I shake my head. “You fucking tell me. You’re the one sitting in Los Angeles asking a million fucking questions instead of investing your time to get to know your daughter.
“I just don’t want her to be stupid.”
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter. “You sent her here to get her shit together, and she’s trying. But you don’t ask how she is, you just want a progress report.”
Vartan’s voice goes colder. “I asked how she was. Yousaid she’s fine. Doesn’t sound like you’re doing your job, Hayes.”
I let out a dry laugh. “My job? You mean the part where I clean up after the mess you don’t wanna fucking deal with?”
“Don’t you dare twist this?—”
I stop walking, my blood is buzzing now. “Don’t talk to me like I don’t see it, Vartan. I don’t know what the fuck you said or did to break her down like this, but you sure as hell aren’t gonna fix it from behind a desk in Beverly Hills.”
There’s silence on the line.
“She’smyfucking daughter.”
“No,” I say, my voice low. “She’s a person. A woman who’s doing the damn best she can in a place you threw her into without a parachute.”
“Watch it, Carter.”
“No,” I snap, “you fucking watch it.”
I end the call before he can say another goddamn word. I toss the phone into the dirt at my feet, and my hands shake with a rage I haven’t felt in years.
If he suspects something’s going on between me and Catalina, then so fucking be it. Because whatever friendship we had?
It’s dwindling.
Vartan is a couple of years older than I, and when I had met him in my freshman year of college, before I dropped out, he wasn’t this cold, hollow bastard. He was kind and full of life.
The man I just got off the phone with? Not the same man I met years ago. Vartan was someone I respected—someone who stepped up when I was drowning in grief, who talked about his wife like she hung the moon. But ever since money took over, he’s changed. He isn’t the same manI used to know, I can tell from the way he talks and presents himself.
When he sent Catalina here, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I told myself that keeping my distance was the right thing to do. That staying away from her meant honoring the kind of friendship we used to have.
That thread has been fraying from the start. And after that phone call? It’s hanging by a single, splintered strand.
Catalina isn’t just some woman crashing on my ranch anymore. She’s fire, chaos, and everything I haven’t let myself want in a long fucking time. She fights the world with her chin high and her heart bleeding through the cracks.
Maybe she doesn’t see it—but I do.
I’ve watched her try to make sense of a life she never got to choose. I’ve seen the quiet moments when the weight gets too heavy, where she hurts silently, and all I can do is hold her and be the shoulder for her to cry on.
Whatever loyalty I still have left to Vartan, it’s not enough to keep me from her anymore. Because whatever we were? It doesn’t come close to what she’s becoming to me.
I pace the barn like a caged animal. My boots kick up hay and dust, each step harder than the last, my jaw clenched so tight it feels like it’s about to snap off. Vartan’s questions are still rattling in my skull, souring every breath I take. I need to cool the fuck off, before I punch a wall or rip apart the next poor bastard that looks at me wrong.
I pick my phone up from the dirt, not even thinking. I call the only person who can pull me back from the edge.
Her.
The phone rings once. Twice. Then that sweet, sultry voice answers, wrapping around me like a goddamn noose.
“Miss me already?” She’s smiling, I can hear it, thatlittle hint of seduction laced through her words that immediately starts to untangle the tight knot strangling my chest.
I tip my head back, closing my eyes, letting out a breath that’s half a laugh, half a desperate exhale.
Fuck, just hearing her voice is better than any drug I’ve ever known. “I miss you every second you’re away from me, darlin’,” I mumble. “You on break?”
