Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
CORD
These Hollow Hours
“Fuck.”
The screwdriver twists between numb fingers that still don’t work properly. Maybe they never will. My brain screams at the loss of basic motor skills while my heart aches for something more. Something I refuse to recognize.
The loss of her.
All because I couldn’t do something simple like pick up a fucking screwdriver.
“You’re trying too hard. Here.” West reaches around me, scooping the tool out of the dirt and presses it back into my hand. The gentle touch of work-roughened hands brings me to my knees.
“Fuck off,” I grit out between teeth that won’t last long if I keep clenching them this damn hard. “I can do it myself.”
“No, you can’t, you entitled little shit,” West says soothingly. “But it’s okay because we’re going to get through this. I promise.”
“Yeah?” I fumble the screwdriver twice more and nearly stab us both. “Fu—”
“Let it out, big boy. You got this.”
“You should have been a motivational coach. Not a damned architect from a broken home,” I grouse in the best reverse shit talk I can manage.
Three weeks Lanie’s been gone. Three weeks of West manhandling me like a baby. The first two I came close to punching him. Would have, if my body had managed, and we both know it. But then, if I’d been able to do that, I wouldn’t need to be fucking babied, would I?
“Yeah, because everyone wants a high-functioning coach on the autism spectrum who walked out of a DV family household at seventeen and plays Sims because he’s an insomniac.” He grunts, lifting my inoperative ass off the ground.
I shrug. At least my shoulder works. “Maybe if you show my sister some of your more charming habits, she’ll see you for who you really are and you can start getting along.”
West drops me. “Well, shit.”
“Fucking ow.” I stare up at him from my place in the dirt. Everything stings, but nothing seemed to have rebroken. My toes wiggle in my boots. “What the hell was that for?”
Overcast gray eyes meet mine in a war of wills that, on a regular day, I probably wouldn’t win, the stubborn ass. But today…
“Focus on healing up and fixing your own house, Rand,” West mutters.
I smirk. “But your lovesick drama is so much more fun.” My smile drops as his hands shove under my armpits.
He hauls me up, heedless of whether my knees play ball for this round.
My feet hit the ground and I grab for traction with anything that would stick.
“Seriously, though. You’d be good for Winnie.
That douche she married is the definition of a sinking canoe.
She and Sally need a stable influence in their lives, and for fuck knows what reason, my sister actually seems to like—”
“I’m not the marrying sort, Rand, but thanks.
You already tried to give shit away before you died.
Don’t do it again. Besides, people can make their own choices.
” He pauses, hands pinching my arms as he steadies me, both of us breathing hard from the exertion in a swirling dust devil of our own making.
“I mean, look after your sister and niece, for sure. Hell, look after Lanie. That’s your fight with her, even though she’s gone.
But I’m doing just fine on my own, thanks.
Don’t need no handout from a lonely rich man who needs to buy his friends. ”
That stings, and he has to know it. Lanie’s absence is something we don’t talk about. I can’t force myself to face the fact she’s not in the homestead anymore, or in my bed each night when I shuffle back along the darkened corridors alone to my room.
Winnie and West have taken up residence in rooms opposite each other in the previously unused wing of the house where Sally usually stays.
But that leaves the rest of the homestead to just me.
No matter how full the house seemed when I first came back after the Invitational, how much I held back on my pain so I wouldn’t bother her, Lanie still packed up and took her grant back to Alaska without a single word to me.
Or maybe she did say something, and I wasn’t listening at all.
Now, my end of the house is just bare walls and empty halls.
And me to haunt them.
I twist in a way my surgeon would slap me for, just to see West’s face. Harsh lines pull taut, deepened from working shoulder to shoulder with me beneath the Montana sun and wind for the past decade.
“I was trying to protect you. Both of you.” What starts as a shithouse, snarky comeback emerges as something more honest and quiet.
West’s lip curls as the truth in my words hits home. “Then pick up the damn screwdriver and get this job done. Because we’ve got a whole helluva lot more to do if you want to go chasing your girl across another country to find her.”
My heart lurches as denial bubbles up in my chest. “She left.”
He barks a laugh as harsh as his face. “And you’re gonna take that shit? Cordell Rand, giving up because a girl walked out on you? Who the fuck are you, man? Give me that damn thing.” He snatches for the screwdriver that I clutch in stubborn fingers.
