Slow Burn Cowboy

She surrounded herself with warmth here. And in this tiny place with its rough-hewn furniture, with the lake on one side and the endless woods on the other, she felt free.

Usually, she felt a sense of relief as the rustic wood walls offered sanctuary from the day.

Not today. Today required more eating.

She flicked on the light and walked into the kitchen. Except those actions blended into one, and it took a moment for her to realize that the light had not turned on. She stopped, letting out a hard breath. She tested the light switch again. Nothing. The kitchen remained resolutely dark. Then she looked and noticed that the lights were off on the microwave and the coffeemaker.

She let out a short curse. Then she raced to the fridge.

When she opened the door the light was off, but cool air emanated from the appliance. She let out a sigh of relief. At least the power outage was recent.

That was all she needed. For everything in her fridge to go rancid. Which it would do if she didn’t get this fixed.

There was a lamp on in the living room, so clearly the lights were fine there. It was probably some weird fuse situation because everything in the cabin was old, including the wiring. She wandered over to the fuse box and flipped a few switches. Nothing. She lifted her cell phone up in the darkness and shined it onto the box, attacking the suspect switch with even more intensity, and still, she was bathed in darkness.

She growled. And before she was fully conscious of what she was doing, she turned her phone back toward herself and dialed Finn.

CHAPTER THREE

IT HAD BEEN a long ass day. And it was fixing to be an even longer ass night. Mostly because Finn was so very aware of the fact that his brother and his niece were asleep in his house. And that the rest of them would be coming tomorrow.

Alex, with his easy grin and smart-ass comments. Liam and the chip on his shoulder that he seemed so committed to.

Cain said he wanted to stay. That he wanted to work the ranch. Give Violet a fresh start. And Finn had no legal recourse to stop him. His grandfather had left equal shares of the ranch to all of them, and that meant that Finn was up a creek.

He jerked the fridge open, grabbing a bottle of beer, then changing direction. He put the beer back and closed the fridge, making his way over to the bar on the other side of the room. His grandfather had been a good Irishman who believed in keeping his liquor supply healthy.

Finn reached out, closing his hand around a bottle of whiskey. “God bless you, old man.”

Then his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He bit back a curse, lifting the device to his ear. “Hello.”

“It’s me,” came the sound of Lane’s familiar voice.

“Hi,” he said, barely managing more than a grunt.

“I need you,” Lane said, her voice breathy.

Those words were like a slug straight to his gut. And it didn’t matter that he knew full well this was in regards to something that had absolutely nothing to do with his body—his body reacted strongly.

“Do you?” he asked, keeping his eyes pinned on the bottle of liquid salvation in his hand.

“Yes,” she said, the word coming out in a long whine.

“It can’t wait till morning?”

“No,” she said, her voice emphatic. “The power is out in my kitchen. I flipped the switches and they won’t work.”

“Which switches did you flip?”

“All the switches. They won’t work! All of my food is going to go bad. I don’t have cheap food, Finn. My cheese. Think of my cheese. Donnelly cheese.”

He closed his eyes, letting out a long slow breath as he released his hold on the liquor bottle. “I’ll be right over.”

If nothing else, it gave him a chance to get out of the house. This house that was a constant reminder of his grandfather, the old bastard. An old bastard he missed, about as much as he wanted to punch him.

He was going to take the chance to get out of this house that now contained two members of his family who seemed determined to stay.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, then reached out, grabbing hold of his truck keys. The metal scraped against the granite countertop, the noise loud in the relative silence of the expansive room.

By the time he pulled up to Lane’s house he wasn’t entirely sure how he’d gotten there. The entire drive over was a blank space. He had been too busy having imaginary, angry conversations in his head. With his brother. With a dead man.

Good thing he knew the road and the route better than he knew just about any other.

He walked up the porch steps, noticing that one of them wiggled beneath his boot. He would have to fix that for her. Then he looked at the porch light, at the excess of cobwebs hanging around it, made much more obvious with the direct glow of the porch light and the darkness behind it.

