The Ranchers Son (14 page)

“Stow the
thoughts,” Ethan said with a smile. “This is Adam.”

Sam held out a
hand and Adam took it. “The wanderer returns
sans
memories.”

“Yeah,” Adam said,
a smiling kind of grimace curving his lips.

“Come this way.”
Sam led them to the back of the restaurant, quite close to the door to the
kitchen and away from the other diners.

One of the tables
held the family of the veterinarian, and both Adam and Ethan nodded and smiled
as they passed.

Adam took the
chair with the back to the wall, and Ethan sat opposite him, where he could get
a good look at him after what had happened that day without making it obvious
he was staring. One of the injuries on Adam’s chin had opened a little and oozed
blood. Ethan had tended to it that afternoon. It looked an angry red tonight,
and Ethan didn’t have to stare to see that it was giving Adam some pain.

“What do you
like?” Sam filled glasses with water.

“I don’t really
know,” Adam said. “I mean, in the hotel I found out I like Mexican food.”

“Hmm.” Sam looked
thoughtful and then his face brightened. “Okay, I have it.” Then he vanished
through the kitchen door.

A waitress brought
over some bread and took drink orders. All Adam wanted was water, but Ethan
needed a beer. Just one, to take the edge off things.

Adam saying he’d
seen Justin had been a kick in the stomach. The idea that anyone could see
Justin felt completely wrong. Justin was out there alive, somewhere, but he
certainly wasn’t in the woods behind the ranch. That was just Adam’s memories
coming back to him.

That was all.

Dinner was an easy
hour of Sam bringing out different foods for Adam to taste. Adam loved steak
and chicken, devoured barbecue, and adored the Thai red curry. He wasn’t keen
on the selection of sweets, though, and announced he was clearly more of a meat
guy. When he said that, he smiled up at Sam, and when Sam patted him on the
shoulder, jealousy cut right through Ethan.

Sam didn’t mean
anything by it; he was just that kind of guy, a devil-may-care flirt who
flitted from one guy to the next.

But not Adam. Not there
while Ethan was watching.

When they left,
Adam and Sam hugged as if they were best friends, and Sam didn’t hug too hard,
and he was all conciliatory and kindness personified.

When they stepped
outside into the cool night air, Ethan wrapped his jacket around Adam. He
pulled away and thrust his hands in his pockets. He didn’t know where the hell
his head was at the moment. He wanted Adam in his life, then he didn’t, then he
had to have him, then he was scared of how he felt. A few more days of that and
he would lose his freaking mind.

They walked up the
hill to the Strachan house, slowly and carefully, in the dark. Although Ethan
noted that Adam looked more confident as he sidestepped dips in the mud and
bypassed bushes that jutted into his path. He was like a pro, like someone who’d
lived here forever, instead of someone who upped and vanished twelve years ago.

They reached the
house and Adam yawned. He took his last painkillers and half stretched, wincing
as he did so.

“You okay?” Ethan
asked, concerned.

“Oh, yeah, I’m
cool. I just can’t stretch the whole way yet, funny how you miss things like
that.”

Ethan locked the
door and waited. “You want me to sleep with you tonight? Or I can take your old
bedroom if you think you’ll be okay.”

Adam didn’t look
like he was considering the question; relief flooded his face. “God, yes, if
you can handle another night.”

Ethan nodded and
held out a hand. “C’mon, then, let’s get some sleep.”

“And no dreaming,”
Adam said to himself.

Yeah, please,
no dreaming.

At some point in
the night, the bed became less about sharing and comfort and more about being
wrapped around Ethan so tight that Adam thought Ethan might complain.

What woke him up
he didn’t know, a pain, maybe, or a dream that wasn’t quite a nightmare. Whatever
it was, when he woke sprawled over Ethan and realized that Ethan was holding
him tight, he extricated himself as gently as possible.

“What’s wrong?”
Ethan mumbled, reaching for Adam, but he wasn’t entirely awake.

Adam wasn’t sure
what to do or say, so he just patted Ethan’s arm and watched as Ethan rolled
over and hugged his pillow. Adam padded out to the kitchen and stretched a
little, stopping just before it hurt. Armed with a glass of water and Ethan’s
phone that had been left on the side table, Adam sat on the sofa and scrolled
to the app for the Internet. Ethan had said it was okay for him to use it, and
there were actually some things he wanted to look up.

“Man. Missing.
Disappeared. Work. Horses.” He spoke the words out loud as he typed them in.
That seemed like a lot of keywords—he huffed as he realized he even knew what a
keyword was.

Fucking broken
brain.

The top search was to a Wikipedia page
entitled “List of People Who Disappeared Mysteriously.” His finger hovered over
the entry, but that was going to be about unexplained people who vanished with
UFOs and stuff like that. Adam didn’t get the feeling he’d been abducted by
aliens; there was a much more earthly reason about where he’d vanished to.

