LITMIR.BIZ

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      He lifted his beer bottle to his lips and scanned the room. He didn’t know how he had allowed his younger half brothers to talk him into going out. He had to admit that his daughter made a pretty convenient excuse for his hermitage. Of course, Violet was sixteen now, and she could stay alone for a while.

      Though, if his brother Finn and Finn’s new girlfriend, Lane, weren’t at home, he probably would have used the excuse of them being in a new place to avoid going out. Out in the middle of nowhere like the Laughing Irish Ranch was, Violet was likely to get scared. Or some other lie.

      But Lane and Finn were at home, and Cain had found himself fresh out of excuses. So he was sitting in the local bar, Ace’s or something. Which was the name of the guy who owned it, he’d been told.

      The place was a strange collision of surf and turf. There were fishing nets, half a boat hung up on the wall and other little pieces of evidence that Copper Ridge was a coastal town before it was anything else. But there were also Western touches that could rival any honky-tonk he had been to in Dallas.

      Including a mechanical bull. Which he had to admit was providing a decent amount of entertainment.

      “Are you going to watch that thing all night?”

      Cain turned to look at his brother Alex, who had been eyeing a pack of blonde chicks in the corner, and now looked at Cain just long enough to give him a baleful stare.

      They were too...young. All those girls, standing in the corner and laughing, scanning the room and trying to see if they could catch the eye of some guy who might buy them another drink. He knew his brothers were up for it. Liam and Alex would happily jump right in the middle of them—in the next thirty seconds, most likely.

      Cain felt too old for all of this. He was supposed to be done. That was the point of getting married. He had liked that. That routine. That certainty.

      He had been so certain about the decision to marry Kathleen. She’d been pregnant, and he’d always known that if that happened, he’d be marrying the woman. In many ways he’d been thrilled. To have something in his life that he’d felt long denied.

      Stability. A family.

      He’d become a father at twenty-two, and it had been the proudest day of his life. And for a while, everything had been exactly like he wanted it.

      Obviously it hadn’t been what Kathleen had wanted.

      And this wasn’t what he wanted. But he was just so damn sick of being alone. Being celibate. Yeah, it was the celibate thing that bothered him. He didn’t want another relationship. There was no point. Violet was sixteen, and bringing somebody else into the middle of things when their life was already hard enough just wasn’t going to happen.

      He had never felt right about bringing a woman home for sex with his daughter in the house. And he had really never felt right about spending the night out while he left her at home. Not when his wife had left the way that she had.

      So, here he was. Contemplating his celibacy in a bar. Looking at a mechanical bull rather than women. It was all depressing and mind-numbing enough to make him reflect.

      On the slow breakdown of his marriage, the day Kathleen had packed up all her stuff and left without telling him what she was planning and where she was going.

      The day she’d surrendered parental rights to their daughter, because she needed a clean break.

      He looked away from the bull-riding spectacle and over toward the bar, where he saw something that most definitely caught his attention.

      There was a petite redhead leaning up against the counter, her ass perfectly showcased by the tight jeans she was wearing. She shifted, and her hair shimmered beneath the multicolored lights. Then she lifted her arm, brushing all that glossy beauty to one side. Cain was transfixed by the sight of that arm. Pale, freckled, slim. She looked soft.

      Just for a moment, he could imagine touching her so vividly that he could feel that creamy soft skin beneath his hand.

      More likely, it was a full-on hallucination. He wasn’t even sure if he remembered what a woman’s skin felt like.

      Maybe she wouldn’t be quite so pretty from the front. It was always possible. But he hoped that she was. He hoped that when she turned around she provided him with more fuel for the fires of his fantasies. Because hell, fantasy was all he had.

      The beautiful redhead did not disappoint. And she was, in fact, beautiful from all angles. She turned, scanning the bar with a smile on her face. Damn, she was probably there with some other man. Not that he was in a position to do anything about it either way.

      Still, it was nice to know that he could get excited about somebody.

      “If you’re going to sit there looking like you’d rather be anywhere else, maybe you should be somewhere else,” Liam said, never quite as easygoing as Alex was.

      Cain didn’t welcome the interruption of his fantasies. “This is my happy face,” he returned.

      “You’re scaring women away,” Liam said.

      “That would be your ugly face,” he said.

      Alex laughed. “I love bonding time.”

      Cain rolled his eyes and took another drink of his beer. Here he was, out. On a Saturday night. And it just felt wrong. He preferred the life he’d had.

      Bars, picking women up—he’d done all that in his early twenties. He was just so far past it now. He couldn’t even remember what he’d found appealing about it.

      “It’s better than sitting at home,” Alex said, clearly looking for some kind of reaction that he just wasn’t going to get.

      “Okay,” Cain relented, “it was nice to go and eat a hamburger.”

      “And spend time with us,” Alex added. “Because we’re so charming.”

      “I work with you dumbasses all day, every damn day. I wasn’t exactly hurting for quality time.”

      “That makes me feel sad, Cain,” Alex said. “I really thought we were making progress with our brotherly bond.”

      Of the four of them, only Alex and Liam had grown up together. They were also the only two full-blood brothers. Cain had been the product of his father’s first attempt at commitment, and then Finn had been the second. Both had been short-lived and unsuccessful.

      For the most part, Cain had been raised in Texas, while his brothers had spent their childhoods on the West Coast. All of them had spent sporadic summers at the Laughing Irish, their grandfather’s ranch on the outskirts of Copper Ridge—good times, sure. But added up, the brothers had only spent a handful of weeks together during their lives.

      Last month, they’d all inherited an equal share in the place and, since then, it had been a labyrinth of trying to figure out how to navigate the new family dynamic. Mostly, he liked them. Mostly, he didn’t want to punch them all in the face every day. Mostly.

      “For me,” Cain said, “this is progress. Drinking in public instead of drinking alone.”

      “Well,” Liam said, “you might look like you enjoy it more.”

      “Like you?”

      Liam lifted a shoulder. “Women like this.”

      “It’s true,” Alex chimed in, “they do. I go with ‘wounded war hero smiling bravely through my pain,’ and Liam...well, hell if I know why, but something about looking angry at the world seems to draw them in. You could work that angle, Cain.”

      “I don’t want an angle to work,” he said, taking another drink, looking across the room to try to find the redhead again. She had sat down at a table with a couple of other women, and they were eating, laughing. Definitely having more fun than he was.

      She laughed at something that must’ve been particularly funny, throwing her head back and making

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