The Rival

Chapter Ten

SHEWASTHERE. Bright and early. Standing on his porch holding a cup.

“Ready.” She grinned at him.

Today she was wearing a pair of jeans that looked so tight he had no idea how she was going to bend over and do any work in them. She had on her work boots, and a black tank top that scooped low over the curves of her pale breasts.

They were freckled. Like her face.

He was trying to recall if he’d ever made love to a woman who had freckles on her tits.

He did not think he had.

“Hi.”

He looked up, meeting her gaze, suddenly very aware that he had been obviously looking at her rack. “Morning,” he said.

She wrinkled her nose, and her cheeks went vaguely flushed. “What’s on the agenda for the day?”

“Work,” he said.

“When you say work...”

“I mean work.”

“So as far as the year goes, do you divide certain work up into quarters?” she asked.

“No. I don’t work in an office. I’ve never seen the point of playacting like I did.”

“It’s for... It is to help organize the business.”

He shrugged. “Sounds boring.”

He took long strides toward the truck, leaving her behind, and she took four steps to his every one, doing her best to keep up.

It was like he was being followed by a particularly persistent squirrel.

“Boring or not, it is reality. And if it’s boring to you, then what you need is for somebody...”

“Listen,” he said, finally losing his patience. He stopped and turned to face her, standing there in front of his truck, staring her down. “I got fucked over on that deal with your dad. I was too stupid to understand what mattered. I don’t take on things I can’t handle myself. Do you understand?”

She’d been badgering him about this yesterday. She’d been badgering him since she appeared. So sure and certain she knew it all. If she really wanted to know it all, then he’d tell her.

“I...”

“I was an idiot—is that what you wanted to hear? Because I didn’t have anybody advising me, because there was nobody with a fancy degree hanging around. Because...” He shook his head. “The details aren’t important. But the thing is, I don’t need you to lecture me. You went to college, little girl, congratulations. But that’s not the real world. In the real world, people die, and you have to pick up the pieces and move on. There are kids to raise. There’s shit to take care of.”

He could see that he’d hurt her. And he didn’t really care. Because who was she to come in here and start lecturing him on all these things like she knew better than him?

Like he didn’t know anything. About the life he’d been baptized into by hell fuckin’ fire when he was eighteen years old.

“I talked to Camilla a little while yesterday,” she said, her voice surprisingly soft. “She told me that she was two when your dad died. And that you’re basically her father and... I’m sorry. I think I didn’t fully give enough weight to that.”

The apology was shocking enough that it stopped him cold. Because one thing Quinn had proved about herself was that she was determined, and a little bit mean. He liked that about her, if he were forced to pick a thing to like.

That she was sharp and a bit pointy, that she wasn’t afraid to burrow down into an issue and refuse to come out. But she had backed way down this time. And it made him wonder what the hell emotion he had actually shown beneath his anger.

He needed to get a grip.

She was a Sullivan.

“You don’t just want an easement. You want to use my land. You want strangers to drive onto my land.”

“Just the road...”

“You never asked me what the road went past. What it might impact.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “What...?”

“Let’s get to work.”

He felt like an ass, because he had let her talk her way into this, had let her talk herself in circles.

And she had seemingly not noticed that he had never agreed to readdress his answer, just because she was working for him. He had thought it was funny that this woman who thought she was so damn smart only listened to the words coming out of her own mouth, and not the words coming out of his. That she was so certain of her logic, and her understanding, that she genuinely hadn’t heard him say no.

But she looked young and fragile just then, and he did have to confront the fact that she was his sister’s age, and if a man treated Jessie like this he would’ve run the guy over.

But it wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a man in the moment, just as she wasn’t a woman. He was a rancher, and she was a pain in his ass.

It wasn’t the same.

Right. And you looking at her breasts earlier wasn’t about you being a man and her being a woman.

No. It wasn’t.

Well, it was. But only in the most basic of ways.

She was... She was a little can of rage and determination under pressure. And the wrong thing was going to make that girl explode. He had no patience for anything like that. He didn’t do entanglements. And he didn’t do intense. He had a feeling that Quinn Sullivan only knew how to be intense.

So whatever he felt, whatever interest he experienced looking at her body... It didn’t go any further than that. It was physical. And it was hypothetical.

It would never be anything more.

This disagreement between the two of them had nothing to do with him being a man and her being a woman.

He could not care the hell less about her gender. Not when she was standing there feeling like an emblem of the mistakes he’d made in the past.

