Page 43 of Hometown Cowboy

He couldn’t see past Alan and Genevieve to who had said those words. Ryan jerked back at the light touch on his arm. He shoved his hand through his hair and couldn’t look them in the face.

“I’m sorry.” He’d had no business coming here. He turned and hurried out the door, taking the low steps three at a time. “I shouldn’t have come.”

He bolted for his ute, not looking back.

Alan had a whole other family, one that didn’t and would never include him. What had he been thinking? Did he really believe after all this time he’d be welcomed into the family as a long-lost son?

“Ryan please! Don’t go. I’m sorry.” Alan’s distressed voice reached him.

He shook his head. He couldn’t do this.

He reached his ute and slid behind the wheel. He gunned the engine and blinked through the sudden blurriness in his vision. He swore. What kind of idiot was he that he’d gone there expecting anything other than what had happened? The man was a stranger. No one appreciated strangers turning up on their doorsteps like that, not ones who belonged firmly in their past.

No one wanted abandoned children disrupting their perfectly normal lives and showing their faces unannounced.

No one had ever hung around or wanted anything to do with him other than his mother. Even Lucy had left. Sure, she’d died, but she was still gone from his life.

And now Darby had rejected him too. One of his closest friends, and she’d pushed him away. The truth was he simply didn’t deserve her. He never had. He wasn’t good enough for someone like her. What on earth had possessed him to think that he had any right trying? It seemed no matter which way he turned he failed to measure up for those closest to him.

He was the only common factor in all of this. People like Mildred Appleton had been right his entire life—hewas the problem.

Chapter Nineteen

Ryan turned intohis driveway and glanced at his ringing phone and grimaced.

His mother.

She was the last person he wanted to talk to right now. How would he tell her he’d gone to see Alan? She’d be so hurt. Betrayed.

He couldn’t do that to her.

He held the button down until his phone turned off completely and tossed it back into the console.

He drove past the houses and kept in line with the main fence until he reached the huge shed. He pulled into the cool, dark interior and stopped the engine.

As he walked past the long workbench, he grabbed the shabby old akubra that sat there and pulled it down on his head, then kept walking out the rear door. He finished hooking up the old disc plough, a remnant left behind from the previous owners of the farm, and patted the faded blue wheel arch of the ancient tractor.

He’d finish off that paddock he’d been meaning to cultivate for the last two weeks and forget all about the mess he’d made of his life, forget about all the people he’d disappointed and let down.

He’d forget about them and move on with his life. Because everyone else had already done the same and left him far behind.

Foot on the brake, he yanked the automatic gear lever upward. The tractor shuddered, as if impatient to get to work. It was a bitch of a tractor, ornery and unpredictable, but it never failed to start. He’d get a new one after he sold off the calves at the spring sales next week. The experts were predicting good returns this year. He’d unload them and some of the other unneeded animals and update the machinery he’d put off replacing for the last five years.

*

Afternoon was fadingtoward dusk as he neared the last pass on the final quadrant of the paddock. He squinted ahead and saw something shiny, catching the last rays of afternoon light, sticking out of the patchy weeds ahead.

Dammit. It looked like wire.

He braked and reefed the gear lever into neutral and hopped onto the freshly churned earth. His boots sank deep into the soft soil, the powder-like quality of the top having been churned through it and mixed with the deeper, more damp soil.

It came up over the high sides of his boots and he flicked one to stop the clod of soil from trying to crumble and filter down past his socks and under his feet.

The tractor made a strange grinding sound and shuddered. It was nothing unusual. The old thing groaned and creaked so much that he often thought it was talking to him.

Ryan patted the front tyre and braced himself on it to lean down to retrieve the wire.

“Don’t worry, Old Girl. We’re almost done.”