26. Gianna
— ? —
Gianna
We’re back at the manor, temporarily.
I’d said it without thinking, standing on the back porch with coffee gone cold in my hands.
That I missed the slow loops around the ranch.
The ones we used to take before Alex, when the land still felt like it belonged to both of us and not just to the quieter, careful version of the life we’d been living since.
By late afternoon there was a carriage in the drive.
Orion had it hitched to Clementine, my mare, the bay who always found me at the fence whether I had sugar or not.
The carriage was small and open, dark wood and old leather, the kind of thing that looked like it had been waiting in someone else’s barn for a prettier century.
He’d put a quilt on the seat and a thermos.
That particular look on his face like he was prepared to be told he’d done too much.
“You bought a carriage.”
“I borrowed a carriage,” he said, almost sheepish. “From the McCreadys. Then I bought it when they tried to give it back. You said you missed going around the property. I wasn’t putting you in a saddle for two hours if what you wanted was the long way.”
Something in my throat went tight.
“She’s yours,” he added, nodding at Clementine. “Seemed right she do the work.”
I crossed the gravel in my boots and put my hand on the mare’s neck. She blew warm air against my wrist. Orion watched me the way he watched weather, quiet, waiting to see what I’d do with it.
“You remembered that too,” I said.
“I’m trying to remember all of it.” He offered his hand to help me up. “No pressure. No figuring anything out. Just the ranch. If you want to turn around at the first gate, we turn around.”
I took his hand.
The manor fell away behind us. Clementine’s hooves made a soft, even sound on the packed dirt, harness jingling whenever she shook her head at a fly.
Late light laid gold across the pasture, the mesquite, the far fence line I’d walked a hundred times.
It looked different from a carriage, slower.
Like the land had been waiting for us to come back to it at this pace.
Orion drove with one hand on the reins and the other on his thigh, close enough that I could have covered it if I wanted.
He didn’t reach. He hadn’t reached first since the dance hall.
Since the truck. He let me decide the distance now, and the fact of that still undid me more than any grand gesture.
“I used to do this with my grandfather,” he said after a while. “Not a carriage. A wagon, mostly. He’d talk the whole way and I thought I wasn’t listening. Turns out I was. Turns out that’s how you learn a place. You go around it until it stops being scenery.”
“Is that what this is? A lesson?”
“No.” His mouth tipped. “This is me hoping you’ll let me take you somewhere I should’ve taken you years ago. The lesson’s just a bonus.”
I found myself smiling. The anxiety that usually lived under my ribs when we were alone had gone quiet. Clementine walked on.
We talked the way we had in the dance hall booth.
Small things. The dog that still wasn’t allowed on the good sofa and still ended up there.
The way Alex had started grabbing for Orion’s hat.
The first freeze due in a few weeks and whether we’d get the north fence finished.
Nothing that required a verdict on our marriage. Just the threads.
At the ridge above the creek he drew Clementine up and set the brake.
The manor was a pale shape in the distance. Our whole life, small enough to hold in one look.
“This is what I missed,” I said. “Not the view. This. Being out here with you and not feeling like I had to earn the quiet.”
He turned on the seat to face me. The sun caught the dust on his shirt, the worn place on his belt. He looked like the land had made him on purpose.
“You never had to earn it,” he said. “I just made you feel like you did. That’s on me. All of it.”
I leaned in and kissed him.
Then his breath left him and his hand came up to my jaw, careful, and I made a sound I hadn’t meant to make. The carriage creaked. Clementine shifted her weight and the whole frame rocked, and Orion’s other hand found my waist like he was steadying us both.
“Gianna.”
“I know where we are.” I kissed the corner of his mouth, then the other. “I know it’s open. I don’t care.”
“Someone could come up the service road.”
“Then they’ll get an education.”
A rough laugh against my lips. Then he was pulling me across the leather seat and into his lap, my dress rucking up around my thighs, his hat knocked back off his head into the footwell.
His mouth opened under mine, hungry now, the patience he’d worn all afternoon finally thinning.
His hands stayed at my hips, thumbs stroking the crease where fabric met skin, like he still couldn’t quite believe he was allowed.
“You feel like every evening I wasted in that office,” he murmured into my throat.
