Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Thunder
My daughter has been conducting an investigation, and this morning she presents her findings. "Daddy."
Raine sits across from me at breakfast with the serious face she gets when she's been thinking hard about something, cereal spoon paused halfway.
"I found four hair ties that aren't mine.
And they're not Grandma's because Grandma doesn't wear the little clear ones.
And there's a girl toothbrush in the bathroom that's purple.
And the coffee creamer in the fridge is the vanilla kind and you drink yours black. "
I set my cup down real careful. "Is that so?"
"Mm-hm."
She takes a bite, chews, watches me with those dark eyes that don't miss a thing, my eyes in her face. "And Miss Presley's truck is here a lot. Early. Like before-school early."
She lets that hang there like a little prosecutor. "So."
"So," I say.
"So is Miss Presley your girlfriend or what?"
I've faced down armed men with less of a dry mouth.
There's a whole calculation a man does in a half-second like this—how much a nine-year-old can hold, how much of the truth is safe, how much a slip at school could cost when the whole thing's supposed to be a secret.
But I've never once lied to Raine, not the real kind of lie, and I'm not about to start over a hair tie.
"Would that bother you?" I ask her. "If she was?"
Raine considers this with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice.
"No," she decides. "I like her. She helps me with my cow project and she doesn't do the fake voice grown-ups do. And she makes you not sad."
She points her spoon at me.
"But if she's your girlfriend, she should come to my birthday, and also you can't be weird about it."
"I'm never weird."
"Daddy. You're a little weird."
She goes back to her cereal, case closed, the whole earth-shaking matter settled to her satisfaction. "You don't have to tell me if it's a secret. I'm really good at secrets. I never told anybody about the window."
"What window?"
"Exactly," she says, and I decide not to pull that thread before nine in the morning.
Mama Lou comes for her at noon, because Saturday's their day and has been Raine's whole life.
The two of them baking, running errands, or watching their shows, and my mother gives me a look on the porch that says she's done her own investigating and reached her own conclusions and is choosing, for now, to keep them to herself.
"You look good, son," is all she says, Raine's overnight bag over her shoulder. "Rested. Haven't seen that on you in a long while."
"Sleepin' better."
"Mm." She pats my cheek like I'm still ten. "Sleep. Sure. That's what we're callin' it."
And she's gone down the steps before I can say anything, cackling to herself, Raine already in the car hollering about what kind of pie they're making.
The cabin goes quiet behind them.
And I stand on my porch on a golden Saturday afternoon with the whole place to myself and a woman two cabins over that I get to go find, and I think a man could get used to this.
A man could get downright careless about how good this is.
I already have, if I'm honest. We both have.
Her hair ties are in my bathroom, her creamer's in my fridge, and my kid's running a detective agency, and not one of us has been half as careful lately as we were in the spring.
Can't bring myself to care today.
Today's too good.
* * *
I find her in the main barn, where I figured, because Presley at loose ends on a Saturday means Presley working.
She's got the big sliding door open to the afternoon light and a folding table set up in the alley with her laptop and a mess of papers spread out.
EPD sheets, breeding charts, and a herd book gone soft at the corners.
She's chewing the end of a pen with her boots up on a hay bale and her brow furrowed at a spreadsheet.
She's so beautiful concentrating that I stand in the door a second just to look at her before she knows I'm there.
"I can feel you staring," she says without looking up.
"Can't help it. You're a sight." I roll the side-by-side slowly, the bed of it loaded with what I've hauled out. "Figured you skipped lunch again. You always skip lunch when you're deep in numbers."
That gets her to look up, and her whole face changes when she sees what I've brought.
Because I didn't bring her a sandwich.
I brought the good cooler and the folding chairs and the whole spread—cold chicken and potato salad, a couple of Mama Lou's leftover biscuits, two beers sweating in the ice, and the little battery lantern because the light'll go before we're done.
"Thunder." She's half laughing. "Did you bring me on a date? To the barn?"
