Down Home Cowboy

“Have fun,” he said, just because he knew it would irritate her.

He had lost the power to make her laugh. To make her smile, with any kind of ease. So, he supposed he would just embrace his ability to irritate.

At least he excelled at that.

He could tell he had excelled yet again when she didn’t smile at him as she left the room with Lane.

“Wait,” Finn said, walking past him and grabbing Lane around the waist, turning her and kissing her deep.

It was all Cain could do to keep from groaning audibly. Between his horndog younger brothers and his incredibly happy other brother he felt like sex was being thrown in his face constantly. Except not in a fun way that involved him having it.

Just him watching other people get it.

Lane and Violet left, and Finn walked back into the living room. “I’m going to marry that woman,” he said, the self-satisfied grin on his face scraping at Cain’s current irritation. He had a feeling he and Finn had the same smile. But it had been so long since he’d actually smiled it was hard to say.

“Have you asked her yet?”

“Not officially. But I’m going to.”

“She might not say yes,” Cain said. He was feeling like an asshole, so he figured he would go ahead and be one. “Or, worse, she might say yes.”

Finn was not deterred by Cain’s bad mood. “I want to spend the rest of my life with her.”

“That’s a long time. Trust me. Married years are different than regular years.” He had way too much experience living with somebody who didn’t even like him anymore. Way too much experience walking quietly through his own house so that he could avoid the conversation that needed to be had, or avoid the silence that seemed magnified when the two of them were in the same room.

He didn’t think Finn would suffer the same fate though. Finn and Lane had known each other for years, and they had been friends before they were a couple. Cain and Kathleen had been stupid and young. He had gotten her pregnant and wanted to do the right thing, instead of doing the kind of thing his father would do.

All in all, it wasn’t the best foundation for a marriage.

For a while, they had tried. Both of them. He wasn’t really sure when they had stopped. He couldn’t blame her for that part. For the silence and the nights when it was easier to pretend he was asleep when she slid between the sheets than it was to try to make love with someone who didn’t have two words to say to you.

Ironically, he would be thrilled to make love with someone who didn’t have two words to say to him now. But hooking up was different than marriage. At least, he vaguely remembered that it was.

“I hope they are,” Finn said, obnoxiously cheerful. “I hope every year with her feels like five. Because my time with her has been the best of my life.”

Given the way they had grown up, he really didn’t begrudge Finn his happiness. He was glad for him, in a way. When he wasn’t busy feeling irritated by his celibate status.

Of course, if he really wanted to do something about it, he could. But for a long time it had suited him to stay unattached in every way possible.

Though, in fairness to him, figuring out how to conduct a physical relationship while he was raising a teenage girl was pretty tricky. He had to set some kind of example. And casual sex wasn’t exactly the one he was aiming for.

He figured he had to at least try to be a model of the kind of man he wanted his daughter to be with. In twenty years or so, since he wasn’t in a hurry for her to be with anyone.

But that good example thing was simple in theory, and not all that enjoyable in practice.

“Good for you,” he said, sounding more annoyed than he had intended.

“How’s the barn coming along?”

Cain was grateful for the change in subject. “It’s coming.”

“Show me.”

His brother grabbed his hat off the shelf by the door, and Cain grabbed his own. Strange how this had become somewhat natural. How sharing a space with Finn, Alex and Liam—while annoying on occasion—was just starting to be life.

He took the steps on the front porch two at a time, inhaling the sharp, clear air. It was late summer, and in Texas about now walking outside would be like getting wrapped in a wet blanket. That was also on fire. He could honestly say he didn’t miss that part of his adopted home state.

The Oregon coast ran a little cold for his taste, but he had to admit it was still nicer than sweltering. The wind whipped up, filtering through the pine trees and kicking up the smell of wood, hay and horse. If green had a smell, it would be that smell that rode the coastal air across the mountains. Fresh and heavy, all at the same time.

