SLADE
“Yo, Slade.” Tanner stands in his stirrups, already not watching the cattle. “Your pipes bust or something? What’s with all the painters?”
I’m with my Dad, my younger brother and our informally adopted brother Rafe, who’s also Wild Rose’s foreman, trying to get our cattle from one pasture to another. The cattle are being difficult, which suits me fine. I don’t shy away from a challenge.
I’ve had years of professional challenge playing in front of crowds, of being watched and evaluated and written about. I don’t like that part of it, but it’s tolerable because I can escape it and come home to this. Dust and horses and uncooperative animals on a cold September morning. My family land. My brothers’ voices carrying across the grass.
Nobody watching. Nobody keeping score.
“Redoing some stuff at the house,” I say in answer to Tanner.
“Where’s your new dog?”
“Dropped her off to be watched.”
I keep everything as vague as possible, which isn’t unusual for me. Besides, my brothers wouldn’t suspect that I’ve dropped off “my” dog with a beautiful woman I can’t stop thinking about.
“What broke?” Tanner pushes.
“Nothing.”
His brow furrows. “You’re just repainting for the hell of it?”
“Why not?”
“Because you sleep on a mattress on the floor. What do you care about what color your walls are painted?”
“I need furniture, so I hired a designer. Designer said the walls need new paint color, so they’re getting painted.”
“You hired a designer,” he repeats, obviously baffled.
Rafe glances over once. “Who’d you hire?”
“Local firm.”
“What’s the name?” my father pipes up.
I don’t give my family details. Details become questions become a conversation I don’t want to have.
This detail in particular is one I have no intention of handing over. The detail being a certain gorgeous pink-haired designer who picks out ridiculous squeaky toys that have somehow ended up in my home, along with the three-legged dog I’m fostering because it puts a smile on her face. The designer I’ve been finding reasons to stay with twenty minutes longer every morning this week.
Tanner would never let me hear the end of it if he knew. Let alone if it got back to Walker, who had to put up with us giving him shit for turning into a lovesick fool over his now-wife. He’d just love to turn the tables on me.
More importantly, there’s nothing to tell. Lila is my designer. She’ll be in my life for a few months and then I’llleave for another city and another season and she’ll have probably been snatched up by some other cowboy by then.
An emotionally available one, one good at relationships, like she deserves.
And that’ll be that.
But my dad asked directly and I’m not going to lie to my dad. I tell him, “The name is Lila Interiors.”
“Never heard of it,” Dad muses. “Must be new in town.”
“Yup.”
Tanner perks up. “Lila. That’s a name. That’s a woman’s name.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” I say.
