Chapter 13 Rose
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ROSE
I was doing routine work, the kind of task that required just enough focus to keep my brain from spiraling, when Graham found me in the barn.
“Hey,” Graham said from the stall doorway.
I didn’t look up. “Hey.”
He leaned against the frame. I could feel him watching me the way he’d been watching me for weeks. That steady attention that used to make me feel seen and now just felt like pressure.
“Did you eat?” he asked.
“Not hungry.”
“Rose.”
“I said I’m not hungry.”
I heard the creak of leather as he stepped into the stall and crouched beside me. His hand covered mine, warm, gentle, the same hand that had been tangled in my hair two nights ago while he whispered things against my throat that still made my skin flush when I thought about them.
“Talk to me,” he said quietly.
“About what? The seventy-two thousand dollars? The shell companies? The fact that my accountant just told me half my vendor payments went to businesses that might not exist?” I kept my voice even. “Which part would you like to discuss?”
“Any of it. All of it.” His thumb traced a circle on the back of my hand. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
I looked at him then, and that was my mistake.
Because Graham wasn’t just offering comfort.
He was there, in a way that was impossible to ignore.
Solid and warm and looking at me with those gray-green eyes like I was the only thing in the world worth paying attention to.
And my body, my stupid, traitorous body, responded before my brain could stop it.
I kissed him.
Not softly. Not the tentative, testing kisses of our first night in the lounge.
I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him toward me and kissed him like I was drowning and he was air.
He made a low sound against my mouth, surprise, then heat, and his hand came up to cup my jaw, angling my head, deepening the kiss until I could feel it everywhere.
For about ten seconds, the world went away.
No embezzlement. No insurance crisis. Just Graham’s mouth on mine and his hand in my hair and the solid, grounding weight of a man who made me feel safe in a way I hadn’t felt since I was two years old and too young to know what safe meant.
Then Sandra’s voice echoed in my head. Two of the shell company accounts have already been emptied and closed. The money is gone.
I pulled back.
Graham’s eyes were hazy, his breath uneven. “Rose—”
“I can’t.” I pressed my palm flat against his chest, half holding him there, half pushing him away. I could feel his heart slamming under my hand. “I can’t do this right now.”
“Okay.” His voice was rough, but steady. He didn’t push. Didn’t try to pull me back. Just stayed where he was, one hand still cradling my jaw, waiting.
That was almost worse. If he’d pushed, I could have fought. If he’d been selfish about it, I could have been angry. But Graham just knelt there in my horse’s stall with hay on his jeans and his heart hammering against my palm and gave me space I hadn’t asked for.
“It’s not about you,” I said, and hated how much it sounded like a line.
“I know.”
“It’s about—” I pulled my hand away from his chest and pressed it against my own sternum, where I could feel myself fracturing.
“I don’t have room. In my head. For this and everything else.
And if I let myself feel this, feel you, I’ll fall apart.
And I can’t fall apart right now because there’s no one else to hold this place together. ”
Graham was quiet for a long moment. Then he leaned forward and pressed his lips to my forehead. Soft, brief, the kind of kiss that asked for nothing.
“I’m here,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready. And if you’re never ready, I’m still here.”
He stood. Brushed hay off his knees. And then, instead of walking out, he stopped in the stall doorway and turned back.
“Rose. The Taylor firing.”
His tone made my shoulders tighten. “What about it?”
“Denise was crying one minute and building a case the next. Access logs, timestamps, every system he touched. She had the whole plan ready before the tears were dry.” He paused. “She didn’t need to think about it. She didn’t ask questions or check records. She just had the steps ready.”
I stared at him. “Because she was upset and wanted to help—”
“Aye. That’s one explanation. But Rose—” He chose his words like a man walking across ice he wasn’t sure would hold. “The vendors. The shell companies. Taylor’s name is on all of it, but Taylor didn’t start working here until June. Some of those companies were registered months before he arrived.”
The barn went very quiet.
“What are you saying?” My voice came out flat.
Graham held my eyes. “I’m saying someone set the table before Taylor sat down to eat.”
The implication hit me hard.