It was fastest to take a truck out to the old barn on the property, the one that had originally stood near the first house that had been built when their great-grandparents had bought the land. The house was long gone, but the barn still remained, and with all of his near-nonexistent free time Cain had been fashioning the place into a house for Violet and himself.

“You know,” Finn said, as they pulled the truck up to the old structure, “you could always hire Jonathan Bear to finish this out. If you keep going like this, it’s going to take you forever.”

“You haven’t seen what I’ve done. Anyway, are you in a hurry to get us out of the house?” In the month since they’d come to live with Finn, he’d never seemed to mind them being in the house.

On the ranch in general, yes. But not in the house.

He shrugged. “It doesn’t make much difference to me. Even if you and Violet aren’t in the house Liam and Alex will be. So Lane and I aren’t going to start engaging in public sex anytime soon. At our house. However, there’s a reason she held on to her cabin.”

Lane owned the property down by the lake, and even though she was essentially living with Finn, she still kept that property, and harvested vegetables out of the garden to sell at her mercantile store and to share with them. Cain had no complaints.

“Well, thank God for that,” Cain said, his tone dry. “I was seriously concerned.”

He and his brother walked through the still overgrown pathway that led up to the old barn. He had started with structural things. A new roof, replacing siding where it had dilapidated. Recently, he had moved on to the interior. He slid the brand-new door to the side, revealing the gutted, mostly hollow belly of the beast.

“Wow,” Finn said, stepping deeper into the room. “You’ve done a lot.”

“New wiring,” Cain said, gesturing broadly. “Insulation, drywall. I need to texture, and then I’m going to work on interior walls. But, yeah, it’s coming along. It will be fine for the two of us for the next couple of years. And when Violet leaves...”

Unbidden, an image of the beautiful redhead he had seen at the bar last night filtered into his mind’s eye. Yeah, in a couple of years he would have a place to bring a woman like that.

Not that he couldn’t go back to her place, or get a hotel room, but he didn’t want to have to explain his absence to a teenage girl who barely thought of him as human, much less realized he was actually just a guy with a sex drive and everything. Both of them would probably die from the humiliation of that.

“It’ll be a pretty nice place,” Finn said, and Cain was grateful his younger brother couldn’t read his mind.

“Not bad. And yes, I know that I could pay somebody to finish it. But right now I’m kind of enjoying the therapy. I spent a long time managing things. Managing a big ranch, not actually working it. Managing my marriage instead of actually working at it. I’m ready to be hands-on again. This is the life that I’m choosing to build for myself. So I guess I better build it.”

He knew that at thirty-eight his feelings of midlife angst were totally unearned, but having his wife leave had forced him into kind of a strange crisis point. One where he had started asking himself if that was it. If everything good that he was going to do was behind him.

So, he had left the ranch in Texas—the one he had spent so many years building up—walked away with a decent chunk of change, and packed his entire life up, packed his kid up, and gone to the West Coast to find... Something else to do. Something else to be. To find a way to reconnect with Violet.

So far, he’d found ranch work and little else. Violet still barely tolerated him in spite of everything he was doing to try to fix their lives, and he didn’t feel any closer to moving forward than he had back in Texas.

He was just moved.

Finn’s phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket. “Hey,” he said, “can you pick up Violet tonight from work?”

“I thought Lane was doing it.”

“It’s her girls’ night thing. She forgot.”

Well, he had just been thinking that he needed to actually see where Violet worked. “Sure. Sounds good.”

“What are you going to do until then?”

“I figured I would do some work in here.”

Finn pushed his sleeves up, smiling. “Mind if I help?”

“Sure,” Cain did his best to disguise the fact that he was shocked by his brother’s offer. He wasn’t used to this. He’d been navigating life alone for so long he’d forgotten what it was like to have support. “Grab a hammer.”

* * *

ALISON STARED AT the sunken cake sitting on the kitchen countertop and frowned. Then quickly erased the frown so that Violet wouldn’t see it.

“I don’t know what happened,” Violet said, looking both perturbed and confused.