What if he’d been in prison?

Dread gripped him only so long as it took him
to realize that if he’d been in prison, his prints would be in the system and
Ethan would have been able to track down where he’d been.

A couple of articles down was a news item
from a Canadian newspaper. Adam read the title out loud to delay clicking the
link. “Man Missing for 30 Years Solves His Own Disappearance After Suddenly
Remembering Who He Is.”

Thirty years? What if that was it—he made a
life at Crooked Tree and then abruptly recalled he had a whole other life? That
didn’t bear thinking about; he couldn’t start a new life until he’d solved the
existence of the previous one.

He clicked the link and scanned the item.
The guy at the center of it, folks thought he’d gone to Niagara Falls to kill
himself, but he’d hit his head and lost all his memories, then spent thirty
years as another person before abruptly recalling everything from before he was
twenty-one.

How? How can
someone just vanish like that?

“Is that what I did?” he murmured to the
empty room.

Did I try to
commit suicide?

“Adam?”

Ethan’s sleepy voice interrupted the awful
train of thought and surprised Adam so much that the phone flew from his hand
and slid to the floor. He leaned over to pick it up, wincing at the pain in his
chest. “Hey,” he said, standing, the phone clutched in his hand.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Ethan yawned behind his
hand.

“Something woke me up.”

Ethan grunted something and then opened the
fridge door; the light spilled into the darkened room, giving Adam an excellent
view of Ethan in just his jersey shorts.

“Chocolate?” Ethan asked, although from
behind the fridge door, the word sounded muffled.

Adam thought he’d said chocolate, and right
then that seemed like an excellent idea. “Please.”

Ethan pulled out milk, then flicked on the small
under-cupboard light before pulling out chocolate powder and a pack of
something white. “How do you like it?” he asked on another yawn. Then, as if
realizing what he’d just said, he turned to face Adam. His face was illuminated
by the soft light. “Shit, Adam, do you even like hot chocolate?”

Adam smiled at him, at the grave frown on
his face. “I said yes without thinking, so I must do. Right?”

Ethan nodded and started warming milk and
adding powder, bringing over the two mugs and the bag filled with white things
to the sofa. The extra packet turned out to be tiny marshmallows and he placed
it between them.

“You think that works for everything?”
Ethan put a couple of the marshmallows into his chocolate and stirred them with
his spoon, pulling them out every so often to see the texture of them.

Evidently he liked them softened in the
drink, and he spooned them into his mouth after a few seconds. Adam was too
fascinated by the process of learning what Ethan did with the drink to react to
the question, until Ethan looked at him expectantly.

“Sorry, what?”

“You think that works for everything?”

“What? Sorry, I was a million miles away.”

“Instinct, I meant. You said that you said
yes to the chocolate and it just happened.”

“I did.” Adam took his own sip and savored
the taste, picking up a marshmallow and letting it drop in the dark frothy
goodness. “And it’s good.”

“We need to talk.” Ethan said so softly it
was almost a whisper. The only light was the glow from the small lamp in the
kitchen, and the dark invited the sharing of secrets.

“What about?”

“The kiss, about when you were younger,
when I was, about how I feel about Justin and how it’s all wrapped up in you. I
don’t mean to send out mixed messages, and even though my search for my brother
is all-consuming, it’s almost like….”

He stopped and drank some more chocolate,
probably to get his thoughts in order, because so far what he’d said was a
little jumbled.

“Like what?”

“Jesus, you’re going to think I’m fucked in
the head,” Ethan said.

“Nope, it’s me that’s fucked in the head,”
Adam teased. He didn’t like seeing Ethan so stuck for words.

Ethan smiled at him, and Adam knew in that
single moment he’d never seen another man as gorgeous or wanted to kiss another
man so badly. Instinct had him knowing that was true.

“Just, there’s a space inside me that’s all
you.”

Adam heard the words, made sense of them in
his head, and found he had no response that made the emotions inside of him
real. Then, as if everything clicked into place, he knew exactly what he wanted
to say. Only it wasn’t a statement, but a question.

“What if, when I was gone, I waited the
whole time to find you again? What if we were waiting for each other?”

“Maybe that’s true.”

“Tell me about when I was a kid.”

Ethan looked at him steadily. “You were quiet,
all into reading books and writing stories. It was always Justin who got you
into trouble, but I think you and Cole did everything you could to get out of
the house and avoid your dad’s wrath. He was always on at you both.”

Adam’s heart sunk, he didn’t know what he’d
been hoping to hear, but it was probably that his dad had one redeeming quality
to his character. “He really was a bastard, then?”

Ethan looked him right in the eye. “Yes, he
was.”

“How did he die?”

“Liver failure. It
was quick and ripped him apart just like he’d ripped
apart his own family with his drinking.”

“And my mom? You
said she passed away when I was six.”

“Yeah. She left, I
think she’d had enough.”

“But she didn’t
take me and Cole with her?”