“Every night I came in late and looked at you sleeping and told myself tomorrow. I’ve been thinking about this since you got up on this seat.
About the way you look in this dress with the ranch behind you.
About putting my hands under it and finding out if you missed this as bad as I did. ”
“I missed it.” I rolled my hips once, felt him hard through his jeans, and his head dropped to my shoulder. “I missed you like this. Not careful in a kitchen. Not asking me from across a room. Out here. Where we started after marriage.”
“We started in a barn, if I remember right.”
“Then take me there after.” I found his belt. “I want this first.”
He caught my wrist to make me look at him.
“If anything pulls, your scar, your back, anything at all, you tell me. Carriage isn’t a bed. It moves. I will not be the reason you hurt.”
“I’m cleared. I’ve been cleared. You were there for that appointment too.” I turned my hand in his and kissed his palm, the calluses, the place that always smelled like leather. “I’m not made of glass, Orion. I’m your wife. Act like it.”
Something in his expression went dark and fond at the same time.
He unbuckled. I rose up on my knees on the seat, awkward, laughing once when Clementine stamped and the whole carriage lurched.
He steadied me with a hand at my waist, the other shoving my underwear aside, and then I was sinking down onto him in the open air with the creek below us and the wind in the grass and his forehead pressed to mine like prayer.
We both went still.
“Christ.” His voice had gone wrecked already. “That’s… Gianna. You take me like you were built for this ranch. For me. Warm and sure and still a little mad at me, and I can feel all of it.”
“Move,” I whispered.
He did. Slow, because the carriage would give us away if he didn’t, because Clementine would start walking if the frame rocked too hard.
Tiny lifts of his hips, my dress pooled around us, the indecency of being fully covered from the road and joined underneath it making my pulse trip.
His mouth found the neckline of my dress, kissed the swell of my breast through the fabric, then tugged it down enough to get his mouth on my skin.
“Prettier. You had my son. You wear this land on you now and you don’t even know it. I’ve never wanted anyone in a carriage in my life until you sat down next to me like you belonged on this seat.”
I tried to take him deeper and his hands clamped on my hips, holding the pace.
“Easy.” A breath. A kiss at the corner of my mouth. “She’ll walk. And I am not finishing in an open carriage where the McCready boys cut through to the south tank.”
“Then stop talking and get us off this ridge.”
He laughed, broken, and it vibrated through both of us.
For a few more strokes he didn’t stop. He couldn’t.
I felt him shaking with the effort of it, praising me.
Then he lifted me off him with a groan that sounded like it cost him, set me back on the seat, and fumbled the reins with hands that weren’t steady.
“Barn,” he said. “Now. I’m not doing the rest of this where the hawks get a show.”
He didn’t bother fixing his belt all the way. I didn’t bother fixing my dress. Clementine, unimpressed, took us down the ridge at a trot that made me grip the rail and made him swear under his breath every time the carriage hit a rut.
The barn was already in shadow when we reached it.
He was out before the wheels fully stopped, unhitching with the fast, practiced motions of a man who could do it asleep, leading Clementine into her stall, sliding the latch.
I stood in the aisle on unsteady legs, dress wrinkled, mouth swollen, and when he turned around the look he gave me nearly put me on the ground.
“Come here.”
I went.
He backed me into the empty stall beside hers. Fresh shavings, a horse blanket already thrown over a hay bale like he’d hoped, or planned, or both. The door swung shut behind us. Leather and sweet feed and dust. Late light striped through the gaps in the boards.
This time he didn’t hover.
He kissed me like the ridge had only been the start, hauled my dress up and off, and went to his knees in the shavings without being asked. His mouth found the scar first, open and reverent, then the stretch marks on my hips, my belly, the silver lines I’d stopped looking at in the manor mirrors.
“These are my favorite things you own,” he said against my skin.
“Don’t cover them. Don’t you dare. You grew a whole person in this body and then you let me back into it.
I don’t have a word good enough for that.
Beautiful doesn’t cover it. I just keep saying it because the other words would scare you. ”
“Orion…”
“Let me.” He hooked my leg over his shoulder, still in his jeans, boots planted in the shavings, and put his mouth on me the way he hadn’t had room for in the truck.
