she said. “I love a man in uniform.”
He frowned at that. “I was planning on traveling alone, actually.” No point in letting this silvery female use her wiles on him—there might be a busted limb in it! This town wasn’t lucky for men.
“Lonely is bad, Ranger. We’ve learned our lesson about anyplace with the word Lonely in it. And we simply can’t let you travel alone.” Cissy tossed another suitcase into the truckbed, this one leopard-printed.
“We?”
“Hey, Ranger,” Hannah Hotchkiss said, poking her tousled head around Cissy to smile at him, that devastatingly bright, cute-rocker-girl smile that had caught his attention the first time he’d been to Lonely Hearts Station. His heart hit his boots. These two women had nearly reinvented the catfight, bringing it to new form over him! Well, maybe not so much in the physical, girls-mudwrestling fantasy he’d had about the two of them, but that was something he would keep to himself. He didn’t want both of them in the truck with him. There might be two busted parts of his anatomy in his future!
Cissy crawled in the front seat, ignoring his frown. Hannah jerked open the door to the extended cab. “Uh, Ranger, did you say you were traveling alone?” Hannah asked.
“Well, I was.”
“Well, you weren’t,” she said, mimicking his tone. “There’s a man in your back seat.”
He whirled around, his jaw dropping when he saw his twin grinning up at him from his napping place in the back. “Archer! What in the hell are you doing?”
“Heretofore, I’ve been listening to you cuss all the way to Lonely Hearts Station,” Archer said with a grin. “But now that we’ve got seatmates, I’d say this trip is going to be a whole lot sweeter!”
Which just showed how little his twin knew.
THEREIN LAY THE RUB, Mason told himself, which was a pretty stupid expression. What rub? he asked himself sourly. What fool had time to sit around and think up such stupid sayings?
The fact was, he was feeling testy, and he knew it, and his brothers knew it, though they hadn’t complained as yet. Actually, they had complained—to each other when they thought he couldn’t hear them. But they had spared him their grousing, and he knew why. Pity. Plain and simple pity, which was worse than if they’d just come right out and chewed his butt.
Mason sighed, pulled his hat down lower, and stared into his coffee cup. At this moment, he was only fit company for his horse, and so the barn was where he sat. And the word of the day was moping. He was moping—couldn’t call it anything else—something he’d always told his brothers they weren’t allowed to do. So he was hiding out here with Samson, because the horse wouldn’t tattle on him and didn’t care anyway as long as his hay was fresh.
“You like having me around, doncha?” he asked Samson softly, running a hand over the horse’s back. “Not like some people I know.”
Mimi. Mimi, Mimi, Mimi. Why did his mind always come back to her?
“And therein lies the rub,” he said to Samson. “Not the kind of rub you like. The kind that really sticks in my craw, that makes my gut churn. I guess,” he murmured on a deep sigh, “I guess I’ll only say this to you once, and to no one else, but seeing Mimi walk down the aisle with Brian tore my heart right out of me. I thought I could handle it. I thought it wouldn’t matter. But, ol’ pal, it mattered. It just about mattered more than anything in my whole life.”
It mattered so much he could barely show his face anywhere. The whole town knew, of course. Everybody had known that he loved Mimi. He just hadn’t known it. He so much hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself.
“And there are reasons for that, but none I’m going into, even with you,” he said with a last gentle rub over Samson’s back. He swiped his coffee cup and headed to the house. There were some things he wasn’t going to think about—some fears not worth mentioning.
THROUGH THE MAIN HOUSE window, Last watched Mason as he left the barn and walked toward home. “Talk about a sore head,” he muttered to Tex. “That one’s a walking case of soreness.”
Tex peered at Mason moving slowly toward the house, his gait not as firm as it once had been. “Why in the hell didn’t he stop her?”
They both knew the “her” was better left unnamed. “Because he couldn’t,” Last said. “Mason couldn’t stop Dad from leaving. He knew some people do what they have to do sometimes, regardless of what other people need or want. And Mimi couldn’t wait around forever. Lord only knows, Mason was never going to marry her. And we all realized that.”
“It would have taken a miracle,” Tex agreed. “I am never falling in love. Never. It’s much easier just to sleep with a woman who only wants sex.” He leered happily until he caught another glimpse of Mason’s face, set in sad lines. “And that’s another thing I can’t figure out. Why didn’t he just sleep with Mimi?”
Last gasped. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Well, hell,” Tex complained. “He wanted her. Even if he acted like he wanted an arm-shave more.”
“Yeah, but she’s like our little sister!”
“But that was the problem,” Tex insisted. “I think he knew his feelings toward her were stronger than that, but he thought that was sacrilegious or something.”
“But he couldn’t have slept with Mimi,” Last argued, still horrified. “That wouldn’t have been right. I mean, Sheriff Cannady’s daughter!”
“Well, then.” Tex returned to the toaster where he discovered he’d burned the bread to a crisp. Smoke came out, and a disgusting odor. “Hell-on-fire,” he complained. “Helga’s gonna kill me. I’ve messed up her domain.”
Last shrugged, watching Mason kick mud off the porch that one of the brothers had scraped from their boots. “If you ask me, life is going to get a lot messier around here, more than any of us would like.”
And it was all Mason’s fault. Unfortunately, as Last and Tex had just discussed, Last really didn’t have an answer for what his big brother, Mason, should have done. All he knew was that whatever needed to be done hadn’t gotten done, and now they were all forced to live with the consequences—except Ranger, who had escaped. Traitor.
“Where’s Archer?” Mason demanded as he walked into the kitchen.
“I ain’t my brother’s keeper,” Tex replied, his voice instantly tense. “Make that plural, just so you’ll know.”
Last stared at Mason. “What do you mean, where’s Archer?”
“His roll-up tent and sleeping bag are missing from the barn storage.”
Last groaned to himself. One more brother on the lam. Whether Mason wanted to admit it to himself or not, he was driving his family away one by one—just as he had Mimi.
And Mason couldn’t stop them from leaving—any more than he could have stopped their father, Maverick, from leaving when Mason was seventeen.
That’s what love did to a man.
“It’s
