Page 51 of Rancher's Return

Then he looked back at his food.

His sisters-in-law took to Marigold immediately and spent the whole dinner talking her ear off, while Lily was easily chatting to Boone’s stepdaughters, who he intuited she already knew from school.

He stood up to go get another helping of food and just about ran into Boone at the serving table.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

He nearly got a smile out of his brother.

“Marigold is nice,” Boone commented.

“Yeah,” Buck said, frowning. “She is.”

“You seem to like her quite a bit.”

“What’s not to like? Anyway, she’s my business partner, and of course Colton is dating Lily.” How many times had he said this exact thing to different people over the course of them working together, even in conversations with her? An easy, well tread justification for why they spent time together. For why he liked her.

It was the damnedest thing.

“Seems like you’ve been settling in pretty well,” Boone said.

“Yeah. I guess. And the bruise on my face is healing.”

“Sorry about that,” Boone said, clearing his throat. “My wife informed me that it wasn’t an appropriate way to greet my brother.”

“I don’t know about that. You had your feelings. You were entitled to them. I’m not going to pretend that my behavior in the past was...honorable.”

He had talked to all his brothers quite a bit since he had come back. But Boone least of all. And they hadn’t addressed the way they had greeted each other. And he wasn’t sure—was that what was happening now? Maybe there was just enough distance between that moment and this one. Or maybe somehow the difference had to do with Marigold. He couldn’t quite figure out how, but he felt different because she was here.

And maybe Boone could sense that.

“I felt like you left everything to me,” Boone said. “All the grief, all the responsibility. Everything. And I... Believe me when I tell you, a certain part of me gets off on that shit. I’m a champion martyr, Buck. I was in love with my best friend’s wife for over a decade.” He looked across the space, at Wendy, who was currently talking to Marigold. “I wanted her, and I couldn’t have her. And everything in my life felt like a struggle. I think I wanted it to feel like one. But you were my bad object. The person I blamed all of it on. Well, not Wendy being married to somebody else, but all the other stuff. I’ve dealt with a lot of things over the last few years. I have Wendy now. But apparently, I was still carrying around a little resentment toward you.”

This felt comfortable. Being resented. Buck kind of wanted to thank his brother for it.

“Hey. I don’t blame you. What I did back then was selfish. And at the time, I really did believe you were all better off without me here. It’s that kind of depressive thought that sends you down really dark roads. And I went down a pretty dark road. But when the fog finally cleared, I realized how selfish it had been. At that point, I’d been gone so long I didn’t know how to come back. That was selfish too. But part of me really was afraid I was going to disrupt whatever you all had put back together in my absence. I didn’t want to do that. I threw myself into my work, but it was when I adopted those boys that I really understood... Family is important. It makes a huge difference to these boys and...”

“You can say it makes a difference to you,” Boone said.

“Of course it does.”

“Are you glad you’re back?”

He felt like he was being jabbed in the stomach with a red-hot poker. “Yes. Of course I am. I missed you.”

Emotion tightened his throat. He really didn’t like how close to the surface all his feelings were now that he was home. Now that he had kids. Now that he was...trying to be healed. Whatever all of it was...it was creating a damned difficult way to be.

Maybe that was part of why he had avoided coming home for so many years. Maybe that was why he had stayed away. Because somehow he had known that, if he came back here, he was going to feel things. Everything. And yes, he had done a lot of work on himself, but he had also spent a lot of time living a life that allowed him to control what people knew about him, what he talked about and when and what he allowed as far as emotional closeness.

Everything was more volatile here. Everything had been more volatile since he had adopted Reggie, Marcus and Colton. Because there was no control when it came to caring for kids.

They were mean to you, they were wonderful to you, and you loved them all the same. They jerked you around, endlessly. They made you feel like you would cut off a limb to be there for them. To do whatever they needed.

The experience had left him raw and vulnerable, frankly, and coming home had only made it worse.

He’d missed his family.

---