Page 174 of Cowboy Daddies

“Yeah, but what a way to go,” Luther quipped as we both swung up in the saddles again. “So how long do you think it’s gonna take them to make it all the way home?”

“Hopefully long enough to put the fear of God into them.”

Luther’s chuckle turned into a full-blown laugh. “Seriously? Have you met those two?”

I could only sigh. “Yeah, but you know what they say, hope springs eternal. Come on, let’s go check the herd and get that out of the way.”

After we’d done exactly that and spent a few minutes watching Skeppy and Skippy butting their heads in play, I figured we’d given the girls enough time. Once we’d closed the gate, I cut my eyes to him and grinned. “Race you!”

Neither of us were too concerned to declare the win as we pulled up at the same time once we were within sight of the barn. Though all four of us had basically spent the last month together, and this wouldn’t be the first time the girls had gotten into mischief and earned a spanking, those had taken place in different bedrooms. This was the first time they’d be punished together.

“Anything I need to know before we begin?” Luther asked as he unsaddled Duke.

I took the time to give the question serious consideration as I pulled the saddle from Zephyr’s back, knowing he wouldn’t rush me.

He’d have to have been blind, deaf, and not paying any attention at all to be ignorant of the fact that Livvy’s only and last relationship had been tainted from the start. She’d shared a bit about how Spencer, her father, had hand-picked Roland for her. He hadn’t even searched hard or any further than his own company as Roland had been his vice-president. The two might as well have been cut from the same cloth. If that didn’t make it easy for the asshole, the fact he’d kept his daughter under tight control by sending her to private schools and limiting her exposure to anything and especially anyone that didn’t meet with his approval, assured she was as malleable as clay. His only mistake had been in failing to recognize that try as he might to ignore it, Livvy shared the same DNA as her mother. And her mother had inherited the same DNA from her mother, Olivia Brenson. Those strands of genes and the love Livvy had for those two women had been the difference in being poured into some mold and breaking free of it.

With Spencer’s death, Roland had become president of one of the largest firms in the United States. He proved to be even better at seizing floundering companies and gutting them as well as the people who’d spent decades building those companies. It had taken a lawyer who’d seen his clients losing their jobs at the whims of a man who hadn’t considered them at all to awaken the warrior in Livvy. It all began with an envelope slipped to her, not by himself or in view of Roland, but by the lawyer’s wife in the restroom of the very building where the final papers were being signed to turn over ownership of yet another family owned company to a man who wouldn’t know the meaning of family if it bit him in the ass.

The contents of the envelope had led Livvy on several searches of Roland’s office whenever she had an opportunity. One night she’d found the papers the lawyer’s note had alluded to. I was still coming to terms with the fact that Livvy hadn’t cared about the fact Roland as well as her very father had basically stolen from her for years. Oh, she hadn’t been forgiving enough not to turn over the evidence to the lawyer who took it to the proper authorities to bring charges against Roland that I was sure he’d spend the next twenty years or so fighting. But it had been one document inside that envelope passed to Livvy that had truly set her free. It had been a copy of the last will and testament of Olivia Brenson. It had been written the year of Grace Brenson Boothe’s death. The original was safely in the hands of Kevin Norton, who’d taken over the family law firm in the very town of Tumbling Falls.

Livvy learned that Grammie O had not only left everything she owned personally to her only granddaughter, including the house and the land it sat on, but her shares of the very company that her daughter’s husband had run. Shares that, when added to those Livvy’s mother had gifted her at her birth, gave her granddaughter the majority of the company Roland thought he controlled. Livvy learned that her father had known for years what the will contained and had chosen to not only ignore it, he’d lied to shareholders and had forged her mother’s and then his daughter’s signature for years. To further destroy any love Livvy might have had for him, he’d lied to her, letting her believe her grandmother had died when she was just a child. All those years Livvy could have spent with her grammie, stolen without any sign of remorse. Spencer Boothe had gone to his own grave without ever revealing the truth to his only child.

Livvy could have taken great satisfaction in watching Roland’s world implode the moment she slipped the engagement ring off her finger. Instead, after leaving the ring on the conference room table, she’d given instructions that her company was to be dismantled and reconstructed. She’d worked with Kevin to set up a new board where the money would be used to rebuild instead of destroy. Liv could have lived anywhere in the world to oversee the decisions the board made, but she’d chosen what she’d ached to do for years. She’d come home.

As we led the brushed and watered horses into their stalls, I finally looked over at my brother and answered his question. “Just that this woman is my life the same as Kate is yours.”

He nodded. “That’s all I need to know.”

And with that, we left the barn and headed to the house where the loves of our lives waited.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Livvy

Staring at the juncture where two walls met tends to focus one’s mind. Even when the thoughts inside said mind were skittering about like balls on a pool table once the cue ball hit them head on. I shifted my weight yet again as I faced the truth of exactly why I was standing in the corner with my jeans and panties pooled at my ankles. It wasn’t that I’d jumped a fence. It was that I’d jumped that fence knowing it was likely to end up with my bare ass hanging out in the wind. Of course, what I’d—what we’d—failed to consider was that jumping in tandem with Kate would have quite the affect it had.

“You okay?”

The question startled me a bit, but only because I’d been straining to hear any sound of my Daddy approaching and he’d not been the one to ask the question.

“Believe it or not, I think so.” I smiled as the answer had come without me giving it much thought. “How about you?”

“I’m good,” Kate said. “Though ask me again when we’re done and I might give a different answer.”

“I didn’t mean to scare Lincoln, just wanted to⁠—”

“To what?”

It took me a second to understand the very man I was talking about had just spoken.

“Oopsie,” Kate said and for some reason I found that incredibly funny and burst into giggles.

“Good grief, what have we done?” Luther asked.

“We? There is no we. You’re the one who encouraged her from the moment you yanked her out of the truck,” Lincoln said.

I tried to get control of myself, honestly, I did, but the giggles wouldn’t cooperate. Not until I felt a very large, very warm hand splay against my ass, that was. Who knew that all it took was my Daddy’s palm against my bare butt to cut off a giggle mid-giggle. And that it then took a puff of warm air against my ear saying, “Breathe, pixie,” to have me inhale much-needed oxygen.