Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
WEST
Pillow Forts and Wolf Ears
Coyote Falls comes up faster than I expect after I stopped for coffee.
Winnie didn’t make it through Valiant Peak without topping up on her vice, and my soft spot for her grew every time she gave me puppy eyes.
Getting her alone for the first time in a day—it feels a whole lot longer than that—is a luxury I want to last forever.
But that’s not on today’s schedule, so when I pull into the well-used drive at the top of my best friend’s property, my hand still wound around hers, where it’s been for the last thirty minutes, my grip tightens to cracking point. I loosen my hold and tug her toward me.
“Winnie, I know you’ve got your heart set on Cord and me reconciling—”
“Because you’re both stubborn as hell?” She stares out the front windshield, though her mouth twitches. It’s hard to tell if she’s amused or frustrated in advance of our showdown.
Hell, if I thought we’d have the place to ourselves for a bit, I’d do that and more. But with the setup for the rodeo all week, Cord’s driveway is likely to have the turnaround of a main road, not a billionaire hermit’s getaway like Coyote Falls traditionally is for the rest of the year.
I lean across the cab, tucking hair behind her ear. It’s grown long, and I like having length to play with. “Maybe I’m bringing hell to him for once. Not that I haven’t earned it.” I stroke my thumb across her jaw and drop my hand back to the gear shift.
She giggles at the reversal and slides back into her seat, pressing her fingertips to the side of my thigh. “Are you ready?”
I put the truck into first and roll through the open gate. “If you are.”
The yard that should be full of people is empty when Winnie and I pull up in front of the oversized homestead that Cordell Rand built to home a family. Well, that I did.
Instead, he spent the last decade in it living alone and roaming the halls like a too-tall wraith out here once his legs did manage to work again, after months of therapy, operations, and more cussing than a hooker on a Friday night in Whore Alley.
He’s wandered about in that big homestead during the night.
During sunlight hours, Cordell bled sweat and dust with the rest of us like a mere mortal.
In the last months before I left, his ego doubled back to the size it had been before he met Lanie, and I finally had enough of his brand of bullshit.
“Typical.” Winnie slips from the cab of my truck. A puff of dust rises around her as she hits the ground.
I round the front of the vehicle. “They’re busy with the Invitational.
The rodeo is a lot to set up.” But even as the words leave my mouth, stained with a sense of ancient loyalty to the dust of this place, I look around, tapping my fingers on the hood.
Where in the hell is everyone? “You wanna do your thing, badass mama?”
I don’t need to look at her to know that she’s smiling.
“Sally!” Winnie yells without drawing breath. “Where are you?”
She takes a few steps toward the homestead, with its wraparound veranda and double glass doors etched with the falls that are Coyote’s namesake. It’s all Cord’s style, and ostentatious as fuck.
“I’ve always hated this house,” she mutters.
I slide an arm around her waist, tugging her back into me.
“I built half this house, you know that?” I nuzzle her ear.
I designed it too, but mostly under Cord’s direction.
My style was different back then. I’ve learned beauty in simplicity over the years, and beauty in strength. Like the woman I hold now.
“Yeah, I know.” Winnie doesn’t back down, not even with me when I’m trying to intimidate her just to be an asshole because I’m feeling what she’s feeling right now.
Coyote Falls is dead.
“Sally!” I join the chorus for the hell of it, listening to my echo fade beyond the house. The switchbacks frame the homestead, their distant purple haze today prettying up the brutal mountain range from their usual spectrum of grays.
Footsteps pound the floorboards somewhere inside the house.
Despite her earlier declaration about despising the house, Winnie darts through the doors and disappears inside the shadowy hallway, kicking her boots off as she runs.
I’m not half as coordinated, stopping at the doorway to toe off my work boots that aren’t suitable for the black sassafras floors I helped to cart in and lay. No way am I trashing those.
“—alone. I swear, when I find him—” Winnie fumes. Her raised voice filters back to me from the wing of the house that Sally usually stays in, alone. The kid has no idea how good she has it. Or maybe, coming from the tight walls of the cramped townhouse that she and Winnie share, she does.
“I’m fine, Mom. Uncle Cord is around somewhere. Check his office? He’s always busy.” Sally’s utter disdain for formality plays off against her mom perfectly.
I smirk. The smart-ass probably passed us while we were in Valiant picking up on Winnie’s coffee habit. Still, when Winnie finds her brother, I’d better be in the room to watch her rip him a new one.
“He’s supposed to be looking after you. Where’s Lanie?”
I don’t get to hear the tail end of that conversation, heading across the large living and kitchen area to where Lanie used to host poker nights when she first arrived. Back when everything was normal. Before everything changed.
Again.
I close my eyes and rest my hands on the counter.
Everything about this place has left scars on each of us.
The man I was when I first agreed to work here is not the same man I am now.
That man had hope. He gave hours of his life—thousands of them—in an effort to help a friend who he hoped would one day become a better man.
