Chapter 6
BELLA
I'd been awake since three. I'd spent the night turning the kiss over in my head from every angle, the way I'd evaluate a photograph in the dark hours after a shoot. The composition. The light. What it would look like printed. Whether it would hold up.
That kiss held up.
At five thirty, someone knocked on my door. It could only be Jace. I pulled a robe around my shoulders and opened the door to find Jace standing on the landing in a flannel shirt I hadn't seen before. He hadn't slept either. I could see it around his eyes.
"Get your camera," he said. "I want to show you something."
"Now?"
"Yeah. The light won't last." He didn't say anything else, just turned and went back down the stairs and I stood there for a second with my hand on the door frame, doing the math on whether this — the man knocking on my door at five thirty after kissing me in his barn the night before — was a continuation or a reversal.
I pulled on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeve t-shirt then reached for my camera. Whatever it was, I wanted to be part of it.
He was waiting in the barn with two horses already saddled, the bay mare named Rosalee, and Cutter, who hadn’t stopped tracking me since the morning he'd quit spooking at my shadow.
"Have you ridden before?"
"Some." I let him lift me onto Rosalee without arguing the point. The last horse I'd been on belonged to a friend in Bozeman two summers ago, and before that it had been camp. Both counted, though neither was the same thing as a mountain trail. "Where are we going?"
"East. The ridge." He swung up into Cutter's saddle in one fluid motion. "Forty minutes there. You'll be all right. Rosalee will take care of you, and the trail's wider than it looks."
He took it slow. Much slower than he would have if he’d been riding it alone.
He checked back over his shoulder at every turn and didn't make a thing of it.
Once, where the path narrowed around a granite shelf, he shifted Cutter's track without telling me and I realized after we'd cleared it that he'd just put his horse between me and the drop.
A man who couldn’t stop managing risk was now managing me up his ridge.
I photographed the dust the horses kicked up at the steep parts. The way the early sun lit the underside of a pine bough. The back of his hat, twice, because that was the angle I had.
What kind of man invites you to see a sunrise on a Sunday morning when his daughter is at her mother's lodge and the clock is running toward one o'clock?
The kind who doesn't have any other way to say what he needs to say before that clock runs out.
I knew that the same way I knew anything about him, by reading what he wasn't doing instead of what he was.
The overlook opened without warning. The trail curved around a stand of pine and there was a drop and a view that went all the way down to the valley floor. Mustang Mountain spread below us small and unaware of being watched.
I stopped Rosalee and shot the view before either of us spoke. Then I shot the boundary marker. It was a weathered post at the edge of the clearing, a notch cut into the wood at a height that suggested the cutter had been on horseback. Jace dismounted and stood next to it with one hand on the top.
"This is what you wanted me to see?"
He nodded. "Kincaid land runs north from here. Or it did. The Hollisters claimed it ran northeast."
"And nobody knows which is right."
"Everybody knows what their family told them." He crouched and ran his thumb along the notch. "Doesn't mean any of it's accurate."
I lowered the camera. "You brought me up here to tell me something."
"I brought you up here to show you something." He stood. "There's a difference. I haven't decided about telling yet."
I let that sit. I tied Rosalee to a pine branch and walked to where he stood, close enough that I could see the dust on his collar and the gold catching in his stubble. He smelled like leather and the same soap I'd been smelling on his towels for three weeks.
The light was unbelievable, but I wasn't going to mention it. He hadn't brought me up here to talk about the light.
"There's history in those records," I said. "Isn't there?"
"There's history in those records that neither family knows about. Or doesn't want to know."
"Are you going to do anything with it?"
He looked at the post. At the valley. At the distance between what people believed and what had actually happened. "Not yet."
I turned back toward the view and lifted my camera again. Not because I wanted the shot. Because my hands needed something to do besides giving in to the overwhelming need to reach for him.
When I’d finished taking photos, I found him sitting on a flat rock at the clearing's edge. I sat down a few feet away but close enough that I could feel where he was without looking.
"Does her mother show up regularly?"
"Often enough that Rory knows not to plan around her. Not often enough that I've stopped letting myself be surprised by it." He picked up a pine needle from the rock and turned it between his fingers. "She'll have her back by one. Probably."
"And if she doesn't?"
"I drive to the lodge."
The clock was ticking. We had five hours until Dana's deadline. Six until the family rodeo clinic. I'd known that walking up. He'd known it before I had.
"I'm the same way," I said.
He looked over. “What do you mean?”
I swallowed hard. “Leaving before anyone has time to expect me to stay. It's easier than the alternative."
"What's the alternative?"
"Staying. And then having someone decide they wished I hadn't."