“No.”
“Give,” he snaps at me, impatient. “We don’t have all fucking day.”
“Mine.” I’m less than a toddler with a toy I shouldn’t have, but his words strike home as intended. “She’s mine, too,” I insist.
“Then move your behind, get the job done, and go get her,” he grates.
“Fine,” I snap back.
Silence falls between us, charged and brittle.
“Yeah, I told Jed I could, so I did.”
“Did what? You’re full of shit. You know that.”
Something clangs, and someone else swears as voices drift back to us on the other side of the barn. West and I both freeze, our ears perking up like a pair of biddies eavesdropping on the hottest town gossip at the adjacent table come bingo night.
“Yeah? Well, maybe I’ll be working for Jed next season. Seems like he’s got a good idea what he wants from the town.”
I frown, trying to work out who’s talking between the younger pair. Is that Jesse? I mouth to West.
Tripp, I think, he mouths back, eyes wide.
“And maybe you’ll be coming back here. Have you seen the boys who turn up on Cord’s doorstep, broke or pissed because Jed’s screwed them?”
“Yeah, that won’t happen. He’s got something up his sleeve.”
“Whatever.”
I frown, still unsure who’s who in the conversation. Hell, it could even be one of the other hands, or Billy, though I don’t think so. Dammit, I knew letting Jed around my boys was a bad idea. Now he’s poaching my staff right out from under me when I need my family the most.
The sounds shuffle away, but the voices don’t stop. I strain, West’s expression shuttering as he concentrates as hard as I do.
“You know he’s bad news.” The faint voice of reason, whoever it is, leaves me cheering internally. Whichever kid that is deserves a raise for his loyalty. That’s always meant the most to me. That, and hard work.
A soft laugh echoes across the otherwise silent yard. “You think Rand’s accident was a real accident? How the hell did you think Jed—”
I never hear the end of that sentence. My head jerks to one side. Something twinges, my vision going white with the pain that results in both a blinding blankness and an all-over numbing sensation all at once. West flinches, swearing as his attention turns away from the conversation and to me.
“Fuck, not now,” I mutter, straightening too fast. The world pivots, or maybe I do. Gravity no longer matters.
“Whoa.” Large hands catch me, a shadow much taller than West’s looming above me. “Not the right time to take a nap, boss.”
I blink and find my nose within an inch of the ground.
Billy eases me backward as I mumble my thanks.
The ground and sky meld for an instant, swirling in a dizzying kaleidoscope of grays and blues and browns.
Dust coats my tongue as I scrabble for the rope, certain Wreck’s hooves will slam into me over and over again.
But when my vision steadies, no bright lights flare the night wide, and no sterile scent floats around me.
Only faces I know well, concern etched in every expression.
I squeeze Billy’s hand, which still grips mine hard. I find West’s face among the crowd hanging over me, uncaring that I suck in more of Coyote Fall’s dust than air.
“All right. We do this like you said.”
I want to know who screwed with that bull, and I need my girl back.
Maybe not in that order.
Bite marks that do not come from a dire wolf decorate Aveline Swanson’s veranda.
Her cottage sits on the outskirts of Valiant Peak, a mile or so from its nearest neighbor.
Perfect fodder for wild critters to forage from, or rogue dire wolves, if the rumors that Pollux Jenkins and his media misfit band camped out on the poor woman’s lawn this morning are to be believed.
I hightail it across town, with West as my chauffeur, a solid week after my decision to seek out Lanie—a decision that has been delayed every damn day—to help out after a brief phone call.
Apparently last night was the only night that Dallas hasn’t spent at Aveline’s house this week, or for most of the month.
No one else, including any of the Coyote hands, seems to have any damn idea he had invested in anything more than a one-night stand.
For a small town, our lone wolf has managed to play his secret damn close to his chest. That’s a solid achievement in itself.
His rigid stance at her back tells its own story, not unlike the one developing between West and my sister.
But from the look of the stricken woman who keeps glancing between her broken house, I have the impression that Dallas won’t be going anywhere any time soon.
Her back door hangs from its hinges in what appears to be a failed break-in more than a wolf attack.
The crowd gathers on her front lawn, leaving Dallas in defender mode.
He’s claimed her for sure, even if he has to set up camp on the rickety chair beside the broken door.