SPRING ROLLED ON.
Stormy gray days gave way to sparkling green, bright blue and so much giddy sunshine it made a man almost forget about winter. And then the rain swept in again, making everything smell clean and new.
It was tempting to do as much of nothing as he could, and just enjoy it. But that wasn’t who Remy was. And besides, spring meant something very specific to a man with a cow-calf operation. Work. The cows moved from feed to grass once the grass came in up in the pastures. And there was the enduring project of calving, which Remy liked to do in both spring and fall, because he’d never been one for habit and conventional wisdom over innovation.
Handling calves meant everything from births to vaccinations to branding, and Remy couldn’t do it all alone. Or even only with Keira. He usually hired hands from the surrounding area, or exchanged labor with other ranchers he knew. Tonight he’d listened to the rain while he’d made a dent in his usual pile of paperwork, then had started thinking about who he needed to call to help him out.
Keira hadn’t asserted her authority over her grandmother’s herd the way Remy had half expected her to, which meant that he planned to go ahead and do what he’d been doing for the past five years. He kept telling himself he should force the conversation. Or go see about buying that land over in Logan County he’d heard about, because maybe it was high time he owned what he worked. But he never quite got around to it. He figured he’d keep on doing what he was doing here until Keira decided what she was going to do with her grandmother’s cattle. Or with him.
Or until spring turned into summer and she took off again.
Because he knew she was going to leave. He knew it.
Remy tensed at that. Then he made himself breathe. There was no sense anticipating trouble that might never arrive. And there was no point in worrying about something as inevitable as Keira Long leaving.
Remy counted himself lucky that at least this time it wouldn’t surprise him.
He’d hated it when she’d cried in his arms in the middle of town, because he couldn’t stand to see her cry. Yet he’d wished that she would keep on crying, because he still loved her in his arms.
He still loved the way she fit.
Remy tensed. Again. But this time, for a different reason altogether.
“Get a grip,” he muttered to himself, and then returned his attention to the stacks of paper before him that always seemed to multiply of their own accord every time he looked away.
Waylon was sleeping by the fire, herding cattle in his sleep, but a while later he rolled himself awake and alert. He cocked his head, then whined out an alarm. He padded over to hover at Remy’s side.
A moment or so later, Remy heard a pickup making its way along the dirt road that led to his cabin.
Remy braced himself. Waylon barked out a sharper warning.
Which told Remy that it wasn’t Keira. If it was Keira, Waylon would have forgotten himself entirely and gone for the door like an excitable Chihuahua, wiggling and carrying on and embarrassing himself.
Maybe Remy would have, too.
He was already irritated when he got up and went to look out the window. But when he saw the truck outside, he felt no particular urge to wiggle or carry on. He scowled.
He tossed open the front door and stood in the doorway, hoping he looked as unwelcoming as he felt.
And watched his oldest brother, Colt, unfold himself from his pickup, then take his time looking around the wide clearing, from Remy’s barn back to the cabin, as if he expected the forest might have changed since the last time he’d come up here to perform this song and dance.
“Interesting strategy to come alone,” Remy drawled into the quiet, while he could still pretend things between them were the way they used to be. “I think I prefer it when all four of you roll up here together, like my very own redneck revival.”
“Now, Remy,” came his older brother’s mild, irritating drawl, which he knew Colt was drawing out for effect. “You know your mother prefers country to redneck.”
“That’s because your mother is a redneck with money. It’s called putting on airs, I believe, no matter how many acres she likes to call her own.”
Colt let out a laugh. “I didn’t live this long by talking back to that woman, thank you. And I notice you’re only this bold while you’re living on the opposite side of the valley and know full well she can’t hear your blasphemy.”
Remy was tempted to smile at his brother, which only made his temper kick at him all the more.
“We don’t need to have this argument again,” he said as Colt sauntered around the front of his truck, then leaned against it, as if he was prepared to have a battle to see who could look the most languid.
