Page 17 of The One Who Never Left: Colter

Sutton rolled her eyes, trying to hide the twitch of a smile. “Oh, yes. I was practically a professional. You know, if grace under grossness were a competition, I’d have a trophy.”

Vivi looked between the two of them, then smiled. “I was just telling Sutton about the barbecue at the ranch next Saturday.”

His gaze slowly met hers, and there was a look there that she couldn’t decipher. Good? Bad? Hell if she knew. All that mattered was that it irritated her.

“You guys should come,” he said making sure to look at Lynlee when he offered the invite.

“Can we mommy?”

Sutton gave him a hard look. “I’ll think about it.”

“No thinking in these parts. Someone invited you to dinner, you say “What can I bring,” he said.

“What can I bring?” she deadpanned.

“Cantaloupes,” Colter said, and she nearly hit him. How was she ever going to be able to look at a fruit again without her thighs quivering?

Instead, she laughed and hated herself for it. Before she could tell him to fuck off, he was gone and the coffee shop noise filled back in around her like nothing had happened.

Lynlee was already asking Jo something about the horses on the wall, and Sutton sat for just a moment with her hands around her cup, the warmth of it the only thing that felt uncomplicated.

She did the math without meaning to—the way she always did when nobody was watching. Rent. Groceries. The birthday party Lynlee was already planning like it was a state dinner. The final exam for her vet tech licensing, which she was studying for at midnight when Lynlee was asleep. The medical degree that kept moving further and further down the list.

She pressed her thumb into the seam of the coffee cup and told herself the plan was still working. It was. It was all still working. She just needed to stop sitting in coffee shops doing math and start believing it.

CHAPTER 7

After Colter’s day all he wanted was a hot shower, a cold beer, and a woman in his bed. A woman who knew the score. Not one who could waltz into his carefully managed life, tip it off-balance, and make him realize that all the rules he’d built to keep his life uncomplicated were suddenly negotiable.

Not that he'd ever explained those rules to anyone. Not even his brothers. The short version was this: he'd watched his parents build something extraordinary—the ranch, the family, thirty-five years of a marriage that made even cynics believe—only to lose every single bit of it in the two seconds it took for a truck to run a red light.

After his parents died something inside him changed—something fundamental.

He couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment, and it wasn't like he'd sat down and thought, New strategy: fall for no one, keep things light with no strings. It had just happened—the slow calculus of a man who had learned, firsthand, that the more you let yourself love, the more there was to lose.

It wasn't just about romance. That was the easy answer—the one that fit neatly on a dating profile and required no further explanation. The harder truth was that the leaving had started long before he'd learned to protect himself from it. His parents, gone in two seconds, Eli shipping out year after year to places Colter couldn't follow and rarely coming home. Boone, almost swallowed whole by grief and the rodeo circuit, ruining his life.

Well, until Vivi came along and pulled him back from the ledge.

Even the clinic—the patients he'd saved, families he'd gotten to know who moved away or couldn't afford to come back or just stopped showing up. He'd spent years surrounded by people and animals who needed him and learned the same lesson every single time:

Need was temporary.

People left.

The only variable was whether you saw it coming.

Great system. Airtight. Was considering patenting it.

It’s easier to keep things moving and keep it casual. Nothing wrong with a night that began and ended cleanly with no residue, no one left holding a piece of him when it ended. Or worse, him holding a piece of them.

It was a damn good system—efficient, painless, and absolutely bulletproof right up until the moment a short redhead with freckles and more than enough curves to hold onto, and her four-year-old had walked into his world and made things complicated as hell. Which was why he was answering a list of ridiculous questions his older brother’s fiancée, Vivi, was throwing at him in order to update his dating profile.

He didn’t want a new dating profile, nor did he need one. The one Vivi wrote for him last year had been a disaster, attracting the kind of women who were looking to lock things down. The only thing Colter wanted locked down in his life was plans for the ranch’s new breeding program.

He shifted in his chair, pressing his knuckles to his temples like he could contain the noise in his head.

“I don’t need someone to match my life,” he said. “I need someone to make the night interesting, then let me go about my day.”