Chapter Five
“I WOULDLIKE to vote to increase the budget for the easement endeavor.”
Her sister Fia looked up at her, as did Rory.
“You need a budget increase to get Levi Granger to agree to an easement?” Fia asked, tilting her head, her red hair sliding over her shoulder in a shimmering wave. “I mean, it’s better than you needing heavy artillery, I guess.”
“Negotiations are young, Fia. Who’s to say where it will end up?” Quinn said. “But for now, I need a laminator. I need to go buy one.”
Fia frowned. “How much is a laminator?”
“Around thirty dollars.”
“You don’t need to request thirty dollars,” Fia said.
“Yes, I do. Because we need to make sure that our business expenses all come out of the correct account and are accounted for.”
“You’re exhausting,” said Rory.
“Thank you. At this point it’s better than being exhausted, because we have work to do.” And what she did not say was that Rory and her featherheaded approach to everything was equally exhausting to Quinn.
A person needed to be exacting; at least, in her experience that was the case. Rory was too much of a romantic to deal with budgets and receipts. Fia was a little bit more like Quinn was. Practical, measured.
Though, in Quinn’s opinion, Fia could also be a little bit too head-in-the-clouds when it came to an idea she really, really wanted to make work—practically be damned.
It wasn’t common, but though she knew her sister would deny it, Fia was a dreamer, fundamentally.
Quinn didn’t dream. She’d learned not to a long time ago. She’d once been dreamy. She’d fantasized about life when she was a grown-up, when she’d be old enough to kiss Levi Granger and show him she was a woman. Then maybe she’d leave for a while and become successful. She’d go to cities and live in an apartment for a while.
Levi would come for her eventually, of course.
But that was all before. Before her dad had left and her family ranch had begun to crumble, and she’d realized dreams could only ever be dreams because you couldn’t see the future.
Fantasies got you nowhere.
Planning, on the other hand...
She had her boots on the ground, and she had enthusiasm, which she knew that sometimes people mistook for optimism, or for some kind of unrealistic viewpoint, but that wasn’t it at all.
Quinn was researched, and that allowed her to be enthusiastic. Quinn knew what she was about; she had the education, she had the understanding.
It was how she had gotten to college in the first place. She had been older when she’d gone. She had assembled the appropriate documentation, she had gotten a collection of scholarships, had gotten recommendation letters, had done prerequisites and online classes. She had known the path to get herself there. She hadn’t simply sat around dreaming about it.
When Quinn was sixteen, she had realized that her anger was going to kill her.
She had gotten into a fistfight with a boy at the one-room schoolhouse. And perhaps he could be faulted for hitting a lady. But the lady had hit him first.
She had just been so angry when their dad left.
She had been driven by it.
As if it was a motor propelling her around the ranch. Like a little Tasmanian devil. But in the end, it wasn’t sustainable, and it hadn’t gotten her anything.
Fia was the one who’d sat her down and lectured her after Quinn’d punched a kid at school, who had then in turn punched her back and left her with a split lip that Fia’d had to treat. As she’d dabbed the wound with a medicine-soaked cotton ball, she’d lectured her.
You’re so smart, Quinn. But I don’t know what happened to the sweet, sensitive kid who used to cry when a robin fell out of its nest. Now you’re just acting like you can punish Dad by being awful to the people around you, and you won’t get anywhere doing that.
Fia had been right. At that point their mom had been there, but not really. She’d been emotionally wholly checked out. And maybe that had contributed to Quinn being even angrier. She’d had this strong need to prove she wasn’t her mother by not dissolving.
She’d needed to put mileage between herself and the kid who’d chased her dad barefoot down the driveway with tears streaming down her face as she’d begged him not to leave.
Anger had felt safer than that.
But she didn’t want all of her goals to implode because of her dad. She’d remembered who she’d wanted to be. She’d pulled herself back.
Quinn had replaced anger with logic. And with drive. When she found herself being powered by the drive to succeed, all of that energy became productive.
It was so much better than being angry.
“Soooo... I take it he didn’t say yes,” said Fia.
“No. He didn’t. Yet.”