“Let’s just go,” she said, moving toward the truck.

“Sure.”

They got in, and he felt tangled up in his own fury. Even though some of it was at himself.

He had let her think that he wasn’t all that smart, and this explosion wasn’t exactly going to stand as a testament to his intelligence.

He had thought it was funny, and now he was irritated by it.

But he was also too damn stubborn to simply drop the facade.

The truth was, he did like to move slow. The truth was, he did like to carefully consider every angle before making a decision. And so if the little windup toy thought that made him slow, that was just fine.

Another testament to her inexperience.

They drove out toward the back field again, and he tried to imagine that field being full of Christmas trees. It wasn’t a terrible idea. He had done a little bit of research on it. He’d watched a couple of videos on the subject, which was one of his preferred ways of getting new info on very specific topics. The internet was a marvel.

One that he had learned to use to his advantage. There were a lot of good things about the Christmas tree idea, it couldn’t be denied, though at this point he did feel like if he took her advice he would owe her something.

Though she was the one who wanted that to be the case. He hadn’t agreed to anything.

They worked for a while, and then when it started to get warm, he told her to go back to the truck. “I’ve gotta go pick up feed today. You want to come?”

Now, that was guilt talking.

“Yes,” she said. “I thought you did grass fed.”

“I do. For the cattle. But there are vitamins and nutrients to go into that, and then also, there’s the non-fancy cows, of which I have a few, and there’s the horses.”

“You sell regular beef, too?”

He nodded. “Yes. I keep the animals separate, and it is not the biggest part of my operation, but when I was trying to recover from the soybeans, I had to start somewhere, and I started with regular cows and built from there. I’m working on phasing them out, but it’ll be a couple of years yet. I have some local accounts that use the meat, and I don’t want to lose them.”

“Oh.”

“Additionally, sometimes families buy cows direct from me before the slaughter. And that way we can bypass some different laws that make it more expensive. There are heavy markups when you sell and store, but a lot of that has to do with the cost of getting the animals to the USDA station, and going through that approval process. So once we circumvent...”

“Right. I know all about it,” she said. “We read about it in school.”

“Right. Of course you read about it.”

He could feel her get instantly testy in response to his terse statement. “I did more than read about it. I grew up at Four Corners. The Kings and the Garretts deal with this sort of thing all the time. I’ve witnessed it. Discussed it as part of business meetings.”

He said nothing to that. He didn’t owe her a response. He hadn’t asked her to be here, after all. It wasn’t his job to make her feel better when she said something he didn’t like.

“It was smart,” she said. “Approaching it that way. You made some good decisions.”

He looked at her. “Well, thank you kindly. I don’t know that I could have ever anticipated such a compliment.”

“Are you trying to be mean?”

“If you have to ask, I’m not doing a very good job.”

“I’m sorry. I really am not talking down to you. I promise. I didn’t mean to make it seem like I thought I was smarter than you. I just think that I might have a different portfolio of knowledge.”

“I know that you think that. But I have a hard time believing that anything you learn in the classroom is going to replace what you actually do out here.”

They got into the truck and began to drive toward the main road.

This was the road that she wanted the easement for. And when they drove by the big oak tree with the grave markers for his parents beneath it, he didn’t say anything, but he might’ve slowed down just a little bit.

If she noticed, she didn’t say anything.

“Well, I have a hard time believing that you can have a full understanding of the business aspects of running a ranch on a wing and a prayer. I grew up on a ranch. I can’t stress that enough. I still learned a hell of a lot going to school.”

“And why did you go to school exactly?” he asked.

“Isn’t it obvious? I’ve already talked about how much work it’s been for us to keep Sullivan’s Point going, to keep us being big contributors to Four Corners. Our parents are gone. They didn’t die. They just decided to walk away. My dad abandoned us, and then my mom couldn’t stand being there anymore. When he left, she fell apart. It was like there was nothing left of her. And she didn’t know anything about running a ranch. So that left us. Her daughters. And I looked at that and I decided then and there I was never letting a man determine how successful I was going to be. My father walked away with all that knowledge. So I went and got my own. I’m never going to let a man affect my life that way. I’m never going to let one change me like that.”

After the verbal skinning he’d given her earlier, he hadn’t expected her to share like that. But maybe it came from anger for her, too.

Maybe she was tired of him making assumptions, like he was with her.

Why did it matter, though? When he’d gone off on her, part of it had been because...