Colt would probably win, too. He usually did.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Colt said, an edgy grin on his face that meant he was 100 percent going to have the argument, anyway. “It’s only taken you five years to see sense. No need to go around hiring hands when your brothers will help you for free.”
“I don’t want your help.”
“And there it is. The patented Remington West stupidity, rearing its ugly head.”
“What I do with my head has nothing to do with you. Any of you.”
“I’m not Dad, Remy,” Colt said mildly. “You’ve spent so long sitting out here by yourself that you’ve mashed your whole family together in your head. I’m your older brother. I never cared who you were dating, and believe me, I never will.”
Remy stared him down, but Colt only grinned wider.
“Though, rumor has it Keira Long is alive and well and living in her grandmother’s farmhouse when she’s not fighting with her mother in the street. I’m sure you meant to tell us.”
“Yeah. I can’t wait to talk about Keira with Mom and Dad again. That’s pretty much my whole bucket list right there.”
Colt sighed. He was three years older than Remy, but all the West brothers had grown up close. Maybe too close. They’d been roughhousing, wrestling, camping, hunting and working cattle together on and around the West ranch their whole lives. And also getting up in each others’ business with alarming regularity. Remy was the only one who had walked away from that, after the friction and bad feelings his relationship with Keira had caused. Because Flint and Annette West could hold grudges like it was their job, and they hated Michael Long. Flint especially. As far as they were concerned, once Keira had dumped their son, she was no better than her father and just as unwelcome.
Remy had taken exception to that attitude. While he and Keira had been together, he’d stayed on the ranch because he’d thought he could turn his parents around on her. After all, while they hadn’t loved her at first, they hadn’t hated her.
They’d thought Keira was too clingy, too needy, at seventeen. They’d wavered between thinking she was smart to go to college and lamenting the way Remy put his life on hold to wait for a college girl who might not come back. They’d never welcomed her with open arms, but he’d thought—or maybe he’d wished—that his parents would thaw over time.
And he’d thought his brothers could have had his back more instead of asking him what his hurry was to settle down in the first place.
When Keira had left him, Remy had gone ahead and done what he should have done years before: he’d moved off West land and refused to let his family into his life again. They could have supported him when he’d asked. They hadn’t.
It was his hill and Remy was prepared to die on it.
“We’re your family, whether you like it or not.” Colt only shook his head when Remy, perhaps predictably, started to say how much he didn’t like it. “You made your point. You holed yourself away out here like a hermit and you’ve kept it up for five years. Congratulations, you couldn’t have given Dad a more effective middle finger if you tried. You actually outstubborned the old man. But where does it end?”
Remy only stared back at him, his face wooden.
“Are you back together with Keira? Is that what this is? Are you...protecting her honor?”
“Are we in seventh grade, Colt?”
“You sure seem to be,” Colt replied with a laugh. “Rumor is she was crying on the street like something out of a Twilight movie.”
“Because you know from Twilight movies.”
“I have a daughter,” Colt said loftily.
“Maybe you should go back home and ask her to braid your hair then.”
They stared at each other a moment. Remy hated this part. Because he forgot the reasons he was keeping his distance. The reasons that seemed so clear to him when he was alone.
“Remy.” Colt wasn’t grinning anymore. “I think you’ve taken the martyr thing about as far as it can go, but that’s between you and your thirst for suffering. You’ve been punishing us all for five years. Do you think that’s going to get her back?”
“I’m not a martyr, jackass,” Remy retorted, and for the sake of the adulthood they should have reached by now, he ignored Colt’s last question. Because if he acknowledged it, there was likely to be a scuffle.
But on nights like tonight he wondered if the person he was really punishing was himself.
“You don’t want help. Fine. It’s your call if you want to be an idiot.” Colt shrugged, but his gaze was hard. “But at a certain point, you’re not sticking it to Dad. You are Dad.”
