Page 36 of Second Chance with the Rancher
Nodding, but a little overwhelmed at the sudden personal information overload, he forced a smile. “So when is it ready for pick up?” Did he know she had ADHD? He couldn’t remember Triss ever mentioning it about Mieka. It explained some of Mieka’s behaviors, though. How scatter-brained she seemed sometimes and fidgety.
“Day after tomorrow the order will be ready to go grab in Denver.”
He was still nodding. “We’ll take the horse trailer so that we can fit everything in. Do I need to book the helicopter?”
“Not a terrible idea. Do I get to ride in it?”
“You’ve never been in a helicopter?”
“I’ve done a lot of things, but riding in a helicopter is sadly not one of them.”
“Well, then, lady, we will definitely have to fix that.”
She beamed at him, then her lips twisted in a playful, but peculiar way, like she was thinking, but thinking suggestive things. “I don’t remember much of that night … unfortunately.”
His brows lifted. “Of the night … we …”
Her head bobbed. “Did we even kiss?”
He was about to say, “Of course we did,” but he had to stop himself and think for a second. He’d been shitfaced, too. Maybe they hadn’t kissed.
“I don’t remember,” he finally said, deciding to be honest.
She huffed a laugh through her nose and shook her head. “Quite the pair, huh? We got so drunk that we can’t even remember if we kissed or not when we had sloppy drunk, UNPROTECTED sex up against the barn. Not my finest moment, that’s for sure.”
“You worked your ass off all week helping out with wedding stuff, then you gave a killer speech. I say you deserved to cut loose. Particularly, after having to deal with your parents for four days.” He made a yikes face with buggy eyes and a grimace. “How are those scared-of-their-own-shadows two?”
She exhaled through her nose. “Yeah, Royce and Yanna Young are a lot. They’re fine. I haven’t told them about my arm, or about my contract not being renewed. I have no idea how they’ll react, and I’m honestly not in the mood to answer their millions of questions, or hear all the shoulda, coulda, woulda that would spill out of my mother’s pie hole.” Her top lip curled. “You should be more careful. Mieka. You could have paid more attention to where you were putting your hand. You would have been fine if you’d just watched what you were doing and practiced more.” The voice she adopted to imitate her mother wasn’t at all how Yanna sounded, but it was comical. Nasally and whiny and with lots of animated facial expressions.
“Triss told them about the baby, yet?”
She shook her head. “I asked her when she planned to tell them and she said maybe when the kid turns three.”
He barked a laugh that made Chance take notice and he nudged Nate’s shoulder with his nose.
He knew from what Triss and Asher had said, then from his own experience meeting Mieka and Triss’s parents that all the Young sisters avoided their parents as much as they could, especially after what they did to Rayma when she was seventeen.
Mieka and Triss’s youngest sister had gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd when she was a teenager, so not knowing what else to do with her, they shipped her off from Baltimore to Mieka’s oldest sister Pasha who was living in Seattle at the time doing her pediatric residency. They didn’t even tell Pasha. Rayma just landed on her doorstep one day.
Rayma continued to rebel and got tangled up in more trouble. It took Pasha and her now husband Heath driving down to Vegas to save Rayma after she was kidnapped.
A real shit-show.
So, who could blame the girls for remaining distant with their parents after that? When a kid got tough, they just gave up and pawned her off on someone else. Someone who didn’t even know they were being made guardian. Someone who had their own busy life to deal with. Asher and Nate felt the same way about Royce and Yanna. They tolerated them, but they didn’t like them. He also knew that Mr. and Mrs. Young had run a very tight ship when the girls were small. They avoided trouble of any kind like it was a twenty-foot angry viper. The girls were considered guilty of indiscretions before they even committed them. The kids could do no right, even when they did no wrong.
They were “trouble duckers” as Triss called them. Pacifists and super judgmental about everything.
And Nate had witnessed all of that firsthand.
The grief and guilt-trip that Triss’s mother had laid on Triss about having booze, let alone an open bar at the wedding, was enough to bury an entire village. Triss lost a fair bit of weight right before the wedding because of the stress, which pissed off Asher. He’d been close a few times to telling off his bride’s parents and kicking them off the property, but Triss stopped him.
Thank God they had the sense to retire to bed early after the reception, so the real party could start.
The transformation of the Young sisters once their parents were gone was like watching five depressed caterpillars emerge from cocoons into vivacious, life-of-the-party butterflies. Rayma and Mieka both danced on the tables, Triss did a keg stand in her wedding dress, and Pasha and Oona—who had both started pole dancing classes in their respective towns—gave the entire guestlist a small show, after Triss surprised them with stripper poles in the reception tent. It’d been a fun and wild night, and one Nate wished he could remember better.
“Looks like you got a little lost in thought there, cowboy,” Mieka said, bumping his shoulder with hers.
“Just remembering the reception,” he said with a smile. “Or at least trying to. Things do get a little hazy after that sixth shot of Fireball.”
