Chapter Nine
Finn could not have explained for the life of him how he’d gotten himself into this situation. This marriage, when he’d always been pretty clear that he wasn’t headed for white picket fences, a wife, or any of the trappings of domesticity his father had twisted into something ugly.
He’d vowed to himself when he was still a kid that he would never, ever fall into the trap his mother had.
But somehow, being married to Kitty suited him.
For one thing, it turned out that after all these years living in bunkhouses on the ranch in Colorado, and then the foreman’s separate quarters not far from the bunkhouse, Finn had been missing out.
Because living with the Bennett sisters was delightful.
“You must be losing your mind,” Raleigh said one morning.
He and Finn had driven all the way out to Colton Dean’s ranch to look at some horses and talk to the grumpy rancher about his program some more.
Raleigh was the one who could manage to tame any wild horse he encountered, but Finn had always liked horses himself.
Even if he was no horse whisperer. “Trapped in that house with all those women.”
“Does that sound like a bad thing to you?” Finn asked, eyeing his brother.
Raleigh was driving his truck and navigating the dirt roads that wound through the mountains with the safe deftness he did most things.
When people weren’t watching him, that was.
“Because that’s never going to sound like a bad thing to me. And let me tell you, it’s not.”
Raleigh shot a look at him, then returned his attention to the road. “I like my own company.”
“Someone has to, I guess,” Finn said, with a laugh. “But I like my wife.”
He would have said that anyway, because he was supposed to be bolstering the fake marriage thing no matter what their real relationship was like. But the funny thing was, it was true.
There was no need to bolster anything. He liked Kitty. He’d liked her from afar. He liked her more up close.
And he would describe his feelings about sharing a bed with her as something a little closer to goddess worship—not that he’d describe it that way to her. She would frown and tell him he was exaggerating and one thing Kitty Bennett did not like was an exaggerator.
By now he thought he had all of her likes and dislikes carved into his bones.
He liked her sisters, too. They made three different types of redheads, all different, and he appreciated them all. He hadn’t been sure how it would go at first, given that he doubted very much that Kitty had asked her sisters if they were up for a new roommate.
But he was very good at putting people at ease, so that was what he did.
Finn didn’t act as if he was walking on eggshells around them, but he didn’t barrel around taking charge of the place, either.
“I expected a man in the house to be much more… distracting,” Flannery said one morning when they met at the coffee machine.
Finn thought they both knew that her first choice of word had not been distracting.
He nodded. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Besides,” Flannery said quietly. “I’ve never seen Kitty like this. I’ll admit, I thought this was one of her many schemes. But I guess not. No one could be more surprised than me.”
Finn had been thinking about that one for days.
The truth was, he lived for those nights up there in that attic room, where he could roll around in bed with the perennially unimpressed and always excited Kitty.
He lived for the mornings when they woke up wrapped up around each other and didn’t let go until they were both sighing out their pleasure together.
He had never been particularly concerned about sex, the way some men were. He had always been pleased when it happened, but he’d never wasted a lot of time looking. He supposed that was because he’d never felt like there was a drought.
But there had never been anything in his life like Kitty.
It wasn’t only that everything was new to her. Because she was just as capable of being cranky about that as she was about anything else. It wasn’t only the touching her and watching her bloom beneath his hands felt like a miracle, every time.
It was that he’d never felt this kind of chemistry with anyone, ever.
He might have been tempted to think that because it was new to her, she would ease into the whole thing. Take it slow, be a little bit shy.
But she was voracious.
She wasn’t the slightest bit shy. If anything, she attacked him.
Finn was only too happy to let her.
And it wasn’t just sex. He liked her. He had liked her from the start, even before he’d met her.
There had been something about her that had called to him all along, and getting to spend this time with her, so up close and personal was a gift.
He was in her bed and wrapped up in her life now, and he couldn’t help but think that it was changing something in him.
