They all started talking at once, arguing in loud voices.
“Stop it,” Rafe said in a low voice. It was the voice he used to use on the most obnoxious of informants.
Though he hadn’t really raised his voice, they all quieted and long looks passed between the five of them.
Polly finally gave Zane a nod. “All right. I won’t fight you on it. You’re right about him.”
Everyone else sighed and some amount of tension seemed to leave the room.
Zane had a shit-eating grin on his face when he turned back to Rafe. “Just use that tone of voice on everyone and you’ll be fine, Mr. Mayor.”
Shit. His day had just taken a turn for the worse.
Chapter Seven:
Aidan, Lexi, and Lucas
Aidan took a long breath and looked out over the Circle G. The noonday air was warm but not hot. So unlike Texas. If he was home, the day would already be hotter than hell. It was beautiful country, so unlike the flat plains of Texas where he’d grown up and spent his life. Mountains surrounded him on every side, rising from the high plains like mammoth guardians, protecting the ranch and house and herd. He wondered what it would look like covered in snow.
He wondered what Lexi would look like in a cute little parka, frolicking in the snow with Lucas. They would playfully fight, tossing snowballs at each other. He loved to watch them play like they were kids without a care in the world. He longed for a time when he was enough for both of them.
Lucas was napping. Aidan had left him in their big bed but it had seemed so empty without Lexi there. Lucas had taken care of his body. However, now that he was alone again, he was thinking of his girl.
“It’s different here, isn’t it?” Trev McNamara was suddenly beside him. “Even the air feels different in Colorado. And the sky is so blue. I haven’t gotten used to it yet. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that my kids are going to be from Colorado and not Texas, you know? I always thought they would be Texans.”
God, he’d given Trev hell in the beginning. He hadn’t wanted anything to do with the ex-football-star-turned-drug-addict. Trev McNamara had been a friend to strippers and drug dealers until the day he’d turned his whole life around. Trev had managed to do what very few people did. He’d taken his second chance and made something of himself.
Aidan actually had a lot to say to the man who was his brother’s partner. “It is different, but there’s not a damn thing wrong with it. I love Texas, but I have to admit, it’s easy to see why you love it here. The land is gorgeous and the people are…unexpected. I like them. They’re a little crazy but a whole lot of honest. And hell, you don’t have to deal with the Deer Run city council. Bunch of assholes.”
Money-grubbing assholes were what they were, but he’d managed to force their hand. It would teach them to try to grab his land. It still made him angry thinking about what they had tried to do. Thank god he’d kept it from Lexi. He didn’t want her worrying about something like that.
Trev smiled as he looked out over the spread he shared with Jamie and Noah. “No, but there are some drawbacks. I find Nell Flanders sometimes trying to talk my cows into forming a union. She thinks all living creatures respond to compassionate political views. I don’t think she’s ever watched a nature documentary in her life.”
It was a weird place, but he might take some weirdness over the nasty politics of his hometown. They were only accepted because of the money the ranch brought the town. Hell, that really only meant they hadn’t been run out of town. He had no idea what he was going to do when his kids were old enough to go to school. He was just grateful he’d kept Lexi out of it. “Well, Bo’s really happy here it seems to me. Trev, I just wanted to tell you how glad I am that you took Bo under your wing. He’s a damn fine man and a happy one. You and Beth have done spectacular things with him.”
Trev shook his head. “Nah, we just gave him a place to find himself. Everyone needs a place like that. It’s what a Dom is supposed to do.”
And that was part of Aidan’s problem. He wasn’t Lexi’s safe place anymore. He wasn’t so sure he even was her Dom anymore. He started out trying to give her what she seemed to need, but what she seemed to need now wasn’t him. “What if giving my submissive space means letting her go?”
