Chapter 20
TWENTY
CALDER
The next morning, I keep checking my phone in case Meredith calls or texts.
Why she would need to—or want to—I don’t know.
When I got home last night, she wasn’t at the house, so I buzzed through town and found her car parked outside Sawyer’s house.
Satisfied she was okay with her best friend, I met Bowen at home and got fucking grilled about me and her.
The conversation was short. There is no Meredith and me.
Last night was a mistake on the verge of happening.
Then why did I wake up with my stomach chewing through my abdominal wall?
“Does Carlos know?” Bowen walks with me down to the barn. “About the financials?”
“I’ve just told Meredith.”
“Christ, Calder. Is she your confidant?”
I shoot him a glare. “I wanted to see her reaction.”
“Is that all you wanted to see?”
I aim another scowl his way, but he only smirks.
“Best not to tell anyone else our plans until we know what the fallout is.” He stops and frowns at the pasture. “Whose horse is that?”
“Want to ride one instead of that sports car of yours?”
“It’s not mine, jackwagon, and I told the attendant exactly what I’d be driving on.”
“The gravel roads are going to love that thing.” I find more humor in his vehicle ordeal now that it stands out like a… well, like a Camero in a farmyard. “The horse is Styx, short for Pixie Styx, rescued by Holly. Meredith rides her.”
“I don’t recognize a single one,” he mutters. I know how he feels. All the horses are different now. “Is there a Highland cow somewhere too?”
I snort. “No, surprisingly. Just on the walls of the house. Two donkeys, though.”
“Heard they’re good for mountain lions.”
He’s been keeping updated on the ranch or all the ranching practices? If I ask, he won’t give me a straight answer. He’s better than Landry, but not by much.
“Doubt the coyotes are too friendly with them.”
He adjusts the new Crossroads Ranch ball cap he took from the mudroom.
He raided the boxes in the basement like I did.
In the same situation I’m in, he’s wearing his normal jeans with old boots and a stretched-to-the-seams shirt.
The wind kicks up dust around us, blasting dirt into our exposed skin.
Neither of us fucked with our cowboy hats.
“Landry call you?” I ask, tipping my head down to keep from getting a face full of grit.
“Hell no.” He grumbles and starts for the barn again. “He’s always been bad about falling offline, but since Dad started reaching out, he’s worse.”
“He has a ten-to-one ratio. I have to bug him ten times before he answers.” But he’ll always answer eventually. Dad’s death has changed things. I just don’t know how they’ll shift going forward.
We’re hoping we can sell and go back to our lives.
Will it be so easy to return to the concrete jungle?
To sit in an office all day and endure meeting after meeting?
I’ve had hours of emails and texts to answer every day, but my assistants have handled the rest. In Scandal, I can close out my email account and be done.
Outside is right out the door, and not ten floors down.
“I sent him a new phone last week,” Bowen says, yanking me out of my head. “Added a note that said the keyboard on his must be broken.”
Times like this make me miss their bickering. Mama used to say they fought like jackrabbits in a pillowcase.
“Maybe with his marketing skills, he could resurrect Jules Creek and the ranch.”
Bowen’s boots skitter to a stop. “Are you seriously second-guessing our plans?”
No. Maybe. “Just thinking of all the angles. We don’t know what Dad’s will is.”
“It’s a living trust.”
“No shit.”
He shrugs. The nerd in him can’t help but correct me. “He was that close to Meredith?”
“He loved Holly, and she and Meredith were all he had after he drove us off. We’re going to have to wait until after the funeral before we know for sure.”
Bowen grunts, likely unhappy to hear about what a tidy little family unit they were without us. “The funeral planning’s done?”
I update him on how Thursday is going to go. He glowers as much as I did when he hears about the reception.
Just as I finish, a truck pulls in behind us. Carlos parks his dirty white pickup and hops out.
He grins and holds his arms out. “Thought I was seeing double for a minute there.”
Bowen gets a hug and a hearty clap on the back. When Carlos lets him go, there’s a shine in his eyes, and he sniffs.
“Any word on the third stooge?”
“No, Uncle Carlos,” Bowen says. “He always was the most stubborn.”
“It’s a three-way tie.” Carlos hitches up his jeans, making him look more bowlegged than normal, and rakes his gaze down Bowen. “Pretty nice pants you got there.”
