Down Home Cowboy Read online

Barracudas were more gentle than Rebecca and Cassie.

  “I’m not going to talk to him,” she said, taking a sip of her Diet Coke.

  “Why not?” Rebecca asked. “Talking doesn’t mean anything else. It might be good practice.”

  “For what? My future as everyone’s favorite spinster? I don’t need to talk to him for that, Rebecca,” she said drily.

  “Suit yourself,” Rebecca said. “But he was looking at you. And that’s a nice ego boost if nothing else.”

  Alison nodded begrudgingly and took hold of her straw, nudging a piece of ice up to the top of the glass and crunching it between her teeth. There, he probably wasn’t checking her out now. Who wanted to watch somebody noisily crunch ice?

  Much to her chagrin, she looked back over to where he was—and, also much to her chagrin, felt a stab of disappointment when he wasn’t looking back at her. There was no reason to feel disappointed.

  But the feeling only increased when he stood and made his way over to the bar, speaking to Ace for a moment before tipping his hat and heading toward the door.

  Then he was gone. And she might never have a chance to talk to him. She didn’t know who he was. So he probably wasn’t local. Since she owned a bakery, and before that, had worked at Rona’s diner, which had been one of the more popular diners in town until Rona had retired and closed the place down, Alison was fairly confident that she could spot the out-of-towners.

  He was probably one of the tourists that frequented the retail space Rona’s had been divided up into. He had probably been some rambling cowboy, just passing through town for a brief moment before moving on. And now she would never see him again.

  Relief warred with a strange clenching feeling in her stomach. Something that felt a lot like temptation. Well, temptation had just removed itself. From her sight. Possibly from town. With any luck, she wouldn’t have to contend with it ever again.

  “The only ego boost I need,” she said, dragging her gaze away from the door, drawing in a breath and forcing herself to calm down, “is for people to enjoy my baked goods.”

  Rebecca and Cassie looked at each other and the corner of Rebecca’s mouth twitched.

  Alison frowned. “I did not mean that euphemistically. I own a bakery.” She wadded up her paper napkin and threw it in their direction. It missed, rather grandly, and rolled sadly onto the floor.

  “Sure,” Cassie said, smiling.

  “My life is full,” she persisted, taking a bite of her side salad.

  And if sometimes she felt a little bit wistful when she saw a handsome man, then looked at her life and saw nowhere to put him, well, that was understandable. Someday. Someday she would try to sort all that out. But for now, she was enjoying her aloneness. Enjoying her own company. Something she had absolutely not been able to do before her marriage had ended.

  She had never wanted to be alone with her own thoughts, because she had hated that sad, small woman that she was. Almost as much as she had hated her husband in the end.

  She had absolutely no regrets about her decisions. About the way she had chosen to move on.

  One hot-ass guy in a flannel shirt and Stetson eyeing her up wasn’t going to change that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “HEY, Bo,” CAIN CALLED, looking around the kitchen and living room area for his daughter, who was on the verge of being late for her second week on the job. “Are you ready to go?”

  He heard footsteps hit the bottom landing, followed by a disgusted noise. “Do you have to call me that?”

  “Yes,” he said, keeping his tone and expression serious. “Though I could always go back to the full name. Violet Beauregarde the Walking Blueberry.” She’d thought that nod to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was great. Back when she was four and all he’d had to do was smile funny to get her to belly laugh.

  “Pass.”

  “I have to call you at least one horrifying nickname a week, all the better if it slips out in public.”

  “Is there public in Copper Ridge? Because I’ve yet to see it.”

  “Hey, you serve the public as part of your job. And, unless you’re being a bit overdramatic about how challenging your job is, I assume you see more than two people on a given day.”

  “The presence of humanity does not mean the presence of culture.”

  “Chill out, Sylvia Plath. Your commitment to being angry at the world is getting old.” He shook his head, looking at his dark-haired, green-eyed daughter who was now edging closer to being a woman than being that round, rosy-cheeked little girl he still saw in his mind’s eye.

  “Well, you don’t have to bear witness to it today. Lane is giving me a ride into town.”

  Cain frowned. He still hadn’t been in to see Violet at work. In part because she clearly didn’t want him to. But, he had assumed that once she was established and feeling independent she wouldn’t mind if he took her.

  Clearly, she did.

  “Great,” he said, “I have more work to do around here anyway.”

  “The life of a dairy farmer is never dull. Well, no, it’s always dull, it just never stops.” Violet walked over to the couch where she had deposited her purse yesterday and picked it up. “Same with baking pies, I guess.”

  “I have yet to sample any of the pie you make.”

  “I’ll bring some home if there’s any leftover,” she said, working hard to keep from sounding happy. At least, that’s how it seemed to him.

  “Are you ready to go, Violet?” Lane came breezing into the room looking slightly disheveled, Cain’s younger brother Finn close behind her, also looking suspiciously mussed.

  Absolutely no points for guessing what they had just been up to. Though he could see that Violet was oblivious. If she had guessed, she wouldn’t be able to hide her reaction. Which warmed his heart in a way. That his daughter was still pretty innocent about some things. That she was still young in some ways.

