Unexpected Family Read Online Free

he sure as hell didn’t ask, because he was such a mess. Everything was a mess.
    Looking at her was like looking at everything he once had and could no longer have again.
    “Thanks, cowboy,” she said.
    “Sorry.”
    “No sorry about it.” The teasing, the sauciness, in her voice made him smile, allowed him to look up at her. Allowed him to breathe.
    “Thanks,” he said. “For Reese and for…”
    “Rocking your world?”
    He laughed. “It needed rocking.” Which was a lie. His life had been taken by its heels and shaken until everything he knew and recognized had vanished. He’d been rocked enough and what he needed was to be left alone so he could figure out how to handle it.
    “Good night,” she said, and then she walked across his porch.
    It was rude. Bad-mannered in the extreme but he did not follow. He did not yank open the sliding glass door for her, even though he knew it stuck. He just stood on that porch and stared up at the moon until he was numb enough to go back inside.
    * * *
    L UCY TOOK THE LONG WAY back to the Rocky M. Opening up Reese’s car over the pass, the engine roared and the world slipped by like a ribbon. The wind blasting through her open window wasn’t enough to cool her fevered skin and her damaged pride, so she hit the controls to roll down every window until it was a cyclone inside the car. Her hair whipped around her head and still her skin burned, her heart ached.
    Stupidly, she felt like crying.
    Don’t care, she told herself, slowing down to take the first curve down the mountain toward the ranch. You’ve got enough shit to worry about, without worrying about Jeremiah Stone.
    The smart move would be to leave. To pack up her mother and face the mess in Los Angeles.
    But the thought made her panic and a cold sweat formed around her hairline. She wasn’t ready. It had only been three weeks since she’d let go of her employees and closed up the shop.
    Couldn’t she have some time to grieve? To lick her wounds? To hide?
    Such a coward.
    The Rocky M ranch slipped in and out of view through the pine trees until she turned left up the long driveway. The brown ranch house sat under a granite overhang. As a kid she’d prayed more than once that the mountain would fall down on that house. It baffled her that Mia could call this place home.
    Mia and Lucy had grown up on here as the children of ranch employees. The McKibbons, Walter and his wife, owned the land while her father, A.J., had been the foreman and Lucy’s mom, Sandra, the housekeeper and cook. Mia and Lucy’s childhood hadn’t been unhappy, but it had never been secure. Not a moment had passed that they’d been unaware of their status. Every tie they had to this home and this land could be severed. And almost had been.
    That this was where Lucy chose to lick her wounds was even more strange. But beggars couldn’t be choosy. Broke didn’t even begin to describe her financial state.
    She parked beside her sister’s old pickup truck, rolled up the windows and turned off the engine. The quiet echoed and boomed like a heartbeat. Like the house was alive and waiting for her.
    Exhausted by the roller coaster of the night, she finally pulled herself out of the car and into the house through the side door. It was midnight and the house was silent.
    Mia and Jack were living a mile up the road, using the house Mia and Lucy grew up in—the little two-story that their mother, Sandra, had cared for so passionately—until their new house up in the high pastures was finished. Walter, Jack’s father, still occupied the ranch house. And for the past three weeks, Lucy and Sandra had been staying in the rear guest rooms of the house; they smelled like mothballs and had beds like hammocks.
    She unzipped her boots in the mudroom, stepped back and looked at her gray high-heeled Prada knockoffs next to the filthy work boots. She saw it as the perfect example of how she didn’t belong here. Had never belonged here.
    Just a little bit