It wasn’t like the way that he was treating the whole thing with Sammy could disprove that. Quite the opposite.

But there had been so many years of struggle. Just so many. And was it so bad to want some settled years where things just felt...good?

“I’ll tell you what,” Ryder said. “You do your job. I’ll do mine.”

“Which is?”

“Raising hamburger,” Ryder said. “Neither of us needs to give the other life advice.”

“All right,” Logan said. “Fair enough.”

“What about you?” Ryder asked. “Are you ever going to get married?”

Logan chuckled. “I can’t see it in the future.”

“All right, so why are you here harassing me about it?”

“Because you’re the best of us,” he said. “Not me. It’s not even close. I...” He shook his head. “Look, if anybody deserves normal, it’s you.”

“That ship sailed a long time ago. We were never going to get normal. Not after all that.”

“That seems a damn shame.”

“We have this place. Seems like that’s good enough.”

He looked around, took in the cloudless blue sky that was so clear it created hazy sunspots in front of his eyes. At the jagged green mountains capped with pine trees and the rolling expanse of fields all around him.

Hope Springs Ranch.

There had been a moment in his life when it had felt like all hope was dead. It had felt like this place and its name was an albatross around his neck. But gradually he had gotten used to the weight. And he had begun to find the hope buried here.

The salvation.

It had sustained him. His siblings, his cousins, his friend Logan.

And Sammy.

It would continue to do so.

He would be certain of that.

* * *

“SO ARE WE going to go daddy hunting tonight or what?”

Sammy popped into the barn late in the afternoon, and could tell immediately by the rigid line that Ryder’s shoulders created that she had led with the wrong sentence.

But really, he was the one who had said he would help her. And the fact that he intermittently acted irritated about it wasn’t really her problem.

“Can you not call it that?” he said, turning around.

She sucked in a breath, momentarily frozen by the picture he created standing there at the center of the barn, backlit by the open double doors behind him. He had a black cowboy hat pulled low over his face, and there was dirt all over those high cheekbones of his. Ending just above his whiskers. He was thirty-five, but he looked weathered in the best way possible. Years had only made him more distinct.

She had known him since that face was smooth.

And as the years wore on, as he got all the kids in the house taken care of, as he expanded the ranch and steadily dealt with financial issues and all other manner of things that came with running a cattle ranch, he had added lines. By his eyes, his mouth, at the center of his forehead, between his eyebrows.