Chapter Three
“SEEYOUAT the end of the day, Cam,” Levi said as he headed out the door, into the early, pink morning.
He felt...angry, sure, and filled with restless energy. He hadn’t gotten laid last night. He’d been really looking forward to it, too, because it had been a while.
Sex for him was more of a rare indulgence than he would like, but he was busy, and he didn’t bring women back to his house. A holdover from when his siblings were young.
Even though he more or less had an empty nest now, he hadn’t quite made the switch mentally.
Quinn Sullivan...
He would like to think it had nothing to do with her. Nothing to do with the fact that her red hair and freckles felt burned into him.
Nothing to do with the fact that she enraged him, but had exhilarated him a little bit, too.
The blonde had just seemed bland by comparison by the time he got back in.
That fight had run his blood temperature up far too hot.
She’d called him stupid. She outright had.
And that was the thing that made him angriest.
When people underestimated him. Thought he was an idiot...
Yeah. Well. He’d done some things that were dumb. That was the simple truth.
Brian Sullivan had made sure that Levi knew that he had only been able to take advantage of him because Levi had been careless. Because he wasn’t as smart.
And he could see that same arrogance in the man’s daughter. She thought that because she’d gone to school she was smarter than him.
He shook his head and got in his truck, driving over to the barn where the horses were.
A couple of his hands were on the grounds already, and he nodded, tipping his hat to both of them as he got out of his truck to head over to his horse Jasper’s stall.
He did his best to run his spread with the kind of courtesy and kindness that he valued. He did his best to prove that he had a place here, and a right to be a rancher, and it didn’t matter that Four Corners, the Death Star, was only a few paces away. His place was a good place to work.
He couldn’t pay the wages they did over at Four Corners, but the men he had working for him were loyal. They believed in what he was doing, and eventually, he would be able to pay better.
That was another problem of existing next to such a giant spread.
They paid well. They had their own school for the children of the people who worked there. Many of the people who worked there also had places to bunk. They were just so big they were able to offer the kinds of benefits that Levi could only dream of offering his employees.
Hell. It didn’t matter. He loved what he had. And it had taken years for him to dig out from under the soybean fiasco.
His reputation had been shot to hell because of it.
He could still remember...
The day that Brian Sullivan had shown up on his doorstep with this plan.
He’d said that he heard Levi was in some trouble, particularly since his parents had died, and that he was at his wit’s end figuring out how to work the land and what exactly to do with it.
Levi had been so desperate for help. For someone to come alongside him and...
He’d had to drop everything and care for his siblings. He’d had no real support for himself and this had felt like a gift.
The truth was, as wonderful as Levi’s father had been, he was not a businessman. And most of the land was sitting in disuse. There had not been a lot of money for...anything. The house they lived in was modest at best, and there were many things in it that needed repair, and Levi didn’t even know where to begin. He needed money. Money to take care of the kids, and time. Time to cook the meals and...
He was grieving all over again, having just lost his mother a few years before, and he just hadn’t known what else to do but to sit down with Brian Sullivan and listen to his plan.
It can’t fail...
Yeah. He’d heard that again recently. It can’t fail.
And from Brian’s perspective, Levi supposed it hadn’t failed.
He had been able to broker a deal with a giant factory farm to cover Levi’s land with soybeans. Levi had made some money on it, just enough, but it had tied up his land and prevented him from building anything new. And when he discovered that Brian was pocketing a massive amount of what had been on offer from the company...
Well. Brian had informed him it was Levi’s own fault.
He hadn’t read the fine print.
You’re like your daddy, Levi. You’re never going to be an entrepreneur. You have to work for people like me, who know things.
Those words still lived beneath Levi’s skin. In his blood.
And fuck that. In the years since the soybean deal had ended, he had built himself a thriving operation. Against all odds, frankly, because, again, it was difficult to succeed here, but he’d found his niche.
And he was proud of it. He was damned proud of it. Of everything he’d accomplished, everything he’d done.
He got on Jasper’s back, and he rode. Down the road, and up into one of the high pastures, just riding. Trying to do something to defuse the rage that was boiling in his body.
He had succeeded.
In spite of what teachers had said he’d do. In spite of what Brian Sullivan had said.
It had been hard and he’d worked harder and he’d made it.
Camilla had once given him a magnet for the fridge that said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
He’d laughed it off like it was silly, and not something he needed, but it had become something that he had actually held on to. Deeply.
He had been vulnerable, and in a difficult space, and so Brian Sullivan had been able to take advantage of him. Additionally, he had been able to make Levi feel inferior. And Levi had accepted that back then. Because he’d felt inferior.
He didn’t anymore.
He’d brought the ranch out of that time and into strength. He’d raised his siblings and launched them into the world.
And Quinn Sullivan didn’t have the power to make him feel inferior.
He rode his horse hard and took in the view, the rolling mountains with sharp-tipped pines reaching up toward the sky. The intense blue of it all, the green.
The Four Corners crew didn’t have more of a right to this place just because their ancestors had come and managed to get themselves a huge plot of land.
He had a right to be here. This was his. His blood was in this dirt.
