THE DEVIL WAS back in town.
And wearing his favorite long-lost Oregon Ducks T-shirt.
Remy West glared at the woman who’d ripped out his heart, stomped on it until it was dust beneath her shoes and then kicked it off to the side of the road on her way out of town. He congratulated himself on behaving like a gentleman.
Or as close to a gentleman as he could, given the circumstances.
Though if he had this to do over, he would rethink the part where he busted into her bedroom and found her...in a bed.
That had been nothing but dumb.
Because the last thing he needed to do was fill up his head with images of Keira Long, soft and sleepy and warm, and wearing nothing but his T-shirt.
He’d be better off pounding his own head into the nearest wall.
“But—” she began, then stopped herself.
By biting down on her lower lip.
And this was the trouble with Keira, right here.
She never looked evil. Right now, for example, his old T-shirt clung to her entirely too lovingly. And made him remember...too much. Her soft brown eyes were still sleepy and her mouth was as wide and full as he remembered it, and her nibbling on it didn’t exactly help. Her hair was lighter, falling around her shoulders with a lot more gold mixed in to the usual mess of different browns and reds. It hung around her in a tangle that reminded him of more things he ought to forget already, but he’d cut off his own hands before he let himself touch it.
Or her.
“Okay,” she said, her voice much too even. The Keira he remembered would have blown up at him for calling her princess like that, to say nothing of the college crack. “I bet that dig made you feel good. I don’t blame you. But I really don’t know—”
“There’s no argument here,” he said, cutting her off. “Grandma June hired me to take care of her herd years ago and that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m guessing you’re here to decide what to do with them now that she’s gone. I’m not going to sit around and research with you, Keira. If you want to know about the cattle, you’re going to have to come on out and take a look at them yourself.”
Grandma June had always treated him like family instead of a hired hand, but it had occurred to Remy that the woman who’d had no trouble refusing his ring might take a different view of the situation. Grandma June had been so sure the two of them could work together, and Remy hadn’t had it in him to tell her that the likelihood was that Keira would show up, make a big gesture toward handling her grandmother’s herd and then vanish the minute her season here was up.
He was so sure that was how it would go that he hadn’t bothered to put out feelers for other work.
Another potentially bad idea, he admitted.
“Wait a minute.” Keira frowned at him. “Why do you work on my grandmother’s land? Why don’t you work on your own?”
It was funny how a man could have wanted a particular conversation for years, and then when it started, want nothing to do with it at all.
“Funny you should ask that,” he said. Maybe a little darkly.
She tied her hair into a knot on the back of her head the way she had years ago, and he wanted to punch himself because he still found it effortless and elegant and—
Focus.
“Is it funny?” Keira asked, and the fact she sounded good-humored made it worse. “You don’t look like you think it’s funny.”
He didn’t want to consider the things he liked about her, such as the fact she was the only person alive who didn’t take him too seriously, and yet took him very seriously at the same time. Most people usually fell into whichever camp irritated him more in a given moment. But not Keira.
Who he’d once imagined had seen all those jagged parts of him and loved him, anyway.
Sometimes the amount of things he’d been wrong about when it came to her threatened to take him down like a vicious March storm, sweeping over the hills and lashing the fields with its fury.
But not today.
He could feel the smile on his face then, and it wasn’t nice. “It turns out that once you turn your back on your family and decide you’re going to marry the daughter of their sworn enemy, but then don’t, it makes it all a little too complicated to carry on ranching the family land together. Your grandmother offered me an opportunity and I took it.”
“Really? And then what? You go on back home to your father’s land and pretend that everything’s—”
“I don’t live on my father’s land. I live here.” He glared at her, because he didn’t want to say this next part. “In the cabin.”
She blinked. And Remy told himself he didn’t care that he could no longer read every single thought that moved over her pretty face. He clearly hadn’t been all that good at it in the first place, or he would have seen it coming. He would have known that she was going to throw his love—and his ring—in his face. And Lord knew he hadn’t had the faintest clue.
“The cabin?” She said it very carefully, as if the word might hurt her. “You don’t mean...?”
