Chapter 21
LUKE
I said I recognize it in front of Briggs and four women at two in the morning. I didn't say the name.
She hasn't asked. The name has been sitting between us the whole drive, and she has let it sit. That is either patience or strategy, and I have stopped trying to tell the difference with her.
The porch light is on when we pull up. I turned it on before I left for Duke's, which is something I'm not acknowledging right now.
Mags looks at it. Looks at me. Says nothing.
I get out and open her door. She takes my hand with her good one, steps down, and walks up the porch steps ahead of me. Not waiting to be steered. Even at three in the morning, after everything, she enters a room first.
Inside, she takes it in without rushing it. The coat hooks loaded with a working life, the bookshelves I built the winter after Colt moved out, the PROUD UNCLE mug on the kitchen counter. She looks at the mug for a half second longer than everything else.
Then she looks down. Something at the foot of the far chair catches her eye. She crouches and comes back up with a small plastic horse. Bay, three legs, one ear missing. She turns it over in her hands.
"Nora," I say.
She sets it on the shelf at eye level, carefully, like she is putting it somewhere it belongs. Then she turns to me.
"You brought me here instead of letting me stay at my apartment."
Not a question. She is reading the room the way she reads landscape, and she has already found the answer.
"There was no way in hell I was letting you stay there alone."
She holds my gaze for two seconds. Then she crosses the room, takes my face in both hands, her injured palm warm and careful against my jaw, and kisses me.
Not soft. Not urgent. Something in between that I feel in my sternum.
When she pulls back her eyes are steady on mine. "Thank you for the porch light."
Her face is tired in the way that only comes after a long night of holding yourself together in front of people, and I think she is the most remarkable thing I have ever let into this room.
"I'm tired," she says.
"I know."
"That was my work. Six weeks of?—"
"I know." I press my mouth to her forehead and hold it there. "We'll get it back. Not tonight."
She doesn't answer right away. Her forehead drops against my chest and the weight of her shifts into me. Not all of it, but more than she has given me before, and I take it without moving.
"Alright," she says into my shirt.
"Let's get you out of this dress," I say against her hair, and reach behind her for the zipper.
I take my time. That is the whole plan.
The zipper runs the length of her spine and I follow it with my thumb, slow, feeling her breathe. The dress was a statement at Duke's. Now it's just fabric in my hands. I let it fall and step back to look at her in the lamplight.
She reaches for my shirt buttons and I catch her hand, the injured one, and bring it up and press my mouth to the center of the bandage.
She goes very still.
I pull the shirt over my head and drop it.
She looks at me. Her hair is loose around her shoulders, copper in the low light, and she has the expression she gets when she is about to tell me I am incorrect about something measurable. I reach out and tuck a strand of it behind her ear.
She hooks her fingers into my belt and walks backward toward the bed, pulling me with her, and the look on her face is not the look of a woman who is tired.
It is the look of a woman who has decided what she wants next.
The kitchen table was urgent. The high country was reverent. This is three in the morning after a long night and what she needs is the weight off.
So I take it off her.
I get my mouth on her throat and work down, finding the freckle on the slope of her left breast that I have been thinking about since the high country. She makes a low sound and her hand goes into my hair.
"That's not fair," she says.
"No," I agree, and close my mouth over her nipple and suck hard.
Her hips come off the bed and I pin them down with one hand and stay where I am until she is panting and her fingers are fisted in my hair.
"Luke. Please."
I switch to the other side and her back arches and the sound she makes goes through me like a current.
The bandaged hand stays careful at my shoulder rather than gripping, and I keep track of it without making a production of it.
When she pulls me back up to her mouth, the kiss has changed register. Slower. Open. The kind that costs something.
I move over her and she opens for me, her thighs parting, her good hand pulling my hips down. My two fingers find her first. She is still wet since her confession by the river, and that fact alone makes my cock throb so hard my vision narrows.
I press the tip to the soaking heat and her breath hitches. It’s fucking killing me to go slowly but I want to take my time, so I slide in, watching her lips part and eyes shut. Her back lifts off the mattress and I hold there, buried, not moving, feeling her walls grip me.
" Luke." Her voice cracks on it.
"I've got you."
I start to move. Slow. The kind of slow that has nothing to do with patience and everything to do with wanting to feel every inch of her around me. She is tight and slick and warm and I drop my forehead to hers and set a pace that makes her fingers dig into my shoulder.
"There," she breathes. "Right there."
I stay right there. Rolling my hips deep, pulling back slow, watching her mouth fall open and her eyes go glassy. The July heat is in the room even with the windows open, warm air moving across damp skin, and I can feel the sweat building between us, her stomach slippery against mine.
"Don't stop."
I don't stop.
She wraps her legs around me and I groan low against her throat because the angle changes and she gets tighter and I have to slow down or this ends before I'm ready. She rolls her hips up to meet me and makes that sound I crave. Fuck, she’s so mine.
"Slow down," I tell her, and my voice comes out ragged. "I want this to last."
"I don't care." Her hand is in my hair, pulling. "I want you deeper."
I give her what she wants. I get my hand under the small of her back and tilt her hips and drive in deep and she cries out, her head thrown back, her neck exposed, and I put my mouth there and taste the salt on her skin and feel her pulse hammering under my lips.
