Untamed Cowboy

by Maisey Yates

  But no, he was drawing a blank.

  “You want to go drink,” Kaylee said, waving a hand. “Interrogate me some other time.”

  “Good night,” he said, getting into the truck that served as a mobile veterinary unit. He might go ahead and crash at Get Out of Dodge tonight, he mused as he pulled onto the highway, putting Kaylee and her date out of his mind.

  He could get hammered and sleep in one of the cabins that were currently unoccupied on the dude ranch. They were gearing up for their grand reopening, but it hadn’t happened yet.

  Wyatt was working tirelessly—and working the rest of them to the bone when they were doing their real jobs—getting it ready.

  Although, his brother Grant officially didn’t have a real job anymore. His real job was the ranch. Jamie, the only girl, and youngest in the family was in the same boat as Grant and Wyatt. Bennett was the only one that hadn’t thrown himself wallet and soul into the place.

  But it wasn’t as simple as that for him. Veterinary medicine was his passion. He hadn’t gone to school for all those years so that he could quit when his brother decided on a whim to stop flinging himself around on the back of angry bulls and focus on the homestead for the first time in fifteen years.

  For as long as Bennett could remember, he’d liked to fix things. That need had only grown stronger after the death of his mother.

  And stronger still later on.

  He could have been a doctor, but he truly hadn’t been able to face the idea of working on people and losing them. He lost enough people in his life. But having such a comprehensive veterinary practice in Logan County kept himself and Kaylee fully occupied. Being able to go into business with his best friend was a privilege.

  The two of them had talked about doing that from the time they were kids. Usually when you made a pact with dirt and spit and a handshake underneath an oak tree when you were thirteen years old you didn’t keep it.

  But he and Kaylee Capshaw had.

  She was the truest and most constant person in his world. His friend, his partner. Always. From the moment he’d met her when they’d been in seventh grade. She was new to school, and looked lost, but defiant right along with it. And he couldn’t help but be intrigued by the redhead with a thousand freckles who didn’t talk to anyone for the first half of the day.

  Something in her reminded him of his own losses. The way it felt to feel like you were walking through a room of people all alone.

  So at lunch he’d sat down and introduced himself.

  She hadn’t been friendly at all. Not until he’d asked if she liked horses, and if she’d like to come over to his ranch sometime and see them.

  That had made her smile. And something about her smile had felt so damned good. He’d wanted to keep on making her smile.

  She hadn’t been smiling when she’d left the ranch just now.

  He pushed away the guilt at not having her come over as he turned into the driveway that led up to his brother’s ranch. Well, the family ranch, really. Bennett was part owner in the place, even if he wasn’t working on it full-time. He had thrown a good lot of his money into it, but then, that was another thing about him staying in veterinary medicine. He made enough money to help Wyatt with this crazy scheme. Bennett was mostly a financial backer when it came right down to it.

  Although, Wyatt had made a decent amount of money on the rodeo circuit. Bennett had no idea how much, because Wyatt preferred to be a mystery.

  He shook his head and parked his truck, getting out and slamming the door.

  He walked up the familiar steps, steps he had walked on thousands of times, and up to the door. He just opened it up and walked in, because he wasn’t going to knock on the door of his childhood home. He might not live there anymore, but it still felt like home in many ways.

  “Hey,” he called out.

  “Drinking in the kitchen,” shouted Wyatt.

  Bennett moved through the entryway and into the kitchen, where his brother Wyatt, his other brother Grant, and their sister, Jamie, were all sitting around the high counter on barstools, clutching various alcohols of choice.

  “That’s nice,” Bennett said, “are you all having a drink for me?”

  “Wash your hands,” Jamie said, wrinkling her nose, her brown hair pulled back in a loose braid that had likely started the day tight, but had ended askew, a testament to the activities of the day. Knowing his sister those activities had been riding horses like hellhounds were biting at her heels.

  Jamie didn’t know caution, not on the back of a horse.

  “All right,” he said, looking down and seeing that while he had been wearing gloves for a good portion of the procedure he had not escaped unscathed.

  He started to scrub up in the sink, very aware of the fact that all of his siblings were watching him. “Did any of you have a comment to make?” He gestured broadly.

  “Olivia is pregnant.” Jamie leaned forward, resting her chin on the lip of her beer bottle. “How do you feel about that?”

  “I didn’t know Jamie was going to be here,” he said to Wyatt.

  “Where else would she be? Anyway, you didn’t ask.”

  “I just came over for a drink,” he said pointedly, “not a talk. If I had wanted to talk, I would have had Kaylee come over.”

  “You should have had Kaylee come over here,” Jamie said.

  Jamie wasn’t a whole lot more of a girl’s girl than Kaylee was, and the two of them got along pretty well now that Jamie wasn’t a kid. Though, at twenty-three she still seemed a lot like a kid to Bennett.

  “She was tired. She had to leave a date to come help me deliver a calf. It was breech.”

  “Did you save it?” Grant asked.

  “Yeah,” he responded. “Hopefully it makes it through the night. But at this point I don’t see why it wouldn’t. Everything was good when we left.”