She hated messing with things like that too, so he should probably clear them when he came to do the step. He sighed, lifting his hand and knocking firmly on the wooden door.

It jerked open half a second later, revealing a nervous-looking Lane. “I hope it’s easy to fix,” she said, moving out of the way and allowing him entry. “I have deep concerns about my food.” She lifted her hand to her mouth, chewing idly on the side of her thumbnail.

“I can take some back with me if we can’t get it fixed—assuming there’s room in my fridge after all that casserole. Also, you can put some of it out in your cold room. Not perfect, but overnight it’s not going to be any warmer than your fridge out there.”

“There you go being all measured and logical.” She waved her hands, looking anything but measured and logical.

He hadn’t felt like either of those things earlier today. No, dealing with Cain he had felt decidedly un-calm and illogical. He could almost see himself standing in his house, being an ass to the brother who had driven halfway across the country to be there, the brother who had been through a whole hell of a lot in his adult life, and who was trying to do something good for his kid.

But he hadn’t been able to be any nicer. He just hadn’t had it in him. The ranch felt like his. He’d invested blood and sweat in that land. Probably even a few bone chips from the time he had busted his shin in a dirt bike accident when he’d been thirteen.

Yes, they had all spent summers there up to a point. But Finn was the one who had stayed. He was the one who worked it. The one who had gotten it into the state it was in, and now Cain just wanted to move in and use it as therapy.

“It’s a gift,” he said, rather than dumping any of those dark thoughts on Lane. “It’s probably just a fuse, and it’s probably just going to take me a minute.”

“I told you I flipped the switches,” she said, sounding grumpy.

“I know you did,” he said.

“You think I flipped the switches wrong,” she said, accusatory.

“I’m sure you’re a great switch flipper,” he responded, deadpan, as he continued to the fuse box.

He knew that the old cabin was a bit of a mess when it came to wiring. He had a rudimentary knowledge of those things, but he wasn’t an electrician. So while he was tempted to offer to sort everything out for her, it would probably be better if she got a professional. Which he’d told her before, but she never hired anyone to help out.

He had fiddled with her fuse box a couple of times before, so he already knew that the labels next to each switch were wrong. The one that claimed to be linked to the bathroom, in fact wasn’t. If he remembered right that one went to a back bedroom.

He knew for certain the one that was labeled living room went to the bathroom. But he wasn’t exactly certain which one went to the kitchen, since there had never been a fuse issue with it before. He turned off one that claimed to be the master bedroom, and heard Lane shout from down the hall.

“Now it’s just completely dark in here!”

He flipped it back on. “Sorry,” he said.

His hand hovered over the switch for the outdoor power, and then he decided to test it. Off, and then on.

“Nothing!”

“Nothing?” he asked.

“Nothing!” she shouted back.

He walked back to where she was, frowning. “Wasn’t the original part of this place built in the twenties?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied, looking confused.

“I need to get up in your crawl space.”

“Wow, Finn. Buy a girl dinner first.”

He sighed wearily. “Lane...”

“Fine. But I don’t know what you’re going to find up there.”

“Knob and tube wiring, I hope.”

He went back out to the truck and grabbed his toolbox, then opened up the attic access in her hallway, lowering the built-in ladder down and climbing into the tight space. It didn’t take long after that to find a wire that had been chewed until it had lost its connection.

He fused it back together with his soldering iron and heard a triumphant hoot from down below.

“I take it that did it?” he called.

“Success,” she called up. “Now get down here before you get eaten by spiders.”

“I don’t think you have man-eating spiders,” he said, making his way back down the ladder. “I think you had wire-chewing raccoons.”

“Raccoons?” she called back.

“Possibly possums.” He made his way from the hall into the kitchen.

