Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
No More Running
Jace
Iget them inside and lock the door and then I stand there with my hand still on the deadbolt, listening to the house settle around us, doing the thing I've been doing all night.
Holding it together.
Because that's the job right now, that's what this moment needs, someone steady at the center of it who isn't going to let the fear show.
The second it shows it becomes real for everyone else in the room. Riley is already holding herself by a thread she's too proud to let anyone see fraying.
So I hold it together.
I check the windows and the back door. I walk the perimeter of the house the way I've done it these past weeks. I find nothing. No one, just the dark and the wind and the marks in the soft ground near the porch that confirm what I already knew.
Someone was here, close enough to touch this house, close enough to know we were inside it.
I come back into the living room and Riley has Hadley settled on the couch with a blanket and a quiet voice. Talking her down from the edge of something the kid barely understands but feels anyway. Hadley has always felt everything first and understood it second.
I watch them for a moment from the doorway, and that's when it hits me.
Not the anger or the frustration of being two steps behind on something I should have seen coming faster.
Not the tactical calculation of what happens next and how I handle it.
Something underneath all of that, something that has been building since the rodeo, the note in the trailer and the sprint across dark ground toward my daughter.
Even since Riley said we, and meant it. Since I stood in this house I built and started understanding why I built it the size I did.
I am not going to lose them.
The thought arrives without permission and lands without apology. Certain in a way that bypasses every wall I have ever built against exactly this kind of certainty. I feel it settle somewhere deep and permanent, the kind of knowing that doesn't ask for confirmation.
I'm not built for halfway. I never was, and I spent a long time pretending otherwise.
Riley gets Hadley down around nine, sitting with her until her breathing evens out and the tension of the night releases the way it only can in sleep.
When she comes back down the hall and finds me in the kitchen with two glasses of sweet tea she doesn't want but is going to drink anyway. She stops at the counter
Watching.
Taking stock.
I slide one mug across the island toward her and she takes it without a word, wrapping both hands around it the way she does when she needs something to hold onto.
We stand there on opposite sides of the island in the quiet of the house with everything that happened tonight still sitting between us.
"She's out," Riley says.
"Good," I answer.
Silence settles again, not uncomfortable, just full, the kind that happens when two people have run out of practical things to say. Neither one of us have decided what to do about everything underneath.
I look at her across the island, this woman who drove back into my life carrying a secret and a daughter and enough composure to make a lesser man feel inadequate.
I feel the thing I've been holding at arm's length since the moment she pulled up to the ranch with Hadley and turned my entire understanding of my own life inside out.
I'm done holding it at arm's length.
"I need to say something," I tell her. My voice comes out steadier than I expect it to, quieter, like the words have been waiting long enough.
She looks up from the glass. Waits.
"I'm not doing this halfway," I say. "I know that's not what we agreed to and I know it's not what you planned for.
I'm not asking you to meet me somewhere you're not ready to be.
" I pause, making sure she's hearing me and not just the words.
"But I need you to know where I'm standing so you're not guessing at it anymore. "
Something shifts in her expression, careful and open at the same time.
"I'm in this, Riley, all of it, you and Hadley and whatever comes next, and I have been for longer than I've let myself admit out loud until right now."
The kitchen is very quiet after that.
She doesn't look away.
She sets the glass down slowly, the soft click of it against the island the only sound in the room.
I watch her work through whatever she's working through, not pushing into it, not filling the silence with anything that would make it easier on either of us.
This moment doesn't need easier, it needs real.
"I know," she says finally.
Two words that land with the weight of everything she hasn't said yet.
"I've known for a while," she continues, her voice quieter now, stripped of the careful control she usually keeps between herself and anything that could matter too much.
"That's the part that scared me. Not you specifically, not the rodeo or the danger or any of the practical reasons I kept lining up. Just the knowing. The way it felt inevitable even when I was working the hardest to make sure it wasn't."
I come around the island slowly, not rushing it, giving her every opportunity to step back if that's what she needs, but she doesn't move, she just watches me close the distance with those steady eyes that have been taking me apart piece by piece since the moment she came back.
I stop close enough that I can see the exact moment her breath changes.
"I'm not asking you to have it all figured out," I tell her, low and even. "I'm not asking you to trust me with everything all at once. I'm not asking you to stop being careful or to pretend the last five years didn't happen the way they did."
"Then what are you asking?" she says, and her voice is barely above a whisper now, not from uncertainty but from the kind of honesty that doesn't need volume behind it.
"Just this," I answer, and I reach up and tuck a strand of hair back from her face, slow and deliberate. My hand settling against her jaw the way it's been wanting to all night. "Just right here, just us, just whatever this actually is without either one of us running from it."
She exhales, something releasing in her that she's been holding for a long time.
Her hand comes up and covers mine where it rests against her face, not pulling it away, just holding it there. The warmth of that small intentional gesture does something to me that no words have managed to do yet.
It feels like an answer.
It feels like the only one that matters.
She kisses me first.
Not tentative, not testing, but certain in the way Riley does everything once she's made up her mind. Her hand sliding from mine to my jaw, and the contact hits like something that has been building pressure for weeks finally finding the release it was always moving toward.
I pull her in without hesitating, one hand at her waist and one still against her face.
The kiss deepens before either of us chooses it to. The way it does when two people have been holding something back long enough that restraint stops being an option.
She makes a small sound against my mouth that undoes something in me completely.
I walk her back slowly until her shoulders meet the kitchen wall.
