Hero for the Holidays (Four Corners Ranch #9)

Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

F IA WAS UP EARLY , and ready to go take on Landry.

Fucking Landry.

She told herself that it was not vanity that had her paying a little more attention to her red curls this morning, or putting on some emerald green eye shadow that she knew highlighted the intensity of her eyes. She also told herself that red lipstick in the morning on a ranch was perfectly appropriate.

She tried never to think about the time that she first wore red lipstick, and where she had left it behind on his body.

She gritted her teeth.

No. She didn’t need to go there. She didn’t know why it was such a struggle sometimes. Why it was so difficult to let all that go.

She felt tangled up in it more than usual right now, and she couldn’t explain that. But maybe it was because it had been years since she’d gone to King’s Crest. And not by accident.

And maybe she wore kind of a short dress over her woolen tights, which was going to make her feel a little bit cold, but she also knew she looked cute.

So whatever.

She drove out to the ranch, and she did feel just a tiny bit bad as she headed toward King territory.

It was funny, to have lived on this ranch her entire life and have deleted this whole portion of the collective from her mind.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d driven up this road, and yet she knew it by heart.

It looked familiar and foreign all at once.

The way that her heart shimmered in her chest was the same.

Like she was fifteen and about to see him, that giddy new love spreading through her, like the first bite of cotton candy. Sweet, fluffy and clinging to her tongue.

But it vanished.

Oh, how she knew that.

But her heart could still feel that same old joy, that same old anticipation. That same old need. It was like loving Landry King had worn grooves into it, so deep and so entrenched she’d have to cut her whole heart out to get rid of them.

And she wouldn’t do that. Not for him.

Because she still loved too many other things in her life. Because she still had so many things worth caring for, and Landry King didn’t deserve her whole heart. Even if she couldn’t do much of anything about the grooves.

So she just had to accept that rolling up on King’s Crest would always present as a new wound. Fresh and sharp as it had always been. With little that could be done about it. It was the cost of being human, she supposed.

She drove past the farmhouse. She had never spent much time there. It wasn’t like they had openly been in a relationship back then.

Theirs had been secret. A method they’d used to escape their untenable situations. A wild, untamed need that had been theirs, only theirs. They hadn’t been helpless teenagers dealing with family drama, they hadn’t been two kids living in the middle of nowhere. When they’d been together they’d been king and queen of their own kingdom.

They’d held all this bright, wonderful feeling between them, and they’d found pleasure. Real, adult pleasure, and they’d wielded those dangerous things between themselves, and in the end they’d gotten hurt.

They hadn’t known what to do with all that emotion. It had been jealous. And mean. She’d wanted him all to herself. If he talked to another girl, she went feral. He’d once put a dent in the side of his truck with his fist, because she’d been talking to another guy. They’d been mutually, ridiculously horrible.

She had been so obsessed with him. It was all she could think about. She had dreams for a while. Of what she wanted to be when she grew up. And they rotated. She had wanted to do all kinds of things. And then for a while there, she had wanted Landry. And that was it. She dreamed about kissing him. Touching him. When she lost her virginity to him, she’d been more than ready. If she had one secret that she quite enjoyed, it was that Landry King might’ve taken her virginity, but she’d taken his too.

She supposed in the end of all things she could claim that as a little bit of a perverse victory.

Then her heart sank because the problem was, there was simply no victory to be had in that complicated landscape of her and Landry.

Well. There was going to be one today. She wasn’t going to oppose him for the sake of it, but she was going to make things a little bit difficult for him. And frankly, he deserved it. He’d done more than make things difficult for her when she was trying to expand Sullivan’s, after all.

She saw the old barn, and some sawhorses set up outside, power tools and the like.

So he must be at work today. Already.

Well. That was fine. She cleared her throat and tossed her hair, pulling the car up to the front and turning off the engine. She got out and surveyed the place.

And Landry strolled out of the barn. Black hat on his head, tight black T-shirt molded to his muscular body. She knew that body. Except, she also didn’t. He had been a kid the last time she’d seen him naked, just as she’d been one. He was a man now. And she might’ve watched him grow and change every day since then, but it still hit hard, every time. And the way he looked at her, she had to wonder right then if he’d been hit hard too.

