Her Four Cowboys

I looked back at him, amazed at the man that my little brother had grown into. Even when presented with the opportunity to try for the most amazing woman we’d both ever known without threat of competition, he said that it shouldn’t be up to either of us.

“So, what do we do?” I asked. “Ask her to meet up and just… tell her together? Offer her the choice?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice steadier than I’d ever heard it. “And no matter what happens, we won’t let it come between us. At the end of the day, we’ll still be brothers, and some girl won’t change that.”

“She’s not just some girl, though,” I said, looking at him from under my eyebrows.

“She’s not,” he said, “but you’re not just some other guy.”

I grinned, standing up. “Do we hug it out now or something?”

“Hell yeah.”

22

LUCY

“So what do you think of this one?” Molly asked as we walked down the path from the little house that we’d just finished touring. After six weeks of being back in Rock Ledge, I was hitting my limit of being home with the parents, as wonderful as they were. With my mom’s consistent ‘gentle nudges’ about unpacking and tidying and generally making my room more livable, especially when combined with my dad’s irrepressible need to knock on my door at the most inane times in order to ask the most ridiculous questions, I was definitely hitting the boiling point of my patience.

Also, the plan that I’d made for living in my parents’ house had been before I’d gotten the very generous employment offer that I’d gotten from the clinic. The salary had been a lot higher than I’d been anticipating.

Truthfully, I could make a decision now about a place I liked, sign the lease for immediate move-in, and still not really feel the pinch.

The only trouble was that none of the places that we’d seen had really struck me as the right place for me. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but I hadn’t been able to see myself living in any of the little places that we’d toured so far.

“I’m not sure,” I said, heading back out to where Molly’s car was parked by the curb. My best friend had gamely agreed to pick me up and go with me to the different properties today, and this was the third one that we’d seen.

Once inside the car, I slumped over tiredly. “I’m not sure, Moll. It just doesn’t feel right to me.”

She looked at me, blinking a few times. “Can you be more specific?”

“I honestly have no idea. It’s just a feeling I have. I don’t want to move again until I’m ready to actually buy a property, so I really want to love the place that I’m moving into, you know?”

The corner of her mouth twisted up just a little, and she shrugged a shoulder. “Yeah, I do.” She tilted her chin to my phone. “How many more places do we have to see?”

I looked at the emails and sighed in relief. “Just one.”

I read out the email to her, and the two of us drove over to the address given in it. I fiddled with the radio dial on Molly’s old Camry as we drove, and we chatted casually as we snacked on the bag of gummy worms that one could usually find in her car. She didn’t bring up any of my escapades with the Kent brothers, and neither did I.

I hadn’t seen any of them since my tryst with Austin in his truck outside of Spurs. Instead, I’d just been biding my time in texting any of them back about anything remotely personal. Aaron hadn’t really tried to get in touch with me at all since the night that I’d gone out to the ranch before the storm hit, and honestly, I felt a little bit better about the fact that I hadn’t had to talk to him or face any of the feelings that had been wreaking havoc on me for the last few weeks.

Those feelings had had another enormous wrench tossed in the middle of them when Austin and I did what we had done in his truck. I didn’t know what had possessed me; I’d never had sex in a car in my life, not even when I’d been a teenager and had no other option for privacy.

“Luce,” Molly said as she pulled the car to a stop outside the final address. She turned it off and turned to look at me. “Where’d you go?”

I bit my lip before shaking my head at her, reminding myself of one of Aaron’s horses when it was being dogged by flies. “Nowhere,” I said. “I just got distracted.”

“Yeah, I could tell,” she said. “I just don’t know what you got distracted by.”

I shrugged one of my shoulders. “Just thinking of all the possibilities once we actually find the place,” I said.