Chapter Thirteen
Daughtry couldn’t pretend he didn’t know what had happened last night, no matter how much he wanted to.
He hadn’t invited Andrea back to his place because he’d been thinking about Bix.
And Bix thought he was a Captain America cardboard cutout.
Bix was a liar, though.
He knew that.
She resorted to lies when backed into corners, and relented only when she realized she couldn’t wriggle around the truth.
Evil little possum.
It was just that when he had seen Bix with that guy, he hadn’t been able to think about anything else. Everything he’d been
trying to suppress had gone up to a boil and once his mind had been firmly fixed on that, there was no way he was going to...
“Lord Almighty,” he growled, grateful that he had a full shift of work to get to.
Of course, then work was boring. He waited for calls, parked on the side of the road and pulled over a few idiots who were
driving too fast, and then it was all over before he was ready to head back to the ranch.
The sun was still shining, even though it was getting late. And somehow, it stood in stark contrast to his mood and it annoyed him.
He decided to take a walk down to the river to do a little fishing, like he had done the day that he had found Bix. Something
to get his mind off of her seemed like a pretty good idea. He ignored the fact that she seemed inextricably linked now to
this location and activity. He walked through the woods, his pole slung over his shoulder. He stopped for a moment, and listened
to the sounds.
Smelled the pine heavy in the air.
There were birds, calling to each other. Sunbeams shone through the pine needles, fragments of light reflecting on the forest
floor. It was a strange thing, that this place, where he had been a bad man, and had done his best to become a good one, had
stayed the same.
That across the river a month and a half ago had been a skinny, half-starved woman who was now enmeshed in his life in a way
that he would never be able to explain. And yet it was all the same. The sky, the trees, the scent in the air.
He was the same.
No matter that the day-to-day sometimes felt different.
That was what he had to remember.
No matter how things seemed like they might be different, they were actually the same. He came through the trees to the edge
of the river, and looked down a few feet from where he had emerged.
There she was, standing on a rock. Her blond hair was flowing around her shoulders, and she was wear ing a short dress that came just midthigh. She had a fishing pole, and she cocked it back over her shoulder and let the bait fly out into the center of the water.
She shook her hair out, and the sunlight caught the golden locks, shining.
It hit him then. Like a ton of bricks.
It wasn’t possessiveness.
That would’ve been too easy.
It was jealousy . Pure and simple.
When another man had been with her, treating her like a woman, it had been far too easy for him to tell himself that what
had happened when he’d danced with her had been a trick of the firelight, but then he’d seen that man holding her...
He’d known it was more.
It was like every moment of seeing her from that first time collided with this one. Her brilliance. Her sharpness. The humor
and the ferocity. Her climbing up on the barn. The triumph of her succeeding. Her books. Self-improvement and a romance novel.
The way she had told him about what she wanted.
He had never known anybody like her. When he thought about it, he wasn’t exactly sure he knew anybody. Not as well as he knew
her. They had talked about a lot of things. And he admired her.
More than that...
She was beautiful.
And feral as hell. And he was angry that some other guy had been dancing with her.
He didn’t want Andrea, because he wanted Bix.
His stomach went tight.
No. Hell no. Bix was...
She was his to protect. She wasn’t his to... to possess like that. Suddenly, it was like she sensed him standing there,
and she looked in his direction.
She startled for a moment, and looked like she might run. It was a reminder. Of the way they had met. Of how she had been
when he had found her.
She had pretended to be afraid. But deep down, he suspected that she was a little bit.
“Hey,” he said.
He lifted his fishing pole.
“Oh hi,” she said. “I guess technically I’m fishing on private land without permission.”
“Are you?”
She sighed. “No. I even got a fishing license down at the general store last week.” She looked distressed. “My street cred
is irretrievably damaged.”
He couldn’t help himself. He laughed. He felt, for a moment, like he was back on even footing with her. But then she smiled,
and his world felt rocked again.
He pictured her like she’d been then. With that scab on her chin. He could still see that woman, there beneath the healthier,
smiling one now. But it wasn’t who she was.
It never had been.
It was what life had done to her. And the person she was now, was the woman who had dug out of it.
It would be tempting to feel a certain level of triumph over that. To take credit for it.
But he and his father had been responsible for ruining more lives than intervening in this one could ever make right.
