22. Proof
PROOF
Ariel
The room is still buzzing when I slip out the side door.
Not the press conference room — that cleared out fast once Brock stepped away from the podium, folding chairs scraping concrete, the low murmur of reporters already filing copy on their phones.
The Midland afternoon pouring through every propped-open door, hot and flat and smelling like dust and asphalt and cut grass from the park across the street.
I mean the buzz inside my chest. The one that started when I heard his voice come through Cami's phone speaker in the guesthouse and hasn't stopped since.
Professionally and personally.
He said it into three cameras and sixty people and I stood in the back of that room like an idiot with wet eyes and did absolutely nothing about it.
I do something about it now.
He's still in the doorway — one hand braced on the frame, the last of the crowd moving past him into the parking lot. He's watching me with that steady, patient look that has no business being as unnerving as it is.
"Brock."
I close the distance between us in four steps and jab a finger at his chest. "You didn't ask me."
He blinks. "What?"
"You named me. At a podium. In front of cameras. You named me your partner and you didn't ask me first."
Something moves across his face, not guilt. Almost like he's bracing. "Would you have said yes?"
"That's not the point."
"Ariel—"
"You did it anyway." My voice cracks on the last word and I hate it.
"You stood at a podium and blew up your relationship with your father.
Harrison Steele, in front of every camera in Midland.
The deal you've been managing your whole life.
You blew all of it up and you didn't even—" I stop.
Press my fingers to my mouth for a second. "You could have lost everything."
"I know."
"It was reckless."
"I know."
"It was the stupidest?—"
"I know." He steps closer. Not reaching for me. Just close. "I also don't regret it."
I look at him. Really look, the line of his shoulders, the tired around his eyes, the tie hanging loose and the hands that are still slightly raw at the palms from where he grabbed Titan's reins the day we met.
Same hands.
Different man than the one I thought he was then.
"I'm scared," I say. "I need you to know that. Not of Harrison. Not of the press. Of this." I gesture between us. "Of being something you chose in public and then put down in private when it stops being convenient."
He doesn't flinch. "That's not what this is."
"I know what you've done. I know your pattern. Week or two, then gone."
"That was before you." His voice is quiet. No performance in it. "I don't know how to explain the difference except to say I've never once asked anyone to stay. And every morning since the guesthouse, I've woken up hoping you hadn't left."
The buzz in my chest does something complicated.
"Your father's not going to stop," I say.
"No."
"This gets harder before it gets easier."
"Probably."
"I'm pregnant and tired and my professional reputation is currently held together with Cami's spreadsheet and whatever goodwill Sheriff Holloway has in this county."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. "I know."
"And you still?—"
"Yes." No hesitation. No qualifier. Just that.
I exhale. Long and slow. "I'm still angry at you for not asking."
"I know that too."
"Okay." I look at him one more second. "Okay."
I take his hand. He closes his fingers around mine and we stand there in the side lot of the Petroleum Club while Marcy's voice carries faintly around the corner and neither of us says anything else for a long moment.
We don't need to.
We make it back to the ranch by four. The highway back is the kind of flat and wide that makes you feel small in the best way — sky going pale at the edges, heat lifting off the road in waves, nothing between us and the horizon.
Brock takes the ranch turnoff without a word and the gate swings open and something in my chest unclenches.
The main house is quiet, Cami took Jenni back to town after the press conference, Red's handling the afternoon feed. The kind of quiet that feels intentional. Like the house exhaled too.
Brock sets his keys on the entry table and turns to me and I'm already looking at him.
"Talk first," I say. "All of it."
He nods once.
We sit on the couch in his office, not across from each other, side by side.
The room is all dark wood and worn leather, shelves lined with reining trophies and a single framed photo of a younger Brock on horseback.
No suits. No brand strategy. Just the man underneath all of it, sitting close enough that our knees touch, and we do the thing we've been too afraid to do since the night in his bedroom.
We talk without armor.
I tell him about the exes who called me a backup plan. The clients who asked if the actual vet was coming. The way I built the clinic as proof, proof I was enough, proof I didn't need rescuing, proof that depending on someone was the fastest way to end up with nothing.
He listens. Doesn't fix it. Doesn't try to reframe it.
When I finish, he's quiet for a moment.
Then he says, "My father's version of love is control.
