My life had become a series of robotic movements.

Planned and executed.

Each day almost the same as the last.

It was maddening.

It was monotonous.

It was everything I wasn’t.

I’d done it to myself. There was no one else to blame.

Every morning, it took me longer and longer to get out of bed. To push myself into putting one foot in front of the other in my well-rutted path.

I was miserable.

“What cha’ doing there, slick?” My teeth ground together when I heard Gibs’ voice.

I had enough to keep me busy. Didn’t need, or want, Gibs trailing behind me, getting in my way. He did it just for spite since he got his ass handed to him by Randy.

I ignored him, continuing to wash out feed buckets. A job given to me after Gibs complained he had too much to do and needed some of his chores taken off his plate.

Gibs swaggered over, beaming as he pushed his hat back on his head.

“You’re pretty good at that,” he said, spitting a brown stream of tobacco beside my foot.

“I’m busy, Gibs. Go bother someone else.” I dumped the dirty water out of the bucket, making an effort to splash him in the process.

“Watch it!” He jumped back.

My mouth turned up at the corners. Gibs hated getting wet. It was one of the things I’d learned a week ago, and I planned to take every advantage to utilize that knowledge whenever I could.

Lifting the feed bucket up, I held it out in front of me, hose pointed straight at it. Which also happened to be the same direction Gibs stood.

I pulled the trigger on the hose, water spraying past the feed bucket and hitting Gibs in the arm.

“You son of a bitch! You did that on purpose.” Gibs reached out and snatched the feed bucket from my hand.

I didn’t release my grip from the hose, spraying him right in the face.

“You're damn right I’m doing it on purpose. The same way you find some sort of fun out of being a pain in my ass. “

Gibs lunged for me, but I twisted out of his way. His boots couldn’t find any traction, and he ended up falling forward, arms outstretched. His palms skidded along the ground, feet scuttling forward so he was forced to bear crawl with the momentum until he gained his balance.

I could have helped him. Could have caught him and helped him stand, but I didn’t. After weeks of being a complete pain in the ass, Gibs had received a healthy dose of karma à la mode.

He spun around, cheeks burning a deep red as his face contorted with rage. “You’re gonna pay for that.”

I dropped the hose and beckoned him forward. “Take your best shot, Gibs, but you better make it count.”

The muscle in his jaw twitched. “You’re about to get a lesson, slick.”

I ducked when he swung out at me. His reach was not quite as long as my own. “You gonna teach it to me, Gibs? Or talk about it?”

He snarled and lunged forward again. This time, I stepped into his punch, letting it glance off my shoulder, then pulled my own fist back and caught him in the stomach. His mouth opened and closed like a landed fish.

My arm throbbed where his punch had hit a nerve, making it go numb. Oddly enough, I hadn’t felt so alive since I’d set foot on Benton Farm.

“Come on, Gibs. You’re not even trying,” I taunted.

He swung, missing, but barely. His lips curved. “You think you’re so tough? You think you can just waltz around here like you’re better than everyone else?”

I smirked. “Jealous?”

He lunged at me with a roar, hitting me like linebacker.

We rolled along the grass, upending feed buckets filled with soapy water, which made our struggle a slippery one.

I outweighed Gibs by a good twenty pounds, and had at least four inches to his stubby height, but he was angry and not going to back down easily. It reminded me of how it used to be when Lex and I got into it. There was no getting Lex to back off until he either knocked me down, or I got a solid hold around his neck.

Lex being my brother gave him more of a right to land a couple of well-deserved blows on me. Gibs wasn’t blood. He wasn’t anything more than a puffed-up banty rooster. A bully. And I wasn’t about to let him get the best of me.

I’d just got my arm around his neck, my foot hooked over his leg, when Benton came around the corner, hollering. “What the hell is going on here?”

I tightened my hold against Gibs’ neck in warning to let him know I’d overpowered him once, and he better believe I could do it again.

When I let him go, he scrambled to his feet and put his hand out to help me up. “Just blowing off a little steam is all.”

Benton’s hands rested on his hips as he looked between us. “Do I need to remind you this isn’t a day care? If I catch you screwing around again, you’ll be packing your bags. Understood?”

Gibs dipped his head. “Yes, sir.”

I just gave a quick nod and went back to cleaning the feed buckets, hoping they’d go away.

* * *

“Benton spent fifteen minutes chewing me out because you two can’t act like grown-ass men. Mind telling me what the hell you were thinking?” Randy asked. He didn’t look amused about having to deal with us about our blow up the day before.

