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"Just what kind of man do you think you bagged here? Some soft city boy who can't function without a latte and Wi-Fi connection?" Aiden rasped. His voice was amused but still full of sleep.
Seth turned in his arms, momentarily disarmed by the height difference from standing on a lower step. Aiden's eyes were pink-rimmed and puffy from sleep, and his morning beard held flecks of gold even in the dim light. He looked rough but so damn handsome. While Seth was hiding up in the mountains, licking his wounds, Aiden had changed from a scrawny young boy into a rugged, blue-eyed devil of a cowboy.
Seth couldn't resist grabbing a fistful of his shirt—a borrowed shirt from Seth's closet, baggy through the shoulders—and tugging him into a morning kiss.
"I wanted to give you a day off," he admitted.
Aiden looked pleased. A touch of color crawled up his neck. He cleared his throat awkwardly and said, "Hell, this is a day off. You get to roll out of bed and right into the barn. I've got to wake up in the pitch dark, scrape ice off my windshield, and make the twenty-minute drive to the Triple M just to get there by daybreak."
"No rest for the wicked."
Aiden's laughter was soft, and Seth knew he was trying to keep his volume down so he wouldn't wake Tessa at the end of the hall. Seth still hadn't decided what he would say to her. He didn't know how to explain that whatever was happening between him and Aiden was more than a fling. It wasn't a fit of desperation born from loneliness. It was always supposed to be this way.
Aiden's eyes drifted over to the old family photos lining the wall. "You know, I used to come up these stairs every day just to look at these pictures."
"Yeah?"
He nodded. "Mom has some photo albums, but they're all people I never met. Cousins from other states and whatnot. She hated her parents. They blamed her for getting pregnant and moved to Florida when I was just a baby. She didn't talk about them much. It was just the two of us." He smiled slightly and reached out to wipe a smudge from the glass on the portrait of Seth's grandfather. "I always felt like the people in these photos were keeping an eye on me. Making sure I was doing right by this place, you know?"
Seth considered the portraits. He was surprised Aiden's feelings mirrored his own so perfectly, but he shouldn't be. They'd always understood each other. "I like to think they're watching over everyone who takes care of this place. It's more than just a piece of land. It's our legacy. I can go out there and rest my hand on a water pump installed by my great-uncle before he was killed in Vietnam. History like that matters."
Aiden's throat flexed when he swallowed. "I know it's not my family,” he admitted with an embarrassed rasp. “Not my history. But it feels like I'm a part of it, you know? The Double Jay was the first place that ever felt like home to me. I wasn't on edge all the time. I could walk in the door without an argument waiting around every corner. Your dad taught me everything I know—and you, too. You made me feel like I belonged. That's why it sucked so bad when you pushed me away."
Seth's guilt was so thick it was a bitter taste in the back of his throat. He'd tried so hard to do right by everyone counting on him, and in the end, he'd let them all down.
Aiden must have noticed the misery in his expression. He did a quick double-take, and then he grinned. "Aw, don't go looking like that on the morning after. It'll have me questioning my technique."
"Wasn't much technique involved," Seth said wryly, cupping Aiden's ass in both hands and stroking it gently. "I was too rough. It's just that I'd been dreaming of that—of you—for so long that I couldn't stop myself. I just… couldn't wait anymore."
His balls began to tighten at the memory. He could almost feel the steamy air in his lungs again, the armrest digging into his hip and Aiden's weight on top of him. The tight, silken sheathe of his body and Aiden's delicious, stifled noises of discomfort. The way they had melted into moans of pleasure.
"I'd have stopped you if it was too rough," Aiden assured him with a helpless chuckle. "It was hot as hell. I never came hands-free before. Not even when I was a teenager."
"I have," Seth admitted.
Aiden's eyes lit up with delight. "Tell me."
Seth huffed out a quiet laugh. "Not much to tell. I used to wake up in the middle of the night from a dream about that time we all went skinny dipping to impress Marla Hatch?—"
"And her magnificent knockers of doom," Aiden interrupted, grinning fondly at the memory.
Seth's smile was faint. "All I had to do was remember how you looked that day, all wet and tight, and I'd just lose it. Didn't touch myself once. I washed so many sheets back then. My dad must've thought I had a sudden obsession with cleanliness."
Aiden's laughter was filled with joy. He wrapped his arms around Seth's neck and kissed him hard. "God, if only I'd known," he said, eyes twinkling. "What a wasted opportunity."
"Story of my life," Seth muttered.
They stopped in the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, bathing in the quiet comfort of each other's company. The silence might have felt oppressive if not for the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room. Instead, it felt peaceful. Familiar. Precious.
Aiden grabbed a muffin from the breadbox, trailing crumbs behind him as he shimmied into one of Seth's spare jackets and stepped out onto the porch.
"Did I ever tell you the joke about a cowboy who walks into a bar?" he asked, licking crumbs from his thumb. His breath was a puff of steam in the icy morning air. "He walks in, sits down at the bar, and orders a beer. The bartender asks why the long face, and he explodes, 'I've been hanging gates so long that I'm still hearing voices!' The bartender says that's rough and slides a beer across the bar…"
Seth shook his head, grinning as he tugged on his gloves, fingers already stiffening from the cold. His gaze drifted over the landscape as Aiden prattled.
Ponderosa pines mingled with Douglas firs along the distant edge of north pasture. It looked like an artist had taken a paintbrush and smeared a deep green line across a white landscape. Rabbit tracks crisscrossed the snow, and frost clung to clumps of sagebrush, glittering like crystals on the silvery leaves. A few hardy clumps of bunchgrass poked out of the muddy, churned-up snow at the barn door, and the horses greeted them with soft, waking nickers. The barn stood like a lodestone in the center of the property, more important than even the farmhouse and filled with even more memories.
Familiar surroundings from his earliest memories, but he was suddenly looking at it with new eyes. This was his land, his duty, a way of life passed onto him by a father who'd always understood they were a dying breed. Droughts came and went, cattle prices dropped each season, and the world he'd been born to vanished bit by bit. It was hard, lonely work…but he remembered when it had felt hopeful and fresh and right with Aiden by his side. They weren't those boys anymore. Now, they were two weather-beaten men trying to hold onto a world that felt like it no longer existed. They'd wasted so much time.
