“There’s not too polite and there’s downright rude. I can be downright rude,” she decided. “What’s ‘all right’ for yourself, more or less?”
“Enough I didn’t have to sell. I could’ve kept the land, given my mother and sister their shares. Bought some stock, got a decent ranch going.”
Maybe that was more all right than she’d imagined, and maybe that added another aspect to him she hadn’t considered. She appreciated a good head for business and financial security.
“But you didn’t.”
“Nope. Because it’s not what I wanted. I didn’t mind running my own business, and wasn’t bad at it.”
“What do you mean your own business?”
Since he knew where she’d been heading, he rode forward. “I hooked up with a partner in California, and we had our wrangling enterprise, such as it was. And it did all right. When I was ready to come back, he bought me out. I don’t mind working for somebody else, either. So I’m fine where things stand.”
Yet another aspect she hadn’t considered. “I didn’t know you started a business—I thought you just worked for one.”
“I wanted to try it out.” As simple as that really, he thought now. He’d wanted to try things, get a feel for things. “It fit well enough, for a while. It fits you better from what I see. I’ve gotten real fond of women who know how to run things, and have to think a lot of one who juggles it all to get home for an hour in the middle of the day to put family ahead of everything.”
“Why, Callen Skinner.” Eyes wide, she pressed a hand to her heart. “You’re going to bring a blush to my cheeks.”
“That’ll be the day.”
He could see the house up ahead now, the single story with its slightly crooked L. The empty paddocks, the overgrown yard, the scrabble of a chicken coop. The empty barn gone to a faded, red-streaked gray where his father had hanged himself.
Some wildflowers were trying to bloom. In the distance, the mountains held some blue, some green under the frosting of snow.
“What was the idea?” he asked her. “Coming here?”
“We’re still deciding what to do. We have some options. The first is whether to incorporate it into the ranch or the resort. I lean, big surprise, toward resort.”
“That’s a shocker,” he replied.
“Chase is on the fence—another shocker. Though I think part of the fence-sitting is waiting until he knows what you’d rather.”
“It’s not my land.”
“Shut up. Rory’s with me. Mom’s just too distracted to think clearly either way, and Dad leans ranch, but he’s open. We haven’t brought the grannies into it, but we will.”
“Okay.”
“Either way leads to other options, but right now the leans are swaying heavier toward resort’s more likely, so I’ll give you those. We could fix up the house, the outbuildings, rent this out as a mini-ranch experience. Families, groups, corporate events. We could raze the house, the outbuildings, and build new ones. Either toward that mini-ranch experience or a group of high-end cabins, with a central kitchen and community area like we do for the glamping. Bring in some stock, make it an educational experience for youth groups. How to tend horses, cattle, chickens. Lots of options.”
“You’ve got your preference. Which is it?”
She shook her head. “They’re all workable, all good, and can all be fluffed up and marketed. I’m asking you how you feel about it.”
“I told you, I’m fine with it. It’s not mine to say anyway.”
She hissed, dismounted. “Oh, get off your horse, Skinner. I mean that literally and metaphorically.” She walked Leo to the paddock, looped his reins over the fence. “You grew up in that house. You worked the land here, raised horses and cattle. You have a damn opinion. You have feelings.”
He got off his horse, and distinctly felt the edges of the corner she had pushed him into. “I don’t care as much as it seems you want me to.”
“Bullshit. Just bullshit. I’m asking you to tell me right when we’re standing here. Take it down, the house, the barn, all of it, or fix it up and make it new again. Just that. Tell me.”
Angrier than she wanted to be, she knocked a fist on his heart. “Tell me what you feel, what you’d want.”
She left her hand on his heart. He swore it burned right into it, like the sun burning across the sky on its slow descent. Like her eyes into his.
“Take it down. All of it. I—”
“Done.”
“Bodine—”
“Done,” she repeated. “That’s all I needed.”
He grabbed her wrist before she could pull away. The temper they both felt evaporated when she laid her other hand on his cheek.
“It matters, Callen, what you feel. Not just to me, but it sure as hell matters to me. They’re options, and all of them good. Why shouldn’t what you want count?”
“It’s not mine.”
“It was.”
“It might’ve been, but it wasn’t. If my only choice in coming back was to come here, to this land, to this house, I wouldn’t be here. This isn’t where I’m rooted, and whatever roots there were, were so shallow ripping them out didn’t change a thing.”
He pulled her close so they could look at the front of the house together. “I’ve got mixed memories, good and bad. I don’t know that one outweighs the other so much. I remember when my father got it into his head to build that addition there. He didn’t know what he was doing, and I was about twelve, so I didn’t know, either. But he tried.”
He heard his mother’s voice as they stood in the wind over his father’s grave.
He tried.
“He tried,” Callen repeated, maybe finally accepting just that. “And it made my mother happy. It’s lopsided and the floor inside slopes, but he tried and it made her happy. It’s mixed that way.”
Saying nothing, Bodine leaned into him a little. An offer of comfort.
“But my mother’s never going to walk on that floor again. And she’s never going to stand here and look over at that barn and remember how he looked hanging. I don’t want you to take it down for me.”
“I said it’s done.” Turning to him, she laid her hand back on his heart. “Maybe she’ll come back here one day and see what we’ve built. Maybe it’ll make her happy. Maybe it’ll make you happy.”
She gestured, waited until he stopped looking into her eyes, followed her direction. “You’ve got a couple of rosebushes over there. You should dig them up. Make sure you get good root balls, cover them with burlap, and take them to your mother. I bet your sister would know how to get them going again. It would mean something to your mother.”
In his throat, emotion lodged with gratitude. “There are times I don’t know what to say to you. Times you just blow a hole through me.”
He drew her in, held on. “I’ll dig them up,” he told her. “She’ll like that, and I wouldn’t have thought of it.”