Good thing he knew the road and the route better than he knew just about any other.
He walked up the porch steps, noticing that one of them wiggled beneath his boot. He would have to fix that for her. Then he looked at the porch light, at the excess of cobwebs hanging around it, made much more obvious with the direct glow of the porch light and the darkness behind it.
She hated messing with things like that too, so he should probably clear them when he came to do the step. He sighed, lifting his hand and knocking firmly on the wooden door.
It jerked open half a second later, revealing a nervous-looking Lane. “I hope it’s easy to fix,” she said, moving out of the way and allowing him entry. “I have deep concerns about my food.” She lifted her hand to her mouth, chewing idly on the side of her thumbnail.
“I can take some back with me if we can’t get it fixed—assuming there’s room in my fridge after all that casserole. Also, you can put some of it out in your cold room. Not perfect, but overnight it’s not going to be any warmer than your fridge out there.”
“There you go being all measured and logical.” She waved her hands, looking anything but measured and logical.
He hadn’t felt like either of those things earlier today. No, dealing with Cain he had felt decidedly un-calm and illogical. He could almost see himself standing in his house, being an ass to the brother who had driven halfway across the country to be there, the brother who had been through a whole hell of a lot in his adult life, and who was trying to do something good for his kid.
But he hadn’t been able to be any nicer. He just hadn’t had it in him. The ranch felt like his. He’d invested blood and sweat in that land. Probably even a few bone chips from the time he had busted his shin in a dirt bike accident when he’d been thirteen.
Yes, they had all spent summers there up to a point. But Finn was the one who had stayed. He was the one who worked it. The one who had gotten it into the state it was in, and now Cain just wanted to move in and use it as therapy.
“It’s a gift,” he said, rather than dumping any of those dark thoughts on Lane. “It’s probably just a fuse, and it’s probably just going to take me a minute.”
“I told you I flipped the switches,” she said, sounding grumpy.
“I know you did,” he said.
“You think I flipped the switches wrong,” she said, accusatory.
“I’m sure you’re a great switch flipper,” he responded, deadpan, as he continued to the fuse box.
He knew that the old cabin was a bit of a mess when it came to wiring. He had a rudimentary knowledge of those things, but he wasn’t an electrician. So while he was tempted to offer to sort everything out for her, it would probably be better if she got a professional. Which he’d told her before, but she never hired anyone to help out.
He had fiddled with her fuse box a couple of times before, so he already knew that the labels next to each switch were wrong. The one that claimed to be linked to the bathroom, in fact wasn’t. If he remembered right that one went to a back bedroom.
He knew for certain the one that was labeled living room went to the bathroom. But he wasn’t exactly certain which one went to the kitchen, since there had never been a fuse issue with it before. He turned off one that claimed to be the master bedroom, and heard Lane shout from down the hall.
“Now it’s just completely dark in here!”
He flipped it back on. “Sorry,” he said.
His hand hovered over the switch for the outdoor power, and then he decided to test it. Off, and then on.
“Nothing!”
“Nothing?” he asked.
“Nothing!” she shouted back.
He walked back to where she was, frowning. “Wasn’t the original part of this place built in the twenties?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied, looking confused.
“I need to get up in your crawl space.”
“Wow, Finn. Buy a girl dinner first.”
He sighed wearily. “Lane...”
“Fine. But I don’t know what you’re going to find up there.”
“Knob and tube wiring, I hope.”
He went back out to the truck and grabbed his toolbox, then opened up the attic access in her hallway, lowering the built-in ladder down and climbing into the tight space. It didn’t take long after that to find a wire that had been chewed until it had lost its connection.
He fused it back together with his soldering iron and heard a triumphant hoot from down below.
“I take it that did it?” he called.
“Success,” she called up. “Now get down here before you get eaten by spiders.”
“I don’t think you have man-eating spiders,” he said, making his way back down the ladder. “I think you had wire-chewing raccoons.”
“Raccoons?” she called back.
“Possibly possums.” He made his way from the hall into the kitchen.
Lane was standing in the middle of the room and both of them were all lit up. A wide smile stretched across her face and when she spun around in a circle, he couldn’t help but notice the way the light caught her dark hair. For some reason, it put him in mind of what it might feel like if he reached out and let those glossy curls sift through his fingers.
“Possibly possums,” she said. “Great. Attic possums.”
“Better than man-eating spiders, all in all.”
“Sure. Thank you,” she said, sighing happily. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”
He shoved his hand in his pocket. “You’re welcome. Anyway, now your food won’t go bad, and I won’t have to listen to you cry about it for the next two weeks.”
She scowled. “Is that an implication that I am dramatic? That I perhaps don’t let go of things as quickly as I should?”
“Take it however you want to take it, Lane. I’m just saying.”
“I take it with umbrage.”
“Well, that’s a quick change of heart. Turning on your food savior already.”
“Hey, buddy. It doesn’t benefit you to have my food go bad either. Who would feed you?”
“Damn straight. And I’m going to need more food than usual, apparently.”
“Why is that?” she asked, looking concerned now.
Without waiting for an invitation—because he didn’t need it, not in her house—he moved to the fridge and took out a beer. If he was going to stay and talk, he would allow himself one beer.
He popped the top off using the edge of the counter, then made his way across the small space and into the living room, where he sat down on the couch. “Cain is staying.”
“I kind of heard some of that,” Lane said, grabbing her own beer before joining him in the living room.
She didn’t sit next to him, and that didn’t really surprise him. They were friends. Platonic friends, and always had been. But there was a definite line of reserve when it came to physical contact.
She settled into the armchair, lifting her beer to her lips. He looked down at his. “Well, that’s basically it. He wants to stay. He wants Violet to go to school here. He wants to get involved with ranching. Basically, I think my brother is having a midlife crisis at the age of thirty-seven.”
“He’s divorced?”
“Yeah. It’s been a couple of years, but it was ugly. I mean, from what I understand.”
“I see why he’d want a change, then.”
He frowned. “Don’t you dare take his side.”
“I’m not taking sides. I’m saying it’s understandable. When you go through something like that... You just want a clean slate sometimes. And it sounds to me like he muddled through where he was for as long as he could. But eventually, it gets obvious that the problems aren’t going to be fixed if you stay where you are.”
“I will turn your lights off again.” He wouldn’t. “I will leave you in the darkness.”
“The ranch is big. The house is big.” She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Will it kill you to have them living there?”
He set the beer bottle down on the table by his couch without any delicacy. “The ranch is mine. That’s the point.”
“I get that you feel that way, but you sound like a jackass.”
“What the hell kind of friendship is this? You’re supposed to tell me what I want to hear.”
Lane rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry. If that’s the kind of conversation you want, you need to tell me before we actually start talking. Otherwise, I’ll assume you want some honesty. And if you want honesty, then this is what you get.”
“I don’t want honesty. I want you to tell me that it’s egregious that somebody who never gave a damn about the ranch before now considers himself entitled to it.”
“But he is entitled to it,” Lane said, her tone gentle, which was more annoying than her previous harshness. “It’s his ranch. Legally. Your grandfather wanted him to have part of it, and it isn’t really up to you to say that he can’t.”
He shook his head. “It never occurred to me that he would want it. He has a life in Texas.”
“Apparently, a life he doesn’t like.”
That made him pause. The whole situation with his brothers was difficult. It always had been. They had a bond—that was undeniable. When he looked at them, it was like looking at himself, with features and coloring rearranged and slightly different. There was no denying they were brothers. Same dark hair, all over six feet tall. Though the youngest brothers had green eyes instead of blue. Still, there was no mistaking they were related. Because that damn Donnelly blood was just so strong.