Page 33 of Make Me Shiver (Oil Barrons 2)

“Two cakes with eggs over easy and links if you have them, please.”

I stared at him. Since when did he eat pancakes? Normal ones made with white flour? And sausage that was more flavor than it was actual pork? Introducing him to local fare like knoephla soup was one thing. Cheap diner food would make Briony gag. I doubted Wilson would even enter the building.

“Sure thing.” She patted his shoulder. “Welcome to town.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Holden arched a brow toward me. I lifted a shoulder. Jocelyn was Jocelyn. She was never called ma’am. We’d all learned her name by the time we could talk.

Archer focused on Holden. “So. What’s my aunt like? The rest of my cousins?”

The men launched into easy small talk. The volume kicked up as everyone went about their business. The rest of town, including Archer’s extended family, would know about us by the end of the day. If his friends had planted the idea of annulment in Archer’s head, what would his uncles tell him?

* * *

Archer

After we ate, I told Holden when he asked that he could plan a family gathering so I could meet everyone. It had been clear Delaney and Holden weren’t friends, but other than his initial hostility, he had seemed as ambivalent around her as she was around him.

She’d been more comfortable around the cousin she claimed she wasn’t friends with than she had been around my friends. There’d been no tension, no shyness, no strained smiles.

I had to sit with that information for a while.

She was driving back to her place so I could retrieve the tractor, but she made a turn I didn’t recognize. In the corner of the pasture was a trailer house with an acre fenced off around it. The yard was empty, with nothing but another old pickup sitting outside the door.

The vehicle was familiar. It had been parked outside the garage at her parents’ place. “Is this where your brother lives?”

She nodded and turned into a driveway that used to be an approach. Cows grazed the pasture surrounding the yard. “Yes. Ma and Papa moved this out here after Kane graduated.” As if she sensed my next question, she added, “He didn’t shoot himself in the house. Papa scrapped the pickup he did it in.”

“I’m a little surprised he’s still okay with staying here.” Tough decisions a family never thought they’d have to make, and she’d done it while assuming her marriage was freshly over.

“I am too, but he was okay with it as long as staying here didn’t mean he was going back to his old way of life. There was nothing good about what happened, but his choice of location helped keep Ma from claiming it was an accident cleaning his gun.” She pulled in next to the pickup. “Living out here was better for him than being at home. After he recovered, he stayed at the house for a while. Then I helped him get set up with online college classes. It’s been going really well.”

“What’s he going to school for?”

“Computer science.” Pride rang in her voice. “He wanted something versatile with technology that has nothing to do with agriculture.”

I understood better than the rest of Kane’s family why he’d been so full of despair. If I’d had no choice but to work the ranch I’d grown up on, I didn’t know where my head would’ve gone. The Grangers were probably better than the owner Dad had worked for, but there were days when it had been like a prison without bars. I had envied the cattle we took to the sales barn. They had gotten away.

Kane pushed open the front door and came outside. When his dark-blue gaze landed on me, I had the urge to prove myself in a way I hadn’t done since I won the Truitt scholarship my senior year of high school.

Delaney got out, and I followed her lead.

“You’re the brother-in-law I didn’t know I had?” Kane said as he came down the metal stairs from his front door. He dropped the tailgate of his pickup and scooted a butt cheek on it as if he was more comfortable entertaining guests in his yard instead of his house.

“Guilty.” I lowered Delaney’s tailgate. “Though Delaney told me about you.”

“I can imagine,” he said with a rueful grin aimed at his sister. “Delaney, huh? It’s like you’re always in trouble.”

She scowled. “Only he gets away with it.” She hopped up beside me and swung her legs. “We were driving by, and I thought I’d stop in and officially introduce you two.”

Kane and I nodded at each other. An easy silence fell between us.

He tilted his face to the sky. “I’m applying for jobs.”

Delaney quit kicking her legs. “Really? Where?”

“Fargo.”

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