She tried not to think of the derisive way that he had looked at her. The dismissal on his face. He was just... He was so obnoxious.
He hadn’t listened to a single thing she said, and she had training, she knew what she was talking about. He was just so...
He was a man.
That was the problem.
Men, in her experience, were inherently self-centered and prone to thinking they had thought of absolutely every eventuality, when in reality they just wanted their way.
And he was a whole, particular thing that she couldn’t put her finger on. He had refused to move with her rhythm. Usually her energy invigorated other people.
It was like he was a black hole where her enthusiasm went to die.
Or worse, where it went to turn into electricity that rocketed through her body like lightning and couldn’t be contained or controlled.
She had persevered, though, and she would be back, stronger than ever.
“I told him that I would be back tomorrow with a binder, so tonight I need to make a binder. I need to go point by point on what he could be doing differently at his operation, which I grant is going to be difficult because I don’t know very much about his operation, so I have to make sure that I cover all my bases.”
“And your bases will be...laminated?” Fia asked.
Fia was making fun of her. But Quinn didn’t care. Fia wasn’t the one who was trying to conquer the black hole.
“Yes, Fia. It’s called making a professional impression. I’m trying to convince him he needs input from me, so I have to look like someone he can take seriously.”
“Have you ever been told that you’re a bit intense?” said Rory.
“Have you ever been told that you have the intensity of a feather pillow?”
Rory smiled. “No. But I like that.”
“He is impossible,” said Quinn.
He’d been so dismissive and so rude. And there he was, chopping wood in front of what was essentially a shanty, and given what she knew of his ranch, he should be living a lot better than that.
He was the only supplier of Wagyu beef in the immediate area, and the product sold for an absolute premium. Unless he was severely mismanaging things, he should be doing quite well, and yet she’d seen the house.
“Well, maybe you should enlist Alaina,” Fia said. “Impossible men have become her specialty.”
Their youngest sister, Alaina, had a baby, and was married to Gus McCloud, which meant she was in very close proximity to all the McCloud brothers.
Alaina’d had a bit of a rocky road to happiness, but now she seemed pretty well giddy with it.
And yeah, the McCloud men, who she was now surrounded by, were notoriously hardheaded and difficult. Her husband most of all.
“He’s not the same kind of difficult as Gus,” she said, trying to figure out how to articulate the Levi of it all. “He’s...he’s arrogant, first of all. Gus is not arrogant.”
“You don’t think so?” Rory asked.
She thought about her brother-in-law, who was scarred and a bit gruff, but ultimately one of the most caring men she’d ever met. Alaina was mouthy and had a quick-burning temper. Gus couldn’t be arrogant, not when dealing with Alaina.
“No,” said Quinn. “I don’t think so.”
“Hmm.” Rory picked up her phone and brought up a video call.
Alaina, all red curly hair and smiles, answered. She was holding their nephew on her hip. “Hey,” she said.
“I have a question for you,” said Rory. “Is Gus arrogant? Quinn doesn’t think so.”
Alaina howled with laughter. “Yes. He’s the biggest, most arrogant bastard on the planet.”
“Hey.” They heard a man’s voice off to the side and Alaina quickly flashed the phone over toward him.
“This is irrelevant,” said Quinn. “I don’t care about Gus.”
“That’s hurtful,” Gus said just from outside the frame.
“That’s not what I mean,” she said to her brother-in-law, and she could feel all the impossible heat she associated only with Levi flooding her. “I just mean that I’m trying to deal with Levi Granger, and I think he’s more arrogant than Gus.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Gus. “Levi Granger is an asshole.”
“See,” said Quinn. “Levi Granger is an asshole.” For some reason, that sat wrong with her, and made her feel bad, too, but she did not recant. “And it is a noted, documented fact. But I’m not going to let him make me angry. I’m going to make a binder instead.”
“Sorry,” said Fia, dipping her head toward the phone. “You got involved in a sister dispute.”
“Do I need to come over there?” Alaina asked.
She was about an eight-minute drive away, living on McCloud’s Landing, a few miles away on the interconnected dirt roads that ran between the ranches.
