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Fuck my life!
She sniffled. “I don’t want to see her.”
“I’ll make sure you won’t.”
“Thanks, baby. I just…I just worry that things will be a mess if she’s around. That I will be a mess.”
She wasn’t wrong ‘cause I could already see disaster coming.
My fragile, grieving mother on one side of me, my perfect, society-groomed girlfriend Fiona on the other, and then added to the mix was Elena—the daughter of my father’s mistress, the woman I couldn’t stop wanting, even when I hated her. All of us standing over my father’s grave.
Hell of a homecoming.
CHAPTER 5
elena
Isaw the message on my phone from Joy Kincaid and sighed:I want all the deets, bitch. 6 p.m. Blackwood Prime. Mav will be there.
Of course,Mavwould be there.
He probably wanted to interrogate me about Duke and how I was handling him. No surprise, considering how Duke behaved with Maverick. The man was giving me whiplash. Get the fuck out. Stay where you are. Sell my fucking horses.
Damn it all to hell, he was selling the ranch!
While Nash was dying, I lied to him plenty. I told him, of course, Duke wouldn’t get rid of the ranch. It had been in the family for generations. He’d save the Wilder legacy. But I knew from Hunt that Duke didn’t want to have anything to do with Wildflower Canyon. He’d warned me that once Nash died, he and I would have to find new jobs.
“It’s good that you’ll be able to leave, Elena,” he toldme one night when we sat outside the ranch house drinking Nash’s good bourbon.
“You love it here, though.”
Hunt had come to Wilder Ranch when he was ten, an orphan, alone. Nash had taken him in, taught him ranching, and treated him like a son, probably because Gloria had taken Duke away to Dallas a couple of years before that. I knew why Nash and Gloria’s marriage had fallen apart. Duke didn’t know. Nash had never wanted him to know. If he did, maybe he’d have been there for Nash; perhaps he wouldn’t want to sell this land piece by piece to the vultures waiting to develop it into something unrecognizable.
“It’s time to move on. We’ll leave together.”
“Maverick will hire you in a heartbeat,” I reminded him. He’d hire me, too, but I wasn’t interested.
“I want to leave Colorado. Maybe go to California? Wyoming? Montana? Don’t you want to leave?”
“I do. Well, we can go to Texas. Knox Lawson has offered me a job a few times.”
The famous country singer was a fan of mine and had asked me to take care of his horses. He had a ranch outside of Austin, and I knew I had a job there if I wanted it. It’d probably pay better than Wilder since Nash still treated me like a ranch hand even though I all but ran the place along with Hunt.
“Maria is gone now. You have no more promises to keep,” Hunt reminded me.
“I can go on my own, Hunt. You shouldn’t lose your home because of me.”
“You’re my sister, Elena. Youaremy home. I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
That was our plan until Duke asked me to leave. I had no choice but to call Maverick. I needed a place to stay, and he was the only person I trusted except for Hunt.
What a clusterfuck everything was! I knew it would be like this after Nash passed, and the chaos was living up to my expectations.
The bunkhouse door slammed shut behind me as I stepped into the cool evening air. The sun hung low over the horizon, throwing gold across the dirt yard, stretching shadows long. Hunt’s truck sat parked a few yards away, and I was halfway to it when I heard Sawyer’s voice cut through the quiet.
"Guess you’re on your own now, huh?"
I slowed but didn’t stop, didn’t give him the satisfaction.