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Plus, Rosco was a pretty awesome dog.
Jackson also liked that Michael didn’t try to fill the quiet with meaningless conversation for the sake of hearing his own voice. They rode, drank from their canteens, kept an eye on their dogs and the herd, and did their job with the minimum amount of words shared between them. Perfect morning for Jackson. Alan would have nattered on about whatever new TV show he’d watched the night before. Sometimes it was entertaining but Jackson had little interest in most television or movies. Life was hard enough, and he didn’t need to spend his free time watching fictional people suffer, too. His supply of VHS tapes from the library was pretty limited, so he filled a lot of his free time reading.
After eating his cup of instant ramen soup and downing a sports drink, Jackson fed Dog her midday share of kibble. She got her regular meals in the morning and at night, but he always felt strange about eating in front of her without giving her something, too. Had since the day she wandered into his life and blinked those big blue eyes at him.
Eyes that saiddump the liquor and the pills instead of swallowing them.
He had a few minutes left on his break, so he went to the main barn doors and leaned against the frame. Tilted his face up into the sunshine, grateful for it against his skin every single day, after spending far too much time without it.
Dust rose on the horizon, followed a minute or so later by the distant rumble of a car engine. Probably Brand’s afternoon interview. Dog loped out of the barn and took a familiar position by his side. Up on the main house’s porch, Brutus rose from his cushioned bed and stood by the steps, watchful over the family home. The old German shepherd still had some scars that would probably never go away, but he was loyal as hell and a good judge of people.
Way better than Jackson was.
A blue sedan eventually appeared on the dirt road that led to Woods Ranch from the main state road. An oddly familiar sedan. Curious and a little confused, Jackson hung around by the barn and watched the car circle to park near one of the ranch pickups. Brand appeared on the porch of the smaller bunkhouse situated between the main house and the barn. No one had used the bunkhouse for years until recently, because the Woods family hadn’t employed the help to make it necessary. Then Hugo had needed a place to live last year. Hugo had cleaned it up, and now it was both Brand’s office as ranch foreman and a shared living space for Hugo and Brand—getting the very-much-in-love pair a home of their own.
The car’s driver-side door opened and a tall, lanky figure emerged. He wore a familiar uniform of jeans, a fleece-lined jacket, and boots. Way too familiar. Jackson took a few steps backward, deeper into the gloom of the barn, his heart kicking a bit. No fucking way was last night’s...what? He hadn’t been a hookup. Last night’s bar save? No way was he here for an interview.
The guy also wore a knockoff Stetson, hiding his hair, and in the light of day the clothes almost made him look like someone playing a cowboy role on TV. The clothes were practical, sure, but something about it was almost comical to Jackson, and he couldn’t figure out why. Not until the guy stumbled getting out of the car, and then Jackson knew. Even without seeing his face, the coat and car and tripping were enough.
As the interviewee approached Brand and the bunkhouse/office porch, he took off his hat to reveal a head of curly red hair. It glinted like fire in the sunlight, the tight curls a little unreal, and it was definitely his Wilson. When Wilson tripped on the one step up to the porch, Jackson snorted, both amused and a little angry. He had asked Wilson point-blank what kind of work he was looking for, and the whole time he’d had this interview lined up? Had the whole runaway thing been a lie, too?
Had he played Jackson for a free bed?
Annoyed and in no mood to make nice if Brand spotted him, Jackson stalked back into the barn. It was up to Brand to hire this guy or not, whatever. Hopefully Wilson didn’t make it a habit of tripping up stairs. If he did, it was going to be a long winter.
For about five minutes of his life, Wyatt Gibson had wanted to be a spy. Granted, he’d only been seven years old and the urge came after he’d watchedMr. & Mrs. Smith, which made the life look insanely fun and glamorous. In reality, spying on other people was kind of boring, took a lot of time, and only got him spanked by his stepdad for reading his older stepsister’s journal and tattling on her for smoking weed with her friends.
Early life lesson: smoking weed is fine; telling is bad.
The “telling is bad” lesson hit even harder about a year later after his stepbrother, Peter, did something epically stupid, and it had haunted their family ever since. Wyatt had learned quickly to keep things close to the chest. Not that he’d had a lot of adult life so far, since he’d just turned twenty last spring, but secrets ran deep in his family. So deep that he was in the middle of Bumfuck, Texas, on a hunt to find out about the other half of his birth family, because his mom had refused to tell him anything other than his sperm donor was a selfish prick who hadn’t cared about Wyatt before he was born and wouldn’t give a shit now.
If he hadn’t stumbled over one of his late mother’s old high school yearbooks in a dusty box in the attic two years ago, he wouldn’t have even known where to start looking.
Now he was being interviewed for a job he wasn’t qualified for, by the man who might be his biological father. Sometimes he really longed for the simple days of being a seven-year-old wannabe spy.
At least he’d gotten a little bit of subterfuge practice last night with some hayseed named Jackson, if that was even his real name. Wyatt had chosen the Blue Tavern because a bit of internet digging showed it was a local gay bar. A gay bar hundreds of miles from home that gave him a chance to explore something his stepfamily would shit themselves over if they knew about.
He’d thought finding a bed to sleep in, rather than shelling out for a seedy motel or sleeping in his car, would have been a nice bonus. Turned out he’d found both a seedy motel and a bed—albeit not a bed with a hot loner in a leather jacket. Wyatt had thought for sure the “runaway” obfuscation would win him some extra sympathy and it had—just not the kind he’d wanted. The grumpy-looking loner from the back of the bar had seemed like the exact type to take Wyatt somewhere and bang him. He had definitely taken Wyatt somewhere. The motel had scared him, then intrigued him, and the sexy teasing had revved his engine.
But Jackson had been too nice and kept his hands to himself all night, which had made Wyatt doubt his ability to size up people. He wouldn’t make that mistake with Maybe Daddy.
Stumbling on the first step of the building he’d been told to go to by his potential new boss wasn’t a good look, but he didn’t mind being stared at. He’d always been kind of accident-prone, which probably came from always being oddly tall and gangly (not sure where that came from) and standing out for having very red hair (definitely from his late mom, who’d had almost identical ginger curls). He’d learned to take the teasing from a very young age and how to lean into it, so it felt more like he was being laughed near, rather than laughed directly at.
Mostly it helped assuage his ego while he learned how to make people take him seriously. Not only as a man who deserved to know his past, but also as a guy who was still exploring his attraction to other guys.
Thankfully, the man in front of him simply smiled at his bumbling and held out a hand. “You must be Wyatt Gibson. I’m Brand Woods.” He spoke with a firm, lightly accented voice, but nothing about the man seemed familiar. Not his hair, his eyes, his chin, and he was even a few inches shorter than Wyatt. This guy was supposed to be his father?
Maybe the amateur detective work Wyatt had done to find this place had been wrong.
“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir, Wyatt Gibson.” He started to reach out with his right hand to shake, realized he was holding his hat in that one, and switched it over fast. “Nice to meet you. You’ve got quite a spread out here.”
“Thank you. It’s been in the family for quite a long time. Please, come inside.”
“Yes, sir.”
He followed Brand into a large living space with a kitchen/dining area to the left and a kind of living room to the right, where another guy was stretched out on a sofa reading on a tablet. The other guy waved vaguely at them, but Brand didn’t introduce them, so Wyatt just waved back. Brand led him into a room on the right, which was obviously an office. Desk, laptop, stacks of folders, one bookcase with not much on it. Sparser than he expected but what did Wyatt know about how a cattle ranch was run?
Nothing.