He’d wanted her to know.

Why?

And why would she want him to know?

He couldn’t sort it out, so instead, he was terse. “Admirable,” he said. “But you know, just because you got a degree doesn’t mean you don’t have something to learn from a man who’s been running a ranch all these years.”

“Fine,” she huffed. “Drop some knowledge on me.”

“Don’t sign a contract with a shady factory-farming company. Or your dad?”

She forced out a laugh, and he looked at her out of the corner of his eye, saw her gripping the shoulder strap of her seat belt and looking out the window.

“What?” he asked.

“Sometimes you’re so... You seem almost funny.”

“Maybe I am funny, Quinn. Did you ever think of that?”

She looked at him then, those green eyes clashing with his, and he looked away for a second.

He had to keep his eyes on the road, even if they were still on the property.

“You didn’t exactly brand yourself that way when we met.”

“I was unaware that I was branding myself.”

“You...lied to me, in a way. On purpose,” she said. “You don’t want me to know anything about you.”

“That’s not true. You know about my parents dying. You know that I leased out the fields and that I regret it. Those things are true.”

“But I don’t know you.”

There was something about the way she said that that burrowed its way under his skin. And for some reason right then, he thought about her little white shoes.

“You don’t need to know me. I didn’t invite your ass to my ranch in the first place. I didn’t invite you to know me, nor do I have a particular yen to be known by you.”

The words made something in his chest pull tight, because hadn’t he just been thinking that part of him did want her to understand?

“Does anybody know you?”

“That’s a good question,” he said. “And the answer is...probably no. I had to try and be the parental figure to my siblings, and having them know me just would have made that harder. I can’t have them seeing my flaws, after all. Not when I need their respect. And as for lovers...well, no. Not even a little.”

“Oh, wow,” she said, sounding irritated again, the words low and vaguely venomous. “You sleep with women you don’t know?”

“Now, that,” he said, “I am confident had absolutely nothing to do with the potential easement deal.”

He looked at her and noticed her ears were pink.

“You’re the one who brought up lovers.”

“That’s true,” he said, after a fashion. “I did.”

“And my question stands. Does anyone actually know you?”

“No,” he said, firm and hard. “I never needed anybody to, and I never asked anyone to.”

That wasn’t strictly true. He’d always had Damien, but then... They didn’t talk about stuff, not deep stuff. Damien had been there for him when his parents had died. And when Damien had lost his mom a couple of years ago, Levi had known just how he felt.

But they worked alongside each other. They didn’t bare their souls to each other.

Lord Almighty.

He decided to turn the radio on, because he didn’t know how he had gotten walked into a personal conversation with the little hellcat, nor did he particularly want to be in one. So he turned the music up, and enjoyed her obvious discomfort as Luke Bryan demanded that a country girl shake it for him.

They drove down to a feed store about twenty minutes outside of Pyrite Falls, not really situated in Mapleton, but not really anywhere.

It was big, with a chain-link fence around the perimeter, and an industrial-looking building. It was the cheapest place to get the kinds of things they needed for the ranch, and it sat where it did because many people used it, from various outlying areas.

And it was the strangest thing. When they got in there, she was...excited.

Interested in all the products they carried, and it made him wonder how long it had been since she’d left the damned house.

“Are you unfamiliar with feed?” he asked.

“Not at all. But we don’t do a lot with animals, so I haven’t had the opportunity to really spend a lot of time in stores like this one. I just think everything’s really interesting. Everything about ranching. It is an undervalued profession. Listen, I know that you think that I’m snobby, but I’m not. I am proud of the kind of work that we all do. People with office jobs think they’re better than the people out there working the land. In reality, we are all part of an ecosystem. We need people to work in offices, but they need us to work in the fields. I think that what we do is the closest thing to magic out there. You take seeds, and from those tiny seeds something amazing grows.”

This little rabbit of a woman spoke more words in a few minutes than most people he knew spoke in a day, and yet this monologue fascinated him, even when it shouldn’t.

She went on. “You raise animals, and there are so many things that can be done with them. Flour, salt, yeast, eggs, butter and water, and you have bread, but only when you put it together right. There is wisdom in all those things. I get it. You don’t think that I have the wisdom. But I have the passion. And I also took the time to figure out the best ways that I could support what we had. And that’s all. I’m just trying to help with that.”

He could see that she was sincere. She really believed that. She really loved all this.

With all of herself. And it was rare to meet another person who did.

