Page 1 of Forget That Guy
PROLOGUE
Nothing is ever too much information. To me, TMI means “tell me immediately.”
—Denver’s secret thoughts
DENVER
“You never listen!” Juliana threw up her hands in defeat.
“What do you want me to do about your problems, Juliana?” I asked her. “I work all day. Literally from five in the morning—if not earlier—until at least six thirty at night. Every single day. It’s not like I can just take a day off to go do fun things when we have literal living things that depend on us for survival.”
Juliana narrowed her eyes. “We could go hang out with the club!”
“We do,” I pointed out. “All the fuckin’ time. When I have time.”
“What about hiring extra hands?”
I sighed. “I do that, too. But I can’t just sit in the house and hang out with you while I have people out there doing all the work. Plus, most of them don’t have the first fuckin’ clue whatto do. They need guidance. I can offer that. Why don’t you come hang out with us?”
That caused her to snort. “Yeah, like I want to do that.”
Juliana and I had married almost fifteen years ago. When we’d met, I was in the Air Force. I got to go to all these places and see all the things.
But then my dad had died, and Sawyer had told me, rather succinctly, that he would rather cut off his own nuts than work the farm.
I didn’t blame him.
Farm life had never really been something he’d been interested in. Would he help Dad and me? Sure, of course he would. But he never got the thrill of excitement of it. He never liked waking up at the ass crack of dawn and making sure the cattle were fed and the fences were secure. And they weren’t all out having babies in the middle of a damn blizzard and stranding them somewhere in a snowdrift.
His son, Boone, had loved it. But he was on a different path in life.
So, I’d gone home.
Juliana had come with me, and we’d started having babies.
But she’d never acquired a liking to the life.
She hadn’t wanted to get a job, either.
She loved being a stay-at-home mom—even if she did fuckin’ suck at the stay-at-home mom part.
Hell, I got more kid time than she did before they were in school.
From sunup to sundown, I had at least one of the kids with me, if not all three.
All three of my babies loved the ranch life just like I did, but it was my oldest, Joe, who really got the most joy out of it.
Catalina and DeeDee loved it, but I had a feeling that they wouldn’t be spending their lives out here unless they found a husband that wanted to join that life with them.
“Are you even listening to me?”
I gritted my teeth and turned to my wife.
“What is it, exactly, that you want to do?” I asked. “Do you want to go on a vacation? I can swing that maybe for a week right before we have to start harvesting the hay for fall.”
Her eyes blazed. “That’s not going to work. I want to go to the Caribbean. Then I want to go to Italy. I can’t make both of those work for a week. It’ll take a whole day just to fly to Italy.”
I scrubbed at my face, only belatedly realizing that I still had my gloves on.