“You probably took it out too early. Though, it’s nothing a little extra icing can’t fix. And it’s my girls’ night tonight, so I think it can be of use in that environment rather than being put up for sale.”

Violet screwed up her face. “It’s ugly.”

“An ugly cake is still cake. As long as it doesn’t have raisins it’s fine.”

“Well, I didn’t put any raisins in it.”

“Excellent. Of course, I try to provide raisined items to people with taste bud defects, because we here at Pie in the Sky like to be inclusive. But not in cake. It’s just not happening in cake.”

Alison was slightly amused that her newest employee seemed to know about her raisin aversion, even if she didn’t quite have cooking times down. Violet was a good employee, but she had absolutely no experience baking. For the most part Alison had put her on at the register, which she had picked up much faster than kitchen duties. But she tried to set aside a certain amount of time every shift to give Violet a chance to get some experience with the actual baking part of the bakery.

Maybe it wasn’t as necessary to do with a teenager who had her first job as it was to do with some of the other women who came through the shop, desperately in need of work experience after years out of the workforce, but Alison was applying the same principles to Violet as she did to everyone else.

Diverse experience was important on job applications, so that was what Alison tried to provide. Experience with food service, with register work, customer service, food preparation. All of her employees left with expertise in each and every one of those things, plus a food handlers’ card for the state. It was a small thing, but it made her feel like she was doing something.

It also gave her a high turnover rate at the shop, but that was okay with her. It meant a lot of work, a lot of training, but when everything went smoothly it also meant that she could put the employees who had been there the longest on training, which gave them yet another set of skills to add to their resume.

Right now she was short on staff, and even shorter on people who had the skill level she required with the baked goods to do any training. So while she could farm out Violet’s register training, the cakes, pies and other pastries had to be done by her.

“I’ll do better next time,” Violet said, sounding determined. Which encouraged Alison, because Violet hadn’t sounded anything like determined when she had first come in looking for work. Violet was a sullen teenager of the first order. And even though she most definitely made an attempt to put on a good show for Alison, she was clearly in a full internal battle with her feelings on authority figures.

Having been a horrific teenager herself, Alison felt some level of sympathy for her. But also very little patience. But Violet seemed to react well to her brand of no-nonsense response to attitude. Alison wasn’t going to let a chip on the shoulder make her angry, she wasn’t going to get into a fight with a child, after all. But she didn’t cater to it either.

“You will do better next time,” Alison said, “because I can eat one mistake cake, but if I have to continue eating mistake cakes my jeans aren’t going to fit and then I’m going to have to buy new jeans, and that’s going to have to come out of your paycheck.”

She patted Violet on the shoulder, then walked through the double doors that led from the kitchen to behind the counter. The shop was in its late-afternoon lull. A little too close to dinner for most people to be stopping in for pieces of pie. During the summer, they often got people stopping in after dinner, whereas during the school year she got a mini rush just after elementary school let out and parents brought their kids for after-school snacks.

She decided to take the opportunity to check the freshness of her baked goods. She opened the glass-backed display case, grabbed a piece of wax paper and pressed gently on the first row of muffins, then moved on to a loaf of cinnamon chip bread.

A rush of air blew into the shop and Alison looked up just in time to see a tall, muscular man walk in through the blue door. A pang of recognition hit her in the chest before she even got a good look at him. She didn’t need a good look at him. Because just like the first time she’d seen him, in Ace’s bar, the feeling he created inside of her wasn’t logical, wasn’t cerebral. It was physical. It lived in her, and it superseded control.

For somebody who prized control it was an affront on multiple levels.

He lifted his head and confirmed what her jittering nerves already knew. That beneath that dark cowboy hat was the face of the man who had most definitely been looking at her at the bar the night before.

He hadn’t left town. He hadn’t been a hallucinogenic expression of a fevered imagination. And he had found her.

The twist of attraction turned into something else, just for a moment. A strange kind of panic that she hadn’t confronted for a long time. That somehow this man had found out who she was, had tracked her down.

