Page 42 of The One Who Never Left: Colter

Aiden chuckled. “Guess I’ll have to come back when you’re off the clock.”

“Guess you’ll have to,” she said, taking the clipboard back.

His smile widened as he shifted the carrier to his hip. “If you change your mind and want to check on them, make sure I’m doing right by your babies, my number’s on the intake form. See you around, Sutton.”

CHAPTER 16

Colter liked to think he could juggle anything—animals in crisis, brothers with opinions, busybody grandmas, a clinic that never slept—but the longer he and his brothers walked the ranch’s perimeter, the more obvious it became that something had already slipped through his fingers.

His boots crunched over dry earth where the new corral was being built. The sun was already climbing, heat settling into his shoulders the way responsibility did.

Boone stopped, kicked at a marker flag, and nodded toward the open stretch of land. “Excavation guy should be here tomorrow around noon.”

Colter’s steps slowed, then stopped completely. “Tomorrow?”

Eli turned, one brow lifting in that silent, military way that said ‘Say it again and I’ll judge you harder’.

“Please tell me you’re joking,” Boone said. “We’ve been talking about this corral for six months.”

Colter scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. Between the clinic, emergency calls, paperwork, and trying to keep the breeding program on track, something had fallen through the cracks. Apparently, it was a man with heavy machinery.

“I completely spaced,” he admitted. “It’s been a week.” And yet it was only Tuesday.

“This meeting decides grading, drainage, footing,” Eli said. “All the stuff that keeps horses from blowing tendons or standing in mud up to their knees. You’re the resident expert on what the horses need.”

“This is not exactly something you can eyeball later,” Boone added. “We get this wrong and we might as well scrap the whole project.”

Which was why Colter had expressed his concern from the beginning about how expanding too fast could blow up in their face. But then, last week, Boone, by chance, ran into one of the top breeders of quarter horses in the country, and the guy happened to have a mare of unparalleled bloodline, already pregnant, that was looking for a home. Seemed the original buyer went belly up and welched on the deal.

Something, if he and his brothers weren’t careful, could be their future reality.

“It was the opportunity of lifetime,” Boone had said.

“One we couldn’t pass up,” Eli had added.

Colter, on the other hand, was willing to pass it up but they all had equal stake in the ranch, which meant it was a majority rules kind of operation. And he’d been in the minority.

Colter exhaled, the weight settled heavier in his chest. He looked over the land again, seeing not just dirt and posts, but the future he was trying to build.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I know.”

“Is there any way you can make it?” Eli asked and there was no way Colter could say no. His kid brother had asked for more personal time from his commanding officer to be there for this meeting.

“Let me move some things around. I’ll be there.”

It meant he’d be pulling long hours the rest of the week, but he didn’t want to be the weak link when it came to fulfilling their dad’s dream and protecting the Callahan legacy.

Colter hated liars. But there he was pulling into the diner in town instead of having breakfast with his family. He’d just needed out of the house—out of the schedule, out of the questions, out of the weight of everyone else’s expectations.

He needed thirty fucking minutes of quiet to decompress. Which was how he found himself parking in front of Buns & Guns—a place where the coffee was strong, the opinions stronger, and everyone pretended not to notice when you came in carrying the weight of the world.

Owned by Ms. Kitty, the diner was strictly seat-yourself, small-town to its bones, and as much an institution as the post office or the feed store. As one of the oldest family-owned businesses in town, it had survived three generations on pie, and the unshakable belief that no problem couldn’t be softened by biscuits and a refill.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he muttered to himself.

No matter how many times he said it, it didn’t stop his hands from sweating. Even though it was silly to be stressed over a scheduling error, Colter was noticing it was happening more often than he’d like to admit. He wasn’t just being pulled in different directions, he felt like he was being drawn and quartered.

Colter stepped out of the car, a crisp early-fall breeze causing the tension in his shoulders to loosen just enough to remind him he was still human, not just the sum of everyone else’s expectations.