Shane couldn’t help the way his gaze drifted during the picnic lunch May and Felicity had brought to the tables near the flagpole in the cabin community. He couldn’t see the homestead past the barns, which meant he couldn’t even catch a glimpse of the storage shed and the roof of the tiny house that sat just behind it.

Disappointment cut through him when he heard Felicity tell Dwayne that Robin wasn’t coming. His nose throbbed, and he wondered if it had been broken. He’d told no one about the incident, even when Felicity had asked how he’d gotten a bloody nose. He’d simply shook his head and used the half-bath off the kitchen to get cleaned up.

Austin and Dylan flanked him at the table, chattering about the gophers out in the fields behind the cabins. They were fixing to trap some of them and Dylan kept saying he was going to make gopher stew.

Shane let them carry on, though neither one of them knew how to do much more than boil water. If they couldn’t slap something between two pieces of bread, or fry an egg, they didn’t eat it. A stew was way beyond their culinary skills.

Shane soaked in the easy camaraderie between him and his brothers, as well as the other men who worked the ranch. Dwayne and Felicity didn’t host picnics much, but they did a good job making sure everyone knew they had a place here at Grape Seed Falls. The sense of belonging was one of the first things Shane had fallen in love with about the ranch.

He’d tried to emulate how Dwayne treated the men when he interacted with them. Dwayne had coached him that it wouldn’t be easy being the boss, and sometimes he had to make unpopular decisions, and that it wasn’t like running a family ranch. Shane had kept his mouth shut and nodded through all the training. The best training had been watching Dwayne all these years and doing what he would do in any given situation.

He was right about it being different than a family ranch, but Shane didn’t let the reminder of what he’d lost dig at him. At least, most of the time he didn’t.

He’d just started to relax when his phone went off. It wouldn’t have been so alarming if both Dylan’s and Austin’s hadn’t sounded in the next three seconds too.

“Family text,” he muttered, wondering if it was his mother or his father. He hoped his mom. Then he wouldn’t have to ignore the message, delete it without responding, and deal with the guilt.

“It’s Dad,” Austin said.

“Don’t care,” Shane said automatically. “Don’t read it out loud.”

Austin frowned, but Shane didn’t care about that either. Austin, the youngest, had been shielded from a lot of what had happened fifteen years ago, and Shane wanted to keep it that way.

He’d been asked what was so vile about their father that he couldn’t even speak to him, but Shane didn’t want to go into details. Austin had been too young to get the full brunt of it when his father had left. Dylan understood more, but he still lifted his phone and read the message.

“Definitely don’t read it,” he muttered under his breath before stuffing the phone in his back pocket. But Austin started thumbing out a reply.

Not Shane’s problem, and he was actually glad that Austin still felt like he could communicate with their father. Shane knew he’d be disappointed sooner or later, though he hoped the sting came later. Much later.

He’d just finished his fruit salad—dessert in Felicity’s book, which made no sense to Shane. Had she never heard of brownies?—when a putrid smell wafted over the group.

Dwayne’s head turned toward the homestead at the same time Kurt perked up. Shane copied them, looking at the barns as if he could see through wood and nails to find the source of the unpleasant smell. And being a ranch, foul smells weren’t that uncommon. But this…this was a whole new level of stink Shane hadn’t smelled in a long time.

Kurt stood, and Shane went with him. “This can’t be good,” the other man said, and he waved at Dwayne to stay while he and Shane took care of it.

They strode past horses, all of them facing the homestead, and that wasn’t a good sign either. Kurt pulled out his phone and said, “Call Dwayne,” in a freaky calm voice even though his pace increased.

“It’s the sewer,” Shane said as they approached the edge of the field. And the stench wasn’t letting up. A streak of blonde caught his attention, and he said, “Robin.”

“She stayed behind to hook up the utilities.” Kurt twitched and said, “Hey, so, it’s definitely the sewer at the homestead. Shane said he saw Robin, but I don’t see her now.” He scanned the homestead’s yard. “What? Yeah…okay.”

He dropped the phone to his side, and said, “Dwayne wants you to handle it.”

“Me?” Shane paused, already a half a step ahead of Kurt.

“He says Robin was assigned to you, and he wants you to deal with it.”

“What if—?” Shane set his jaw. “All right. I’ll let you know.” He continued on, making his shoulders as boxy as possible though he wanted to find a gas mask and get as far from the offensive smell as possible.

And the relentless sun wasn’t going to help matters. He neared the homestead, and he hadn’t seen Robin again. Maybe she’d gotten everything hooked up. Maybe this would be no big deal. “Robin?”

Detouring toward the storage shed, he scanned the yard for puddles or problems. He couldn’t see anything. “Robin?”

“Coming!” A moment later, she appeared at the corner of the storage shed, breathless and red-faced. She scraped her bangs off her forehead and puffed out her cheeks. “Hey.”