Gibs slumped against the tack wall, cleaning his fingernails with the tip of his knife. He paused in his grooming to point it at me, “Slick sprayed me with the hose, so I taught him a lesson.’

I snorted, bringing Randy’s attention to me. “Something funny about that, Owens’?”

“Funny? No, I wouldn’t call it funny.”

“Then what would you call it?”

“Slick doesn’t know how to take a joke,” Gibs chimed in.

“Slick?” Randy cocked his head.

Gibs nodded in my direction.

“I should walk out right now and let you two finish what you started. Only, I can’t do that because my job is on the line right alongside yours. If I lose my job because you can’t keep your mouth shut…” he said, looking at Gibs, “and you can’t keep from going all hotheaded, so help me, I’ll kick both your asses.”

Gibs snorted. “You can try…”

I’d been watching Gibs, when all along I should have been watching Randy. Maybe I would have seen it when he moved like lightning, fist shooting out and catching Gibs right in the jaw.

Gibs didn’t have the slightest notion about what was coming at him. His head bounced off the wall with a hollow thud, his eyes rolled back in his head, and then he toppled over, knife skittering to the floor.

Randy turned to me, shaking out his hand as he opened and closed his fist. “I wasn’t kidding when I said Benton threatened our jobs. Gibs might not be smart enough to understand what that means, but I know you are.”

Gibs moaned as he raised himself up to a sitting position, and then cradled his head. The motion too much for him, he leaned over and vomited on the floor.

Randy grumbled something under his breath as he walked out.

I scrubbed my hands down my face with a drawn-out sigh. Gibs hadn’t moved much, hadn’t even picked himself up from the ground. It served him right, but I’d never been one to walk away from someone who needed help.

I knelt in front of him. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Go away. I don’t need your help,” he answered, trying to get his knees under him.

I hooked my hand under his armpit and helped him to his feet. He swayed, knees all but buckling under him.

“I suppose you can make it to your bunk all by yourself?” I asked, pulling him along beside me, guiding him out of the tack room and across the yard to the bunkhouse.

Benton had a pretty sweet setup for his hands. The building had a communal kitchen, but each hand had a bedroom and bathroom. Kitchen detail rotated between the hands, but everyone was responsible for the upkeep of their quarters.

Once we made it inside the bunkhouse, Gibs had regained enough steam to make it on his own, but I stayed with him until he opened the door to his room. The last thing I needed was the fool to topple over and break his damn neck, making it look like I’d taken him out.

“Word to the wise, Owens, Randy might look like an old man ready to be put to pasture, but he’s got a right hook that kicks like a donkey.” He worked his jaw back and forth, wincing. His hand came up and touched where it had started to swell.

He left his door open and staggered over to his bed. Reaching under it, he pulled out what looked like a small first aid kit. From that, he dug out some aspirin and one of those ice packs that had to be activated. He swallowed the pills dry and then lay down, holding the ice pack against the side of his face with a grimace.

There wasn’t anything more I could do, and really, I didn’t want to stick around and chitchat with him, so I closed the door, and then made my way back to the tack room. There was still the matter of Gibs’ vomit on the floor, and the longer it sat there, the worse the room would reek if it didn’t get cleaned up.

Randy scraped the flat-head shovel against the floor, bringing what looked like cat litter into a pile, and then scooped it up.

When he saw me, he smirked. “Knew you’d be back.”

My eyebrows pulled together, watching him sling the contents of the shovel into a trash can just outside the door. “How could you know when I didn’t even know it myself?”

He leaned the shovel against the wall and then grabbed a push broom, sweeping what was left of the cat litter out of the tack room. “Because that’s just who you are, Owens. Tell me something—why did you leave your family ranch to come work here?”

“The breeding program Benton has here is cutting edge. I wanted to learn about it, get some experience in it,” I answered as Gracen’s face flashed like a vision before my eyes.

“And now that you’ve had a chance to see what it’s about, what do you think of it?” he asked.

“Honestly? It’s a great program, but it’s not what I’d thought it would be.” I hitched my shoulder, leaving the rest of what I thought unsaid.

“I come from a long line of ranchers who raised both cattle and crops. I’ve seen farms fall under the burden of many things. Money, mismanagement, taxes. I can spot someone whose blood runs in the lands as easy as I can someone who’s just along for the ride. But you? You’re straddling both those lines for me. The land is wrong… it’s not home, I mean, and the job you’re doing… that’s not where your passion is. You might have thought so in the beginning, but how much longer do you think you can fool yourself?”

