Page 16 of Beehives and Broken Heroes

Brandon shoved a hand in his pocket and turned away from her with a shrug. “Just did.”

“You just did, huh?” Cash gave her a pointed look and raised a brow.

She wanted to smack that brow to his knees.

Great. Now Cash had enough ammo to bug her for days. A light brush against her arm made her look down. Brandon had somehow closed the space she’d made, his arm sweeping past hers. When had he even moved? Heavens to Betsy, she had to get out of here.

Step six. Give yourself space if you need it.

Oh, she needed it all right. Right. Friggin’. Now.

“Okay, well, you guys have fun . . . building . . . things.” She spun on her heel and rushed to her store, over the wet pavement while trying not to slip in her heels. She waved a hand over her head as she fled. “See ya later!”

So much for Heather Lynn and her stupid rules! And Allie totally took back her thought about missing the Slades.

Chapter 6

March

It’d been a month since Brandon had seen Jo outside Cash’s restaurant. A month since she’d made her feelings about him more than clear. He knew she’d been avoiding him, but the truth behind her avoidance hurt far worse than he’d expected. “What do you take me for?” she’d said.

What do you take me for?Like he was some kind of horrendous beast. He still couldn’t believe he’d called her out like he had, but she had a way of making his blood boil, a way of getting him to snap, that no other person in his life ever had before. Not that she was in his life. Not really.

After helping Cash to install his bar, he’d stopped in at the honey shop—three Choco Lattes in hand, one for each of the twins and one for Kathy—to look at numbers with Jo. Allie had seen him, a little smile had graced her lovely lips, and then she’d blushed. She was attracted to him—that was plain as day—but she didn’tlikehim, or at least didn’t want to. That had been evident in the very next moment when she’d practically flown up the stairs to her apartment, making some excuse lame enough to fit in the “I need to arrange my sock drawer” category.

He’d moved to Harvest Ranch to get away from drama—not run right into it. So, he’d stopped trying. Stopped popping into the honey shop at odd times hoping to catch her, stopped asking for her to go over numbers with him, stopped going to family dinners at the Winslow’s. Stopped making himself easily and readily available.

Grabbing his Carhartt jacket from the fancy coatrack by the front door—a David Ward original, no doubt—Brandon made his way to the barn, purposely thinking of anything but Allie and her willful stubbornness. If she didn’t want to see him, he wasn’t going to make her. He had bigger problems to deal with in his life and had had enough of women running from him to last a lifetime.

From his pocket, the song “Bad Liar” by Imagine Dragons blasted from his phone. He scrubbed a hand down his face. That was Zoey’s ringtone. His little sister had known very little about why he was leaving North Carolina, but she had known he was leaving and managed to put the song in before he’d left. He pulled the phone out and silenced it.

Zoey was nineteen years his minor, full of piss and vinegar, and madder than a wet hen because he’d moved without telling her why or saying goodbye. And she was even madder because he hadn’t spoken to any of his family, including his parents, in at least a month. He couldn’t deal with them now. He’d been gone five months, and Zoey still called him on the regular. At least she hadn’t figured out where he lived yet. He shoved his phone back in his coat. She’d call him another three times when he didn’t answer. At least. And today, he just wasn’t in the mood for drama.

There were things to be done.

He’d made friends with Tom Westbrook, an older man who owned a large plot of land for a whole gang of Westbrooks a few miles away and closer to town than him. They’d met in the hardware store and gotten talking. Tom was a rough-and-tumble cowboy through and through, with a rough demeanor if you didn’t know him well—a dying breed, really—but a heart of gold.

Tom had told him about his indoor arena and horses, and Brandon had told him about how he’d used to train horses. Of course, Brandon had left out the part about how he’d been one of the most sought-after horse trainers in North Carolina from the time he was sixteen until he’d entered the army at age twenty-one.

Tom had offered to let Brandon bring his horses over to his property every week to use their indoor arena in exchange for cleaning out his horse’s stalls.

The horses had some room for walking around in his barn, and they had an area outside when it wasn’t too cold, but with the wet ground, it wasn’t a good place for them to run and stretch their muscles. Brandon had agreed to Tom’s terms and took the horses over once a week. He took turns riding each one and got the others to trot along with him. It served a twofold purpose—one, it got them good and exercised, and two, it helped Titan to at least think about trusting him as a rider.

Then, per Tom’s instructions, he’d clean out the stalls, if there was anything to clean. Not that there was ever much. Brandon suspected that was Tom’s way of making Brandon feel he wasn’t taking advantage of the practice time.

He also used that time to work with Titan. The horse still wouldn’t let Brandon ride astride him, but he’d managed to saddle the horse and ride standing with one foot in a stirrup on his side. It was good progress.

Brandon glanced over at the horses. “One more week at Tom’s should do it. The ground is close to dry, and then you can spend as much time as you want out in the pasture.”

Flower whinnied. Clover looked up at him through her lashes. Scout pawed at the ground, eager to get out. Titan stood quietly, eyes up on the ceiling.

A buzzing sound zipped past Brandon’s ear, and he stepped to the side. He thought it was a bee, but as he got a closer look, he saw it was a wasp. The wasp flew around, slowly making its way two stories up to the pitch of the roof directly above three sizable piles of loose hay he kept inside for the winter so it’d stay dry. A large wasps’ nest sat huddled in the crook of the rafters.

“Dadgummit,” he said. Allie and Jo had kept several of their hives and their equipment here through the winter. They’d had nowhere to store them, and Brandon had offered the space in their father’s woodshop on the far side of the barn.

The wasp flew around his nest, taunting Brandon.

Maybe Brandon could hire an exterminator? No, the chemicals might get on the twins’ equipment and harm the bees. He had to let the twins know there was a wasps’ nest here. Wasps were known for attacking honeybee hives and carrying off both the honey and the bees. Jo and Allie would know the best action to take. He pulled out his phone, ignoring thefourmissed calls from his sister, and dialed Sticky and Sweet. He held his breath until someone answered.

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