“ANOTHER CASSEROLE?”
“You’re welcome,” Lane said, crossing the threshold into Finn Donnelly’s house carrying a disposable tin pan that looked like it was full of enough food to feed a small army.
“I can’t eat all of this, Lane,” he said, watching his best friend’s petite form disappear as she made her way from the expansive entry into the kitchen.
“But your brothers can,” she shot back.
He followed her path, his footsteps echoing on the stone floor as he entered the kitchen behind her.
“I don’t know how long they’ll be staying.”
His brothers. The entire Donnelly clan was theoretically showing up any day now. To collect an inheritance none of them deserved. Who knew that his grandfather—possibly the most difficult old bastard on the planet—possessed such a sense of fairness from the great beyond?
Finn had dedicated the last twenty years to working on the Laughing Irish Ranch while his brothers had gone off and made their own way. Which was fine by him. At least, it always had been. It was much less fine now that the old man was dead and his three brothers had been left with equal share in a property they had no blood, sweat or tears invested in.
But Finn figured they would come to pay their respects, and then he could offer them monetary compensation and send them on their way.
They’d never been interested in the ranch before. He didn’t see why they were acting like they wanted to be involved now.
“I imagine they’ll be staying long enough to eat a meal,” Lane said, her tone dry. She flipped her dark hair over her shoulder as she opened the fridge and bent down, examining the available space. “I have brought you a lot of food,” she said, looking back over her shoulder.
“Yes. A lot.”
“Well, most of these dishes you shouldn’t have to cook while you’re dealing with all of this. But some of them are also the result of my testing various sauces and spices that get sent to me. So I can figure out what I want to stock in the Mercantile.”
“Lane of Copper Ridge,” he said drily, “the patron saint of self-serving charity.”
She made a scoffing sound as she straightened and closed the fridge, then set the pan on the counter before turning away from him again. “No one else is cooking for you, Finn. Because you’re a cranky asshole. So maybe you should show a little more appreciation.”
She jerked the fridge open again, bending back down and starting to rearrange the contents. She made a little humming sound, her back arching as she reached deeper inside.
He looked at her ass. He didn’t even bother to try and stop himself. He had accepted the fact that he was attracted to Lane a long time ago. And around the same time he had accepted that he was never going to do anything about it.
He had a host of reasons for that, all of which he’d spent the past several years reinforcing. She was younger. Her older brother would kill him. But more than that, it just wasn’t worth messing with their friendship, no matter how fine her ass was.
Lane was special to him. Important. There was also something fragile about her that he’d sensed from the first, when she’d turned up in Copper Ridge to live with her brother. Finn was the wrong man for fragile.
The first time he’d ever felt attracted to her had come as a shock. Like getting hit in the chest with a bolt of lightning. She’d been eighteen to his twenty-four and he’d been at her and her brother Mark’s house for dinner. Mark had gone to bed, citing an early morning, and he and Lane had ended up staying up to watch a movie.
It was a comedy, and Finn could barely remember what it was. But he remembered Lane laughing. It had been the sweetest sound, and it had done something to him. Then she’d leaned up against him and placed her hand on his thigh to brace herself, and that something had become abundantly clear.
He’d been so disgusted with himself he’d made a thousand excuses and gone straight home. It had never gone away. Not after that. Not once he’d seen her as a woman.
But it had dulled to a vague ache now, instead of that sharp shock of heat. And that was how it had to stay. Repressed. Controlled.
Given that he’d made his decision early on, normally, he made a show of controlling his desire to check her out. Right now, he didn’t see the point. Right now, his grandfather was dead and he was going to be invaded by family that he hadn’t seen in longer than he cared to admit.
Right now, his focus was dedicated to dealing with that.
Amid a host of unenjoyable things, he was going to go ahead and enjoy the sight of Lane’s ass in those jeans.
“I’m sorry, Lane,” he said. “I will try to be more appreciative of the fact that I’m going to die buried beneath a pile of bereavement foods.”
“At least you won’t die of starvation,” she said, straightening and turning to face him, her smile brilliant, her brown eyes glittering. She picked up the casserole pan and put it in the newly cleared space in the fridge, then closed the door.
“Well, that’s a small comfort.” He crossed the kitchen, making his way over to the sink, pressing his palms flat on the countertop and gazing out the window. The house—which was a giant monstrosity that Finn had never understood, given the fact that for as long as he’d known his grandfather the old man had lived here alone—was nestled into a hillside, overlooking interlocking mountains covered in pine trees that stretched on into the distance until they faded from deep green to a misted blue.
The back of the house faced the ranching operation. The fields, containing herds of dairy cows, and the barns.
His blood, sweat and tears were there. Soaked into the ground, the wood and basically every other damn surface in the place. Like the rest of his brothers he had spent summers here as a kid. Unlike them, when he was sixteen he had decided that he was here to stay.
Finn had never felt anything quite like the peace that came from working his body boneless out in the field. And after a life spent with his volatile mother and completely unreliable father, he had liked finding something that he could control.
If he did the work, he got a result. If he spent the day fixing a fence, at the end of the day he