Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Thunder
Pride's a hell of a painkiller right up until it isn't.
That's the lesson I'm about to learn again, and I'm going to learn it the hard way, because I'm forty minutes into rehanging a gate I've got no business touching, and I'm too stubborn to quit while I've still got the legs to walk away from it.
The gate's on the corral by the far barn, the heavy pipe one that sagged its hinges last winter and never got fixed because there was always something worse we had to handle here on Sharp Shooter Ranch.
It's a two-man job on a good day.
I'm doing it alone at the tail end of a morning that already took more out of me than I let on to anybody.
Phantom's got the whole club stretched thin watching for a silver truck that hasn't shown again, and every hand on this ranch is doing the work of two.
I'll be damned if the Sergeant at Arms is the one man standing around holding a cane while his brothers sweat.
So, I've got the gate up on my shoulder, and a hinge pin in my teeth and my weight braced wrong.
All of it fucking wrong, and I know it is even as I'm doing it.
I set my feet to lift the last inch.
And my hip goes.
It doesn't hurt at first.
That's the trick of it, the cruel little mercy of it, the leg just quits, the way a rope quits, all at once with no warning, the muscle around that hunk of bullet fragment deciding it's done taking orders.
One second I'm holding sixty pounds of steel gate at shoulder height.
The next my left leg isn't under me, and the gate's coming down, and I'm coming down with it.
I get a hand out.
Catch the corral rail.
It's the only reason the gate doesn't take my foot off, because I get enough of a twist on it to send it crashing sideways into the dirt instead of straight down onto my boot.
Then I'm down on one knee in the dust with my bad leg splayed out useless behind me and the pain arriving all at once now, roaring up from the hip like the fragment's caught fire.
I don't make a sound.
Twenty years of getting hurt taught me that much.
But I'm down, I'm all the way down.
I can't get up, and for one long ugly second I understand exactly how far I've fallen from the man I was—a man who used to put other men on the ground and now can't get himself off it.
Then I hear the truck door.
Of course.
Of fucking course she's here.
The one person on this whole ranch I'd have crawled into the barn to keep from seeing this, and here she comes at a dead run across the lot with her braid flying and her face gone white, and there's nothing I can do about it because I'm on my knees in the dirt like a shot horse.
"Thunder—" She hits the ground beside me, hands already on me, on my shoulder, my arm. "Don't move. Don't you move, let me look at you?—"
"I'm fine."
"You're on the damn ground."
"I'm restin'."
"You aren’t resting, you—" Her voice cracks, and she stops, and her hands are shaking where they've got hold of my arm, and I clock that even through the roar in my hip.
She's scared.
Not annoyed, not exasperated.
Scared clean through.
"God, Thunder, the gate could've—your leg is—can you feel your foot? Can you move it?"
"I can move it."
I do, to prove it, and it screams, and I keep my face flat.
"Fragment shifted. It does that. It'll settle."
"It'll settle." She says it like a curse. "You're out here hanging a two-man gate by yourself on a hip full of shrapnel, and you want to tell me it'll settle."
She gets under my arm before I can tell her not to.
I want to tell her not to.
I open my mouth to tell her not to, because the last thing on this earth I want is Presley Hutchins-Lyle taking my weight like I'm an old man who fell in the shower.
She looks at me with her jaw set in that Lyle line and says, "Don't. Don't you dare tell me you've got it. Let me help you up or sit here in the dirt till your mama drives by, those are your choices."
So, I let her help me up.
God help me, I let her, because the alternative is worse, and because some part of me that I'm not proud of has been starving for weeks for exactly this.
For her hands on me, her body against my side, the warm familiar weight of her fit up under my arm where she used to fit for entirely different reasons.
We get me vertical.
It takes both of us and it's ugly.
By the time I'm up, I've got sweat standing on my forehead and my breath coming hard through my nose.
She's breathing hard too, and we're pressed together in the dirt by a fallen gate with her arm around my back and my arm across her shoulders.
Both of us don’t say anything for a second.
She's smaller than the job.
That's what gets me, standing there leaning on her more than I want to be.
She's a hundred and twenty pounds of ranch girl with a two-hundred-forty-pound man's weight half on her, and she's not buckling.
She's got her boots planted and her arm locked across my back and she's holding me up through pure stubborn will.
There was a time not long ago I could've picked her up over my head with one arm.
The world turns you around fast.
"There's a stock tank behind you," she says finally, quietly. "The turned-over one. Sit down before you fall down."
Second person today to tell me to sit down before I fall down. Roan yesterday, Presley now. A man might start to take it personal.
I sit.
She crouches down in front of me in the dirt, and she runs her hands down my bad leg, professional and quick, feeling along the hip and down the thigh the way she'd check a horse that came up lame.
I let her, and I hold still under her hands, and I don't say a damn word.
She's good with her hands.
Always was.
I've got reasons to know it that have nothing to do with a busted hip.
I shove every one of them down where they belong, because she's kneeling in the dirt trying to figure out if I've done myself permanent damage, and it'd be a low thing to be thinking about her mouth right now.
"It's not the joint," she says, half to herself. "You'd be screaming if it was the joint. It's the muscle. It seized around the fragment and dumped you."
She looks up at me, and her hand's still on my thigh, warm through the denim, and she seems to realize it the same second I do, and she doesn't move it.
"You could've broken your neck, you know that? A gate that size comes down the wrong way, and it's not your hip we'd be talking about."
"I know."
