“Bite me.”
He didn’t respond to that provocation. Because part of him would like very much to bite her. Then she would know what the hell that meant.
So he just elbowed her. “Get back to work.”
“Fine, fine. When do we start training?”
“After Thanksgiving. After the wedding.”
The words felt weird on his tongue. Marriage didn’t matter to him. Not one bit. But he’d still never thought he would be doing it.
“Well, all right, then. I guess we get back to stringing fence.”
“I guess so.”
* * *
JAKE HAD ALWAYS liked Thanksgiving. It was one of the easier holidays to get through, even after his parents had passed. Because it was just... Loud and filled with food and people. And he and all his cousins, and his brother, had always done their best to make it the most chaotic, crazy event possible. There was always football, on TV and played out in the yard in the freezing cold, sometimes thrown around the living room. There was dinner, and then there was a second dinner, which they always ate on TV trays in the living room, and there was every kind of pie imaginable. The season itself didn’t come with the melancholy of Christmas, of the pressure of family memories, of his parents waking him up early in the morning so that he could open presents, of dressing up for church.
He primarily remembered everyone at Thanksgiving, not just his own family unit.
It was just the right amount of celebrating, without digging too deep into childhood scars, that he appreciated.
And today would be no exception. As they drove beneath the big sign that proclaimed the place Hope Springs Ranch, he smiled.
“This is it,” he said to Cal.
“Wow,” she said, looking around. “It’s... Well, it’s bigger than I expected it to be.”
“My dad had a pretty good spread here, but Ryder has made it something else. Our fathers worked together, though his dad was chief of police, and that was his primary work.”
“How come Ryder ended up running the ranch if it was your dad who ran it while your parents were alive?”
“Because Ryder was the only one that was eighteen. He was the one who had to take care of everybody. For years. He and the kids needed the house. And in the end, he was the one who really saved us all. Who established our roots here. Who grew this operation so that it supported us, and supported him, as well. Besides, I had itchy feet. I wasn’t ready to stay here. Not yet.”
His relationship to home was complicated and always had been.
It was the circumstances of everything, he was sure. Because Ryder had to be the father figure. There had been no other option. And he’d done it. He’d done it well. And he’d made sure that everybody was well taken care of.
He’d been a teenage boy, not a kid, not a man, not yet. Ryder had to become a man, and Jake had been... Lost somewhere in between.
He knew he’d been a pain in the ass. Sneaking out, getting drunk, in general being a dick to the one person that he was counting on to see him through everything, to keep the family together, and he just hadn’t seen it that way. Not at the time. He regretted that. Being so difficult for his cousin. And it was one reason that he’d always used pieces of the earnings he’d gotten on the road to help support the ranch at Hope Springs. Because it mattered. Because he’d had some atoning to do.
But yeah, for him the place would always be a haunted ground of what could have been. Because maybe this would’ve been his. In another life. Or maybe Colt’s, but they wouldn’t know. It was Ryder’s, and rightfully so. Nobody contested or questioned it. Things were just too different. You could never go back and pretend...
They could never pretend they hadn’t lost their parents. And that had reshaped the entire fabric of what this place was and what it could be. They couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t altered the fabric of who they were completely.
“If I open the door for you are you going to get mad at me?”
She narrowed her eyes and pushed the door open, letting herself out. And he chuckled, getting out and leading the way up the front porch. As soon as his boot hit the bottom step, the door flung open, and his little second cousin came charging out, all pudgy legs and a four-toothed grin, her wild blond hair sticking up at all angles. And her mother followed behind her—Sammy, in a flowing white dress, her blond hair not any more tamed than her daughter’s.
“You’re here,” she said, folding him into a lavender-scented hug.
“And you must be Cal,” she said, looking from him back to Callie.
He frowned at Sammy’s speculative look. “Yeah.”
Then his cousin Ryder filled up the doorway, standing behind his wife. “Hey, Jake,” he said. “Who’s this?”
“Cal,” Jake said.
Ryder laughed. “Hell. We thought your friend was a man.”
He saw Callie turn a shade of beetroot, all the way up into her hair. “Oh,” she said.
“Oh, well, then you’re going to think the rest of the story is even funnier,” Jake said, planting his hand in the center of Cal’s back and propelling her forward toward the house. They all collected inside, where his cousins Pansy, Rose and Iris already were, with their respective partners, as was his brother, Colt, who was sitting in the corner fiddling with the tuning pegs on his guitar.
Logan was next to him. Logan, who had been part of their ragtag band of misfit toys here in Hope Springs, as he had lost his mother in the same accident that had claimed their parents. Him getting together with Rose last Christmas had come as a source of shock to the family, since they’d all felt the family kind of way about Logan, and clearly Rose had not.
But they were happy, and that was what mattered.
“Everybody,” he said. “This is Callie Carson. Callie, everybody.”
They greeted her with an uneven roar, and he leaned in. “You’ll figure them out as we go. I figure if I tell you all their names now, you’re not going to remember, anyway. But you know Colt.”
Colt treated them to a half wave.
“I thought your friend was a man,” Rose said.
“What did you tell them about me?” Callie asked.
“I just said that my buddy Cal was coming up for Thanksgiving.”
“Oh. Well,” Callie said, sounding exasperated.
“Callie is my fiancée now,” he said.
The entire room went silent. Of all the things he’d expected from this pack of assholes, silence wasn’t it.
“It’s a funny story actually,” he said.