It was especially strange to discover that they actually did have something in common. He’d heard her speak, he’d known she was Brian’s daughter, and he’d decided he knew who she was.

But he hadn’t.

But they were more the same than they were different. That was the weirdest realization.

Because they were both standing in a feed store like they’d rather be there than anywhere else on the planet, and she was practically in tears over the miracles of the land.

And that was the kind of thing that he’d felt in his soul from the time he was a kid. Though, he’d lost that over the years. Because the ranch had become something he’d had to do, and not the promise of a future.

That was the toughest thing.

When his mom had gotten sick, right at the beginning of her pregnancy with Camilla, he’d been sixteen.

Before then he’d had his dreams. Rodeo dreams.

He was going to get out; he was going to chase glory. In a place where all that mattered was what he could do on the back of a horse, not whether he got good grades.

What would it be like when he was grown and he didn’t have to take that hour bus ride into Mapleton to go to school anymore? To sit there all day in a classroom, when he hated it more than anything else, and felt dumber than a bag of rocks by the end of every day. Listening to teachers go on and on at him about how he just didn’t try or didn’t apply himself.

Like it was his fault the words were backward and he couldn’t put numbers in order. Like it was his fault that he could sit there and stare at a page for an hour and not get any of the information. Like he chose for it to all be so hard he couldn’t get a grip on it at all.

They all acted like he chose that. And it had never made any sense to him at all. Why it seemed easier to think that a kid was stupid than that maybe you needed to change the way you were teaching them. But that was what happened to him.

And he had been champing at the bit for the day when all he would have to do was get up in the morning and ride.

Leaving school had come sooner than he’d expected, but it hadn’t been a dream.

He’d lost his parents, and along with the grief had come the reality of being responsible for everything. Everything and everyone.

And the death of his dreams, too.

He was thirty-six now. You didn’t join the rodeo at thirty-six.

It was fine. His life was here now and it didn’t matter.

In the scheme of things, it didn’t feel like the worst thing.

The people he’d lost, the years he’d lost with them, that would always matter more.

He could remember distinctly when he’d gotten cut on some barbed wire after his mother had died. He’d gone into the bathroom to get the first aid kit, and as he’d fixed the wound, he’d realized he didn’t have a mother anymore.

He had to dress his own wounds.

Her soft hands wouldn’t be the ones soothing him, not anymore.

He’d sat in that realization for a long time. His mother had been wonderful. She’d cared for him like no one else.

No one would ever love him or care for him like that again.

He’d cried that night, over that cut on his arm. Over the realization he’d lost something he would never get back.

He hadn’t known that he’d be without his dad a year later.

That he’d watched the strongest man he’d ever known go down in a field, felled by that same strong grief that had immobilized Levi that night when he’d cut himself.

Grief was a monster.

He’d tangled with it too many times.

No. Losing his rodeo dreams wasn’t the tragedy.

Even though ranching hadn’t been his immediate dream, he’d imagined he’d settle into it someday. He’d always known this place would go to him. Just not when it had.

He’d imagined life away from the tyranny of school would be carefree.

Wonderful.

He’d never had a carefree moment from the time his mother had first gotten sick.

Really, the closest he’d come to that was in the last few years. After the kids had grown and gone, and he had finally started finding his feet with what he wanted to do with the land. Finally found a way to make it profitable for him. Now he had a little bit more of that.

But he’d had it from the time he was a kid. Those big, blue-sky dreams that had stretched out before him like the promise of a new day.

It was just that they’d been taken away.

Because that was what life did.

But it seemed to him that Quinn might even understand that.

Based on what she’d said about her father, based on what she’d said about the decisions that she’d made in order to protect herself, to keep herself safe. To make sure that no one could ever take anything from her.

He hadn’t anticipated standing there in a feed store feeling like maybe Quinn Sullivan was more his kind of person than he might’ve been able to imagine.

“I’ll show you the vitamins we need.”

He took her over to the corner, and she was messing with all the different syringes.

“Those are for calves.”

“All right. Do you do your own castration?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Though, you might want to be careful with that. You go asking men that out of context and it sounds a little bit rough.”

Her cheeks went slightly pink again, like they had that morning when he had been looking at her breasts.

Lord Almighty.

“Right.” She cleared her throat. “But you knew what I meant.”

“I did. I’m just being difficult.”

“You seem to specialize in that,” she said.

“Yep.”