He wasn’t sure what it was, but as July carried on still bright late into the night and sometimes approaching real heat during the day, everything about this life he was living with Kitty felt timeless. And beautiful.
When he found himself spending a lot more time looking not at ranchland, but at the abandoned farms that sat on abandoned plots in the hills, Finn had to face the fact that Kitty really was changing something inside of him that he would have said was fundamental.
After all, he’d never thought of himself as a farmer.
But there were a lot of these small-scale plots in the canyons and gulches all around Cowboy Point.
Some of them had been on the market for decades.
Story was, when the miners realized there was no love to be found in Copper Mountain, a lot of them decided to claim some land instead of continuing to crawl around in the dark, beneath mountains that rich men always seemed to own.
Many of them figured they’d till a field and plant something green to see what came of it.
Most of those first-generation farmers stuck it out. Hard to say, looking back, if this was because they liked farming in Montana’s tricky growing season so much or if what they really liked was not mining.
But over the generations, the zeal to work the land wasn’t always passed along. And as happened in far too many rural areas, when things got stark, folks moved away. A good portion of them never came back.
And the old farmhouses their ancestors had built with their hands on fields they’d worked with their own blood, sweat, and tears sat there like a ramshackle monument to dreams long past.
It was a beautiful July afternoon when Finn drove up into one of the canyons behind Kitty’s house, a long and narrow stretch of land, like it was trying to reach all the way over the mountains into Paradise Valley itself.
Dallas was kicked back in the passenger seat of Finn’s truck, because he was the one who knew about this land.
The two of them had been talking at the General Store about Finn’s growing interest in these smaller, more intimate operations that had always run on family instead of the work of imported hands.
Not that Finn had really wanted to get into why he, a prime example of an imported hand, did not care to set that same system up again.
I like a place with ghosts, Dallas had replied, with that bittersweet look about him that he got sometimes. Tennessee said it was because he spent too much time alone in his folly of a lighthouse up there on Lisle Hill.
Finn recognized loss when he saw it, and figured there was more to it than that. Just like he figured that if Dallas wanted to talk about it, he would.
I don’t mind ghosts as long as they don’t mind me, Finn had replied.
And Dallas had told him that he would be only too happy to show Finn his favorite lost farm in the area.
“I guess I thought you were more of a rancher,” Dallas said now, pointing out which fork to take when the single dirt road split.
Though calling it a road was a pretty serious upgrade, to Finn’s mind.
“I’d say you should head over to the Careys and see what they have going on, because they always have something going on, but lord knows there’s too many of them already. ”
Most of the Carey brothers were settling into family life these days, so Finn had really only gotten to know Wilder, thanks to Cat. And he didn’t know how to tell Dallas that he really wasn’t in the market to work for another family he wasn’t a part of.
Not again.
“I loved the years I spent ranching,” Finn told him instead. “I won’t pretend otherwise. I’m not in a position to buy the kind of acreage I’d need to make it work on a large scale, especially not around here. And I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I want to do it all over again, either.”
His half brother nodded. “I get that.”
They took a sharp curve in the road, and Dallas laughed. Then he pointed across the pretty little valley that was Cowboy Point to the lighthouse that stood on the opposing ridge.
“That lighthouse looks pretty from this angle,” he said.
“It’s pretty all right,” Finn agreed. “Despite the fact that there’s nothing remotely resembling an ocean out here.”
Dallas laughed again. “I think folks have come around on the lighthouse,” he said, still looking out through his open window. “They complained a lot when I first started getting the light up and running again. Now they complain when I turn it off.”
“Still on track to open that bed-and-breakfast?” Finn asked.
He thought Dallas sighed, or maybe it was another laugh. “I’ve always been on track,” he said. “It’s only if you talk to Tennessee that you might get the impression that there’s nothing but Don Quixote up at the top of that hill, swinging at windmills all day and night.”
“There’s not a damn thing wrong with swinging at a windmill or two,” Finn said, staunchly. “Sometimes that’s the only thing to do.”