Saviours of Oestend Oestend 2 (13 page)

Winter descended upon the ranch with the sudden brutality Simon had learned to expect of Oestend. One day it was sunny, a shockingly cold wind blowing from the north, and the next day the inhabitants of Brighton awoke to sub-zero temperatures and a world covered in frost.

The best thing that could be said about the arrival of winter was that things at Brighton Ranch were closer to normal. Or at least, the strange occurrences seemed fewer and further between. Maybe it was colder than it had ever been. Maybe the night lasted longer and the wind howled louder, but if there was anything else unusual about the weather, Simon failed to notice.

His relationship with Frances was as easy and casual as it had always been. Frances gave no sign of anything unusual ever having happened between them. Simon might have thought he’d imagined the entire incident. Sometimes he’d go days or even weeks without thinking about it at all, but then suddenly, he’d have one of those days where he couldn’t keep his mind off sex, or he’d wake from a dream with his cock hard and aching for release, and he’d inevitably begin to think of Frances.

It wasn’t that he desired him. He still didn’t find him attractive, any more than he’d ever found any man attractive. It was simply that he now knew how unbelievably good Frances could make him feel. It was with some reluctance and more than a little embarrassment that Simon finally admitted to himself how much he wanted it to happen again.

Even after accepting the truth of his desire, he had no idea how to go about it. It wasn’t a matter of seducing Frances or wooing him. That felt wrong on every level imaginable. Frances was his partner. His friend. In many ways, his brother. There was nothing romantic between them, and Simon wanted to keep it that way. But how exactly did one go about asking another man to be his sexual partner?

“What’s a hand job between friends?” was a saying commonly heard among ranch hands on the prairie. Still, Simon had no idea how to initiate such a thing. Not only that, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to reciprocate.

“What’s going on with you?” Frances asked him one day, midway through winter. They were in the loft of the barn, shifting hay from the back, where it was still full, to the front, which had been emptied.

“Just seems like you’ve been weird these last few days. You keep looking at me like you’re about to say something, but then you just stand there.”
Was that true? Simon thought back over the previous week. It was true that several times, he’d almost managed to broach the topic with Frances only to turn craven at the last second. Still, he hadn’t realised he’d been so obvious. And now, being confronted by Frances, he found it no easier than he had those other times.
“If it were anybody but you, I’d think you needed money,” Frances said. “But I know you hardly spend a dime of your pay, so it can’t be that.”
“No.” Simon’s cheeks were burning, his palms suddenly clammy. “It’s not money.”
“Well, what is it then? You know you can ask me anything.”
Frances wasn’t looking at him. He was looking down at his work. Simon tried to steady his shaking hands. He’d known for at least a week the words he wanted to say, although now they suddenly seemed like rather stupid words.
Don’t be a fool! This is Frances. You can say anything to him.
He took a deep breath and said, “I wondered if you’d be willing to do me one of those favours again?”
Frances stopped working. He was still bent over his pitchfork, but he glanced up at Simon with huge, surprised eyes. “You talking about the kind of favour I think you’re talking about?”
Simon felt sure his cheeks had to be at least ten shades of red. He wished he could snap his fingers and make himself disappear. He tipped his head back to stare up at the ceiling, concentrating on the spider webs in the barn rafters so he wouldn’t have to meet Frances’ eyes. “Uhh, yeah. I think so.”
Frances laughed. Not a laugh of mockery or derision, though. It was a sound of pure relief.
“Holy Saints, Simon, I thought you’d never ask!”
And as simply as that, Simon found himself on his back in the hay in the cold, dry loft of the barn, with Frances’ wonderfully warm, wet mouth around his cock. This time, Simon didn’t think about women. He didn’t think about anything at all except how unbelievably good it felt. He didn’t last long, but Frances didn’t either.
“Just so you know,” Frances joked when they were done, “I’m
always
willing.”
After that, it was easy, although still somewhat infrequent. Most of the time, things were as they’d always been between them. There was no flirtation. No casual caresses or new intimacy. But occasionally, when they found themselves alone, Frances would turn to him with a smile and say, “Let me do you a favour.”
The third time after the hay loft, they were in one of the windowless outbuildings used for storage. Frances closed the door, leaving them in utter darkness. He pushed Simon back onto a pile of burlap. He greased Simon’s cock with saddle oil, and Simon lay back and gave himself up to the feel of being touched by Frances. But then Frances stopped stroking him. There was a rustle of clothing, and then Frances straddled him. The boy was naked from the waist down, his bare legs brushing Simon’s hips as he rubbed his perineum on Simon’s cock. Feeling Frances’ erection against his own was unnerving.
Simon gripped Frances’ thighs. “Wait,” he said, suddenly unsure. It was one thing to have Frances suck him, but the idea of actually fucking him made him uneasy. He was glad it was too dark to see.
“Shut up, Simon.” Frances’ voice was thick and breathy with arousal. “It’s been way too long since I got to do this.”
Frances lifted Simon’s erection into position and slowly sank down onto it. He took Simon deep into his warm body and began to move with wild, enthusiastic abandon.
Simon’s unease quickly gave way to pleasure. Any other protests he might have uttered died unspoken in his throat. Fucking Frances felt amazing—tighter than any woman, and with none of the guilt—and Simon found himself wondering why he’d ever resisted this type of arrangement in the past. Maybe because he’d never known anyone who was nearly so willing as Frances. Maybe because he’d never trusted anybody enough. Certainly he and Garrett had never even come close to jerking each other off, let alone anything more intimate. But here, with Frances, it seemed logical. Simon was unable to have any kind of normal relationship with women, and Frances was young and horny and willing. They were friends. They were partners. They shared everything else they had. Sharing their bodies seemed like such an obvious solution.
He hoped it wouldn’t cause trouble for him later.