They purchased all their goods, and he pushed the big flat cart out to the pickup truck while she tagged along to the side, fluttering with nervous energy over the fact that she had nothing to do. He picked up a very small bag from the top of the flat. “Here.” He handed it to her and she looked up at him like he was nuts.

He didn’t explain himself.

“You hungry?” he asked, as he finished loading the last of the bags into the truck.

“You don’t have to keep feeding me.” She threw her little bag on the top.

“Oh, don’t go getting excited. It isn’t going to be anything fancy like Becky’s. I just figured we’d stop at the Minute Market up the road at the gas station.”

They trailed into the little store and he grabbed a deli sandwich out of the case. Quinn had disappeared into an aisle—not tall enough for her head to be seen over the top of it—and emerged with a bag of candy a minute later.

She then went to a milkshake mixing machine and got herself vanilla.

A stark contrast to yesterday’s Caesar salad order.

He felt it was tantamount to having driven her to drink.

He took the items from her while she glared at him, and he paid for them all.

“I want to see your paperwork,” she said, taking a big sip of the milkshake.

“Nope,” he said.

“You don’t owe me anything. I mean, if I look at it, and I give you some advice, you don’t owe me anything. Flat out. But I want to see. When I said I want to help, I’m serious. None of the way that it’s charity or anything like that. It’s only that I really do like solving problems.”

“I said no.”

He put the last bite of his deli sandwich into his mouth and oriented the truck toward home, driving down the highway just a little bit too quickly.

“Just let me see.”

He looked at her. She was all glittering, sparkling, annoying. Beautiful.

His gut went tight and his body burned. And what the hell?

What the actual hell?

It was like he was drawn to bullshit. That’s what it was. Because she was the most annoying, high-handed female he’d ever had the misfortune of meeting and his body reacting to her was egregious.

“Quinn,” he growled. “You need to learn when to step off.”

And he thought she’d argue. But suddenly something like knowing moved through her green eyes, and instead, she leaned back in her seat.

She didn’t say anything more for the rest of the trip.

ATDINNERTHATNIGHT, he and Camilla had pizza, and a FaceTime call with Dylan.

“How are things?” Camilla asked.

“Hot as hell,” said Dylan.

“Well, it’s Jordan,” said Levi. “I’m not exactly certain what you expected.”

“See the world, they said,” Dylan said. “Join the military, they said. Not exactly the vacation that I was hoping for.”

And all he could do was worry about his brother, which just irritated him. And when they got off the phone, Camilla looked at him, a little bit too sharply for his taste.

“You’re going to accept that girl’s help, right?”

“I don’t know,” he said, because at least that was honest.

“I don’t know why you’re so hesitant to do it.”

Of course she didn’t know. Because she couldn’t possibly understand. The ways in which he felt like he had let them all down. How compelled he felt to keep control now.

“Because I am,” he said. “Can’t that be enough?”

“No.”

“You are a stubborn little hellcat, Camilla. Has anybody ever told you that?”

“I don’t know why I’m so stubborn,” she said, looking at him, her expression bland. “It’s weird. Almost like it runs in the family.”

“Yeah.” He couldn’t help but smile. “Almost like.”

“She seems smart.”

He frowned. “Who?”

“Quinn.”

He had known full well what his sister meant but he felt that showing he did was too...validating to Quinn, and even without her here, he wouldn’t do it. “She’s Brian Sullivan’s daughter.”

“I know.”

“Why do you think she seems smart? Because she went to college? And because she’s encouraging you to stay at college?”

“You’re encouraging me to stay at college,” Camilla pointed out. “Why are you being mean about Quinn doing it?”

He was being unnecessarily rude. Quinn did seem smart, that was the thing. She was sharp, and more than that, she had a real love for the land. He was just being irritated. And he was letting himself be irritated. Because all this nonsense was digging under his skin. Because he had life sorted out for himself. And having somebody meddle in it right now just felt annoying. And like something he didn’t especially want to deal with.

They finished their pizza, and he went upstairs, pausing by the door to the office.

It had been his father’s office before his. The place where he had sat with his papers, and his pipe, and gone over the financials of the ranch.

His father had been a simple man. And all of his records had been physical, not digital.

Personally, Levi found digital easier to manage. And easier to read. Particularly in certain fonts.

Another thing that he’d learned.

He had work-arounds, but it didn’t mean that it made any of this easier, or that he felt more inclined to jump in and do things.

It was just...possible now.

He was holding on by the skin of his teeth when it came to filing taxes and all of that.

