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She was such a petite little thing. And she had definitely lost weight since he’d seen her a few weeks ago. He couldn’t imagine her taking on a place like this, and suddenly he felt like the biggest ass on the planet. That he had stayed away because she was going to be angry, when she had clearly been here working her knuckles to the bone.
Jason had been clear on what he wanted. The fact that Alex had screwed it up so far seemed just about right, as far as things went.
“Big wine-tasting day?” he asked.
Clara frowned. “No. Why?”
“You’re home late.”
She raised a brow, then walked around to the back of the truck and pulled out a bag of groceries. “I had to stop and get stuff for dinner.”
“Good. You do eat.”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
“You’re too skinny.” He felt like a dick for saying it, but it was true. She was on the sadness diet, something he was a little too familiar with. But he’d learned not to give in to that in the military. Learned to eat even when his ears were ringing from an explosion, or the heat was so intense the idea of eating something hot was next to torture. Or when you’d just seen a body, bent and twisted under rubble.
Because food wasn’t about enjoyment. It was about survival.
A lot like life in general.
Clara Campbell needed help surviving. That was clear to him.
Clara scowled even deeper as she walked toward him. “Great. Thanks, Alex. Just what every woman wants to hear.”
“Actually, in my experience, a lot of women would like to hear that.” He snagged the paper grocery bag out of her arms as she tried to walk past him. “SpaghettiOs? What the hell is this?”
“I call it dinner.”
“Sure, for a four-year-old.”
“I’m sorry they don’t live up to your five-star military rations. But I like them.”
She reached out and grabbed hold of the bag, trying to take it out of his arms.
“Stop it,” he said. “You’ve been working all day. I’m going to carry your groceries.”
She bristled. “You’re insulting my groceries. I feel like you don’t deserve to carry them.”
He snorted, then turned away from her, jerking the bag easily from her hold. “Open the door for me.”
“I thought military men were good at taking orders,” she said. “All you seem to do is give them.”
“Yeah, well I’m not in the army now, baby.” He smiled, and he knew it would infuriate her. “Open the damn door.”
Her face turned a very particular shade of scarlet but she did comply, pulling out her keys and undoing the lock, then pushing the door open. He walked over the threshold, and a board squeaked beneath his feet. He made a mental note to fix that.
“The dining room is just through there, set the bag on the table.” She walked in behind him. “See? I can give orders too.”
“While eating SpaghettiOs.” He set the bag on the table she’d indicated, then took a look around the room. It was sparse—the floor, walls and ceiling all made with rustic wood paneling. There was a red rug on the floor with a geometric design that provided the only bit of color to the room, other than a big, cheery yellow cabinet that was shoved in the back of the kitchen, packed full to the brim with white plates. It seemed a little incongruous with the rest of the place. And at odds with the rickety dining table and its mismatched chairs.
He had never been to Jason’s house before. They had met when they were in high school, and consequently, had spent their time hanging out away from the watchful eyes of parents and guardians. After that, they’d wound up serving together in the military.
The place was...well, cozy was a nice word for it. Eclectic badger den possibly less nice but more accurate.
“I’m hungry,” Clara said, fishing one of the cans out of the bag. “Don’t taint my SpaghettiOs with your judgment.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He watched as she moved around the efficient little kitchen, making small economical movements, getting out a blue-and-white speckled tin bowl and a little pan, then opening the SpaghettiOs and dumping them in it. She put the pan on the front burner, turning it to high, then whirled around to face him.
“Okay. What are we talking about?”
“Do you want to wait until you’ve eaten your dinner?”
“No.” She turned around and opened the fridge, pulling out a can of Coke before popping it open and taking a long drink. She didn’t offer him one, he noticed.
“I was contacted by your family lawyer shortly after Jason’s death.”
Clara crossed her arms, her lips going tight. “Okay, why did he call you?”
“Why didn’t he call you, Clara? I expected you would have talked to him.”
