Chapter Ten
Logan had planned the morning.
He’d drawn it all up the night before, in his head, while he lay in bed staring at the ceiling—the way he did for every morning, because a day without a plan turned into a day where Mason forgot to feed the cattle, and Thomas wasted the day away napping or complaining how he didn’t get to go to town as much as he wanted.
So, Logan had to organize them.
South pasture first, where the creek crossing needed new stones laid before the spring runoff softened the bank.
Then the barn roof, which had started leaking again from the east, because, of course it had.
After that, inventory on the feed stores, a ride out to check the far fenceline, and, if the light held, maybe an hour of work on the crib he’d started carving in the woodshed after supper three nights ago.
A real crib. With turned spindles, a curved rocker base, and joints tight enough to hold for twenty years.
He hadn’t told anyone about it yet.
So, he pulled on his boots, tucked his shirt in, buckled his belt, and grabbed his hat off the hook by the door.
Warm coffee sat on the back of the stove, where Grace always left it, since, somehow, the woman rose before him every single day, no matter how early he got up, and he’d stopped trying to beat her to it.
He took one swallow, set the cup in the basin, and opened the front door.
A man stood on the porch.
Tall, dark-haired, younger than Logan by maybe a year or so, wearing a coat that’d gone threadbare at the elbows and carrying a rucksack slung over one shoulder. His stubble gave off the air that he’d been on the road a few days rather than choosing facial hair as a grooming choice.
Between one breath and the next, Logan grabbed the man by the collar and hauled him sideways off the step.
The rucksack hit the dirt. The stranger yelped, which implied surprise, and surprise meant Logan had the advantage.
He drove his shoulder into the man’s ribs and took him down into the yard.
The impact knocked the air out of both of them.
Logan, however, had managed to land on the top, so the math worked in his favor.
“Pa! Mason!” He pinned the stranger’s arm against the ground with his knee. “Get Grace and Miriam out the back! Now!”
The stranger swung with his free hand and caught Logan across the jaw.
Stars. He saw actual stars—the kind that bloomed white and hot behind the eyes and tasted like copper at the back of the tongue. The punch carried more weight behind it than a man that lean should be able to muster, and Logan’s grip slipped for half a second.
Long enough.
The stranger rolled and scrambled to his feet, and Logan lunged after him, getting a fistful of that threadbare coat and yanking him back down. They hit the ground together in a tangle of knees and elbows, and dust kicked up around them in a cloud that tasted like dry earth.
“Get off me, you lunatic!” The stranger clawed at Logan’s wrist. “I ain’t here to rob you!”
“Then why’re you on my porch at five in the mornin’?”
Behind them, the front door banged open. Boots on the porch boards. Mason shouting something. Pa’s voice, rough from sleep, barking an order Logan couldn’t make out through the blood pounding in his ears.
“Logan,” Thomas grabbed his shoulder. “Logan, hold up a second—”
“Get off me, Thomas, and get Pa’s rifle—”
“Stop it!”
Grace came off the porch at a dead run with her hair still loose from sleep and one of Logan’s own flannel shirts thrown over her nightdress. She’d started borrowing them in the mornings, and he’d never said anything about it because, well… she looked good in them.
She threw herself between them and dropped to her knees right in the dirt. She shoved both palms against Logan’s chest hard enough to break his grip on the stranger’s collar.
“That’s my brother!”
Logan blinked.
The stranger coughed and sat up, rubbing his throat where the collar had dug in.
Up close, in the gray pre-dawn light, the resemblance hit Logan like a second punch.
Same dark hair. Same line to the jaw. Same scattering of freckles across the nose, though the man’s skin ran a shade lighter than Grace’s.
“Jonah.” Grace grabbed the man’s face with both hands and turned it side to side, checking for damage. “What on earth are you doin’ here? You said a few months! It’s been three weeks!”
“I got an early start.” Jonah winced when she pressed on a spot above his ear. “Ow. Gracie, I’m fine. Quit pokin’ at me.”
“You’re bleedin’.”
