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“I will,” Jane said. A pinch of guilt nagged at her stomach. She had not been an easy teenager for her parents to raise, and she’d fought with her mother a lot. Her father too. She’d found them out-of-touch with young people and old-fashioned in their rules. She’d hated leaving Ivory Peaks every summer, as she’d had to start over in friendships many times because of it.
Now, she leaned down and kissed her mother’s cheek. “Love you, Momma.”
“Love you too, sweetie.” The sound of the sewing machine accompanied Jane as she left the main room at the back of the house and headed for the front door.
Worry gnawed at her, and she wanted to run until she couldn’t breathe anymore and then scream into the sky. She and Mikey had been close to the same age growing up, and he’d been a calming influence on her many times.
Even now, Jane felt like she ran so hot, everything either annoying her to the point of snapping or so wonderful she was almost crying. Honestly, she felt like she needed medication, but she didn’t even know who to go see to find out why she was the way she was.
One of her younger brothers, Tucker, had been diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, and once her parents had gotten him on the right medication, he’d excelled at everything. Right now, he was touring with the biggest name in rodeo, doing an apprenticeship with the manager so he could learn how to manage a champion’s schedule, their animals, their travel, all of it.
He loved the rodeo, but he’d never been good enough to compete in it. Deacon was almost the opposite of Tucker, in that he wanted a simple life, right there on the farm where he’d grown up.
Jane knew Hunter would retire from HMC as soon as he could, and that Mike would take over as soon as he was well enough. After that, Deacon would run the farm for Daddy, and all the shifting of positions left Jane’s stomach sour.
“Why though?” she asked herself.
The answer came to her as she reached the end of the fence and turned right. She had nowhere to belong. As the only girl, she’d always felt a little bit like she was on the outside looking in in her family, and she’d never wanted to be a cowgirl. The small-town life didn’t bother her, but it didn’t feed her soul either.
Jane wanted excitement. She wanted the freedom to twirl under the blue sky, laughing until she was so dizzy she fell down. Then she’d laugh some more, and a strong, handsome cowboy would gather her close and whisper how much he loved her.
She wanted romanticism, and larger-than-life birthdays and holidays. She wanted someone to think she walked on water and treat her that way, and she wanted to fall in love with someone so deep that she’d never get out.
Her mother had often told her such things only existed in fiction, but Jane wanted them in her real life.
She’d dated a couple of men in college, but she’d never had a boyfriend in high school. She went to dances, and she’d even kissed Ryan Wellington after a football game once. He hadn’t called her back and never asked her out again, and that was not the type of romance Jane wanted.
A sigh gathered and gathered in her chest, but Jane refused to let it out. She wasn’t going to be one of those women who sighed their way through life because it wasn’t going her way.
She’d hated her job in Colorado Springs, so she’d quit. She’d come home. She’d started at HMC a couple of weeks ago. She actually liked it there, and people in the accounting department liked her.
One of the receptionists had even said, “I’ve never met an accountant with a sense of humor, Jane. It’s refreshing.”
The problem was, Jane felt everything to the extreme. Happiness. Sadness. Worry. Guilt. Fear.
Right now, she just wanted to know Mike was going to be okay. She’d tried to go over to the hospital, but her daddy had said that Uncle Wes didn’t want the whole family there. When Jane had tried arguing, he’d said, “It’s not actually Uncle Wes, Jane,” in that perfectly even tone that drove her bananas. “It’s Mike. He doesn’t want us all there, okay?”
That had shut her down, because Daddy was probably right. Mike would be mortified to see a dozen Hammonds sitting in the waiting room when he came out of surgery. He wouldn’t even want them to come visit him once he came home. With his siblings here, he was probably overloaded already.
Jane loved Opal with her whole soul, but the woman had only gotten more intense as she’d gotten older. And Mike felt overshadowed by Easton in every way, so he tended to withdraw even more.
She entered the stable, the whoosh of air around her ankles bringing with it the tell-tale scent of horses. Jane did love horses. They just didn’t always love her. She didn’t trust them as much as she’d like, and she’d never worked at Pony Power the way Mike and her brothers had. She’d slung burgers like most high schoolers, and she’d been perfectly happy doing so.
It helped that Liam Newcomb had worked at the fast food joint too, because he’d been oh-so-dreamy.
No one seemed to be working this afternoon, and Jane got down the tack herself. She struggled under the weight of it, but she managed to get it in the stall with Hershey, a horse she’d ridden before.
“Shoot.” She remembered she didn’t saddle the horse in the stall, and she left everything on the floor and led the pretty bay horse outside to a fence. She threw the rope around it, half-thinking Hershey would wander off.
Jane even checked over her shoulder before dashing back into the stable again. This kind of work kept her mind off Mike in a way the sewing machine never could. She’d learned to cook, clean, can vegetables and fruits, and sew from her mother. She did love spending time with her, but Jane wasn’t all that interested in a domestic life.
She wanted housekeepers and personal chefs, and she’d even used some of her two-billion-dollar inheritance to fund a female-owned company called She Cooks. The three women who owned it trained personal chefs and placed them in homes in the greater Denver area.
Jane sat on their board when they had meetings, and she loved that she’d been able to help another woman’s dreams come true. She’d decided that she didn’t need to start her own foundation or company to do good in the world. She knew Hunter found small businesses or floundering businesses or businesses that weren’t even businesses yet, and helped them financially through Hammond Manufacturing Company.
She was doing the same with her own money, because she didn’t have the genius ideas others did. But she could fund them and make those dreams a reality.
Relief sang through Jane when she found Hershey still standing at the fence where she’d left her. She started to saddle the horse, but it had been a while since she’d done it, and she couldn’t quite remember if she’d done all the steps.