“My condolences over your inability to poach.”
She snickered, then started to reel her line back in. “Thank you.”
They hadn’t spoken since last night. That moment when things had been charged. He knew he wasn’t imagining it. He knew it,
because he was standing in the bolt of lightning that had resulted from it. Cardboard-cutout Captain America.
And he had been shirtless, and in the shower thinking about her while he was naked, and even if it hadn’t been a sexual fantasy,
it had still been a step over a line he hadn’t been aware he was so close to.
For somebody who thought it was cardboard, she had an awful lot of thoughts about his sex life.
Unfortunately, so did he, since it had been nonexistent for close to a year now.
Maybe there was some truth to what she’d said. He had become a cardboard cutout.
He had forgotten that he was a man.
Right now, she was reminding him of that.
“So how are things going with the brewing?”
“Good. Getting antsy for that next meeting. Denver is thinking that it might be good if I am present.”
“Are you comfortable with that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never presented in front of people. I’ve never been treated like I was an expert in anything. Well. Except
petty crime.”
“Yeah.” He realized that they had never talked about that with any real seriousness.
“You know I read your record.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Mostly taking food and first-aid items.”
“Yeah,” she said, casting her rod again. “Listen, I like to pretend that I’m a hardened criminal, but mostly I was just sad
and desperate. With some distance from it, I feel like I can admit that.” She looked down.
It was still hard for her to come to terms with. That was for sure.
“Why do you need to be hard?”
“Because it’s the only thing that helps you survive. When everything is hard, what’s the point of being sad about it?”
“I can relate to that,” he said, setting his pole down so that he could bait his hook. “When Denver bought the ranch out from
my dad, he was really clear with all of us that our dad was toxic and needed to be out of our lives. I knew that. I knew that
I didn’t like who I was when I was with him. But I didn’t know what to do about it. I still cared about him. And I was angry
that Denver sent him away, even though I knew it was the right thing to do. That was when I decided to go to police academy.”
“I don’t get how those two things are connected,” she said.
“Because I didn’t trust myself to not just become my dad if I didn’t have a very rigid framework to live my life in. And that’s
all I’ve done. Ever since then. You asked me what my dreams were, and I guess it’s just to do more good than harm. But I don’t
trust myself to do it outside of... the system.”
She chuckled. “Well. In that way we are very different.”
“Yes. We are.”
He sidled up to where she was, keeping a healthy amount of space between them so that when he cast he wouldn’t hit her with his hook.
They stood there, bathing in the last little bit of sun, their lines in the water.
“I’m going to catch the fish before they make their way downstream to you,” she said.
“I can handle that.”
“I don’t want your charity fish, Daughtry.”
“Too bad.”
“Is that why you took me in? Atonement?”
He firmed his jaw, trying to figure out how to answer the question. Because there was honesty, and he had a feeling it would
hurt her feelings. And also, the honest answer was complex, and he didn’t know if he could give it without exposing pieces
of himself that he would rather keep private.
“Maybe. A little bit at first. But primarily, all I could think was... if my dad found you on our land, he wouldn’t have
helped you. And sometimes, when I don’t know which way is north, I can find south by figuring out what my father would have
done, and do the opposite of that.”
“I want to do that,” she said. “I want to... change the way that I see things. I want to do more than just survive.”
There was something about her words that echoed inside of him. He felt drawn to her. There was something in her, and it was more than just beauty. It was the spirit that she had. That fight that she carried with her. For no real reason. Because everything in her life had been difficult. He had his siblings. He had this ranch.
She was right. He had a brick. Hell, he had more than one. Sure, there were some things that were difficult, but it was nothing
compared to what she had been through.
“How much time have you actually spent in jail?”
She scrunched up her face. “The longest time was three weeks. Quite a few overnight stays. Mostly in the drunk tank. I wasn’t
drunk. Just holding on to me until they decided whether or not to let me go. But I’ve had a couple of six-week sentences that
ultimately got reduced.”
“The threat of prison never deterred you from doing anything?”