Lane was standing in the middle of the room and both of them were all lit up. A wide smile stretched across her face and when she spun around in a circle, he couldn’t help but notice the way the light caught her dark hair. For some reason, it put him in mind of what it might feel like if he reached out and let those glossy curls sift through his fingers.

“Possibly possums,” she said. “Great. Attic possums.”

“Better than man-eating spiders, all in all.”

“Sure. Thank you,” she said, sighing happily. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

He shoved his hand in his pocket. “You’re welcome. Anyway, now your food won’t go bad, and I won’t have to listen to you cry about it for the next two weeks.”

She scowled. “Is that an implication that I am dramatic? That I perhaps don’t let go of things as quickly as I should?”

“Take it however you want to take it, Lane. I’m just saying.”

“I take it with umbrage.”

“Well, that’s a quick change of heart. Turning on your food savior already.”

“Hey, buddy. It doesn’t benefit you to have my food go bad either. Who would feed you?”

“Damn straight. And I’m going to need more food than usual, apparently.”

“Why is that?” she asked, looking concerned now.

Without waiting for an invitation—because he didn’t need it, not in her house—he moved to the fridge and took out a beer. If he was going to stay and talk, he would allow himself one beer.

He popped the top off using the edge of the counter, then made his way across the small space and into the living room, where he sat down on the couch. “Cain is staying.”

“I kind of heard some of that,” Lane said, grabbing her own beer before joining him in the living room.

She didn’t sit next to him, and that didn’t really surprise him. They were friends. Platonic friends, and always had been. But there was a definite line of reserve when it came to physical contact.

She settled into the armchair, lifting her beer to her lips. He looked down at his. “Well, that’s basically it. He wants to stay. He wants Violet to go to school here. He wants to get involved with ranching. Basically, I think my brother is having a midlife crisis at the age of thirty-seven.”

“He’s divorced?”

“Yeah. It’s been a couple of years, but it was ugly. I mean, from what I understand.”

“I see why he’d want a change, then.”

He frowned. “Don’t you dare take his side.”

“I’m not taking sides. I’m saying it’s understandable. When you go through something like that... You just want a clean slate sometimes. And it sounds to me like he muddled through where he was for as long as he could. But eventually, it gets obvious that the problems aren’t going to be fixed if you stay where you are.”

“I will turn your lights off again.” He wouldn’t. “I will leave you in the darkness.”

“The ranch is big. The house is big.” She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Will it kill you to have them living there?”

He set the beer bottle down on the table by his couch without any delicacy. “The ranch is mine. That’s the point.”

“I get that you feel that way, but you sound like a jackass.”

“What the hell kind of friendship is this? You’re supposed to tell me what I want to hear.”

Lane rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry. If that’s the kind of conversation you want, you need to tell me before we actually start talking. Otherwise, I’ll assume you want some honesty. And if you want honesty, then this is what you get.”

“I don’t want honesty. I want you to tell me that it’s egregious that somebody who never gave a damn about the ranch before now considers himself entitled to it.”

“But he is entitled to it,” Lane said, her tone gentle, which was more annoying than her previous harshness. “It’s his ranch. Legally. Your grandfather wanted him to have part of it, and it isn’t really up to you to say that he can’t.”

He shook his head. “It never occurred to me that he would want it. He has a life in Texas.”

“Apparently, a life he doesn’t like.”

That made him pause. The whole situation with his brothers was difficult. It always had been. They had a bond—that was undeniable. When he looked at them, it was like looking at himself, with features and coloring rearranged and slightly different. There was no denying they were brothers. Same dark hair, all over six feet tall. Though the youngest brothers had green eyes instead of blue. Still, there was no mistaking they were related. Because that damn Donnelly blood was just so strong.

Finn looked like his grandfather. They all did. They also looked like their terrible jackass of a father who’d had children he didn’t particularly care about with women he cared even less about.

That was the bond, though. And that was it. Other than Liam and Alex, they had only spent snatches of time together growing up. Cain had mostly been raised in Texas and had a little bit of a drawl as a result, while the rest of them had grown up on the West Coast.