Ethan shook his
head. “I wish I could tell you she tried but I don’t know. She died a couple
months after, I don’t recall how.”

Adam wanted to
hate his mom, but how did you hate someone you had no memory of? She had to
live with his dad and that had to have been hard from what Ethan was saying.

 “What about your
dad? Are you close to him?” Adam asked, even though he’d heard them argue and
seen them toe to toe over the fact it was him and not Justin who came home.

Ethan hesitated
before he answered, a flicker of sadness crossing his face. “Not like we used
to be. He was a good dad. I know that as a fundamental fact. He doted on
Justin, but who wouldn’t? Justin was one of those kids, getting into all kinds
of trouble, but always with a grin and the biggest of hearts.”

“That must have
been hard on you. What were you, two or something when your mom died?”

“I don’t really
remember her, or Justin being a baby, or anything changing, just what dad told
me. I do know my dad was always there for me.” He paused and added sadly, “Until
he wasn’t.”

“So, you’re not
close now.”

“No, when Justin
and you… when you first disappeared, we were joined in the need to find you and
he was so strong. But, the shit hit the fan when Dad gave up, when he wanted
Justin pronounced dead and I wasn’t ready to let my brother go.”

“Or me.”

“No, nor you.”

“Thank you for
never giving up,” Adam whispered and leaned over to press a kiss of thanks to
Ethan’s cheek. Ethan turned a little as Adam moved, and the kiss brushed the
corner of Ethan’s mouth.

They froze,
staring at each other. Ethan was the one to break the silence.

“I would never
have stopped looking, I still won’t. Justin is out there, and I will find my
brother.”

Adam backed away,
not sure how to process that statement. A tiny part of him had been hoping that
Ethan would turn to him and say that he didn’t give up because of how he’d felt
about Adam, but of course Justin was the central figure in all of this. And who
could blame Ethan; Justin was his brother, his blood.

Ethan didn’t let
him move too far; he curled his fingers into Adam’s T-shirt and gently tugged
him closer.

“And you,
you were only fifteen. Hell, I was only seventeen
, but we were in love, and I would never
have given up on my first love.”

“First love.”

“Only love, really.
I haven’t let myself….”

Ethan stopped, and
then it appeared that words were not what he wanted to focus on. He took Adam’s
empty mug and placed it next to his on the floor, moving on the sofa right up
close to Adam.

“I want to kiss
you,” he announced as he leaned in. “Is that okay?”

In answer, Adam
bridged the small gap between them and they kissed. Somehow, despite his sore
lip, his swollen eye, and the bruises all over his body, he found a comfortable
position and lost himself in the pleasure of kissing the man. Gently, never too
hard.

They kissed for
the longest time, sighing into one kiss after another, until somehow Ethan maneuvered
them with him lying back on the sofa and Adam sprawled on his chest.

“Is this okay? Are
you in pain?” Ethan whispered between kisses.

Adam hurt all over;
his chest was tight, his left thigh hurt, but he wasn’t moving from that very
spot where his hard cock lay snug next to Ethan’s. “No, just keep kissing me.”

“I want you so
bad.”

Ethan moved a
little under Adam, enough for the delicious friction between them to have Adam
moaning into the next kiss. When Ethan pulled back to ask if he was okay again,
Adam stopped him with another kiss and pressed down against him, swallowing a
moan of his own along with Ethan’s groan.

“I think this is
that sense-memory instinct thing,” Adam said, pressing, sliding and pushing
against the man under him.

“This feels… right.”
Ethan placed a hand on Adam’s ass and held him steady, not enough pressure to
push, but enough to have Adam wishing he’d hold tighter.

But he wouldn’t. Ethan
cared. He held him as if he was precious, and no one had ever done that before.

No. I’m not wondering
why I know that.

Instead he focused
on the orgasm that was teasing him, waiting just out of reach, his limbs loose
and the rush to come overwhelming him.

“Fuck… Adam,”
Ethan groaned.

“Too much,” Adam
whispered, pushing against Ethan and finally cresting, his breath catching as
he came so hard that every muscle in him tensed. Under him, Ethan cursed,
gripped the globes of Adam’s ass, harder this time, and then pushed up with a
muffled groan as he came.

As soon as Ethan
was back in the real world, he cursed an apology and released his hold on Adam.
“Shit, are you okay?”

“Stop asking me.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Ethan, that was
the hottest thing I have ever done,” Adam murmured, closing his eyes as sleep drew
in. “At least I think it is. Now sleep.”

“We should move.”

“No… wanna stay.” Sleep
claimed him fast, and with come in his pants and sprawled over Ethan, this was
exactly where he wanted to stay.

So when he woke in
bed, alone, he thought he had dreamed the whole thing. He groped for Ethan
lying next to him, but Ethan’s side of the bed was cold to touch. Definitely
not in bed. Somehow they must have made it in here but he didn’t recall how.