The deepest heart of an Oestend winter was harsh and bleak. The sky hung low and grey, and the wind blew so cold it made bones ache and skin numb, and seemed to suck the very air from a man’s lungs and freeze it upon his lips. It was a dangerous time. Frostbite was common, and hypothermia always a threat. One ranch hand came down with the fever and died a week later. Another fell through the river ice and was swept away before his bunkmate’s eyes. The residents of Brighton Ranch wrapped their coats tighter around themselves and ducked their heads against the ever-present wind.

There was still work to be done.
As the temperatures plummeted, Dante worried about Cami. She was so thin and unused to the cold. During the week when she’d cared for the fevered ranch hand, it had been all Dante could do to stand by and let her tend the sick man.
“What do you want me to do?” she’d asked. “Let him die?”
Better him than you
, he’d wanted to say. He wanted to keep her safe, and everybody knew women were far more susceptible to the fever than men.
It wasn’t until after the man was dead that Dante realised Cami was no more susceptible to it than he was.
As the days crept by, though, Dante began to realise how foolish his concern for her had been. Cami not only survived the winter, she thrived. Whatever light had left the sky seemed to have found its way into her. She was the only person he’d ever met who laughed with joy at the prospect of wrapping oneself in layers to face the day. Certainly it was easier for her than for the men, since only a small portion of her chores were outside. Still, Dante was surprised at how she seemed to bloom in those dark months. The harsh wind made her cheeks red and her eyes bright. More than once when she came in from the cold, Dante found himself thinking she was beautiful.
She spent less time in the evenings mending and more time knitting. She’d found a stash of yarn in the sewing room on the third floor, and she used it to turn out hats and mittens and scarves at a surprising rate. They were bright and cheery, and decidedly unmasculine, but they were warm, and even Dante had to smile when he saw a big rough ranch hand like Simon wearing a purple hat with a garish orange scarf as he went about his chores. Oestend itself may have been grey and bleak, but in attire at least, the residents of Brighton lived up to the ranch’s name.
The darkest months of winters were brutal, but the bright side was, the worst part of the season was also blessedly short. Before long, the sky began to glow weakly blue. The shallow sunlight of not-quite-spring warmed the ground and thawed the streams. The wind went from bitter and piercing to merely frigid and brisk.
Dante was also relieved that nothing strange happened during those months. No unexplained cattle deaths or unnatural weather. No buzzards. Nothing that couldn’t be blamed on good old-fashioned winter. Nothing out of the ordinary since the lightning storm.
Two weeks after the weather had turned, Dante had his first visitors—Tama, Alissa, and his brother Jay.
“They’ve been nagging me to bring them for weeks now,” Jay said. “It was all I could do to hold them off ’til the thaw.”
It pleased Dante to have them there. His last visit home had helped quell his feelings of being an outcast, but having them visit his own ranch gave him a bit of confidence he hadn’t quite realised he’d been missing. Yes, it was
his
ranch, not Zed Austin’s—not anymore—and it was with a certain amount of pride that he told them of its new name.
“It’s fitting,” Jay said. “He’d think it was funny.”
“He would,” Dante agreed. He could imagine Brighton laughing about it. “It was Cami’s idea.”
“Aren told us to ask if you’d named it,” Tama said. “He also wanted us to ask when you’d be back at the BarChi. He says he’d like to talk to you at some point about the books.”
“He would, huh?” Dante turned away, trying to decide how that made him feel. Everything always led back to Aren, but for the first time, Dante didn’t feel that familiar stab of jealousy behind his ribs. He didn’t have to remind himself that Aren wasn’t out to get him. Of course Aren wanted to talk to him about the books. That was Aren’s job.
“He could have come with you,” he said.
He saw the surprise in Tama’s eyes at the suggestion and the quick glance that passed between her and her sister.
“Well,” Tama said, her tone almost apologetic, “I think he was worried you wouldn’t want him here.”