  Hard to retain any sort of innocence when your mother abandoned you. And, since he knew all about parental abandonment and how much it screwed with you, he was even more angry that his daughter was going through the same thing.

  Though she was actually a little more well-adjusted than he’d been.

  Sometimes he was almost tempted to take the credit for that.

  Not that it was very great credit. His own mother had been a drunk gambling addict when his father had left, so the threshold for being better than her was not a high one.

  “Ready,” Violet responded.

  Even though it was a one-word answer, it lacked the edge usually involved in her responses to him. He supposed being jealous of his brother’s girlfriend was a little bit ridiculous.

  “Have fun,” he said, just because he knew it would irritate her.

  He had lost the power to make her laugh. To make her smile, with any kind of ease. So, he supposed he would just embrace his ability to irritate.

  At least he excelled at that.

  He could tell he had excelled yet again when she didn’t smile at him as she left the room with Lane.

  “Wait,” Finn said, walking past him and grabbing Lane around the waist, turning her and kissing her deep.

  It was all Cain could do to keep from groaning audibly. Between his horndog younger brothers and his incredibly happy other brother he felt like sex was being thrown in his face constantly. Except not in a fun way that involved him having it.

  Just him watching other people get it.

  Lane and Violet left, and Finn walked back into the living room. “I’m going to marry that woman,” he said, the self-satisfied grin on his face scraping at Cain’s current irritation. He had a feeling he and Finn had the same smile. But it had been so long since he’d actually smiled it was hard to say.

  “Have you asked her yet?”

 
“Not officially. But I’m going to.”

  “She might not say yes,” Cain said. He was feeling like an asshole, so he figured he would go ahead and be one. “Or, worse, she might say yes.”

  Finn was not deterred by Cain’s bad mood. “I want to spend the rest of my life with her.”

  “That’s a long time. Trust me. Married years are different than regular years.” He had way too much experience living with somebody who didn’t even like him anymore. Way too much experience walking quietly through his own house so that he could avoid the conversation that needed to be had, or avoid the silence that seemed magnified when the two of them were in the same room.

  He didn’t think Finn would suffer the same fate though. Finn and Lane had known each other for years, and they had been friends before they were a couple. Cain and Kathleen had been stupid and young. He had gotten her pregnant and wanted to do the right thing, instead of doing the kind of thing his father would do.

  All in all, it wasn’t the best foundation for a marriage.

  For a while, they had tried. Both of them. He wasn’t really sure when they had stopped. He couldn’t blame her for that part. For the silence and the nights when it was easier to pretend he was asleep when she slid between the sheets than it was to try to make love with someone who didn’t have two words to say to you.

  Ironically, he would be thrilled to make love with someone who didn’t have two words to say to him now. But hooking up was different than marriage. At least, he vaguely remembered that it was.

  “I hope they are,” Finn said, obnoxiously cheerful. “I hope every year with her feels like five. Because my time with her has been the best of my life.”

  Given the way they had grown up, he really didn’t begrudge Finn his happiness. He was glad for him, in a way. When he wasn’t busy feeling irritated by his celibate status.

  Of course, if he really wanted to do something about it, he could. But for a long time it had suited him to stay unattached in every way possible.

  Though, in fairness to him, figuring out how to conduct a physical relationship while he was raising a teenage girl was pretty tricky. He had to set some kind of example. And casual sex wasn’t exactly the one he was aiming for.

  He figured he had to at least try to be a model of the kind of man he wanted his daughter to be with. In twenty years or so, since he wasn’t in a hurry for her to be with anyone.

  But that good example thing was simple in theory, and not all that enjoyable in practice.

  “Good for you,” he said, sounding more annoyed than he had intended.

  “How’s the barn coming along?”

  Cain was grateful for the change in subject. “It’s coming.”

  “Show me.”

  His brother grabbed his hat off the shelf by the door, and Cain grabbed his own. Strange how this had become somewhat natural. How sharing a space with Finn, Alex and Liam—while annoying on occasion—was just starting to be life.

  He took the steps on the front porch two at a time, inhaling the sharp, clear air. It was late summer, and in Texas about now walking outside would be like getting wrapped in a wet blanket. That was also on fire. He could honestly say he didn’t miss that part of his adopted home state.

  The Oregon coast ran a little cold for his taste, but he had to admit it was still nicer than sweltering. The wind whipped up, filtering through the pine trees and kicking up the smell of wood, hay and horse. If green had a smell, it would be that smell that rode the coastal air across the mountains. Fresh and heavy, all at the same time.

  It was fastest to take a truck out to the old barn on the property, the one that had originally stood near the first house that had been built when their great-grandparents had bought the land. The house was long gone, but the barn still remained, and with all of his near-nonexistent free time Cain had been fashioning the place into a house for Violet and himself.

  “You know,” Finn said, as they pulled the truck up to the old structure, “you could always hire Jonathan Bear to finish this out. If you keep going like this, it’s going to take you forever.”

