Chapter 40 #2
"Oh, I'm sure you did, boy." Denny laughed and stepped closer, hands on his hips. "Well, I don't know 'bout you boys, but I could use a cold beer. That drive was somethin'."
"Come on in," Mr. Calloway said, casually hangin' back and not pickin' up on a bit of the tension. "Got plenty."
He said it to Denny. He said it to Wyatt. He didn't say it to Rhett, and he didn't say it to me.
Denny grinned and slapped a hand against his thigh. "Now we're talkin'. Calvin, you want—"
"She's working," Rhett said.
Not rude. Not aggressive. Just a door, closed.
Denny shrugged—easy, unbothered, already moving toward the porch. "Suit yourself, kiddo. We'll be around awhile."
Wyatt followed Denny toward the house but paused at the bottom of the porch steps.
He looked back over his shoulder—one last look, slow and deliberate, his eyes dropping from my face to my throat to my chest before climbing back up.
Taking his time with it. Making sure I knew he was doing it.
Making sure I felt his hands even though he wasn't touching me.
Then he turned and followed Denny inside.
The screen door shut.
The yard went quiet.
Rhett hadn't moved. His phone was still in his hand at his side. He still hadn't ended the call.
I stared at the house. At the closed door. At the porch where Mr. Calloway had stood and shaken my daddy's hand and said glad you could make it out like he'd done something neighborly.
"Calvin."
I didn't look at him.
"I'm fine."
He didn't answer that. He knew better.
After a long beat he said, "Barn," and started walking.
I followed.
We worked in silence.
Rhett mucked stalls. I sorted tack. Neither of us spoke. The only sounds were the scrape of the pitchfork, the clink of buckles, the horses shifting in their stalls—soft nickers and the occasional stomp of a hoof against packed earth.
I didn't ask what Brody had said when Rhett had ended the call.
Didn't want to know. If I thought about him right now—about his face, his voice, the way he'd look at me—I'd come apart at the seams, and I could not afford to come apart with Wyatt Cole sitting on the back deck of the main house drinking a beer like he belonged there.
So I sorted tack.
Bridles on the left hooks. Halters on the right. Lead ropes coiled and hung by length. I'd done it three days ago and it didn't need doing again, but my hands needed a job and this was the one I could manage without thinking.
Rhett didn't comment on the redundancy. He just worked alongside me, steady and quiet. Every now and then I caught him looking toward the house—not at it, but through it—like he could see his father and mine on the other side and was deciding, piece by piece, what to do with our guests.
We'd been at it maybe twenty minutes when I heard tires on gravel.
Fast. Too fast for the rutted drive.
Rhett straightened up. Set the pitchfork against the wall. Walked to the barn door and looked out.
I didn't have to look. I knew the sound of that truck the way I knew my own heartbeat.
Brody's door slammed. His boots hit the dirt at a pace that had nothing casual about it.
I could picture him—jaw set, hands fisted, lookin' for someone to hit.
He'd have driven the whole way here with his knuckles white on the wheel and his foot on the floor, running through every word of what he'd heard through Rhett's phone.
But when he came through the barn door, he didn't find a fight.
He found us.
Rhett, leaning against a stall door with his arms crossed. Me, standing in the tack room doorway with a bridle in my hands that I'd already hung up and taken down twice.
Brody stopped. His chest was heaving. His eyes were wild—scanning the barn, scanning me, looking for damage, looking for the thing that needed fixing.
I watched him take me in. Watched the fury in his face collide with the reality of what was in front of him—not a woman in crisis, not a fight in progress. Just his girl, standing in a barn, holding a bridle, with a face made of stone.
The fight drained out of his shoulders, but the fear didn't. That lived deeper.
Rhett pushed off the stall door. He and Brody exchanged a look—one of those wordless conversations they'd probably been having since they were kids. I didn't try to read it. Whatever passed between them was theirs.
Rhett gripped Brody's shoulder once as he passed. Brief. Firm. Then he walked out of the barn without a word.
His watch was over. Brody's had begun.
The barn was quiet. A horse blew softly in a nearby stall. Dust motes drifted through shafts of afternoon light cutting through the high windows.
Brody stood ten feet away.
He didn't close the distance. Didn't rush me. Didn't ask what happened or if I was okay or any of the things his body was screaming to do. He just stood there, breathing hard, fists slowly uncurling at his sides, those green eyes locked on mine.
I hung the bridle on its hook for the third time.
"You gonna stand there all day?" My voice sounded foreign. Flat. Like someone had scooped the warmth out of it and left the shell.
"Long as you need me to."
I turned back to the tack wall. Adjusted a halter that didn't need adjusting.
He didn't move. Didn't speak. Just stood there, giving me the only thing I'd ever really needed from anyone.
Space, and the certainty that he wasn't going anywhere.
After a while—could've been five minutes, could've been fifty—I turned and found him in the exact spot I'd left him, his eyes still tracking my every move.
I swallowed hard.
"He touched me."