And they didn’t do any talking that night.
Chapter Twenty
It was a rare morning out on the ranch, where Cody had actually joined the workers on the ranch side, rather than being on the resort side.
Zane still hadn’t replaced his goddamn gloves, and he felt overly conscious of that as he stood next to Cody.
“Do the gloves have anything to do with –”
“Yes,” he said.
“I thought so,” Cody said, looking overly smug.
But Zane felt smug. Last night had been amazing. Another one spent with Cara, and he could really get used to it. Waking up with another person. Sharing breakfast with another person, looking forward to seeing them at night. His whole life had been so solitary. He got up, he had breakfast alone, he usually had lunch alone, even at work, out on the ranch. Then, unless the Graysons invited him over for dinner, he went home, and he ate by himself. He went to bed by himself. Even when he hooked up with a woman, he would drive away from the hotel and go to bed alone.
Alone had been the standard for a very long time, and last night he had thought that he would have another night of it –and fair enough, they didn’t need to spend every night together – but then she showed up.
She showed up, and he was so damned happy that she had.
In fact, he felt something like giddy, and he didn’t know if he’d ever felt that in his life.
“Well, at least I know now,” Cody said, taking a sip of his cowboy coffee, which he was sipping out of a tin mug.
Zane was all for strong coffees, but Cody took it a little bit too far. You could practically chew this stuff.
“You know, since we’re sharing now,” Zane said.
“Are we?”
“Well, more than we used to. I thought I ought to let you know I’m thinking about starting my own operation.”
“Oh. As in… Not working at this one.”
“Yeah. Though, me fully not working here would probably be a couple of years away. But my father bred horses in Texas. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about getting back into that. It feels like a family legacy. I have an eye to buy a really good stud horse, and probably right at first what I’ll be doing is sending his material off for breeding, rather than having horses on my land, but eventually…”
“I think that’s a great idea,” Cody said. “Though, if you’re going to do that, I think you need to open up more of our land for tourists to go through.”
“Absolutely fucking not.”
“Oh, come on. It seems only fair if you’re going to abandon me.”
“I’m not going to abandon you,” he said. “It… It wouldn’t have happened at all if it weren’t for you. If it weren’t for the friendship that you’ve given me over the last few years.” Cody was looking at him like Zane had slapped him in the face. “Don’t say anything, because if you do, I’m not going to be able to finish this. It’s you, Cody, you have changed my life. You making friends with me in the rodeo, you giving me a place to go to. That put me on a different path. It gave me a sense of belonging, it gave me… A little bit of a family. And now, I feel like I can put down roots, because I feel like there’s a new place I can call home. I didn’t think I would ever feel that again.”
Cody looked down, and it took a moment for Zane to realize that his friend was overcome with an emotion. Well, damn. Zane felt pretty much the same way.
He’d rather not have feelings, not any kind of feelings, but the truth was, he’d never successfully outrun them either.
Because all the anger that he felt all this time, all of the denial, the isolation, the walls built up around them, those were feelings.
It was just easy… Hell, it was comfortable to pretend that they weren’t.
“I really, really care about her,” he said.
“Seems like making a ranch, making a life for yourself, that’s a pretty good start if you want to be with her.”
Zane shifted. “But I don’t know how to be with anybody. It feels wrong. It just feels wrong to experiment on her. To try and build something for myself when… This is when I feel conscious of the fact that she’s younger. But she’s had it difficult. That she should have it easy, I’m not easy.”
“Do you love her?”