Trev turned to him, a frown on his face. “I don’t think Lexi wants to go anywhere. I damn well know Lucas doesn’t want to. That’s beyond obvious. I saw the way he looked at you. I don’t have any interest in men, but let me tell you I was a little jealous of you this morning. He looked like he couldn’t stand another minute without you. My Beth is too tired to look at me like that these days. I think she would rather cut my dick off than let me use it on her. It was like that in the last half of her pregnancy. She was just so tired and sick. I’m hoping it changes once Caleb lets her off the leash in a couple of weeks.” Trev’s harsh words were softened by an amused chuckle. “I’m praying for it because I’m dying.”
“Lexi was insatiable when she was pregnant. I guess it’s different for different women.” It was only a few weeks after she’d given birth to Chelsea that she’d moved into complete work mode. When she’d been pregnant, she hadn’t shut him out. She’d clung to him and Lucas, allowing them to treat her like a queen. He’d loved that time.
“But she’s not now, is she?” Trev asked. “I will admit, I was worried things wouldn’t be the same after the baby was born. I hope things settle down. Beth seems happier now. She’s been a little more cuddly. Damn, I missed cuddling her.”
“You’ll find a new normal. We were the same after Jack. A couple of months in and we found our groove again. Maybe it was too soon to have another one. Maybe she needed more time. We didn’t exactly plan Chelsea. She was a happy accident, but I’m worried Lexi has postpartum depression. I read somewhere it can last a really long while. I ordered her to go and talk to Leo, but Leo says she’s fine. I think she lied to him. She’s really smart and quite good at creating a fictional tale.” The first of her many manipulations that had cut him off at every turn. Every time he tried to deal with the problem, she had another excuse. “I’ve tried to get her to talk to me, but she brushes me off and says nothing is wrong, that she just wants to get back to her career. She took a month off because of Chelsea, but apparently the world of a romance novelist is very fast paced. She keeps telling me she’ll lose her place if she doesn’t keep up.”
“Sometimes, we need to be reminded of just what our place is,” Trev said. “Sometimes that reminder is best served with a nice flogging. I have some stingers if you need one. Brand new. It’s a hobby of mine. Drinking coffee and making floggers.”
Aidan shook his head. “No. She’s still too fragile. Chelsea’s whole pregnancy was hard on her.”
“And you watched her in childbirth?”
Aidan nodded. “Yes, I was there the whole time, both me and Lucas. Her blood pressure dropped in the middle of labor. She nearly coded. They had to cut her open in her room. They couldn’t even wait to get her to the ER.”
Trev nodded, his expression grim. “So you nearly lost her and now you’re letting her run wild. I understand the impulse, but she’s alive, and I have never seen a woman who was asking her Dom to take control more than your wife.”
He shook off the mental image of all that blood on the floor. Lexi’s blood. And he’d put her there. Oh, Chelsea might not be his, technically, but he’d wanted to get her pregnant again. He’d loved watching her get round and soft. “I felt like I should give her whatever she wanted. She almost died.”
“I bet it wasn’t as close as it felt like. Those doctors don’t often lose women anymore. I’m not making light of what happened, but I’ve damn near died a couple of times and I know what I needed afterward. I needed control. I needed to feel safe. How is Lucas handling it?”
“He’s not getting what he needs.” Aidan stared out into the distance. How was the world still so beautiful when his life felt like it was falling apart? “He’s a switch.”
T
rev whistled a little. “Damn. So he’s got no one to top.”
“I’ve tried, but he knows I’m not enjoying it. I feel so helpless. I never realized just how delicate a balance it is for us. I thought we were solid. I thought we had gotten through the rough stuff.”
“Life is full of rough stuff, Aidan. You should know that. It’s why we get married in the first place, so we have someone to get through it all with. It’s been really quiet and happy for me and Bo and Beth, but I don’t doubt we’ll come up against some bad shit. We have a long time to live, and I’m sure our kids are going to give us hell. How we deal with it is going to be the real measure of our marriage. I know we place a lot of emphasis on weddings, but that’s not the end of the story. It’s just the beginning. The rest might not be as pretty, but that’s life.”
