3. Cash
CASH
Idip out of work early today to make time for self-care.
Because self-care is important.
So I take my bike out on an empty county road, letting the throttle out until whatever’s been living in my skull decides to fuck off for a while.
All of the stress—gone. At least, for an hour or two.
Here’s the thing nobody in my family will say out loud but everybody knows: Rhett gets the ranch. It’s obvious as he’s the first born—golden child—and the one Uncle Luke is grooming to take over when he finally lets go of it, which isn’t anytime soon, but eventually.
Rhett will own the primary share, and I’ll own a portion.
I figured that out early on. I don’t hold it against anyone, I just decided if the game was already rigged, I wasn’t going to spend my life pretending I had a shot at winning it.
So I don’t. I do whatever the fuck I want. I drink too much, smoke a little weed, fuck women I have zero intention of calling back, and I work the ranch because it’s in my blood and I’m good at it.
But I don’t carry it the way Rhett does.
Dawson’s somewhere in the middle—running the horse side of things, performing restraint like that’s going to tip something in his favor.
It won’t.
But I love him so I don’t say that.
So I just ride my bike, let everything go quiet, and call it self-care, because it is.
I’m coming up on Miller Creek when I catch the pink flash in my mirror.
A pink sports bike pulls up alongside me and I get maybe two seconds to assess before I’ve already clocked the most important detail.
It’s a woman.
The fit of the jacket, the curve of her waist where it meets the seat.
And, look, I’m a man with a pulse and she’s got a body that even full leathers can’t argue with.
The hips don’t lie and neither does that ass, which is doing something genuinely impressive for someone going seventy miles an hour.
I give it more throttle.
She answers immediately.
Okay. So that’s how it is.
We run the road for a good stretch—trading the lead, neither of us being reckless but neither of us being polite about it either. There’s a conversation that happens between two people on bikes that can’t happen any other way, because we can’t see each other’s faces, or hear our voices.
The road bends south at Miller Creek and she takes the inside line, carrying more speed into the apex than I’d have risked, weight shifted perfectly, not a wobble, and just like that, the gap opens up. Ten feet. Twenty. And then she’s gone over the rise before I’ve finished the thought.
I ease back.
Huh.
I don’t get dusted on this road, that’s just a fact. And she just took it from me like I wasn’t even a consideration. The messed up part is I’m not even mad. A woman just smoked me on my own county road, and I want to know everything about her.
Rhett, Dawson, and I pull up in the truck to meet Colt at The Bar.
I like Colt.
My brother, on the other hand, would consider him a mortal enemy.
Rhett’s jaw does something when he spots him.
I just chalk it up to some bullshit that probably happened to them at work today. He’s going to just leave it alone for the night, and so should I.
Here’s the thing about The Bar:
Aria Dawson has run this place for as long as I can remember, which means she’s been watching me do stupid things since I was old enough to follow my brother through the door. She’s my mom’s best friend. They’re so close that Dawson’s named after her.
Aria loves me in the way that women who watched you come into the world love you—with zero tolerance for your bullshit. The woman is more terrifying than my mother, though, as we’ve heard rumors within the family that Aria shot someone in The Bar for looking at her the wrong way.
I’m about sixty percent sure it’s something the adults made up to keep us in line.
Forty percent is a lot of uncertainty, though.
I’ve looked at that woman across this bar a thousand times and there’s something behind her eyes that doesn’t fully rule it out. She smiles at you and the smile is warm, and then you catch the edge of whatever’s underneath it and you think—yeah. Yeah, maybe.
Her niece, and Colt’s older sister, came back three months ago.
I’ve known her my entire life, but she’s older than me.
Then she went to college, got married, and moved somewhere else entirely, and became just a name that came up at family things.
I never thought about her specifically. She was filed under Dawson family details as “not relevant to Cash.”
Then she came back.
She came back with pink hair and a bigger personality than I ever remembered her having. The Halle I remembered was a pretty girl in the background of my summers growing up—quiet and put together.
This version looks like she stopped giving a shit about what she’s supposed to look like, and I find that deeply attractive. So much so that the realization went straight past my brain and landed in my dick.
And then there’s the divorce.
She left her husband—or he did something.
Who the fuck cares, though, because she’s back, she’s single, and I have a very specific and well-documented appreciation for divorced women.
I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s something about a woman who has been through some traumatic shit that makes them animals in bed.
