Page 56 of Pretty Little Scars

I scowl. Where’s theI love you and I can’t live without you and if you say no, you’ll tear my heart out of my chest and set it on fire?

Even Harper’s nose wrinkles as if she just tasted something disgusting.

“Yes, of course.”

Wait, what?

Chad, with a pleased grin on his stupid face, slips the ring on Ava’s finger and then leans in to press his lips to hers in a chaste kiss that has me wanting to punch him in the nuts.

This idiot didnotdiscuss this with our father, he didn’t say one thing about love in his ridiculous little speech, and then when she said yes, he gave her a peck on the mouth.

Not that I want to ever witness my sister having her face chewed off by some dude, but come on.

She just agreed to marry him, not pick up his fucking dry cleaning.

“Um, congratulations,” Harper says, still frowning. “I didn’t realize you’d talked about marriage.”

“Well, we really haven’t,” Ava says, looking as surprised as the rest of us. Her eyes are pinned to Chad, who’s gone back toeating his dinner, as if he just told Ava they needed to get gas on the way home.

She glances down at the rock on her finger. It’s ... big. That’s all I really know about diamonds. But I can see by the way her brows pinch together that the way this entire fucked-up thing went down isnothow she envisioned it when she was a little girl.

And my sister deserves the fucking world.

I glance over at Easton, and he’s already looking at me. He gives a little nod.

We need to have a conversation with Chad.

But I won’t do anything to upset Ava, so we’ll choose another moment for our little heart-to-heart.

“You gota whole big-ass truck of dirt delivered,” Scott says the next day, as we watch a vehicle that’s not quite the size of a dump truck pull down the driveway, the bed full of soil for the planters.

It’s good timing because we just finished setting the last one in place.

“You’re observant,” I reply, sounding short even to my own ears.

I can’t help it.

Darby still hasn’t come home, and it’s been almost two days that she’s been gone. She texted me this morning to tell me that they should be able to wrap it up today, but she has no idea when.

It’s not that Ineedher here for anything ranch related. All the animals are healthy.

It’s that I haven’t had my eyes, not to mention my hands, on her in the better part of forty-eight hours, and I’m losing my fucking mind because I don’t know for sure that she’s okay.Shehasto be exhausted. I’m sure they’ve brought food in, but I would have had food delivered without hesitation.

I’ve had her here on my property for such a short time, and yet, she belongs here. With me. It’s not the same without her here, and I don’t know what that means for the future, if she decides to move on.

She’d better not fucking move on.

I flag the truck driver over to the greenhouse area, and we all grab shovels and get to work. It’s not easy to carry tons of dirt, but it’s an excellent workout. And by the time the beds are all overflowing—the dirt will settle—each of us is a sweaty mess.

“Let’s call it a day,” I say to my guys. They all came to help me today, rather than working around the ranch, and I’m grateful. What started as a project that I would have sworn would take half a day, turned into most of the day because I added a seventh box.

The only thing left to do tomorrow is add the wildlife fence around the whole thing so the deer don’t eat the produce.

We all go our separate ways. The guys head home, and I go inside, take my boots off on the back porch, then walk through the kitchen and straight up to the bathroom. After stripping down and tossing my filthy clothes into the hamper, I turn on the shower, and while the water heats, I check my phone for the fortieth time today and feel my stomach jump when I see that I have message from my Duchess that came in about an hour ago, likely when the truck was running loudly in my ear.

Duchess: We’re wrapping up here in the next few hours. I hope. Definitely this evening. I don’t know if you wanted to know that, I just thought I’d give you a heads-up.

She doesn’t know if I want to know?