Chapter Eight
She was gone. Brett knew it even before he glanced out the front window and saw that her truck was no longer parked in the driveway.
In the time it had taken him to shower off his work day plus their expedition into the run-down bunkhouse, she must have slipped out of the house. He wondered where she was going.
To her lawyer’s?
If not for her trailer still being in the driveway, he might have figured that she’d taken off for good. That he’d scared her away from ranching. It wasn’t as easy and fun as she seemed to think it was.
Didn’t she realize how hard her dad had struggled?
She should have gone over the books with Blake. Instead, she’d taken off.
Maybe she’d gone to see Maci. But then Maci’s little SUV appeared in the driveway, heading toward the house. She would have passed Trish on the road if Trish had been going to see her.
He waited for her at the front door.
“Hey, Brett,” she greeted him. “What’s going on?”
He shrugged. “I really have no idea. Did you pass Trish on the road, by any chance?”
She shook her head. “No. Was she coming to see me or heading to town?”
“If she’d been doing either of those, you would have passed her,” he pointed out. “So she must be going to see him.” He thought as highly of Stokes as Frankie did, which wasn’t very high at all despite his sterling reputation as a champion of the underdog.
He hadn’t considered Trish an underdog. But now, knowing the struggles she’d had with her mother and her ex-husband, Brett realized that she might have been in those circumstances. That wasn’t the case with the ranch. At the moment, it definitely felt as if she had the upper hand.
“Hey, beautiful,” Blake said as he walked out of the kitchen to greet his girlfriend at the door. He passed Brett and pulled Maci into a hug.
A jab of envy hit Brett like an elbow. He’d felt that before when he’d seen how happy Blake was with Maci and Liam with Elise and Lucy.
At the time he hadn’t realized it was envy, though.
He’d just figured he was concerned about his brothers, worried that they might wind up getting hurt like Frank Dempsey had been. And their dad, when their mom died.
Was love worth that kind of pain?
Hopefully, his brothers and his sister, who was engaged, would never know that pain, only the love and happiness they were experiencing now.
Was he jealous of that love and happiness?
He shook his head at the thought. Absolutely not. If they wanted to put themselves at risk like that, that was their choice. It wasn’t one he was ever going to make for himself. And that was good, because one of them had to put the ranch first.
“You okay?” Blake asked when he noticed that Brett was still standing there.
He nodded.
“He’s worried about Trish,” Maci said.
“What about Trish?” Frankie asked, as she walked in the door Maci had left open. “Where is she?”
“Brett thinks she went to see her lawyer,” Maci said.
Frankie sucked in a breath. “Well, better that she goes to him than that he comes here again.” She shuddered. “I don’t want to see him ever again.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be an option,” Brett said.
“Why?” Blake asked. “What happened between the two of you today? Liam and I saw you walking back to the house together. Where were you?”
“The bunkhouse,” he replied.
“You thinking of moving out there?” Liam asked as he carried Lucy out from the kitchen. He must have been cooking because delicious aromas drifted out with him. “I hope Lucy’s not chasing you out of the house.”
“I don’t think it’s Lucy he wants to get away from,” Frankie said. “It’s Trish.”
It was Trish. But now that she was gone, he had a strange feeling. Like a hollowness. That was probably just about the ranch, though. He was worried that lawyer still might talk her into going after all of it.
“But she was out there, too,” Blake said. “Why?”
“She wants to start a kids’ camp at the ranch,” Brett said.
“She was serious about that?” Frankie asked.
“She mentioned it to you, too?”
She and Maci nodded. “She seems really excited about it,” Maci added.
“It’s a stupid idea,” he protested. “It will expose us to all kinds of liability.”
“And children,” Liam said, chuckling. “Isn’t that really what you don’t want? A bunch of kids running around the ranch?”
“Who’s running around the ranch?” Elise asked from the kitchen doorway. “Come and eat. It’s all ready.”
“Children,” Liam said and shared with his wife Trish’s desire to start the camps.
“I love that,” Elise said.
“Brett doesn’t,” Liam said.
He shook his head. “That’s not the case. I would have loved it when we were kids.”
Blake and Liam nodded.