“No.” The word was out before I’d finished thinking it. “No. Absolutely not.”
“Rose—”
“Don’t you dare.” I stood up so fast Starlight shifted sideways. “You’ve been here three weeks. You don’t know her. You don’t know what she’s done for me, what she’s been through—”
“I know what I’m seeing, Rose. The timing, the patterns—”
“You’re seeing what you want to see.” My hands were shaking.
Not from the kiss anymore, from something hotter and uglier.
“Denise has been here for five years. She was here when I had nothing. When the ranch was barely surviving. When I couldn’t make payroll and she deferred her own salary for three months so I could keep the lights on. ”
Graham’s expression didn’t change. That careful, steady look that I’d once found comforting and now wanted to shatter.
“People aren’t always what they seem,” he said quietly.
“You’d know something about that. Fraser Kincaid.”
The name landed like a slap. I watched him absorb it, the flinch he almost hid, the way his jaw tightened.
“That’s fair,” he said.
“It’s more than fair. You lied to me about who you are. You brought photographers to my gate and a media circus to my door. And now you want me to believe that the one person who’s been honest with me, someone who didn’t show up under a fake name, is the one I should be afraid of?”
Graham opened his mouth. Closed it. Nodded once, not agreement, just acceptance that this wasn’t a fight he could win. Not today. Not like this.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have—”
“No. You shouldn’t have.”
He walked out of the barn without looking back.
I stood there shaking, my arms wrapped around myself, my lungs refusing to fill properly. Starlight nosed my shoulder, tentative, gentle, the way horses do when they sense you’re about to break.
“I’m fine,” I told her.
I wasn’t fine.
Because the worst part, the part I couldn’t say out loud, couldn’t even think without feeling sick, was that Graham wasn’t wrong.
The insurance explanation had come too fast.
Taylor’s face when I fired him. That wasn’t the face of an architect. It was the face of a man watching someone else’s plan work exactly the way it was supposed to.
You know what you fucking did.
He’d said it to Denise. Not to me. To Denise.
I pressed my hands over my face and stood in the barn and refused to let the thought finish forming.
Because if Graham was right, if Denise was behind this, then the last five years of my life were built on a lie.
And I couldn’t afford to believe that. Not now.
Not when I was already losing everything else.
I went back to my list. The list was long. The list didn’t care about my feelings. The list was safe.
The days after Taylor’s firing blurred together like watercolors left in the rain.
I fed the horses at five. Cleaned stalls by seven.
Answered emails by nine, mostly cancellations now, politely worded paragraphs from people who’d booked Gracen Ranch for the mountains and the quiet and instead heard about photographers camped at the gate.
I wrote professional responses. We understand.
We apologize for the inconvenience. We hope to welcome you in the future.
Each one felt like signing a small death certificate.
Sandra called with depressing updates. The insurance reinstatement was going to cost triple the original premium because of the lapse.
The sheriff’s office had opened a file on Taylor but warned that financial crimes moved slowly, months, not weeks. Two of the shell company accounts had already been emptied and closed. The money was gone.
Graham worked the ranch every day. Fences, water lines, feed runs with Hank. He filmed with Jamie when the light was right, though the videos felt different now. Quieter. Less joy in them. He ate meals in the main house and said the right things.
But the warmth between us had cooled. Not because of the fight.
We hadn’t really fought. Because I was retreating into the only mode I knew how to survive in: head down, handle what’s in front of you.
Intimacy required bandwidth I didn’t have.
Vulnerability required energy I’d already spent.
I was running numbers in my head, calculating how many months of operating costs I had left, trying to find a version of the math that didn’t end in disaster.
He knew. I could see it in his face. The way he watched me, the questions he didn’t ask, the space he gave me that felt less like respect and more like grief.
Hank found me in the tack room on a Thursday afternoon.
“Got a minute?” he asked from the doorway.
“Always.”
He came in and leaned against the workbench. Hank had managed ranches since he was nineteen, and had exactly two modes: quiet competence and quiet concern. This was the second one.
“Ran into Denise at the feed store this morning,” he said.
“Okay.”
“She was talking to Bill Edmond. About you.”
I kept working the bridle. “What about?”