’d earned the right to do nothing, for no one, after his stint in the service.
“What?” she asked breezily without looking up as she slid onto the stool behind the counter. “Don’t stare at me. It’s rude.”
“Are you going to explain herself?” Tennessee asked.
She swiveled and looked at them, both of them with expressions on their faces as if she’d come in throwing punches and shouting insults. And it was interesting, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t describe herself as afraid of them. She wasn’t.
But she certainly didn’t put that to the test often.
“The new doctor has asked me to consider managing her office,” she relented enough to tell them. “So I’m doing a week’s trial run over there, mostly to see if we’ll get along in close quarters like that.”
Both of her brothers stared at her with such total and complete incomprehension, that she felt her little-accessed temper bubbling up inside of her. She knew they loved her. She loved them too. They were all they’d had, with a father who was always somewhere else and when he wasn’t, liked to make their mother cry.
What she did not love was the fact that they clearly couldn’t imagine that she could ever do anything but exactly this. Sitting in the family store, ringing up cans of corn and bags of chips.
For some reason, today, she was incensed.
“What did you think? That I was running off to elope?” She laughed when her brothers stared back at her with identical thunderstruck expressions. “Too bad that Kendall got to it first. I might have answered Harlan Carey’s ad myself.”
She didn’t know what she was talking about. She didn’t even know if it was true that Harlan Carey had actually put an ad out for a wife, or if it was a rumor that was so much fun that everyone had decided it was true. It seemed unlikely to Cat, given that he was a Carey and therefore looked like all the rest of them.
Though not, in her opinion, as dangerously hot as Wilder. But then, who was?
“You should see your faces,” she told her brothers, shaking her head. “I don’t know that I believe that Harlan Carey had to stoop to putting out an ad, because why would he? That’s never made sense.”
“I’m going to have to disinfect the entire store now,” Tennessee said darkly. “It has Harlan Carey all over it.”
“Why have we now said his name three times?” Dallas asked, sounding outraged. “That feels ominous. Ebenezer Lisle is going to haunt us all tonight.”
“But also,” Cat said loudly, interrupting the blood feud nonsense, “if I did decide to run off and marry some man, you have no one to blame but yourselves. Because apparently , every single man in the greater Paradise Valley area is afraid to come near me because of you two.”
Dallas grunted. “Good.”
“I don’t understand why we’re talking about your romantic life instead of the fact that you’re taking a week to audition for a job that isn’t in the family business,” Tennessee said tersely. “What happens if you actually get the job?”
“Then I’m taking it,” Cat replied, only shooting a dark look at Dallas. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because we have responsibilities to the family.”
And Tennessee was talking to her in very much in the same tone she remembered from when she was younger. She hadn’t liked it much then. She certainly didn’t like it now.
“I’m not planning a revolution or a poker game, Tennessee,” she said, maybe a little sharper than necessary. “I don’t even know what hours Ramona plans to keep the clinic open. And, fun fact, it’s literally a five minute walk away. It’s not in a different country. I’m not running off with the circus. We could maybe take the looks of betrayal down a few notches, that’s all I’m saying.”
“I don’t know that I like the idea of this at all,” Tennessee growled.
“I don’t know that I asked you if you liked it,” Cat replied, and she had watched Dallas and Tennessee have too many fights in her time. She knew that the kiss of death was to get emotional. Tennessee liked to think that he was too logical, and Dallas believed that he was too numb to ever break from their fierce grip on rationality.
She knew they were full of it, but there was no point arguing it with them. She turned to the monitor instead and started clicking through to the purchasing page she’d left open earlier.
“Maybe I’m going to become a nurse someday,” she said when they just stared at her. “Maybe I just want something different. But none of that matters, because I wasn’t asking for permission.”
And Cat didn’t look up again until Tennessee muttered something dire under his breath, and then went slamming over to the diner part of the building.
Dallas, however, stayed put. “What’s gotten into you? I know it’s fun to rile him up, but what’s the endgame?”
“What exactly do you do up in that lighthouse all day?” she asked him, instead of answering.
He didn’t miss a beat. “I’ve been restoring it. As you know perfectly well. I’m going to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast.”
She knew that was what he said he was doing. And she had made her feelings about Dallas as a grumpy innkeeper perfectly clear already.
Still. “That’s not a twelve hour a day project, Dallas. There’s no reason why you couldn’t pick up my shifts, is there?”
He settled in next to her, leaning his side against the counter next to her. “Now, why would I do that in the absence of being asked nicely?”
And Cat had the presence of mind to act just outraged enough by that that he might forget to ask follow-up questions. Because she thought that it was a major giveaway she’d mentioned the Carey family at all. She certainly didn’t want Dallas putting those pieces together.
Later that evening, she walked back up the hill after she closed the store, and found herself so close to all-out skipping that she felt something like giddy.
And she knew why.
Because before Wilder, she never would have walked over to the clinic today. She never would have talked to Doctor Ramona about an actual job. She never would have said that she wanted to be a nurse, which was a silly dream she’d never told anyone.
And she certainly never would have stood up to her brothers.
That was the thing about Wilder and these last few weeks.
It was almost like she was brand-new.