And he was letting it pass all of them by. “I think Lucas blames me. He won’t say it, but he thinks I should have brought her back in line long ago. I just thought I was helping her live her dream. I don’t know how I would handle it if she told me to stop ranching.”
“What would you say if she asked you to cut back?”
He sighed because there was no easy way to answer that question. “I would say that a ranch requires what it requires. You know damn well this isn’t a nine-to-five job.”
“No, but you have the money to hire extra hands. You could make it a nine-to-five job. With the new baby, we’ve put up extra money to hire another helper so one of us is always close at hand to help her out.”
Aidan shook his head. “I don’t have that kind of money. Everything I have is invested in the land. The free money we have is Lexi’s money and Lucas’s money. It shouldn’t go into the…” Fuck. The truth hit him like a bull on the loose. What had he been doing? “I was about to say it shouldn’t go into my ranch.”
Trev nodded as though he’d figured out the problem long ago. “Yours. Not theirs. You’re holding yourself apart. Do you think they can’t feel that?”
Aidan groaned, the enormity of what he’d done settling in his gut. “I didn’t mean it like that. You have to understand, Lucas came from money. Lexi’s stepdads have more money than god. The only thing I brought to the table was that rundown ranch that Jack Barnes had to help me save. I guess I didn’t think they would want it. I thought it was my burden to bear.”
But Lucas had helped out every weekend. Before he’d moved his office to Deer Run, he would drive home from Dallas and change out of his fancy suit and get down and sweaty doing menial labor with him and the ranch hands. Lucas never complained. He’d sat up long nights helping with calving and rode the fences when the air was so cold he couldn’t feel his hands.
And Aidan wouldn’t let him put a dime into the place.
Lexi worked so hard and was so proud of the money she’d brought in, and he forced her to keep it in a separate account because he didn’t want her hard work paying for his ranch.
How had that made them feel? Did they think he was trying to keep the ranch from them? As though it was too special to ever share?
“Do you know what Bo did with his money?” Trev asked.
When their dearly beloved asshole father had kicked it, he’d set his sons up in an impossible situation. He’d left Aidan the ranch and Bo the money needed to keep the ranch up. Aidan and Bo had been in a bad place and neither had been willing to really help the other. By the time they had settled their difference, Lucas and Lexi were on the scene and Jack had helped bail him out by bringing the O’Malley Ranch into his small co-op of organic ranches. Bo had kept his inheritance when he left Texas. “No, what did he do with it?”
“Well, first off, he gave some to Beth to fix up that house of hers, the one y’all live in now.”
Aidan snorted a little. “Yeah, well she turned a profit on that one.” Lucas had paid through the nose for the big, rambling farmhouse Beth had turned into a beauty of a home.
“Yes, and they brought every cent of it to me and demanded their fair share of our future. I bought into this place for ten million, but almost a million of that was Bo and Beth’s money. I know it sounds silly. I had the ten million from my last football contract, but it was important to them that they had a stake and not something I gave them. So we put the rest of the money in a safe place and now we live off what we make here and what Beth makes renovating houses. This is something we’re building together. You can’t take that away from them.”
But he had. He’d spent years telling them they didn’t matter in that one, deeply important part of his life. He didn’t discuss his anxieties about the ranch with them, only telling them that everything was okay and they shouldn’t worry. God, he’d just gone through hell with the city council and he’d never once said a word to Lexi. He’d only brought Lucas in because Lucas was his lawyer.
He’d shut himself off from their work lives as well. In trying to honor them, he’d shut them out.
When they were safely home, he would sit them both down and fix the situation.
“Things have to change.” And that started with him.
Chapter Eight:
Rafe
Rafe settled Sierra down in her crib, trying to resist the urge to reach down and brush his hand across that little cap of black hair. Maybe if he woke her up again, he could avoid the crazy people in the living room for another hour or so.
