It was almost noon when Dylan hopped on one of the ranch’s snowmobiles and headed toward the stables. Nothing cured a man’s worries like honest hard work. He shut the engine off in front of the first building. With almost a hundred horses in residence, they had four separate stables in a row with the last building reserved mostly for maintenance. The weathered barn siding had faded to a light gray over the years. They needed updating along with the rest of the ranch. Dylan had tried to allocate money equally between the horses and the lodge, but there just wasn’t enough to go around.
When you didn’t have a whole lot of money, it meant you always had work to do. Considering they were short-staffed after many of their employees had decided to leave when Jax announced the ranch’s imminent closing, Dylan had been pulling double duty. But he needed the distraction of extra work now more than anything.
One of the stables still hadn’t been mucked thanks to Wes once again skipping out on work. In hindsight, he should’ve fired his brother a long time ago, but Dylan and Jax had been the only ranch around willing to put up with his extensive bull-riding schedule. He’d thought after the World Finals that Wes would have returned to work full-time again. He’d been mistaken. At least his brother had the courtesy to send him a text message and say he wasn’t coming in. He didn’t even know where the man was sleeping anymore. He had a cabin on the ranch, but he rarely stayed in it.
He couldn’t blame Wes for not wanting to stick around. Their family had fractured the moment their father had died. Correction, had been killed. His brother, Ryder, had confessed to running over their father after a drunken argument. Four and a half years later and it still didn’t make sense to him. Ryder and their father had always had a great relationship. He had never seen them argue let alone get into a drunken brawl. It didn’t matter now. Dylan had been forced to accept it. He just wished it hadn’t destroyed the rest of his family. He still couldn’t bring himself to visit his brother in prison.
His mother had sold the family ranch and moved to California shortly after the funeral. She’d remarried a year ago and had no plans of returning. His other brother, Garrett, had moved to Wyoming with his wife years earlier and Wes devoted ninety-nine percent of his time to bull riding. That left only Dylan and Harlan in Saddle Ridge. Jax had become a second father to them both. And now he was gone, too.
Dylan reached into his back pocket for his work gloves and realized he’d left them in his truck. He grabbed a spare pair from the tack room and set off in search of the wheelbarrow. He’d already fed the horses that morning. Normally the stalls were empty this time of day, but he’d kept the horses inside when he’d seen the weather report. Mucking stalls when you had to continually move horses around was a pain in the ass. Between that, repairing some tack, ordering supplies and a second attempt at fixing one of their ranch trucks, it would be well past sunset before he finished for the day. Good. That’s what he wanted. No—it’s what he needed.
Over the past six months, Dylan felt like what was left of his family had splintered even further. After Harlan and his ex-wife had split up, whenever he was on late-night patrol as deputy sheriff, Dylan used to babysit his daughter, Ivy. Now that Harlan had married Belle, she watched Ivy when he wasn’t home. There were still rare instances when they both had work or were in desperate need of a date night, but it wasn’t like it used to be. He missed spending time with his niece. Combined with many of his friends leaving the ranch and Jax’s death, he had never felt more alone.
Dylan snatched a shovel from the wall bracket and swung open a stall door. He jammed it into the soiled hay and tossed it into the wheelbarrow. By the time he reached the last stall in the first stable, he no longer felt the cold. Hay and manure replaced the sweet scent of Emma’s hair. A blister had begun to form between his thumb and index finger and he welcomed the ache. If only it would replace the one that had settled deep within his heart.
Five years ago, he had been a man-with-a-plan. He had bought into Silver Bells with the best of intentions. Jax had owned the ranch for three decades and it made a solid income. But he’d had plans to make it better. Together, they were going to create the biggest and best family guest ranch in the state of Montana. His ex, Lauren, had told him repeatedly that she didn’t want to live on a ranch. She wanted to stay in her modern home with sheetrock walls, not rough-hewn cedar logs. She wanted neighbors and a two-car garage, not hundreds of acres for a backyard. And the horses... She’d warned him she wasn’t an animal person, yet he had pushed and pushed until finally she’d pushed back and left.
In hindsight, they couldn’t have been more opposites of each other. It’s what had attracted him to her in the first place. She wasn’t a big city girl like Emma, but she was definitely suburbia. Dylan had made a name for himself training horses and he had set aside every penny he’d made, earning interest. When he’d met Lauren, she’d been divorced for a solid two years already. She had two kids—a boy and a girl, ages three and five. Sweet as the day was long. He loved those kids as if they were his own. And they loved him enough to call him dad. It made her leaving that much harder.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if their marriage had started on a ranch. If he had let her know from the beginning that this was the life he wanted. Instead, he had moved into her traditional four-bedroom home in Bozeman. The city was touristy, rugged and quaint all in the same breath. He had found work but felt suffocated living in their cookie-cutter housing development. The only time he had felt at home during their marriage was when he was working on someone else’s ranch. So, when Jax had presented him with the opportunity to partner in Silver Bells, he jumped on it.
Lauren had followed him faithfully, despite her protests. The day they sold her house, she bawled like he’d never seen before. That had been his first sign they may not last. Dylan hadn’t touched any of the money from that sale. His conscience wouldn’t allow him to. That decision had given Lauren the financial freedom to leave.
The kids had been seven and nine when they moved to the ranch. They had been excited at first, but had quickly grown bored of ranch life when they realized they couldn’t run down the street to play with their friends. Lauren missed her book club and Board of Education administration position. She’d accepted an office job in town, but she couldn’t relate to the other women and their laid-back country lifestyle. The connection just wasn’t there.
She had stuck it out for a year. An actual year to the day. And then that was it. He hadn’t tried to stop her when she left. There had been no point. She was better off without him. Happier, at least. And the last he’d heard, she had married a Bozeman businessman and had returned to living in a cookie-cutter housing development with manicured lawns and white vinyl fences.
He didn’t blame her. He blamed himself. He’d made her believe he was somebody other than he was. It didn’t make losing her and the kids any easier. Since he hadn’t legally adopted the children, he had no claim to them. He’d been their father for four years and he missed it as much today as he had when she’d left.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real live cowboy at work.”
Emma’s voice startled him and he almost impaled himself on the shovel.
“Somebody has to do it around here since you ran off my men.” Dylan blew out a hard breath. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Yeah, you kind of did. But I get it. No harm, no