Chapter 6
I buried the love of my life in this place I never wanted to go to. Now I’m alone in this house. Alone in this life. Living a dream that was never mine without the one who wanted it.
After the barbecue, he decided to stay at his new homestead.
There was no power on inside the house yet—but the construction site was powered up, so although he couldn’t flick the lights on inside, there were some utility lights he could use.
He was sort of grateful for the lack of heat, because he could use the time to cool down.
Maybe take a cold shower.
Maybe engage in a little physical labor.
Who the hell was he?
A year ago, he’d have gone to The Watering Hole and found a woman.
Hell, three months ago, he’d have done it.
Three months ago, he had done it. Now his body was fixated on one woman because she’d brought him a plate of food, and the only thing he could think to do to get his mind off her was … cabinetry?
Okay, it hadn’t started with the plate of food but … God. It was visceral. His reaction to her. His desire for her.
Was he getting old? Was that what this was?
He’d rather stay home with his carpentry than get laid?
Images of Cassidy ran through his mind. Her handing him that beer.
Her looking at Dalton. An image of her lying sprawled out in the arena dirt pushed to the forefront of his mind, and he had to grit his teeth against an onslaught of intense …
everything. She’d scared him to death earlier, and then she’d impressed the hell out of him by getting right back on the horse even though he was being an absolute dick about it.
He’d been harder on her than he needed to be and he knew it.
But she’d … scared him and he’d wanted to scare her right back.
“You’re unhinged,” he said to himself as he walked into the kitchen and looked around at the progress. It was coming along. Pretty soon the house would be fully habitable—right now he was going back and forth between the homestead and the trailer he still had at his parents’ place.
If his parents were bothered by the fact that Jessie and he were moving away at the same time—they hadn’t said.
It wasn’t as if he’d been home his whole life.
He’d done a lot of stints on the road with the rodeo.
Back then, it hadn’t made sense for him to keep a house when he’d been traveling all the time, and then later, it hadn’t made sense because it was easier to live at the Wild West Show when he was working there almost round the clock.
He did the physical part. Planning and arranging staff, reining his dad in when his ideas got too wild.
Jessie Jane had always done the budgeting and the taxes and all the paperwork.
He was good at playing the stock market, but he never wanted to sit down and actually focus on a spreadsheet full of numbers.
Turn it into a game? Sure. But the idea of sitting and focusing on dry numbers was his nightmare.
Well, along with reading something that didn’t interest him, writing about something boring, or listening to a lecture he didn’t want to hear.
There were a lot of reasons he hadn’t graduated from high school—but not caring was the biggest. If something didn’t spark his interest, he just … couldn’t do it.
There was some concern on his end about this whole ranching thing. He worried that when the house was done, and the plotting and planning and learning was done, he’d get sick of it. But he had to do something.
What he didn’t want was to be his dad—gray-haired, wearing a fringe jacket, and running a western circus.
Maybe that was mean. His dad had accomplished a lot.
West’s difficulty in sitting and listening was amplified in his dad.
His mom was … her own whole thing. Neither of his parents was able to socialize.
They weren’t conventional. So they’d cobbled together an unconventional life, filled with showmanship, unstructured days, and a support crew of other people who were like them.
It had made for a wild childhood, that was for sure. There hadn’t always been food; the power had been shut off sometimes. Maybe that was one reason he didn’t mind being up here with just the construction lamps.
It reminded him of home.
He chuckled dryly as he moved to his workstation and used his phone’s flashlight to guide him to the lights, so he could turn them on. The flood lamps filled the space, and he set the phone on the sawhorse set up next to the cabinets—which still didn’t have countertops affixed to them.
He was working on drawer faces, which would need to be sanded and stained to match the bodies of the cabinets that were already installed.
It was meditative work, and surprisingly, he liked it, but watching the way the clear glaze brought out the natural grain of the wood was interesting.
It was like discovering something new every time.
Though his mind did wander off while he worked.
