Chapter 22
MAGS
My truck window is still boarded with cardboard, six weeks of collar data gone on a portable drive that is no longer mine, and I am rebuilding from server backups that don't include the field annotations.
But Luke makes French press coffee. Hand-ground and water pulled off the boil at exactly the right moment.
I woke up past seven in his cabin to the smell of it and found him at the counter watching the grounds bloom like that was the important task of his morning.
He's a complete coffee snob. I am never going to let him live it down.
Today is Sunday, and Claire has organized a river picnic on the south pasture, which is how I end up standing on the bank of Copper River holding a glass of lemonade someone put in my hand before I could object, surrounded by enough potato salad to feed the entire federal wildlife service.
Mason is losing at horseshoes. Badly. Viv watches from a camp chair beside me with the satisfaction of a woman whose fiancé is being publicly destroyed by Hank Durrell, who is at least seventy and throws underhand and hasn't missed in four rounds.
"He's been practicing," Viv says. "All week. His wife told me at the co-op."
Mason flings a horseshoe that lands three feet wide. "That's elder abuse," he calls to no one. "Someone call the authorities."
"I'm documenting it," Lucy says from the cooler, phone up. "For the permanent record."
Luke is in the river.
Specifically, Luke is knee-deep in water that has to be freezing, Nora on his shoulders, her fists in his hair, shrieking at a volume that startles a magpie out of the nearest cottonwood.
He took his shirt off somewhere between the truck and the water.
I am noting this the way a wildlife biologist notes a change in habitat conditions.
Clinically. With my pulse fifteen beats above baseline.
Claire settles onto the blanket beside me, tucking her legs beneath her.
"I want you to know," she says, her voice just under the noise of the water, "that he has not picked up his niece since she could crawl on her own. He's showing off."
I choke on my lemonade. Claire pats my knee once and goes back to her chair, having detonated me with the same efficiency her son used to fix fence.
Luke catches my eye from the river. His gaze drops from my face to my mouth to my bare legs crossed on the blanket. Then back up. No smile. Just inventory. Deliberate and slow and aware that I am watching him take it.
I hold his gaze until he looks away first.
He doesn't. Instead Nora pulls his hair at an angle that should hurt and he doesn't flinch. I take a long drink of lemonade and feel the heat of that look all the way down to the grass under my legs.
He brings Nora back to Shane at the grill, pulls his shirt on without rushing it, and walks the long way around the blankets to where Jesse is sitting with his wife and kids.
Jesse's youngest is in his wife's lap, small enough that his whole body fits in the crook of her arm.
The older two are chasing each other near the water.
Jesse has been on this ranch since before Luke could ride.
When Luke reaches him, they fall into conversation with the ease of two men who have shared fences and weather and loss for thirty years.
Jesse's wife adjusts the baby's sun hat and laughs at something Luke says, which I file as evidence that Luke McAllister is, in fact, capable of being funny when he isn't performing stoic rancher for an audience.
Luke glances at me over Jesse's shoulder. One second. The corner of his mouth moves.
I look away. I look back. He's still watching.
This has been happening all afternoon. Every time I turn, he is already looking, and the accumulation of it is doing something to my concentration that I would describe in my field notes as "significant observer interference."
Ellery picks up her guitar.
She's been tuning fragments all afternoon, but now the melody resolves into something whole.
Her voice lifts over the river, low and clear, a song about land and what the ground holds after the people who loved it are gone.
She's still working out the phrasing, adjusting a word here and there, baby Hank on the blanket in front of her chewing his own fist.
The whole picnic goes quiet.
I watch Luke's face change. The set of his jaw loosens. His eyes go somewhere I can't follow, and for three seconds he is not the man holding anything together. He is a brother listening to a song about his father's land, and whatever moves through him, he lets it pass without catching it.
I have to look at the river for a while.
When I look back, he is watching me again. Not the heat from before. Deeper than that, tangled up in the song and the land and the fact that I am sitting on his father's ground, and the look on his face makes my chest tight in a way I am not prepared to name at a family picnic.
I mouth two words at him across the shady grove: Show off.
His mouth curves. Barely. The McAllister version of a grin.
The afternoon stretches and the temperature drops off.
I sit near the newly started campfire and pull my knees up.
The kids are going heavy-eyed. Nora is fighting it on Shane's shoulder, her eyes closing in increments she refuses to accept.
Jesse's youngest is out cold in his wife's lap, one hand gripping her collar, boneless the way only small children sleep.
Luke drops beside me, close enough that his arm presses mine. He's warm and he smells like woodsmoke and the soap I know lives on the second shelf in his shower. His hand finds my knee. Not gentle. Possessive. His thumb drags once across my kneecap, slow, and my breath catches before I can stop it.
"You've been staring at me all day," I say, low enough for only him.
"Yeah." His voice is rough and close. "I have."
"You're not even going to pretend you weren't."
"No."
His thumb moves again. I press my knee into his hand and watch his jaw tighten.
The fire pops. The mountains above the south pasture are going dark.
The river is still running and the cottonwoods are full and heavy and the air smells like July, like smoke and cold water and grass, and I think about my apartment in Missoula.
The white walls. The desk where I rebuilt a career no one stole because I wouldn't let them.
I cannot remember the last time I missed it.
Luke leans close. His mouth is at my ear and his hand is still on my knee and his voice is low enough that it moves through me before I process the words.
"Want to show you something."
His eyes are on me with that intensity I have learned to recognize as the precursor to ruining my panties.
I set my lemonade down in the grass.
"Lead the way."