  “She left a date to come and help you deliver a calf,” Wyatt said, his eyebrows raised.

  “It was a life-and-death situation,” Bennett said. “It’s more important than dinner.”

  “Sure,” Wyatt said, “but couldn’t you have called someone else?”

  “No,” Bennett said. “She’s the only person I can count on in a situation like that. And anyway, I didn’t know she was on a date.” Though, he probably still would have called her. Kaylee was always there when he needed her.

  It wasn’t like he’d needed help choosing a tie. He was trying to save a life.

  “Careful,” Wyatt said, “or she likely won’t be at some point. Not if you keep taking advantage of her.”

  “I don’t take advantage of her. First of all, we run our business together. So, she benefits from the extra time I put in and in the middle of the night. Second of all, she’s my friend. And I would do the same for her, and she knows it.”

  “Still,” Jamie said, her tone sly, “you have a history of losing women now, Bennett.”

  For one blinding second Bennett wished that he were still fifteen. Because if he were, he would have yanked on Jamie’s braid until she apologized for that.

  “I do not have a history of that,” he said. “One girlfriend broke up with me.”

  “And now she’s having Luke’s baby,” Grant pointed out. “Which I feel like is why you’re here, even though you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Bennett returned.

  “That’s fine,” Wyatt said. “We do have more important things to discuss than your lack of a love life.”

  Of course, Bennett hadn’t had a love life when he was with Olivia, not that his family knew that. Olivia had said she wanted to wait until they were engaged to have sex, and he had honored that. It just wasn’t the kind of thing that you discussed with your older brothers. Well, it wasn’t the kind of thing you discussed with anyone, first of all, because he wo
uldn’t go talking about Olivia’s business like that. But second of all, because he had no desire to get harassed. Not that Grant was in any position to harass anyone on that subject.

  Since the death of Grant’s wife eight years ago, Grant’s love life had been in the deep freeze. Grant hadn’t even gotten close to having another woman in his bed, let alone in his life. At least, that was the impression that Grant gave to his family.

  They tried to get him to go out when they could, hoping to do something to heal that hollowed-out look in his eyes. But nothing ever did.

  Though, that likely explained why his siblings enjoyed giving Bennett such a hard time about the situation with Olivia. It wasn’t fatal. Not even close. It was just one of those things.

  “Much more interesting,” Wyatt supplied, “is the fact that we got our first few bookings online today.”

  “That is great,” Jamie said, almost shimmering with glee.

  His younger sister wanted this business to take off almost more than anyone. Because the opportunity to ride horses for a living didn’t present itself often, and this was her chance to do exactly what she loved to do. He respected that. Understood it. Because this might not be his dream, but he certainly wanted his family to work it all out. And anyway, he had his work dream. So he wanted them to have theirs too.

  “We’re set to open with a big barbecue by June. Kind of a grand opening with tours and all of that, and then afterward, it looks like we’re already halfway full.”

  “Fantastic,” Jamie said.

  Grant nodded. Grant didn’t do much in the way of enthusiasm.

  “You seem thrilled,” Wyatt said, directing that comment at Bennett.

  “I am,” Bennett said. “But my primary focus is still my veterinary practice. You know I support this, but I have other things on my plate.”

  “I never said you didn’t,” Wyatt said. “But you do have a stake in Get Out of Dodge. I figure you don’t want to lose all your money.”

  “I’m fine,” Bennett said.

  “Right. So you’re fine if I take a stack of your cash and light it on fire? And you’re fine with Olivia being pregnant?”

  He really wasn’t fine with any of that. But since Wyatt wasn’t going to burn a stack of his cash, and Olivia was going to remain pregnant regardless of his feelings on the matter, he didn’t see the point in rising to Wyatt’s bait.

  “Doesn’t worry me,” he said, grabbing a beer out of the fridge. He had every intention of drinking more heavily here. But he didn’t want to expose the fact that he was bothered by all of this. He really should have stayed with Kaylee, who would have imagined that he was heartbroken or wounded in some way. He wondered if that was what his brother thought too. That Olivia had broken his heart. She hadn’t. It was dredging up a past he didn’t like to think of.

  He wondered if it would be like this if he ever had his own children.

  That was a strange thought. Because of course he had been planning on having children with Olivia. But it had seemed an easy thing. Part of that normal life he was planning for.

  He hadn’t anticipated that it would make him think of his first girlfriend and the baby that they had lost all that time ago. The baby that nobody knew about.

  Nobody but Cole Logan—Olivia’s father and Quinn Dodge’s best friend. He’d been like an uncle to Bennett, and far enough removed from the situation for Bennett to feel like he could go to him for help without being terrified of being seen as a disappointment.

  Not even Kaylee knew.

  There was no point talking about something that had never become anyone else’s problem. He had intended on bringing the issue forward with his family when it had become something they couldn’t deny. But he’d been sixteen, and he’d been an idiot. He’d been caught up in feelings, and he sure as hell hadn’t been thinking.

