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me.”
    â€œNo,” Cade said, setting his mug on the countertop. “Fine.”
    Cole nodded and turned, heading up the stairs toward his room. Toward his crumb-free bed.
    It was easy for Cole to put it on hold, because he had a life. Because he had a wife and a kid, and a ranch that he called the shots on.
    Cade wasn’t sure he wanted any of that, ever, but he sure as hell needed something.
    A year before they even broached the subject of the bison. A year before his only idea on contributing would be considered.
    Another year in holding-pattern hell.
    He wasn’t sure he could deal with it. But he wasn’t sure what to do about it either.
    He was a take-charge kind of a guy. A doer, not a thinker, much to his mother’s chagrin all through his teenage years.
    But his injury had taken his control. It had taken the charge right from him. He couldn’t do what he chose to anymore, and he had no idea what the hell he actually wanted to do.
    Except sleep. Hell yeah, he was pathetic.
    He would go to sleep. And tomorrow would be the same as every day that had come before it for the past two years.
    Just. Fucking. Perfect.
    *   *   *
    Amber groaned and shuffled the stack of bills from the table to the counter. She sighed. Then she pondered putting them in the shredder.
    But she couldn’t do that. Damned adulthood.
    She wasn’t sure when she’d be able to pay them either. Maybe if she picked up another shift at the restaurant she could do it. But the medical bills from her grandma’s illness, the funeral fees, and the taxes her grandfather had forgotten to pay—they weren’t much on the fixed income, but two years of that was from when the farm had been producing decent income, and getting slapped with a back-tax bill at a self-employed rate was killer.
    It was just dire.
    She shuffled to the coffeemaker and picked up the carafe. Thankfully, it was on a timer, so she didn’t have to worry about making it while she was this bleary. She always tried to wake up before her grandpa, which meant getting up before the sun, so that she could bring him coffee and breakfast and get him set for the day before she went off to wait on strangers.
    Waiting on her grandpa was definitely preferable.
    She loved the old man more than anyone else. Except for maybe Cade.
    She moved to the stove and fired up the gas range. The pan was greased and waiting for her already. Her grandfather was a man of habits.
    Every morning she made him whole wheat toast, two fried eggs, hash browns—pre-shredded at the beginning of the week because she was not doing that at five thirty a.m.—and two strips of bacon.
    Amber didn’t indulge in quite the lumberjack breakfast he did. Though he didn’t seem to have suffered for it. He was still lean as could be, though he had definitely aged since she’d first arrived.
    He’d been old from the first moment she’d met him.
    Fourteen, angry, terrified. Because she’d been uprooted, not just from the home she was living in—that was normal—but from her city, from the people she’d called friends.
    Taken from Portland and brought out to the little pile of bricks rising out of the wilderness known as Silver Creek.
    At first, she’d wanted to get sent back. Back to where she had access to her friends. To drugs and alcohol and all of the crutches she’d been using to deal with the pain in her life.
    So she’d done her best to make them hate her too. Since she was sure it would happen anyway. Like her mother had. Like every foster family had from the moment she’d darkened their door. Angry, sullen . . . crazy, as one foster mom had called her.
    But her grandparents hadn’t let her do it.
    In their mid-sixties, wrinkled and gray, the oldest people she’d ever been exposed to, they’d also been the toughest. They’d expected her to work. To collect eggs. To be home when they said