“No,” she said casually. “I really wouldn’t have been stealing things if it didn’t feel necessary. So the threat of prison always felt like a more abstract worry than not having what I needed in the moment. And you have no idea how many times I got away with it versus how many times I got caught.” She cleared her throat. He could have sworn he saw tears shining in her eyes. “The worst thing that I ever did was there was this old woman, and she had twenty dollars sticking out of her purse. I walked slowly by her shopping cart, and I snagged the twenty dollars.” She cleared her throat again. “About ten minutes later the old woman caught up to me, and she handed me another twenty-dollar bill. She said if I needed the first one that bad I probably needed a second one too.” She tried to laugh, but it sounded forced. “I told you, I’ve heard basically every version of the good news out there. That was the only version of it that felt all that compelling to me. There was no reason for her to be that kind to me. That was about six months before you found me. It was right before my dad and my brother went to prison. I kept the forty dollars for myself. I didn’t share it with them. The way that woman treated me made me want to be different. But then they went to jail, and I was left by myself, and I didn’t feel like I had the choice. But every time I would get tempted to steal something, anywhere, I remembered her kindness. And I just... I would rather be her than my dad. But I’ve never gotten to a place where I felt like I could be.” She took a shuddering breath. “Scarcity makes you so mean. Even when you wish you could be kind.”
“It’s not just scarcity for some people. My dad never had that excuse. He was just mean. You know how you can tell you’re
not that person?”
“How?”
“Look how different you are now that you don’t have to worry about where your next meal is coming from.”
She said nothing for a while. “Do you think that you’re different?”
He grunted. “The problem with me is that it was never about desperation. It was about trying to please the wrong person. It
was about having an entirely wrongheaded view of the world.”
She shrugged. “Many people would say that I have a wrongheaded view of the world, Daughtry. Antipaperwork as I am.”
“Listen, I don’t agree with you, not on everything. But when you talk about the way that life has worked for you, and why, I can definitely understand why you don’t like how certain things function. I can certainly appreciate how difficult it is for you to try to earn money when you don’t have it.”
“Well. Listen. I might feel justified in brewing moonshine still. Even if I know I can’t justify stealing money out of old
ladies’ purses.”
“Fair.”
The breeze flared up, and her dress tightened around her hips, coming up on her thighs. She was a lot more shapely now that
she had regular meals. It looked good on her. Everything about her looked good.
He practically wanted to get in a fistfight with himself.
He didn’t know how to reconcile his desire to protect her, his admiration for her, with the attraction that now had him in
a choke hold.
And he realized that all of his hesitance when it came to her was about trying to minimize her.
Trying to make her less than a woman. Trying to treat her like she was a charity case, always and forever. Because if he had
met her in a bar and he had thought she was this beautiful, he would want to do something about it.
Well. There was that. There was also the fact that she lived on the ranch.
And when he had told her he didn’t do relationships, he had meant it.
And whatever decision he made, it could be about his own issues. But it wasn’t fair to make it about her. She was strong. And if she knew...
Well, if she knew that he was checking her out she might reiterate that she thought of him as cardboard.
But if he told her that the only reason he wasn’t making a move on her was because he was afraid that she couldn’t handle
it, she would probably pull a switchblade on him.
“So if you give the speech at the town hall, what are you going to say?”
“You should invest in this beer because you’ll be an idiot if you don’t?”
“Listen, I think it’s excellent,” he said. “But maybe if you don’t call everybody idiots...”
“I was under the impression that was how Denver handled things.”
“We try not to encourage it.”
“Are you and Denver still in a fight?” she asked.
“No. We had a disagreement. But that doesn’t mean we’re in a fight.”
“My brother doesn’t love me.” She looked at him and wrinkled her nose. “I’m sorry. This is just kind of a whole list of all
the things about me that are sad. My brother, Chip—”
“Chip and Bix?”
“You’d think they charged by the syllable for baby names, I know.” Bix rolled her eyes. “He is honestly the biggest asshole. And I think he always resented me. And was angry that my dad took me in. We have different moms. And he’s thirteen years older than me. One time we went into the woods to check on one of my dad’s stills, and he left me there. And I mean, he didn’t leave me by the still, he tried to get me good and lost so I couldn’t find my way back.”
“What?”
“Yeah. That was the first time I really knew... that I was on my own.” She shook her head. “But the thing is, I never have
been. Not really. Because sometimes there are old ladies who give you the extra twenty dollars out of their purse. And then
sometimes there are policeman cowboys who find you in the middle of the woods and give you a whole new life.” She looked up
at him, her blue eyes dewy. “I’m never going to be able to pay you back.”