“Your husband hits like a mule, so yeah, I reckon I might be.”
Logan stood up. Dirt covered him from collar to knee, and the spot on his jaw where Jonah had connected throbbed in time with his pulse. Behind him, on the porch, Pa, Mason, and Thomas formed a line, and Pa held the rifle.
“So.” Logan brushed dust off his sleeves, his trousers, then off his sleeves again, as the dirt had gotten into everything. “Your brother.”
Grace helped Jonah to his feet. “My brother.”
Jonah straightened his coat and stuck out a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Foster.”
Logan looked at the hand.
Back in the kitchen, Miriam started crying. Of course she did.
A morning that’d started with a plan had turned into a brawl in the front yard before the sun cleared the ridge, and this baby had some kind of supernatural instinct for picking the exact worst second to demand attention.
“Mason.” Logan jerked his chin to the house without taking his eyes off Jonah. “Go see to Miriam.”
Mason glanced between Logan, Grace, and Jonah and then ducked inside.
Jonah’s hand hung in the air for another beat before he let it drop.
“Anyway, uh, I was wonderin’ if you needed a ranch hand? I ain’t lazy about the work, and I’d love to stay close to—”
“No.”
“Logan.” Grace frowned at him before looking back at Jonah. “Of course, you can work.”
“Grace. I don’t know this man.”
“I know him. He’s my family.”
“And this is my property.”
That landed crooked between them, setting a hard line between them, and Logan registered it the second it left his mouth. But the words had already hit the air, and he couldn’t pull them back any more than he could un-throw a punch.
Jonah looked at his sister. Then at Logan. Then back at his sister.
“Gracie, if it ain’t a good time—”
“It’s fine, Jonah.” She kept her eyes on Logan. “We just need a moment to discuss this.”
“Seriously, I can come back another time.” Jonah touched the spot on his forehead where a bruise had started to purple. “Or not at all, I—”
“Jonah, hush.” Grace stepped closer to Logan. “He’s my family.”
“He’s a stranger who showed up on my property without warnin’ at the crack of dawn.”
Grace flinched.
Somewhere in the back of Logan’s head, in the part that catalogued things and filed them for later, he noted that flinch.
Noted, too, that he didn’t like it. Not the flinch itself but the way his chest did something stupid and small in response, some reflex he hadn’t agreed to.
Filed it. Moved on because the rest of his head still ran hot from the surprise of the fight and the fundamental problem of an uninvited man standing in his yard acting like the world owed him a seat at the breakfast table.
“Logan.” Grace put a hand on his shoulder. “You said yourself the herd needs more hands come autumn—”
“I said that to you. In private. About hirin’ men I’d vet and choose myself.”
“So vet him! He’s standin’ right here!”
Jonah rubbed the back of his head. “Uh, Grace—”
“He can mend fences. He can haul feed. He can do anything your brothers can do and probably with less complainin’ than Thomas.”
“Hey now.” Thomas straightened up on the porch. “I’m right here.”
“Grace.” Logan held up one hand. “I said no.”
She crossed her arms. “Well, I say yes.”
“That is not your call to make.”
She stared at him.
The air between them changed. The texture of it. Like something smooth had gone rough under his palm, the way a planed board scratched when you ran your hand against the grain instead of with it.
“Excuse me?”
“Your arrangement here covers the house, the cookin’, and the mendin’.” Logan clenched his jaw. “It don’t extend to hirin’ decisions, and it sure don’t cover invitin’ people to live on this ranch without consultin’ me first.”
“I’m consultin’ you right now!”
“No, you’re tellin’ me. There’s a difference, and I don’t appreciate it.”
“Because you won’t even give him a chance! You tackled the man before he got a word out!”
“He stood on my porch before dawn! What’d you expect me to do, offer him lemonade?”
“I expected you to act like a reasonable human being before punchin’ someone in the face!”
Jonah had taken a step back during all this, which showed more of a self-preservation instinct than Logan would’ve credited him with based on that right hook.
