“NOT HAVING DINNER with your real family tonight?”
Hunter looked across the table at his brother Lachlan. He could never decide how much weight was actually behind comments like that. If his brothers actually resented the amount of time he spent with the Garretts.
They weren’t big on having heart-to-heart talks.
They preferred a nice physical brawl.
But right now, Hunter decided not to punch him. In the McCloud house, emotions were often expressed with fists. But at least among the brothers it wasn’t with the intent to actually harm. More than could be said for their father.
Gus had just thrown a fifth pizza into the center of the table, a gourmet effort that had involved taking the pizzas out of the freezer, unwrapping them and sticking them in the oven.
And they wondered why he preferred to eat with Sawyer, who had acquired a wife that was an excellent cook. Hunter’s sister-in-law Nelly was a decent enough cook, but Nelly was a quiet, bookish librarian and she and Tag only graced them with their presence for dinner a couple of times a week, which meant they didn’t always get the benefit of her cooking.
“It isn’t you,” Hunter said to Lachlan. “It’s that I have a strong preference for Evelyn Garrett’s cooking.
“Ungrateful shit,” Gus said, sitting down at the head of the table.
His oldest brother was a mean-looking son of a bitch. Scarred all to hell from something that had happened with their father when he was a kid. Something he never talked about. But Hunter wasn’t dumb. He knew what burns looked like. What he didn’t know was whether his father had actually been trying to kill Gus or not.
He wondered if Gus knew.
Hunter’d never asked.
McClouds didn’t do heart-to-hearts or feelings.
They preferred guilt, bottled-up emotion and hard work. In that order.
“Not that I don’t appreciate the effort involved in unwrapping these pizzas,” Hunter said.
“Good,” Gus said, putting his boots up on the table and taking a drink of beer.
“Cheese in the crust,” Brody commented, taking the first slice and not bothering with a plate. “You spoil us.”
“I’ll clock you if you don’t shut the hell up.”
“Love you too,” Brody said.
Gus, Lachlan, Brody, Tag and Hunter had been hell in cowboy boots all their lives. There was barely a year between each of them—only eleven months between Brody and Lach—and they’d spent most of their time running around outside avoiding their father growing up.
Making their own guns, slingshots, rabbit traps and shelters. It was a miracle they’d survived their childhood.
Not even so much because of the homemade weapons. It was their dad.
They’d grown up thick as thieves and caring for each other.
And it wasn’t any different now.
They’d been feral and wild back then and...well.
The house was a mess. It was such a bachelor hellhole they should all be ashamed. Granted Gus made his home in the main house, like a bear in a den. Lach had his own cabin, and so did Tag, Brody and Hunter.
Tag’s house was nice now, since he had a wife to impress. He made it plain he didn’t have Nelly doing all the work. But now that he had someone else to live for, he treated his own life like it mattered just a bit more. And that included making a nicer home for them to enjoy.
“When are you going you get yourself a wife, Gus?” Hunter asked. “Sawyer revolutionized his place with one.”
“Sawyer needed a mom for his kid,” Gus said, talking around a mouthful of pizza. “None of us are stupid enough to end up with accidental babies.”
It was true, the Garretts had had a rash of accidental babies lately. Sawyer had gotten a bar hookup pregnant and had ended up facing down the prospect of being a single father. Rather than have his child grow up motherless the way that he had, he had gotten himself a mail-order bride. Evelyn.
She had worked out better than anyone could’ve imagined.
Then there was Wolf, who had gone and gotten some pretty young thing from Copper Ridge knocked up, and had married her for good measure. Though, they seemed sickeningly in love at this point.
Wasn’t Hunter’s thing. He was happy for them. But it also meant that while they still did some work together, things were different. They weren’t going out to the bar anymore. They talked about babies and how expensive colleges were—as if any of them had gone, but of course they figured their kids would—and dilation. Hunter did not want to talk about the dilating of anything.
Tag was married. That would solve the issue of “would anyone inherit McCloud’s Landing someday?” Not that it was an issue any of them wasted too much time worrying about. When he was dead he wouldn’t care who worked this piece of ground. He liked to think he’d be too busy to worry about shit like that.
But you know, in the abstract that had been a bit of a thing, and now Lach, Gus, Brody and he were free of that concern.
Big ups to Tag.
“Maybe not a wife, then,” Lachlan said, “maybe you just need Snow White to show up.”
“Too bad I’m not a tiny man,” Gus said.
Brody hooted out a laugh and Lachlan snickered into his beer down at the end of the table.
“Well, once we’re done pouring money into this start-up maybe you could consider a housekeeper,” Hunter said.
“I don’t go over to your place and criticize the cleanliness,” Gus said.
“You also don’t come over to our places,” Hunter said. “Because we do everything here.”
“Fine. If it bothers you so much, princess, maybe I will. Didn’t realize my mess was a pea under your mattress. Once we get everything up and running with the new facility. Once we get new arenas and paddocks put in, we can focus on guest cabins. And maybe after that, I’ll worry about the state of this place.”
“Fair enough,” Hunter said.
“The guest cabins are going to require a little bit of song and dance with the county. We have so many dwellings on this property just because we’re grandfathered into previous laws. Getting new permits might be a pain in the ass.”
“Yeah, it might be,” Hunter agreed. “But it’ll be worth it in the end. Because some people might need long-term therapy, particularly if they’re coming from out of town... There’s not enough lodging in Pyrite Falls to make it easy.”
“Yep. Hey. Are you going to make that trip up to Vancouver to talk to the owner of Running Y about his horses he’s off-loading?”