Not urgent, not rushed, just deliberate, taking my time with it the way I've wanted to since long before I had the right to.
She goes with it, her hands finding the front of my shirt curling into the fabric like she needs something to hold onto while the ground shifts under everything she thought she knew.
I pull back just far enough to look at her, to make sure we're in the same place.
What I find on her face is not uncertainty or hesitation but something open and unguarded that she doesn't show easily and has never shown me until right now.
"Jace," she says, just my name, but the way she says it carries everything.
"I've got you," I answer, and I mean every layer of it, tonight and tomorrow and whatever comes after, all of it. The whole weight of everything around us.
I take her hand and lead her down the hall, past Hadley's closed door where the quiet of her sleep holds steady.
We walk into my room. When the door closes behind us the house settles into a different kind of quiet, the kind that happens when something that has been unresolved for too long finally finds its answer.
She turns to face me in the low light, her eyes clear and certain, and reaches for the hem of my shirt.
I let her as she pulls it over my head. No buttons bothered with.
I take my time with her.
That was always going to be how this went, because Riley Grant is not a woman you rush. Not a woman you treat like something to get through to the other side. I have wanted this long enough that hurrying feels like a waste of something I intend to remember clearly.
I find the hem of her shirt, she lifts her arms without being asked, and I take it slow, My hands are trailing up her sides as the fabric goes, feeling the way she reacts to the contact, the small catch in her breathing that she doesn't try to hide the way she would have a week ago.
She is naked underneath the long sleep shirt.
She's not hiding anything tonight. She is ready and wet. She wants this.
That might be the thing that gets me most. Suddenly I'm hard and rubbing against her, she takes my breath away. My clothes piled on the floor.
I lay her back against the pillows and take my time working my way down. My mouth finding the curve of her throat, the line of her collarbone, the rise of her chest as I move over her nipples, now hard as she arches when I take it into my mouth.
I keep moving lower, learning the geography of her with the patience of someone who has been given something worth paying attention to, and she lets me.
Her fingers threading into my hair, her body arching into the contact in a way that tells me everything I need to know about what she wants without her having to say a word.
Though she does say words, quiet ones, my name and please and a soft broken sound when my mouth finds all the places that makes her forget about being composed. I file every single one of them away like they're something I'm going to need to find my way back to.
I work my way down with my mouth. Stopping at her breasts again as I kiss and tease the nipples with my tongue one by one. I move down further this time.
Spread her legs gently. I can see just how wet she is. I insert two fingers, my thumb on her clit making small rotations.
She lets out a moan, squirms and arches into it. "Jace" she says softly. I watch her with her eyes closed. Her breathing is getting faster, she is unguarded and walls have come down. I can see the pleasure on her face. "I'm going to..." she trails off. I tell her to let it go.
Her body convulses with pleasure. I hold her arms to help her through it. Her body finally relaxes.
I slowly move over her, kissing and touching all the way back up. Her nipples still extremely hard. She's ready again. She's pulling me in.
When I finally settle over her and she pulls me down. Her legs wrap around me. The breath that leaves her is the most honest sound I've ever heard from her, open and unguarded and entirely without the careful distance she keeps between herself and anything that could reach her.
I move slowly at first, watching her face while I move in and out.
I stay in contact with her eyes when she lets me.
What I find there makes my chest tighten in a way that has nothing to do with want.
It has everything to do with the understanding that this is not just bodies finding each other in the dark.
This is two people who have been circling something true, finally deciding to stand still inside it.
She pulls me closer as I release. The orgasm falling over me like a wave.
For a long time after that neither of us says anything at all.
There isn't anything left that needs saying.
We just try to get our breathing back to normal as we lay tangled in each other.
Her head on my chest, her dark hair messy but spread across me.
Afterward the house holds us in the kind of quiet that doesn't ask anything of you. Riley tucked against my side with her breathing slow and even now. Her hand resting flat against my chest like she fell asleep measuring my heartbeat and didn't notice when she stopped counting.
I should sleep. I just can’t. My thoughts won’t let me.
My mind does the thing it does when something is unresolved, turning it over and over the way you turn a stone in your hand, feeling for the edge that doesn't fit. The place where the shape of it doesn't match what it should be.
The person outside the house tonight wasn't trying to hide.
That's the part that keeps nagging.
Every other move Colt has made has been careful, calibrated, designed to look like something else until you get close enough to see the intention underneath it.
The sabotage at the rodeo looked like equipment failure. The note in the trailer could have been anyone. Even Hadley, what happened with Hadley at the rodeo, was engineered to look like a lost child and nothing more.
So why send someone to stand outside my house and make enough noise to be heard?
I stare at the ceiling and let the pieces move the way they've been moving all night, and somewhere around the time the moon shifts past the window and the shadows in the room change angle, it lands.
This was not a warning. It was a distraction.
Someone wanted us awake and reactive and focused on the house, focused inward, focused on each other, while something else happened somewhere we weren't looking.
My stomach drops. Our land. They are distracting me from our land.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand, careful not to wake Riley, and pull up the trail camera app I installed on the property a few weeks ago after the first round of sabotage, the one I set up and mostly forgot about because nothing had triggered it.
Three alerts within the last ninety minutes
I sit up slowly, angling the screen away from Riley's sleeping face, and open the first image, then the second, then the third. Then what I find looking back at me from the grainy night-vision footage turns everything I thought I understood about this situation completely inside out.
Because it isn't Colt in those images.
It's someone I trusted.
And now I know this was never just about the land.
It was about setting me up to take the fall for all of it.