Chapter 3
After he got the mutt loaded up into his front seat, he started the engine and began to follow Lydia out of the driveway. He punched the call button of his phone on the console of his truck.
“Matthew,” he said. “Your sister just brought a dog to my house.”
His best friend sighed. “That sounds like her. Why isn’t she keeping it?”
“Because he belonged to my old man.”
He heard his friend’s breath hiss through his teeth. “Well, she misread that situation.”
“And how.”
Except he did have the dog, so had she misread the situation, or did she have his number in more ways than he wanted to admit?
The thing about Lydia was . . . she was special.
Matthew was his best friend, and his parents were the only people even close to parental figures he’d ever had.
Lydia was something else altogether. She’d always had the power to make him laugh, to make him smile. To make him sigh in horror, also, when she did things like save baby mice from certain doom.
He could remember that well. She’d had a whole passel of the little beasts in a basket, wrapped in towels.
Those things are disgusting.
They’re living creatures, Remy!
Aren’t you at least going to bathe them?
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. They’re tiny! They’d die!
Lydia Clay, telling him he was dumb about animals for more than a decade.
“I’m on my way to her place to get supplies for the dog. The dog that is sitting in the front seat of my new truck.”
“Well. If you weren’t such a fancy-pants, it wouldn’t bother you that the dog was in your truck.”
Remy winced. He did not like to think of himself as a fancy-pants. But the truth was, he lived comfortably, and he liked the things he had. He had grown up in scarcity, and that had been shit.
He hadn’t had any control over the things surrounding him, and now he did. He’d built his house from the ground up and chosen everything inside it. He’d bought a brand-new truck that only he had ever driven.
His reaction to feeling out of control as a kid was normal. He’d read that on a Psychology Today blog post.
It was normal, so that meant he didn’t have to do anything to fix it.
He had decided to become a rancher because it was almost . . . revenge. Getting back at his father just a little bit for the way he had acted—as if ranch life required they live in a wallow.
And yeah, being a little bit of a programming genius—or in all honesty, programming lucky—had given him a boost up in life.
It freed him up to work the ranch. He still used his degree. He programmed games for fun and didn’t really need them to earn a whole lot. He didn’t need the ranch to earn a whole lot. He had the best of all possible worlds. Plenty to keep him busy, but the stakes were low.
He had won at life, basically. And his dad was dead. Yay for him. Except now, suddenly there was the dog.
“Your husband likes my truck,” Remy said.
“I know he does. I give thanks every day that he’s not your type. Because he would’ve left me for you a long time ago.”
Remy laughed. “Yeah. The whole commitment thing’s not for me.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not. Family is a difficult, thorny thing in my opinion. And I don’t want much of anything to do with it.”
“You like my family well enough.”
“I do. And when you and Jackson have babies, I’m happy to be their fun uncle who gives them back to you the minute they start to cry.”
This was a well-worn conversation between himself and Matthew. Matthew thought that Remy should want what he had. Someone to care about him. Someone to go home to at night.
But Remy just didn’t see any of that leading to happiness.
Yeah, Matthew’s family was great. They always had been.
His parents loved their kids, not in spite of who they were, but because of it.
They seemed to enjoy watching their children come into their own, and they had let Remy know they were proud of him too.
But Remy couldn’t imagine being that lucky in life himself.
In some ways, he had outrun his past. Financially. He was more successful than he had ever imagined he could be. But personally?
Work hard, play hard. That was his motto. But coastal Oregon was pretty rural, and small towns meant too many people he had to see all the time if he wanted to have one-night stands that really stayed one night, and didn’t devolve into him running into the person at the feed store.
He often drove out of Myrtle Creek and into Coos Bay to hook up. Spending a little bit of time by the ocean, eating fresh seafood and picking up women who wouldn’t track him down the next day, that was his idea of a good time.
“Well, we’re almost at Lydia’s place. So I have to go face her rodents.”