"Brought supper to a woman who forgets to eat." I start unloading, ignoring the way my hip complains about the twisting. "If it turns into a date, that's on you."
We eat in the barn alley with the door open to the dying light, sitting in two folding chairs with the cooler between us for a table, and it's the best meal I've had in a month even though it's leftovers off paper plates.
She tells me about the numbers—which cows are throwing the best calves, which bull she wants to bring in next season, the paint mare she's got her eye on—and I actually follow it, because I ran stock my whole life before the club took the front seat, and there's a particular pleasure in watching a woman be that good at something.
She knows her animals.
She knows the science behind the animals.
She lights up talking about it in a way she doesn't light up about much else, and I could listen to it all night.
"You're doing that thing again," she says, catching me.
"What thing?"
"Looking at me like I hung the moon because I explained heritability estimates."
"Maybe you did." I take a pull of my beer. "Prettiest anybody ever made cattle genetics sound, I'll tell you that."
She throws a biscuit at me.
I catch it and eat it, and she laughs, and the sound of it goes through me warm.
"This is nice," she says after a minute, quieter, looking out the open door at the last of the daylight going pink over the pasture.
"I don't think I've just... sat. In weeks.
Months, maybe. There's always a fire to put out.
A cow to doctor, a sister to worry about, a secret to keep.
" She tips her head back against the chair.
"I forgot you're allowed to just eat cold chicken in a barn with somebody and not be running from anything. "
"That's the whole idea." I reach over and tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "You spend so much of your life takin' care of everybody else, Presley. The herd, your sisters, my kid, me. Somebody ought to bring you supper once in a while and make you sit down for it."
She catches my hand before I can pull it back, turns her face into my palm, presses a kiss there.
"Nobody ever has," she says against my skin.
"Before you. Not once."
And that hits me somewhere deep, because I know it's true.
She was raised by a good man who loved her, but he's gone now, and she came into this family a grown woman with nobody whose whole job was just her.
Well.
She's got somebody now.
The light goes gold, then blue, and I click on the little lantern, and somewhere in there the easy quiet turns into something with more weight to it.
She's watching me rub my hip without meaning to, the way I do at the end of a day.
"How is it?" she asks. "Really. Not the answer you give the club."
I think about dodging.
Then I don't, because that's the deal with her now, the whole point of her.
"Better," I say. "Real slow, but better.
PT's helping. I can get through most of a day now without it puttin' me on the ground.
" I flex the leg out, feel the fragment pull.
"But I want to ride, Presley. Not the bike, I'm back on the bike.
A horse. I haven't been up on a horse since before the bunkhouse and I miss it worse than I can say.
Grew up on horseback. Feels like a piece of me's just... parked."
"So get back on one."
"Can't yet." And it galls me to say it, but I do. "Doc says the hip's not ready for what a horse asks of it. A green colt spooks, I come off wrong, I could undo everything, maybe worse. So I wait. I hate it, but I have to wait."
I look at her. "Spent my whole life bein' the man who could do anything the club needed, physically. Learnin' to tell my own body no and mean it—that's the hardest work I've done in years."
She reaches over and takes my hand.
"You'll ride again," she says, simple and certain. "You're doing the patient thing now so you get all of it back later. That's not weakness, Thunder. That's the smartest kind of strength there is."
She squeezes. "I'd know. I run a breeding program. Patience is the whole job."
I don't have words for what that does to me, so I do what I do instead of words.
I stand, and I pull her up out of her chair by the hand she's got in mine.
I walk her back into the deeper dark of the barn where the light from the lantern goes soft, and I back her up against a support post and kiss her slow and deep.
She melts into it with a little sound that undoes me every single time.
"Barn," she murmurs against my mouth. "Anybody could?—"
"Everybody's at supper. Raine's at Mama Lou's. Nobody's comin' out here." I get a hand in her hair, tip her head back, work my mouth down her throat. "And I've been wantin' to lay you down in the hay since the second I saw you chewin' that pen. Let me have you, rattlesnake. Slow. We got all night."
