inhaled deeply and fought her way back from the fantasy.
The echo of the sound of the shower underscored the loneliness in which she had lived most of her life.
She couldn't go on this way. As she rinsed and dried and dressed, Carrie knew the time had come to make some tough decisions. She'd already taken a few baby steps away from what was, toward what might be.
Now she needed to decide if she was woman enough to begin the next part of that journey.
Chapter 5
"What do we really know about this guy, anyway?"
Brian grinned at his brother. Chase had a way of slipping into the role of devil's advocate the moment the need arose.
He'd done that a fair bit in the past, and there'd been a time or two Brian hadn't particularly been grateful to him for it. But he understood that trait better now than he did in his younger days.
When he stopped for a minute and reflected that what was at stake at the moment was the very future they were building for themselves, he really couldn't blame his older-by-eight-minutes twin for his caution.
Brian had already marshaled his argument in favor of the man who would soon be there. In this case it hadn't been hard. He grinned. "You remember Michael Finn, don't you?"
"The same Michael Finn who worked the rodeo we worked for the summer before college when we traveled the circuit? Mick, the slave driver we answered to every day?"
Brian nodded. "The very same."
Their mom and dads had always known about their dream to be cowboys. There may have been a bit of rebellion in that dream, at one point. Brian could admit that now. After all, Uncle Jon had the ranch, but he was the only Benedict at the time working the land. All the rest of the family was split between Benedict Oil and Minerals and Benedict International. Well, except for his dad, who was a college professor and Uncle Caleb, who was a cop.
He and Chase had worked at the ranch during a few summers, and he guessed their parents weren't satisfied that they hadn't surrendered their dream in the face of the hard, stinky work of mucking out stalls and spreading manure that Uncle Jon had provided them each year.
Clearly the parents had decided that desperate times called for desperate measures, and had hooked them up to work the rodeo for most of the spring and summer the year they turned eighteen - with the codicil that they would enroll in college in the fall, and set out on a course that would bring them into the family corporate fold, as it were.
They'd kept their promise and fulfilled their obligations. He and Chase had honestly given the corporate life their best shot, but neither of them had been happy. Finally, when they'd returned to Lusty from New York, their parents had conceded the battle. It was pretty hard to accuse them of teenage rebellion when they were twenty-eight years old. The senior Benedicts had told them, and the Town Trust, that they were behind their sons' choice to open this ranch and pursue their dream.
If only the rest of the family would get in line. Brian shook his head and looked at his brother.
Chase had a far-off look, as if he was peering into the past. Then he smiled. "Yeah, the folks thought they'd cure us of our cowboy dreams by signing us up with the hardest-assed boss they could find. He certainly was a tough son of a bitch, was Mick Finn. But fair, and not so much of a hard-ass once he realized we weren't the spoiled trust fund babies he'd been led to believe we were. So what's Mick got to do with anything?"
"Well, while you ran into town this morning to the hardware store, Mick called. He said he heard we were opening up one of the old spreads, and that we might need a hand. Said he knew of a man looking for a job and not afraid of hard work. Only negative thing Mick had to say about the guy is that he was a bit of a drifter, still looking for his place."
Chase took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair. "We can't rightly hold that against a man. Until we made our move, we were looking for our place, too - even if we knew exactly where it was."
Brian nodded because that was how he felt as well. "Oh, and he