And that right there was the reason. It wasn’t underestimating her; it wasn’t not giving her credit. It was that as long as
she felt like she owed him, he could never make a move on her. Because he would never, ever treat her like that. He would
never be one of those men who acted like a woman’s body was a collection against a debt. Even if it wouldn’t be that for him,
if she felt even slightly coerced he...
He could never do that.
“I don’t need you to pay me back.”
“And I come back to why .”
“Atonement. Is that the answer that you need?”
She looked hurt. She turned and looked at the river, and then her fishing pole jerked. She pulled back on it sharply. “Fish on,” she said. And she spent the next couple of minutes reeling in the fish. Not long after he caught one of his own, and when they had five on a string, they walked back to the house together.
He had hurt her feelings. And he didn’t have answers to much of anything. So that had been a productive trip.
At least there was fish.
Bix was efficiently cleaning fish at Daughtry’s kitchen sink while he warmed up the pan, and she was trying to process why
she was irritated with the conversation they just had.
Why she felt prickly.
It had felt, for a minute, like they were getting closer, and she had valued that. Especially after what happened last night.
She had been mean. Which was completely ridiculous and uncalled-for when he was being so nice.
But then...
Atonement .
Why was she even mad about that? She had always known that was why he was doing it. He had tortured do-gooder written all over him.
“Fish,” he said.
“Here you go,” she said, giving him the cleaned trout.
He fried them up in the pan with butter, and they ate them with rice and salad. He had a beer. She had a Coke.
“I’m sorry about what I said last night,” she said. She was trying to decide if she was being nice or provocative. She wasn’t
really sure which.
Because sometimes it was hard for her to say exactly what she was doing. She just wasn’t experienced enough with people. With friendship. With men.
And he was all of those things. He was people, in the general sense.
He was a friend, kind of.
And he was definitely a man. A man that she was attracted to.
“Which thing?”
“Well. I feel that it was unladylike of me to bring up that I saw the condoms in your bedside drawer. I also feel like it
was a bit churlish of me to say that I thought you were sexless.”
She looked down at her food and tried to keep her expression mild, while he made a choking sound. “Did a trout bone get caught
in your throat?” she asked.
“I think you know it didn’t,” he rasped.
“I don’t know,” she said, pushing her food around her plate. “I was maybe a little bit jealous.”
Why are you saying these things, Bix?
His expression looked cool, unreadable. “Don’t be,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Did you hear what I said about not doing relationships?”
“Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said about me not planning too far ahead for the future?”
“Bix...”
“I’m not innocent,” she said. “I have had a really hard life. And you are not part of the hard.”
He looked at her for a good thirty seconds. “I don’t want to be,” he said. “I never want to be a part of the hard things that have happened to you.”
“You couldn’t be.”
“Bix, one time, my dad took a man’s whole ranch as collateral. It was all legal, all the paperwork. I watched that man come
apart when my dad came to collect. Elias King unraveled the men in his debt, and he enjoyed it. And I didn’t feel sorry for
him. I felt like my dad was amazing at his job. At what he had set out to do. I thought my dad was a hero. That’s how wrong
I can be. That’s how much bad I can be in somebody’s life.”
“Okay, but counterpoint,” she said. “You can’t know what you don’t know. And you can’t unknow what you know now.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, I didn’t know how to get a bank account. And maybe half of the reason I was so angry about some of the things in the
system was I didn’t know how to use them. Now I know how to use a high-yield savings account. I can collect interest on my
money. That’s just making money doing nothing. I didn’t know that. I can’t be angry at myself for not knowing that. But also,
I know it now. So I’m never going to view banks quite the same as I used to.” She picked at a piece of rice in stuck in her
teeth. “Still pretty skeptical about fishing licenses.”
She looked at him eagerly, trying to gauge his response to that. She didn’t know if she should be embarrassed that she made it kind of obvious that she was attracted to him. Because she had never told a man she was attracted to him before. Because she had never been attracted to a man before Daughtry. And suddenly, she was seized with a very desperate need to act on that attraction.
To feel something normal.
That’s what it was. Daughtry had given her this beautiful, normal life. And she wanted the other things that came with that.
