way she treated him... It was why he was here.
It was why he cared about Emmett. Because otherwise he sure wouldn’t care about some snot nosed fifteen-year-old.
Obligation. Blood.
That’s what it was. These made-up reasons you were supposed to care about each other, when you had come from such different circumstances.
Though it felt like more than made-up stuff now. It felt like...it felt like something deeper.
He and Emmett, for all that they were of different generations, had more in common.
His half brothers here... Yes, their father was a problem. A philanderer. Someone who had sown his seed indiscriminately and left a whole lot of pain behind.
But he also seemed to open his arms and his home easily enough. He had treated them like he cared about them—each and every foundling that had come into the place. He had given them a space in this family.
Emmett and West couldn’t much get the mother who’d raised them to do that.
“I suppose that’s true,” Caleb said slowly. “But you look at our parents now and you see them with things kind of held together. For a while there...it was held together with duct tape. It might’ve been gold duct tape, but duct tape nonetheless. We kind of had to be the adults. Because they couldn’t seem to manage it. They were always fighting and screaming and lighting things on fire.”
“You mean that as a figure of speech, right?” West asked.
“Hell no,” Gabe said. “Tammy Dalton lit her share of things on fire. And she smashed in Hank’s truck with a baseball bat. Pretty sure Carrie Underwood writes her songs about Tammy.”
“Well okay, that is something,” he said.
“It wasn’t all easy stuff growing up here,” Gabe said. “But we made it through. And we’re...family. For whatever that’s worth.”
“I guess it’s as good a reason as any to band together.”
“Sure. But this ranch...the boys that are here... The family is expanding, and that feels good too.”
“You know...our friend who died, Ellie’s first husband,” Caleb said. “He was part of our family even though we weren’t blood related. And I think because of him this school exists. Because of him, because of McKenna. Because of expanding our ideas of what it meant, and who we might feel responsible for. Our dad was irresponsible, and he did a whole bunch of stuff that my wife would divorce my ass for. But I think from that we’ve made something good. And I guess that’s the thing. You can let bad things take hold, take over. Or you can decide who you’re going to be and why. I think we all damn well decided.”
And because of that they were helping Emmett.
Because he had come here. Because he had reached out. It was all a decent enough endorsement for the idea of family. In whatever shape it came.
Well, he was grateful for it when it came to Emmett, anyway.
“I figured I’d help give you a hand this morning, if you were all right with that.”
“Sure,” Caleb said, draining the last of his coffee. “I’m not staying long. I gotta get back to the ranch.”
“Why?” Gabe asked. “Time to feed the Christmas trees?”
Caleb took plenty of crap for running a Christmas tree farm. It had been so lucrative for him, that while his plans had been to expand into beef, he had ended up sticking with the trees.
“Yeah,” he said. “Something like that. You know, I work my own land, Gabe, not just something that Dad built.”
“You’re an ass,” Gabe said.
“Yeah,” Caleb said. “That’s well established. And the only person in the world I really care about doesn’t mind.”
He winked and Gabe rolled his eyes. Then the fight seemed to be over.
So this was having brothers.
It was weird.
But he didn’t mind it.
“Let’s get to work,” Gabe said.
They did, and West allowed it to drown out thoughts of Pansy, and the fact that he wanted to call even though he was pretty sure she wouldn’t want him to.
And that he was also pretty sure he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.
But there was ranch work.
And ranch work was a good thing to have when you didn’t want to think about your problems.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SHE WASN’T A VIRGIN.
As Pansy sat at her desk at the police station she could only think that phrase over and over again.
She was no longer a twenty-seven-year-old virgin.
She had dealt with it handily in the arms of West Caldwell last night.
She kept having to remind herself, because it seemed so strange. Like she was having an