13. Rules, Boundaries, and Brotherly Bodyguards
RULES, BOUNDARIES, AND brOTHERLY BODYGUARDS
Dean
Damon and Dylan flanked me like a pair of overeager bodyguards, except their main occupation tonight was giving me shit about Felicity Foster.
I ignored them—I’d been doing it since the age of six, when ignoring their shenanigans meant fewer broken bones—but I could feel the truth of it. I wanted to check in on Felicity and Maverick—no, I craved it, like how you crave more air when you’re in the deep end of the pool.
The inaugural Cowboys and Campfires weekend had gone off better than I ever could have imagined.
It was as if everything Felicity touched turned to gold.
It was a weekend centered around the power of nostalgia, community, an open flame, and a well-timed s’mores bar.
By sunset on the final day, Lockhart Ranch was humming with an almost dazzling energy of a hundred guests—locals, out-of-towners, old-timers who remembered when the barn looked like it might collapse if you sneezed, and kids who probably thought the hay bales had always been arranged for their convenience.
The final dance was underway in the main barn, a space that was supposed to smell like horses but tonight was all cinnamon, baking bread, wood polish, and that sharp, mineral tang of sweat.
I stood with my brothers at the edge of the festivities, drinks in hand, watching the crowd circulate like some intricately choreographed organism.
If you were a Lockhart and a single man, every set of eyes over the age of twenty-five had sized you up at least once by now.
A cluster of string lights were in display up over the dance floor, throwing gold over everyone’s faces.
I watched Felicity from across the barn, her hair spilling over her shoulders, her laughter rising above the music as she talked with Grant, the ranch’s head of security.
I’d known Grant forever—he was ex-military, kept his sideburns clipped so sharp he could have been a Lego figure—but apparently tonight he was trying out a new routine as the town’s unofficial stand-up comic.
She laughed at something he said and put a hand on his arm, casual, like you do when you’re genuinely comfortable with someone.
I felt something cold and stupid twist in my gut.
I feared it was a violation of rule number seven: no jealousy.
Grant was at least twenty years older than her and had grown kids.
Still, logic didn’t stop my brain from charting out every possible future where Felicity decided she preferred her men with more life insurance and less emotional constipation.
“Maybe she’s into the mature, emotionally available type,” Damon ventured.
“Grant’s been divorced twice,” I shot back, and immediately regretted it. It showed weakness, something Damon would sniff out like a bloodhound.
Damon slapped his hand on my shoulder. “Yet he still beats you for emotional availability.”
“Should we warn Grant?” Dylan asked.
“About what?” Damon cued him up for what I was sure would be a dig at my expense.
“Apparently talking to Dean’s not-girlfriend is now a workplace safety violation, because if looks could kill, that man would be fatally wounded,” Dylan exaggerated.
The thing about being a Lockhart brother—especially the CFO, the one who handled payroll and insurance and all the horseshit that kept this ranch running and solvent—was that people assumed you were boring, or at the very least impervious to distraction.
My brothers knew better, but even they struggled not to get sucked in.
Proof: barely two minutes after their synchronized roast session, a trio of women sidled up to us who Felicity had mentioned were influencers she’d invited for the PR, all cowboy boots and statement earrings and the sort of heat you could feel radiating off a campfire at fifty feet.
Damon’s eyes went comically round, then he grinned, all dimples and reckless confidence. “Ladies,” he greeted, tipping his hat with a grandness that was somehow both ironic and perfectly sincere. “Hope you’re enjoying your night here at Lockhart Ranch.”
“We’d enjoy it a lot more on the dance floor,” said the woman with the silver hoops.
“Darlin’ I thought you’d never ask,” Dylan grinned as the redhead was already tugging him toward the floor. He followed with the helplessness of a man who pretends he doesn’t want to be wrangled but very much does.
Damon gave Silver Hoops a slow smile. “I should warn you, I’m pretty hard to forget after one dance.” He stood and offered his hand. “Still willing to risk it?”
“I think I can handle it.” Silver Hoops took his hand, and then all eyes were on me.
“Sorry, I’m gonna have to sit this one out,” I excused myself.
