Bowen’s boots skitter to a stop. “Are you seriously second-guessing our plans?”
No. Maybe. “Just thinking of all the angles. We don’t know what Dad’s will is.”
“It’s a living trust.”
“No shit.”
He shrugs. The nerd in him can’t help but correct me. “He was that close to Meredith?”
“He loved Holly, and she and Meredith were all he had after he drove us off. We’re going to have to wait until after the funeral before we know for sure.”
Bowen grunts, likely unhappy to hear about what a tidy little family unit they were without us. “The funeral planning’s done?”
I update him on how Thursday is going to go. He glowers as much as I did when he hears about the reception.
Just as I finish, a truck pulls in behind us. Carlos parks his dirty white pickup and hops out.
He grins and holds his arms out. “Thought I was seeing double for a minute there.”
Bowen gets a hug and a hearty clap on the back. When Carlos lets him go, there’s a shine in his eyes, and he sniffs.
“Any word on the third stooge?”
“No, Uncle Carlos,” Bowen says. “He always was the most stubborn.”
“It’s a three-way tie.” Carlos hitches up his jeans, making him look more bowlegged than normal, and rakes his gaze down Bowen. “Pretty nice pants you got there.”
“You’d file an indecent exposure complaint with HR if I wore my old ones.” Bowen thumps the heel of his boot on the ground. “Good thing these still fit. I’d ruin a five-hundred-dollar pair of shoes otherwise.”
I’m nodding, but Carlos’s gaze oscillates between us like he can’t understand what we’re saying. “All the equipment in the office didn’t even cost five hundred dollars.” He swaggers through the barn. “Might as well break those pretty threads in with the bottle calves.”
We both follow him like we used to do with Dad, and the comfort that sinks into my bones is staggering. I get to wake up and hang out with two of the few people I can stand spending time with. The only way this day would’ve been better is if I’d woken up to a beautiful woman.
I wipe Meredith’s distraught gaze from my head. Did she get some rest last night? I didn’t. Not only did the way she left keep me up, but the smoldering kiss robbed me of rest entirely. The way her thighs gripped the sides of my hips. How her tongue stroked mine. I’d been so close to coming I should be ashamed.
“Ah, hell.”
Carlos’s voice meets me before I enter the fenced-off area with the bottle calves. One little Angus calf lies in the corner, not trotting over to us like the others. His ears droop, and a line of snot streams from his nose.
“Probably pneumonia,” Carlos says, and memories lock in place of treating sick animals with Dad. The way he’d gather me and my brothers around to explain what it could be—coccidiosis,scours, nutrient deficiency, anything. We’d treat as much as we could before calling a vet. “Let me call Sawyer real quick.”
I want him to ask Sawyer how Meredith is when they talk, but then he’d ask why I want to know. I keep my mouth shut and prepare bottles to feed the other two with Bowen. By the time we’re done, and I’ve been headbutted by a calf at least ten times, my phone pings with the alert of Sawyer’s arrival, thanks to the alarm system. She pulls up and jumps out of her vaguely familiar beat-up blue truck.
“Is that Dad’s old truck?” Bowen’s tone fires hot.
My stomach sinks. I haven’t even had the chance to introduce them. I don’t have the best history with Sawyer, and now she likely knows what our plans are. However, a “how ya doing?” would’ve been a better greeting.
“Hey, Sawyer. I don’t know if you remember Bowen.”
“I remember,” she says curtly. “I bought the pickup from Ransom.” She glares at my brother. Her salty gaze shifts to me. “So, you can’t sell that out from under Meredith.”
Bowen sucks in a breath. Neither of us has a retort, and if we did, it’d put us deeper into asshole territory.
She hauls a supply bag out of the back seat. Bowen receives the same distasteful inspection of his outfit from her. “Are you going to try to buy it from me when that Camero of yours gets its paint chipped by the gravel?”
Bowen puffs his chest out like she ripped up his “country boy” card. “It was all the rental company had.”
“Is that what happened?” she asks innocently and walks away, extra sass in her steps.
