“They didn’t need me anymore.” But that isn’t quite true.
The guilt is ever present whenever I go home. Ranching is hard work. All hands on deck. Losing me hurt them, though they never asked me to stay or reconsider.
My brothers were happy to stay ranching. I love my family, love the ranch and my hometown, but I felt trapped at sixteen, and that feeling grew year after year.
I was eighteen when I went looking for work that wasn’t on a cattle ranch in the middle of fucking nowhere. I don’t regret it, but over ten years later, that guilt still hasn’t gone away, even though I’ve finally accepted that this is my life; you only get one, and you can’t waste it doing something you hate. “If I’d stayed, I wouldn’t have been here for Rose.”
She hasn’t mentioned going back to Memphis, but every time I walk out the front door, my chest gets tight, and I have the most vivid, terrifying fear that she’ll leave and I’ll lose her.
I’ve never felt this level of terror about anything—not even that one time my older brother, Rowan, convinced me to go for a weekend in Las Vegas, and I lasted ten minutes in my seat beforeI walked off the plane and promptly threw up in the nearest trash can.
“It gets easier,” Wyatt says.
My eyes snap to him. “What gets easier?”
He gives me a small, reassuring smile. “The fear. When Maisie’s ex-husband grabbed her, and we couldn’t find her, I thought I was going to have a coronary.”
Knox, Elias, and Hunter nod and hum their agreement.
“Maisie isn’t our scent match, so I can’t imagine everything you’re feeling,” Elias says.
Opening up has never been easy, but if anyone is going to understand, at least about this, it’s these guys. “On my family’s ranch, if something is broken, I fix it. If an animal is hurt, we get the vet out. There’s always a solution. This is the first time I’ve learned that helping someone requires restraint. I tried to give her a nest, but she didn’t want one. She lost her alpha before she came here, and she’s pregnant with his kid and has this adorable five-year-old that you can’t help but fall in love with. Yet she never asks for help. Not ever. Her alpha, Simon, died saving someone, and I don’t know how I can compete with that.”
“Easy,” Knox says calmly.
“Easy?” I raise my eyebrow at him.
“You can’t compete, and you shouldn’t be trying to because there’s no competition. Even if Maisie’s ex weren’t a piece of shit, the relationship we have with Maisie would never have been the same as what she had with him,” Wyatt says, watching me closely. “I know we’re your bosses now, but we were friends first. You ever want to talk about this, you know we’re always here, right?”
“Yeah,” I say, wondering how I went from a freelance construction worker who traveled alone for years to being settled in a small Iowa town with a pack, a scent match, a kid Ilove more with each passing day, and a group of guys who have my back.
I turn at the knock on the door, and Rose and Ben step in.
Happily surprised, I’m up out of my chair, bending to pick up Ben as he sprints toward me.
“Murph!” he grins, with chocolate ice cream around his mouth and a half-demolished chocolate ice cream in his hand.
I smile. “Hey, little guy, what’s up?”
Rose is beautiful in a light purple sundress with spaghetti straps, white sandals, and her chestnut brown hair loose around her face. Her skin is golden from the sun, and she’s holding two ice cream cones. One looks to be banana or vanilla, and the other mint.
“Hi, I hope we’re not interrupting. We were out on a walk, and Ben wanted to see where you work,” she says shyly, glancing at the four men at the table doing nothing to hide their curiosity.
“Not at all. We’re just doing boring paperwork,” I say.
“We brought you ice cream.” Ben turns to Rose. “Mommy, you can give it to him now, or it will melt.”
Rose hands me the green ice cream cone. “We remembered you like mint choc chip.”
What did I do in another life to deserve all this sweetness?
We were talking about our favorite ice cream flavors during Ben and Rose’s first dinner at the house. Never in a million years did I think they’d not just remember, but surprise me by bringing me an ice cream cone at work.
I cough to clear the lump in my throat. “I do. Thanks. Let me introduce everyone to you. Guys, this is Rose and Ben. That’s Wyatt, Knox, Elias, and Hunter.”
They call out greetings as I lick the cone before it can drip all over my fingers. The ice cream parlor is open only in spring and summer, and they use cream from a local Iowa dairy. The last time I got a cone was months ago, and I had intense cravingsfor a solid week afterward. Yet this tastes even better than I remember.
“Do you all build houses?” Ben asks, awed.
