The Ranchers Son (7 page)

Adam blinked awake.
Ethan was shaking his arm. “Where are we?”

He’d taken all his
meds this morning. They’d knocked him out and, in the fully reclined passenger seat,
he’d slept a dreamless sleep.

“Alexandria,
Minnesota.”

Ethan helped him to
move the seat up, and Adam got his first look at the new state they were in.
Apart from a few more trees in the distance, the highway didn’t look any
different, and the hotel they had stopped at was a carbon copy of the one
they’d just left.

“How long did you
drive?”

“Six hours or so,
stopped halfway at a mall and got you some more clothes, ate shitty barbecue, played
my music really loud, but nothing was shifting you from sleep.”

Adam covered a
wide yawn with his hand. He felt like shit; not so much pain, but confused and
uncomfortable. “I need a shower.”

“I need a shower,
then food.”

Adam looked at
Ethan, but there was no innuendo in his voice and certainly nothing on his face
to show he was about to make a joke about them sharing a shower.

“If you want a
separate room….” Adam deliberately trailed off and let Ethan fill in the
blanks. Again, Adam kept his expression carefully neutral.

“Would you
like
a separate room?”

“I’m not the one
paying for all this.” Adam waved at the hotel. “I’m happy to share.”

This time, Ethan
frowned. “You have money, you know, in frozen accounts. Income from your
portion of the ranch. I can pay, and you can pay me back later.”

Adam filed that
information away, not sure what to do with it. “Okay,” he said, which was all
he could manage, still with the fuzz of sleep clouding his thoughts.

“But like I said,
if you want a place to yourself—”

“No,” Adam said
immediately, “I don’t want to be on my own.”

Compassion
filtered into Ethan’s expression and he nodded. He didn’t jump on that comment,
or analyze it, or make a point of encouraging discussion; he just accepted Adam
at his word.

Their room faced a
stand of trees.

“Seems like the
view is getting better each time,” Ethan said, staring out of the window.

Adam stood next to
him, stretching out tight muscles. “I need a shower,” he said.

“You take the
shower first,” Ethan offered. “I need to check my email and locate the nearest
food outlet.”

“
You’
ve
been driving
. Are
you sure you don’t want to go first?”

Ethan looked at
him and quirked an eyebrow. “Have you smelled you?” he teased.

Adam pressed a
hand to his heart, affecting his most wounded look. “I’ll have you know I smell
of man,” he said, then smiled.

When Ethan smiled
back, something passed between them: recognition, a spark that Adam couldn’t
define.

“I got you this.” Ethan
gave a toiletries bag to Adam. “Now go,” he ordered. “Make yourself pretty.”

And then he picked
up the folder from the desk to look at the details of the hotel inside, and
Adam couldn’t do anything other than go into the bathroom.

He closed the door
behind him, and for a second he rested there. He felt different today, more
relaxed, not like his every single nerve was on fire. His chest still hurt when
he breathed too deeply or when he twisted in a certain way, but he felt better.

He attempted to
center himself, then leaned on the sink and stared at the face in the mirror.

“Okay, I really do
look like shit,” he mumbled to his reflection. He catalogued dark eyes, ignored
the bags under them, examined the tattoos in reverse on his chest, and ignored
the bruising. He could do that—compartmentalize all his pain and exhaustion and
focus on what was important.

 His identity.
Dark hair, nearly black in this light; brown eyes; rough, scarred skin on his
neck; the tattoos climbing his chest and shoulder. He attempted to twist to see
the horse in the mirror, but that just made his chest ache. He could recall
what it looked like and didn’t need to see it again. Stubble was slowly turning
to beard, and that didn’t feel
right
.

Scars on my
neck. No beard. Tattoos all over my torso. I wonder what Ethan sees when he
looks at me?

Actually, Adam could
guess what Ethan saw.

The one who was
alive.

Not his brother,
not Justin. That was who he saw. What Adam had focused on in Ethan’s expression
just then couldn’t be anything but concern. There was nothing else it could be.

Adam was there and
Ethan’s brother wasn’t. Simple as that. Ethan probably hated him under the calm,
supportive exterior.

But Adam didn’t
feel hate. He felt warmth inside him whenever he thought of Ethan. And hell,
wasn’t it Ethan’s name he recalled in the hospital? Not Cole’s or anyone else’s.

He’d looked to
Ethan for help, and Ethan had been there for him ever since.

Adam’s cock thickened, and
it took him by surprise that thinking
about Ethan had this effect on him. Hell, if he could recall what sex was like,
or what he’d done…. All he knew was his body was reacting and instinct took
over.

Staring at his face, he closed his hand
around his cock
and lost
himself in the sensation of connecting to his body again.

Everything seemed
to take forever in this smooth drive to getting off, but Ethan’s voice
interrupted Adam’s focus.

“You okay in
there, Adam?”

“I’m okay.” He
felt the burn of embarrassment and stepped away from the sink, turning on the
shower. The last thing he needed was Ethan walking in on him to check if he was
still alive.

The toiletry bag
held everything he could need to shave, but the effort seemed way too great,
and it hurt just a little bit too much to lift his arms. He settled for pulling
out the shampoo, conditioner and shower gel.

The water was heavy on his back.
As he turned to allow it to press against
his chest, he winced. He quickly turned around so his back was under the water
again; it was the lesser of two evils.

He washed his hair
and put conditioner on it, because that was what he knew to do, a routine from
his past.

