5. Chapter 5
Tana
Foaling barn.
I drag on yesterday’s jeans, jam my feet into my boots without bothering to lace them, and run.
The cold hits the second I shove outside, sharp enough to bite through the flannel on my arms, but I barely register it. Gravel snaps under my boots as the morning light blinds me, too bright and too harsh for this hour.
Cassie's in the aisle in leggings, a ranch sweatshirt, and the kind of expression that means there is no point wasting words.
“Juniper?” I ask.
She nods once. “I think it’s starting wrong.”
That's enough to clear the rest of the sleep out of me.
Rebel is already there.
I see him first in silhouette, broad shoulders taking up most of the stall entrance, the overhead bulb picking silver out of his hair. He looks like he came straight from bed and only remembered halfway down the hall that people usually bother dressing before they face a crisis.
Cassie goes through the stall door first, and I follow her into the heat.
Juniper, one of the foundation mares in Rebel’s breeding program, is down on her side in the straw with her flanks working too hard and the whites showing around her eyes.
I drop to my knees beside her without thinking about the damp soaking through my jeans.
My hands go to her neck, then settle there, firm enough for her to feel me, steady enough for me to feel her nervousness.
“Hey, pretty girl,” I murmur, and the words are for the mare alone. “I know. Let’s see what you did to yourself.”
Behind me, straw shifts under boots.
Rebel doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to. I hear the leather in his grip give once against the halter rope, and that small sound tells me more than words would.
Juniper’s belly goes rigid under my hand. I check the foal's presentation and find the problem fast enough to hate it, not bad enough to panic.
“Malpositioned,” I say, keeping my voice level. “Not disastrous yet, but I need her up.” I reach back without turning. “Can you take the halter?”
He’s already moving by the time the sentence finishes.
We work with almost no language after that. He lifts when I tell him to lift. He waits when I need Juniper still. My hand goes back inside the mare, checking the position of the foal once more. The stall fills with the rank, hot smell of labor.
I can feel Rebel watching me even when I’m not looking at him, and it isn’t my hands he’s studying so much as my face … the fact that I don’t flinch from the blood, the pressure, or the mess.
“You’re good at this,” he says finally, and the words sound like he had to drag them up from somewhere deeper than pride.
“Had a lot of practice with difficult births.” I shift the foal’s head another fraction and wait for Juniper to stop fighting me. “My uncle’s place couldn’t always afford the vet, so sometimes what we had was whoever kept their head.”
The stall goes quiet except for Juniper’s breathing and the wet internal sounds of labor.
Then Rebel says, “Your hands are steady.”
I look up at him then. “Yours aren’t.”
The admission lands between us and stays there.
He glances at his own grip on the rope as if he had not fully noticed what his body was doing until I said it out loud. The tremor is slight, but real.
“First foal from this line,” he says. “My mother’s favorite mare’s granddaughter.”
That is all, but it is enough. It tells me this isn’t just a valuable foal and not just a breeding decision.
“She’s going to be fine,” I tell him. “Both of them.”
I’m not sure whether I mean the mare and foal or the man holding the rope. He seems to hear both.
The next contraction comes hard and useful.
The adjustment takes, and the foal comes in a rush of fluid and limbs, all slick body and brand-new life.
I guide her down into the straw and clear her nose while Juniper swings her head around with that stunned look mares get when instinct arrives half a second ahead of comprehension.
The filly’s chest shudders once, then again. She seems to catch a good long stretch of air, and that feeling brings me a badly needed, big sigh of relief.
Rebel’s beside me before I realize he moved, his hand landing on my shoulder.
“Thank you,” he says.
The words come out rough and spare, as if thanking someone costs him more practice than command ever does.
We stay where we are while Juniper turns and begins the rough, intent work of licking the foal dry. The filly’s legs twitch. Her ears flick. Rebel’s thigh presses against mine in the cramped stall, and I only become aware of it when I realize his hand has not left my shoulder.
The next few seconds feel like forever, because I pause where I am, silent but comfortable … just like this.
Doc Rhodes gets there just after the filly is out, late enough that all he can really do is check breathing, look Juniper over, and confirm what the straw already knows: the worst part is over.
Cassie gathers blood-streaked towels into a bucket and rights a kicked water pail while muttering about coffee strong enough to qualify as a felony.
Wade appears long enough to get the summary, absorb the result, and disappear back into the night.
By degrees, the stall empties until only Rebel and I are left with the mare, the foal, and the damp rustle of straw under Juniper as she noses the filly dry.
“You were scared,” I say.
He doesn’t bother pretending otherwise. “Honestly, yeah. I’ve been really invested in making sure Juniper and her foal were being well cared for.”
I wait. He understands that I am waiting.
“I don’t let people see that,” he says after a beat.
“Why me?”
The question comes out before I decide to ask it.
He turns his head just enough that I can feel his breath near my temple. “Because you didn’t look away.”
We sit down in the bedding after that because the filly is trying to gather her legs under her and neither of us seems in a hurry to step back into the ordinary world.
When we finally get to our feet, my back complains and my knees argue with me. Rebel’s hand closes around my elbow to steady me, and neither of us pretends it is incidental.
Juniper noses the filly again. The little idiot throws her weight the wrong way and nearly tips sideways before I catch one shoulder and set her straight.
When I glance up, Rebel is watching my hand on the foal with an expression I cannot sort fast enough.
“You trust them fast,” he says.
“Horses?” I draw my hand back and wipe it on my jeans. “Usually.”
“And people?”
