Page 5 of Endlessly Yours
And every other person was married, with most of them either already having kids or talking about them.
I was the single man out, and I didn’t care. It wasn’t as if I was going to follow along with them. After all, I had been the first one to get married. I paused in my thinking. No, my cousin Evan and his wife Kendall had been married before me. They had been young, married too quickly, gone through hell, and after their divorce, had caught up again and gotten married. Their second chance was something that only made sense to them, but at least they were able to have one.
I was never going to have a second chance with Amara. Because cancer sucked, and it took everything from you.
I stopped pulling on my Henley and frowned. Why the hell was I focusing on Amara this morning? We had a family meeting, I had a shit ton of things to do at work, and I needed to avoid Rory because she kept coming onto the property to work with Ava. That meant I didn’t have time to focus on the grief that seemed unending. It had been enough time that I should be okay. Or at least, should be able to go through the days without feeling like hell. And honestly, that was the truth. I could have an entire day where I didn’t think about Amara, only to wake up in a desperate grip of grief.
Because I wasn’t the man that Amara had married. Nor was I the man that had held her as she took her last breath.
I wasn’t even the shell of a man who’d slowly meandered his way through the first two years without her.
I was Brooks Wilder. Contractor. Builder.
And grumpy asshole. I should probably put that last part on my business card. Just to warn people.
I looked in the mirror, realizing it was summer in Texas and 103 degrees today, and pulled off my Henley to find a T-shirt. Sometimes I forgot that I didn’t live in the North anymore. Amara and I had lived up in Wisconsin for a few years, and that had been ingrained in me enough that I’d forgotten my Texas roots for a moment when I’d been on autopilot.
I shoved my feet into my work boots, tied them up, grabbed my wallet, keys, and phone, and hoped to hell that somebody made coffee at the retreat.
When my cousins had first opened Wilder Brothers, the Wilder Retreat and Winery, they’d just gotten out of the military and had needed to figure out what they were going to do with their lives. That side of the family had all joined up to the Air Force, other than our cousin Eliza, who’d married into the military instead with her first husband. My brothers and I hadn’t joined the service but had gone our own ways. So when the cousins needed a way to blend back into society and figure out what to do with the rest of their lives, they bought this land with the winery and inn that had already been established.
Over the years they’d added to it, and I had helped along the way. Now it was one of the top ten inns and wineries in the state of Texas. Which, considering the size of Texas, was a big thing.
We had grown exponentially in the past few years, to the point that we had waitlists, celebrity weddings, and high-stakes security that my brother helped run.
All in all, I was glad that I didn’t have to deal with a lot of the business aspects of it.
The cousins had all originally lived on the property as well. Now most of them had moved on with their families and moved out with their families, but each living close enough that they could be at the retreat in an emergency quickly. Some of them still lived on the land itself because there was enough acreage for that to happen.
In fact, my brothers and I had bought into the family estate by buying the land next to the original inn.
So now we have double the acreage and could expand.
My brothers still lived on property with their wives and families.
But I didn’t.
I was a builder, it’s what I liked doing.
So I’d built my home and a few other homes on another section of property that wasn’t attached to the retreat.
Not that I wanted to be alone, which could always be an issue, but mostly because I wanted space and for my business not to be completely wrapped up in the other Wilder businesses. It was always good to have your finger in a number of pots. Everyone else did in the family.
So I had built my home and a few others on the property, so it was nearly a neighborhood, but it wasn’t as if we were an HOA community with a groundskeeper or anything. I owned all of the homes and rented them out, and somehow, I created a fiefdom.
At least that’s what my brother called it.
I shook my head and drove the few miles to the retreat.
I went in through the employee entrance, a new section that we had added in the past year, and nodded at the security who let me through. It was odd to think that this was our lives now, but I didn’t mind it. I wasn’t the complete loner and asshole that I’d been when I had first moved here, and I tried to be calmer and nicer.
But there was always an edge of anxiety these days.
And then as I parked my truck next to a familiar SUV, I realized exactly where that anxiety came from.
Of course Rory was here.
She wasn’t going to be at the family meeting, but she was going to be on the property. Doing something. Probably drawing in one of the forested areas or near one of the creeks on the property. I didn’t know precisely what she did, but she was here often enough that I couldn’t escape her.
