Page 13 of Rancher's Return

No matter that there was a Buck Carson-sized complication in the middle of it all.

Chapter Four

This was the most wholesome thing he had ever done in his life. Sure, he might have spent the past twenty years trying to find balance. He might have even tried his hand at being one of the good guys. But wholesome? That wasn’t really in his wheelhouse. Which made him a good father figure for misguided teenage boys, he thought. Because after all the life experiences they’d had, wholesome was out of their reach too. At least, he had thought it might be.

But here they all were, dressed in their Sunday best, about ready to go to a school carnival of all things.

“You will make sure to get the dirt out from under your nails?” he asked, looking at the boys.

“I’m not an animal,” Colton said.

“At least not an armadillo. Since there are no armadillos here,” Marcus said.

“Shut up,” Colton said.

“Yeah, you all look like you pass muster to me,” Buck said. It wasn’t like he made a habit of scrubbing his own nails or anything like that.

He thought about Marigold and ignored the tension stretching across his shoulders.

It had taken him a couple of hours after she left to realize how pretty she was. And to start to wonder about her. Really wonder. Not in terms of her being an emblem of potential salvation, but as a human being. Who had a seventeen-year-old daughter. His friend’s little sister had always been a small, sunny presence, and she had been annoying. Chipper and buzzing around like a fly. He hadn’t given her much thought. He had been nice, because you couldn’t be mean to somebody else’s brother or sister, that was just a rule. But she had been young, and primarily inconsequential to him. But she was a grown woman now. And it was strange on a few levels.

The first being that he hadn’t seen Jason’s family in all the years since the accident. Well, not since Marigold had yelled at him in the street. And the second being that because of the accident, Jason and his family had sort of frozen in place in Buck’s mind. Because Jason was dead, so he hadn’t gotten to grow or change or age. He was eighteen forever. Buck often found it strange that his friends were frozen forever in that place, graduation night, with a lifetime of possibilities ahead of them, while he was...getting old.

He had lines on his face. Calluses on his hands. New scars, in and out, that had torn through his flesh or his soul in all the years since his friends had been gone.

And Marigold was no different. She had grown, and she had changed. She wasn’t the same person she had been all that time ago. She wasn’t a child anymore. She was a mother herself.

It was a wrenching sort of joyous realization. Because at least Jason’s parents had her, had a granddaughter.

And Buck’s son was working on defiling her, apparently.

He’d had a pretty stern talk with Colton about possible consequences. Yet he had felt like an imposter, because he had practiced few of those things he was ranting against when he was a seventeen-year-old boy. Sex had been a game. It was a small town; there wasn’t shit else to do. He had been part of the wilder group of kids.

The truth was, there was a narrative that he had somehow led those more upstanding boys into that wild space, but they had done a good job taking themselves there.

It wasn’t that part of it that left him feeling guilty. It was being involved at all.

It was being the one who survived.

Because what he did wonder was if any of his friends would’ve done more than he did. For the world. For themselves.

If they were supposed to fall in love and get married and have children.

If they were supposed to cure cancer or climb the tallest mountain. Or maybe they wouldn’t have done shit.

It was impossible to say. But it was the not knowing that got to him. It was the not knowing, and never being able to know. That was what kept him awake at night.

It was just a damned hard pill to swallow.

And then... there was the fact that she was pretty.

She was damned pretty. And he had done his best to ignore that. Because there was pretty, the kind you could appreciate, and then there waspretty. The kind that hooked its way deep in your gut, made you feel something down beneath your skin. Something that was more than just aesthetic appreciation. Attraction.

That was the dumbest thing he had ever thought. But it was rattling around inside himself.

He could not be attracted to Marigold Rivers.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s head out.”

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