Wyatt knew for a fact that his brother had to have a drink every night before he went to bed, or he couldn’t sleep. But that was one of those things they didn’t discuss. At least not at length. They made jokes about it, they could mention it in passing. But they could never get into what it actually meant.
The Dodges were a close family, but it was a stretch to call them emotionally well-adjusted.
“You know I haven’t had too much to drink today,” Jamie said, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms.
“Yeah, I also pay you enough that you can go get your own.”
Jamie scowled. Then she sat up, planting both booted feet on the ground, pushing herself into a standing position. “All right. I’m going to get a drink.”
Grant stared at her. She stared back. And then she sighed heavily. “What do you want?”
“Whiskey,” he responded.
“Of course.” She shook her head, her dark ponytail swinging with the motion, and then she headed over toward the bar.
A few of the men sitting at tables around them followed her movements, and Wyatt was sure to give them his deadliest glare. Jamie was twenty-four, certainly old enough to have her own life and date and all of that. But age had nothing to do with the fact that none of the assholes in this bar—hell, none of the cowboys in this town—were good enough for his younger sister.
Jamie, for her part, seemed oblivious. That suited him just fine.
“So,” Grant said, leveling his dark gaze on Wyatt. “What crawled up your ass and died?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re in a crappy mood.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Wyatt said, folding his arms over his chest.
He was conscious of the fact that he was mimicking his sister’s body language from a moment ago.
“I do,” Grant said.
“Right. And I’m supposed to take commentary on my mood from a guy who has been in a crappy mood for the past decade?”
“I wasn’t criticizing. I was just asking.”
“Just got a lot going on,” he said. Because he wasn’t going to say that he was stressing out about whether or not he was going to be able to fulfill their father’s directive.
That he was afraid he was going to let them all down. That Jamie was going to end up out of work and Grant was going to have left his boring but long-running career at the power company for nothing.
It was easy for him to convince himself that his father wouldn’t actually sell the ranch. Because the fact of the matter was, Quinn Dodge was a hard-ass, but he was a hard-ass who loved his kids.
That was the conclusion that Wyatt would come to if it were any of his other siblings in his position.
But it wasn’t Grant. It wasn’t Jamie. It wasn’t Bennett.
It was Wyatt Dodge spearheading this project. And deep down he had a feeling that his father might just let him fail. Not just himself, but his brothers and his sister.
That was something he could never explain to Grant. Nobody else had the relationship with Quinn that Wyatt had. And it was his own damn fault. It was a situation he created. A relationship that he’d earned.
He couldn’t even be pissed about it.
Except he was.
“Oh,” Grant said, looking somewhere past Wyatt.
“What?” Wyatt shifted in his chair.
“She’s here.”
Wyatt didn’t have to ask who. He froze in his chair, his jaw hardening. He felt like...he felt like he was in damned high school, and he resented that. His younger brother telling him not to look. And him resolutely not looking.
To hell with that.
He lifted his glass and swallowed it down in one gulp. “I’ll be back.”
He pushed away from the table and stood, turning and seeing Lindy standing there. And it was like someone had put their fist through his stomach, grabbed hold of his internal organs and twisted hard.
It reminded him of that first time. But then, every time he saw her it reminded him of the first time.
He gritted his teeth and began walking toward her. And he knew the moment she saw him. Her eyes didn’t meet his, no. And she very resolutely did not look in his direction. But she knew that he was there. He could see it. In the way that her shoulders suddenly went stiff, in the way that her whole body got ramrod straight. To the casual observer it might look like she simply had a neutral expression on her face. One that hadn’t changed in the past ten seconds. But he was not a casual observer.
No, her face had changed too. There was a firmness to the corners of her mouth. Intent. The absence of a smile or frown, totally and completely purposeful.
“You didn’t respond to my email,” he said. “I’m wounded.”
She tilted her head slightly, looking up at him. Then, she faked surprise. As if she truly hadn’t realized he was there until right then.
That shouldn’t get him hot. Nothing about her should get him hot. But everything did. Everything damn well did.
“Sorry. Were you expecting a same-day response? I didn’t think that you engaged with such newfangled technology all that often.”
“Nice to see you too.”
“Right.”
He grinned. “Most people would say that it was also nice to see me. That’s manners, Melinda.”
The light behind her eyes indicated that she wanted very much to tear his throat out. But her expression betrayed that not at all. “We didn’t go over how to handle infuriating cowboys in deportment.”
She hated it when he called her Melinda. He knew that. He also loved saying it. Because no one else did. It put him in the mind of other things he might do to her that no one else was currently doing.
Unless he had the read of it wrong. Maybe she had a different lover every night. It was possible, for all he knew.
Just because his balls were all bound up in wanting her, didn’t mean her body was similarly bound up in wanting him.
“Now that’s a shame,” he said. “How are you supposed to go on if you don’t know whether or not you’re supposed to hold your pinkie out when you tell me to go fuck myself.”
“Oh, I know which finger to hold up when I tell you that, Wyatt Dodge. Don’t you worry about that.”
“What brings you out here tonight?”
A moment later, his question was answered when in came her brother, and a friend of his from the rodeo, Dane Parker. Followed by her former sister-in-law Beatrix Leighton.
“They were parking,” Lindy said, by way of explanation. “I mean. They were parking the truck. They weren’t out parking.”
That made him think of all the things he might be able to accomplish if Lindy went parking with him.
Yet again, he felt like he was back in high school.
He really did resent that.
“Dane,” he said, reaching around Lindy to offer his hand to the other man. “Didn’t know you were going to be in town.”
“I live to be a surprise. Lindy mentioned that you might have a job for me coming up in a few weeks.”
“If by job you mean being unpaid entertainment for a mob of people. Yes.”
“For