“It would have been great to spend our summers on a ranch,” Brett acknowledged. “It might have made up for our parents moving us to the city. But now, with all the work we already do around here, why would I want to add more work? Because that’s all this will be, more work and more trouble.”
“And more kids,” Liam said with a mocking grin.
“I love Lucy,” he said. “And I love being her uncle. But this camp idea… I’m just not sure that it’s feasible.”
When no one else said anything, he sighed and added, “But I’m not going to worry about the camps and her petting zoo idea until I know what she’s decided about the will.” None of it would matter if he wasn’t able to keep his inheritance of the ranch.
“So you think that’s why she’s meeting with her lawyer,” Maci said. “Because she’s made a decision?”
He nodded. “I think so.”
“And? What do you think she decided?” Liam asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. When we were in the bunkhouse and she was talking about her plans, I reminded her how much work a cattle ranch is. Maybe she’s changed her mind about wanting to be part of it.”
Or she just wanted it all for herself now so she could turn it into what she wanted without any resistance from him.
* * *
“I made my decision,” Trish said when Nolan Stokes opened the front door of his new, two-story modern house.
With its metal and glass and sharp roof lines, the place looked like it belonged downtown in some big city, not in the middle of fields and pastures.
Even the barn matched the house with its sharp angles and black metal.
“Come in,” he said as he stepped back for her to enter past the ten-foot-high entrance door to the foyer.
The ceilings soared even higher in the wide-open spaces. He gestured in one direction and said, “The kids are still eating…”
Through a doorway, she caught a glimpse of dark cabinets and a long table where three kids sat staring at plates of vegetables.
There were two girls with pale blond hair.
One was probably seven or eight, and she sat next to the younger one, who was probably just three.
Her hair was wispy with little tendrils curling softly around her face.
A boy, who was probably somewhere in the middle of their ages at five or six, had black hair and Nolan’s pale blue eyes.
“They’re beautiful,” she murmured.
“They’re stubborn,” he said with a sigh. “Nobody wants to eat their vegetables.” He raised his voice. “And they know they don’t get dessert until they eat at least half of them…”
The boy sighed but picked up his fork and stuck it into a spear of broccoli. The older girl lifted her chin, and the younger one stuck out her bottom lip.
Instead of getting irritated, Nolan laughed. “Who knew my toughest negotiations would be with my own children?”
Babies are a lot of work. That was what Brett had told her just that afternoon. And Lucy was still a baby. The work didn’t stop when they got older.
And Trish had decided to do this on her own. But plenty of people did. Nolan Stokes was doing it. She could, too.
She had to.
She didn’t have a choice now.
“Here,” he said as he slid open a pocket door off the foyer. “Let’s step into my office, so that they have time to hide their vegetables without me catching them.”
She laughed now. This was a side she never would have suspected him of having. “You’re a good dad,” she said as she followed him into the room with its high ceiling, tall windows and dark furniture.
He sighed. “I have no idea what I’m doing half the time, like moving them out of the city to this ranch,” he said. “Hopefully they survive to adulthood.”
She touched her belly. For her first few pregnancies, she hadn’t let herself think much beyond the pregnancy. But these babies were doing well. They would make it, and then she would have to figure out how to get them to adulthood.
“What about you, Trish?” he asked. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“As a mother?” She shook her head. “All my mother taught me was what not to do.”
“Sometimes that’s the most important stuff to know,” Nolan said. “What about the will? What are you going to do about that?”
“I’m not going to fight it.”
He groaned. “You’ve only been there a couple of days, and they already coerced you into giving them what they want. No wonder they were able to get your dad to change his will.”
Trish shook her head. “The only person who ever coerced my father was my mother. After her, I seriously doubt he would have let anyone else do that.”
“You don’t believe that the Lemmons conned him?”
“No,” she said. “I believe they worked hard, and my dad always rewarded hard work.” That was why he’d paid for Maci’s law school.
“But you are his rightful heir,” Nolan said. “You shouldn’t have to share what’s yours with strangers.”
She might have only been at the ranch for a couple of days, but the Lemmons didn’t feel like strangers anymore.
Especially not Brett. He wasn’t happy she was there, but he had been kind to her.
He’d also been very honest today, and that had scared her.
But he was right. Ranching and raising kids were both hard work.
Trish glanced out the big window at the pasture. “Do you manage this ranch, too?”