Unexpected Family

“Yes,” she groaned, lifting herself into him, the sweetest arch, the sweetest capitulation. He grasped his hands over her hips, taking all her weight and, like every teenage fantasy of what a woman should do, she slipped those long legs around his waist.

Ready to take her into the house, he turned toward the screen door, but immediately tripped over Casey’s scooter and then backed into Ben’s baseball bat—both of which clattered to the ground. The sound was like gunshot in the quiet night.

He tore his lips from Lucy’s and focused his gaze on Casey’s window just above them. He held his breath, waiting for the light to come on, for the five-year-old to come looking for him like he did every night.

But the window stayed dark.

Thank God.

He sighed, resting his head against Lucy’s.

Under the relief that Casey hadn’t woken up, he felt something awful, a black tidal wave of anger. A tsunami of resentment.

A kiss. One goddamned kiss in the moonlight! Couldn’t he just have that? Couldn’t he just have this one thing for himself?

He didn’t ask for any of this—the ranch, the work and the boys who stared at him with their hearts in their eyes.

I don’t want it! I don’t want any of it!

The scream gagged him. His miserliness shamed him. Those boys didn’t ask for him, either. In a heartbeat they’d take their mom and he’d give Annie back to them if only he could.

Lucy pressed her lips to his and he wanted—more than anything in the world right now—to get right where he’d been in that kiss. But the moment was gone.

There were three kids in that house. A drunk cowboy. And three days’ worth of work to get done all before he could go to bed.

That was his life and the truth was he was terrified of what would happen if he forgot that, even for an hour. How much of his resentment and anger would slip through the cracks of the control he’d had to build up over the past year. How many days would it take for him to look those kids in the eyes again? How many nights of staring up at the ceiling and forcing himself not to run away?

The answer was too many.

He kissed her, a tender, reluctant goodbye kiss. And she must have read it in his lips because she unwrapped her legs from around his waist and slipped her arms from his neck.

“Well.” She patted his chest, her fingers so hot through his T-shirt he had to step back to get some distance. Some clarity. She blinked at him, her fingers suspended in the distance between them, and he had to look away. He hoped she wasn’t hurt, but he didn’t look at her to find out and he sure as hell didn’t ask, because he was such a mess. Everything was a mess.

Looking at her was like looking at everything he once had and could no longer have again.

“Thanks, cowboy,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“No sorry about it.” The teasing, the sauciness, in her voice made him smile, allowed him to look up at her. Allowed him to breathe.

“Thanks,” he said. “For Reese and for…”

“Rocking your world?”

He laughed. “It needed rocking.” Which was a lie. His life had been taken by its heels and shaken until everything he knew and recognized had vanished. He’d been rocked enough and what he needed was to be left alone so he could figure out how to handle it.

“Good night,” she said, and then she walked across his porch.

It was rude. Bad-mannered in the extreme but he did not follow. He did not yank open the sliding glass door for her, even though he knew it stuck. He just stood on that porch and stared up at the moon until he was numb enough to go back inside.

* * *

LUCY TOOK THE LONG WAY back to the Rocky M. Opening up Reese’s car over the pass, the engine roared and the world slipped by like a ribbon. The wind blasting through her open window wasn’t enough to cool her fevered skin and her damaged pride, so she hit the controls to roll down every window until it was a cyclone inside the car. Her hair whipped around her head and still her skin burned, her heart ached.

Stupidly, she felt like crying.

Don’t care, she told herself, slowing down to take the first curve down the mountain toward the ranch. You’ve got enough shit to worry about, without worrying about Jeremiah Stone.

The smart move would be to leave. To pack up her mother and face the mess in Los Angeles.

But the thought made her panic and a cold sweat formed around her hairline. She wasn’t ready. It had only been three weeks since she’d let go of her employees and closed up the shop.

Couldn’t she have some time to grieve? To lick her wounds? To hide?

Such a coward.

The Rocky M ranch slipped in and out of view through the pine trees until she turned left up the long driveway. The brown ranch house sat under a granite overhang. As a kid she’d prayed more than once that the mountain would fall down on that house. It baffled her that Mia could call this place home.

Mia and Lucy had grown up on here as the children of ranch employees. The McKibbons, Walter and his wife, owned the land while her father, A.J., had been the foreman and Lucy’s mom, Sandra, the housekeeper and cook. Mia and Lucy’s childhood hadn’t been unhappy, but it had never been secure. Not a moment had passed that they’d been unaware of their status. Every tie they had to this home and this land could be severed. And almost had been.

That this was where Lucy chose to lick her wounds was even more strange. But beggars couldn’t be choosy. Broke didn’t even begin to describe her financial state.

She parked beside her sister’s old pickup truck, rolled up the windows and turned off the engine. The quiet echoed and boomed like a heartbeat. Like the house was alive and waiting for her.

Exhausted by the roller coaster of the night, she finally pulled herself out of the car and into the house through the side door. It was midnight and the house was silent.

Mia and Jack were living a mile up the road, using the house Mia and Lucy grew up in—the little two-story that their mother, Sandra, had cared for so passionately—until their new house up in the high pastures was finished. Walter, Jack’s father, still occupied the ranch house. And for the past three weeks, Lucy and Sandra had been staying in the rear guest rooms of the house; they smelled like mothballs and had beds like hammocks.

She unzipped her boots in the mudroom, stepped back and looked at her gray high-heeled Prada knockoffs next to the filthy work boots. She saw it as the perfect example of how she didn’t belong here. Had never belonged here.

Just a little bit longer, she thought. Just until I formulate a plan. Get my feet under me.

Through the dark she walked right to her mother’s bedroom and knocked softly on the door.

“Mom?” she called, and she heard the bed creak.

“Come in, Lucy,” her mother said, and Lucy walked into the small bedroom. Mom pushed herself up in bed, her black hair a cloud around her shoulders. The white of her nightgown glowed in the dark. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

Knowing she needed no special permission, she crawled into her mother’s bed, the warmth under the covers immediately banishing the chill of the evening.

She curled up on her side and stared at her mother’s still-young face. They needed to find her a life. A man to take her dancing. A church group that would keep her young.

“Fine,” Lucy whispered, and Sandra turned on her side, her hands under her chin, mirroring Lucy’s position.

“It’s time for us to go home,” Sandra said.

“What? Why?”