Free Bound, Branded, & Brazen by Jaci Burton

more than that. Something that couldn’t separate them no matter what.
    She’d walked out on him, had made it clear she wanted no part of his way of life. And yet he knew that they were still bonded. He felt it. So did she, even if she tried to deny it.
    Maybe they always would be.
    And maybe he was just a damn fool.

six
    there wasn’t enough coffee and acetaminophen on earth to obliterate the hangover Valerie had woken up with. But after a shower, nearly half a pot of coffee and some of Lila’s heavy-on-the-carbs breakfast, she decided she might live through the day.
    What an epic idiot she was. Thinking she could down all those beers and shots of whiskey when she normally didn’t even drink was a lesson in stupidity. Even worse, she hadn’t been nearly drunk enough to forget Mason driving her home, or her throwing up on the side of the road, or Mason putting her to bed.
    He’d taken care of her when she’d gotten sick. He’d held her hair and kept her from falling on her face in a sick, drunken stupor. Then he’d tenderly washed her face, driven her home and carried her up to her room. He’d undressed her and pulled the covers over her. She didn’t deserve such treatment after the way she’d unceremoniously dumped him, divorced him and left him. Why couldn’t he be an asshole like so many guys she knew? Most men would have left her in the parking lot of the bar and told her she was on her own.
    Then again, Mason wasn’t most men and never had been. That was one of the reasons she’d fallen in love with him in the first place.
    Jolene and Brea had gone to Tulsa for the morning, which meant she couldn’t avoid her ex-husband, unless she wanted to spend the day hiding in the house. And it was a warm spring day, and she was no coward.
    She slid on a pair of the darkest sunglasses she had, put on her cowboy hat to shield her devastated head from the sun and found Mason out at the cattle pens, roping the calves for branding. She swung over the fence and walked toward him.
    “Hey,” she said, squatting down and ignoring the smell of burning calf flesh as one was branded with the Bar M mark. Branding calves was as much a part of her life as breakfast.
    “Kind of busy here, Val,” he said, holding a branding iron to a squalling calf.
    “I need to talk to you.”
    He let the iron up, and the two hands holding the calf’s legs let go. The calf sprung up and sauntered off, and was let out of the pen and into the pasture, while the next calf was brought in, roped—or wrestled—into lying down.
    “If you’re going to insist on being in my way, put on some gloves and get to work.”
    She sighed, looked around and found a pair of work gloves, then took her place at the front end of a calf, replacing one of the cowboys, who went off to perform another task. She held tight to the calf’s forelegs while Mason applied the brand.
    They worked silently for a while, her, Mason and Bobby, one of the hands. Valerie found the rhythm relaxing. It had been a long time since she’d done any ranch work. She’d always found it enjoyable, a distraction that required a lot of physical effort, but didn’t overtax her mind. And after eight years of having her brain cells filled to bursting with medical school, this was a slice of heaven.
    “Thank you for last night,” she finally slipped in between brandings.
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    His tone was gruff. Probably because he was busy, concentrating on what he was doing.
    “Well I do worry about it. I didn’t set out to get stinking drunk. Or to have you take care of me.”
    His gaze lifted to hers while they waited for Bobby to bring the next calf over. “Someone had to, since you were in no shape to take care of yourself.”
    She leaned back on her heels. “You’re not responsible for me.”
    His gaze was direct. Unnerving. “I’ll always be responsible for you, darlin’. You may have walked out on our marriage, but I never walked out on you.”
    And just like