Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
Please Don’t Do This
Riley
Iwait until Hadley is asleep.
It was planned that way. Not because I'm protecting her from the conversation but because I need to have it without editing myself. Without filtering what I say through the part of my brain that is always aware of small ears and impressionable hearts.
I find Jace in the kitchen. I always seem to find him in the kitchen. That room is the place this house does its real living. He looks up from the counter when I come in with the particular awareness he has of me now.
The kind that started somewhere around the night everything shifted between us and hasn't gone away since.
He knows before I open my mouth.
I can see it in when he sets down whatever he's holding and turns to face me fully, giving me his whole attention the way he does when he understands that what's coming is deserved.
"Riley," he says, and just my name in that tone is already an answer to something I haven't asked yet.
"Don't," I say. My voice comes out steadier than I feel. I guess that is the thing about being a school counselor for long enough that you learn to regulate your external temperature even when your internal one is running dangerously high.
"Don't say my name like you already know what I'm going to say and you've already decided it doesn't change anything."
He doesn't look away. "Okay."
"I don't want you to ride," I tell him. The words land hard. They're not hard to say, but saying them out loud makes the fear underneath them real.
Real in a way I've been trying to keep at arm's length since he told me about the rodeo four days ago.
"I know that's not what you want to hear and I know it's not how you're thinking about this.
I know you have reasons that make sense inside your head.
I just need you to hear me say it before any of that. I don't want you to ride."
Something moves through his expression, carefully and attentive, taking in what I'm saying without immediately countering it.
"I hear you," he says.
"Do you?" I press, stepping closer. I need him to understand that this isn't the practical version of this conversation. It isn't the strategic discussion about risk and reward or the best way to move on Dusty and Colt before the season ends.
"I have spent the last four days watching you prepare for something that puts you directly in the path of two men who have already shown they are willing to hurt people to protect themselves.
I have been holding this in because you needed the space to do what you needed to do, but I can't hold it anymore. "
He is very still across the kitchen.
And I am done being quiet about this.
The thing about loving someone who does dangerous things is that the fear doesn't stay in one place.
"I know what happened to the last man who tried to come forward," I say. Jace told me what Dusty said behind the stock pens. I have not been able to unhear it since. "I know what these people are capable of.
I have watched them sabotage equipment, plant evidence, and send someone to stand outside this house in the dark. And now you want to walk into an arena with both of them? For what, draw them out? Force their hand in a public place and trust that public means safe?"
"Riley—"
"It didn't feel safe at the last rodeo," I continue. My voice cracks slightly on the last word in a way I didn't plan for and can't take back.
"It didn't feel safe when Hadley was standing in the dark with Colt crouched down in front of her and I didn't know what I was running toward.
That was before we knew everything we know now.
Before the evidence disappeared and before we understood what Dusty has been building. What he's willing to do to protect it."
Jace moves toward me and I take a step back. Not because I don't want him close but because if he touches me right now I will lose the thread of this completely and I need to finish it first.
"I need you to hear all of it," I say, holding up a hand that isn't quite steady.
"I need you to understand that this isn't me not trusting you or not believing in what you can do. I'm not trying to control something that isn't mine to control." I tell him while almost holding back tears.
"This is me standing in front of you telling you that I have let you in. That you and Hadley are the two people on this earth I would burn everything else down to keep safe, and the thought of something happening to you in that arena is not something I know how to be rational about."
The kitchen is very quiet.
Jace has stopped moving. He is standing a few feet away with his hands loose at his sides and his eyes on mine.
There is something in his expression that I have not seen there before.
Not the steadiness of the focus or the careful controlled calm he carries like a second skin.
Something underneath all of that. Something open and almost undone, like what I just said reached somewhere the rest of it hasn't.
I let out a breath that shakes slightly at the edges.
"I love you," I say, and the words arrive without warning or ceremony, true and terrifying in equal measure.
"And I need you to know that before you walk into that arena, because if something happens and I never said it then I will never forgive myself for being too careful with it."
The silence after that is the loudest thing I have ever heard.
He crosses the kitchen in three strides.
His hands find my face before I can decide what to do with what I just said.
He tilts it up so I have nowhere to look but at him.
The expression on his face is the most unguarded I have ever seen it.
Stripped of every layer of control, deflection and careful management he usually keeps between himself and anything that could reach him.
"Say it again," he says, quiet and certain.
"Jace—"
"Riley." His thumbs brush along my jaw, gentle and deliberate.
I hold his gaze and I say it again. Steadier this time, because it was true the first time and it's true now.
The only thing that changes when you stop being afraid of something is that it gets to be what it actually is instead of what fear makes it. "I love you."
Something moves through him. The kind of shift that doesn't show on the surface so much as change the whole underlying structure of a thing.
He presses his forehead against mine and stays there for a moment. Both of us breathing in the same space. I feel the weight of everything we've been carrying these past weeks settle differently.
Not lighter exactly but more evenly distributed, like it belongs to both of us now instead of sitting on separate sets of shoulders.
Then he pulls back just enough to look at me. His expression has shifted into something I recognize. I've seen it in the arena. That particular quality of focus that means he's made a decision and everything in him is aligned behind it.
"I have to ride," he says. His voice is low and even and full of the kind of honesty that doesn't dress itself up.
"Not because I'm reckless or because I don't understand what's at stake.
Not because what you just said doesn't matter to me more than anything else in this room right now.
" He pauses, making sure I'm with him. "I have to ride because it's the only play we have left. "
I start to speak and he shakes his head gently, not cutting me off but asking for his moment.
"The evidence is gone," he continues. "Whatever Brooks finds in the financial records, whatever Luke pulls from the circuit data, it's going to take time we don't have.
When Dusty finds out how much we know, he could disappear the same way the evidence did.
He's been doing this for twenty years, Riley.
He knows how to vanish. He knows how to rebuild somewhere else under a different arrangement with different people and leave nothing behind. "
He searches my face. "Dusty doesn't know what I found in those records before they were taken. He doesn't know what I photographed or what Brooks is already working from. He is not aware that we know it's him and not Colt at the center of it."
I am listening to every word, even the ones I don't want to hear.
"The rodeo is the one place he has to be," Jace says.
"Contractors, riders, handlers, the people he's been running this with, they'll all be there, and a man who has spent twenty years in the shadows doesn't know how to not show up to the thing that built him.
That's his blind spot." He looks deep in my eyes.
"That's the only window we have." He pauses.
"And I'm the only one who can open it. I'm the one he's been watching, managing and keeping pointed in the wrong direction.
The last thing he's going to expect is for me to walk into that arena knowing exactly what I know.
I will be ready for whatever he decides to do about it. "
His hands are still holding my face, steady and warm. I feel the logic of it moving through me even as every instinct I have resists it.
"You're using yourself as bait," I say.
"I'm using myself as the one variable he can't account for," he answers. "There's a difference."
I want to argue that distinction but I can't find the clean line between them that would make the argument hold. That might be the most frustrating thing about loving someone who is smarter about certain things than you are.
"And the riding?" I ask. "Is that part of it or is that just Jace McCallister being unable to walk into a rodeo without climbing on a bull?"
Something shifts in his expression. Something that in another moment might almost be a smile. "Little of both," he admits, with the honesty I have come to understand is one of the things I love most about him.
I let out a breath that has been sitting in my chest since he said he had to go.
I haven't won this argument.
I knew before I started it that I wasn't going to.