Page 42 of Unbreakable Love

I scooped low and grabbed her waist, then threw her up into the air. “All right, kid. Let’s go see the puppy.”

She threw her hands in the air. “Yay! Thanks, Daddy!”

“How’s everything going out here?” I scanned the brewery and the gated and fenced in animal pen outside Bryce’s brewery.

He’d started it earlier this year, after Dalton and our dad loaned him some land. His dream, unlike mine, had always been to stay as close as possible to the land and work it, but we all knew Dalton would be the one in charge someday, and he wasn’t an easy man to take instruction from. I loved my brother, but the saying a man is set in his ways didn’t figure into Dalton’s personality. He was so far set in his ways his feet were buried in concrete. The man was unmovable when it came to change.

Bryce wanted the land, but he also understood the public’s fascination with our family. Given our brothers making names for themselves in their professional careers, that attention only grew over the last five years. Bryce wanted to work the land but give the people somewhere to come nearby where they could see the family, see the land. His brewery, so far, I figured was doing decently well considering he’d only opened it this summer.

“Good. Ava’s been helping me with some marketing strategies and things to help keep business coming over the winter. I was hoping we could have built more of the fence today, but the snow might make it difficult.”

“Eh. Posts have been in, so it should be fine. Unless you’re too much of a baby to spend all that time in the cold.”

“Jackass. I’m no more of a baby than you are.”

“Ah. But as the actual baby of the family, you’ll always be more of a baby than me.”

“Shut up or nut up, Gav, and prove you’re not all talk.”

“Please.” I snorted. “You know this is what I do for a living, right?”

“Then you should have no problem taking care of it.”

I sighed dramatically, purely for effect. After all, this was exactly why I was there. “Let me grab the tools. Where’s the wood?”

Bryce was doing a simple fence surrounding the animal petting area. He’d planned for it to originally be a smaller space, but it was such a crowd pleaser he wanted to extend the area, giving the goats more access to roam and adding more feeding stations for next spring. While he’d set the posts before he faced the risk of the ground freezing, he’d only added horizontal wood beams in between them along the side that met up with the gravel parking lot. Once the beams were all set, we’d wrap it with chicken wire to make sure the animals couldn’t escape.

“Out in the barn. Goats are penned right now, though. Need some help?”

“And have you possibly break a nail? I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Shut up.” He chucked a coaster at me from the bar like it was a frisbee. It landed three feet in front of me, making both of us laugh.

“Nice, kid. Really nice.”

“How’s the cute teacher doing?”

Oh, now he was trying to rile me as only a baby brother could.

“I’m not falling for that,” I told him and headed out of his bar and out to my truck where I grabbed my tool belt and chest from the bed of my truck. Bryce was in the barn when I reached it, already grabbing and stacking the boards. The goats, excited for company and because they were obnoxious, if not cute, little things, were braying so loud the noise bounced off the walls and rattled my ears.

“So we’re not talking about the cute teacher?”

“Can you stop calling her cute?” I grumbled and went to the other side of the barn to grab the wood there.

“Is it because you don’t like other men looking at her or because you don’t think she’s cute?”

“Goddamn, Bryce, you know how to needle something to death, don’t you?”

“Just trying to figure out if you’re interested or not. Ryken stopped by here last night, said you went feral over the thought of him helping her out.”

The wood dropped from my hands with a clatter and a clang and yet, the only thing I now heard was the roar of wind and anger rushing through me. “What’d you say?”

Bryce glanced at the wood at my feet and back at me. “So you do think she’s cute.”

“She’s not cute. She’s gorgeous and sweet, and she also spent last night having dinner with Josie and me because Josie insisted and then halfway through, Josie lost her mind when she started suggesting Penny could be her new mom, so yeah… Bryce, I’m a little pissed at the idea of someone thinking she’s cute. And last night only proved how careful I have to be because Josie gets that shit in her mind and her little heart is going to shatter if something doesn’t work out.”

Bryce stood there, a handful of boards piled in between his hands, towering over his six-foot frame, blinking at me.

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