“No. This is all about Quinn requesting money to buy a laminator.”
Alaina laughed. “A laminator. That’s what this is about? Aren’t those like twenty bucks? Let it never be said the Sullivan sisters couldn’t make a mountain out of a molehill. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Alaina hung up.
“Well, thank you for that,” said Quinn. “I didn’t need to involve the whole family.”
“Yes. We can drive over to Mapleton and get a laminator.”
“All of us?”
“All of us,” said Fia.
Which was how she found herself bundled up into her sister’s turquoise truck, and headed the hour out of Pyrite Falls into Mapleton, the closest town that actually had some decent-sized services.
Pyrite Falls itself was less the town and more a strip of buildings. With Smokey’s Tavern, John’s grocery store and Becky’s diner, the place was very small.
The public school was in Mapleton, and the children of the families that worked at Four Corners had the option to send the kids to the one-room schoolhouse on the property to be schooled that way. That was where Quinn had gone to school.
All of them had, in fact.
It really was the most extreme small-town life. Pyrite Falls was tiny, and Four Corners was a small town unto itself.
It had been really different, going down to California for school. Even in the Central Valley, which wasn’t exactly a budding metropolis, it had been a big change.
But Quinn had kept focused. Her head hadn’t been turned by any of the fancy things in the city. She was back to herself then. She knew who she was and what she wanted.
She’d wanted a degree to help her add another shield. More protection. Something to help her feel good enough, because she hadn’t known what else might do that.
She hadn’t gone down there to date, though she had often felt a little bit left out when the people around her went and had fun. But she had gotten there on scholarship, and she was determined to do the best she could.
She got her agribusiness degree, and she was ready now. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t done the social-life thing in college; it wasn’t what she had done college for.
She was exceptionally good at keeping focused on a goal.
That sort of energy was adjacent to rage, after all.
It just required that you bit down on something hard, and refused to let go.
They rolled into Mapleton, and she looked around, trying to see if there were any new businesses on Main Street. It had been a little while since she had come into town, and tourist season was a great time of year to go.
People often came to stay in the vacation rentals. There was a resort off in the mountains, and it attracted quite a lot of people.
It wasn’t the same kind of tourist town as somewhere more picturesque like Copper Ridge, but it had its share of people who enjoyed coming and visiting.
There was a new clothing boutique, and she knew that, without even asking, Fia would stop them there.
Her sisters did have an affinity for dresses.
But the first thing they did was stop at a store that had office supplies, and she got not only a laminator, but also a very large binder with flowers on the outside of it.
She made sure that Fia and Rory voted yes on every purchase, and technically, it was all still right within the bonds of their family business, because they would’ve been a majority and outvoted Alaina even if she would’ve said no. But Alaina would not have said no.
Anyway, it didn’t matter.
They stopped then and got a couple of new dresses, and then went to one of the local coffeehouses, where they got iced, flavored espresso drinks.
“Now, this was a good day,” said Fia.
“How soon do you think we’ll be able to get the farm store opened?” asked Rory.
“It squarely depends on Levi. If we have to figure out how to get the road dug in all the way from the main drag, it’s going to be costly and create a huge delay. I mean, obviously we can open and put out signs and hope that people want to drive eight miles down a dirt road, but that’s going to be a bit of an uphill battle.” Fia took another sip of her drink. “And it’s a battle that will probably cost us so much, the store will fail before it ever begins.”
“You’ve done a good job,” said Rory. “Whatever happens, Fia. You’ve done a great job.”
Fia would never say it, but Quinn believed it to be true. The Sullivans had had it hard. They were also resilient. They were the only family on the ranch made up entirely of women.
The McClouds were all boys, the Kings and the Garretts mixed. The Sullivans had had to be creative once their dad had left. There weren’t a plethora of sons to lift hay bales and do manual labor. They’d always had to lease out their fields and hire foremen. They had to focus on their own strengths and hone them. They produced a massive amount of hazelnuts, vegetables, fruits. They baked, they made preserves.
