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them would end
up with each other, but since college, it seemed that they were
happier as friends.
    “Five minutes,” Gabe said and elbowed
him.
    Luke elbowed back, and then they did that
stupid brother-grin thing they shared.
    Part of Sam bemoaned that even though he had
a brother; Ben was more likely to stab him than tussle with
him.
    “Seeing as no one else will do it,” Nate
began with a put-upon sigh. “We have a proposal for you.”
    Sam realized Nate was talking to him, and he
sat back in his chair. “Okay?”
    Maybe they wanted him to cater something or
organize a wedding or an event, something in his remit. He wondered
if it was Gabe’s wedding to the gorgeous Ashley, but Gabe wasn’t
jumping in after his brother started, so it couldn’t be that. And
Sam was already working with the couple on the catering,
anyway.
    “We know that without Branches, or more
specifically, the work you do at Branches, we wouldn’t be pulling
in the passing trade, so to speak. The ones who see the leaflets
Jay produces for the family days.”
    Sam narrowed his eyes. Nate sounded an
awfully serious and not one iota teasing or laughing. “Thank you.”
He hesitated as he said that.
    Where is this going?
    “All the families are here.” Nate gestured
around the guys at the table, at himself and the other two Todd
brothers, at Adam, the only Strachan at the table, and at Marcus
and Ethan, the Allens’ representatives. “And we’ve been
talking.”
    Nate cleared his throat again. “Gabe said
you’d been talking about moving to Miami, heading for the sun,
setting up a restaurant down there?”
    Sam glanced at Gabe, who dipped his head.
“That was just us shooting the shit, talking about—Look, why is
that…?” He didn’t even know what he was asking.
    “We don’t want you to go, any of us. So we
voted. We’d like you to have a permanent stake in the ranch, to
become part of the place, so when you work, you see payback, you
get a sense of permanence.” Nate looked at Sam steadily as he said
that.
    “Oh.” Sam was just this side of freaked out
with the way everyone was staring at him.
    “So instead of a salary, you’d profit-share,
like on some kind of bonus scheme or something. I don’t know how,
we didn’t get that far, but hearing you talk about leaving was a
kick up our collective asses.”
    Sam shook his head; it was all way too much
to take in. They were looking for him to agree to a long-term
commitment? He’d already decided, just that day, that he was
staying at Crooked Tree. All his wanderlust thoughts had been wiped
out by going back to see his family. He didn’t need to move to
another state to escape the crap at home; he’d already done that by
coming to Montana, and he loved it here.
    Here at Crooked Tree they liked him, they
even forgave him for his quick and fiery temper, put it down to him
being a chef. But it all sounded wrong. Like he was being rewarded
for something he’d already decided to do, and he wasn’t that much
of a bastard. “I’m not leaving,” he admitted. “I’m happy here. But
I do have something I want to say.” He considered his words
carefully. “I want to buy into Crooked Tree.”
    “The arrangement we all agreed to would be….”
Nate looked down at the papers in front of him and frowned.
    “Not an investment as such,” Gabe finished
for him.
    Sam shook his head. “No, I want to own a part
of it, maybe just Branches, or a percentage of the whole thing,
something like that, but I’d like it to be my stake in the rest of
my life.” Then he stopped, because that was kind of forward, and
God, could he sound any needier? But his grandmother’s insistence
that the family reject was never going to succeed was fire in his
blood.
    Silence.
    Nate’s only comment was physical—he raised
his eyebrow in question, a typical Nate reaction.
    Sam went on. “I have…” an inheritance? It wasn’t exactly that, more like blood money. He cleared his
throat and saw everyone