Damon immediately offered an arm to the woman in the blue sundress. “Don’t worry, I can handle two partners,” he promised. “On the dance floor, I mean. Well, anyway, let’s see what happens.”
Within seconds, both of my brothers were absorbed into the swirling mass of people, leaving me abandoned.
I watched them go, registering the easy way they slid into the music and the noise and the crowd.
I used to envy that, back before I realized that for every talent there was an equal and opposite cost: Damon’s ease meant he never took anything seriously, especially not himself; Dylan’s wildness meant he self-destructed almost as often as he burned bright.
Me? My “talent” was keeping everything together.
If I was funny, it was accidental. If I was charming, it was because people expected stoic competence and were thrown by the occasional offhand joke.
I was the guy people called to fix the spreadsheet when it didn’t add up, or to talk some drunk fool down from the hayloft at 2 a.m., or to drive a distant cousin to a root canal because everyone else had plans and they knew I wouldn’t say no.
So yeah, maybe I watched Felicity because she was the first person in a long time who made me feel like there was more to my life than the sum of my responsibilities.
She stood with Grant in the corner near the old saddle display.
I tried not to stare but kept drifting back to her—the way she angled her head when she was really listening, how she threw her whole body into a laugh, like it was too big for her ribcage to contain.
Grant said something, and she reached out, fingers momentarily brushing his forearm.
It was nothing, it was friendly, but it short-circuited my brain all the same.
Was I really threatened by Grant? He was a good man, but I doubted he was her type.
He was twenty years her senior, had two marriages in his belt and two baby mamas to go along with them.
Yet here I was, inventing wild futures in which Felicity, tired of dealing with emotionally repressed/immature men her own age, found comfort in a more stable, older model.
One who didn’t overthink every conversation or count every decimal point.
Someone who loved kids. Someone who wanted a family life. Someone better than me.
“Dean.”
My mother’s voice cut through the noise like a thrown lasso. I turned, and there she was, Selma Lockhart, matriarch of the clan. She had Maverick bundled in her arms, the kid’s face pressed into her shoulder, one tiny fist still clutching a half-eaten marshmallow on a stick.
“He’s out,” she said it with the satisfaction of a woman who’d just put out a small but persistent house fire. “Like a light. That little man can go from full steam to full stop in under thirty seconds.”
I stepped forward automatically, arms out. “I’ll take him.”
She hesitated, surprised by my actions and didn’t pass Maverick over.
Instead, she adjusted her arms, shifting him higher on her shoulder, and turned her full attention on me with that classic Lockhart squint that meant she was about to test you.
Maverick’s little face was pressed into her cardigan, and his fist still clenched that decapitated marshmallow like it was all that stood between him and a napless existence.
“I’m going to take him into the main house so he can zonk out properly,” she said, her voice pitched low out of respect for the freshly unconscious.
“Could you let Felicity know? And tell her not to rush. She worked really hard this weekend and deserves to unwind. She should take her time. Blake and Tabby made a sleep fort in the front room, and Tabby’s already out.
Maverick is more than welcome to have a sleepover, if she wants to take the whole night off. Tell her to enjoy herself.”
The emphasis on enjoy was not lost on me.
My mother had been orchestrating Lockhart emotional states for three decades and had an undefeated record; if she wanted Felicity to have a ‘night off,’ it was because she’d judged, in her matriarchal wisdom, that Felicity deserved one.
I felt a twinge of—what, responsibility?
Annoyance?—as though I was somehow now responsible for making sure she enjoyed herself.
No, it was irritation at myself for looking at my mom’s instructions as a loophole to my rules.
Since I’d made them, over the past few weeks, I’d done a damn good job at keeping my distance from her.
Time alone, at night, was exactly what I’d been actively avoiding.
“Yeah. I’ll tell her,” I agreed reluctantly.
My mom’s eyes lingered on me for a beat, softening, and she did the thing where she cupped my cheek for half a second. “You’re allowed to be unsure,” she said, and then, with a wink added, “just remember there are two hearts on the line.”
Then she pivoted, holding Maverick like a tiny sack of potatoes, and disappeared into the night toward main house’s porch lights.