Hoyt's throat moved. He didn't answer, but I wasn't really asking him to. There was a long way to go with all of it, and we weren't getting there tonight, but it was enough that I'd said it. It was enough that he'd heard.
He ambled to his truck and drove from the house to the back of the barn.
“You okay?” Lucas asked quietly.
“Yeah.” I pulled him close and hugged him. “I channeled the Pop-Tart, but shit, that was hard. I don’t know whether to love him or hate him.”
“It’s all good. It’ll work out,” Lucas said, sounding so certain. Then, he cradled my face and smiled at me, and myheart flipped over again. I loved this man, and it was as strong and certain as the mountains. “I love you,” he whispered as he kissed me.
I wanted to cry—what kind of cowboy even does that shit? I blinked back the tears and buried my face in his neck. I could stay here forever.
“Uhm, boss?” I groaned and pulled away from Lucas to see Jake standing there, grinning at me. “Should I come back later, or do you two want to finish whatever that was first?”
“Asshole.”
“Is now a bad time to ask where the spare fencing wire went—because it’s not where it should be.”
“By the small barn, second rack,” Jesse said. “And yeah, it’s a bad time.”
Jake nodded to the left. “And the new arrival?”
I sighed. “That would be my brother, Hoyt. You can spread it around. He’s parked up behind the barn and is mending tack for now.”
Jake didn’t know Hoyt, had never met him, but he was a big-time bull rider, and obviously, people talk. I waited for questions, but Jake nodded, kept quiet, tipped his hat, then headed off to the small barn.
And when I turned back to Lucas, he smiled at me. “Go help Jake,” he said, and gave me one more kiss. “I’ve got cabin renovations to plan.”
Epilogue – Lucas
Another six months later
Our new marketing guy, Nathan, had opinions.
“Relax,” he said for the third time and turned to me. “I’m not turning this into a fashion spread, Lu, but I do need Jesse to look like himself. Rancher. Honest. Trustworthy.”
“I’ll fix it,” I said.
Jesse grunted from the doorway, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
He was freshly showered, hair still damp, clean jeans, the good shirt I’d talked him into after a lot of eye-rolling and oneextremelydistracting blowjob in the shower that hadn’t improved his mood as much as I’d hoped.
“Fancying around is not what cowboys do,” he muttered, tugging at the collar.
“You own a ranch with a website made in this decadenow,” I said, going over and straightening the fabric. It had taken me three weeks and two very patient meetings with Nathan to get the old staff listing down. Abel Knox, foreman, had been up there long after he'd stopped being either of those things, and I'd felt Jesse go still the first time he saw me working on it. He hadn't said anything. I'd deleted the entry and moved on. “This is exactly what cowboys do.”
His jaw tightened. Not at me. Not really.
It had been a bad morning. A phone call from his father’s facility had him driving there at first light, refusing to let me come with him. He’d come back an hour later, and gone straight to the barn without stopping at the house.
I'd made coffee and left it on the fence post where he'd find it, and when he came back in a while after with mud on his boots, I handed him a fresh cup and kept my mouth shut. His dad was getting worse, and Jesse knew what that meant and that it wasn’t going to be easy. But he'd done the hard thing already. The papers, the facility, the twice-monthly visits to a man who'd spent decades grinding him down. He'd handled all of it, and he was still standing, and I was going to spend the next fifty years making sure he knew that mattered.
And now he was having to pose for photos.
“Can you move him?” Nathan asked me, waving to the left at a grumpy Jesse who apparently wasn’t in frame.
“I’m not a slab of meat,” Jesse grumbled.
I smiled at him as I repositioned my sexy cowboy near the barn doors, where the light caught just right, and for a second, Jesse looked… devastatingly beautiful.
