Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
GRIFFIN
The restraint it required to stay away from Winslow was agonizing.
For the past two nights, I’d practically barricaded myself at home. My email inbox was empty, my desk clear. Last night, after dinner, I’d wanted to go to her so badly that I’d spent three hours cleaning stalls in the barn.
Keeping busy.
Keeping my distance.
My skin craved the heat from hers. My fingers twitched, desperate to thread through her hair. My arms ached to hold her as she fell asleep.
I missed her blue eyes. I missed the freckles on her nose.
The nights had been brutal. Sleepless. But even the days were difficult. It was noon and all I wanted to do was turn my truck around, head into town and track her down.
I refused to let myself break.
The ranch and my family needed my full attention. There was no time for anything else.
It shouldn’t be like this. Never in my life had I struggled so much to let go of a woman. Especially when there’d been no commitment involved. Hell, I’d had girlfriends in college easier to erase from my mind, despite dating them for months before calling it quits.
So why the hell was Winslow Covington stuck in my head?
Her beauty was unmatched, her intelligence as attractive as her slender body. Her responsiveness in the bedroom and the way our bodies came together were like nothing I’d felt before.
This had to be a physical thing, right? Chemicals and hormones fucking with my rationality. One thought of her bare, creamy skin and I was hard again. Like I’d been for the past two days.
“Goddamn it,” I muttered.
“What?” Mateo asked from the passenger seat of my truck.
“Nothing.” I waved it off. “Thanks for coming out today.”
“Sure.” He shrugged those broad shoulders.
At twenty-two, he hadn’t quite filled out his frame. But he would. If he kept eating Mom’s cooking and working on the ranch like he had been this summer, breaking a sweat and testing those growing muscles, soon he’d be as big as me.
Of all my siblings, Mateo and I looked most alike. We all had the same brown hair and blue eyes, but Mateo and I shared the same nose, the small bump at the bridge. Like mine, his Adam’s apple was pronounced, a feature I hadn’t thought much about until Winn.
She loved to drag her tongue up my throat, especially while I was buried inside her body.
Fuck. Why couldn’t I stop thinking about her?
“What’s the plan for today?” Mateo propped a forearm on the open window. The smell of grass and earth and sunshine clung to the air.
There weren’t many places I’d rather be in life than rolling down a Montana dirt road in June.
Winslow’s bed was threatening to take that top spot.
“I’d like to check the fence along the road to Indigo Ridge. Conor started on it but . . . you know.” I hadn’t had the heart to send anyone back there since Lily Green.
“Yeah,” Mateo mumbled. “How’s he doing?”
“We’re working him hard.” On the other side of the ranch and as far from here as possible.
“He always liked Lily. Even after their breakup. I always thought they’d eventually get together.”
“I’m sorry.” I glanced over and gave him a small smile.
Lily had been a year younger than Mateo, but the size of Quincy High meant they would have known each other well.
“I hadn’t really talked to her in a while. But every time I bumped into her, she’d smile. Give me a hug. She was sweet like that. Like you were this long-lost friend she hadn’t seen in years. Not someone you saw once a month at the bank. I had no idea she was struggling. No one did.”
Because maybe she wasn’t.
That knee-jerk thought hit so fast and hard that I flinched.
The doubts were Winslow’s doing. She’d put them in my brain, and now, whenever the topic of Lily came up, any previous assumptions had been tossed in the trash.
Was there more to her death? What if she hadn’t committed suicide?
Winn had been searching for a boyfriend or hookup during our stops at the bars. Maybe Lily had slept with someone recently. Maybe that guy had done something to mess with her head. Or maybe she hadn’t been alone on Indigo Ridge.
Maybe there was more.
“Was Lily dating anyone?” I asked.
“Not that I know of. Whenever I saw her at the bar, she was usually with other girls.”
Probably the same girls Winn had rattled off to John at Big Sam’s. Local girls. And knowing Mateo, he wouldn’t have paid them much attention.
My little brother took after me in that regard too. He wasn’t interested in a relationship and tourists wouldn’t be there to harass him for more come morning.
It was advice I’d given him.
Advice I wasn’t following myself.
“Heard you’re hooked up with Covie’s granddaughter. Winslow.” Mateo grinned. “I got a speeding ticket last week. Think you could get her to fix it for me?”
This idea that Winn and I would be able to keep our tryst under wraps had disintegrated like wet toilet paper. “It’s not like that.”
“Fuck buddies?”