I’m the kind of
man who takes care of himself. Someone who conditions his hair.

The shower gel
smelled of lemon, and he washed every inch of himself. His cock made a valiant
rise, but not too far. Even the somewhat erotic thoughts of Ethan were pushed
to one side by the sheer joy of feeling clean. He hummed a little under the
water, then realized he was humming, and in recognizing the fact, completely
lost whatever tune he’d been using.

He rinsed out the
conditioner and turned off the water, toweling his hair and wrapping a towel
around his waist. He should have brought clothes in with him, but that was his
life at the moment, a confusion of barely thought-out shit.

He opened the door
and the steam inside the bathroom billowed into the room.

“Was it good?”
Ethan asked.

He stood and
stepped closer, and abruptly Adam felt uncomfortable at the fresh scrutiny his
traveling companion was giving him.

Adam rubbed a hand
over his stubble, an unconscious gesture of apology that he hadn’t used the
shaving bits and pieces in the kit.

“If you want me to
do that, I can,” Ethan said, his voice a little unsteady.

“What?”

Ethan touched a
hand to Adam’s beard and then dropped his hand as if the touch had burned him.
“Shave you.”

That kind of offer
sounded curiously intimate, and Adam’s cock was well into the idea of a party
now. “I’m okay,” he said.

Ethan smiled at
him. “Beards are in.”

Then he went into
the bathroom and pulled the door shut, leaving Adam standing there wondering what
the fuck had just happened between them.

And also, what the
hell? Beards were in? Had he somehow been transferred back to the seventies?

He crossed to the
bag of clothes Ethan had indicated, and peered inside.
Soft
sweats again
and some T-shirts
. Two fleeces in matching eyeball-burning citrus colors,
and new underwear.

Pulling on the new stuff
and at the last minute recalling he needed
to take off the labels, Adam felt warmer than he had in a while. He sat in the
desk chair, looking out at the trees.

He listened to the
sounds of Ethan’s shower and closed his eyes; the sound of running water was a good
backdrop to attempting his meditation exercises.

Ten… nine…
eight…

He began to count back from ten as he
tensed and released each muscle set. His feet were okay, his calves and thighs fine,
but his knees were a little sore and tight. His ass seemed to be handling
whatever had happened to him, but he was careful when it came to his torso. He
skipped anything there and instead concentrated on his fingers. One at a time,
then the whole hand. Then his other hand. Finally, he relaxed his breathing.

Three… two… one.

He thought of the trees outside the window,
closed his eyes, and focused on the image he had of his own face.

My name is
Adam. Horses. My brother is Cole; he was married. My dad was harsh. Horses. I
work with my hands. Horses.

A vivid image of a field with grass as far
as the eye could see, and horses there, and he was moving, the up-and-down
motion making him think he was riding.

He turned in the saddle, felt the leather
give beneath him, heard the creak of it, and laughed.

“Why are you
laughing?”
the voice said next to him.

He looked left, and in his mind there was
Ethan, smiling at him—a younger Ethan, his hair long around his face, his eyes
bright with excitement.

I want to tell
Justin….

The words were clear in his head:
I want to tell Justin….
What? What was so important that he felt so light inside, and that
he wanted to tell his best friend? “He’ll understand,” his memory reassured
him.

“I love you,” Memory Ethan whispered and
leaned closer in the saddle of his horse.

They kissed. They tasted, and the taste was
sunshine and forever.

Fear carved into the memory: an argument, shouting,
confusion, nothing more than a jumble of words and accusations, and in the real
world, in the here and now, Adam snapped out of the relaxation and thrust
straight into
today
.

For a while he sat quietly. Who had he been
arguing with? Was it Ethan? Or was it Justin? And had Ethan actually said he
loved
him?

And why was this the memory his brain
wanted to throw at him?

“Adam?”

Ethan dropped to the edge of the bed right
next to his chair; there was worry in his voice.

“You told me you loved me,” Adam accused.

“You’ve remembered something?” Ethan’s eyes
widened and he looked expectant, like he wanted more.

“Riding horses, saying I was telling
Justin, and you said you loved me. Ethan?”

Ethan sighed and seemed to curl in on
himself, bowing his head. When he looked up at Adam again, he smiled wryly.

“Why couldn’t you do this easy and just
remember your house or something?”

The doctor who signed Adam out, not Dr.
Armitage,
who was
nowhere to be seen, had explained to them both that the brain was a fickle
thing. The memories could flood back or trickle in like a dying stream. The first
recollection could be riding a bike as a kid or what the patient ate for dinner
the night before they lost their memories.

“Ethan?” Adam prompted.

“I did love you,” Ethan said. He looked
pained, like the words were spoken at great cost to him.

“When?”

“You were only fifteen, I was seventeen.
Young love, is all.”

He spoke with conviction, but his eyes said
different. And he couldn’t quite look at him.

Adam considered the words, not quite
knowing what to make of them. Ethan had loved him, and from the way he’d felt
in the memory recall just now, Adam had loved Ethan back.

“And then you disappeared,” Ethan summarized.

Adam pulled at his lower lip with his
teeth. He didn’t have anything to add at this point.

Ethan continued, “That same week, the last
thing we spoke about was you talking to Justin after he saw us kiss. But he’d
been arguing with Dad, I don’t know if that was before or after you spoke to
him, and then… I never saw you or him again. You remember that day?”