She bit her lip. “Well. He did. But we didn’t talk.” Alex stared her down and her cheeks turned increasingly red as she shifted her weight from foot to foot. “I’ve been busy,” she added defensively.
“Well, if you hadn’t been too busy for the lawyer, he might have talked to you about the fact your brother’s will concerns me.”
“Excuse me?” This was the part he had been avoiding. The thing he had not been looking forward to. Because his friend had left him with property, had left him with his earthly possessions and a letter explaining his feelings, which ultimately were only that: the feelings of a dead man. Alex had to try to fill in blanks he wasn’t sure could be filled. He’d tried to reason it all out to decide if he could justify defying Jason’s wishes. He hadn’t been able to. So here he was.
“He left me in charge of the estate,” he continued. “The ranch, everything on it, everything in it, the house—until things are stable or until one year has passed.”
Clara didn’t move. The only indication she was reacting to his words at all was that her face had gone completely waxen.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Clara? I have a stake in this house now. And in this ranch. Your brother left me in charge.”
CHAPTER TWO
“CLARA?”
Clara knew she was supposed to respond. She was supposed to say something. Yell, maybe. Or cry? Something. Alex was standing there telling her he was now linked—legally—to this place that she had poured her whole self into.
She’d grown up here. All twenty-one years of her life. Jason had joined the army when she was just eight years old, coming back intermittently when her parents hadn’t been able to care for her. But since she’d turned eighteen it had all been on her.
There had been no college. No dates. There had been this ranch. It was hers. And now he was just...taking that?
She didn’t scream, though. Instead, she just stood there, numbness spreading from her mouth to the rest of her face. She was way too familiar with this feeling. With the moment the earth fell away and the world shifted. With innocuous moments rolling over and becoming something significant.
With her life changing completely between one breath and the next.
That was the worst part about this moment. Not that it was singular in its awfulness, but that it wasn’t.
Of course there was more. Of course there would be no putting her head down and simply getting over this. Moving on to the next thing. Getting used to her new, incredibly crappy normal.
Alex had just redefined normal. Again.
Asshole.
That little internal invective seemed to wake up something inside of her and her gaze snapped to his. “He left everything to you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” She was shaking now, a strange, deep trembling that started at the center of her chest and began to work its way out her limbs. “Why would he leave everything to you? I’m the one who’s been living here. I’m the one who’s been taking care of this place while he was deployed.”
“He wanted to make sure you were taken care of,” Alex said, his tone maddeningly flat.
“Then he shouldn’t have died!” The words exploded from her, and it didn’t matter if they were fair or not. It was how she felt. And Jason was dead anyway, so he couldn’t hear them. Couldn’t get a sense for how upset she was that he had died.
“But he did,” Alex said, his bluntness offensive to her wounded heart. “And he made it pretty clear to me what was supposed to happen if he did.”
“I am a grown woman, why did he think he needed to send you here? I’ve been here without him all this time.” She didn’t feel like a grown woman right now. She felt like the floor was shifting under her feet and she didn’t have the strength to stay standing.
“You’re not a grown woman to him, Clara,” Alex said, slipping up and talking about Jason as if he still thought anything. As if he might be about to walk in the door from a long fishing trip. “The way he talked about you...you were his kid sister. He worried about you constantly, and he worried especially about what would happen to you if he couldn’t come home to you.”
Clara’s eyes felt scratchy with the effort of holding back all the emotion that was swamping her.
Jason had been her hero. He’d taught her to ride a horse. He’d taught her to fish—which she’d hated, but she would go with him anyway. Every weekend he was home, he would pack a picnic with the sandwiches he knew she liked and they would drive to the river.
He’d park his truck on the side of the road and they’d hike down the sandy trail together and sit on the rocks for hours. Talking while they sat there mostly not landing any fish.
And when she’d complain, Jason had always said, “This is why they call it fishing, not catching.”
The image of her brother standing out by the river with that carefree grin on his face felt like a stab to the chest.