I kicked the toe of my boot against the floor, wondering how the hell he’d pegged me so perfectly. How I’d struggled to keep my sanity and force myself to make the most of my situation. The job I’d been hired for had been made to sound different from what it turned out to be. I didn’t want to outright lie to Randy, but I couldn’t tell him how I felt and risk Benton getting wind of it. I needed the job. “I can’t complain—”

“Spare me the pussyfooting around. It’s a bullshit job, and you and I both know it. Can you look me in the eye and tell me this is what you expected when you got here? That you’d be the guy who shoved his arm up a cow’s backside with a turkey baster full of bull sperm like it is some sort of production line?”

I had to laugh. “Well, when you put it that way.”

“Our way of life is dying out, Owens. It’s going by the wayside to people who have more money than sense. Now cattle are bred for mass slaughter to companies that’ll pay the most for it. It’s not a way of life anymore. Ranch owners, like Benton, they’re just businessmen in designer blue jeans.”

A burst of cold wind swept into the room as if punctuating the bitter truth.

“Some might call it a sign of the times. Most ranches are selling out because it’s getting too hard to do it the old way,” I answered.

Randy hung the push broom back in its place on the wall. “Be winter soon. Winter in Texas ain’t nothin’ compared to here. Snow up to your ass and wind sharp enough to cut right through you. You ever worked on a snowmobile before?”

“I’ve worked on just about everything else. Can’t see as it would be too difficult.”

“Good answer. Let’s go get them pulled out of the barn and we’ll see if we can’t do something with them.”

* * *

There was a light dusting of white when I woke the next morning, making the ground look as if it had been sprinkled with powdered sugar. The snow had come down before daybreak as the weatherman had predicted. It would be falling heavier by nightfall.

My breath came out in puffs of white, like cigar smoke, with every exhale. Each whipping burst of air slapped at my cheeks like stinging nettles as I crossed the yard to the barn. It was a sticky snow that clumped at the bottom of my pant legs.

The barn door hinges creaked as I opened it just enough to slip inside. The horses stirred inside theirs stalls, some shifting to poke their noses out over the rails, chuffing in welcome.

Early morning had always been my favorite part of the day. The quietness giving me time to wake up without having to rush about, and I enjoyed a few moments of peace before the rest of the ranch woke up. Back home, Ghost would be bumping the stall door to get my attention, hoping to be the first one to get an ear scratch. Buxby would be bobbing his head, whickering. I missed home with an ache that went deeper than the cold.

By midday the snow had melted, leaving everything waterlogged. By early evening, the remaining puddles turned into solid sheets of ice.

I’d stopped carrying my phone around. There wasn’t any point in it. Lex and I hardly spoke but once a month, and it was usually me who called him from a landline since reception was so spotty up in the mountains to check how things were going. He never mentioned Gracen, and neither did I. Without it in my back pocket, it felt as though I’d taken some of the guilt and left it behind for the day. But it never truly went away. I never stopped thinking about Gracen. Never could stop thinking about her. She would be a part of me for the rest of my life. Probably long after that, too.

At least there was a break in calving. All the calves were in the stages of newborn or yearling. Heifers that had weaned were sectioned off and allowed a short break before being inseminated again. Randy had hit it on the head. Everything that Benton Farms stood for was the complete opposite of how I was raised. Of what I knew. Sure, we’d raised cows to fill our own freezers, but we also had steers we sold at market. Bulls we used for breeding, and heifers that were rotated so as not to be overbred. There was a delicate balance in how Owens’ ranch was run. It wasn’t a huge moneymaker, but it did well enough to keep the ranch going, pay the hands, and have a little to set by in the lean times.

I’d gone over and over it until I knew in my heart what I needed to do. When spring came, I’d make the call to Grant and see if his job offer still stood.

Once I doubled checked the horses for the night, I closed off the barn, hunched into my jacket, and stepped out into a swirling snow globe.

Inside, my room was toasty warm. Shaking my jacket, I hung it on the peg just inside the door. I toed my shoes free and peeled my clothes off, tossing them in my laundry basket instead of tracking melting snow in my wake to the bathroom.

After a quick shower, I pulled out a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt. The chill hadn’t entirely left my bones. It probably wouldn’t until spring, considering how cold October had turned out to be.

I pulled out the makings for coffee and was just about turn the pot on when my phone vibrated on the counter seconds before it rang.

A smile tugged at my lips as I answered.

"Happy birthday, little brother," Lex said over the pop and hiss of our connection.