Always has been. Every time I got close to someone, I'd catch myself doing it, managing the outcome, staying ahead of the hurt, and I'd end it before it could become him.
" He looks at his hands. "I thought that made me better than him. It just made me alone."
"You're not him," I say.
"I know." He looks up. "You made that impossible to ignore."
"The first time I called you controlling?—"
"You were right." Simple. No defensiveness. "I was scared and it came out sideways. That's mine."
I lean back into the couch cushion and look at the ceiling for a second.
The wanting has been there since the tack room. But this, this is different. This is him, the real version, sitting next to me in a quiet room without the Steele name between us.
This is the thing that's been scaring me more than any of the rest of it.
"I love you," I say. To the ceiling, first. Then I look at him. "For the record. In case it wasn't obvious when I stood in the back of that room and cried like an idiot."
He reaches over and tucks a strand of hair back from my face. His thumb traces along my cheek. "It wasn't obvious," he says. "But I was hoping."
What happens next is slow.
That's the difference. Every other time had an edge to it, urgency, anger, something to prove. This has none of that.
He takes my face in both hands and kisses me like he's got nothing left to hide, which he doesn't. I pull him closer by the collar of his shirt and he comes willingly, walking me backward down the hall until the bedroom door swings open behind me.
He lays me back against the pillows and stays propped above me, looking down, and neither of us rushes it.
"Still with me?"
"Still with you."
He starts at my throat, mouth open, unhurried, and works down while his hands deal with my buttons one at a time. No tearing. No shortcuts. He peels my shirt back and looks at me the way he did in the barn that first week, like I'm something worth slowing down for.
"Brock—"
"I haven't stopped thinking about this." His lips brush my sternum. "Every single detail."
So I do. My hands drop to the sheets and I stop thinking.
His mouth traces the curve of my shoulder, the swell of my breast, lower. His hands grip my hips with that familiar controlled weight and I arch into him and he makes a sound low in his throat that undoes me completely.
By the time he works back up my body I'm already shaking. He hooks a finger under the waistband of my jeans and looks up at me.
I meet his eyes and nod once, before he can ask.
He takes his time with that too.
When he finally settles between my thighs I reach for him and he lets me pull him close, lets me set the pace, which is slower than either of us managed the first time.
We move together and he keeps his eyes on my face, watching, adjusting, giving me exactly what I need before I know how to ask for it.
The orgasm hits hard and I cry out, not polished, not quiet, my whole body pulling tight and then releasing all at once.
He follows a breath later, jaw tight, breath ragged, his whole body shuddering as he comes, my name wrecked and quiet in the air between us.
It sounds like his.
Afterward I stay where I am, head on his chest, his hand tracing slow circles on my back. His heartbeat steady under my ear.
"Still with you," I say again, quieter.
His chest moves. "Good."
Outside, the light is going copper through the curtains.
The kind of West Texas evening that makes everything look like it was painted, long shadows off the cedar posts, the pasture grass going still, the horses drifting toward the water tank in that loose, easy way that means the day is done. The ranch settling into evening.
For the first time since I drove through those gates, I don't feel temporary.
I'm thinking about whether to say that out loud when my phone buzzes on the nightstand.
I reach for it, expecting Cami. Or Red.
The screen reads Dr. Okafor — OB.
I sit up.
"Hey—" Brock starts.
I'm already answering. "Hello?"
Dr. Okafor's voice is calm and measured, the way doctors get when they're being careful with information. "Ariel. I'm glad I caught you. We got your bloodwork back from the ER and I want to talk through a few of the markers."
My hand tightens on the phone.
"Nothing critical," she says quickly. "But I'm seeing some indicators I want to take seriously at this stage.
Elevated stress hormones, some spotting risk factors.
I'd like you to come in tomorrow." A pause.
"And between now and then, I need you to rest. Actually rest, no clinic hours, no stress if you can manage it. Lean on your support system."
I look at Brock. He's already watching me, already reading whatever's on my face.
"Okay," I say. "I'll be there."
I hang up.
The evening light is still gold. The horses are still in the pasture. Nothing has changed in this room.
Except something has shifted in my chest, the place where I've been keeping all the self-sufficient, figure-it-out-alone armor I've carried for a decade.
Brock doesn't ask what the call was.
He just reaches over and takes my hand.
"Tell me what you need," he says.
And for the first time in longer than I can remember, I do.