Alex shifted, rapping his knuckles on her table. “He wrote me a letter.”
“What are you talking about? He wrote you a letter that was like... Open in case of my eventual death?”
“Something like that.”
“Wow.”
She didn’t know what else to say. Somehow, the fact that there was a letter almost made it worse. Of course, Jason had known that his death was a possibility. Every soldier knew that. But Clara had never allowed herself to think about it.
Somehow, it was less disturbing to imagine he hadn’t really given it much consideration. Envisioning him sitting down and writing a letter about what Alex should do if he died... It... It enraged her. Even if it was unfair. The fact that he had thought it through that deeply, but had still been in the military, had still put himself in that kind of danger...
He had fully imagined a future in which he might be gone and she might need help. Where she would be left alone and he might have to assign somebody the responsibility of taking care of her.
He had known he could die. Known enough to prepare for it. It made her furious. Absolutely furious.
“He loved you, Clara,” Alex said, his soft, apologetic tone worse than the arrogant tone he had used when commenting on her dinner.
“If he loved me so much, he shouldn’t have reenlisted in the military after our father died,” she said, finally giving voice to the small, useless, mean thoughts she’d been having ever since she’d gotten the news of his death. “If he loved me so much, he would have stayed here. He would be here helping me with the ranch. Rather than sending a surrogate in his place. Did you all love the military so much that you couldn’t stay away? Is it better than this ranch, this town?”
“He believed in the military,” Alex said, his voice rough. “He believed in the ideal of serving something bigger than himself. No matter whether it was perfect or not, he believed in doing something. He died for that belief, and he knew that was the risk.”
He had died across the world, away from her. He had left her alone. Had truly left her without any family at all. And whatever ideals Alex spoke about, she couldn’t share them.
Somewhere beneath the grief and anger, she was proud of her brother. Of his service. Of his selflessness.
But mostly... She just wished that he had applied that selflessness to her. If he was going to sacrifice his life, why couldn’t he have done it in Copper Ridge, near the only family he had left?
Then she wouldn’t be alone.
Those thoughts swirled around in her head, caused tension to mount in her chest, a hard little ball of anger and meanness that she couldn’t quite shake. Didn’t really want to.
“What exactly do you think you’re going to do with the ranch that I can’t do?” She crossed her arms and cocked her hip to the side, treating him to her hardest and meanest stare.
“What exactly have you done with it?” He looked around. “As near as I can tell, you have a bunch of old, rusted-out equipment that isn’t going to do you any good.”
“I’ve been living here and I’ve been running this place ever since Jason reenlisted. And yeah, maybe I haven’t managed to keep up on everything. But I’ve been shifting my focus. We did beef for a long time, but an operation this size... It isn’t sustainable. Especially not with so much local competition. The beef thing... That was my dad’s. And Jason kept it up from a distance. But a couple of years ago we decided to sell.”
“Great. What do you do now?”
“We invested the money back into the house. And also in bees.”
“Bees?”
She sighed. “Yes. The goal was to start producing our own honey. It’s something that I could easily handle on my own. I don’t need to hire workers to help with that, and I can also maintain a job away from the ranch while the hive is getting established. For the first year, you can’t actually take their honey, you know.”
Alex rocked back on his heels. “No. I don’t know that. Because I don’t know anything about bees.”
“Bees are fascinating creatures, Alex,” she said.
Alex just stared at her. Her eyes clashed with his, and her stomach lurched unexpectedly. She looked away from him, counting the mugs on the shelf behind him.
“Bees,” he repeated finally.
“Yes.”
“What else?” he asked.
“What do you mean what else? What do you expect me to do?”
“Your brother was pretty clear in the instructions he left. He wanted the ranch to be an asset to you, not a liability. He wanted me to help you out until this place is solvent. Or until it’s sold.”
Those words made her heart slam against her breastbone, made abject terror race down her spine, flooding her veins with a spiky kind of horror. “I don’t want to sell,” she said, the words sure and certain.