But it wasn’t bad. This was his project, and he could do it however he wanted.
He didn’t have teachers looming over him, watching his every move.
Complaining that he didn’t sit still in his seat or that he was doodling instead of listening—how was he supposed to listen if he wasn’t doing something else to keep his brain tethered to the moment? That was the thing.
But they didn’t get it.
Fine. He was more successful than any other asshole in his class.
Even more successful than Carson Wilder, in his opinion.
He’d bought his own land; he hadn’t inherited it like the Wilders.
They all had a massive chip on their shoulders about what had happened in the past, and for what?
They had land. Sure, Butch had taken the whole bag when he’d run off, but he’d lost it all somewhere along the line, that was for damn sure.
He’d settled elsewhere, and his descendants had eventually returned to Rustler Mountain, but not with big parcels of land awaiting them. Both families might be outlaws, but the Hancocks were outlaws non grata.
He was making a second pass over the wood, watching it darken, watching the red come out and the brown tones deepen, when his phone lit up.
Cassidy Wilder.
So, Boss of Me, when is rehearsal tomorrow?
The boss thing had been a little mean, and now she was saying it back to him, and his physical response to the words was so over the top it was ridiculous.
The arrow of desire that shot straight to his gut—and then lower—was so intense it was almost as if he’d lured her into this exchange just for the satisfaction he’d get out of it.
Almost.
He picked his phone up and unlocked it. What if I asked you to come in extra early?
Do you need me to?
Maybe.
I didn’t text you for a maybe I need a time.
If I’m the boss of you then I get to decide the time and how I give that time to you.
Goddamn. He was playing stupid games.
idk
He stared at her response. Well, whatever was happening in his head wasn’t happening in hers.
I don’t speak text.
sry forgot u were old
But she didn’t elaborate. Which was fine because he knew what idk meant, though he refused to acknowledge that he did.
What do you do with all the time you save not writing out whole words and adding punctuation?
idk
Brat.
Seven AM.
He wrote it out to seem even older. He chose the time to be mean.
He was punishing himself, but honestly, he loved it when things were harder than they needed to be. It made him feel alive.
She sent back a thumbs-up emoji, which he had a feeling was intended to be as bratty as everything else.
He imagined her lying in bed holding her phone and he just stopped.
Didn’t pick up the paintbrush he was using, didn’t do anything.
He just braced himself against the sawhorse and breathed through the pain.
Maybe this was the problem. Wanting a woman like this was a novelty. Usually wanting was over quickly. He wanted; he had. The end. Mystery solved. But this was damn near close to longing, and that was … not something he had experience with.
He let out a hard breath and consigned himself to a cold shower, because he had to do something.
He refused—he absolutely refused—to pleasure himself while thinking about her, because that was something a teenager would do and he was not a teenager, not even close.
He wouldn’t let Cassidy Wilder make him act like one.
He didn’t sleep well. It was freezing in the house and even though he’d signed up for that by staying the night there, he hated it and spent many hours cursing himself for the decision.
He was bone tired when he climbed into his truck with a tumbler of coffee and a bad attitude. He blasted the heater the whole way to the Wild West Show while he marinated in the consequences of his own actions.
Not an unfamiliar state, to be fair.
He did some dumb shit. The road he walked was littered with the detritus of bad decisions he’d made that had blown up on him. He’d decided a long time ago that he had to just accept his own mess. He’d also decided that it was okay, provided he didn’t make it someone else’s problem.
He’d made that mistake once. He’d fallen into a relationship and it had felt comfortable, so comfortable that he lost track of time—he hadn’t started setting timers for himself yet at that point.
He had been detached, focused on other things, and ultimately the whole affair had ended with her sobbing in his arms while she told him he’d broken her heart, while he …
Hadn’t actually been all that engaged.
He’d seen himself far too clearly in that moment, and he hadn’t liked what he saw. So many of his father’s attributes—which had always made their lives hard, but without the obsessive devotion his father had to West’s mother.