His parents were buried here. It was his.
And he would fight for that. And he would fight for this community.
And Quinn Sullivan and her high-and-mighty ways were not going to sway him.
And they weren’t going to make him feel inferior, either.
Because he was different now, secure now.
He would never go back to how he’d been.
FIACAMEOUTof the kitchen onto the front porch, where Rory and Quinn were right in the grass, pinning clothes up onto the clothesline, and kicking chickens out from under their feet.
“The county called,” she said.
“And?” Rory asked.
Quinn only leaned in, trepidation freezing her words so she couldn’t think, let alone speak.
Fia let out a long, slow breath. “They denied the permits.”
“Fia...”
And she saw Fia was dangerously close to crying, which was not something she had ever seen from her older sister.
Her older sister was strong. She had to be. She had led them all these years, since their dad had left and their mom had moved away.
When Fia was a teenager, she’d been volatile. But later Quinn realized it was because she’d been the one who was so much more aware of how their parents were falling apart. She’d been angry and it was understandable. She’d fought with their mother like she’d hated her.
After she’d come back from running away she’d changed. She hadn’t bothered to fight with their mother anymore. It was like she’d come back with a decision made. From then on Fia had treated the ranch and the house like hers. She treated them like hers.
Like she’d known their parents would abandon them and she’d needed to make the conscious choice to stay and care for it and them.
Right now she looked absolutely defeated, despairing. Quinn hated that. From the bottom of her heart she felt like they owed Fia for all she’d done for them. She wanted to fix this for her. Desperately.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do now,” Fia said, shrugging. “We built the whole thing, we’re almost ready to go, but if we have to make everybody drive down this dirt road... Most people are going to decide it isn’t worth the hassle.”
“But they can get here,” said Rory. “And maybe we can make it so amazing that it actually just seems like an adventure. Like you have to go deep into the wilderness to go to this little store in rural Oregon. Almost as if you’re traveling through an enchanted wood.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Fia.
“It’s the kind of ridiculous that would probably end up getting a million views on the internet,” said Rory.
But Rory was always way more dream than reality. The sort of person who thought buying a lottery ticket might be a viable retirement plan, and Quinn and Fia were a lot more grounded. Which was truly painful in moments like this.
“We have one more option,” said Quinn, feeling absolutely filled with indignation and purpose.
And that all-encompassing, ever-expanding sense of something she felt whenever she thought of him.
“It’s not an option, Quinn,” Fia said, “and you know that. He was the chief objector to us getting that extra road access...”
“Because it was going to bypass the town. But going through his property will not bypass the town. It solves the problem. Barring us from using that road would just be petty.”
Unfortunately, she had the feeling that Levi Granger was petty.
“Quinn...” Rory shook her head. “We might just have to acknowledge that we’re in a little bit over our heads.”
“I will not acknowledge that,” said Quinn. “Because this makes sense. It’s logical, and we aren’t wrong. He’s wrong.”
They needed this. If they couldn’t get this up and running, they really were going to be the dead tree branch of Four Corners. They might as well lease out 100 percent of their land to the Kings, and Sullivan’s Point would lose its identity altogether.
And her dad would be right.
About her. About what she could accomplish.
She couldn’t have that.
“I don’t know,” said Fia. “I feel defeated. We tried to do this the right way, we tried to take the community into consideration, but it has been an uphill battle the whole time. The Kings were against us... We don’t even have the full support of Four Corners. They’re indulging us. Don’t think I can’t feel that. They never thought it was going to succeed, not really. We aren’t the same as them. We aren’t men, we don’t have cattle, we don’t have horses. They don’t respect what we do.”
“That’s not true,” said Rory. “They’re not all that way.”
Fia wiped a tear from her cheek. “I know. This was just... It’s my dream and I...”
“And you’ll have it,” said Quinn, fiercely. “Everything that you’ve done for us, all the sacrifices that you’ve made, none of it is going to be in vain, Fia. I swear to you. I swear. I am not going to let you lose your dream.”
“That’s really sweet, Quinn, but I don’t know that there’s any way around it.”
“There is,” said Quinn. “I’m going to prove to Levi Granger that I’m right. I’m going to...I’m going to offer him something.”
“What?”
“It has to benefit him, too, right? This whole thing? So I’ll find something that he needs. I will make sure that it’s something I can give him.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Fia slowly.
“I do,” said Quinn. “I do, and I will make sure that we win. I promise.”
Because in spite of everything, Quinn had always been a dreamer. Or maybe more accurately, a planner.
And what she set her mind to, she accomplished.
It was the one good thing she had gotten from her dad.
Her dad had left. He hadn’t been faithful, he hadn’t been true. He hadn’t really loved this place.
But Quinn did. And she was going to do right by it, and by Fia and Rory and Alaina. She was going to fix this. If Levi Granger was the only obstacle to getting what she wanted...she was going to plow right on through him.
Regardless of how broad his shoulders were.
“What are you going to do?”
“Well, tomorrow, I am going to go to his house, and I’m going to make him an offer.”
“And you think that’s going to work?”
“It has to.”
There was no other option.