He and his brothers had been self-sufficient from the beginning. There had been no alternative. They also hadn’t been raised to be close. He and Liam were close enough, but it wasn’t that same caregiver relationship Jason had had to Clara. He had been ten years older, and they’d lost both of their parents. He’d felt responsible for her in a way Alex had never felt responsible for anyone.
“Sorry,” Liam said. “You’re supposed to hire someone to cover for you here? Why not just hire someone to work at the Campbell Ranch?”
“It’s not just about working on the ranch,” Alex said. “Clara isn’t functioning on her own. She’s not paying her bills. And I think Jason was afraid that might happen. He wanted to make sure she had... Another older brother around to look after her.”
Something inside of him—deep inside of him—rebelled at the thought of being Clara’s older brother. It didn’t sit right.
She was just so damn pretty. That was a fact, and one he’d never been blind to. Of course, there was a difference between realizing a woman was pretty and wanting to actually touch that beauty. Clara was off limits. She always had been. But now more than ever before.
He thought of her extreme, ridiculous and unintentional double entendre earlier. About him getting too close to her hive.
Yeah, she was beautiful. Blond hair, full, pink lips. Skin that looked so soft any man could be forgiven for thinking about brushing his fingertips against it.
But that... That crazy bee thing. And the fact that she seemed to think it wasn’t completely transparent she had a crush as deep as the Pacific Ocean on that ridiculous barista in that equally ridiculous coffee shop, all spoke of not only their decade-wide age gap, but the gap they had in life experience.
He shook his head, banished any thoughts of her skin or her lips from his mind, and focused on the brother thing. Or, if not brother, then at least the fact that he had been entrusted with protecting her.
There were any number of women with soft skin in Copper Ridge—he assumed—and if he was starting to think in that way, he was going to have to find one of them.
He had really enjoyed harassing Cain and Finn about their celibacy before they’d found their respective fiancées, and implying that he himself was getting a lot of play. But the truth of the matter was all he’d done was a little flirting over at Ace’s bar.
He enjoyed that. Spending a few hours blowing smoke and telling tall tales. Having a group of women look at him like he was interesting, funny and not... Well, what he was.
He preferred the joke, every time. Because the fact of the matter was when he was alone, there wasn’t much to joke about. There were just endless images of the kind of carnage he had witnessed during war. The darkness serving as a reminder for what it was like to hunker down for hours in a bunker and wait out threatened attacks.
To watch your best friend bleed out in front of you. A guy who had someone depending on him.
Unlike Alex.
Well, now he did. Now Clara was his responsibility. And dammit all, he was going to take care of her. He didn’t have time to sit around and feel sorry for himself. Didn’t have the luxury of feeling like it had been the wrong man’s blood that soaked into the desert sand that day.
Jason was gone. Alex was here.
End of story.
“Whatever you need to do,” Cain said. “Do it. We can cover it here. Unless Liam can’t pull his weight.”
Liam shot their older brother a look. “Maybe some of us like having a life off the ranch.”
“You don’t have one, though. No matter how much you try to make me believe it. Anyway, some of us like our lives right here on the ranch. Don’t ask me to feel bad about that, because I don’t.”
“Glad to have your support, Cain,” Alex said, cutting off the bickering between the two of them. “Of course, I was going to do it either way.”
“I figured as much,” his brother said. “I also thought that this was a great way to come out looking benevolent.”
Finn laughed. “Yeah. That’s what they say about you, Cain. That you’re extremely benevolent.”
“As dictators go, he’s not that bad,” Violet offered as she jumped down from the stool and grabbed a handful of chips before wandering out of the room, looking at her cell phone.
Alison made a squeaking sound. “I don’t mind taking orders from him,” she added, the words coming out quickly. “That was difficult to hold back, but I was not going to say it in front of his daughter.”
Cain grinned, and Alex wanted to punch him. He imagined this was exactly what Cain had felt like for the past few months while he and Liam gave him endless hell over his lack of success with women. Now he was smug. And Alex and Liam were celibate.
“You could also not say it in front of his brothers,” Alex said.
“You’re adults,” Alison remarked. “You can deal.”
“Some of us have already dealt with enough trauma,” he returned. “I’m a soldier. I fought for this country. I’ve been through enough without being exposed to insinuations about my oldest brother’s sex life.”
He didn’t actually care. But he did like a joke. Especially one that worked to make his past less serious somehow. That made him feel like maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal. Like maybe it was a movie or something that happened to somebody else.
“Thank you for your service,” Alison said drily. “But it does not exclude you from being treated like I would treat any of my brothers.”
He couldn’t even be irritated at her. Because he knew that Alison had had a difficult life. He also knew that she didn’t have any siblings at all. Family. That’s what they were. That’s what they were becoming anyway. More seamlessly than he had imagined was possible.
“Okay,” Lane said, turning away from the stove. “Everybody quit bickering. It’s dinnertime.”
* * *
CLARA FOUND HERSELF dragging at work the next day. She’d had a near impossible time sleeping, and that was making it difficult for her to keep a smile pasted on her face in the tasting room. Summer was drawing to a close, the wind whipping down from the mountains taking on a sharp edge that spoke of the coming fall.
But that didn’t mean tourism in Copper Ridge had abated any. The weather was mild on the coast when the rest of the state was dry and hot or buried beneath snow, which made it ideal pretty much all year round. Though, once it got into October, the fog would start to linger longer and longer, stretching into the afternoon then rolling back in as the sun went down. That would last all through the winter, though there were still people who came to visit during those months.
Especially those who found the low, gray sky atmospheric. Or who just liked getting away from other people.
Even inland, at the winery, it was much cooler than it was down in the southernmost part of the state, and people had migrated upward en masse to escape the last gasps of summer heat.
The sky was bright and blue today, and customers were out in force. Locals who had a day off, coming in to order a flight of wine and a tray of cheese, mixing in with the tourists.
The large, converted barn was full today, the tall tables made from wine barrels all taken up.
And Clara was doing a pretty poor job serving everyone, and she knew it. She slunk behind the counter, hoping she could extricate herself from customer service, that Sabrina or Olivia might take a hint and leave any kind of straightening up to Clara while they handled the guests.
She could only hope that Lindy, the owner of Grassroots, didn’t come in. Lindy had been extraordinarily gracious to Clara, both in offering her the job, and in training her.