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"You should've kept coming back anyway."
She said it like it was simple. If they'd been normal, casual buddies, maybe it would have been. But they weren't. Their friendship had always felt strangely intense.
"I don't go where I'm not wanted," Aiden retorted stiffly. He'd learned that lesson early—and often. His mother could never resist regaling him with everything she'd given up raising him as a single parent. Groveling only made it worse. Better to pretend he didn't crave affection at all. "I don't force anyone to let me hang around."
"Oh, really? Then what are you doing here now?" Tessa asked.
Aiden scowled. "That's different."
"How?"
"He thinks he owes me." Seth's deep rumble interrupted them from the kitchen entrance.
They both jumped and turned in unison with identical guilty expressions.
Seth watched from the door, gripping the overhead frame like he wished it was their necks. His mouth was tight, and faint blue shadows smudged his eyes. It looked like he hadn't slept a wink.
"I do owe you," Aiden protested.
Seth's eyes were fierce and dark when they settled on him. "You don't owe me anything. Never did."
"Well, then, maybe you can do me a favor and take some junk off my hands." Aiden jerked a thumb vaguely in the direction where his truck was parked. "I'm responsible for disposing of the extra supplies cluttering the Triple M's supply shed, but I'm too lazy to drop them by the salvage yard. I thought maybe you could take them off my hands."
The look Seth shot him was so sour it could have curdled milk.
Aiden mustered up his biggest shit-eating grin and clapped him on the shoulder, trying to forget how naked he was under his clothes. "That's what friends do," he said brightly. "Right, Tess?"
"So I've heard." Her tone was rich with irony as she flipped a piece of newly crisped bacon into his waiting hand. "Eat up and get out of my kitchen, will you? I've got a Zoom class in twenty minutes."
Chapter Eight
SETH
Seth wasn't easily embarrassed. Except for the choice to let Aiden drink that night, he'd never felt shame. Aiden could stare wide-eyed at his naked body, and all Seth felt was a brief spurt of alarm when his cock began to respond to the scrutiny. After all, he'd been daring Aiden to look, and Aiden never backed down from a dare. Seth regretted it now, but not out of embarrassment. He just couldn't forget the look on Aiden's face, the way color crawled up his neck, the flare of surprise and hunger in his eyes. Seth kept turning it over in his head, spinning out every possible outcome—what might have happened if he'd dared to reach out and grab him the way he wanted.
It put him in a foul mood while Aiden doggedly trailed him through morning chores.
Aiden wasn't the kind of man who passed judgment, but Seth couldn't stop seeing the ranch through his eyes. It was a shell of what it had once been. Seth had built the herd back from scratch, but local breeders refused to do business with him, so he'd been forced to buy for higher cost out of state. They were solid, healthy animals, fat and glossy-coated even in the dead of winter. They always came first, but everything else was slowly falling by the wayside, one expense at a time. Beneath the dirty slush of snowpack, his pasture needed reseeding. Fences were collapsing faster than he could replace them, and mountain storms had blown shingles off the farmhouse roof. The barn floor was rotting so badly in places that he had to watch his step, or he'd fall right through.
Aiden noted it all with one blue-eyed glance but didn't say a word. He only whistled cheerfully through his teeth and grabbed a pitchfork to muck stalls, just like when he was still learning what being a ranch hand was all about. It felt so familiar, so right, that Seth couldn't bring himself to send him away.
They didn't talk much until late morning when they were breaking their backs loading hay into the trailer Seth had hitched to his tractor. His feed truck would continue to sit like a boulder in the north pasture until he replaced the radiator.
"You've got some premium stock," Aiden commented breathlessly, gripping a bale by the twine and heaving it into the trailer. "You always did spoil 'em."
"Happy cattle are healthy cattle," Seth grunted, sweating despite the frigid weather. The sun blazed down on them, turning the whole world so bright that it snow-blinded them despite their sunglasses.
"The Triple M has some bulls that would love to get at these heifers next breeding season."
"No." Seth didn't look up from his work.
"Why not?"
"Michael Whittaker wouldn't do business with me."
"Sure, he would," Aiden protested. "He's not the type who listens to gossip, and anyway, I'd vouch for you."
Seth took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose. Somehow, he kept his tone even when he said, "I don't need anyone to vouch for me. Not in this town."