They were as much different as they were alike, and while there was no denying they had a connection, Finn liked it best when the connection was distant.

“And that sucks for him,” Finn said, knowing he just sounded petulant now.

“You don’t have to like it,” Lane said. “I mean, you might want to get over yourself eventually. But I understand why it makes you mad.”

“Why is that, Dr. Jensen?” he said, his tone dry.

“You don’t like anyone else to have control. You like to have all of it. And if you actually have to share space with your brothers, you’re going to have to give up some of your control.”

He shrugged. “Well, who doesn’t want control?”

“Hell if I know.” She took another drink of her beer, and his gaze dropped to her lips. To where her mouth wrapped around the bottle.

Dammit.

He might want control, but he was beginning to wonder if he had it.

Silence stretched between them, long and tense. He felt it creeping up his spine, up his shoulders, his muscles growing tight. He was very aware just then of the fact that they were all alone. Of the fact that it was late, and that he was a man and she was very much a woman.

This kind of thing was always worse when his life was thrown off. That awareness. Those moments when he would look at her and instead of seeing her very familiar face, he would be jarred by some new angle of her beauty.

It was more than just features, though on their own they were pretty enough. It was the glitter in her eyes when she was about to say something she thought was hilarious. The way she struggled to hold back a laugh at her own jokes. The insane things that came out of her mouth when she was rambling because she was nervous or excited, or just hopped up on caffeine.

Those moments when she was more than a pretty face or a damned fine figure. The moments when he saw a woman who was beautiful all the way down. The kind of beauty years couldn’t fade.

Those moments were a big damn problem. Normally, he had a better handle on this.

But then, normally, he had a better handle on his life.

“You know,” she said, breaking him out of his thoughts, “with the extra help from Cain you could afford to do more of your own product. I would really, really like to offer some milk that isn’t ultra pasteurized in my store. We could sell it in a glass bottle. People would love it.”

He groaned. “We’ve been through this already. I don’t have the time. My grandfather wasn’t interested and that was for a reason. We’re better off just taking the contracts from bigger dairies.”

“Not necessarily. The demand for this kind of thing is huge, and I love carrying local products in the store. I want more cheese. More of your cheese.”

He snorted. “Now there’s a sentence you don’t hear every day.”

“Maybe if you didn’t make cheese.” She let out an exasperated breath. “Just think about it. Think about the opportunity that having extra help would present you with. Instead of being a stubborn ass.”

With her poking and prodding him he forgot why just a moment ago he had been feeling tense and like he was a little too big for his skin. Why he had been so captivated with her. Because now, he was less captivated by her beauty and more irritated by that stubborn set of her chin that let him know she wasn’t going to back down.

“I’ll think about it,” he said, mostly to get her off his back. He took another sip of beer, then decided to leave the rest. “I need to go.”

“Fine,” she said.

He stood, and so did she. Then he moved away from the couch, heading toward the door and she reached out, breaking that unspoken wall between them as her fingertips touched his shoulder.

He jerked back as though he’d been burned. There was something strange in her expression then, like she was a baby deer that had been startled. Then the air changed, and it all just felt weird.

“Thank you,” she said, the words coming out of her mouth in a hurry.

“You’re welcome,” he returned, his voice sounding rough even to his own ears.

For a moment, he just stood there. And so did she. It all settled around them, the weirdness, the tension, and he had a feeling that if he didn’t hurry up and get out the door it might wrap itself around them, and then they might find themselves being inexplicably drawn toward each other.

It was either that, or she felt nothing at all while he was standing there gasping for breath. And he did not need to make a move to try and confirm which it was.

So he did exactly what was expected, exactly what was needed. And he moved his ass toward the door.

Once he got outside, the cool night air did a lot to break up the leaden feeling that had settled in his lungs. It had been a day of weird stuff. And tonight had just been the cherry on that terrible sundae.