No. That’s not it. Even if he did, that doesn’t make him crazy. It doesn’t.

And more than likely he was just here for a piece of pie. She took a deep breath, steeling herself to look directly at him. Which was... Wow. He was hotter than she remembered. And that was saying something. She had first spotted him in the dim light of the bar, with a healthy amount of space between them.

Now, well, now the daylight was bright, and he was very close. And he was magnificent. The way that black T-shirt hugged all those muscles bordered on obscene, his dark green eyes like the deep of the forest beckoning her to draw close. Except, unlike the forest, his eyes didn’t promise solitude and inner peace. No, it was something much more carnal. Or maybe that was just her aforementioned overheated imagination.

His jaw was covered by a neatly trimmed dark beard, and she would normally have said she wasn’t a huge fan, but something about the beard on him was like flaunting an excess of testosterone. And she was in a very testosterone-starved state. So it was like stumbling onto water in a desert.

Of course, all that hyperbole was simply that. His eyes weren’t actually promising her anything; in fact, his expression was blank. And she realized that while he might look sexier to her today than he had that night, she might look unrecognizable to him.

Last night she had been wearing an outfit that at least hinted at the fact that she had a female figure. And she’d had makeup on, plus she’d gone to the effort to straighten her mass of auburn hair. Today, it was its glorious frizzy self, piled on top of her head, half captured in a rubber band, half pinned down with a pen. And as for makeup... Well, on days when she had to be at the bakery early that was just not a happening thing.

Her apron disguised her figure, and beneath it, the button-up striped shirt that she had tucked into her jeans wasn’t exactly vixen wear.

“Can I... Can I help you?” She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and found herself tilting her head to the side, her body apparently calling on all of the flirtation skills it hadn’t used since she was eighteen years old.

Very immature, underdeveloped skills.

Suddenly, her lips felt dry, so she had to lick them. And when she did, heat flared in those forest green eyes that made her think maybe he did recognize her. Or, if he didn’t, maybe his body did. Just like hers recognized his. Oh, Lord.

“Yes,” he said, his voice much more... Taciturn than she had imagined it might be. She hadn’t realized until that moment that she had built something of a narrative around him. Brooding, certainly, because he had most definitely been brooding a little bit in the bar, but she had imagined he might flirt with a lazy drawl. Of course, it was difficult to tell with one word, but his voice had been clipped. Definitely clipped.

“I have a lot of different pie. I mean, a lot of different kinds. So, if you need suggestions. Or a list. I can help.”

“I’m not here for pie. I’m here to pick up my daughter.”

CHAPTER THREE

WELL, THIS WAS an interesting situation. By which he meant an insane crock of fuckery.

It was the woman from the bar. Right there in the bakery where his daughter worked. Looking even more like someone he wanted to lick all over than she had at Ace’s last night.

Her hair was piled on top of her head, and he wanted to let it down. She was wearing an apron, which was sexy for some strange reason he didn’t even want to parse. And she had flour on her nose. He wanted to kick everybody in the bakery out. Wanted to lock the doors and back her up against one of the rough brick walls and take her right there, hard and fast.

And that was thoroughly incongruous with his usual mind-set. And with the fact that even if he did usher everybody out of the dining area, and lock the door, his daughter would probably still be in the back somewhere. Which was something he really needed to remember.

“Your daughter?” The woman blinked, biting her lower lip, which he felt all the way down in his own body.

“Violet. Violet Donnelly.”

A realization seemed to hit her on an indrawn breath. The reason he’d looked familiar when she’d seen him in the bar. He was a Donnelly. “Right. Of course.” She shook her head. “Of course. She is off about now. I’ll go get her.”

“Is your boss back there?” He didn’t know why he had stopped her, mostly because he wanted to delay her leaving just a second. For what, he didn’t know. Torturing himself? Maybe he was into that now. He wouldn’t know. It had been so long since he had explored exactly what he was into, he had forgotten.

“My boss?”

