Page 20 of Down in Flames

“You won’t.” Not if he could help it. But the one thing he’d been taught, early and often, was that any scrap of control people thought they had was a lie. He’d almost punched his ticket a dozen different ways as a child, and that was playing it so safe he might as well have been swaddled in bubble wrap. So far, caution had brought him nothing but misery.

“You’re a grown man. You want to run around the state, tearing yourself up and letting horses drag you through the dirt, that’s your business. But when you’re home, you’re back at the ranch with me. No more hiding.”

“I can’t live my life in your back pocket,” he protested.

“Why not? It’s where you belong.”

West’s pulse kicked up, fluttering under his bruised ribs. He sat there on the bed and buried his face in one shaking hand. He’d been dreaming of those words for years, but the shock of it had his stomach churning with nerves. Reality was going to kick in sooner or later, and when it did, he thought he might puke.

“You don’t mean that.”

Michael’s sigh was heavy. Static hissed down the line, and West felt a bolt of terror that the call would drop before he could hear what Michael wanted to say. He held his breath, his entire body straining toward the faintest wisp of sound coming through his cell phone’s speaker.

Michael spoke slowly, as if feeling the truth of the words out in his mouth for the first time. “All I know is that I was miserable without you. Somehow, without me even noticing, you filled up all the empty spaces where Mary used to be. I want to resent you for it, but I can’t, because I’m just so damned relieved to not be walking around all hollowed out every second of every day. In return for all that, how could I not do everything in my power to make you happy?”

“It’s too much. You can’t force yourself—”

“Listen to me, West.” Michael’s voice dropped to a low growl that made his balls tighten. “I’d rip my fucking heart out and hand it to you if I could. If it’s what you need. If it would keep you where I need you to be.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. Even if he knew what he wanted to say, his dry throat couldn’t form any sounds beyond a guttural grunt. But he was listening. Oh, he was listening, and the absolute truth in Michael’s sandpaper promise had him hissing through his teeth and pressing down on his twitching cock with the heel of one hand.

“Trust me, kid,” Michael rasped. “There’s no end to what I’m willing to do to keep you with me. All you’ve got to do is come home and find out.”

CHAPTER NINE

Less than a day later, West sat shucking corn on the steps of the farmhouse where he grew up. He ached to head right to the Triple M, but Michael had his hands full digging up irrigation pipes.

West felt like hell, but he launched himself back into his daily routine like the whole weekend hadn't happened. He'd have gone crazy sitting around with Michael's words rattling around in his skull. Nothing made him more miserable than being forced to sit uselessly on his hands when there was work to be done, and in a town like Sweetwater, there was always someone who needed help.

As soon as he crossed the county line, West hit the ground running. Gus had a backlog of local deliveries at the shop, and after that, West had promised Pastor John that he'd crawl into the ductwork and figure out what was making a rattling sound during Sunday service. His oldest friend, Tucker, needed someone to feed his horses while he was out of town, and then there was the usual never-ending work at his family's farm.

The house was so old that it was practically a landmark, but not the fancy kind. Four generations of the Owens family had been raised between the little farmhouse’s crumbling plaster walls. The white paint was peeling and the shingles needed to be replaced, but the flower border his mother had planted when he was young was still vibrant most of the year. The dilapidated little three-bedroom sat like a malignant growth on fifty acres of lush farmland. The fields had all turned to seed years ago, but the overgrown garden still kept his parents fed through the winter.

His father had lost the will to care for the property a long time ago. The kids all pitched in where they could, but Susan and James had families of their own, and Bethany had managed to nab herself a scholarship to the state university. West made barely above minimum wage at the shop, hardly enough to support himself, and Derek had been the wallet of the family for so long that it was only natural most of the bills fell on his shoulders. So, West picked up the rest of the slack with his own sweat and blood. He probably spent more time on the farm than at his own crummy apartment.

It was one of the last few warm evenings of autumn. Even now, the air held a crispness that warned of the coming winter. In the garden, tomato plants drooped in their cages, and the corn stalks had long since turned brown and crispy. Sweat trickled down the base of West’s spine, but every time he twitched to scratch the itch, the agony in his shoulder reminded him why it was a bad idea.

His swollen, bruised face was impossible to hide. He’d played it off by claiming he’d taken a crane arm to the face at work, but it was impossible to avoid using only one arm to carry a fresh supply of firewood into the house. His parents had noticed. As he sat on the steps, focused on stripping every last hair of cornsilk from each cob, their raised voices carried through the open screen door.

“He’s taking on too much!” his mother exclaimed, and her distress tore at his heart. “And you’ve seen the bruises. He should give up that apartment in town and move back home. I’m sure Gus would let him switch to part-time hours if we explained—”

“Explained what?” Jasper Owens cut in harshly. “That you coddled him so much as a child he can barely function as a grown man?”

“He’s fragile!”

“If he is, you made him that way.”

West clenched his teeth and ripped viciously at the stalk in his hands.

He didn’t blame his mother. She’d once been a strong woman; strong enough to juggle four children and a sick baby while her husband worked himself to the bone. She was the one who’d refused comfort care for him and demanded a risky experimental surgery, and then she’d done it again and again. Five surgeries before kindergarten. She’d watched him turn blue right before her eyes, and she’d been the one who performed CPR on him in the backseat of their station wagon while her eleven-year-old drove them to the hospital.

Dorothy Owens was the salt of the fucking earth, but years of hardship had worn her into something thin and frail. West and his siblings hardly dared breathe around her, afraid she’d blow away like a tissue-paper doll.

“You need to do something about your face,” Susan said.

His oldest sister sat in a folding lawn chair, sipping on canned wine and watching as her youngest children ran through the sprinkler for the last time before the weather shifted.

“I’ll do something about mine when you do something about yours,” West said mildly.

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