I didn't like how that sounded once it was out in the open between us. So I picked up the camera again and aimed it at nothing in particular while I waited for him to either ignore my last comment or respond.
He didn't get up, just shifted on the rock until our shoulders were almost touching. "Has someone decided that before?"
That was the kind of question a man asks when he’s trying very hard to figure out what kind of baggage the woman who just entered his life is carrying.
I answered him honestly. "Yes."
"How long ago?"
"Long enough that I’m over it but haven’t forgotten what it felt like.”
The wind shifted. He smelled like leather and sun-warmed pine and something else I'd been pretending not to clock for three weeks. I lowered the camera into my lap.
"Bella."
"Don't."
"I was going to say something I shouldn't say."
"That's why I said don't."
He looked at me the way he'd looked at me last night in the barn door. The look that had cost both of us a night of sleep.
I leaned over the few inches between us and kissed him before he could say the thing he shouldn't say, because if he said it, I'd have to say something back, and I wasn't ready for that yet.
He kissed me back like a man who had been deciding whether to do this for the last seven hours and had finally made the call. His hand came up to the side of my face, the same way it had in the barn last night. His thumb settled at the corner of my jaw.
But this kiss wasn’t the same as last night.
Last night had been a question. This was him answering it.
His mouth was warmer and his grip was steadier and he wasn't holding the line he'd been holding for three weeks because there was no line up here.
We were above the line. We were above everything.
I'd photographed him for weeks. The way he carried weight.
The way his shoulders went still when he was holding back.
I knew him by his outline and his silence and the way he stood next to a fence post like the post was something he'd built.
None of that prepared me for what it felt like to put my hand under his jaw and feel his pulse going faster than mine.
That, more than anything undid me.
I made a sound. Something between a breath and a laugh. He pulled back just enough to look at me, and I saw the version of his face I had been waiting for. Not the locked one. The one underneath.
"You're a problem," he said.
"You knew that the morning of the trailer gate."
“You’re right.”
"Then this is on you."
"I'm aware."
He kissed me again, slower this time. His hand moved to the back of my neck and stayed there. My camera slipped sideways in my lap. I caught it before it hit the rock and we both half-laughed against each other's mouths.
I set the camera down on the rock beside me. The first time in three weeks I'd put a camera down on purpose.
He noticed.
"You can take a picture of the post on the way down," he said, against my mouth.
"I already did."
"Then take one of the horses."
"You're stalling."
"I'm enjoying myself. It's a different thing."
I laughed into his mouth, and he made a sound that was half-laugh, half-something rougher, and his hand slid from my neck down to my waist, and I lost the next minute somewhere in the gold light and the wind and the press of his palm against the small of my back.
He stopped first, though his hand stayed at my waist. He looked at me with the same focused attention he'd looked at the boundary marker… like I was something he was trying to read for accuracy.
"Rory comes back at one."
"I know."
"If she comes back at one."
"I know."
" And there’s a family rodeo clinic this afternoon that I have to be running by three.
” He said it like he was reciting it to himself.
"And tomorrow there's the equipment delivery I've been arguing about for a month.
And the day after that there's the lockbox in a storage unit, I haven't decided what to do with. "
"Jace."
"I'm telling you what's between us and what comes next. Because I'm not doing this halfway, and I'm not doing this on a rock on a ridge in twenty minutes before I have to be a father again."
My lungs squeezed together. He was talking about what comes next. Somewhere between last night and just now, the walls he’d put up between us had come down.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay you understand, or okay you agree?"
"Both."
He let out a breath. Then he stood and reached down to pull me up after him in one motion that was probably not as effortless as he made it look. I picked up the camera. He picked up Rosalee's reins. He held my hand on the walk back to the horses.
That, more than the kiss, was what focused on as we retraced our steps on the trail. He didn't let go of my hand.
The ride back was quieter. The light got cleaner as the sun climbed and I shot through it without really paying attention to what I was getting.
I was thinking about the post. About the story that had been told for eighty years.
About what kind of man kisses a woman on a ridge and then says I'm not doing this halfway and means it.
When we got back to the barn it was nine fifteen. He helped me down off Rosalee but didn't kiss me again. If he had, I wasn’t sure either one of us would stop.
"I have to leave for the lodge by twelve forty-five whether she calls or not," he said.
"I'll be ready."
"Ready for what?"
"To go with you."
He looked at me for a long second. I’d said it without thinking and I was about to walk it back. "Okay," he said.
He led the horses into the barn. I stood in the gravel with the camera against my hip and watched him go, and I knew with a clarity I had absolutely no business having that I had just put myself in the middle of something I knew nothing about. Hopefully it wouldn’t come back to bite me in the ass.