by Lexie Ray
“Drop the fucking panties,” she said, covering her eyes, unwilling to sit there and watch me make a fool of myself.
“I’m … sorry,” I said, letting them flutter into the drawer. “Sorry about that.”
“Please go.”
“Right.”
I took refuge in my room again, looking at the empty duffel bag, wondering if I should be packing it as Amelia was finishing unpacking hers. I didn’t feel as angry or unhinged as I had earlier. Somehow, as twisted as it sounded, holding Amelia’s intimate items in my hands had sort of humanized her for me. She was no longer the bane of my existence, or a living reminder of my nightmares. She was just a woman who was embarrassed of a guy seeing her underwear. It was relatable, like the way I felt when Zoe tried to separate and fold my boxers.
With a sigh, I pushed the duffel bag back under my bed. I could stay here. I could be the man that Chance wanted me to be and stop making Amelia feel like shit.
Besides, I couldn’t leave now. The shot of adrenaline I’d felt when I’d heard frantic movement in Amelia’s room had reminded me that anything was possible.
If Oscar Green really did decide to make an appearance in this house, I would need to be here to stop him when he did.
Chapter 5
“You’re going to hate what we’re about to say.”
Chance and Paisley stood in front of the rest of us — Hunter and Avery, Emmett looking impatient to get back to his horses, and me, all of us gathered loosely in the barn. It was an emergency meeting that Chance had called, though a casual one. Most super-important family meetings were held in the front room of the house, like the one that had determined Amelia would stay here on the ranch with us. The same one at which I’d been forced to reveal many more details than I wanted to about Oscar Green and our connection to him.
Amelia wandered into the barn, carrying a brush that she was probably about to use to groom a horse, like Emmett had been teaching her to do, and paused to watch. I was the only one who noticed her, and had the spike of mild irritation — along with something else I couldn’t quite name — to go with it.
“Say it, whatever it is,” Emmett said. “We have a busy day with the horses today. Lots of appointments that need to be seen about.”
“Everyone’s busy,” Chance said easily. “But we’re all about to become a lot busier.”
“We have to get the herd branded,” Paisley said, her mouth set in a grim line that told me it gave her no pleasure to give the directive. “If we’re being honest, here, we’ve been putting it off too long. None of the calves even have either of our family ranch brands. It’s a recipe for disaster, and if the thefts continue, it’ll be impossible to prove that the animals are ours.”
“Do we have enough people for a branding?” Avery asked.
“We’ll just have to do with the numbers we do have,” Chance said. “It’s not ideal, and we’ll all have to work hard.”
“I don’t mind pitching in, if there’s anything I can do to help,” Amelia piped in shyly. “You all have been so kind. You don’t have to continue treating me like I’m on some kind of resort. I can work, and I can work hard.”
“You have been working hard,” Hunter said, giving her a grin. “We’d never miss one of your and Zoe’s dinner collaborations.”
“I mean really work,” she argued. “Ranch work.”
“It takes all kinds of work to keep the ranch going,” Emmett remarked thoughtfully, “but you are a lot more at ease on a horse, aren’t you?”
Chance gave a rare smile. “You didn’t have to volunteer, Amelia. You were going to get roped into helping, anyway.”
Being included and praised made her beam, but the wattage plummeted when she looked directly at me. I must’ve been still scowling at her for her interruption, and I carefully turned away.
“Shouldn’t we be talking about the cattle thefts?” I asked. I tried to convince myself that I brought it up because it was important to discuss, not because I was done with everyone mooning over Amelia. I didn’t really believe myself.
“What about the cattle thefts?” Paisley asked, looking tired.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I amended quickly. “I know we’ve been needing to take care of the branding, and this doesn’t change anything. But we can’t actually say that branding will help us do anything about the thefts. We haven’t been able to track down any of the missing cattle yet, have we?”
Avery cleared his throat. “That’s something I’ve been freelancing a little on,” he said. “I haven’t had much time or very many resources available to me, but no. I haven’t found them yet.”
I frowned at him. “What exactly have you been freelancing?”
The dread that filled me at his casualness wasn’t unfounded. This was Texas, after all, and the law had given people ample rights to defend themselves and their properties from trespassers with deadly force. With the heightened state of things in the area right now, with more ranches than ours plagued with theft, I had a lot of reason to worry about Avery doing any amateur sleuthing. He’d be likely to get shot again, and this time could prove a little more damaging.
“Nothing that would get me shot again, if that’s what you’re implying,” he said sourly, reading my train of thought perfectly. “I’ve just been canvassing the area, talking to people, seeing what the feasibility of getting a little more advanced in our surveillance techniques might cost us.”
“We have to catch whoever’s doing it pretty much red-handed,” I said. “We all know that. I just really don’t think it’s realistic to plant cameras or whatever throughout the ranch and through people’s surrounding properties. It would take hundreds of thousands of dollars to execute something like that.”
“We’ll just have to lasso one of them during their next raid or something,” Chance remarked sardonically.
