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“I don’t see why you’re all so invested in harassing me about Cara, anyway. She’s been my best friend since middle school.”
“It’s because it makes you mad,” said Boone. “It’s that simple. And you fall for it every time, little brother. It’s one of my favorite things about you.”
He scowled. It really was a bitch being the youngest out of these jackasses. Well, the youngest except for Callie.
Callie had come much later, her parents hoping for another girl after the loss of Sophia.
But he was the youngest boy, and often the subject of quite a bit of harassment. Which was fine. It was just that he wished he wasn’t such a chronic youngest that he fell for it.
But maybe that was one reason that Cara had felt so important to him when they had first met.
She filled the gap in the family. A gap in his life.
He had that other person, right there. He loved his sister Callie. But she was ababysister.
Sophia had been close in age, and Cara was more like that.
He had just... He had just missed Sophie so damn much. That dynamic they had. Then he’d met Cara.
“Well, alternatively, you could all grow up.”
Boone grinned. A big, broad smile that made Jace want to punch him. “I know you are but what am I?”
So he did punch him. Just in the shoulder.
“You’re the worst.”
“I know,” said Boone.
And the thing was, maybe nobody would ever understand his relationship with Cara. He needed it. She was maybe the single most important person in his life, as much as he loved his family.
She had needed him, and that mattered to him.
Because the rest of his family... It wasn’t the same. His parents needed Callie in a particular kind of way, because she had healed them.
They had needed Buck, who would then abandon them. And their older sons had taken on a lot of the burden.
Their father was so into the rodeo, and they all rode in the rodeo. It was just there was an excess of them.
So one of them wasn’t particularly more important than the other in all of that.
But as far as Cara went? She needed him.
He looked out across the table, at the barn, and saw a bright white butterfly land on the bright red wood. It fluttered its wings for a second before it lifted off again and continued on his way. That moment sort of reset his thoughts, cleared them out.
He wanted to help her and he... Dammit, he worried about her making a big business move like this without him around. There would be repairs needing done, and systems to set up...
She needed him, and he guessed on some level he needed to be needed. Which was why he was submitting himself to the ridiculous ghost thing—even though all of that made him irrationally angry—and why he wasn’t going to let his brothers make him too angry with all their nonsense.
As far as they went, their nonsense didn’t matter.
What mattered was Cara.
And making sure she was taken care of. So that was exactly what he would do.
The old hotel building was beautiful. It was at the very end of Main Street. A three-story building with balconies and wooden porch rails. Old Western lettering that said Lone Rock Hotel.She could imagine it repainted. The gold around the border of the letters brightened.
She could imagine it lit up bright in the night. Filled with guests.