Their dad’s abandonment and their mother’s subsequent dissolving had forced the girls to band together. When Quinn had managed to get her anger under control, she’d begun really homing in on ways to make the ranch more profitable. With Rory’s head for management, Fia’s coolheaded leadership, Alaina’s tenacity and Quinn’s hyperfocus on all things agribusiness related, they’d built themselves a profitable spread.
They made money not only on the ranch land, but also on their other skills.
It had never been Alaina’s passion, but it was the rest of theirs. And it was one reason that Quinn had felt inspired to go to college. What Fia had done was figure out how to work smarter, and harder along with it, and she had turned Sullivan’s Point into a huge success. But it had taken creativity and hard work. It had taken her forging new ground. Their father had done beef, just like the Garretts, just like the Kings. Fia was the one who had decided to take a risk and get into fruits and vegetables. Nuts. She was the one who had decided to lease the land. In Quinn’s opinion, Fia was the most creative businessperson in the entire collective, and Quinn looked up to her mightily for it. Not just that, the amount of emotional support that Fia had given to the rest of them over the years. It wasn’t easy being the oldest in a dysfunctional family. Everyone else at Four Corners proved that. Sawyer, Gus, Denver... They were all a mess.
But Fia had done it.
“Thank you,” said Fia. “But we’ll see. If this all goes to hell, you may be cursing me rather than thanking me.”
“The others will have our back,” said Rory.
Four Corners was run as a collective. The other ranches had invested money into the farm store endeavor, because it was what they did. They invested in each other’s ventures. They had done it for the McClouds when they had opened up their equestrian therapy facility, which was proving to be not only extremely helpful, but also successful. They had done it for the Kings when they had wanted to expand their pastureland. They had done it for the Garretts when they’d needed to do the same.
They would bail each other out, always. Because it was what they did.
Fia’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe.”
“Is this about Landry King?”
“No,”said Fia. “Because not everything is about Landry King.”
“But you hate him,” Rory said, tilting her cup back and crunching an ice cube. “You know. In that way a woman hates a hot man, and wishes to be stranded alone in a cabin with him on a mountainside with only one bed to work out all the raw tension.”
Rory was addicted to romance novels. She tended to view things through an overly romantic lens. Quinn also believed Rory to be a virgin. Which meant that everything she said was big talk about nothing that she knew anything about.
That was, of course, another hazard of growing up in a place this small.
You either got into insane entanglements with people that would be in your life ever after—which was what she assumed had happened with Landry and Fia, and definitely what had happened with Alaina and Gus—or there really just wasn’t a whole lot out there.
Which was what Quinn and Rory suffered from.
“Please stop,” said Fia. “I do not want that. But I also don’t think that he would actually... He wouldn’t do anything to hurt the ranch. Okay. But it is going to take a leap for those men to think that this is something worth investing in. They understand what they understand. Meat and horses and masculine grunting.”
“Do you think they don’t respect you because you’re a woman?” Quinn asked.
She had never really gotten that vibe off any of them. But Fia dealt more with the other families. Because they were essentially the founding members of the collective. Fia, Gus, Denver and Sawyer.
“Not intentionally. But look, they’re a pack of alpha males, and I’m an alpha female. We don’t always mesh, we don’t always see eye to eye, and I think that they have an ingrained sensibility that is different from mine. So yeah, sometimes I do feel like I’m in an uphill battle because I see things differently than they do.”
“You should have me go to talk to them sometimes. Now that I’ve had all the schooling...”
Fia looked at her like she was young and naive, and that made Quinn feel a little violent. So she curled her toes in her shoes. “I don’t think that they’re going to put a lot of stock in that. You having something that they don’t have.”
It had never occurred to her that they might think that way. She had an education; that made her qualified to speak on it.
“That would be stupid,” said Quinn. She opened the top of her drink and took out an ice cube, crunching on it the same way that Rory had.
“I hate to be the one to break this to you, Quinn, but sometimes men are stupid,” Fia said. “No matter how nice your binder is.”
“Well, I’m going to prove to you that I can do this. That it was all worth it. Me being away for four years. I’m going to show you that this is going to come together. You can trust me.”
“I do trust you, Quinn. It’s Levi Granger I don’t trust.”