King's Treasure (Oil Kings Book 3) by Marie Johnston (great novels .TXT) 📗

They’re working cattle next week.” She waited for me to elaborate. Her look forced me to do more than ignore the message. “We’re too busy here. I want to help Hector through the summer and get him set up for the winter.”

Her head bobbed. “Makes sense.” She bit the inside of her lip. Another move that forced me to think about what I’d just said.

Shit. “But I suppose I should talk to my wife about it first.”

She blinked. Perhaps she hadn’t been thinking about it like I had—or maybe not consciously. “The flight would be expensive. And long.”

“Unless we take the company’s private jet.”

Shock rippled across her face. “They would do that? To work cattle? Wait, what does working cattle mean?”

The sun had shifted and was blazing on us now. I held my hand out to her. She took it and I led her behind the cabin, where branches shaded lush grass. I sat and pulled her onto my lap. She settled against me with a sigh.

“Working cattle in the spring means vaccinations, tags, and Dawson usually does AI with part of his herd.”

“AI?”

“Artificial insemination.”

“Oh.” Her smile was sheepish. “I have so many questions about that.”

“I have most of the answers.”

She giggled. “Not the conversation I thought I’d have today. So, you’re not going?”

“We’re not going, if it’s okay with you.”

She was quiet and I’d been around her enough that I could see her mind working.

“What are you thinking about?”

She didn’t respond at first. A long breath eked out of her before she spoke. “Are you going to talk to your family before you get the money? Do you plan to see them before then?”

I never planned to see them. Plans were for people who knew where their future was going. I’d planned to go to college. I’d planned to be a photographer. I’d planned to have accomplished more in life by the time I was thirty. Plans were for those who could get stuff done.

Seeing my family just happened. Some circumstance eventually brought me back to Montana. But that wasn’t exactly her question. She was asking if I was avoiding them until I was a millionaire. Then what? I swagger back home, count out bills, and pay Dad back for all his money?

“You think I should?”

She rested her head on my shoulder, her face tipped up to the sky. The temperature in the shade was pleasantly warm. “I don’t know your family, but I can say that I never thought talking to my mother about my issues with them would turn out the way it did.”

“The only talking I’ve ever done with Dad led to him reiterating how disappointed in me he is.”

She licked her lips. “You talked to your mother a lot, didn’t you?”

My stomach sank. The one topic I tried to never think about. My mother and how she was no longer here. “Yes.” We were quiet for a moment before I kept talking, something I’d never done. Previous women had never pushed me on the subject. Not that Savvy was pushing, not really. Maybe she would eventually, but I wanted to tell her about Mama. I wanted to tell a girl who’d become really fucking important to me about the woman who had been the most important in my life.

“She taught me to take pictures. Whenever I got into trouble, or in a fight with my brothers, which was all the damn time, I’d go to my room, or to a quiet space in the barn, or to ride my horse, and she’d find me. She always had her camera and instead of telling me how wrong I was, asking me what I thought, she’d take some pictures and then hand the camera over and give me tips.”

“No wonder you’re a natural. How old were you?”

I would’ve shrugged, but with her resting against me, I didn’t. “I first remember her sitting with me when I was four. We took pictures of Buster, one of the blue heelers we had growing up. I was eleven when Mama died.” When she had been murdered.

“I hope you’re not mad, but I read the story.”

“King’s Creek doesn’t have much to report on, and the paper covered Mama’s death for a full year.” Mama’s death was so gruesome even a bigger town would have salivated at the story. The ranch hand our bastard neighbor had hired had thought something in our house could fund his next meth score. Instead, he’d found Mama. “They constantly interviewed us and did stories about how we were coping and moving on. I hated that Dad could still read the newspaper. I hated a lot of things that Dad did after Mama died.”

Savvy turned her head into my neck and twined her fingers through mine. She didn’t speak and that was what helped me keep talking.

“He played the field. Less than a year after she was gone, he was sleeping with everyone and everything, like he was making up for lost time.”

“That had to hurt.”

“Yeah. It pissed us all off. Dad never really talked about it, but . . .” Savvy gave my fingers a squeeze. “Then I see him with Kendall and I wonder if he was just really fucking lonely and afraid to love again. Except I can’t forget what those years were like, seeing him with other women in the bedroom he shared with Mama.”

“Regardless of how hard it was for him, it was still hard for you,” she murmured.

“Yeah. She understood me. Dad doesn’t. To him, I just run from my problems. Mama got it.” I wasn’t into yelling, or proving myself, or arguing until I lost my voice. I had to go do something. Take that energy roiling inside of me and expend it on the world. At home, I used to ride my horse. Then it was photography. In college, I bought my own camera and struck out in the world, Dad’s cash in my pocket.

“I want to understand you too, Xander.”

A small smile hitched up the corner of my mouth. “Since you