After Zane had pronounced those fateful words—Mr. Mayor—Sierra had conveniently pooped and gotten terrifically fussy. Stella had offered to change her but then Polly had said something to Long-Haired Roger about his new sign placement and Long-Haired Roger had started arguing about flashing lips hurting his business, and Stella had been forced to referee.
Because Hi wasn’t around to do it anymore.
The whole morning was gone and now they were starting the afternoon and he wasn’t any closer to getting his peaceful house back.
He stared down at the tiny baby who was rapidly becoming the center of their world.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Hiram Jones. How hard had it been to not follow his family? Sure, Hiram had been an adult, but even adults wanted that connection to family. In making the decision to stay in Bliss, he’d given up everything he’d known before.
Had he been lonely? Had he lived all these years in Bliss wondering what his life could have been?
It was different for Rafe. He had Laura and Cam and their baby. He wasn’t alone. He had a family already in place.
He just needed to find his place. What if his place was back in Miami?
“They are awfully cute when they’re sleeping,” Zane said quietly. The big tavern owner leaned against the doorframe, his normally hard face soft as he looked at the baby. “I never thought that watching a baby sleep could be so peaceful.”
Rafe glanced back down at his daughter in her pink blanket sleeper, her tiny belly rising and falling as her mouth sucked on some dream pacifier or bottle. “Being a parent is the most important job in the world.”
He would never turn his back on her. Never. No matter what she did. Even when she was forty, she would still need to know her father was around.
Zane nodded. “Yes. I know that more than most. My father walked when I was ten and my mom was more interested in partying than raising a kid. My childhood was a little unstable. It’s weird to think about it, but Nate Wright was the only constant in my life before I came to this town.”
Zane and Nate had come to town after their jobs in the Drug Enforcement Agency went bad. Nate had become the sheriff of Bliss and Zane opened Trio. “Do you miss your old job?”
Sometimes Rafe really missed his. He missed the adrenaline of the chase, the mystery of the puzzles. He missed feeling important.
Zane’s mouth curled up in a little smirk. “Do I miss getting my ass shot at, pretending to be a drug runner and being tortured when the people I’m investigating find out I’m not really a drug runner? No.”
Yes, well, their jobs had been very different. Zane had been undercover and Rafe had profile
d in the Behavioral Analysis Unit. Though a couple of times he had gotten his ass shot at.
“You do miss your old job,” Zane surmised.
Rafe sighed. It was so much more than that. “I miss having a job at all.”
“Well, that’s good because I’m offering you a new one, one that will definitely keep you busy.”
Rafe shook his head, gesturing for Zane to move into the hall. He closed the door to Sierra’s room after making sure the baby monitor light was working. “I’m still not quite sure how you can offer me any job at all.”
“It’s called a coup, Rafe.” Zane’s massive body took up most of the space. “This is a good old-fashioned political coup. It’s also what’s best for this town and very likely what’s best for you. You’re drifting.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. Even if it was kind of true. “I’m looking for a job.”
“And yet you’re still here in this cabin all day long. Hey, I know about what happened with the feds. Sorry about that, man.” His green eyes became grave. “If you want to work in government again, you’re going to have to lie about your living arrangement. Unless you work in Bliss. I wish it wasn’t true, but the outside world isn’t going to accept Cam. Have you talked about keeping him a secret from work?”
Cam Briggs was his best friend and the best man Rafe had ever known. “I won’t say I haven’t thought about it. What am I supposed to do? Pretend Cam is some lazy friend who lives in the guest bedroom? How would I ever explain that to Sierra?”
Cam had been the one to give up putting his name on the adoption papers. Sierra was legally Rafe and Laura’s. Cam trusted him. He couldn’t betray his best friend like that.
And he also couldn’t just stay in the cabin for the rest of his life. But shouldn’t the mayor be voted into office?
“I suspect that would cause trouble down the line if you decide to work outside of Bliss. Of course, you could make a difference right here in the town where your daughter will grow up.” Zane was doing a reasonable impersonation of Mephistopheles. That was exactly what Rafe needed, his own personal deal with the devil.