Chapter 1 #2
Probably inherited from his dad. He had just admitted to her recently that the father they’d thought they all shared—who was a rich deadbeat that had left them this property—wasn’t actually Walker’s father.
It made no difference to her.
Parentage didn’t mean much of anything when none of your parents had been all that great.
But she’d been lucky. She had Walker, she had Cody.
And Nolan, she supposed, though he was not her brother.
She was very, very clear on that.
He had never felt like her brother, even if he did sometimes treat her like a sister.
“Well, chainsaw it up, bro,” she said.
He laughed and reached for the large pack that he had hauled in.
They were getting to the point that, when the weather was good, they were leaving some of their supplies behind so they didn’t have to pack it in every day.
Shirtless, dirty, and looking far too good for her own peace of mind, Nolan picked up the chainsaw and headed forward.
He lifted it up, the muscles on his back flexing, and then he pulled the rip cord. Twice, three times, every time her heart pounding against her chest, and then it started up, the high-pitched buzzing sound reverberating through her as he began to take some of the larger branches down.
They were doing their best to cut into everything as little as possible. They weren’t using bulldozers, they weren’t using heavy equipment, but they were carving the trail just as wide as a horse would need to get through.
They would be leaving the trail relatively rocky and rough, rather than leveling everything out.
This wasn’t supposed to be an easy little walk in the woods, it was an endurance ride. And it was supposed to be a challenge.
Twenty-five miles’ worth of challenge.
Of course, riding the trail once it existed would be much easier than creating the trail.
The one thing Lila could admire was her biceps. The work she had put in with the Pulaski, chopping roots and saplings to help with major obstacles, the bow saw, and an axe had done a lot to refine her arms.
Not that anybody enjoyed that.
The trouble with being in a town this small, and staying in a town this small, was that she knew all the idiots that were her age. And she wasn’t into them, and the feeling was pretty much mutual.
And yes, part of the problem with her was that her reputation as being blunt to the point of deadly preceded her. And it was a reputation she had earned.
As sharp as she could be now, she had been much worse when she was younger.
She’d had a chip on her shoulder, and she had made it everybody else’s problem.
And while her brothers were relatively amused by the way people in the town seemed to like them now that they had money, Lila didn’t find that amusing.
Her entire childhood had been marked by an inability to make friends, or to only make friends who saw her as a sort of Pygmalion that they could mold and shape and make over.
Turn her into whatever their version of acceptable was.
Make her more feminine, more fashionable, more pious.
Teach her to talk like a lady, sit like a lady, walk like a lady.
Before she had stopped bothering with those sorts of charity friendships, she could remember one of her friend’s moms walking behind her and making a comment about how Lila needed to learn to walk across the ground, rather than sinking into each and every step like she was a lumberjack.
Her response to that had been to tell her friend’s mom, deadpan, absolutely seriously, that Lila would love to grow up to be a lumberjack.
And while she wasn’t a lumberjack, there was a significant amount of jacking lumber involved in this job.
So, goal achieved.
And that little mental detour had at least taken her mind off Nolan for a moment.
But now she was looking at him again, at the way he maneuvered the chainsaw, bringing the chain through the wood like butter.
She watched the way his muscles shifted, the way the tattoo on his forearm—a swirling mix of mountains, clouds, and trees—shifted along with that movement.
Working with him in proximity had been a unique challenge.
The situation with him was prickly, yes, but it was also something she had been dealing with for more than a decade.
Even though they saw each other a lot, this had increased their togetherness time. And it was a lot more time alone than she was used to.
Nolan did a lot of work on the ranch that had nothing to do with her—he had carved a lot of the art features around the place, he led a lot of trail rides—while she managed some of the logistics with employees at the hotel, on the grounds and dealt with vendors and orders on a practical level, they still often found themselves intersecting on the same projects.
And when she had come up with the idea to bring more extreme outdoor activities to the ranch, Nolan had been the person to go to about it.
Because Nolan was the kind of person who would want to do those things.
Part of the issue with him was that they were a lot alike in some ways.