On the porch, Pa had settled into his chair with the rifle across his lap, observing the proceedings the way a man observes a thunderstorm from a covered porch.
Nothing to do but wait for it to pass.
Smart man.
“Get off my property.” Logan looked past Grace to Jonah. “Come back when you’ve sent word ahead, and I’ve had time to think on it.”
“You can’t just—”
“It’s my ranch, Grace. My land, my house, my stock, my decision. That’s how this works.”
The words came out the way he’d built them.
The way a man built a fence to keep things on the proper side.
And the logic held because this ranch ran on his authority.
If he let that crack—if he let people show up and plant themselves wherever they pleased just because his wife vouched for them—the whole structure wobbled.
Grace pulled back as if he’d swung at her.
“Your ranch.”
“That’s right.”
“And what about me? Where do I fit into all them yours?”
“You fit where we agreed you’d fit.”
“Tell me somethin’, Logan.” She got in his face, and the morning light caught the copper in those freckles of hers, and her jaw set. “If Mason or Thomas showed up hungry on somebody’s doorstep, and the man of the house threw ’em out on their ear without even hearin’ ’em speak, what would you do?”
The question drilled right into the one spot he couldn’t armor up.
Because he’d burn that man’s house to the ground. That’s what he’d do. If anyone turned his brothers away without so much as a cup of water, Logan would ride out there himself and take the matter up in person, and the conversation would involve very few words and a whole lot of property damage.
But admitting that meant admitting she had a point and losing control of this situation.
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Because they’re my brothers.”
“And Jonah’s my brother. My only blood kin in this world. The person who kept me fed and alive after our parents died. And you want me to stand here and watch you run him off like a stray dog?”
“If you don’t like the way things work on this ranch...”
He pulled himself up to his full height, using every inch of the six feet God gave him, and delivered the line he’d been saving as a final card—the one he figured would end this and bring the whole argument back under his authority because no woman would actually walk away from a roof and steady meals over a visiting brother.
“...then you are welcome to leave.”
Grace went still.
For a stretch that lasted about ten years inside Logan’s chest, she looked at him.
Just looked. With those brown eyes that’d gone all the way to dark in the early light, with nothing honey-colored left in them.
Her face rearranged itself, piece by piece, like she’d been assembling an opinion of him for weeks and had just snapped the final one into place.
“Fine.”
She said it the way you’d close a ledger.
Then she turned and walked into the house. Measured steps that carried the kind of purpose Logan recognized because he walked that way himself whenever he’d made a decision and moved on to executing it.
The screen door closed behind her.
“Well,” Jonah picked up his rucksack and dusted it off. “That went great.”
“Shut your mouth.”
“Just sayin’.”
Logan opened his own mouth to say something, but the sound of drawers opening and then closing came from inside the house.
Quick footsteps on the floorboards. Then Grace reappeared on the porch with Miriam bundled against her chest in the cotton sling, her carpetbag in one hand, and her boots on her feet.
“Grace.” Logan shook his head. “Grace, what are you—”
“You told me I could leave, Mr. Foster.” She walked past him toward Jonah. “I’m takin’ you at your word.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You meant exactly what you said. Don’t insult us both by pretendin’ otherwise.”
She grabbed Jonah’s elbow and steered him toward the road, and Jonah adjusted his rucksack and fell into step beside her. Miriam fussed once against Grace’s collarbone, then settled.
Logan stood in his own yard and watched them walk away.
Down the road. Getting smaller. Grace’s stride eating up the distance with a rhythm that brooked no argument, and Jonah was matching it at her side. The baby’s bonnet, that flour-sack bonnet Grace had sewn by hand at the kitchen table, caught a patch of early sun.
Then the road curved behind the cottonwoods, and they vanishes behind the bend.
On the porch, Pa stood up. The chair creaked behind him.
“You know somethin’, boy?”
Logan turned.
“For a man who takes such pride in keepin’ things in order...” Pa tucked the rifle under his arm and pulled the front door open. “...you got a helluva talent for breakin’ the things that matter.”