She stops arguing.
It's different tonight, and we both feel it.
Not the desperate claiming of the tub, not the quiet we had to be on the edge of my bed with Raine down the hall.
This is slow and settled, a man and a woman who've stopped running at each other and started to just... have each other.
I lay her down on a horse blanket over the straw and I take my time undressing her in the lantern light.
I trace the rattlesnake on her ribs with my mouth, my mark on her, and then lower to the script on her back that says she's mine, and she shivers under every pass.
I'm stronger tonight than I've been.
I can hold myself over her now, take more of my own weight, move her how I want her, and there's a deep satisfaction in getting a piece of that back, in being able to cover her body with mine and feel her go soft and open underneath me.
The hip still talks. It always talks.
When I settle between her thighs there's a bright pull of it that I have to breathe through, and she feels me go still and reads it instantly.
"Let me," she starts, moving to shift us.
"No." I press her back down, gently. "I've got it tonight. I want it like this. I want to be the one over you."
I roll my hips and we both groan. "Pain's just along for the ride, darlin'. It doesn't get a vote when you're lookin' at me like that."
I take her slow and deep on a horse blanket in my own barn while the last light dies outside.
One hand laced with hers up over her head, the other under the small of her back arching her up into me, and I watch her whole face the entire time because I can, because it's mine now, because she gave it to me.
There's a strength coming back to me tonight that I've been missing since the spring, and I feel it in every place our bodies meet.
Months ago I couldn't have held this position, couldn't have taken my own weight on the bad leg long enough to do this right.
Tonight I can.
Tonight I set the pace and hold it, moving in her deep and unhurried, feeling her come apart in slow degrees under hands that finally do what I tell them again.
The hip burns the whole time, a hot wire down my left side with every stroke, and I ride it the way I've learned to ride all of it now, breathing through the worst of it, refusing to let it take this from me.
Some things are worth the pain. This is at the top of a short list.
"I love you," she says, wrecked, at the edge of it. "God, Thunder, I love you?—"
"I know it." I press my forehead to hers. "I know you do. Feel it every time you look at me."
My voice goes rough. "Let go, Presley. I've got you. Always got you."
She comes apart under me with my name on her lips, and I follow her over a few strokes later, buried deep.
Her legs locked around me and her arms around my neck and the hip screaming and none of it mattering at all, because this—her, here, mine, the whole warm weight of her wrapped around me in the straw—this is the closest thing to peace I've ever known.
After, we lie tangled up on the blanket, sweat cooling, her head on my chest right over the heartbeat that's hers now whether she knows it or not.
"We should get dressed," she says, not moving.
"Should."
"Somebody really could come out here."
"Yeah, they could."
I don't move either.
I stroke her hair and stare up at the dark rafters, holding the best thing I've ever had against my side and let myself, for one more minute, be a man with everything.
It's later, driving her back to her cabin on the side-by-side under a sky gone thick with stars, that the other thing settles back onto me.
Because as good as tonight was, as far as we've come, there's a piece of me that never fully stands down, and it's the piece that remembers what came back on that last run.
The men still won't say much about it.
But I know how Rogue's face goes when he thinks nobody's watching, and I know we didn't find what we went looking for, and I know the Firm is still out there somewhere past the good, patient, building their book, waiting on a season of their own choosing.
We handled the investigator. The family's whole.
My hip's mending.
But that silver-truck feeling never fully left, and a man who's survived as long as I have learns not to argue with it.
I drop her at her door and kiss her long enough that she laughs and pushes me off, and I watch her light come on inside, and I ride home under all those stars telling myself what men like me always tell ourselves.
That we've earned a little peace.
That the worst is behind us.
That we get to keep this.
I almost believe it, too.
That's the trouble with happiness.
It makes you careless.
It makes you stop watching the dark quite as hard as you should.
And the dark, in my experience, has never once failed to notice.