34. Weaponized Mom Guilt
WEAPONIZED MOM GUILT
Dean
ONE YEAR LATER
Inever expected to be sentimental about the events division, but the calendar on Felicity’s office wall was starting to look like a victory lap.
She’d taken Lockhart Ranch to the next level.
We were booking corporate retreats, birthdays, anniversaries, a recurring “Goat Yoga and Mimosas” the first Sunday of every month.
Her name was on every contract, her laugh in every room, her color-coded sticky notes covering the office like wildflowers invading a field.
Today was the second annual Cowboys and Campfires weekend, a Lockhart Ranch tradition that last year had nearly not happened because of me, my limited vision, and lack of trust in people. I was not a fan when she proposed it, but damn, had she proved me wrong.
This year was already running ahead of schedule, which Felicity declared “a literal miracle.” The entire ranch was strung with lights and mason jar lanterns.
Every corner of the main field was occupied—kids on haybales, parents at long picnic tables, the grill crew in lockdown around a mountain of ribs.
Maverick, still in the throes of his cowboy obsession, had traded his usual sneakers for a pair of red boots and one of my hats, despite it being so large it kept sliding over his eyes. He’d been having the time of his life hanging out with Tabby, my oldest brother’s daughter.
I’d had a hard time accepting Deacon. My reservations had nothing to do with him, I just wasn’t great at letting new people into my inner circle, whether we shared DNA or not. But over the past year, his daughter Tabitha and Maverick had become best friends.
They came to visit fairly often, at least once a month and seeing, not only what a great dad Deacon was to Tabby, but also what a great stepdad he was to his wife Jenna’s daughter Blake made me respect him more than I could say.
Tabby and Mav had just finished the stick horse barrel race, eaten two s’mores, and were bobbing for apples.
Felicity, dressed in denim jeans that molded to her ass like it was her second skin and a white tank top and the cowboy boots I’d got her for Christmas, was making the rounds with a clipboard, checking on the volunteers and making sure they had everything they needed.
I was counting down minutes and trying not to have a full-fledged panic attack.
The scavenger hunt was starting in ten minutes, and I had a special card clue in my pocket and a ring, a real ring in my other.
I’d been planning this for six months, and now that the time was finally here, I couldn’t feel my legs.
“You good bro?” Damon walked up and slapped me on the shoulder.
“Yeah, why?”
He gave me a side-eye. “You look as pale as Casper.”
I hadn’t told any of my family what I was planning today. It’s not that I didn’t trust them, it was just…I didn’t trust them. If one of them knew something, then everyone did. The only place rumors spread faster than in town was at the ranch.
“Just tired,” I lied. I actually wanted to throw up.
As we spoke a stunning redhead and a knockout brunette walked by, both smiling and making their interest very clear.
I nodded at them, to be polite, and waited to hear Damon make some cocky comment regarding their attention and claim it was only directed at him or say something about the women needing a tour of Lockhart Ranch and nominating himself as the guide. But neither of those things happened.
In fact, he didn’t even seem to notice at all. His eyes were busy scanning the crowd.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“What?” He blinked. “Yeah, why?”
“You seem…distracted.”
“Do you know who all is here with Deacon?”
“Everyone.”
His eyes lit up. “Everyone?”
I nodded.
“Everyone, everyone?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked. “Jenna, Blake and Tabby are with him.”
“Right, yeah.” He nodded. “Good.”
I had no idea what was going on with my little brother. I’d never seen him like this. I felt like he’d been taken over by alien body snatchers or something.
Actually, now that I thought about it, Damon hadn’t been his usual “charming” self in a while. He’d seemed less and less interested in women, which used to be his entire personality.
“Who did you think was coming?” As soon as I asked the question, the answer came to me. It was so obvious, but I hadn’t been paying attention. “If it’s Mikayla, she’s not coming until next weekend for her cousin’s wedding. I heard her and Felicity on the phone.”
“What? No, I wasn’t…” Damon’s response was defensive. “I just wanted to know if my nieces were here.”
“Right. Okay. Sure.” I smiled. If he thought that was convincing, I seriously hoped he was never interrogated for a crime he actually committed.
I was still staring at him when he said, “Whatever,” and walked away.
Holy shit. I had never seen Damon bail on a conversation. His usual M.O. was the more uncomfortable, the better. But of course, he was always the one making the person uncomfortable, not being uncomfortable himself. It was nice to have the tables turned for once.
