29. Carson James
29
CARSON JAMES
“Y
ou should call it a day,” Nate said, appearing in my bedroom doorway.
I looked up from the mountain of laundry I was sorting and raised an eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”
He sighed and loped over, then grabbed one of my shirts and an unused hanger. “The girls are up at Momma’s. Chris and I are heading down to Ray’s. Let’s go.”
“I need to finish up,” I mumbled as I moved to the next stack of clothes.
It had taken me all day, but I had put the door to the under-sink cabinet back on its hinges. I replaced the ripped-up floor planks. All the shit Lennon’s brother had scattered had been organized and put away. I’d even washed the sheets for good measure.
Putting away the clothes that had been ripped out of the closet was the last item on my list, and it was taking fucking forever to finish.
“You need to walk away,” Nate said.
I cut my eyes over at him. “You can go. I have shit to do. And if you mean to walk away from Lennon, you can fuck off.”
He sighed. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Don’t know how you could have meant it any other way,” I said as I jammed the hanger back on the rail.
“Take it from someone who has a long track record of avoidance tactics. You aren’t gonna be able to distract yourself out of this shit. But given the fact that you banished your girl to the ranch house, it’s clear that you’re not ready to work through it yet. So, walk away from it and come eat at Ray’s. The mess will be here when you come back.”
He was right, but I wasn’t ready to admit it out loud.
“I want to get this shit cleaned up before Lennon comes back down here. I don’t want her to see the mess.”
Nate watched me for a moment as I worked through getting Lennon’s and my clothes back in the closet, but I didn’t care. He could fucking stare all he wanted.
After a long stretch of silence, he wandered over and picked up a shirt and a coat hanger.
“You love her, don’t you?”
“I thought that was obvious,” I said.
Nate chuckled. “I’ve never seen you with a woman. You don’t date a lot. You’ve never brought anyone around.”
“Pretty wild guess considering you were rarely around to know whether I was dating or not.”
Nate’s shoulders stiffened. “I kept tabs.”
“Keeping tabs isn’t the same as being here.” I shoved a flannel button-up onto a hanger. “You were deployed. I get it. But don’t pretend like it changes anything. It was what it was.”
“We’re still brothers,” Nate said with an irritated edge to his voice. That was him—Mr. Army Captain. He was used to giving orders and having people hop to it immediately.
I scoffed. “So are Lennon and her brother. Saying we’re brothers doesn’t mean shit if you don’t act like it.”
“You’re angry.”
“No shit, I’m angry!” I shouted as I pitched a coat hanger at the wall. “Some psychopath broke into my bunkhouse, and then got his throat slit. And now I’m having to deal with this and you while she’s up at Momma’s house.”
I pressed my fist to the closet door frame. Goddamn, I was in deep shit with this woman.
Nate picked up a pair of pants. “Come on. I’ll help you finish up.”
We worked in silence until we reduced the piles of tossed clothes to nothing.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” Nate said as he hung the last piece on his side of the closet. “Truth be told, I was dealing with my own demons. The divorce. Getting hurt over there. I wasn’t the brother you needed.”
“You don’t get to make that decision.”
“We’re all out here trying to rewrite the script that was given to us. I didn’t want to become Dad, so I went off and joined the Army. Christian watched me leave and felt like he had to stay. Ray saw Christian settling down with Gretchen to start a family, so he went out and joined the rodeo circuit. And you didn’t want to become any of us, so you dug your heels into the land. Nothing wrong with that. It’s damn admirable. But you have to realize that we’re all doing the best we can. Making choices that affect the trajectory of your life is hard. Trying to avoid becoming someone else doesn’t make you become better or worse. There’s no right answer, Carson.”
Nate stopped me with a hand on the back of my shoulder. “I couldn’t be prouder of the man you’ve become, even if I wasn’t around to see it.”
I worked my tongue over my teeth, again and again, trying to keep the stinging in my eyes from getting the better of me.
“I’ve made my fair share of mistakes, Carson. Ask Becks. I bet she keeps a list on hand for reference when we fight. Hell, Becks, Cass, and Brooke are probably initiating Lennon into the council of Griffith women so she can consult them if she doesn’t think you’re groveling hard enough when you fuck up.” He chuckled. “I don’t know her that well yet, but I hope she sticks around so I can. I think she’s good for you. You need a woman who’s not afraid to tell you when you’re wrong.”
That made me crack a smile. Lennon pulled no punches.
“She’s a lot like Becks.”
Nate cracked a grin. “Mouthy as hell?”
I snickered. “Maybe more than Becks.”
“Then she’s good for you.”