“Yes. The owner of the bakery? Alison something? I haven’t had a chance to meet her yet, and I thought maybe I would.”

“I’m Alison something,” she said, her tone dry, her expression strangely resigned. “Alison Davis, actually.”

Heat and irritation coiled in his stomach, creating a molten ball that he thought might explode. “You own the bakery.”

She didn’t look a day over twenty-five to him, much less old enough to own what appeared to be a successfully established business.

“Yes,” she said, “I do. Is that surprising?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Again, he wasn’t sure why he was submitting to the banter. He should just tell her to go get Violet. Of course, she was responsible for his daughter’s paycheck and, more than that, the only activity she had in town. Which was the only thing keeping Violet from going completely feral.

“Because. You look too young to own a bakery. Not exactly what I pictured. Except for the flour on your nose.”

She wrinkled said facial feature, reaching up and brushing at it with her fingertips. “It’s powdered sugar,” she responded.

It took everything in him to keep from commenting on the fact that that sounded even more appealing. Because it would be even sweeter if he tasted her skin.

Holy hell. He was in the middle of some kind of severe sexual psychosis. He had been married for years. Which meant that the time of seeing random women on the street as sexual possibilities was long past. His default was not to see women as potential partners.

It still was, he supposed. This...aberration was something to do with her. And she was his daughter’s boss. Which was about the most inappropriate thing he could think of.

“Well,” he said, “that’s important to know.”

“In the interest of being strictly correct, yes.”

“I’m nothing if not pedantic when it comes to the details of baked goods.”

“Maybe I should have hired you then.”

That at least penetrated his thick skull and made him think about something other than sex. “Why? Is Violet having a hard time?”

“Not any more than usual,” Alison said. She seemed much more comfortable with the topic of Violet introduced. “I just meant because she clearly doesn’t have any experience baking. So, all things considered, she’s doing really well. Just a couple of sunken cakes. But nothing I can’t eat.”

“Is there anything I can help her...work on at home?” He didn’t know why he was asking. He knew next to nothing about baking. As far as he was concerned cake came from the store.

“I can think of a few things, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“I actually have no idea how to help her. It just seemed like the thing to say.”

Alison laughed, and the sound was unexpectedly erotic. It fired through his veins, made him want to earn some more laughter. Possibly because he was mainly accustomed to having women glare at him, yell at him. It had been a long time since he’d made one laugh. Since one had looked even remotely delighted with him in any way.

“Sorry,” he said, finding himself smiling. “I’m really not that helpful. But I can taste-test.”

“Well,” she said, “Violet does have a cake in the back. You’re welcome to come back and...have a taste.”

“Sure.” Cake was not what he wanted a taste of. He wanted to taste that little hollow at the base of her throat. Wanted to see if her skin was as soft as he thought it might be. Wanted to see if she tasted like sugar, or if she tasted like flowers. He wasn’t really particular as long as the flavor of woman was layered beneath.

“Come on back,” she said, scurrying to the other side of the counter and opening a small, swinging gate, gesturing toward the double doors that he presumed led to the kitchen.

He saw no reason not to comply. So he did. It was tidy behind the counter, plates stacked out of view of the patrons, and napkins and dish towels neatly folded and stacked beside them. She ushered him into the kitchen, and he saw that it was no less organized. There were large mixers, a double oven lining a back wall and Saran-wrapped trays stacked in large holders, full of various baked goods.

And in the back of the room was his daughter, laboriously piping icing onto what looked like several dozen cookies.

“She’s practicing,” Alison said. “She learned a really basic technique the other day, so she gets to try it out on an order that we got for a client’s office party.”

Violet’s expression was full of concentration, and he was momentarily distracted from the strangeness between himself and Alison by it. By the intensity with which she was focused on her task. By the fact that, for a moment, his daughter look like a stranger to him. Not like a child, and not like the angry teenager he was used to seeing.

She looked content, even though she was deep in concentration and actually applying effort to it rather than just rolling her eyes and tossing out a careless whatever.