  The acrid, burning shame of failure still sat in his gut all these years later. For that loss of control.

  He had never acted like that ever again.

  He had gotten caught up in passion, and he hadn’t taken care of Marnie. Hadn’t protected either of them.

  And after all the emotional turmoil of going over what they were going to do, of deciding that he was going to put all of his dreams, his life on hold, so that he could do the right thing and marry her and make a home with her, she had lost the baby. Then she had broken up with him and left town, unable to handle the pain of what had happened.

  He hadn’t heard much about her since. She didn’t stay in touch with her parents. He’d heard once through the grapevine she’d been arrested.

  She hadn’t been that person before. Not when they’d been together.

  He blamed himself, in part. For the fact that what had happened seemed to have damaged her in ways she couldn’t come back from.

  So of course when Olivia said she didn’t want to have sex until they were engaged he had honored that easily. He would never, ever pressure a woman into doing something she didn’t want to.

  And he would never act out of control again in his life. The consequence for that kind of thing were too grave.

  But nobody knew about that. They would all think he was acting weird because his ex was pregnant. They had no idea he’d nearly been a father once. And that this made him think of the baby he would have had fifteen years ago. That it made him wonder about what that might have been like. What that life might have been.

  It hadn’t even been a life he had wanted. It had just been the life he was coping with.

  But it was hovering there now. And he couldn’t even explain it to anyone.

  “Well, maybe at the barbecue I can set up a free vet check booth,” he said drily.

  “Yeah, not sure we want you doing any of that near the food.”

  “Like having hayrides near a barbecue is any less problematic? I don’t think it is.”

  Jamie sniffed. “Horses are not dirty.”

  “Just because you love horses more than you love most people doesn’t mean other people love them near their burgers.”

  “Well, then, they’re not people I want to know anyway,” his sister said.

  Sometimes Bennett wondered if Jamie had suffered the most from losing their mother at a young age. Jamie had been a newborn when their mom had died, and their dad had done his best with her—with all of them—but he’d had four kids, a working ranch and a shedload of grief to contend with.

  Ultimately Jamie had been left to go a little bit wild, running around outside and doing her best to keep up with her brothers from the time she was barely knee-high to a grasshopper. But then, Jamie was happy. Normal shouldn’t matter.

  But it did to him. That was the problem.

  It clearly did, because his entire set of goals had centered around having some version of a normal life. The house, the job, the wife, the kids.

  And it had all crumbled down around him and he didn’t know how he felt about it.

  But then, when push came to shove he hadn’t proposed to Olivia.

  Now that her pregnancy news was rolling over him slowly, and he was dealing with various ghosts from the past, he wondered if that was why.

  If, in the end, his past was part of what had held him back. The fact that he had known marrying Olivia and making a family with her was going to dredge up things he didn’t want to think about.

  But when it came to Jamie, he only cared about her happiness. And that much was easy. When it came to himself, it was a lot different.

  Sometimes he wondered if he deserved to be happy.

  Whatever, he had to quit sitting here feeling sorry for himself. He needed to go home. Now that he had given up on the idea of getting blind stinking drunk, he needed to get his ass in bed so that when tomorrow morning’s wake-up call came it didn’t feel like such an assault.

  “Well,” he said, “thanks for the... This little versi
on of support that you all are able to give.” He tilted his half-consumed beer bottle upward. “I think I’m going to call it a night.”

  “You’re not too drunk to drive,” Grant said, his tone dry, “are you?”

  “I don’t know how you’re ever not too drunk to drive,” Bennett returned.

  “I might not be,” Grant said. “But, seeing as I live here, it doesn’t really matter.”

  A couple of years ago Grant had sold his house in town and moved back onto the ranch. There were so many outbuildings and dwellings on the property that it was easy for them to all cohabit there and not see each other.

  Bennett preferred to have his own space.

  “Fair enough. Now you can just stagger across the property.”

  At least Grant wasn’t drinking alone. He wasn’t going to say that, but he was grateful for that. They all worried about Grant. They had thought that in a year, two years, five years, he would have done something in the way of recovering from Lindsay’s death. But Lindsay had been his high school sweetheart, his first and only love, and the fact that he had married her even knowing their marriage wouldn’t be a long one, knowing that eventually her terminal illness would take her, had made them a kind of tragic love story for the ages in Gold Valley.

  And unfortunately, Grant, it turned out, excelled at existing in tragedy.

  “I’m sure I’ll see y’all tomorrow,” he said. “If you end up needing any help on anything specific let me know.”

  He stood up and went back outside, feeling a little bit like an unsettled boomerang not sure what target he was hoping to return to.

  His hand itched, and he wanted to reach for his phone to call Kaylee.

  But it was late now, and she had probably gone to sleep.

  He had already interrupted her date, he didn’t need to wake her up too.

  Part of him wondered if she had called her date back, if they were resuming activities now. At her home. In her bed.

  He gritted his teeth. What the hell was wrong with him? He didn’t think about Kaylee and sex. He didn’t think about Kaylee showering. Didn’t imagine pale skin and her curves. Never.