The house was small, and it was definitely in rough shape in some ways. But this house contained the story of her entire life. This was the only place that had memories of her family all together. And, yes, there were memories of losing those family members here too. But she’d gotten pretty good at living with those.
This house contained every feeling she’d ever experienced. Good and bad. Her mother had scrubbed this place until it was spotless. Until she had been too ill to clean anymore. Her father had worked the land until his body gave out on him.
Jason had joined the military to help support the place financially, and then when their father had died he had come back and worked until Clara had been old enough to handle herself and keep the house on her own. Even then, all his money had gone right back into this place.
The Campbells were dead, by and large. This ranch, this land, was all that was left.
She would be damned if she walked away from it. She had already given up a lot to be here. And she owed it to her family to keep the ranch going. So that the legacy could live on, even if the rest of them didn’t.
“If you don’t want to sell, then what do you want?”
“I could... I can keep working at Grassroots. It’s not hard. And I’ve been managing. There’s a small garden here and it produces well. I basically have all the resources to get a good farmers’ market booth together. In between the two things, I should be able to make it all work.”
“And what about having a life? Working a farm, doing a booth at markets, working at a winery... When do you expect to take a breath, Clara?”
“I don’t want to take a breath, Alex,” she said, the words harder, more brittle and honest than she intended them to be. “Because breathing hurts.”
Silence fell between them, no sound beyond the persistent ticking of the kitchen clock. The one that Clara never looked at, that was never right. It had just always been there, so she had never moved it.
“Then that’s what I’m here for,” he said, his voice rough. “To help out until it quits hurting.”
Something about those words made her want to strike out at him. Made her want to push him away. Mostly because she didn’t know how to do this. Didn’t know how to be taken care of. Not that her father hadn’t been there for her—not that Jason hadn’t been. But always, always, they’d had their own grief, equal to her own. This was different. Not that Alex wasn’t sorry his friend was dead, but Jason wasn’t his brother. The grief was hers. And Alex was offering to take care of her until it passed.
Alex was giving her permission to collapse.
She wasn’t going to take it. She couldn’t.
“What do you propose?” she asked, gritting her teeth and doing her best to recover from that little moment of honesty.
“Clara, you’re not handling this. You as much as admitted that you’re not paying your bills. You don’t want to sell, but if you don’t pay for stuff, you’re going to get it taken from you. And whatever you feel about being busy right now... It would be for the best if we can get the ranch to the point where it’s self-sustaining. I know that you’re going to get some money from the military, and until then I’m willing to put my own money into this place.”
Suddenly she felt drained. Felt defeated. Because while part of her wanted to stand here all evening and wage war with Alex, the fact of the matter was she’d already lost.
She let out a long, slow breath, then walked back to the stove, dumping the contents of her pan into a small bowl. “I’m going to eat,” she said. “Do you want to join me?”
“No thanks. I don’t order off the kids’ menu anymore.”
She shoved a bite of canned pasta into her mouth. “Your loss.”
“I’ll take a Coke.”
“Go right ahead,” she said, talking around her bite. “You probably have dominion over the Coke too.”
“The fridge, maybe. The contents, probably not.”
“Help yourself, anyway,” she said, tugging her bowl toward her and hunching over it ferally.
He took a soda out of the fridge and popped the top on it, and for some reason, she watched as he brought the can to his lips, watched as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down while he took a long swallow of the beverage.
She looked back into her bowl of SpaghettiOs. “So what’s your brilliant plan for fixing my life? What are you going to invest in? I mean, this is your ranch now. I guess you can make it whatever you want. Buy a bunch of big-ass cows.”
“Like you said, there’s a lot of competition for beef. And frankly, this operation just isn’t big enough to play in that arena. But I do have an idea. And it kind of goes with your...bees.”
She let out an exasperated sigh. “What?”
“Bison. There’s a market for lean beef, organic stuff. We can get away with having a smaller scale operation. We would need to get better fencing, but most everything that you used for the cattle would work. And frankly, the farmers’ market idea is a good one.”