Normally, Landry didn’t have a reaction to her. But right now, he looked like she’d walked up and punched him.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to check out your new venture,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because. It seemed like the thing to do. I mean, after all, my issue was that I wasn’t going to decide to invest on the spur of the moment without actually having a look at the place.”

“Was it? Or was it actually that you had some kind of prejudice against me.”

“I just wanted to—”

“Listen. I’m busy.”

He was acting cagey, standing there with his arms crossed, looking worried.

“You have a woman back there or something?”

She would really rather never think about Landry and his women. Though, she was certain that he must have them.

Still, she couldn’t come up with a reason that he was acting this way now if not for that.

“There’s no woman.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Then why are you being strange?”

“I’m not being strange. Maybe it just seems strange to you, because you crashed the middle of my workday to check up on me.”

“I’m not checking up on you. I don’t care what you do. But I do care whether or not this is a smart business venture. I don’t want to be done out of it because I didn’t do my due diligence.”

“You were given a chance to invest the same as everybody else. If you’re done out of it, it’s going to be because of your own stubbornness, Fia. And it wouldn’t be the first time.”

That was so dangerously close. Dancing so perilously close to the edge of that knife that they pretended hadn’t damn near gutted them both.

“Yeah. Whatever. I think you may have issues with how far this is from the main road.”

He snorted. “Oh. Little Miss We Just Made a New Road can’t figure out how I’ll handle my problems?”

“You would have to make a new road through your own pasture. Are you going to do that?”

“Come back later. When I have some time to show you what I’m thinking. I have an appointment soon.”

“I may not have time to come back later.”

And then, she heard footsteps running toward the barn. A child ran in. Well, not a child, per se. But a young girl. A teenager. With curly red hair and sharp green eyes that Fia had never seen anywhere but on her sisters.

Or in a mirror.

“Hey, Landry,” the kid said. “Did you know there’s a calf out by the—”

The kid stopped talking and looked at them both. But it was the expression on Landry’s face that made something catch low in Fia’s stomach and hook tight.

Then she looked back at the child.

She had Fia’s coloring. That much was obvious. And the same oval-shaped face. But there was something else, and it was something else that actually made her the most unnerved. It was the way she was also quite perfectly a small, female Landry King. The way her shoulders were set, the arrogant jut of her chin.

This combination of her and Landry right in front of her was the most undeniable, terrifying thing she had ever seen in her life.

A come-to-Jesus moment she’d been certain she would never have.

Every word, every thought, everything, evaporated within her, leaving behind nothing. Nothing but this hot insistent feeling, a need almost, to run toward that child and pull her into her arms.

The girl, for her part, didn’t seem to be reacting to Fia’s presence, except she stopped talking because there was a stranger in the barn. A stranger when she had only been expecting Landry, who clearly was not a stranger to her.

“Where’s the calf, Lila?”

Lila.

It was a punch in the gut. Lila.

Lila.

That was a name she had never spoken out loud. Like a pearl beyond price she hadn’t allowed herself to have. And he was saying it. Like it was nothing. And more than that, she knew who he was.

“Lila,” she whispered.

“Fia,” he said slowly. “I’d like to talk to you a little later.”

“The calf is outside,” Lila said, frowning. “I didn’t think he was supposed to be out of the pasture.”

“He’s not. We probably have a little bit of a jailbreak. Is Uncle Denver out there?”

“He went somewhere back by the house.”

“Can you grab him, and then he’ll get the pickup truck and I’ll meet him in about ten minutes?”

“Sure,” she said, scampering back out of the barn. And Fia felt a strange panicky sensation in her stomach. This awful fear that she would never see the child again. It was like terror. And she found herself moving out of the barn quickly, her heart pounding hard. And then he had grabbed her arm.

“Wait,” he said. “Just wait.”

He looked panicked. And that only made her that much more so.

“Landry, what... What is this?”

“I can explain it. But the thing is, Fia, I haven’t talked to her about you yet. She... It’s complicated, the time hasn’t been right. I don’t want her finding out that you live on the ranch like this.”

“You were okay with me finding out that she was here like this?”