“A raccoon isn’t a rodent,” Matthew said.
“Thank you, I’m aware of that. She has a vole too.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Voles, plural actually. That’s your sister. It’s a mystery to me why you don’t get on her about marrying up. Maybe because no man wants to move in with critters.”
He hung up the phone and got out of the truck. He assumed that the dog needed to stay inside. He frowned. The dog better not tear up the front seat of that truck....
“How was he?” Lydia asked.
“Your brother?”
She laughed. “What? No. The dog.”
“Oh. Right. I was just talking to your brother on the phone. The dog was fine.”
“Oh, good. I’ll just keep . . .”
She was fussing around, moving buckets out of the way, so he took stock of the place. The little cottage that Lydia called home was ramshackle at best. It was situated half a mile up a dirt road, and back behind some trees.
She had a chicken coop out front, and a hutch of some kind. When he peered closer, he saw that there were rabbits in it.
He liked animals, well enough. But he liked them to have a purpose. Lydia seemed to have a surplus of pointless animals, and he could not for the life of him understand that.
“Just come in for a second. I have several bags of dog food, but I need to find the formula for older canines. And I do have leashes, collars, crates. I have stuff so you can give him a bath. . . .”
“Don’t dogs clean themselves?”
“That’s cats.”
“I have to give him a bath?”
“When he’s dirty.” She looked at him as if he was an idiot. Which was a novel experience. People around town might be a little suspect of him, but they knew he was smart.
In his opinion, smart was a many-headed beast. There was tech smart, which he was, he couldn’t deny. He’d also been given a lot of help. Without the Clays’ guidance, he would never have gotten himself to college, and he wouldn’t have had access to the technology that had made his success possible.
He would never have made the necessary connections; he would never have even known what careers were available to him. For a minute there he’d thought he’d move away. That his whole life would be in tech. But he hadn’t much liked the idea of moving to a city.
Part of him had always felt most at home on a ranch.
It had been weird living in the beautiful cul-de-sac home with Lydia’s family. Weird to have a small yard and a pool, a paved driveway.
Of course, he also hadn’t expected to program a template in his third year of college that was foundational to every relevant social media site and was still being built off today.
When he’d been offered an obscene amount of money to sell it, he’d taken it.
That had given him something even better than a new life. It had given him the freedom to live whatever the hell life he wanted.
So yeah, he was smart.
Though there were a few things that baffled him still. In the top tier were families and why the hell people chose to start them.
Matthew and Jackson were happy, and he loved that for them. But commitment was never going to be for him.
Remy followed Lydia up the paved path, and through the bright red front door, which had a cheerful yellow flower wreath hanging on it.
It was so very her.
Simple but with thoughtful details that were there just because.
That was one of the things about Lydia that fascinated him. She wasn’t intense, she wasn’t on a trajectory. She didn’t seem to be proving anything to anyone.
She was just living.
The house was all natural wood inside, but the first thing he noticed was not any of the cute décor. It was the raccoon on the kitchen counter.
“Hello,” Lydia said in her best baby voice. “It is so good to see you, Pascal.”
Pascal wobbled across the counter toward them.
Then he stood on his hind legs and lifted his front feet up.
Remy felt his lip curl against his will.
“You don’t like him?” Lydia asked.
“I find it . . . It’s a lot, Lydia.”
“Well. It’s not your problem.”
She turned away, and her blond hair swung with the motion. Just as the sun came through the kitchen window and illuminated her profile. He felt a tug of fondness in his chest. For this girl he had known all his life.
It reminded him why he was doing this.
The light shifted just slightly, and the blue of her eyes became more intense. A little bit of color flooded her cheeks. She smiled. Her mouth was softer than he had remembered, and it was as if the word girl shifted right out of his brain, and the word woman took its place.
Oh hell.
He blinked. “Where’s the stuff? And you said something about a crate. Because I really can’t have him running around the place at night.”