She didn’t say our cabin, the way she would have years ago. He figured her sense of self-preservation must have kicked in.
“Yes, Keira,” he said, and he wished he sounded angry. Cold. Something other than rough and still too dark. “The same cabin.”
It was a cabin tucked into the woods on the edge of one of the higher pastures, that Grandma June—who had insisted that everyone in the younger generation call her that, even if she wasn’t their actual grandmother—claimed was the first place her own parents had lived as newlyweds way back when.
It was the cabin where Keira had found him when she was seventeen, where she had kissed him, both sweet and bold all at once. Then blushed, bright and hot and cute when she’d told him she’d never done that before. The cabin where, the following summer, she’d cried when she’d told him she loved him, but that she wanted to go to college because she didn’t want to turn into her mother.
He hadn’t known what that meant. Keira had never talked much about her parents and she’d gone out of her way to keep them all from spending any time together back then. His parents had been pretty clear that Keira’s parents were awful, Keira was too needy and fragile to be a rancher’s woman, and as the future owner of one fifth of the West ranch, he needed to be careful about such things.
All red flags, in retrospect.
But the cabin was where Remy had ignored those red flags. It was where he’d promised himself to her. He’d promised her he’d wait for her to go off and get her degree, if that was what she wanted. And then he’d accepted the gift of her innocence, the most precious thing he’d ever been given, with a reverence that could still shake him now if he let the memory sneak up on him.
He obviously worked hard to make sure it didn’t. But then, usually, she wasn’t right in front of him.
The cabin was where they’d spent time together when she’d come home from college, away from red flags and family members alike. It was where they’d told each other stories of the future they’d have, together. It was where they’d dreamed. Laughed. And loved each other with such intensity, Remy was surprised the building still stood.
And it was the cabin where, after Keira graduated with honors at the top of her class, Remy had gone down on one knee and offered her the quietly elegant ring he’d bought because it suited her so perfectly. He’d been imagining it on her finger for years.
He’d been completely blindsided when she’d said no.
Blindsided was a mild way to put it.
“I had no idea anyone was living there,” she said now. Quietly. “Especially not you.”
“I’ve been living there for five years.”
She frowned. “And your family is really okay with you—”
“Keira.” He belted out her name as if it was a curse. Because as it happened, it was his favorite one. “You don’t get to ask me these questions.”
Her face looked pale. But he told himself he didn’t care.
“You have three minutes,” he told her. “Get dressed and come outside. This is already taking too much time out of my schedule.”
He turned to go, but her voice stopped him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, low and soft. “I didn’t mean to be...too familiar.”
“You’re not too anything,” he said without turning back around. “Except late.”
He pushed his way out of the bedroom and made his way out of the darkened farmhouse, annoying himself by leaving a trail of light behind him so Keira wouldn’t fall down the stairs and break her neck. He wasn’t sure he breathed again until he was out on that porch. A porch that should have been sagging from the weight of all the memories he had of sitting out here with Keira, keeping his hands to himself while Grandma June was there to supervise.
But the only thing that felt structurally unsound around here was him.
“You have no idea what you’re doing, old lady,” he muttered to the hint of dawn in the sky up over the hills.
He used to call June Gable that. Watch yourself, old lady, he’d say when he’d find her storming around the wet, muddy fields in rubber boots with a raincoat wrapped around her, as if she thought she could intimidate the herd into obeying her commands.
Watch yourself right back, she would reply with a little cackle at the end. You’re too young to be this curmudgeonly.
I’m old in my soul, Grandma June, he’d told her once.
That time, she hadn’t cackled. Everyone thinks that, young man, she’d told him. Right up until the morning they wake up and discover that arthritis hurts a lot worse than their emotional baggage ever could.
Remy had adored her. His father, well-known rancher Flint West, was a hard man who’d had only sons and had expected each and every one of them to grow up as tough as he was. Remy was the third of five, all named after guns of one sort or another, because why not stay on brand? And Remy’s mother, Annette, was not exactly the nurturing kind. She’d always preferred the cattle to her boys, and had often joked that she should have branded the kids right along with the calves. His parents had been kind enough, but never coddling.