But also very different in others. It was those strange meshes and clashes that created inflection points that were often difficult to see coming.
But, of course, most of those inflection points were inside of her, and not something that he ever had any idea about.
Which was for the best. Definitely for the best.
He turned around, just as he kicked the chainsaw off, and swung his arm down at his side, giving her an obscene view of his chest and ab muscles, sweat trailing down between them.
Life would be easier if she had approached sex differently. This was the problem.
Her problem was she had compared every guy she’d even almost tried to date with what Nolan made her feel just looking at him fifty feet away.
And maybe that was unrealistic.
Maybe real physical contact wasn’t supposed to feel like that. Maybe only fantasy was supposed to make your heart beat faster and your knees shake. Maybe only fantasy could wind you up to the point that you had to yell at the object of your fantasy to keep them from getting too close to you.
So maybe when a guy that took her out to dinner and put his hand over hers failed to make an impact, she shouldn’t be surprised. Maybe you had to actually ride the horse to get that experience.
But the trouble was, nothing had made her want to mount the horse — so to speak — not when she could go have a fight with Nolan and have a full body response. Something entirely different and more exciting, enervating and exasperating than anything that happened on one of those dates.
She was under-kissed, underwhelmed, and sadly, virginal, which was annoying because she didn’t like that as a label at all. It suggested a level of softness and innocence that she simply didn’t possess and never had.
She felt, philosophically, like she would be a great candidate to be a good-time girl. Like she had the kind of mentality that would allow her to have casual sex. To simply hop on, get what she came for and hop off, never think about the guy again.
She had attachment issues, and who could blame her, and that kind of thing seemed like it would make casual sex easy.
She felt completely philosophical about that. She felt like there was really no big deal to be made of it. Tab A, slot B, and there you go.
But in reality, she just thought that she didn’t want to have sex that wasn’t exciting. She didn’t want to have sex that didn’t thrill her, and so that left her intimately untouched.
Which didn’t match up with her personality at all. She wasn’t shy, she wasn’t retiring, she wasn’t prudish in any regard.
Yet, she had never even kissed one of those other guys.
She just had this weird fucking obsession with her brother’s best friend, and she couldn’t get rid of it. It made her hate him even more. Made her want to punch him in his beautiful face, and then made her want to...
No. She wasn’t going to go there. She couldn’t go there.
“Forge away, Lila. You’re the one that wants to get another half a mile today. That’s going to take another few hours, and then we’re going to have to hike back.”
“Are you questioning things?”
“I’m not questioning anything, I’m just telling you, it’s going to be a twelve, so we’ve gotta keep going.”
“I’m the one that was just telling you that.”
“Well, now you’re just standing there.”
She growled and moved over to grab her tools, then brushed past him.
She was sawing at branches and clearing the pathway until her muscles ached.
Sweat was rolling down her back, trickling down her temples.
Doing this in September had been a choice. It was just still so hot.
And fall wasn’t showing signs of trying to get there any faster.
The sun was brutal, and there was some lingering smoke in the air from wildfires that were a few hundred miles away.
It made the sun just a little bit orange, and made it feel like you were close to a campout.
“Defeated yet?” Nolan asked, wiping his own brow again.
Still shirtless.
“Yeah, I think I’m ready to call it a day since we still have to hike back. Can we just leave everything?”
“I don’t see why not,” he said.
He bent down and picked up a giant log that was lying there in the middle of the trail and then threw it like he was in some kind of Highland Games competition, the movement looking effortless, and as the log hit the ground with a thud, she felt it echo between her legs.
She decided not to say anything. Not even anything snarky.
Because heaven help her. She just needed to get some space.
She took her phone out of her pocket. It was overheating.
She really needed to get a new one. Her brother Walker always had the latest phone.
He replaced things like that once a year.
She’d had hers for about four years, and it could barely keep a charge, and overheated terribly in weather like this.
The screen was dim, but she could still read Cody’s text to both her and Nolan, asking if they wanted to have dinner.
Great.