“Remind me to ask Peyton not to shoot anyone the next time,” Emmett replied, equally sarcastic.
Their lackadaisical take on all of this irritated me.
“Don’t we have any leads or motivations for any of this?” I demanded. “Suspects? Where are we with getting a regular police patrol out here?”
“Tuck, you know as well as anyone else that you’re more of a cop than the people actually working for the police department here,” Chance said. “None of them have the time or inclination to come all the way out here and overnight with us. And if they did, the whole town would probably hear about it and the patrol would be useless.”
“You think it’s someone in the area,” I said, surprised.
Our eldest brother shrugged as if he hadn’t just revealed a scenario he’d been cooking up in his brain ever since this whole thing started.
“I think that would make sense,” he said. “But all I have are theories.”
“Better than what anyone else has,” Hunter put in loyally.
“We’ll figure out who’s doing this to us,” Paisley said, doggedly getting us back on track. “Sooner or later, we will. That’s the truth of it. But right now … branding.”
“Branding,” Chance agreed, glum at the prospect.
Branding was usually a community affair, as were vaccinations. I remembered how it used to be, ranching families coming from both near and far to help one another out with the big jobs. It's how we figured out who in our school was from ranching folks. I wasn't sure if it was a firm memory in Avery's mind, but I could sure see it clearly the first time Paisley Summers’ blond hair had caught the sun and he had turned his face toward her like he was witnessing a miracle take place. That had been the first time they'd met, at one of these mass gatherings, though neither of them was sentimental about it. Maybe they didn't even remember darting shyly around each other, adults and older kids tasked with whatever purpose the gathering was supposed to serve.
Now, though, things were different. Maybe they shouldn't have been. Maybe, when we were tightening our belts and striking things out on our budgets, we should've made sure gatherings like that
stayed the way they were. They were so important to the ranching community, a way to show even competitors that we were in this together, preserving this lifestyle.
Instead, we'd all decided gatherings like that cost too much time and money. There weren't resources anymore for a daylong party. The state of the industry made it so that it made better sense to most people to get what they needed done in one long haul and keep their resources to themselves. There weren't any daylong parties anymore, filled with hard work and laughter and love.
There was just a quiet desperation that seemed to seep into everything, even the cattle, which shifted and surged at random moments, kept in check only by corral fencing and the extra efforts of the already overtaxed ranch hands.
Every single person available to help did so, Emmett and Peyton leaving their horse project to help shuffle the herd through the gates, Hunter and Hadley closing the clinic for the day so they could man the branding station. Even Zoe and Toby were helping, distributing sandwiches for hands to wolf down in a spare moment and filling paper cups with water they had on ice in a couple of coolers.
A long morning stretched into an even longer afternoon. There wasn’t any shade around the corrals — hands in danger of being overcome had to take themselves over to the barn for respite from the sun, though few did. The branding irons had to be kept hot to be effective, and the individuals manning that station had to continually swap out once they started feeling exhausted. That was a station where we couldn’t afford any mistakes.
I’d just had my turn at it before I walked over toward the rear of the corral, sweat dripping from my face, my body sore and tired, to help with the traffic flow over there. We wouldn’t be done until the evening, and we’d be damn lucky to get done before sundown. There were just too many animals and too few people.
Everything kind of shimmered for a few moments, and I knew I probably needed water or shade or probably both of them at the same time, when I saw Amelia.
She was comfortable enough on a horse by now that she was riding along the back edge of the herd with Hunter, Emmett, and some other hands, keeping the cattle tight so they could be processed quicker. She looked confident, her head held high, hat on a string draped forgotten on her back, her cheeks bronzed beneath the sun. She’d changed so much in the short time she’d been there that I had to rub my eyes and look again to make sure it wasn’t just a hallucination brought on by heatstroke. Gone was the woman who’d cowered in the front room, shaking as she told her story to my family. Gone, too, was the woman who’d bounced awkwardly in the saddle of a horse, tagging along on a tour of the land. The woman before me now knew herself and knew what to do better than she ever had before. Amelia Banks was a changed woman, and my family’s ranch had exacted that change.
I felt something in me stir, a side effect I still blamed on the heat. My heart didn’t swell at the sight of Amelia Banks steering her horse without yanking on the reins. I wasn’t dry mouthed because she grinned at something Hunter said. And I certainly wasn’t lightheaded at the way she’d stopped buzzing her hair, and the sunlight revealed the true color of those soft strands.
I was only suffering from the hot day.
Something made her turn and look at me in that moment, our eyes meeting over the backs of several hundred cattle, and we stared at each other, shaken up. Something in her had probably alerted her that she was under scrutiny, and I found it hard to take my eyes off her. I didn’t want to be feeling like this, didn’t want to admire her, or worse — let her know that I was proud of her. I didn’t want any of this.
It was hard to really gauge what Amelia was thinking at this distance, but it couldn’t have been anything good when I abruptly turned and stalked away. I thought I intended to go to the barn to splash my face with water and cool down a little bit, but I surprised myself with going directly to the house, not looking at anyone or saying a word.