Slow, thorough. A rancher’s patience turned into something filthy and devoted.
“I’ve wanted you on my tongue since I watched you climb into that carriage. ”
I had to clap a hand over my mouth. Clementine snorted in the next stall.
He didn’t stop. Two fingers, then the flat of his tongue, then the focused pressure that made my standing leg buckle.
He held me up with one arm around my hips and kept going until I came with his name crushed behind my teeth, shaking apart in a horse stall like we were twenty and stupid and not parents with a babysitter up at the house.
He rose, wiping his mouth on his wrist, and I dragged him in by the open belt.
“In me,” I said. “Properly. Not like the carriage. I want your weight. I want to feel you.”
“You sure?”
“If you ask me that again I’m going to take it as an insult.”
His smile was wrecked. He got his jeans down just far enough, lifted me, and laid me back on the blanket over the bale.
The hay poked through. I didn’t care. He pushed into me in one slow, deep slide that punched the air out of both of us, and then he was over me, braced on his forearms, the stall close and dim and ours.
“There you are,” he breathed. “That’s my wife. And I am going to take care of you this time. I swear it. On this barn. On that boy up at the house. On every fence I ever built.”
He moved.
Not the tiny, terrified rhythm of the truck.
He’d learned. He gave me the depth I’d asked for then, the sure roll of his hips, the kind of pace that made the bale creak and my hands fist in his shirt.
His mouth never stayed in one place. My mouth, my throat, the underside of my jaw.
He talked the whole time like he couldn’t keep it in.
“You’re so good like this. Letting me have you in the dirt and the hay like we never got fancy.
I love the way you grab at me. I love that you still want me after I gave you every reason not to.
You’re the bravest thing on this ranch, Gianna.
You walked back toward a man who didn’t deserve the walking. ”
“Harder,” I gasped, because I could, because he’d proven in the truck that he would listen when I said it. “I can take it. I want to feel it tomorrow.”
He made a sound like he’d been waiting for permission and then he gave it to me, deeper. The wet, filthy rhythm of it loud in the stall. One hand slid under my hips to change the angle, and I cried out, and he kissed the sound out of my mouth.
“That’s it. Take it. You asked and I’m not going to pretend I don’t want to give it to you. Come on, sweetheart. Let me feel you. Let me know I still get to have this.”
I broke with my face turned into his neck, pulsing around him so hard he cursed, low and reverent, and followed me over with his whole body shaking, spilling into me in long, helpless waves, his mouth open against my hair.
We stayed like that.
Clementine nosed the shared wall. His heartbeat hammered against my chest, gradually slowing. He eased out of me like he hated to, pulled the edge of the blanket over my hips, and gathered me into the uninjured, unhurried hold of a man who had nowhere else to be.
His fingers traced idle patterns on my back. Over the scar. Over the marks he’d kissed.
“I forgot what this felt like,” I said into his shirt. “Being wanted like this. Being seen.”
“You were always wanted.” His voice was hoarse. “I was just too proud and too busy to do anything useful with it.”
“Don’t be stupid anymore.”
“I’m trying.” He kissed my hair. “Every morning I get it wrong a little less. That’s the job now.”
I smiled against his chest. Hay in my hair, his belt still half undone. The manor waiting up the hill with our son and the rest of our life.
“For the record,” I said, “the carriage was a good idea.”
“Just good?”
“I’m not inflating your ego. You already bought a whole vehicle because I missed a dirt road.”
“Had an ego,” he corrected, and I felt him smile. “Past tense. You and a horse stall have taken care of it.”
His arms tightened.
“I love you,” he said, quiet, like a vow laid down in shavings and sweat and late light. Just the truth, set where I could pick it up when I was ready.
I didn’t say it back. Not yet. I wasn’t ready to spend those words.
But I turned my face and kissed the underside of his jaw, and I didn’t look away from what he was offering, and that was its own kind of answer.
We lay there until the light in the aisle went blue.
Then he helped me back into my dress, picked his hat out of the carriage footwell, and walked me home along the fence line with Clementine’s day’s work done and my hand in his, two people who’d almost lost the ranch and each other, choosing the long way back.