thought love was like a forest. You came to the edge of it and went right in, but until you were a ways down the path it was impossible to tell if you were going on a pleasant walk through beautiful scenery, or signing up for an uphill battle with brambles, rocks, mudslides and in his case a bear that wanted to eat his head.
Metaphorically.
“Well. I was just going to do the fence myself,” West said. “And I have no problems with that. Not in any particular hurry to get it finished. So, me not asking for help was hardly being hardheaded.”
“Disagree. If I needed help with something I would ask.”
“You would have a whole crew ready to show up. And I said I didn’t need help.”
Caleb ignored what he’d said about needing help. “You could have a whole crew too. If you asked.”
His situation with the Dalton family was...complicated. He still wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted from them. Or what he expected.
All he knew was that he had reached the point where in Texas there was nothing for him.
His relationship with his mother was nonexistent, she didn’t even know where his younger half brother was at, and thanks to his stint behind bars, he knew just about every law enforcement official in the area was bound to treat him the way Pansy had when she’d first pulled him over. With a hell of a lot of suspicion. That he’d been cleared just never seemed to matter all that much.
Back in Dallas, he’d had a difficult time being accepted back into the circle that he had once been in. The fact that after he’d been imprisoned for three years, new evidence had been unearthed by his lawyer and then his ex-wife had been tried and convicted for fraud might have exonerated him legally, but it hadn’t done it personally.
No. Instead, everyone who sided with her old money family had turned their backs on him completely. They had thought that whatever she had done, it was obviously to escape from a situation with him that had been untenable.
No one would believe that he—a roughneck from the wrong side of the tracks—had in fact been victimized by her—a pampered petite blonde who drank blood in her spare time.
At least, she drank his.
Again, metaphorically.
But, he felt drained all the same.
“Yeah, well. I don’t know y’all well enough yet.”
“You could. If you wanted to.”
“Maybe.”
“Just shut up. I’m going to help you with the fence.”
“I don’t have an extra post hole digger,” he said.
“You’re in luck,” Caleb said, grinning. “I brought my own.”
“Of course you have your own,” West muttered.
Caleb chuckled. “Yeah. Well, I have a whole Christmas tree farm. I need to dig holes sometimes.”
“You are the most random bastard I have ever met.”
“It’s funny, don’t you think?” Caleb asked when the two of them were in position.
“What? The look on your face?”
“No. The fact that we were both in the rodeo for a time. I mean, I was directly following in my old man’s footsteps. You were... I guess you just had it in your blood.”
Discovering that he was the illegitimate son of rodeo royalty had been something of a trip. West didn’t really know how he felt about it. He’d discovered that Hank Dalton was his father some time before he had gone to prison. It was information that would have changed his life when he was younger. But, at that point he had already changed his own life. Made his fortune and all of that.
He didn’t care.
Not especially. Because he had grown into a man who didn’t really need anyone. His half brother was eighteen years younger than him, and they were separated by a whole lot of distance but he’d done his best to try and make what relationship he could with the kid. Have him out to Texas sometimes. Before he’d gone to jail, anyway. Otherwise, he didn’t have much use for family. And he couldn’t say that he had much use for Emmett, it was just that he felt sorry for the kid. Because he knew what it was like to grow up in the fluttering shadow of Jessa Caldwell.
But by the time he’d gotten out of prison, his mom hadn’t even known where the kid was.
It ate at him.
That was something he could talk to Officer Pansy Daniels about. But then, she’d probably write him another ticket.
“What do you know about that little lady police officer?”
He hadn’t meant to ask about Pansy, it had just sort