Every Long Way Home: A Christian Cowboy Romance (The McCord Brothers Book 5)

He has spent his life leaving before anything could matter. She has spent hers pretending she has no reason to stay.

Eli McCord has driven through forty-one states and put down roots in none of them.

He travels light, keeps quiet, and never stays anywhere past Tuesday. After six years of being the empty chair at his family’s table, he has learned that leaving first is easier than having something worth losing.

So when he takes a job on a small Oregon cattle outfit for the fall gather, Eli already knows how this ends.

He’ll work hard. Keep to himself. And be three states gone by spring.

Then there is Maya Sutton.

She came home eight months ago to help her father and refuses to admit she came home to stay. She has a spreadsheet for the rotation, a binder for everything else, and no patience for the hired man who says nine words at breakfast and somehow does the work of three.

Eli doesn’t seem interested in winning her over.

Maya isn’t sure why she keeps noticing him anyway.

Maybe it’s the way he handles a soured bay gelding that everyone else has written off. Maybe it’s the ranch dog who bites everyone but lies down across Eli’s boots. Or maybe it’s the quiet way a man who has spent his whole life leaving begins, little by little, to become part of the place.

But there is trouble waiting beyond the ranch fence.

A vineyard company is quietly poisoning the grass and buying the wreckage cheap. Winter is coming. And Maya’s father, whose bad heart needs more help than anyone in the house will admit, is another reason she cannot simply walk away.

For Eli, this place is supposed to be temporary.

For Maya, home is something she refuses to name.

But somewhere between the fall gather, the horses, the long days, and the things neither of them is willing to say, leaving becomes harder—and staying begins to mean something neither of them expected.

Because sometimes the hardest part isn’t finding someone to love.

It’s believing you are worth staying for.

Every Long Way Homeis the final book in the McCord Brothers—a clean, Christ-centered romance about the last son, the long road home, and the family that never once turned off the porch light.