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He pressed his lips together. He supposed he didn’t. It was just... “This is Sweet Water, North Dakota. Not New York City or Los Angeles. There are no pimps.”
“I’m pretty sure that you’re wrong about that.” Asher’s words were cool, calm, and not inflammatory at all. He was making a logical argument, and Ezra had to admit, he was winning. It hurt to be beaten by his younger brother, especially one that was so much younger than him. Compared to him, Asher was still wet behind the ears.
“I might be. But that’s no reason to throw her out.”
“I didn’t suggest you throw her out. I said let her go. We can certainly help her find another job, find another place to stay. We don’t have to endanger the entire family or bring drugs onto our ranch. We’re struggling enough as it is.”
Ezra kept his mouth closed. Ford and Travis had invested heavily in the Sweet View Ranch. But because of the issues with getting permits, and the way the years had dragged on, their investment had not shown much fruit. Ezra had not wanted to ask for more. He wanted to be able to make things work with the money that they’d been given.
Beyond that, he wanted to make sure Ford and Travis saw a tidy profit, and that he was able to get the ranch to be solely in the Clybourn family.
That seemed like a pipe dream, since he wasn’t even sure whether he was going to be able to make it work at all, without even paying them back.
“I can’t disagree with you.”
“Then you see the wisdom in not having another problem come on the ranch!”
“She’s not a problem. She’s a person. With two small children.”
“That’s another thing. With little kids, she can’t work nearly like someone who doesn’t have children. She almost needs someone to watch those children.”
Ezra couldn’t argue with that either. She hadn’t been able to talk to him until the children were sleeping. That’s what she had just stuck her head in the room about.
“I heard her say that the kids were sleeping so she could talk to you.”
It was like Asher had read his mind.
“Ezra. Usually you make really good decisions. But my eyes almost popped out of my head when you brought her here. And now, you’re acting like she’s going to stay...forever.”
“Not forever. Just until she gets back on her feet.”
“Do you want to run the ranch into the ground? That’s what’s going to happen if you take up every stray person and animal that comes along. Or even one. We just don’t have the resources right now. I want to help people as much as you do. I do! We just can’t right now. A drowning man has to save himself first. He can’t go and help others when he can’t keep himself above the water.”
“Let me think about it,” he finally said after staring out the window at the horses, not really seeing them. He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned around. He’d found that it was usually best to present a confident front, but he didn’t want to mix confidence with arrogance. And as much as he didn’t want to hear what his brother was saying, he pretty much knew he was right.
“Listen, I know you don’t want to hear it. I know that, and you gotta believe me, my heart bleeds for her just as much as yours does. But we have to take care of family first. If she was your wife, it would be a completely different story. But she’s not. And right now, we just can’t afford to take on someone who can’t pull their own weight, but is going to drag down other people, and potentially bring drug dealers and who knows what all else out to the farm. We just can’t.”
Ezra nodded, his lips pressed tight together, his hands fisted inside of his pockets. He didn’t say anything, because there wasn’t anything he could say that would be a good argument to what Asher had just pointed out. They would take care of their own, and if she were a part of the family, either by birth or by marriage, they would absorb her and take care of her. But she wasn’t.
“Ford asked me to take care of her as a personal favor. I couldn’t tell him no. Not after the investments that he’s made in our ranch and after the money we owe him, and he’s been patient enough to wait.”
“Taking care of her is one thing, keeping her forever is something else. We’ve had her for a few days. When the danger, or whatever the problem was, blows over, she needs to go.”
He did not agree. He couldn’t. But he nodded anyway. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Asher’s eyes narrowed. He knew that was not an agreement. But he also knew that if Ezra gave his word, he would keep it. If he said he would think about it, he would. And he intended to. Because Asher had great points.
However, he had told Ford that he would take care of her, and that was his word.
“Maybe you need to keep your word somewhere else,” Asher finally said before he lifted a brow, waiting for Ezra’s chin jerk before he turned around and walked out the door.
He closed it carefully behind him. He hadn’t walked out angry and did not slam it. There was no way that they could make the ranch work if everyone got mad every time someone disagreed with them. They could have disagreements, they could have discussions, they could even have intense discussions, where someone was sure that their way was the right way, but at the end of the day, they all had to be able to get along, jump in, and pull together. It was the only way the ranch would work.
Ezra had preached that to his brothers and sisters since they had started talking about trying to make this go. It was the way hisparents had run their family. Ezra wasn’t sure that parents could have twelve children and have the entire family get along without preaching some such thing. Disagreements were okay, and anger, in its place, was not necessarily terrible either. But selfishness and anger that a person could not get a hold of, that drove a person to do things that were unkind or unbiblical, was not acceptable.
He took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. He needed to talk to Alaska, and he wasn’t sure what he was going to say. That, and the conversation that he had with Sondra, weighed heavily on his mind. It also irritated him, because he should be thinking about the ranch, about the weanings that were coming up, about the price of cattle, and how it was down. They’d held off weaning their herd for as long as they could, hoping the price would go up. But it hadn’t, and they were scheduled to work cattle the next day.
What was he going to tell Alaska?
