“I know you don’t want to sell this place to just anyone. You’ve worked too hard to—”
“I am not discussing this with you,” he ground out.
“This is all you wanted to discuss before!”
“If you can’t ride… If that happens… Well, we’ll figure it out. I hardly ride at all myself anymore. There’s no reason you can’t—”
“Easy,” Cole said quietly. Easy immediately closed his mouth, his gaze falling to his hands, clasped tight around the coffee mug. “I can’t stay here. Not if I can’t ride. I can’t spend fifty years watching men ride out to do the things I can’t do. When I’m seventy, sure. I’ll have earned my place on the porch. But not like this.”
“Damn it, Cole,” Easy whispered.
“Isn’t this what you’ve been trying to get me to see?”
He blinked rapidly, then cleared his throat. “That doesn’t mean I like it.”
“I don’t like it either. But I’ve got to think about it. Away from here maybe. Because when I’m here, all I can see is this place, this land, what I’ve wanted to be my whole life. My father and…”
“Your father was wrong. This isn’t the only life for you.”
“I guess I’d better hope it isn’t.”
“That woman, for instance. She might be another life.”
His head snapped up. “What?” Easy didn’t know. Did he? About Madeline and their history and…
“That purple-haired girl.”
“What?” Cole repeated stupidly.
“Grace. I found her hiding in the backyard a few minutes ago, awfully upset.”
“Grace? Hiding? You must have that wrong.”
“Did you do something mean to that little girl?”
“Mean? Me? You’ve got it all wrong, Easy. That little girl has the heart of a damn mongoose.”
“She didn’t look very ferocious when I saw her.”
“That’s because she’d just used it all up tearing a piece out of my hide.”
Easy eyed him with disapproval.
“I’m serious!”
“A woman doesn’t like to be picked up at a bar and used like a two-bit whore. You’re grown enough to know that.”
Apparently he was more grown than Easy, because Easy was being naive. Cole was the one who’d been used. “Forget about Grace,” he muttered. He took off his hat to rub the ache from his forehead, then shoved it back on. “She’s got nothing to do with my future.”
“All right,” Easy said. “If you say so.”
“I’ll help clean up after these folks tonight, but tomorrow…”
“Take the time you need. But your father was wrong. This isn’t what makes you a man. This place or this work.”
“No, he was right. Everything he said to me that night… He was right.”
“He was wrong,” Easy growled. “He didn’t mean it.”