It was a fair enough assumption for Aren to make, and Dante regretted having made things so much more difficult than they needed to be. Aren wasn’t a bad person. Somewhere deep down, Dante had always known that, but at that moment, it was as clear as the sun shining in the Oestend sky. Aren was just a man who’d fallen in love. He hadn’t done it out of spite or any kind of petty desire to hurt Dante. It wasn’t as if they’d been in competition for Deacon and Aren had won, because Dante had never had the strength to fight for the man he loved to begin with. He’d hidden away, keeping his feelings secret, afraid to let anybody know, and then he’d had the nerve to be surprised when somebody stronger than him stole the prize out from under him.
But it wasn’t Aren’s fault.
It wasn’t Deacon’s either.
It was over, and Dante realised with some surprise that he didn’t mind. He had his own ranch now. His own life. It wasn’t much, and yet it was enough.
“Tell him he’s always welcome here,” Dante said. “I’m the one who wronged him, not the other way around. He’s got nothing to fear from me.”
His brother, it seemed, had simply come to visit for the hell of it, but it quickly became apparent that the women had their own agendas.
“My father wanted to come too, you know,” Tama said to him on the third day of their visit. They were sitting in the cool morning light on the steps of the front porch, each of them hugging their coats around them against the cool Oestend breeze.
“Your father? Why?”
“He still wants you to marry Beth.”
“Ha!” Dante laughed. “Not a blessed chance.”
“That’s what I told him you’d say. I don’t blame you, but I can’t blame him for trying either. He even tried to get your father to marry her.”
“Holy Saints! What did my dad say?”
“He politely declined.” She shook her head. “I think my father’s fed up with her.”
“You thought she was pregnant?”
“We wondered, but seems she wasn’t. She’s just putting on weight, I guess.” She laughed. “That’s part of the problem.”
“That she’s getting fat?”
“Well, yes and no.” She looked out across the lawn to where Alissa and Cami were putting laundry on the line to dry, fighting to keep the wind from tearing the sheets out of their hands before they could get them hung. “Beth always believed she was better than us. Always thought she was too good to be a rancher’s wife. It’s hard, you know? It’s not like we get to sit around knitting doilies and sipping tea.”
“I know you don’t.” If he hadn’t known before, he certainly knew now how much work the women did to keep the ranch running.
“She won’t do it. She always thought she’d be able to marry some rich man in town, and she could buy pretty dresses and have parties and hire maids to do the real work.” She shook her head. “That’s why she tried so hard to get Aren to marry her. She figured she could sit up in that house on the hill and not have to pitch in.”
“Makes me glad he said no.”
“You and me both. I’d be stuck waiting on her now like I did when we were girls.”
“So what does this have to do with her getting fat?”
“I’ve carried four babies, Dante. Lost two, and have my two boys. And still, I don’t have the luxury of getting plump like Beth. Alissa and I, and every maid my daddy hires—we work, all day every day.”
“But not Beth?”
“No. Not Beth. She sits around and complains.”
“And that’s what you want to unload on me?” he joked.
She laughed. “Well, my daddy wants to unload her on anybody he can.”
“Well, you tell him I said no way in this Saints-blessed world.”
“I’ll tell him.” She looked out again towards Cami and Alissa. “So, you won’t take one sister. What about the other?”
“You asking me to marry Alissa?”
“No. Just hoping you’ve changed our mind about letting her live here.”
He watched the two girls together. Alissa was much as she’d been on their last visit to the BarChi—she seemed to take every opportunity to stand close to Cami, and to touch her. Cami was a full head taller than Alissa, and Dante watched as the smaller girl reached up to brush Cami’s hair out of her eyes. She stepped so close, he thought for a moment she was going to kiss her. It annoyed him. He couldn’t see Cami’s expression well enough to determine if she appreciated the attention or not.
That annoyed him, too.
“Why the hell would I want her here?” he asked.
Tama looked over at him in surprise. “Why are you mad?”
“I’m not mad!” Although as soon as he’d said it, he realised he was. “I just don’t see why I should have to take care of her.”
“She’s miserable at the BarChi.” She gestured out towards the girls again. “Look at her here. I haven’t seen her so happy in ages. She’s crazy about Cami! It’s not like you don’t have enough work for her, or room in the house. Cami might appreciate having some help.”
Yes, Cami might appreciate it. She might appreciate it a great deal. She might appreciate it so much she’d start to return Alissa’s casual touches and flirtatious smiles.
“Just talk to Cami about it, will you?” Tama asked.
He sighed in resignation. “Fine. But if she says no, that’s the end of it!”
“What if she says yes?”
Dante chose not to answer.