Page 88 of The Lies We Told Ourselves

“Blake and whoever she wants, I’m guessing. Have you not noticed the distinct lack of single ladies a certain age around here? Money isn’t the only thing Willowbrook needs to bring into town.”

She wasn’t wrong there. Now I really felt sorry for Cole. It was desperate times if he was willing to put up with someone like Blake.

I shuddered at the thought.

She’d better not scare my vet out of town.

CHAPTER THIRTY

REECE

The ranch had been quiet for days, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off.

I’d been staying in Booker’s house while Xander took the cottage. It was only supposed to be temporary, and then I noticed Booker had moved what was left of my things into his closet. Once I went through the wreckage, a few things had been salvageable, but I was desperately in need of a shopping trip soon. Otherwise, my future held a lot of laundry nights.

We’d fallen into a routine of waking up in the morning and making love until we couldn’t ignore the world any longer. I spent my mornings with Bullet and Spirit, making sure they had everything they needed and their feed was made up for the day. Booker was in the process of hiring a new ranch hand and doing as much as he could to help Hank and Cliff while he had his broken arm.

Xander was less than impressed with him, but he was busy enough with some secret project that Booker kept slipping away without him noticing.

The afternoons were full of business planning and social media content creation, and I was just about done withdesigning a temporary website for the ranch. Trying to persuade Booker to go full cowboy for TikTok was proving harder than I thought it would be, but the account was slowly growing without him.

I’d have to pull out all my powers of persuasion to get him to cooperate, though. And I was thoroughly up for the challenge.

“You need a name,” I said, looking up from the computer and finding Booker staring at me in confusion.

“I have a name.”

“No, a name for the ranch. You all just use your family name around here, and I get it. It makes sense when it was just a ranch. But you need a business name. Something that suits what you want to achieve here. And I need it by tomorrow so I can buy the domain name and launch the website,” I added quickly before bolting from my desk and heading for the kitchen.

This was my soon-to-be patented approach to dealing with Booker. Information drop and then run. By the time he caught up with me, he was too distracted by the chase to go into full grumpy denial mode.

Not that I didn’t love helping him work out the grumpy denial mood. It was a hard job, but I was here with it. When it came to Booker, I’d take one for the team any day of the week. Hell, any hour of any day. The man was a magician in bed, and even having a broken arm hadn’t slowed him down.

“I don’t want to change the name,” he shouted from the office we’d put together. “I like calling it the ranch.”

“The Ranch.” I shrugged. “Maybe that could work. Sounds a bit dystopian prison thriller, though.”

Booker wheeled his chair through the office door and glared at me. “It does not.”

“Welcome to The Ranch,” I said in the creepiest voice I could muster, hunching my shoulders as I tapped my fingertips together.

“Well, anything sounds creepy when you say it like that.” He sulked, wheeling himself back into the office.

The seed was planted.

I was getting great at this.

“I’m going to change Spirit’s hay net, and then I’m making lunch,” I called out as I slipped on my boots and headed out the door.

It was so beautiful out here. Even the restless anxiety inside me couldn’t fight against the peaceful atmosphere of the ranch. It would be beautiful out here when the full height of summer hit us. Hopefully, Booker’s arm would heal well enough that we could take a picnic up the trail again.

My cheeks warmed with thoughts of our last picnic as I walked into the barn, heading into the shadowy back storage area where Booker had the feed stored and a little kitchenette set up. I’d already filled the hay nets this morning and had a line of buckets laid out ready with Spirit’s feed. She was off the salt water and nearly solely on normal feed now that her weight was going up. I kept sneaking her an extra alfalfa hay net through the day anyway because she loved them so much.

I was probably going to make her fat, but I figured she deserved to be pampered, and I was pretty sure Booker knew exactly what I was doing and would have stopped me by now if I was doing anything wrong.

I heard a whiny coming from Spirit’s stable and Bullet banging around in his. Maybe I could ask Booker if we could put them next to each other. That’s what they seemed to want anyway, and Cole had already confirmed days ago that Spirit wasn’t carrying any diseases or anything that she could pass to him.

It was cute that the two of them were getting so close to each.

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