“Hey, is everything okay?” Felicity asked, glancing back over her shoulder at Damon, as she walked up to me.
“I know it might sound crazy, but I think Damon has a thing for Mikayla.”
“Oh, that, yeah,” she said as if it were old news or common knowledge.
“You knew?!”
“I didn’t know, know. But last year at Dawson and Sadie’s wedding they played Flirt Chicken and I’m pretty sure Damon won.”
“So they have a thing?” I knew that I was out of the loop about a lot of things, but I should have picked up on that.
“No.” Felicity shook her head. “At least, not that I know of. Mikayla has been getting over a bad breakup, and I don’t think she takes your brother seriously.”
“Normally, neither do I…” But I’d never seen him like this.
An alarm sounded on her phone. “Oh, okay, I’m gonna go check on the band, I’ll see you later.”
I reached out and grabbed her wrist. “It’s time for the scavenger hunt,” I reminded her.
“Oh, right.” Her nose scrunched in the most adorable way it did when she was going to bail on something. “I have too much to do, can you take Mav?”
No. I couldn’t take Mav. This was definitely a time I needed her to participate.
“Yeah, sure, no problem. I can,” I tried to play it cool. “I just know he’s looking forward to it being all of us, because it was the first time he said it felt like we were a real family.”
I would never use mom guilt as a weapon of manipulation. In fact, I hated that those two words were even synonymous with each other.
No woman should ever feel guilty for working or spending time with her friends, or exercising, or all the other fifty thousand tasks they have to do, which I never appreciated until Felicity and Maverick came into my life.
But desperate times, called for desperate measure.
Her head fell back and she sighed. “Yeah, no, you’re right. I know he’s been excited and I promised.”
Yes, Mom Guilt, for the win.
That sounded bad out of context.
After a quick roundup of little man, I handed out our handkerchiefs, which were the same color as last year. We gathered the first ten clues with no issue, and I managed to switch the final clue with my card without Felicity noticing.
She and Maverick found it and she read the clue. While she was distracted, I sent out a quick Bat Signal text to my family to meet us at the storage warehouse, and emoji of a ring, and added the word shhhhhh.
“Where saddles sleep and treasures hide, and ranch supplies are tucked inside. No guests check in, no horses stay, find where we stash the ranch away,” Felicity repeated the clue for the second time and looked up to me, her baby blue eyes swimming with confusion.
She shook her head. “It has to be the storage warehouse but why would they send people to the storage warehouse?”
“Maybe it’s not,” I suggested, knowing exactly what her response would be.
“No, it has to be!” she exclaimed, doubling down just like I knew she would. “Where saddles sleep and treasures hide, and ranch supplies are tucked inside. No guests check in, no horses stay. Find where we stash the ranch away,” she said, her tone indicating it couldn’t be anything else.
“Yeah, maybe.” I shrugged casually, knowing it would drive her crazy that I wasn’t agreeing with her, which I knew would only make her work harder to convince me.
“No, it is. What else could it be?” She started speed walking to the storage warehouse.
On the short walk she continued defending her conclusion, going over why it couldn’t be anything else, and that she was going to speak to Wes because guests shouldn’t be sent to the storage warehouse.
When we got there, she was still so focused on convincing me it was the location, and trying to figure out what would have possibly possessed Wes and his team to use it, she wasn’t paying any attention as I punched in the code and we walked inside.
“Whoa!” Maverick enthused as he spun around in a circle taking in the decor. “So cool.”
There were fairy lights, rugs layered on top of each other, and one packing blanket as a nod to our first time together, drapes covering up all the boxes, chairs, tables, and everything else stored there.
A chandelier hung from the ceiling, there were flowers everywhere and over a hundred photos of us hanging from the rafters on strings.
Her jaw dropped.
Literally dropped.
For one terrifying second, I wondered if I’d miscalculated.
Which didn’t happen often.
I calculated things for a living. Numbers. Risks. Probabilities. Worst-case scenarios. I could look at six columns of financial data and tell you exactly where someone had screwed up, how badly they’d screwed up, and approximately how much it was going to cost to unscrew it.
But there was no spreadsheet for this.
No formula for determining whether the woman you loved would appreciate several thousand tiny white lights strung through the rafters, a ridiculous number of flowers, and a four-year-old jumping around like it was a giant bouncy house.