Epilogue – Lucas
Another six months later
Our new marketing guy, Nathan, had opinions.
“Relax,” he said for the third time and turned to me. “I’m not turning this into a fashion spread, Lu, but I do need Jesse to look like himself. Rancher. Honest. Trustworthy.”
“I’ll fix it,” I said.
Jesse grunted from the doorway, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
He was freshly showered, hair still damp, clean jeans, the good shirt I’d talked him into after a lot of eye-rolling and one extremely distracting blowjob in the shower that hadn’t improved his mood as much as I’d hoped.
“Fancying around is not what cowboys do,” he muttered, tugging at the collar.
“You own a ranch with a website made in this decade now,” I said, going over and straightening the fabric.
It had taken me three weeks and two very patient meetings with Nathan to get the old staff listing down.
Abel Knox, foreman, had been up there long after he'd stopped being either of those things, and I'd felt Jesse go still the first time he saw me working on it.
He hadn't said anything. I'd deleted the entry and moved on. “This is exactly what cowboys do.”
His jaw tightened. Not at me. Not really.
It had been a bad morning. A phone call from his father’s facility had him driving there at first light, refusing to let me come with him. He’d come back an hour later, and gone straight to the barn without stopping at the house.
I'd made coffee and left it on the fence post where he'd find it, and when he came back in a while after with mud on his boots, I handed him a fresh cup and kept my mouth shut. His dad was getting worse, and Jesse knew what that meant and that it wasn’t going to be easy.
But he'd done the hard thing already. The papers, the facility, the twice-monthly visits to a man who'd spent decades grinding him down.
He'd handled all of it, and he was still standing, and I was going to spend the next fifty years making sure he knew that mattered.
And now he was having to pose for photos.
“Can you move him?” Nathan asked me, waving to the left at a grumpy Jesse who apparently wasn’t in frame.
“I’m not a slab of meat,” Jesse grumbled.
I smiled at him as I repositioned my sexy cowboy near the barn doors, where the light caught just right, and for a second, Jesse looked… devastatingly beautiful.
I stepped in close and kissed him, slow and sure, right there in front of Nathan and the other hands all waiting their turn for the website shots.
“You look perfect,” I murmured.
Jesse huffed a breath against my mouth. “You’re biased.”
“Let Nathan take his pictures, and I’ll show you how perfect you are later tonight.”
“Promise?”
“Absolutely. Also, FYI, you and me all fancied up would make for some amazing engagement photos.”
He stilled.
Then, he glanced down at me, something cautious and hopeful flickering in his eyes. “You asking me?”
I smiled because humor was how I kept from shaking.
We’d joked about it so often, but it had been over a year since I’d stepped foot on the ranch, and I wanted to leave my mark on the land and start a whole new dynasty, and the time was right.
“I mean… I have some strong arguments for us getting hitched.”
“You do?” he asked.
I leaned in to whisper. “Well, first up, I love you. Second, you give the best blowjobs, but maybe we should wait—”
He hauled me in by the back of my shirt, forehead pressed to mine. “No more teasing, no more waiting. Marry me, City.”
I laughed, breathless, hands fisting in his shirt. “A hundred yeses would never be enough.”
He kissed me then—slow, deep, unguarded—and everyone very politely pretended he wasn’t there as the camera’s shutter clicked.
Snow Creek behind us.
Everything ahead.
The End