Page 6 of Boston
Boston loved that his parents worried over him. He really did, and while no, he didn’t really want to make the half-hour drive to Uncle Morris’s tonight, he probably would. Then Grams and Gramps could ask him who he was dating, and he could watch Harry and Belle, Adam and Joey, and Bryce and Codi being all cute and coupley.
And, there’d be a lot of food. Boston could cook decently well, but if he didn’t have to….
“It’s not going to be dark for a couple more hours,” he said. “So I’ll probably come.” He finished drying himself off and ducked out of the bathroom and across the hall to his closet. It stood down a hallway from his bedroom-slash-living-room, and no one could see this way unless they stood right at the end of the hall.
“I’ll tell Grams to save you some ham sandwiches,” Daddy said. “And fair warning.” He lowered his voice, and the music and chatter on his end of the line dimmed slightly. Boston assumed he’d walked inside to get more privacy, and he tensed as well.
“North and Skip are certain you’re going to have room in your summer schedule to do horseback riding lessons with them.”
Boston grinned, because while he sometimes felt like an outsider looking into the Young family, he did love his younger cousins. North and Skip were both six years old, and they’d already been atop horses.
“They’ve been plotting for the past forty minutes about how to ask you.”
Boston chuckled. “Yeah? What does that look like?” Because North and Skip couldn’t get themselves to Silver Sage, nor did they own their own horses.
“They’ve been berating Uncle Luke with questions, and then Bryce got here, and?—”
“He’s been helping them come up with a plan,” Boston said.
Daddy laughed. “I love how well we know Bryce.”
“If he can come up with the plan, why doesn’t he do their lessons?” Not that Boston would mind. He loved working with horses, and he loved going to Bryce’s horse rescue ranch—surely where the lessons would take place.
“Same answer as everyone else,” Daddy said.
“No time,” Boston said, though his father and plenty of his uncles had loads of time. Heck, none of them even had jobs. Wait, Uncle Gabe was still a practicing lawyer, but as Boston ran through his other uncles—Tex, Trace, Blaze, Otis, Daddy, Jem, Luke, Morris—he didn’t find a single one with a job.
So Uncle Luke or Uncle Morris could take their sons to Bryce’s ranch and do the lessons. At the same time, Boston knew that wasn’t any fun.
“Well, I don’t know what this summer will be,” Boston said as he pulled on a fresh pair of boxers and then jeans. He plucked a blue button-up off a hanger and stuck one arm through it. “I’m getting a new boss, remember?”
“Oh, right,” Daddy said. “Did you meet her yet?”
“Not yet,” Boston said. “Listen, I’m headed there, and I have something for you.”
“Lay it on me, son.”
Boston smiled, grabbed his phone, and headed down the hall to get his cowboy hat and keys. “I’m taking an important group out on the Wicker Road Trail tomorrow, and I’d love to hear those two stories you have about the time you went there with Gramps.”
“Oh, sure,” Daddy said. “We’ll grab Otis when you get here, because he was there when we were boys, and he just took OJ, Lars, and Cole up there. So he might have something more to say.”
Boston nodded, though he knew the trail just fine. What he wanted was something unique, something personal, to share with the Silvers on the ride tomorrow. “I’m leaving now.”
“We’ll see you soon then,” Daddy said. “Oh, and Blaze said Cash is coming home for the month of July.” He let the words hang there, and they caused a tremor to move through Boston’s bloodstream.
“I’ll call him,” he said. “Because I hadn’t heard that.”
He knew Cash had come to a mini-crossroads in his career, and that he was struggling with knowing what to do. Every time he and Boston had talked about it, though, Cash had doubled down on his rodeo training.
So coming home for a whole month? During the height of rodeo season?
Boston definitely needed to call him. But right now, he hung up with his father and headed out to his truck. For some reason, he glanced around as if he might find that brunette from earlier waiting for him.
He didn’t.
He got behind the wheel of his truck, started it to get the air conditioning going, and took a minute to get the podcast about the Wicker Road Trail going. Sometimes he hated how fixated on something he got, but right now, he simply wanted to makea good impression on all of the Silvers. “Especially your new boss,” he muttered to himself, and his obsessive personality was actually serving him well.
The next morning,Boston gaped at the two coolers of food that Anne had ready for him. “Both of these?”