And before I left, I realized that all that time has been wasted. Nothing changed. I knew that the day that Cord made the bet, but I kept kidding myself.
My knuckles grind into the marble benchtop, bone pressing to stone in an unwinnable battle. My favorite kind. A shriek I recognize rips along the hallway that I just left.
“She’s where?” Winnie screeches as she powers past me with Sally in tow.
My pseudo niece throws me a well, shit look that’s years too old on her tiny frame. She follows Winnie through the oversized kitchen and along the hallways that leads to Cord’s end of the homestead.
“I’d stay out here if I were you, cute stuff,” I mutter, turning my back to the bench and pulling out my phone.
One missed message from Dustan shows me a picture of him dressed in chaps—not his own—that are purple with glitter edges that suit him perfectly.
Another comes through with him looking over his shoulder wearing only the chaps, nothing else.
I get a great eyeful of ass cheeks that I never needed, but at least the cheeky—ha—pic lifts my mood.
Maybe the Invitational can do a calendar for promotional purposes at some point.
Make the grannies in town happy. Hell, maybe the grandpas too. I have no idea.
Sally deviates her path to the sofa, building herself a pillow fort and burrowing under a crocheted rug with a wolf on it for good measure.
Voices echo back to us from the direction of Cord’s office. Sally burrows deeper into her pillow fort. “I hate it when they fight.”
I pocket my phone and haul my ass off the edge of the bench, finding a part of the modular sofa that’s not taken up with pillows. “Can I sit here?”
A pillow is moved a fraction. I take it as an invitation to plant my butt.
“Brad never fought with Mom. Not like this.”
I look down at the small patch of Sally that I can see. “You call your dad Brad?”
The crochet blanket huddle shrugs. “Yeah. Because he’s an as— I mean, he’s not very nice to her. He doesn’t shout, but he says awful things. All the time.”
My blood freezes. “This time isn’t the first he’s been about?” As far as I know, Sally shouldn’t have seen her dad since she was a toddler. That makes it a memory so far buried that they’re probably suppressed at this point.
“Yeah.” The toe under the wolf blanket wiggles near my knee. “He’s around every few weeks. He tells her that she shouldn’t work and that she doesn’t do a good job at pretty much anything. And that she’s fat and ugly and—”
But hearing what Brad has said about her boils my blood.
“Your mom is none of those things.” I can’t help the way the words jar from my throat.
I cough, and squeeze her toe through the blanket.
“I’m sorry for talking over you, Sally. You deserve to be heard.
And I’m sorry Brad hurts your mom with cruel talk. ”
He’s there every few weeks, abusing the fuck outta her? And she’s told no one? Winnie and I have lots to talk about once she’s done tearing her brother a new asshole.
“It’s okay, West. I know she’s none of those things. I love her.”
My heart clenches on the simple statement all bundled up in a tight ball under Lanie’s old wolf blanket as Winnie and Cord hit their crescendo. Hell, I hope it’s their crescendo, or else they’ll never be done.
“Where’s Lanie?” I change subjects. Winnie went on a tirade earlier. I figure I’d better keep up to speed.
“She’s at the hospital in Cloakton.” The toe wiggles beneath my feet. “I’m sweaty.”
I nearly choke on my spit. “She’s where?” No wonder Winnie lost her shit. “Cute stuff, how long has Lanie been in the hospital?”
Sally sits up like she’s reciting facts.
“She had some cramps after she and Cord picked me up. So we went to her doctor, who told her to go to the hospital. And headaches. It was a false alarm for the baby, but they wanted to keep her. So they did. And Uncle Cord got me a burger and brought me home.” Sally shrugs, just like a ten-year-old who’s an only child does in the face of accepted chaos and no other frame of reference.
“Uh-huh.” I run a hand over my face and let Winnie and Cord run on with their argument. I’m staying the hell out of this one. Besides, my girl has it covered. “You want some snacks, or something?” I offer Sally.
“Maybe later? I think there’s a dinosaur movie on TV.” Her eyes peek out from between layers of the wolf blanket.
“Uh-huh,” I repeat, my vocabulary deserting me. “And are you supposed to watch said dinosaur movie?”
Sally’s blanket vibrates, though it doesn’t giggle—yet. “Maybe not? But they’re going to go for a while,” she points out as Winnie yells yet again. “So really, who’s going to know? You won’t get in trouble,” she tells me seriously.
I snort. “That is not how it works, wolf stuff.”
“That’s not my nickname.” She sounds like Winnie to a T.
“It is now.” I give her toe a squeeze. “Let’s see what we can find that’s borderline safe and that won’t get me castrated, all right?”
Sally opens her mouth to ask, but I forestall the question with a wave of my hand and try to pick a movie we both want to watch, knowing it’s unlikely that either of us will be awake when the Rand siblings are finished exchanging verbal blows in Cord’s office.