Tomorrow morning would come, sure and constant as anything. And he would see to his routine. He would get the cows set up for milking, get the milk prepared for processing. He would ride the fence line making sure that everything was shored up.

He would survey the land that had been his whole life since he was sixteen years old. And even if everything wasn’t settled, he would at least have some clarity.

He just had to make it through the night.

Good thing there was a bottle of whiskey waiting at home.

CHAPTER FOUR

HER STORE WAS TINY. It was just so tiny. Lane loved it. She really did. But for some reason when she walked in that morning and turned the closed sign, signaling to the citizens of Copper Ridge that it was time for them to come and get their specialty food items, she was incredibly aware of the fact that the empire she had built was most definitely a miniature one.

Cord was still in her head. She hated that. Him and all of his achievements.

Shaking off the mood, she crossed her arms, surveying her surroundings. If she rearranged the things in the corner, mounted some crates and baskets to the wall, she could most definitely fit in more stock. She didn’t mind the slightly crowded feeling to the place. It was quaint, if she said so herself. Particularly when combined with the red brick and the dark metal decor she had incorporated.

Yes, right over there in the corner would be where she fit the new fridge that she could keep Finn’s dairy products in if he wasn’t such a stubborn cuss.

She wondered idly how Alison would feel about making jam. She worked with fruit when she made her pies. Maybe the addition would be a welcome one. Lane would happily sell them in her store.

She already provided some of the berries for Alison’s bakery, Pie in the Sky; she could always get more intense about her berry collection and provide her with more. Blackberries, marionberries and raspberries grew wild on her property. She could always make jam, she supposed.

She was still musing about various forms of product expansion when her first customers came in. They were tourists, visiting the Oregon coast for the first time all the way from Denver. Lane chatted with them for a while, helping them select products that she considered to be quintessential Copper Ridge items.

Then she referred them to The Grind, her friend Cassie’s coffee shop across the street, for a caffeine fix before ringing up all of their items.

“It sure would be nice if there were a way to order these from home,” the woman said, examining a can of wild caught salmon that had been provided to Lane’s store by local fisherman Ryan Masters.

“Yes,” Lane said, the idea turning over in her mind. “It would be.”

She was still musing on that when the door opened again and Finn came in. “The power in your house okay?” he said, by way of greeting.

“Everything was fine when I left this morning. Nary an attic possum.” She paused. “Thank you again for coming out.”

It had occurred to her last night that she didn’t thank him enough. She just kind of assumed that he would take care of things for her. Probably because he always had.

“Sure,” he said, clearly as uncomfortable with the thanks as he’d been the previous evening.

He meandered through the narrow aisles, divided by wooden shelves. It made her even more conscious of how small the shop was to watch Finn’s broad-shouldered frame moving through the tight space. For some reason, she just stood and watched him for a second. Watched as his blunt, masculine fingers drifted over the merchandise, as he paused over a small jar of caviar. “Do you actually sell any of this?”

“Yes,” she said, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “Not a lot. But some.”

She considered it for a moment. The caviar. She really didn’t sell that much. But right now, her store seemed to be straddling the line between tourist trap and specialty store for the few people in Copper Ridge who had a lot of excess time to shop for specific ingredients and cook with them too.

“Focus,” she said. “That’s what I need.”

“To... Finish your crossword? Or...?”

“For the store,” she said, ruminating while she spoke. “I need to do something to focus its offerings.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, I kept a lot of stock simply because it’s what the old owner carried. But I’ve had the business now for going on five years, and I think it’s time I started taking it more firmly in the direction I want to see it go.”

The need, the burning sensation in her chest, was suddenly manic. Because images of her once-beloved ex parading himself all over national television, reaching levels of success that she would never, ever achieve, had made all of this feel small. It wasn’t, and she knew that. She had never had political aspirations. She wouldn’t be happy being a public figure. So it was pointless to compare herself and her level of accomplishment to Cord, or to anyone else for that matter.