Grandma June had always been a revelation to Remy. He’d never worried about being tough enough for her, or whether he was living up to her expectations of what it meant to be a West and the kind of commitment she expected him to make to the land. Every moment he spent in Grandma June’s presence, it was because she thought the world of him. It had been that simple. He couldn’t seem to get out from under the weight of his grief at losing her.
And the footsteps he heard on the porch behind him didn’t help any.
He glanced over when she got there, and hated himself for the way his whole body tightened at the sight of her. Keira had thrown on jeans, boots and a long-sleeved plaid shirt, and put her hair in a loose braid over one shoulder. She looked like every dream he still had of her—gorgeous in that down-to-earth way of hers and happy to see him again.
Because she had the nerve to smile at him.
That damn smile of hers that outdid the rising sun.
“Let’s go,” she said.
As if this was the life they’d dreamed about together all those years ago, when she’d been the one to walk away from it.
Remy ground his teeth together, swallowed down something mean that he’d regret later once he got a grip on himself and stalked toward his truck. He knew she was following him when he heard the creak of the gate. Then her boots on the gravel drive behind him.
The driver’s-side window was down despite the kick of the March morning because Remy liked the country air in his face. It reminded him who he was. And at the moment, that window was filled with the black-and-white face of his seven-year-old border collie, Waylon.
The dog froze, and Remy knew why.
Just like he knew why Keira stopped walking behind him.
“Is that...?” she breathed into the still morning.
Remy scowled at Waylon, who usually responded to that particular expression with instant and abject obedience.
But not today. He ducked his head, looked from Remy to Keira and then enacted his inevitable betrayal by barking joyously and leaping out of the window to get to her.
Remy turned around and watched the dog who until this moment had been his best friend on this earth—who Keira had helped pick out from a litter over in Gold Valley when he was only weeks old—bark and lick and basically make a fool of himself over her.
No more bacon for you, buddy, Remy promised him silently. Ever.
But no matter how he glared, his traitor of a dog continued to shower Keira with love and delight, even though she’d left them both.
Keira was crouched down, rubbing Waylon’s belly and making those sweet little noises she used to croon at him when he was a puppy. Reducing Waylon, a well-trained herding dog who did the bulk of the work some days and was renowned across Jasper Creek for his abilities, into nothing more than a squirming, silly puppy.
The sky was getting lighter, and there was no disguising the amused, knowing look on Keira’s face when she looked up at him again. “I’m surprised you didn’t teach him to bite me on sight.”
Remy couldn’t help himself. He felt the corner of his mouth kick up. “I did. This is outright treachery.”
She laughed and continued rubbing Waylon’s belly as he gazed up at her in adoration. “But such cute treachery. How can you be mad?”
And for a moment, there in the yard outside Grandma June’s house, Remy couldn’t think of a reason. Everything felt easy. The way it used to.
The way it hadn’t in a long time.
But then that was all part of the same betrayal, wasn’t it? Did it matter how cute treachery was? It was still treacherous. She might be back now, but she’d still left. And she was only here because of her grandmother’s letter-writing campaign, not because she wanted to be here. Or wanted Remy back, for that matter. An enthusiastic welcome on Waylon’s part didn’t change that.
Remy lost his smile. He let out the sharp whistle that even Waylon didn’t dare ignore. The dog bounded up, then jumped into the truck when Remy opened the door. Keira followed, too, sliding into the passenger side with that same ease of hers, graceful and smooth, that had always made him a little crazy when they were younger.
And it was betrayal piled on betrayal this morning, because it made him a little crazy now, too.
Remy drove out into Grandma June’s property, through fields that upstart developers from places like Portland or San Francisco were always trying to turn into vineyards, claiming Jasper Creek was the next Napa Valley. He wasn’t opposed to wine, but he didn’t see how turning unspoiled pastureland into clogged country highways packed full of drunken tourists pouring themselves in and out of wineries was anything to aspire to.