That term grated on me and my hands tightened on the steering wheel. It was the right term but it was like nails scraping chalkboard in my ear. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Bumped into Emily Nelsen at Old Mill last night. She asked where you were. I told her you were probably at home and then she made some comment about how you could also be at Winslow Covington’s place.”
“Goddamn Emily.” I shook my head.
She was the reason I’d avoided Winslow’s place the past two days. Apparently, that had been pointless.
On Wednesday, I’d gone into Eden Coffee to grab one of Lyla’s sandwiches for lunch. She’d been talking to Emily, making nice. Lyla always made nice. Maybe because she was smarter than me. She kept her friends close and her enemies in the folds of her green apron.
Emily had never been mean to Lyla and they’d graduated at the same time. For a while, I’d thought they might have been friends but I hadn’t paid much attention. Then I’d screwed up and fucked Emily one night a year ago, and ever since, all she’d done was linger around Lyla.
My sister was smart. She knew why Emily was kissing her ass.
I’d made the mistake of sitting at their table to visit with my sister. It had been . . . informative. Not only had Emily gossiped about every person in the coffee shop, but she’d also commented that she’d seen my truck at Winslow’s house three nights in a row.
I knew better. Damn it, I knew better. How could I have been so stupid as to forget that Emily lived in that neighborhood? Of course she’d recognize my pickup. The last thing I needed was to have rumors spreading around Quincy. It was the last thing Winn needed too.
So I’d stayed away.
It was the smartest decision. For both of us.
Winn was fighting enough battles at the moment. At the station. With the community—no thanks to Emily’s article. She didn’t need to wage war with the gossip mill too.
“She’s a good cop,” I told Mateo. “I think she was the right choice.”
For all the shit I’d given Winn for being an outsider, she fit here. She took the job seriously and had decent connections. Though I wasn’t thrilled about her friendship with Frank Nigel.
That asshole could go fuck himself. He’d had a problem with my family for no reason my whole life.
He’d buy a latte from Lyla’s coffee shop, flirt with her until she was uncomfortable, then leave a shitty review on Yelp.
He’d swing by Knox’s restaurant at The Eloise and tell everyone who’d listen that the food was mediocre.
He’d talk about us all behind our back—to me and Dad, our faces. At least he’d stopped trying to fake it when we bumped into each other around town. I’d made it clear the last time he’d tried to shake my hand that I had no use for the son of a bitch.
Frank’s friendship with Covie was the one black mark against our long-time mayor. I never did understand how they’d become such good friends. Neighbors bonded, I guessed. Hopefully Winn didn’t listen to Frank’s poison.
Mateo and I reached the edge of the ditch along the road. A loose wire dangled at the corner post. I parked the truck, grabbed a pair of leather gloves from the bench seat and pulled on my ball cap, letting it shield my face. Then my brother and I got to work repairing the strings of barbed wire.
Two hours later and we’d made it halfway down the line.
“More junk.” Mateo picked up a hubcap lying on the tall grass.
“Just toss it in the back of the truck. I swear the previous owners of this place took apart an entire car dealership and left the pieces scattered around here just to irritate me.”
I’d been picking up rusted scraps and old parts since I’d bought this property. It had taken us a month of regular trips to Missoula to haul away all of the old cars they’d left scattered around the barn.
“I hate fencing,” Mateo muttered as he picked up his fencing pliers.
I chuckled. “It’s part of ranching.”
“It’s part of you.”
This ranch was all I’d ever wanted. From the time I was a kid, I’d known that I’d live and die on this place. My heart belonged to the land. My soul was tethered to the earth. A day of honest work gave me peace.
I considered myself a lucky man that happiness came easiest when my boots were in the dirt. This wasn’t a job. This was a passion. This was my freedom.
My siblings loved the ranch but ranching hadn’t been their dream.
“Any thoughts on what you want to do?” I asked Mateo. Being nine years older, I often felt more like an uncle than a sibling. He came to me for advice, much like I’d done with Briggs.
“No.” He groaned, crimping a clip to hold a fresh wire to a steel fence post. “I don’t know. Not this.”
“There are other things to do on the ranch besides fencing.”
“This has always been yours.”
“It doesn’t have to be just mine.”
“I know. If I wanted to be part of it, you’d make it happen. But I just . . . don’t. And I don’t know what I want yet. So I’ll just work here and at the inn until I figure it out.”
“The offer always stands.”
“Thanks.” He nodded and stepped back from the section we’d just fixed. He looked past my shoulder as the sound of tires crunching gravel filled the air.