And long after the sound of Colt’s truck faded away into the sweet sounds of the damp woods, Remy found he couldn’t get that parting shot out of his head.
Because he was willing and able to be a lot of things in this life—including lonely and bullheaded, apparently—but he was not his hard-assed, unyielding father.
He was not.
Remy sat in the cabin that was stuffed full of ghosts he pretended not to notice and listened to what was left of the rain. Those loud, off-tempo drops seemed to hit particularly hard out there in the stillness.
It felt like his heart.
Beating hard and insistent, whether he wanted it to or not.
Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised that he found himself up on his feet, then heading for the door again.
The night was close and cool and smelled fresh. Dark and green, and spring straight through.
He opened the door to his truck, and Waylon jumped in before him. Remy slid in after, and wasn’t particularly surprised to find his dog giving him the eye.
“Mind your own business,” he muttered.
Waylon made a funny little sniffing sound, which Remy opted to ignore.
He told himself he didn’t know where he was going. That he was out for a drive, that was all. Minding his business in the Oregon countryside. Enjoying the aftermath of a spring storm, where the clouds hung close to the mountains and the fields rolled out in all directions.
Still, there wasn’t a single part of him that was surprised when he found himself pulling up to Grandma June’s farmhouse.
Something about this place got to him. The lights were on inside the house tonight, cheery and bright against the thick darkness, and it made his chest feel tight. He had always felt this way, he knew.
Outside, looking in.
Flint and Annette weren’t bad parents, necessarily. Remy didn’t hate them. He felt certain they’d done their best, but it was a hard sort of best. There had never been any place to land. It was his parents’ way, or no way, with no special treatment and no deviation, no matter what.
He was nothing like either one of them, he assured himself, no matter what Colt said.
Meanwhile, everything at Grandma June’s was soft. Accessible. Sweet, despite how salty the old woman used to get when she’d had a mind to speak her piece.
And Remy knew that it was something special about this house, because he hadn’t only felt that way growing up and then falling in love with Keira. He’d felt this way all throughout the last five years, too, when missing Keira had been wrapped up in everything—and this had still felt like the only safe space in Jasper Creek.
He found himself standing on the other side of the white picket fence that ran around the house, and he hardly remembered how he’d gotten there.
But he wasn’t surprised when the front door swung open and Keira stood there before him.
Not surprised, maybe. But he felt the kick of something deep and fierce at the sight of her.
It felt like joy.
And it roared in him like a new kind of flame, a far better fire.
Or that same old one that he’d never quite managed to extinguish.
The light spilled all around her. She had her hair piled on top of her head, messy and cute. She was wearing a cozy-looking white sweater that was too big for her, but still somehow managed to look perfect as it slid off one sweet shoulder.
He wished he knew why that about killed him.
“The porch light is on,” he said, and his voice sounded odd. He told himself it was the thickness of the weather and the way it muffled and distorted things, and not...something else. “Expecting someone?”
“I didn’t leave the porch light on.” Keira tucked her hands in her back pockets, and there was the strangest expression on her face as she peered up at the light in question. “In fact, I deliberately turned it off earlier. But sometimes I think this house has a mind of its own.”
“Makes sense,” Remy said, and somehow it did.
Keira didn’t ask him what he was doing here tonight. She only stood there, the door wide-open and the light all around her.
And a heat in her eyes that Remy knew all too well. Because he’d put it there himself a long time ago.
“Did your mom give you any more trouble?” he asked, because it was the kind of thing he would have asked. The kind of thing he would have wanted to know, back when they’d been together.
Though it occurred to him then that Keira had never really answered questions like that. She’d dodged around them. Maybe that was why she’d told him she didn’t want to be like her mother, but he hadn’t understood what she meant until it was too late.
And here he was now, standing outside her house, like he’d learned nothing from the past five years except how to wait for this exact moment.
That notion should have sent him storming back to his cabin. But instead, Remy stayed where he was.
“No,” Keira said softly. “No more trouble just yet. But it will come. It’s inevitable.”