“Is everything okay?” He approached cautiously, the way he would a terrified dog. He still couldn’t locate the source of the smell.

“I had a little trouble getting the sewer line hooked up to the septic tank. But I got it.”

Shane nodded, not wanting to contradict her. “We can smell the septic tank over in the Cowboy Commons.” He stopped a few feet away, her beauty striking him full-force in the chest. Why couldn’t he move past her? Would she say yes this time if he asked her out again?

Do not ask her, he commanded himself. The four words streamed through his head, a constant reminder of what had happened last time. He’d already made a fool of himself once. Neither of them needed a repeat of that.

“Want me to check it anyway?” he asked.

She sighed, and her slight shoulders fell. “Yeah, you better.” She stuffed her hands in her pockets. “I’ve never—I mean, this is the first time I’ve hooked up to someone’s tank. I usually use the RV hookups.”

“Oh?” Shane walked alongside her, noticing a fold-up picnic table had been set out to the side of the steps, creating an outdoor eating area. And the steps themselves created a nice porch, where she’d put a rocking camp chair. He hoped the wind wouldn’t steal that away, but with the shed and the house, the chair should be okay.

“You’ve been living in a mobile home lot?”

“Campgrounds mostly,” she said. “I’m glad to be somewhere more permanent for a while.”

Shane let himself scan her, from her dark denim jeans to her peach-colored blouse. Her blonde hair he wanted to rake his fingers through. Her lovely blue eyes. That cute smattering of freckles across her cheeks. Her cowgirl hat hung down her back, but she made no move to replace it on her head.

“More permanent?” he asked. “I thought the point of having a tiny house was non-permanence.”

A ghost of a smile whipped across her face. “Sort of, I guess. It’s about being able to go where the work is and not be an imposition. It’s about not having to pay for a house I don’t live in much.” She lifted the shoulder closest to him in a shrug and pressed her lips together as if she’d said too much.

Shane paused at the end of the cement pad. “Didn’t you tell me you don’t want to be tied down?” He hadn’t meant for the words to come out with quite so much bite. But the way Robin flinched said they had.

“Never mind,” he muttered before rounding the house and checking the electrical and water lines. They looked good. “These work okay?” he asked.

She appeared at the corner of the house, the cowgirl hat now in place so he couldn’t see her eyes. They were probably storming, like a hurricane coming toward shore, and he didn’t want to see them anyway. “They work okay, yes.”

The sewer hook up was right next to that, and in a normal campground, she’d connect the two ends and be done. But here at the homestead, it didn’t quite look like her fittings matched up with the hose she’d connected to.

He’d gotten used to the smell by now, and he examined the two pieces. “They don’t match up,” he said. “Want to go try flushing the toilet, and I’ll see what happens?”

She turned without a word, and several seconds later, the sound of rushing water met his ears. And some of it—clean—came through the connection. He waited until that ran through, and then he wrenched the two ill-fitting pieces apart. He aligned them, and screwed them in tight together.

Knocking came on the window above him, and Robin’s face filled the pane of glass. “Should I try it again?” Her muffled words came through the glass, and he nodded.

She did, and this time the fitting stayed dry.

Now to figure out where the water was going. He followed the tube out into the lawn, which sloped slightly upward to the house. Dwayne had provided a hookup for her to his main septic line.

He turned and came face-to-face with the gorgeous Robin, who exhaled and stuck her hands in her back pockets. “Thanks so much, Shane.”

The Georgian drawl on his name made his whole body heat up. The first summer they’d met she’d told him about her mother, how she was raised as an only child on a patch of land only an hour from the seashore. Her mom rescued animals and ran a veterinary office as a secretary, and Robin had gotten her love of dogs and horses from her mother.

“Sure thing,” he managed to say before she thought him mute. “You should come on over to the picnic.” As soon as the words left his mouth, he wished he could suck them back in.

“Oh, I—”

“Felicity and May have tons of food. It’s no imposition.”

“Why y’all havin’ a picnic today?” she asked, twisting in the direction of the cabin community. Why had he invited her? It wasn’t his shindig, and if she came, he’d be dancing on eggshells and hoping his brothers didn’t notice that his three-year crush was still in full force.

Robin tilted her head, still waiting for his answer. He cleared his throat. “We finished all the planting last week, in record time. So we’re taking a long lunch today, courtesy of Dwayne and Felicity.”

Robin smiled, her pink lips thinning to show her white teeth. Shane wanted to touch her tanned skin, thread his fingers through her hair, and pause just before he tasted her mouth. He backed up a step instead. “I better head back and report.”

She fell back too, going all the way to her cement pad before saying, “Tell them sorry about the smell.”

Shane waved and forced his feet to go in the opposite direction than what they wanted to do. But he would not fit inside that tiny house with her. Not even the huge, open range was big enough to contain the feelings he still harbored for her.

And he really hated that.