Page 6 of Call Me Yours (Lodestar Ranch #4)

Now that dichotomy was reversed, and it was making my head spin. He was glaring and grumbling, but he was also bringing me food?

It had to be a trap.

I side-eyed him suspiciously as I popped a piece of bacon in my mouth. “You seriously named Junior after yourself?” I asked.

“You named her Steve Junior, not me.” Steven narrowed his eyes at me over his coffee. “And she’s not Steve Junior anymore. She’s Stevie Nicks. It seemed fitting, since she’s a Fleetwood Mac fan.”

“Stevie the Pig…is a fan…of Fleetwood Mac.” I needed a moment to digest this information. “How would you even discover such a thing?”

He lifted a shoulder. “The usual way.”

“The usual way? As in, you were going for your Sunday drive, windows down, radio on, and she started singing along?”

He laughed. “No. I listen to music while I’m doing chores. She made her preferences known. She likes Fleetwood Mac. She does not like Aerosmith.” He leaned down and rubbed her head. “No one’s perfect, I guess.”

Steven listened to Fleetwood Mac while doing chores? Maybe even sang along to songs of yearning and drama? I could not wrap my brain around it. He had all the emotional depth of a bumblebee. It did not compute. But then, I wouldn’t have thought he’d keep Junior or bring me avocado toast, either.

A lot of things about Steven McAllister did not compute.

“Jaxson Quinn, get your butt back here right now,” I whisper-hollered to my brother’s retreating back. Mom was lying down with a headache, and I didn’t want to disturb her. “You’re not so big that I can’t turn you over my knee and spank you.”

At sixteen, Jaxson was the baby of the family, and the only one of the five of us to still live at home, although we were all fairly close by.

Ellis, Garret, Cole, and Jaxson were technically my half-siblings, although we never called each other that.

My mom had married Terry three years after my dad’s accident, when I was seven.

Ellis was born a year later. The rest of them came every eighteen months like clockwork—Garret, then Cole, then Jaxson—and each time I prayed I wouldn’t get a sister because I didn’t want to share a room.

Having all brothers worked out well for me.

They were often noisy and smelly, but they were also a lot of fun.

Though right now, this one was being a pain in my ass.

“Yeah, right,” Jaxson whispered, pivoting back into the living room. “You’ve been saying that since I was four, and you’ve never made good on it.”

“I will this time,” I threatened. “You literally saw me cleaning this room while you lazed on the couch with your goldfish and now you’re leaving me the crumbs and your empty soda can? I don’t think so.”

“You’re mean today,” Jaxson muttered as he snagged the can from the coffee table. He tucked it under his armpit and swept the crumbs up into his palm. “I just got home from basketball practice and I still have pre-calculus homework.”

“Meanwhile, I slept in until noon and am spending my afternoon here because cleaning is my hobby.” Sarcasm dripped on every word.

He dipped his chin so his hair flopped in his face, then looked up at me sheepishly with his big brown eyes. Dammit. Youngest kids always knew how to work their angles. “I’m sorry, Chloe. I just needed a moment to unwind, you know? I didn’t mean for you to clean up my mess.”

“I know. It’s okay. Because I know you’re going to do the dishes after dinner even if Terry tries to do it first. Right?”

He blinked but despite the teenager attitude, my brother was a good guy, and he knew our dad would put in ten hours of hard physical labor before finally sitting down to dinner tonight. “Right,” he confirmed. “But you’re making dinner?” he added hopefully.

My chest squeezed. The kid had probably been living on PB and J sandwiches and hot dogs this week.

“Just a frozen lasagna. That’s all I have time for today.

But I stopped by the grocery store earlier.

The freezer is stocked, the pantry has spaghetti and pasta sauce, and I bought your weight in goldfish and apples.

” Which might last maybe three days, because Jaxson was already six-two and only getting taller.

“You’re the best.” He dropped a kiss on the crown of my head before heading out with his crumbs and trash.

I took the staircase—dodging the creaks I had long ago memorized—to the gable office, passing my grandmother in the hallway.

She had lived with us ever since my grandfather’s death eight years ago, and sometimes I marveled at how surreal it must feel to her, living with her daughter-in-law and her new husband and family.

My dad had been her only child, so she hadn’t had much of a choice in the matter, having no other family who could take her, but she got on well with my stepdad, so maybe it didn’t bother her.

“Hi, Grams,” I said, on the off chance today would be different, but I wasn’t surprised when her cloudy green eyes looked straight past me. There was too much to do to get in my feelings about that today.

The office was, predictably, a mess. Mom usually kept things tidy and followed the organizational system I had set up for them, but Terry, god love the man, was more of the absent-minded professor type.

With my mom battling a lupus flare this week, he had been left to his own devices, which meant dumping receipts and handwritten notes in a disorderly pile on the desk.

With a sigh, I rolled the chair to the other side of the desk.

Mom liked to face the door, but I liked the view out the gable window.

It was the only room in the house where we could still see the mountains beyond the rooftops.

This house had been in the family for a hundred years.

Five generations of Adams had looked out these windows and saw nothing but green and golden fields of corn and wheat stretching all the way to the Rocky Mountains.

Then my grandfather died, and we hadn’t been able to hold on.

The land had been sold off. Some of it was still farmland, but the acres surrounding the farmhouse had been sold to housing developers.

Now the hundred-year-old farmhouse sat on a cul-de-sac with modern colonials on either side.

Six years. That was all it took for suburbia to creep in. Six years for houses to block out the sky. Six years to pave over what we nurtured for a hundred years. Six years for our family graveyard to become someone’s backyard nuisance.

Sometimes I couldn’t blame Grams for flitting around like a ghost.

An hour later, with the last receipt entered into the software, I stretched my fingertips to the ceiling to relieve the tension in my back. My shoulder let out a loud, satisfying pop. Some of those scraps of handwritten notes were tiny .

“I thought I’d find you here.”

I spun the chair around at the sound of Mom’s voice. “You’re up?”

“For a little bit, at least. My joints are still achy, but the headache is receding.” She stepped further into the room, looking weary and rumpled but still smiling. “I’m glad you’re here. You do a much better job with all this than I do.”

I made a noncommittal noise that she could interpret any way she wanted to.

My parents were so proud of me, but they didn’t really understand why I had pivoted to mental health.

I knew Mom had hoped I’d put my degree in farm management to use helping Terry with his farrier business or maybe even going to work for another farm.

And for a while, after I graduated college and moved back home to sort out the mess left behind by my grandfather’s death, I thought I would, too.

But I couldn’t shake the anger that all this could have been prevented.

Farmers and ranchers had sky-high suicide rates—two times higher than the average population—but mental health support was almost non-existent in rural communities.

It wasn’t just a statistic to me. It was a tragedy that had devastated my family.

So I started volunteering at a non-profit that connected ranchers and farmers to crisis management resources, including mental health and financial literacy.

When its funding was slashed, I got mad all over again.

That anger pushed me through a master’s degree in social work while working part-time for Terry and part-time at Jo’s.

My dream was to bring mental health services back to rural communities through telehealth therapy sessions with social workers who understood the stresses farmers and ranchers faced.

My parents loved me and supported me. But they also had a tendency to question how talking to someone could make any difference at all when the crops were dying from drought for the third year in a row.

Maybe they were right. Maybe the best I could do wouldn’t be enough.

But I had to try.