The pace builds. Not urgent. Inevitable. Her breathing is loud and her grip tightens and I can feel her getting close, the way her body tenses and softens and tenses again, and I stay with her through every shift.
"Look at me," she says.
Not me telling her. Her. Eyes fierce and dark and focused, her hand at my jaw, holding me there. Making sure I see her.
I see her.
She breaks around me with her eyes locked on mine, her mouth open on my name, and I follow her immediately with my face buried in her neck and my hand gripping the headboard and "Fuck, Red" torn out of me as the orgasm pulses through me so hard I stop breathing.
We stay there. Our breathing starts to slow. The warm air through the open window drying the sweat on our skin. Her fingers tracing slow circles on my back. My weight on her, too much of it probably, but when I start to shift she locks her ankles behind me and holds.
"Stay," she says.
I stay.
After a while I roll us, pulling her against my chest, and her damp hair sticks to my shoulder and neither of us moves to fix it. The stars are fully out, lighting the mountains through the open window.
Her thumb traces a slow line across my collarbone. My hand rests on her hip, my fingers moving without thinking about it, tracing the curve of her.
"Luke," she says, softer now.
"Still here."
"The name you're holding." Her voice is just above sleep, but the words are precise. She is always precise. "When you're ready, I want it. Not tonight."
She just handed me the timeline I was going to ask for and made it her own.
I pull her closer and she comes, her back against my chest, and I put my chin at the top of her head and hold the name where it is, and I think about what I am going to have to do with it.
She is asleep in six minutes. I count them.
Dawn comes in low and pale through the east window.
I have been awake since four-thirty, watching the light build. Mags is still and warm at my side, her red waves loose across my shoulder. Her boots by the door, side by side on the mat, like they had always been there. Which they hadn't. Which they could be.
I get up slow so I don't wake her. Pull on jeans and a shirt, step into my boots in the entryway, and close the door quietly behind me.
The barn is a seven-minute walk from the cabin. I do it in the half-light the way I have done it a thousand mornings, the valley waking up around me, the mountains still holding the last of the dark.
The horses hear me before I get to the gate.
I grain them, check water, pull a bale from the stack and break it into the feeders.
The work is simple and my body knows it and I do not have to think, which is useful because my head is still in the cabin.
I ride out to check the herd in the north pasture.
Colt's truck is already at the barn at seven when I get back.
He's leaning against the tailgate with Cal, both of them holding coffee, both of them watching me approach with expressions I do not care for.
"Morning," I say.
"Morning," Colt says. He takes a sip. Waits.
Cal doesn't even bother pretending. "Ran into town for salt blocks at the co-op.
Drove past Benny's on the way back. He's already got the sidewalk board out.
" He pulls out his phone, holds it up so I can see the photo.
In Benny's handwriting, chalk on black: TODAY'S SPECIAL: THE GRUMPY RANCHER. Strong. Dark. Finally taken.
"I'm going to kill him," I say.
"You're not going to kill him. You're going to walk in there tomorrow and order your coffee and he's going to grin at you and you're going to take it." Cal pockets his phone. "Because that's what happens when you steer a redhead out of a bar with your hand on her back in front of the whole town."
I lead my horse toward the barn door. "You two done?"
"Not remotely," Cal says.
Colt pushes off the tailgate and falls into step beside me, his voice dropping out of Cal's earshot. "Her truck got broken into last night. Briggs called me at three."
I stop. "You know about the plate?"
"I know about the plate." His eyes hold mine. "And I know you recognized something in that kitchen you haven't said out loud yet."
I look at the ground and say nothing.
"When you're ready," he says. Same words she used. Same weight behind them.
He claps me on the shoulder once, walks back to the truck, and he and Cal pull out toward the equipment barn. I turn my bay out to the east pasture, wash my hands at the spigot, and walk back to the cabin in the full morning light.
Inside, she hasn't moved. Hair across the pillow, one hand tucked under her chin, the sheet at her waist. I stand in the doorway for a second longer than I need to.
Then I grind the beans by hand because the electric grinder would wake her and because good coffee deserves the work.
Fill the kettle, measure the grounds into the French press, wait for the water to come off the boil before I pour.
I am standing at the counter in the warm morning light, watching the grounds bloom, thinking about nothing, which is the most content I have been at this counter since before my father died, when my phone buzzes on the table.
I lean over and read the subject line without picking it up.
Federal wildlife corridor management. Formal conflict-of-interest inquiry pending.
Timestamped 7:04 a.m.
I look at it. Then I look at her boots by the door. Then at the east window, the sunlight bright and warm at the edges of the shade, the birds chattering in the meadow.
Cutter filed on the relationship. He took the blue dress, our dance at Duke's, my hand on her back through a crowd of forty people and turned it into a mechanism.
The documentation trail Mags started is no longer just about the corridor.
It is about us. Whatever he does next, he will do it with her data already in his hands and her wolves invisible and a formal complaint on file that puts her standing in this valley at risk.
I am going to let her sleep. I am going to make the coffee and put her mug on the table where she'll find it. And then I am going to have to tell her that last night cost us something neither of us agreed to pay.
Dale Cutter is patient and organized and not finished.
Neither am I.