“You’d file an indecent exposure complaint with HR if I wore my old ones.” Bowen thumps the heel of his boot on the ground. “Good thing these still fit. I’d ruin a five-hundred-dollar pair of shoes otherwise.”
I’m nodding, but Carlos’s gaze oscillates between us like he can’t understand what we’re saying. “All the equipment in the office didn’t even cost five hundred dollars.” He swaggers through the barn. “Might as well break those pretty threads in with the bottle calves.”
We both follow him like we used to do with Dad, and the comfort that sinks into my bones is staggering. I get to wake up and hang out with two of the few people I can stand spending time with. The only way this day would’ve been better is if I’d woken up to a beautiful woman.
I wipe Meredith’s distraught gaze from my head.
Did she get some rest last night? I didn’t.
Not only did the way she left keep me up, but the smoldering kiss robbed me of rest entirely.
The way her thighs gripped the sides of my hips.
How her tongue stroked mine. I’d been so close to coming I should be ashamed.
“Ah, hell.”
Carlos’s voice meets me before I enter the fenced-off area with the bottle calves. One little Angus calf lies in the corner, not trotting over to us like the others. His ears droop, and a line of snot streams from his nose.
“Probably pneumonia,” Carlos says, and memories lock in place of treating sick animals with Dad.
The way he’d gather me and my brothers around to explain what it could be—coccidiosis, scours, nutrient deficiency, anything.
We’d treat as much as we could before calling a vet. “Let me call Sawyer real quick.”
I want him to ask Sawyer how Meredith is when they talk, but then he’d ask why I want to know.
I keep my mouth shut and prepare bottles to feed the other two with Bowen.
By the time we’re done, and I’ve been headbutted by a calf at least ten times, my phone pings with the alert of Sawyer’s arrival, thanks to the alarm system.
She pulls up and jumps out of her vaguely familiar beat-up blue truck.
“Is that Dad’s old truck?” Bowen’s tone fires hot.
My stomach sinks. I haven’t even had the chance to introduce them. I don’t have the best history with Sawyer, and now she likely knows what our plans are. However, a “how ya doing?” would’ve been a better greeting.
“Hey, Sawyer. I don’t know if you remember Bowen.”
“I remember,” she says curtly. “I bought the pickup from Ransom.” She glares at my brother. Her salty gaze shifts to me. “So, you can’t sell that out from under Meredith.”
Bowen sucks in a breath. Neither of us has a retort, and if we did, it’d put us deeper into asshole territory.
She hauls a supply bag out of the back seat. Bowen receives the same distasteful inspection of his outfit from her. “Are you going to try to buy it from me when that Camero of yours gets its paint chipped by the gravel?”
Bowen puffs his chest out like she ripped up his “country boy” card. “It was all the rental company had.”
“Is that what happened?” she asks innocently and walks away, extra sass in her steps.
“Take Dad’s.” I dig the keys Meredith gave me out of my pocket and wiggle the truck keys. I toss them.
He snaps the set out of the air without looking, keeping his gaze fixed on Sawyer. He catches me watching him. “She seems nice,” he says dryly.
“I’m sure she thinks the same about you.”
Another engine drones in the distance. Meredith’s SUV glides down the driveway. My feet remain still. It’s a bad idea. If she wanted to confront me, she would have come home last night.
My phone pings as soon as she crosses the camera on the house. I dig the phone out of my pocket and silence it. I left the damn thing in my office last night, or I would’ve known Bowen was in town.
Bowen blocks my view of Meredith driving into the garage with his big head. “You lying asshole. You’re way into her.”
“I didn’t lie about a thing.”
“Who’s the last girl you dated?”
His question takes me off-guard, and my mind blanks. But when it’s back online, I still can’t come up with a name or a face. My gaze rises to the house, and he leans to block my view.
“Goddammit, Calder. She’s a complication we don’t need.”
“There’s nothing going on.”
“No shit.” He echoes my earlier answer. “You won’t catch me grinding against her. Ever. Girl troubles are never worth it.”
“Keep it that way.” When I scowl at him, he exhales a sigh.
“Remember what her last name is.”
I do. But I might be more like my dad than I thought.