Gina, on the other hand, always stayed close. When my parents took off on their RV trip, Gina begged Wes to let her take over Granny’s kitchen garden. By the time she graduated from high school, she’d fallen in love with growing things. We had to strong-arm her into going to college, but she insisted on the closest agricultural studies program she could find. As soon as she got out, she took over running the Hobart farm until convincing us in 1990 to let her go organic. Wes sat me down and proposed gifting her the farm.
“She’s ready, Doc,” he said.
“I just worry about her finding a partner. She throws herself into work so much, she doesn’t have a life.”
His eyes went soft, and he reached for my hand across the kitchen table. “She’s in love with Carmen Segura.”
I stared at him, picturing the young homeless woman I’d hired six months before to clean the office. She’d been kicked out of her house for being gay as soon as she’d turned eighteen. One of my nurses had heard about her predicament and asked me to help her. We’d put her up in the apartment over the practice. “My Carmen?”
Wes lifted a dark eyebrow at me. He was so fucking handsome, I couldn’t stop staring at him even after twenty years of seeing his face. “Your Carmen? You have some news for me, sweetheart?”
“Shut up, you know what I mean. Is it reciprocated?”
He nodded. “At least I think so. I stopped by Gina’s place two days ago to drop off some mail that had come here by mistake and Carmen’s bicycle was propped against the house. It was seven in the morning.”
My jaw was hanging open. Wes’s finger lifted up, and then he leaned over to kiss me on the lips. “Brenda gets her dramatics from you. You know that, right?” I swatted him away.
“Did we know Gina was gay?” I cried. “How did we not know one of our children was gay? Jesus fucking Christ, Wes. She’s gay? Wait. Maybe she just spent the night as a friend.”
I thought of all the nights I’d spent in that foreman’s house “as a friend.” Wes must have been thinking the exact same thing because his eyes twinkled at me before he bounced his eyebrows seductively.
“God, you’re so smug,” I said. “And for your information, Betsy was plenty dramatic.”
“She was. But you gotta admit, you Wildes sure are easy to turn gay.”
I couldn’t help but bark out a laugh. “Stop. It’s not funny. Should we talk to her?”
“About lesbian sex? Give her the birds and birds talk?”
Weston Wilde made me laugh every single day. I loved him so damned much. “Yeah, maybe. Don’t you think? I mean, we need to at least…”
“Force her to come out to her parents?”
“Argh!” I dropped my face in my hands. “You’re such a know-it-all.”
Wes’s thick fingers brushed through my hair. “You’re adorably naive, sweetheart. Gina had a girlfriend in college. I also caught her kissing Taffy Yarborough behind the bleachers during a high school football game.”
Okay, maybe he was right about the dramatics because I gasped. Loudly. “Are you kidding me? Why wouldn’t you have told me? I feel like I’m looking at a stranger right now.”
Wes reached for me, tugging me out of my seat and onto his lap. I straddled him and leaned my head on his muscular shoulder. His arms circled me and held me tight. I loved having my very own cowboy.
“Liam, honey, you would have wanted to confront her about it and make it a thing. You would have gotten in her face with aggressive acceptance and labeling, when she really needs to manage her sexuality on her own time and in her own way.”
I hated him knowing me so well.
“I never should have gotten together with you,” I muttered. “Nothing but a pain in the ass.”
His hand came down to run a strong finger down the seam of my pants, reminding me of the pounding I’d taken up against the shower wall that morning. “You want me to distract you with some more ass pain?”
“No.” Yes.
His laughter rumbled against my face, and his hands began kneading my butt possessively.
“We were talking about Gina,” I reminded him. “And her girlfriend.”
“Actually, we were talking about the farm.”
“Yeah, fine. Whatever. I don’t care about the farm. I care about our baby.”
“She’s twenty-two.”
I sighed. “At least we still have Jackie at home for one more year. Then we’ll have an empty nest.”
“Unless your mom and dad come back to live with us in the main house,” Wes suggested in a teasing voice. “Anyway, I think it’s highly likely Jackie will stick around after high school considering she’s refusing to apply to college.”
But she didn’t. The day after her high school graduation the following year, she hopped a bus to LA with the money she’d been saving up from all that babysitting and decided she was going to become the next big Hollywood star. She got pregnant within the year and had our sweet Felix, rebuffing all our efforts to help until finally allowing us to bring him home to the ranch when he was nine and raise him as our own.