He took Keira on a chore-laden tour of what he supposed now belonged to her and her cousins, if the rumor around town was right. He wouldn’t have wanted to be the one who had to tell Katy Long that her mother hadn’t left her a thing. Not Katy or her two sisters, who everyone knew had been nothing but disappointments to their mother and father.
Remy had always accepted the local narrative about Keira’s mother and her sisters without comment. Grandma June was a delight and her daughters had broken her heart, anyway. That was the story people told. Though it felt a little more complicated these days, now that Remy was the West brother who’d gone his own way against his parents’ wishes.
Not that anyone dared talk about Annette West’s heart. Not in her hearing.
None of which he shared with Keira as he reintroduced her to the land.
“I always forget how beautiful it is here,” she said with a sigh when they were up in the high pasture, both of them going out of their way not to look in the direction of the cabin. “Seattle’s gorgeous, of course. I loved my walk to work. And the fact that work itself was in marketing and branding coffee, which was almost like not working at all, which made the walk even better. On a perfect, crisp day, when the mountain was out and the water sparkled blue in every direction, you might be forgiven if you thought Seattle was the prettiest place in the world. But I don’t think so. I think it’s right here in this valley. Moody, green and rich, inviting—”
“Are you writing an essay?” he asked, feeling bad-tempered and surly.
Or more than usual, that was.
Everything about her was getting to him. The small talk, for one thing. On and on, merrily, as if she didn’t notice that he was responding in as few syllables as possible. As if he was any guy she might have found herself with for a day out in the fields. She’d good-naturedly done her share of the chores. He knew perfectly well she could repair a fence, having taught her himself when they were kids, so he shouldn’t have been so irritated when that was what she did. She’d even brought her own work gloves.
As if everything was fine.
She was driving him crazy.
Her rich brown gaze found his, and held. “Oh, I see,” she murmured. “Was I supposed to come out on this early-morning tour of yours in sackcloth and ashes? With a scarlet letter stamped on my forehead? You should have been more specific with your instructions when you woke me up.”
“No sackcloth and ashes required, princess. This is your land, not mine. But I don’t know what you’re trying to prove. We’re not friends. I don’t want to be friends.”
He thought maybe that got to her, and instantly felt bad about it. But then again, he couldn’t read her the way he once had.
“Grandma June wanted me to handle the cattle,” Keira said after a moment. “That’s what I’m trying to do. If you’re already handling them, I’m guessing that means we’re going to have to work together.”
“We can work together. I have no problem with that.”
“Are you sure? Because you can see how this looks like it might be a problem, right?”
Something in him liked that she didn’t back down the way she would have when she was younger and more fragile. That she folded her arms over her chest, cocked her hip and gazed back at him, cool and unfazed. His Keira hadn’t been quite so armored. She’d had an attitude sometimes, but she’d been much softer. More malleable, maybe.
Needy, his mother had pronounced after the first time they’d met her. And needy doesn’t get the cows fed.
I get the cows fed, he’d retorted. Then.
Here, now, he didn’t understand how he could like this new version of Keira and mourn the lost one at the same time.
“You can’t pretend nothing happened between us,” he told her instead of mining his feelings for answers he knew weren’t there. “I mean, you can pretend anything you want, but I’m not going to.”
“Was I pretending? Or was I attempting to have a perfectly polite conversation with someone I’m stuck with for hours?”
“I know what you’re doing, Keira. I don’t like it.”
“Of course you don’t like it. Because if you actually talk to me like a person, I can’t be the monster who broke up with you five hundred years ago. And then what?”
Remy rubbed a hand over his jaw, his eyes on the land and on the cows grazing contentedly before him. “It was five years, not five hundred.”
“You do know that I didn’t break up with you just to hurt your feelings, don’t you? Or are you still not able to hear why I had to do it?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
But if she heard the way he muttered that, she gave no sign. “You know what my parents are like.”
“I think I met your parents twice. If that.”
