table that had been his since he’d graduated from a high chair. He cut off a hunk of cheese and slipped it into his mouth, chasing it with a long swallow of beer.
He was still sad over the recent confirmation that his parents were gone. It didn’t make sense. Who would have wanted to kill them?
He took a healthy slug of his beer, enjoying the whiff of pot roast and the mouthwatering aroma of hot apple pie.
Shane had a feeling his mom would have adored Taylor. And—God—she would have loved all her grandbabies, too. It was sad to realize his parents would never be a part of their grandchildren’s lives. It wasn’t fair, he thought grimly.
Shane focused on being happy for all his brothers. He adored his sisters-in-law and all the little Landrys they had produced. He felt like the odd man out, though. Again.
As the youngest of the seven sons of Caleb and Priscilla, he also held the dubious distinction of being the only one who had rebelled as a teenager. The only one who had inspired the ire of their father and the protection of their mother.
Shane suffered a familiar pinch in his chest. Suddenly, the snack wasn’t all that appetizing, so he shoved it nearer the center of the large oak table that dominated the room, and concentrated on his beer.
Thinking about the recent loss filled him with guilt. He knew something about the time just before their murder. Something he’d never been able to share. Not with his brothers, not with anyone. It was gnawing at his insides.
Chapter Two
Taylor liked the structure of her life. A life, she acknowledged, as she carried the heavy tray stacked with pies toward the bunkhouse, that didn’t fit any of the criteria she’d so carefully defined. “How did I manage to mess up so royally?” she whispered as she trudged across the moist ground, doing her best to balance the tray and avoid a huge mud puddle courtesy of the early snowmelt.
Didn’t matter. It would be history soon. She’d get back on track. She’d forget that she actually liked caring for a family—lessons learned and reinforced over and over during her tenure on the ranch. She couldn’t erase the last five years. Probably wouldn’t even if she could. It would mean forgetting how much she loved preparing meals, planning parties and celebrating milestones, and she didn’t want to do that. But she couldn’t make that her whole life, right? No. Career had to be the focus. That was the smart choice. Relationships couldn’t be controlled, and had the ability to evaporate in a second. She didn’t want to be one of those sad women sitting alone in some dingy apartment, pining for a man. Men made you desperate and she’d had enough of desperate to last a lifetime.
So, while she liked her current life, Taylor knew it had to end. Time to move on. Captain her own ship. Float her own boat. “When did I become the queen of the nautical metaphor?” she grumbled, sidestepping another hazardous mud puddle.
Here she was, on the brink of checking off one of the major things on her life-goals list, and she wasn’t happy. That was annoying as sin. She should be ecstatic, exuberantly anticipating her future.
A future that didn’t include the large, loving Landry family. Taylor felt a chill carried on the early evening air. Within a week of meeting the Landrys, all of her preconceived notions had started to crumble. Everything, absolutely everything, she’d been living, breathing, believing, planning and plotting for much of her life had collapsed, crumpled, shattered. It wasn’t supposed to be like th—
She screamed, nearly pitching the tray, startled by seeing two men lurking in the shadows. Her yelp of alarm brought four or five more men out of the bunkhouse, along with the attention of the shrouded figures. Her heart was racing even after she recognized one of the men.
Nervous laughter spilled from her as Will Hampton stepped into the beam of light caused by the flood lamp mounted above the front door. “You nearly scared me to death!” she chided.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he replied with a tip of his tattered hat.
Will was a walking cliché, the very image of a taciturn cowboy. From the hat to his craggy, leathery face, jeans, bowed legs and scuffed boots—you name it, he had it. Along with a personality that bordered on nonexistent. He barely ever spoke, and when he did, it was in one-or two-word sentences that almost always ended in a polite “ma’am.”
Smiling, Taylor acknowledged the other man. He wasn’t familiar, but they were at the launch of the spring calving season, so there were any number of men drifting in and out of steady employment. “I brought you dessert.” She handed the tray to Will, glad to rid herself of its weight, and smiled at the other man. “Hi, I’m Taylor.”
“LukeAdams,” he stated, offering her a perfect smile.
Too perfect, she thought. Ranch hands didn’t normally spend that kind of money on cosmetic dentistry. Nor, she noted, did they have tattoos across their knuckles. Nor, ink marks aside, were they usually so attractive. Luke didn’t have the sun-aged skin of a tenured hand. He was just shy of six feet, with neatly trimmed hair—what she could see of it beneath his hat—and light eyes. Maybe he was just what she needed to get her mind off Shane. Not the brightest approach to filling her final weeks on the ranch, but it wasn’t as if she had any plans for a future here.
“Welcome to the Lucky 7.”
“Thank you,” he said politely.
“When did you sign on?”
“A couple of days back,” Luke answered.
He had a nice voice—not as deep as Shane’s—and he was definitely checking her out. “Where’d you work before?” Taylor’s curiosity was, pathetically, only marginally piqued.
“Here and there,” he said with a shrug of acceptably muscled shoulders. Shane’s were broad and sculpted. She knew this because she’d seen him shirtless. A half-dressed Shane was a thing of beauty.
“…Mrs. Landry?”
She shook off her Shane-brain and asked Luke to repeat the question.
“Are you Mrs. Landry?”
“I’m not,” she answered quickly, hating that she hated saying it. “But there are six of them around. Can’t help but run into one eventually.”
“Six wives? Is this one of those pluralist families I’ve read about?”
“We gotta go, Luke,” Will interrupted, clearly irritated by the mildly flirtatious tone of the conversation. “Ma’am.”
Then again, everything about Taylor seemed to irritate Will. They hadn’t exactly bonded during her time at the ranch. At first she’d tried killing him with kindness, but that didn’t get her too far. Now she just settled for civil exchanges whenever the two of them shared the same space.
Taylor couldn’t fathom why it was that Shane adored Will. As she walked back to the house, she recalled the countless times he had praised the foreman, who’d been working at the ranch in some capacity or another for more than forty years. She suspected Shane thought of the older man as a substitute father. Made perfect sense, considering that Will had stepped in to handle things during Shane’s father’s absence. Good thing, too, since none of the other brothers had any interest in the actual day-to-day running of the ranch.
She thought about