She snorted. “I don’t think Hank is going to run around anywhere. But it’s not a bad idea to see if he’s crate trained. I don’t think your dad had him inside the house at all.”
“So he isn’t house-trained?”
“Probably not. There were a lot of animals at your dad’s place. They were all in pretty rough shape.”
Guilt kicked him square in the chest, and he didn’t know why it should. Whatever the fuck his dad had been up to had nothing to do with him. He hadn’t had any contact with him. Distance was a necessary part of surviving the Hunter Lane experience.
“What happened to them?”
“The horses are at a sanctuary.”
“I would’ve been a better bet for the horses,” he said. “At least I know what to do with them.”
“Some of them had to be euthanized.” She said it very softly, tears filling her eyes.
He felt regret. Rage. Because nobody should treat fine animals that way.
And yes, he had a difficult time understanding why people wanted their house full of animals, but there was no question in his mind that if you consented to take care of an animal, then that was an agreement you made with the earth itself. Violating it . . .
That was why his dad had found an early grave, frankly.
Because how dare you put animals in a cage, where they couldn’t even take care of themselves, and let them suffer?
“He’s a bastard for that,” he said.
“He’s a bastard for a lot of things,” she said.
“No argument from me.”
“I can check on some of the other horses and see . . . if you’d like them.”
“Yeah. I’d like you to do that. He shouldn’t have been allowed to have animals. Or kids, frankly.”
“I know growing up with him wasn’t a great experience.”
“Not in the least.”
“Well. I’ll just get your stuff and then you can . . . You can go.”
“Thanks, Lydia.” And for the first time he meant it. Because yeah, he didn’t know what to do with the dog, but finding out that there had been other animals at the place, finding out that his dad had been up to the same awful shit he had always been up to . . . now Remy couldn’t walk away.
That made him feel a hell of a lot more like he needed to get himself involved. He had questioned his decision at first. He hadn’t known what in hell he ought to do.
He had agreed to foster the dog simply out of obligation to Lydia and her family.
But . . . there was more to it than that. His dad had been a terrible man, and Remy didn’t plan on continuing his bloodline. Not ever.
Remy had already made his legacy, thanks to some of the work he’d done in programming. And he was working at making a legacy of his ranch. But some of his duty was going to have to come back to taking care of the animals that his dad had left to die.
It was his burden now. He hadn’t chosen it, just as he hadn’t chosen to be his father’s son.
“All right, I just need to go in the back—”
“Where in the back?”
“Just my utility room.”
“I’ll go with you.”
She nodded. Her house was tidy, but it couldn’t be called spotless. It was definitely the domain of animals. There were three dogs lying on little beds, and their tails thumped when he walked past.
Those dogs didn’t even know him, yet they seemed happy to see him.
Suddenly his throat felt tight.
They went down the hall, and she opened up the back door. There was a neat utility room, filled with different bags of feed, leashes hanging on pegs, and multiple kennels.
“This one on the top shelf,” she indicated, starting to reach upward.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “I’ve got it.”
He moved in front of her and reached past her, grabbing hold of one of the kennels. Then he turned, and that brought them just so they were about an inch apart. She was looking up at him, and for some reason, he noticed for the very first time that Lydia Clay had freckles sprinkled across her nose.
She smelled like wildflowers, vanilla, and something even more delicate.
And her cheeks turned bright red.
The shade of red cheeks turned for one reason and one reason only.
Lord Almighty.
He backed up, tucked the crate underneath his arm, and turned away from her.
“Well. That ought to do it.”
He could hear her expel a large breath. “Yes,” she said. “That should do it.”
“I’ll . . . I’ll give you a heads-up in the morning to let you know how we did.”
“Thanks. I really do appreciate it.”
“And if you can get the information about the horses . . .”
“I will.”
“Thanks . . . thanks for bringing him to me, Lydia.”
And with that, he turned and walked out of the house. When he got outside, he felt as if he had dodged a bullet, and he couldn’t quite say why.