Keeping up with business licenses and email communications.

He did pretty well.

But that didn’t mean that he didn’t let it get to where it was all piled up. It didn’t mean that he didn’t procrastinate something terrible.

Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to let Quinn have a look at it all.

Maybe it would be a reasonable thing to do.

Maybe it was something he should consider.

Giving her access to the road...

And that was how he found himself going back down the stairs. He did not go into his office. Instead, he went out the front door. Instead, he got in his truck and began to drive down the road.

Toward his parents’ graves.

He parked his truck in the middle of the gravel road, because he could do that. The sky was pink, the sun going down. It was late, but these endlessly long days in the summer meant that the sun was still hanging on.

He took his hat off and looked down at the graves.

“Hey,” he said. “I know it’s been a while.” He bent down and brushed some leaves clinging to the headstone away. He hadn’t stopped by in at least a month. Sometimes grief was hard like that. Sometimes he didn’t want to stop and feel it. Other times he did. “I should come by more. It isn’t like you don’t live close. I know that I really made a mess of things with the soybeans. You would’ve called that a sissy crop anyway, Dad. You would’ve hated it. You’d like the cows, though. But I got this woman, and she wants to help out with things, and you would’ve been suspicious of her, too, because she’s full of book learning from a college in California. And what the hell is a California school supposed to teach anybody about ranching, is what I want to know. And I think it’s what you would ask, too.”

He cleared his throat. “So yeah. I don’t really know. But this is our spot. And I don’t think I really want people here. And they’d have to drive by to get to the barn. Have to cut in some new gravel. I don’t know.”

He wasn’t expecting an answer—he just wanted to be here. Because the office made him wish that he had never inherited the ranch. And this... Being able to stand on the plot of land where his parents were at rest, being able to connect with them while he looked at the mountains, while he looked at the sky, that was why he liked this. It was why he liked being here. Why he valued it. And he needed the reminder today. Because the truth was, if he let Quinn Sullivan into his office, he might end up changing his mind about everything. Because she might just give him what he needed, and he didn’t really know what to do with that.

If he let her into his office, he might have to bleed out some of his issues, and he really didn’t want to do that.

He never talked to his siblings about it. It wasn’t that he was ashamed.

He was self-diagnosed through the internet, which was the thing that kind of irritated him, because he would love to be that crusty old guy who said this generation was soft and always looking for excuses. But for him, it wasn’t an excuse. It wasn’t an excuse. It was something that made the whole of his life make all kinds of sense.

Dyslexia, sequencing disorders, dyscalculia. All those things. They had shown him that his brain just wasn’t put together the way that a lot of other people’s were, but that didn’t mean that he was dumb.

Knowing that, though, didn’t solve the issues. It didn’t erase the shame that he felt.

He wondered...

Like the cut on his arm he’d had to dress on his own, he’d often wondered. If his mother hadn’t gotten sick, if his father’s sole focus hadn’t been that sickness, then the loss. If either of his parents had lived...

Would they have discovered his issues sooner?

Would someone have helped him?

It didn’t matter. He’d had to become an adult and take care of the people around him.

He’d had to bandage his own wounds, and his siblings’, so they wouldn’t feel the loss in the same way he did.

Anyway, he’d figured out what was wrong with him eventually.

It didn’t take away the mistakes that he’d made in the past.

But it had helped him come up with some work-arounds, so there was that.

But he didn’t want to talk to Quinn about the fact that he struggled to read even basic sentences. That he used voice and audio to get most everything done.

Because it was bad.

Because hell, when he was out on the range, he didn’t really think he was stupid, but when he had to deal with this kind of stuff, it felt like he was.

Quinn was a shining emblem of those issues, of his failures.

And it made him a bit feral.

Or maybe it was life that made him that way. Some kind of unavoidable combination of things, and he was just kind of a difficult monster.

Usually at his parents’ graves, he felt some kind of connection. To them, to the land. Right now he felt weirdly alone, and that wasn’t the kind of thing he liked to indulge in.

So instead, he put his hat back in place and wandered back to the truck.

He would be seeing Quinn tomorrow whether he wanted to or not. And then he would have to make a decision about what he was going to do. With her. With the ranch.

He hadn’t felt uncertain in a long time.

He resented that she had the power to do that. Right now, the impulse to hold on to that resentment was pretty strong. Because it seemed easier than a whole hell of a lot else.

So maybe he would just do that.