“This is Jasper Creek,” Keira scoffed. “You know the story. You know my mother got mixed up with my father when she was sixteen years old. And he’s been manipulating her ever since. She chose him over her family. Over her friends. Over every single thing she had in her life, and then she had a child. Me. So she could carry on choosing him over yet another person who should have been important to her.”
“Is this the part where you compare me to your con-man loser of a father?” Remy growled at her. “The one who stole a prize steer from my father and thought he could get away with it? But only after he pretended they were best friends first, to really stick that knife in? Are you doing that again?”
“It wasn’t about you.” Her voice was flat, her gaze direct. And she wasn’t crying this time. She wasn’t sobbing the way she had five years ago, as if she was ripping her own heart out of her body—and his, too. “I needed to make sure that no matter what, I would never end up like my mother. And you couldn’t do that for me, Remy. Or with me.”
“You told me all this back then,” he gritted out. “You said you couldn’t be your mother. I said I’m not your father, so how would it matter? That argument didn’t work. I wanted to marry you, Keira, and you didn’t want to marry me. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”
“Everything is not as black-and-white as you’d like it to be.” And it was like time crumpled in on itself. They might as well have been right back where they were five years ago. Or any other time in their relationship. Remy almost felt dizzy. “There are such things as shades of gray.”
“You either love someone or you don’t,” Remy said flatly. “You made your choice.”
“That sounds even more ridiculous five years out—”
But Remy didn’t want to air old fights and go a few new rounds. He didn’t want to revisit terrible scenes from their shared past. He didn’t want any of this. If it had been up to him, he never would have laid eyes on Keira again.
Because it was better not to have her at all than to have a little of her, but not enough. Never enough.
“I’m not doing this,” he said, cutting her off.
“Yet here we are. Doing it. As always.”
“You’re not understanding me, Keira. I’m not going to do this with you. Whatever you think is happening...isn’t.”
“You think I don’t know that I hurt you?”
And she didn’t ask the question angrily. It would have been easy to brush off if she’d been angry. But instead, there was something imploring in her expression. Her voice. And the way she looked at him, as if she could see straight through him—
That was the last straw.
“You don’t know,” he hurled at her. “You knew the man I was then. You don’t know the man I’ve become. You don’t know how I feel. You don’t know what I had to do to survive you, and you have no idea what my life is like now. Don’t pretend you do.”
She rocked back on her heels and bent her head. But when she raised her face to his again, he couldn’t read her expression at all.
He was ready for that to stop making his chest hurt. Any minute now.
“Noted,” she said coolly.
And he felt like an ass. Instantly.
Because he knew how to be angry at her. He’d been practicing it for years. But there was nothing in him that was okay with hurting her. Even now.
She moved away from him, across the muddy field, as if she didn’t notice it was dirty, as if she didn’t care that spring was coming in, and that messed with the image of her he’d been carrying around all this time. Sophisticated, wannabe-city-girl Keira. The one who needed bright lights, big cities—anything but this. Anything but the land, and the home they could have built here.
She was here again, and Remy hated the way she fit. As if she was a part of the landscape. She was tall for a girl, lithe and graceful no matter what she was doing, and she stood with that cowgirl practicality that called to things in him he wouldn’t have known how to name.
But that was a lot of thinking around the fact that she still felt like his.
That looking at her, planted in the land with her eyes on the cattle that were his present and future all wrapped up in one herd, felt right. She was as much a part of his own personal landscape as that big tree he’d climbed when he was a kid. Or those hiking trails that wound up into the mountains, where he and his brothers had hunted and camped when they were boys and the starry nights had felt like freedom.
He preferred to think of Keira in high heels and fancy dresses, off glittering brightly somewhere. Unreachable. And unsuited for grassy fields, lowing cattle and spring mud.
Having her back here was sheer torture.
But he comforted himself with the knowledge that it was only for a season.
Just one season, Grandma June had told him in her letter.
And if Remy knew anything about Keira, it was that the more she felt like home to him, the less likely she was to stay here and build one.
The more she felt like his, the sooner she would leave him.
It was true five years ago. It was true now.
The only difference was that this time, he knew better.