And somehow, she had a feeling that it was contingent upon him understanding what she was trying to get him to understand.
“That’s if you think it’s about knowledge. And not about an innate lack of empathy,” he said.
“You think that it’s excusable that I didn’t have empathy because of my situation. But I’m not sure if yours was as much different
from mine as you think it is.”
“It is, though. I always had food. I always had shelter.”
“Your dad controlled it all, though. And I imagine that he made it really clear that your position in the household was based
on how happy he was with you. Right?” Daughtry looked uncomfortable then. “What? I can’t be the only one in the hot seat all
the time. You know so much about me because of how it was when you found me. But I don’t know that much about you.”
“You know as much as anybody.”
“The way that your family has rallied around each other is honestly one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. And one thing that kept me at the ranch, even before the beer brewing, was all of you. But I can tell that you didn’t grow up in a happy house.”
“Gee, what gives you that idea?”
“I have a nose for dysfunction,” she said, tapping said feature. “Considering it’s my natural state.”
“I’m not looking for absolution.”
“Because atonement is different somehow?”
He nodded once. “Yes. In my mind, atonement requires an action. Absolution is just given to you. I don’t have any interest
in that.”
She nodded slowly. “So you are also not interested in the good news.” When he didn’t say anything, she sighed heavily. “You
don’t need to protect me.”
“But I want to.”
She pushed against that. “I really don’t need you to protect me. Because the thing is, no matter how well this goes, no matter
how long I stay here, it’s just a pitstop in my life, Daughtry. I don’t need you to go projecting permanence onto me.”
She suddenly felt like it was really important that she say that.
“I will always have to take care of myself. But the beautiful thing about this is I can’t unknow all the things that I’ve learned here. I will never go back to being what I was. Because I know too much. And that is the real beginning of something new. Because you gave me enough space to have hope. But you’ve given me enough space for other things too. I don’t need you to protect me, because the truth is, I’m going to have to go back to taking care of myself. To protecting myself. So as grateful as I am for the rest but, I can’t... I can’t be sheltered by you. Not completely. So whatever your reasoning for things, whatever you’re thinking, just don’t.”
She looked down at her plate again, then back up at him. “I’m sorry. I am half-feral. Not completely , not anymore. But I just... Sometimes I feel normal. And sometimes I feel like I finally get to want things the way that
normal people do. And then I remember I’m still somewhere in the middle of all that. Because at the end of the day, I don’t
have family. I think that’s why I admire yours so much.”
She pushed back from the table. “I’ll leave you to finish your dinner.”
“You never told me what you were going to say in your speech,” he said.
Sidestepping the whole thing. Sidestepping her attraction, sidestepping everything else.
“I was going to say that over the course of the last two months this has really started to feel like home. And I’ve never
had one of those before. I’m honored to contribute something to this ranch. To leave a piece of myself. For whenever I do
leave. And I hope that everyone will join in. That I can make a beer that honors every corner of this place. All four of them.”
Then she walked down the hall and went to her room. She sat on the edge of her bed, and she leaned over and took her copy
of The Wolf and the Dove out of her bag. “You could chain me to the bed,” she whispered.
She didn’t know what she wanted. Not really. She had no idea how to process this deep desire to be closer to him. This intense attraction to him. Because it was just so completely different than anything she had ever experienced before. She knew what it was.
She had read about it.
But why didn’t he want her?
The only real answer was because it wasn’t just that he wanted to protect her, it wasn’t just that he wanted atonement, but
it was that he still saw her as being less. An object of pity.
“Well, I’m not pitiable,” she said out loud.
She wasn’t. She had a job now. She had some dreams.
And she was going to leave. Once she got the beer formula down, once they got the whole thing set and ready to go, she was
going to go get herself an apartment, and she was going to go to school. She was going to take her experience and she was
going to get a job at a brewery. She had to remember that she wasn’t staying here.
It wasn’t her place. It wasn’t her life. She couldn’t be dependent on him forever. She had to find her own path.
It was a good reminder, that conversation she had with him in the kitchen.
She had tried. She had voiced her attraction, and it hadn’t gone anywhere.
And you couldn’t unknow things. Now she couldn’t unknow how uninterested Daughtry was. So she was going to have to scrape
up that pride that she had left and try to move forward.