CHAPTER ONE
WOLFGARRETTSHOULDbe happy for his older brother. He knew that.
It wasn’t that he didn’t feel a sense of happiness for Sawyer, and his newfound status in life as a husband and father. It was just that he couldn’t say he enjoyed being around it much. He loved his niece. June was adorable. But the problem with all of it was that it highlighted the fact that when it came right down to it, Sawyer was sort of the main character at Garrett’s Watch. He lived in the main house, he had his wife and his child, and his happiness was... Well, it was impossible to escape.
Wolf did his best not to wonder about what life he would be living now if things had gone differently. If Breanna had lived. The thing was, it didn’t matter. Because there was no amount of what-ifs that would bring a tragically deceased teenage girl back from the dead. And there were no magical remedies for a heart that had broken a long time ago. They said that time healed all wounds.
The one thing he knew for sure was that sixteen years wasn’t enough time.
He had stopped waiting for that magical moment a long time ago.
And all of this was a lot more maudlin than he ever cared to get but the fact of the matter was, it reinforced the idea that he needed a change of scenery. At least for a while.
“I had a talk with our cousin the other day,” he said, looking around the dinner table.
It was a night when the family got together to have dinner. They didn’t do it every night, but truth be told, his new sister-in-law was a wonderful cook, and any time the offer of her making dinner was on the table, he took it.
“Which one?” Elsie asked.
Sawyer and Wolf weren’t the chatting type, but even still they tried to keep lines of communication open with the cousins who lived in Copper Ridge. But they hadn’t been to visit in years. Elsie seemed to keep tabs on them all with greater frequency, but she hadn’t been to visit, either.
“Connor. Had a conversation about the goings-on in Copper Ridge at their operation. They’re expanding. They need some help.”
“Really?”
“Their spread isn’t anywhere near as big as ours, but with Eli’s responsibilities as sheriff, he’s only able to work on the ranch part-time.”
“Well, if you want to do that...”
Wolf knew that Sawyer had no real reason to take issue with it. They had a full staff of workers at Garrett’s Watch, and the help was more than enough. Their family up in Copper Ridge, Oregon, just a couple hours north and toward the coast, had a whole different type of spread. A few hundred acres, and a smaller herd of cattle. They specialized in beef they sold at farmers markets and local grocery stores. Whereas Garrett’s Watch, part of the broader fifty-thousand acres that made up Four Corners Ranch, joint owned by the Garrett family, the King family, the Sullivan family and the McCloud family, ran massive operations. Beef, horses, hazelnuts, essentially a whole lot of things, making use of as much of the land as possible. It had been in their family for generations.
Of course, the fact was, the oldest sibling in each of those families was always the one making most of the decisions.
And when it came to Garrett’s Watch...
Well, Wolf and Sawyer were both take-charge kind of men, and while Wolf had a generally easy relationship with his brother, Sawyer seemed to feel like whatever his word was would be the law, and that was that.
Difficult sometimes, because Wolf felt very much the same.
“Good. I was thinking I’d leave tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” his sister-in-law, Evelyn, asked.
“Yeah,” he said, looking up from his mashed potatoes. “I was thinking.”
“Oh,”Evelyn said.
“Is there a problem?” She’d saidohin that way women said it when there was definitely a problem.
“No,” she said. “It’s just... Well, June turns six months old tomorrow and I was thinking...”
“He doesn’t need to be here for June’s half birthday,” Sawyer said, speaking of his daughter.
Yet again, Wolf actually had to marvel at his brother’s situation. He’d had an accidental pregnancy with a woman who was basically a bar hookup, and had ended up single parenting. Then he’d gone in search of a wife, and had found one through an ad he’d placed online.
Now they were in love, with Evelyn raising June as her own.
Good for him. Really.Good for him.