And I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
Since her return, I started coming into The Bar more regularly, even though drinking is cheaper at home. But I’m consistent when something interests me. And Halle interests me. So, I’ve been patient. I’ve been charming. I’ve been everything short of showing up with a goddamn sign.
But then she calls me kid and turns away.
Every. Single. Time.
I’m exactly the kind of man that women in this town do not say no to, and Halle Dawson looks at me like I’m a slightly amusing inconvenience, then goes back to serving other customers.
It’s pissing me off.
Halle Dawson is fucking up my order of operations.
I begin to rack the balls at the pool table as my brothers go and grab drinks. Dawson comes back with a highball glass filled with a pink bubbly liquid and a resigned look on his face.
“Halle gave me a Shirley Temple,” he says.
“She knows how old you are.”
“I’m twenty…”
“Tell her that. See what happens,” I say, pointing at Aunt A.
He looks at Aria at the far end of the bar and visibly decides against it.
I laugh, walk over to the bar myself, and flag down Halle.
She comes over without any sense of urgency.
The pink hair is down tonight, hitting right at her shoulders, and I make myself look at her face instead, which is also, it turns out, a problem.
She’s got this mouth on her with full lips, the kind that look like they need to bleed red from me biting them.
“Hey, Halle,” I say.
She lets out a huff of exhaustion. “Hey, kid. A beer?”
I’m twenty-one years old. I have a full-sleeve tattoo, can bench more than Rhett on a bad day, and I ride a sport bike faster than most people in this county, and she calls me kid. I’ll rearrange her guts with my fucking dick and see if she calls me kid afterwards.
I nod. “Yes, ma’am.”
Halle smiles and walks to grab me a beer. I watch her as she moves. Her ass is in tight denim shorts tonight and a crop top that rides high enough to see her barely-soft belly.
“Holy shit. Is that Halle Dawson?” a voice bellows from a few stools down from me.
The guy leaning over the bar is someone I don’t recognize. He’s tall, even sitting on the stool, and wearing an Abercrombie polo that’s a size too small. He looks like the type that peaked in high school.
Halle hands me my beer and looks over at the guy. “What can I get you, Tyler?”
He looks at her, grinning from ear to fucking ear. “Depends…what’re you recommending these days?”
“Therapy,” she replies, deadpan.
The guy next to him laughs and the grip I have on my beer bottle loosens at her rejection toward him.
Because Halle belongs to me. She can fight this all she wants, but one day, she will let me have her. So fuck mister ex-Hollister model.
The guy laughs. “Damn, you’re still feisty.” His eyes rake over her, and I want to carve them out of his skull.
I could kill him.
I could saw his body up into pieces and bury them in the Ozarks.
No one would find him.
I shake the thought away instead. My brothers and I promised my mom no one else would catch a felony.
Halle places her hand on the counter and the other one on her hip, tilting her head to look at him, waiting for him to order.
“Gotta say, you filled out real nice,” he says.
Nope. I think I may, in fact, catch a felony tonight.
I want to walk over there, grab the guy by the back of the neck, and slam his face into the bar until he learns to keep his eyes and mouth to himself around what’s mine. I go to stand, but watch Halle lift a finger, stopping me.
“Drink…order one, or leave, Tyler.”
He lifts his hands. “Relax. I’m just messing around.”
“Yeah.” She nods. “And I’m just doing my job. So unless you want to turn tail and leave when I pull out my aunt’s shotgun, I suggest you pick something with alcohol in it.”
There’s a beat, then Tyler laughs, shaking his head. “All right. All right. Two beers for us.”
She smiles sarcastically. “See?” she says, pulling out two beers from the cooler. “Not that fucking hard.”
Halle slides the drinks over and moves on without another word, and a slow, proud grin spreads across my face. She handled herself and it only makes me want her more.
Before I decide to punch the guy for breathing her air space, I pick up my beer and walk back to the pool table. Dawson’s leaning against the rail, watching me approach with that lazy, all-knowing smirk he gets when he’s already read me like a book.
“What took you so long?” he asks, chalking his cue.
“Ehh…some asshole was giving Halle a hard time at the bar,” I say, grabbing my stick and eyeing the table. “Had to make sure I didn’t need to knock his lights out.”
“And?”
“And nothing,” I grunt, lining up my shot. “She handled it. Told him to order a drink or get the hell out. Was funny, honestly.”