“Are you suggesting I sell honey, tomatoes and bison?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. I have the money to invest in this. I want to do it. And I think it’s the best thing for you.”
Clara bristled. “You think it’s the best thing for me. Based on speaking to me all of five times in my entire life? Based on the fact that you knew my brother? You don’t know what I want, Alex.”
“Okay. What do you want?”
His green eyes were intense on hers, and she didn’t know what to do with that. Didn’t know how to answer the question, mostly because she hadn’t expected him to pose it.
She had the fleeting image of Asher. Of him living in this little house with her. Enjoying a simple existence. Keeping bees, making honey. He could make artisan coffee and maybe they could have goats. She could make room in her garden for kale. She didn’t like tomatoes either, and she grew those.
She wasn’t going to tell Alex any of that.
“I’m not really sure,” she said. “I would settle for not being further traumatized by life at this point.”
Those eyes softened a little. “Unfortunately, none of us gets that guarantee.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Think about it.”
She shoved another bite of food into her mouth. “What’s the point in me thinking about it, Alex? You own this place. Your word is law.”
“It was never my goal to come in here and take over everything.”
She snorted. “That is completely not true. Of course it was your goal. That’s why you’re here. To claim ownership. To take control.”
“Maybe it is. Why would that be a problem for you? You can continue to do what you’re doing. I’m just going to help get things more established, that’s all.”
“Excuse me for not exactly buying into this idea that you’re being a philanthropist here on my ranch. This benefits you financially. Or, it will.”
Alex’s jaw tightened, his face so still it had the look of granite. “I don’t need your money, Clara. But you need my help. And whether or not you believe it, I’m here because Jason asked me to be. Because I fought alongside him and that means something to me, Clara. Whether you can understand it or not, it does.”
She swallowed hard, feeling unsettled, feeling uncertain. First off, she didn’t know why she cared that he was here. Except that he was so large, broad and confrontational. Except that he made it feel so real that Jason was gone. Really gone. He knew things she didn’t know about her brother’s final moments, she was certain. She was also certain she didn’t want to know them. At least, not now.
But if Alex wanted to pour his money into the ranch, if he wanted to add another stream of revenue, there was nothing really to fight about.
She closed her eyes for a moment and had the oddest sensation that she was adrift on a river she didn’t want to be on. Drifting toward God knew where. On a raft she had never consented to get onto in the first place.
No control. None at all. But then, what else was new?
“Fine. Get your bison. Fix stuff. Whatever you need to do to feel like you’ve seen to Jason’s final wishes.” The word final stuck in her throat, snagged on a notch of emotion, making it feel as if she couldn’t breathe.
“I will.” He stood, gripping the brim of his hat and tipping it forward slightly. “I’ll be at the ranch bright and early tomorrow morning.”
“And I’ll be at work.”
His lips twitched. “But first, getting coffee again? Since you like it so much.”
Her face heated, and she fought against the blush she knew was intensifying. She was not a thirteen-year-old girl with a crush. She resented him for making her feel like one.
“Yes,” she responded. “Getting coffee again. My favorite.”
He lifted a brow but said nothing. “I’m sure I’ll see you tomorrow at some point.”
She nodded, and then Alex turned and walked out.
For some reason, as soon as the door closed behind him, a tear rolled down Clara’s cheek. And then another one. Maybe having Alex here should have felt like the answer to something. A wake-up call at the very least. That somebody had come in and seen just how unprepared she was to deal with all of this.
To move into a life that had to function without Jason in it. Forever.
And whether or not he intended to be, Alex Donnelly was a symbol of that.
CHAPTER THREE
ALEX WAS IN a mean mood by the time he got back home. It was late, and he was starving, and he was still replaying the scene with Clara over in his mind. He really should have gone to see her sooner. He had noticed the stacks of mail sitting on the counter. Had noticed the general state of disrepair of the place.