She knew who this was. Just like he did.

He had brought their daughter back to the ranch.

Her baby . The one she’d only held for a moment, because she’d needed to protect herself. The one no one else knew about.

No one but her and Landry.

Their child.

The one that she had very deliberately made not theirs. She had given that child a family. Parents. The most wonderful parents.

Why was she here? Here at Four Corners, where she was never supposed to be?

It didn’t make any sense.

“I don’t understand...”

“I was going to talk to you,” he said. “But only after I talked to her.”

His words blended in with the buzzing in her ears. She was...dizzy. Overfull with so many feelings and she didn’t have the words for any of them. The anger was easy. It was the...the hope, the panic, the joy, that was what she couldn’t sort through. The feeling like she was standing in the center of a miracle, one so fragile it was like dandelion fluff. And if she breathed too hard it would fly away on the breeze.

So she didn’t explore those feelings. She clung to anger.

With Landry, anger was always safest.

“Why is she here?”

“Fia,” he said. “I don’t want her to see us having a fight about this. I can’t...not like this. She isn’t in the right space.”

“So she can know about you but not...about me? You don’t want her to know...”

It was like something grabbed hold of him then, something feral and not quite him.

“That you gave her away. I don’t want her to know that her mother gave her away.”

His words sent her reeling backward, like they were a gunshot that hit her right in her heart. “I... I gave birth to her, and I put her directly into her mother’s arms. Because it was the right thing to do. Because I couldn’t give her what she needed. I didn’t give her away . I gave her a life . And you dragged her back here? For what reason? Why?”

His gaze was frighteningly flat. “Her parents are dead.”

She really couldn’t breathe then. “They’re dead? Jack and Melissa...”

She watched his expression, watched as he tried to sort through what she was saying. “You know them?”

“Yes, I... knew them. I met them.”

He put his hands on his head, like he was trying to hold himself to the earth. Then he put them down, dragging them along his face as he went. “Well, that’s something I didn’t know. Why would I fucking have known? You just came back with no baby. After disappearing for two fucking months .”

“Stop,” she said. It was too much. She couldn’t process the pain that was coursing through her body. She couldn’t rehash her and Landry’s baggage while knowing that their daughter was outside.

She was trying to process this. She had to disappear into herself. Into a bubble inside her chest that didn’t feel anything, not anger or pain or hope.

Her parents were dead. She was here. She didn’t know Fia was here too.

“You haven’t told her about me?” she asked.

“The truth of the matter is, Fia, you gave her up. At some point I have to have that conversation with her. And then I was going to ask her if she wanted to meet you, try to have a relationship with you. And then I was going to talk to you.”

“Why not come to me first? Why not come to me with all of this?”

“Because it wasn’t your choice to make. It was mine. If you had given your information to the adoption agency, they would’ve contacted you the same way they did me. But I had already given out my information. I made it known that I wanted the kid, and so I have the kid.”

“I’m not sixteen,” she said. “I’m not in the middle of trying to hold my family together, I’m not...raising my sisters still. The idea that you wouldn’t come to me about taking care of our daughter ... I can’t believe you, Landry. You wonder why I didn’t want to raise a child with you? This is the most immature—”

“I’m doing my best,” he said. “It’s an unwinnable situation. I didn’t expect to ever get contacted while she was still a child. I thought maybe she would get in touch with me when she turned eighteen. We would go have dinner or something, and I’d keep all my anger and regret to myself and consider it a blessing I ever got to see her. I didn’t expect to end up raising her. When they called me, all I had time to do was get the place ready.”

“You didn’t have a minute to come and have a conversation with me?”

“No. I didn’t. I was thinking about her.”

She let out a hard breath. “Were you?”

“There’s a reason I was keeping her here. There’s a reason she hasn’t been introduced to the broader ranching family. My intent was never to ambush you with her.”

She didn’t believe that. He was being honest about his feelings for Lila, she could see that. She could see he genuinely wanted to do the right thing for their daughter.

Fia could also see that he was still very, very angry about the decision she’d made back then. And whatever he was trying to convince himself of now, he hadn’t cared if he hurt Fia. If anything, he wanted to.

“It wasn’t?” she asked. “Really?”