Something was wrong. I needed to get out of here, get away from her, find my presence of mind again.
“Tucker? Are you okay?”
I cringed. Amelia had apparently been so bothered by whatever she’d seen in me that she’d followed me, only just now dismounting from the horse by the porch. I’d been so close to escaping her, escaping whatever it was that was inside me, but now I had to confront it.
“Just leave it,” I said, not bothering to turn around. I didn’t want to look at her anymore, and certainly not this close. I wanted space and time and a great gaping distance between us. Was that so much to ask? Would it be terribly hard for her to understand?
“Do you want me to get anyone for you?”
She persisted, and it made the knots in my shoulders tighten, my neck ache. “No.”
“But do you need anything? Water? To rest for a bit? Is that why you’re going to the house?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, my voice strained with tension, not sure what was wrong with me, with her, with all of this.
“You’re acting really strange,” she reasoned, and a small hand slipped onto my shoulder. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
And that somehow burst the dam of whatever pent-up feelings I had inside myself.
“I didn’t ask you to come here,” I said, whirling around to face her.
“I didn’t want to come here.” Her arms hung loosely at her sides. She didn’t have any fight left in her. This was it. There wasn’t a single defensive muscle tightened in her body, and she wasn’t talking about not wanting to come here to the house right here, in this moment. I realized that I wasn’t talking about that, either. I was talking about why she was here in general, and I felt ugly about it. It was too late for any of that. We were going to have this discussion now. It had been hanging over our heads for several long weeks. It was well past time to clear the air on it.
“Then why? Why the hell did you come here if you didn’t even want to?”
“I didn’t know what else to do.” She lifted her eyes to meet mine, the gray luminous with tears. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“You had to have somewhere else to go. Anywhere else.”
“I don’t. If I did, I would be there.” It had to be painful admitting that she was really that alone in the world, but she simply stated it as fact.
“I don’t believe for a second that you don’t have a family who would help you,” I said. “There has to be someone.”
“I thought there would’ve been, but there isn’t.” Amelia wiped her cheek roughly, leaving a streak of dirt from her hand. “This wasn’t the first place I tried to seek shelter. Believe me. It was the very last.”
“Of course it was the last. You didn’t try anywhere else because my family’s too big-hearted.”
“No, it was the last on my list. My father died of a heart attack when Oscar took me. My mother died shortly after everything ended. She wasn’t well — never recovered, even when I was back. I’m an only child. And none of my cousins wanted to take me in. Not enough room, money, or inclination to associate themselves with someone like me.”
She jutted her chin out at me, defiant when I didn’t have anything to say to that sad accounting of family support she lacked.
“You’re lucky, you know,” Amelia added. “You have such a big family. They’d do anything for you — for anyone. They took me in, and thank God. I know you didn’t want me here. But I can’t just give up and resign myself to the eventuality that Oscar will find me again.”
I flinched. “Stop calling him that.”
“What? Stop calling him what? That’s his name, isn’t it?”
“Were you on friendly, first-name terms when you were his captive?” I demanded roughly. “Call him Green if you have to give him a name. If you just say ‘him’ I’ll know who you mean. Don’t give him the decency of using his Christian name.”
“Guess what?” she demanded, aggressive. “I can call the motherfucker whatever I want to. Don’t you think I’ve earned that right?”
She was so angry, blossoms of red spr
eading on her cheeks, that it was disconcerting for a moment. Then, I realized just what kind of asshole I was being. I blinked quickly, trying to get my bearings, wondering when I’d gotten so far off track that it wasn’t even rational anymore.
Amelia laughed suddenly. It wasn’t quite a humorous laugh, but it was a sight better than all the vitriol we’d been spouting at each other — even if it was something of a non sequitur.
“What’s so goddamn funny?” I asked, but there wasn’t a bit of heat to my words.
“Us,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the space between us. “If we keep this up, trying to prove who’s the most fucked up by everything that happened, we’ll be going on all night. And all day tomorrow. And into next week.”
“Better than sleeping,” I muttered, and she laughed again.
“We’re such a pair. Plagued by the same nightmares, the same man, the same night. We should make a support group or something.”
“Everyone else who could’ve been a part of it is dead,” I said.
For some reason, that made her laugh harder, and for some other reason, I joined in. I didn’t know what it was. What we had been discussing was nothing to laugh about, but here we were.
“This isn’t funny,” Amelia managed to say before giving herself over to a peal of laughter.
“I know it’s not,” I said, chuckling. “I have no idea why we’re laughing.”
“Because there’s no better alternative,” she said. “Because if we don’t laugh, we can’t live.” I remembered saying something to that effect when I’d first seen her astride a horse, with Avery, and wondered if it had stuck with her.
“I’m sorry that I haven’t been very good at this,” I said, after a beat of silence that wasn’t quite as awkward as it should’ve been.
“If anyone was actually good at this, I would seriously wonder about them,” she said. “Nobody’s supposed to be good at this. This is beyond what people should be able to do.”