There it is again, not flirtation exactly but something closer to him putting one finger on the weak place and waiting to see whether I flinch.
I let my head rest back against the stall wall and look at the foal instead of him. “That answer would ruin the mood.”
His gaze stays on me. “That assumes there is one.”
The line gets to me in a way the cleaner version never would have. The Inn had heat on its side, but this is all straw, fatigue, and the ugly intimacy of having just watched the same life come through by inches.
I look at him. “See? Ruined.”
He comes closer without hurrying, one forearm braced on the half wall behind me, his attention fixed on my face like he is still allowing himself time to back out if I give him a reason.
And that, more than the wanting, is what gets to me … the fact that he is still fighting himself and still coming anyway.
“So ruin it,” he says.
I laugh under my breath, more reflex than amusement. Then his eyes drop to my mouth, and the air in the stall alters.
This time there is nothing careless in the way he touches me.
His hand comes up to the side of my neck, thumb settling just under my ear, and the restraint in it is what undoes me.
He is careful in exactly the place I least know how to defend.
His eyes stay on mine, asking the question without dressing it up.
I answer by closing the distance myself.
The kiss tastes like the whole night … salt, damp straw, the ache in my shoulders, and the steady weight of his hand where he left it on me after the filly finally breathed.
My fingers knot in his shirt before I think better of it.
The sound that leaves him is low and rough enough to pull straight through me.
Juniper shifts in the straw, and the stall comes back around us in pieces … the filly finding her legs, and the first stir of the barn waking outside our corner of it. Somewhere down the aisle a stall door slides open and a tractor starts up. Morning is beginning whether we are ready for it or not.
He draws back just enough to look at me, and what is on his face makes the space between us feel less safe than touch.
Rebel rests his forehead against mine long enough for both of us to catch one uneven breath.
“Come with me,” he says.
Morning has already edged itself into the barn. I could go back to the bunkroom, scrub the sweat off my skin, and stack the whole night somewhere useful in my head before daylight gets too strong. I see that option clearly enough to know I’m walking past it on purpose.
I go with him anyway.
The walk to the main house is quiet. Gravel snaps under our boots.
Cold air moves between the barns and carries the sharp smell of wet earth, hay dust, and the metallic after-scent of the foaling stall on my clothes.
Once, his shoulder brushes mine on the narrow path.
Neither of us mentions it. By the time we step inside, the house is still dark enough to feel almost separate from the rest of his life, like we got in before everything else could catch up to us.
He leads me upstairs without touching me again. At his bedroom door, he stops with one hand on the frame and waits there, not crowding me or softening the choice by making it for me.
That is what gets me over the threshold.
I step inside.
The room is quieter than I expected and less arranged than the rest of him.
One lamp is on near the bed. A shirt hangs over the back of a chair.
There are books on the nightstand with slips of paper marking pages instead of anything neat or decorative.
A half-empty glass of water sits beside his watch, laid down carelessly enough to suggest fatigue got there before order did.
The room feels lived in, which is somehow more intimate than if it had looked expensive.
He closes the door behind us, and the latch settles with a small click that sounds final in the dark.
When he reaches for me, the tremor is still in his hands.
I catch both of them in mine and press his palms flat against my ribs. “You’re allowed to need something,” I tell him.
The sound that leaves him is rough and low. Then his mouth is on mine again.
The kiss is unhurried, exploratory, as if we're learning each other for the first time. His fingers trace the curve of my waist, my hip. When he lifts me onto the bed, I go willingly, my legs parting to make room for him between them.
We move slowly, stripped of urgency by fatigue, each touch deliberate and witnessed.
He enters me with a slow pressure that makes my breath catch, and we stay like that for a moment, joined and still, looking at each other in the lamplight.
Something passes between us ... acknowledgment, risk, the understanding that this means more than either of us want to name.
"Montana," he whispers, using my full name like a confession, and I feel the sound of it everywhere.
The rhythm we find is deep and relentless, building not from frantic need but from something more dangerous ...
trust, exposure, the willingness to be seen.
When I come, his eyes holding mine through every pulse of it.
He follows, burying his face in my neck, his body shuddering with a release that seems to cost him everything.
Afterward, he gathers me in close without any of the urgency that got us here.
The room has gone quiet except for our breathing and the faint sounds of the house beginning to wake under us.
Exhaustion comes for me fast once I stop fighting it.
The last thing I register before sleep takes me under is his hand moving slowly over my back again and again, with the concentration of somebody committing it to memory.
Gray light wakes me.
The bed beside me is empty, but the sheets still hold warmth where he lay. I put my hand there and feel it giving itself up by degrees.
From downstairs, his voice carries through the floorboards, low and even, discussing feed ratios with the foreman as if the night has already been sorted, filed, and shut away with everything else he knows how to control.
I lie there for a second longer, listening.
The difference is not subtle. The man in the stall, the one whose hands shook on the halter rope and again when he touched me, is nowhere in that voice.
What’s left is Rebel as he means to be heard downstairs: precise, contained, already halfway back behind the walls that keep the rest of his life running clean.
I dress in yesterday’s clothes and stand for a moment in the room with my boots in one hand, looking at the dent my body left in his bed.
His side of the bed is already cool enough at the edges to tell me he left early, and the sound of his voice downstairs makes it clear he intends to keep the cost of last night contained to this room if he can.
I go downstairs carrying that knowledge with me, my thighs still sore from the night, my hair still smelling faintly like straw, and the hardening sense that I am going to be the one feeling this in daylight if somebody has to.