She looked out at this moment from the safety of the bubble she’d found. She didn’t know how to process this, and she was fairly certain she might be in shock.

But maybe the shock was protecting her. From crumpling to the ground right now. From breaking into pieces.

“Now she’s seen you,” said Landry. “And we’re going to have questions to answer. We need to work this out really quick. You don’t get to be half in and half out.”

He was acting like this was her mistake. Like she had created this situation when he was the one who had brought their daughter here, and hadn’t warned her or Lila.

Anger popped the bubble.

“Don’t talk to me like that. Don’t lecture me . Don’t you dare tell me what I can be when you didn’t give me a chance. You let your bitterness drive this choice, not your love.”

His face was hard, and not even that accusation broke him. “In or out, Fia?”

There was no question. She’d held that baby in her arms for only a moment, thirteen years ago, and she’d loved her. She’d known she had to give her away. She’d known she’d never see her again.

Now she was here.

She’d survived that once. Living through looking at that beautiful, perfect child and knowing it would be the only time. She couldn’t do it again.

Lila was here.

Fia couldn’t let her go, never again.

“In,” she said. “Let’s go talk to her right now.”

“No. Let’s not ambush the kid in the middle of the day. How about that?”

“No one is suggesting an ambush. But you’re the one saying it needs to happen fast, and I’m agreeing with you.”

Her heart was pounding. She needed to see Lila. She couldn’t stand not having her in her line of sight. Couldn’t stand not being with her.

“Let’s think about this. She’s been here for a few weeks, and I’ve been trying to help her get adjusted. Hell, Fia, I didn’t even know if she would want to stay.”

That didn’t help. It made her angrier if anything.

“You were going to bring my daughter here, and if she didn’t want to stay, you were just going to let her go, and I was never going to know?”

“You didn’t want her.”

The swirl of feelings inside her, the emotional mist, collected like a hurricane then. And exploded.

“ Thirteen years of living since I had that baby, of growing, aging, seeing more of the world, seeing more of yourself, and that’s still how you see it? Fuck you. ”

She went storming out of the barn and he grabbed her arm. “Meet me. Tonight.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you. I’ll get a lawyer. I’ll do—”

“You don’t need a lawyer. Come on. I want to do what’s best for the kid, Fia. That’s it. Maybe I’m doing a shitty job of it... I expected to be able to meet the kid someday, I didn’t expect to ever be a father. She needs a father. Hell, she could use a mother too.”

His words were like poison, and she wanted to spit them back at him. And that was the biggest thing that kept her from running toward Lila now.

That she felt poisonous.

That she felt so angry and wounded.

That she wanted to kill Landry King with her own hands.

They needed to have it out. They needed to have the conversation they had been waiting thirteen years to have. And then they would see what was on the other side of it. But one thing Fia knew, and that was now that she’d found her daughter, she was never going to let her go again.

She hadn’t been looking for her. Because she’d made a choice. She had made a choice to give that child the best life she could, and at the time it had felt like that had to be far away from Four Corners. Far away from her, far away from Landry. From their family drama, from their own toxicity.

She had wanted her baby.

It was one of the things that had made her hate Landry the very most. That he had offered her a dream. Spun a fairy-tale story where they could run away together and it would work. Make a little home, with their little family. Where they would just be two destitute dysfunctional idiots.

She’d wanted to take it.

She’d known she couldn’t. She’d done her best to make the right choice and he’d spent years punishing her for it.

He thought she hadn’t wanted Lila enough.

She hated him for that. It was the thing she would never forgive him for, of all the things. That he had no idea how much she’d wanted it. And how hard she’d fought to choose the right thing in the face of it.

“Tonight,” she said. “Six. We’ll make a plan.”

But she knew it was more than that. There was so much hard emotion between them, and the truth was, they needed to be able to say it. In the interest of keeping her secret, she’d pushed it down. They’d been civil to each other, even if barely.

Even if barely.

When she drove away from King’s Crest this time, she knew she cut her heart out and left it behind.

That was another thing she didn’t think she would ever forgive him for.

But maybe most of all, it was something she couldn’t forgive herself for.

For giving that man her heart and never managing to get it back.