CHAPTER THREE

“HOW WAS WORK, JAMIE?” Wyatt asked the question so casually that Jamie had to conclude that Lindy, his wife, had threatened him within an inch of his life, and commanded that he not be a dick.

Everyone who’d worked on the ranch that afternoon—which today had been Bennett, Kaylee, their son Dallas, Grant, McKenna, Wyatt and Lindy—was seated in the private family dining area that they built out behind the main house.

A Very Lindy Touch that had been added to the property recently. A large paved area, covered by a hard-top gazebo with lights woven through the rafters, picnic tables and benches, a barbecue. A place for the family to gather no matter their configuration.

Jamie had to admit, it was a lot nicer than the dirty firepit area they’d sometimes occupied, or than trying to eat at odd hours out behind the mess hall that was reserved for guests.

“It was good,” she said, shifting uncomfortably as she thought back to her interactions with Gabe that day. In hindsight, she didn’t really know what she had been thinking, coming at him like she did, yelling at him about the way he was interacting with Gus, but his response hadn’t been what she expected. And she kind of would’ve rather he behaved in a way that was expected.

She had figured he would be the kind of guy to come right back at her if she went at him. That he would yell and puff out his chest, and be all...

Well, the way that Wyatt acted with her.

She got on Wyatt’s nerves, and he went straight for hers. It was what she knew. And she had figured that Gabe and her big brother were cut out of the same cloth.

They were, after all, oldest brothers and rodeo cowboys, so it seemed fair enough to make that assumption.

And in her experience there were only a couple of different kinds of men.

There were the responsible ones—the space under which she filed her brother Grant. Less so her brother Bennett, who had certainly turned into a responsible adult but had made a few mistakes in his youth, one of which resulted in a secret son he had only found out about a couple of years earlier. Still, in his thirties, he fit the bill of Responsible One.

Then there were the laconic whores. Like their family friend Luke Hollister, who was quick with a smile and had a whole lot of easy charm that Jamie thought was about as transparent as a glass-bottom boat.

Gabe was a charmer, and women liked him, but that was the same with her brother Wyatt, and he wasn’t what Jamie would call easy. No, far from it. He was hardheaded, stubborn as a mule and infused with too much pride and testosterone to be able to cope with anything.

Her sister-in-law had done a pretty good job of taming Wyatt—the gazebo being a fine exhibit of this—but she had a feeling if she said that, he would have to go out and punch a tree or hit a wasp nest with a stick, or something else that would prove his unending masculinity.