  “You haven’t seen what I’ve done. Anyway, are you in a hurry to get us out of the house?” In the month since they’d come to live with Finn, he’d never seemed to mind them being in the house.

  On the ranch in general, yes. But not in the house.

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t make much difference to me. Even if you and Violet aren’t in the house Liam and Alex will be. So Lane and I aren’t going to start engaging in public sex anytime soon. At our house. However, there’s a reason she held on to her cabin.”

  Lane owned the property down by the lake, and even though she was essentially living with Finn, she still kept that property, and harvested vegetables out of the garden to sell at her mercantile store and to share with them. Cain had no complaints.

  “Well, thank God for that,” Cain said, his tone dry. “I was seriously concerned.”

  He and his brother walked through the still overgrown pathway that led up to the old barn. He had started with structural things. A new roof, replacing siding where it had dilapidated. Recently, he had moved on to the interior. He slid the brand-new door to the side, revealing the gutted, mostly hollow belly of the beast.

  “Wow,” Finn said, stepping deeper into the room. “You’ve done a lot.”

  “New wiring,” Cain said, gesturing broadly. “Insulation, drywall. I need to texture, and then I’m going to work on interior walls. But, yeah, it’s coming along. It will be fine for the two of us for the next couple of years. And when Violet leaves...”

  Unbidden, an image of the beautiful redhead he had seen at the bar last night filtered into his mind’s eye. Yeah, in a couple of years he would have a place to bring a woman like that.

  Not that he couldn’t go back to her place, or get a hotel room, but he didn’t want to have to explain his absence to a teenage girl who barely thought of him as human, much less realized he was actually just a guy with a sex drive and everything. Both of them would probably die from the humiliation of that.

  “It’ll be a pretty nice place,” Finn said, and Cain was grateful his younger brother couldn’t read his mind.

  “Not bad. And yes, I know that I could pay somebody to finish it. But right now I’m kind of enjoying the therapy. I spent a long time managing things. Managing a big ranch, not actually working it. Managing my marriage instead of actually working at it. I’m ready to be hands-on again. This is the life that I’m choosing to build for myself. So I guess I better build it.”

  He knew that at thirty-eight his feelings of midlife angst were totally unearned, but having his wife leave had forced him into kind of a strange crisis point. One where he had started asking himself if that was it. If everything good that he was going to do was behind him.

  So, he had left the ranch in Texas—the one he had spent so many years building up—walked away with a decent chunk of change, and packed his entire life up, packed his kid up, and gone to the West Coast to find... Something else to do. Something else to be. To find a way to reconnect with Violet.

  So far, he’d found ranch work and little else. Violet still barely tolerated him in spite of everything he was doing to try to fix their lives, and he didn’t feel any closer to moving forward than he had back in Texas.

  He was just moved.

  Finn’s phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket. “Hey,” he said, “can you pick up Violet tonight from work?”

  “I thought Lane was doing it.”

  “It’s her girls’ night thing. She forgot.”

  Well, he had just been thinking that he needed to actually see where Violet worked. “Sure. Sounds good.”

  “What are you going to do until then?”

  “I figured I would do some work in here.”

  Finn pushed his
sleeves up, smiling. “Mind if I help?”

  “Sure,” Cain did his best to disguise the fact that he was shocked by his brother’s offer. He wasn’t used to this. He’d been navigating life alone for so long he’d forgotten what it was like to have support. “Grab a hammer.”

  * * *

  ALISON STARED AT the sunken cake sitting on the kitchen countertop and frowned. Then quickly erased the frown so that Violet wouldn’t see it.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Violet said, looking both perturbed and confused.

  “You probably took it out too early. Though, it’s nothing a little extra icing can’t fix. And it’s my girls’ night tonight, so I think it can be of use in that environment rather than being put up for sale.”

  Violet screwed up her face. “It’s ugly.”

  “An ugly cake is still cake. As long as it doesn’t have raisins it’s fine.”

  “Well, I didn’t put any raisins in it.”

  “Excellent. Of course, I try to provide raisined items to people with taste bud defects, because we here at Pie in the Sky like to be inclusive. But not in cake. It’s just not happening in cake.”

  Alison was slightly amused that her newest employee seemed to know about her raisin aversion, even if she didn’t quite have cooking times down. Violet was a good employee, but she had absolutely no experience baking. For the most part Alison had put her on at the register, which she had picked up much faster than kitchen duties. But she tried to set aside a certain amount of time every shift to give Violet a chance to get some experience with the actual baking part of the bakery.

  Maybe it wasn’t as necessary to do with a teenager who had her first job as it was to do with some of the other women who came through the shop, desperately in need of work experience after years out of the workforce, but Alison was applying the same principles to Violet as she did to everyone else.

  Diverse experience was important on job applications, so that was what Alison tried to provide. Experience with food service, with register work, customer service, food preparation. All of her employees left with expertise in each and every one of those things, plus a food handlers’ card for the state. It was a small thing, but it made her feel like she was doing something.