I closed the closet and started picking up my tools, stuffing them back in the bag. “Sorry I was a dick. You still heading to Ray’s for dinner?”
Nate shrugged. “Pretty sure that’s what brothers do. I’d be worried if you weren’t.”
I took the long way to Ray’s house, letting my arm hang out of the truck window and float in the breeze.
Nate and Christian parked in the driveway beside Ray’s wheelchair ramp. I found a spot around back, headed up the ramp, and let myself in through the sliding door.
Christian looked up from the kitchen island where he was opening pizza boxes. Several packs of beer were stacked in rows beside them.
I remembered times when Christian and Nate would get together, drink beers, and shoot the shit. I had always been too young to join them. By the time I could partake, their lives had turned upside down.
“I tell you what—the girls learning how to drive used to scare the shit out of me,” Christian said. “Then I realized I could call ’em up when they’re in town and ask them to bring pizzas back to the ranch.”
Ray laughed as he pulled clean laundry out of the dryer and dropped it into the basket on his lap. “Your own personal gophers?”
“Just wait until Seth is driving,” Christian said. “It’ll change your life.”
“I’ll take him out with me,” I said as I snagged a beer from the cardboard pack. “Get him driving around the ranch before he’s tall enough to reach the pedals like Dad did with us.”
Ray grinned. “That’s the beauty of my truck. No pedals. All hand controls.”
Nate clapped his hands together and grabbed a plate. “I’m starving.”
“Aren’t we waiting for the girls to come down?” Ray asked.
“Nah. Becks texted and said they got food from the restaurant. They’re already eating,” Nate said.
“How’s Lennon holding up?” Christian asked as he loaded his plate.
I rested my shoulder on the wall. Honestly, I had no idea. She was a steel vault.
“Shocked is an understatement,” I said.
Ray slammed the dryer shut, spun his wheelchair around, and rolled into his room to set the laundry basket on the bed. “You gonna put a ring on it?”
The thought of proposing to Lennon was a given. It wasn’t that I had sat down and thought about the event of it—the ring, the location, and the words I would say. It was simply that I knew deep in my soul that I was at peace with her.
Maybe that’s where I had gotten it wrong before. For most of my adult life, I had been waiting for the fire to die down, when I should have been looking for the person I wanted to walk through it with. I should have known she was the one the minute I saw that phoenix tattooed on her arm.
Fire fears what it cannot consume.
“Thinking about it,” I said as I snagged a slice of pepperoni.
“Gonna move out of the bunkhouse?” Christian asked.
A definitive “yes” was on the tip of my tongue, but I wanted to hold my cards close to the vest. Besides, there were a few loose ends I needed to tie up to make that possible.
“If you’re hesitating, you’re fucking up,” Ray said as he shuffled a slice out of the box and onto a plate. “Don’t be a jackass and make her wait because you don’t want to seem too eager.”
“If you don’t treat her right, I’ll kick your ass,” Christian said.
I scoffed. “If I don’t treat her right, Lennon will kick my ass. Or are you forgetting about the little family reunion we had in the office when she clocked me in the face?”
Christian laughed. “And look how well it turned out for you. You deserved that, by the way.”
“I know I did.”
“Lennon punched you in the face?” Nate asked.
Ray grinned. “I knew I liked her.”
“What’s the deal with the dead brother?” Ray asked.
“Geez,” Christian muttered as he cracked into another beer and settled on the couch. “You don’t bury the lede, do you?”
“I lost all my spare fucks when I was in the hospital,” Ray said. “No sense in dicking around.”
“I don’t know. The cops don’t know. Lennon doesn’t know,” I said. “We haven’t talked about it since this morning. She’s been up at Momma’s, and I’ve been trying to clean up shit so we can sleep in the bunkhouse.”
Ray smirked. “Cass has been texting me updates. She hasn’t said much, but she’s been letting Seth color her tattoos. That practically makes her family. Once you get your tattoos colored, there’s no going back.”
“Wait,” Christian said. “You and my wife text?”
“Yeah,” Ray said as he looked at his phone. “And I kick her ass in our crossword puzzle game.”
Nate looked at Christian. “Becks used to play it with them, but she won too much, so they kicked her out.”
I loved the women my brothers had married.
Becks had filled a role none of us knew was missing when she joined the ranch. Her presence strengthened my mom and gave everyone a reason to get together.
Brooke and I worked together as she learned about horses and took over the equine program with Cassandra. Cassandra and I had bonded over her hatred of riding horses. Slowly, I changed that.
For some reason, knowing Ray had bonded with them in different ways than I had brought a smile to my face.
