Page 73 of Rancher's Return

Like you are in trouble now.

Maybe he was. But he didn’t do or sell drugs anymore. So there was that. In fact, he’d left all petty criminal activity behind.

He was a respectable rancher. He had a good job. He had a great family. It was just Lily. Lily was the only thing that reminded him that he didn’t have everything. That things weren’t perfect.

And he was stuck here with her.

Well, he could leave. He could head out and go to a motel in town, but that would violate his sworn internal oath to never let her see him sweat where she was concerned. Acting unbothered by her presence was his biggest skill set.

Well, one of them.

When he was in bed with other women, he might not feel half as much as he once had innocently kissing Lily, but he knew how to make them see God.

Detachmentwas the primary header most of his skills could be filed under.

He could do a lot of things without feeling much of anything, and no one with him would be any the wiser.

A blue-haired girl at his college had told him it was a trauma response.

Beth was one of his best friends now. He’d stayed with her and her girlfriend when he’d been in Portland. He liked to tell her men didn’t have trauma. She liked to tell him he was gender essentialist. He pretended he didn’t understand what that meant, like they hadn’t gone to the same college and listened to the same people shouting into megaphones.

She said his enjoying making her mad was him testing boundaries, which was also a trauma response.

His eternal response was that people were too goddamned traumatized these days.

Who had that kind of time?

Secretly he wondered if she was right. But what did it matter if she was? What was the alternative? To lie down and cry about it?

Not likely.

It was best to just put your head down and get on with things. He didn’t hope for the best or the worst; he just dealt with the reality of it.

Whining about it wouldn’t have helped him back when he’d been a legitimately traumatized kid, and it would seem damned ungrateful now that he was an adult who wasprivilegedas hell. Another word he’d learned from Beth.

He didn’t lie down. He didn’t weep. He wouldn’t be leaving this fuckingprivilegedhouse to get away from his stepsister.

“Well,” she said.

And he wondered if she was going to admit it was awkward or uncomfortable. For her. He didn’t feel awkward. No, that wasn’t the word that applied here.

But she didn’t admit anything.

She wouldn’t.

Which also annoyed him. Maybe that was the game. Maybe it was why he was so dedicated to not reacting to her. He was the one who deserved a reaction. She’d broken up with him and she tiptoed around him like a little church mouse, like she thought he was a cat who was going to eat her.

In many ways, he wouldn’t be opposed.

The wreckage would be epic.

He did his best not to think about that too deeply.

“Wellwhat?” he asked, in spite of himself.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just...we don’t hang out much.”

“No,” he said, deadpan. “We don’t.”