Page 58 of Midnight Surrounds Us

And I knew for sure it had come time for me to leave it.

I had no clue what I’d say to my dad, how to explain the need I felt to go out on my own, but whether he understood or not, I was doing it.

And when I looked down at Aubrey in my arms and her brilliant smile, I knew the name of my new endeavor:

Spitfire Ranch.

Wyoming SusBeef didn’t have much of a ring to it. Any name that spoke more to the type of sustainable farming I planned on doing would probably have been more conducive to the whole business-model thing I’d heard people talking about. I had to admit, that shit had never come easy to me, but the woman currently in my arms knew a thing or two about business, and I planned to utilize her beautiful brain if she’d let me. And I’d pay her for it too. In fact, if I could convince her to love me, she could have it all.

And if she’d inspired it, why not name it after her?

“You got me in some kinda mood, Spitfire.”

Reaching up, she scratched her fingers through my beard softly and trailed one finger over my lips. “Show me.”

“Feel like a roll in the hay?”

She smirked. “Do I ever.”

I looked down at her legs hanging over my arm, her skirt inching up her thighs and the cowgirl boots I still remembered her wearing with that pink dress decades ago dangling in the night air.

“Okay, but you’re leavin’ those boots on.”

Her head tipped back and she laughed, and I could’ve died of satisfaction. This was it.

Shewas it for me.

Did she have any clue how much I’d been yearning for her? If she didn’t, I was about to show her.

After I calledBax and made him an official offer for his land, I asked him to meet me for a drink in town.

My sister-in-law out in the Midwest worked in real estate, and I’d asked her to do some research for me so that the number I gave Bax was competitive. My mama wasn’t Sorelle’s biggest fan even though she’d given my parents three really cute grandkids (it seemed Calla Graves wasn’t a fan ofanywoman who tried to claim one of her sons), so bonus, I knew Sorelle would keep quiet until I was ready.

I wasn’t quite there yet. I needed to have all my shit situated before I went to my dad.

Bax and Brand met me at Manny’s Bar in town the next weekend, and we had a rowdy good time, remembering our teens and early twenties and all the trouble we’d gotten into.Brand had always been the quietest of the three Lee brothers or their younger sister, Abey, but when you got a couple beers in him, his personality leaked out.

“Oh, no, don’t you dare blame that tractor explosion on me,” he said, laughing after finishing his third beer. “That honor goes to Abey. Our baby sister was the real troublemaker in our household. But I’ve got a good one. You remember the time we let all the chickens out of the coops at Lee Farms after we got into our mama’s wine coolers?”

“Oh man,” I remembered, “your dad called my dad, and he drove up to whip my ass. I was thirteen! It was embarrassin’.”

Bax laughed. “You think our dad was any more pleased than yours? The sheep were terrified of those chickens, and they chased all the ewes out of the pen that Dixon forgot to latch. Some of those fuckers were loose for a day before we finally caught ’em all. One of ’em ended up over on old man Marley’s property. If we hadn’t figured it out, he would’ve eaten that animal.”

Bax and Brand shot their arms up in the air, shouting, “My land. My rules!”

“Shit,” Brand said, “I lost baseballs, frisbees, and hard-earned money to that man’s land.”

Bax took a swig of his beer and nodded. “Me too. What a grump-ass. You know, even after Dad died and I took over the farm, that man was still a damn pain. He had to get around with a walker in his later years, and he couldn’t see for shit, but he never missed the opportunity to screech and holler at us. He got up in Candy’s face one time when she got a flat tire and had to pull over at the end of his drive until I could get there. She had Athena with her, a truckload of groceries, and she was six months pregnant with?—”

Bax’s long pause said everything I needed to know about how my friend had been dealing with the loss of his wife and unbornson. I couldn’t remember ever hearing him mention the baby, but it seemed to be getting a little easier for him to talk about Candy.

“What a dick,” I said, watching Bax carefully as he saw the memory in his head.

It had been three years. Raising a spunky thirteen-year-old on his own couldn’t be easy, but Bax had pulled himself up by his bootstraps with the help of his family.

“Anyway,” Bax said, trying to shrug off the painful subject, “that brings us to the land part of this conversation, and Brand and I have an addendum to add to your proposal.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked. “What’s that?”

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