Even with the distance I felt from Nate, the four of us had always been brothers. But with the girls joining the ranch, they felt more like family than ever.
Part of me wondered how Lennon fit into that equation. The thought of my nephew coloring her tattoos with markers, like my nieces used to do to Ray, made me want to rush to the house and get down on one knee right then and there.
But would she stay for the long haul? She was so fucking talented. She could be working in any one of DeRossi’s restaurants all over the country. I had looked them up—New York, Chicago, North Carolina, California, Vegas...
I couldn’t ask her to give up a career she had fought for tooth and nail.
“What’s Lennon’s number? I need to get her in on it,” Ray said. “She’s quiet, which means she’ll probably wipe the floor with Cass and me. Always gotta watch out for the quiet ones.”
“Yeah,” I said as my beer soured in my stomach. “She’d probably be good at it.”
Christian was staring at me from across the room. He tipped his head in Nate’s direction. “He’s got that look.”
Nate nodded. “Yep. He’s got it bad.”
“The fuck are you talking about?” I muttered as I took another sip to wash down the nervous acid in my mouth.
“Cards on the table,” Ray said. “You wanna marry her?”
“Yeah.” It slipped out before I could stop it.
“Good,” Nate said. “At least he can admit it. That’s a start.”
I scrubbed my palm down my face. “What are y’all getting at?”
Christian wiped his hands clean. “Consider us at your disposal for planning your proposal. Nate and I have each done it twice.”
“I learned what not to do the first time,” Nate said.
“Ray’s done it once,” Christian said as he hopped up and grabbed a bag that was beside the pizzas and beers. He dropped it at my feet.
I opened it up and lifted out Lennon’s ranch jacket.
“We know she’s going through shit,” Ray said. “And we’ve all been there. So don’t rush it. You do this ‘lone cowboy’ thing, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If you need advice on how to handle things, you don’t have to go at it alone.”
It doesn’t have to be that way —alone.
I didn’t know who needed to hear that more: me or Lennon.
The lights in my parents’ house shone brightly as I drove up to get Lennon. She met me on the porch, easing out of one of the rocking chairs and heading down the stairs.
“Hey, trouble,” I said as I pulled her into my arms and held her tight. “Sorry I was gone so long.”
“It’s fine,” she said as she closed her eyes. “Cass told me you were with your brothers. I figured you needed that.”
“Why do you say that?”
She shrugged. “You don’t spend a lot of time with them.”
I pressed a kiss to her temple. “You might be right. I need to get better at that.”
“I’m sorry if you stopped hanging out with them because of me.”
I shook my head. “Nah. You’re the reason I see them more now. You’re good for me.” I swayed in the porch light, keeping her close. “How are you holding up?”
Her eyelids fluttered closed. “I’ve been fed and had my tattoos colored. And I’m now part of a crossword puzzle game with Ray and Cassandra, which is kind of weird.”
I chuckled. “That’s not what I meant, love.”
Lennon was quiet for a moment before finally piping up again. “I feel numb.”
“It’s a complicated situation,” I said. A tear streaked down the corner of her eye, and I wiped it away. “It’s okay to grieve, Len. He was still your brother.”
“I want things to go back to the way they were two days ago.” She sucked in a shaky breath. “We were happy.”
“I’m still happy with you. Just because there are clouds doesn’t mean the sun doesn’t exist. You don’t have to put up a front and pretend like it doesn’t hurt. Let it hurt. Let it heal. You don’t have to have all the answers right now.”
Lennon nodded against my chest. “I like your family,” she admitted. “A lot.”
“Good,” I said as I softly kissed her lips. “Because I’m pretty sure they love you too. And Len?”
“Hmm?” She looked up with diamond-covered lashes.
I wiped her tear-stained cheeks again. “I love you too.”
Lennon looked down at her feet. “I...I don’t know how to take that. I mean, I know you’ve said it before, but I...It’s weird saying it. I feel it. But it’s like, if I admit that I love you too, then I’m risking getting hurt and I...I don’t know if I’ll survive that.”
It stung, given the conversation about my intentions that I had with my brothers.
“You don’t have to say it back,” I reassured her. “But I want you to know where I stand. I love you, and I will not hurt you.”
She let out a nervous laugh. “Can’t you just push me against the wall and fuck my mouth or something? I know how to handle that. I’m good at that. I’ve never thought about what it would be like to fall in love, and it scares me.”
“It’s okay to be scared, Len.” I rested my forehead on hers.
“It’s not,” she whispered as the words choked her.
I pressed a long kiss to her forehead. “It is. You know why?” I cupped her cheeks. “Because you scare me.”