"Then why, Thunder?" It comes out raw. "Why are you out here doing this alone? You've got a whole club of men who'd hang that gate in ten minutes. You've got a cane. Why in God's name are you?—"
"Because I can't be the man who holds the cane."
It comes out flatter and harder than I mean it to, and it shuts her up.
I look away from her out across the lot because it's easier than looking at her face while I say the rest.
"I've been the Sergeant at Arms of this club for years," I tell her.
"You know what that is? It's the sword. Phantom points, I go. Somebody threatens this family, I'm the one who walks into the dark and makes it stop, and I've been that man so long I don't know how to be any other kind. It's not a job. It's my purpose."
The gate lies in the dirt where it fell. I don't look at it.
"And a few weeks ago a man walked into our bunkhouse and I couldn't stop him. Took a bullet trying and it wasn't enough, and now I've got a piece of him living in my hip, and every morning I wake up and find out all over again that the sword's got a crack in it."
My jaw works.
"Club's stretched thin right now. Real thin. Somethin's comin' and every man's pulling double, and I'm out here provin' to a fence gate that I can still pull my weight because if I can't do that, Presley, if I'm not the sword anymore, then I don't rightly know what I am."
She's gone very still, crouched there in front of me. "You're a father," she says quietly.
"Yeah." That one I can answer. "That's the one thing left I know I'm still good for. My girl, and this club. Those are the two things I'd crawl to that gate on both broken legs for."
I finally look at her.
"The club's my whole life, Presley. It and Raine. That's all I've had for years and it's been enough." And here's where I should stop.
Here's where a smart man stops, a man protecting himself, a man who remembers she ended it and walked out his door and told him no more lies.
I know exactly where the edge of the cliff is.
I've known the whole time.
I say it anyway.
"The club, and my daughter." I hold her eyes. "And now you."
She doesn't move.
The words sit there in the hot noon air between us, three of them, and now you, the closest I've come to saying all of it out loud.
They hit her as hard as a slap, her lips parting, her eyes going bright, her breath catching somewhere in her chest.
"Thunder—"
"I'm not askin' you for anything." I keep my voice low.
"You made your choice and I heard it. I'm not takin' it back for you and I'm not gonna stand at your pens beggin'.
But you asked me why I'd break my own body rather than sit still, and that's your answer.
Because the two things that were my whole life turned into three somewhere back in the spring, and one of them won't look at me anymore, and a man'll do a lot of stupid things with his hands when the rest of him's got to keep distracted. "
Her eyes have gone wet now, full and shining, and one breaks loose and cuts a clean line down through the dust on her cheek, and she doesn't wipe it away.
"That's not fair," she whispers.
Same thing she said at the pens. Same three words.
"You can't just—you can't say things like that to me. Not when I'm trying so hard to?—"
"To what?"
"To not want this." Her voice breaks all the way.
"Do you have any idea how hard I'm working to not want this?
My family fell apart, Thunder. My sisters won't look at me, my whole life cracked down the middle, and the one thing I know—the one thing I've got left to hold onto—is that I can't add one more secret to the pile.
I can't. And then you go and get a rattlesnake put on your neck, and you say what you just did, and you make it so hard. "
I get a hand up. I shouldn't.
My hip's on fire and I've got no business moving, but I get my hand up off my knee, and I bring it to the side of her face, and I catch that wet line with my thumb, and she doesn't pull back.
She leans into it.
Barely, the smallest press of her cheek into my palm, her eyes falling closed.
It's the first time I've touched her since a hotel room in the spring and it goes through me worse than the fragment ever did.
We're close now.
She's crouched in the dirt between my knees and I've got her face in my hand and her breath's gone shallow, and her mouth is right there.
Close enough that I can see the freckles the sun's brought up across her nose, close enough that all I'd have to do is lean, just lean, six inches and I'd have her mouth back after all these weeks of nothing.
She knows it too.
Her eyes come open and drop to my mouth and come back up.
For one second we hang right there on the edge of it, both of us, her hand fisted in my shirt at my chest and my thumb at her cheekbone, and the whole ranch has gone silent around us.
Then she pulls back.
She does it slowly, but she does it—takes her hand out of my shirt, sits back on her heels, and puts eight inches of hot air between her mouth and mine.
She presses the back of her wrist to her lips like she's holding something in.
"I can't," she says. "Not because I don't—" She stops. Shakes her head. "I can't, Thunder. Nothing's changed. Everything that was true when I walked out your door is still true."
"I know it is."
"Then you have to let me go get someone to help you up to the house."
She's already standing, already putting the ranch back between us, already reaching for the steady voice she runs her whole life with.
"You need ice on that hip, to stay off it, and you need to not hang any more gates by yourself, you stubborn, impossible?—"
"Presley."
She stops.
"Thank you," I tell her.
"For stoppin'. For gettin' under my arm. I know how difficult it must’ve been for you. Not just physically, speakin’."
She looks at me a second longer, and there's something breaking behind her face that she's not going to let me see finish. Then she turns and heads for her truck to go find me a set of hands that isn't hers.
She goes.
And I sit there on an overturned stock tank next to a gate I couldn't hang, with my hip screaming, and I think, clear as the noon sky, that I got closer just now than I have in weeks.
She leaned into my hand.
She had eight inches and a clean shot at walking away, and she spent one whole second looking at my mouth first.
A man works with what he's got.
And what I've got, sitting in the dirt with a broken-down body, and a cracked sword, and a family coming apart at the seams, is a woman who's working as hard to stay away from me as I am to earn her back, which means we're both pushing on the same locked door.
Sooner or later one of us is going to stop pushing.
I intend to still be standing there when she does.