Answering him without really telling him a thing. “Funny you should use that word.”
Remy opened the gate before him, the squeak of the old hinge loud in the stillness of the soft spring night.
“Which word?” she asked.
“Inevitable.” He walked toward her, aware of Waylon zigzagging behind him, as if he thought he needed to herd Remy straight to her. “The thing is, princess. You’re going to go. That’s what you do.”
He expected that to scrape at her, but she only smiled. A little sadly.
“It’s what I did once,” she said. “Just once.”
“No. First you went to college. Then you went for good.” He made himself smile, too, and that was when he felt the scrape of it. In him. “But I know that now. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”
“You need it to count? Are you keeping score?”
“I don’t know what I need.”
“You say that, Remy,” Keira said quietly. “But here you are. It’s coming up on ten o’clock at night, and I know you have an early morning.”
“So do you.”
“Remy.” He’d never gotten over that, he could admit. The way she said his name. As if it was precious to her. As if tasted to her the way she did to him. “I never stopped—”
But by then he was on the porch. And he didn’t want to hear her finish that sentence.
“I try to stay away from you,” he told her, something dark and urgent in his voice, telling her things he would have preferred to keep to himself. “Even when we’re together these days, I try to keep my distance. But I can’t do it.”
This close, he could see the sheen in her eyes that let him know she had all the same emotions he did.
But he didn’t want that to be true, either. He didn’t want to accept it.
“No one’s asking you to stay away from me,” Keira said, her gaze steady on him. “You can stop that anytime you like.”
Remy moved closer. He reached up to catch the door frame on either side of her, because that seemed a lot safer than touching her. He thought she might step back and put some more distance between them, but she didn’t. She just tipped up her face and met his gaze head-on.
“I knew you were bad news when you started looking at me when you were seventeen,” he said in a low voice. “I knew you were going to get me in trouble, and you did.”
“Some people are very young at seventeen,” Keira replied. “But I wasn’t.” He looked down between them as she reached out, and slowly—almost carefully—ran her fingers over the hollow in the center of his chest. “That’s what happens when you have to parent your parents from a very young age.”
It was the kind of thing she’d always said. Offhand. Almost like an aside. Why hadn’t he realized she was telling him the most crucial things of all that way?
“I’ve been trying to get over you for a decade,” Remy gritted out. “It never seems to work.”
She smiled, as if it hurt a little. “Maybe you should stop trying so hard.”
Remy traced a pattern over her face. Her pretty face that had been haunting him for so long now he hardly knew who he was without Keira in his head, cluttering him up and making him crazy, whether she was right in front of him or ten hours away in Seattle living her own life.
And she felt the way she always did.
As if she had been specially crafted to fit him perfectly.
Remy didn’t know how to make that feeling go away.
And here, now, with a soft night all around them, the light spilling from inside the house, and that smile on her face as if she’d never stopped loving him and never would, Remy couldn’t think of a good reason to stop.
“This isn’t why you came back,” he said. “You came back for your grandmother, not for this.”
Not for me, he thought. But somehow managed not to say.
Keira leaned her cheek into his palm. Her smile was brighter than the lights from inside this cozy old farmhouse, sweeter than the spring night spread out behind them, and wound around and around and around him, as if she would never let him go.
He’d believed that once. God, how he’d believed that.
“You know what they say about those country roads,” she said softly, as if she could see inside him the way she had, once. The way he wanted her to, still. “Sooner or later, they get you where you need to go.”
Remy didn’t know if he bent down or she rose up. He didn’t know which one of them started it, or if both of them did.
But in the next second, his mouth was on hers. And she was pressed up against him, kissing him back as if she’d never stopped.
As if she never would, when he knew that was a lie. A dream.
But he didn’t care, because she was heat and yearning, need and belonging. She was Keira. She was his.
And Remy threw himself, head over heels, into all that perfect fire.
The way he always did.