Chapter 19 #3
He set up the camp chairs in the back of his truck and carried the cooler, thermoses, and bag of food to the tailgate.
He also tossed the blanket in the truck bed so they could sit under it later without freezing.
Then he hopped up beside Bonnie, who was still sitting on the tailgate.
Their legs hung over the edge, boots dangling above the mud.
“What did you bring to eat? I’m starving,” she announced cheerfully.
“Lemon chicken,” he said, opening the cooler. “And roasted potatoes with, and I quote Noah, little bits of green stuff sticking to them. There’s pecan pie for dessert. Noah briefed me on your preferences.”
“My seven-year-old briefed you.”
“He was extremely thorough. He also told me you always say you shouldn’t get the pie and then get it anyway. So I skipped moderation and just brought the whole pie.”
Her gaze softened with a flicker of wonder. “He’s not wrong about the pie.”
“Noah’s not wrong about much. He just delivers information without any filter between the data and the output.”
“You realize you just described yourself.”
That was fair. Mostly. “I’d like to think I have marginally better filters than Noah.”
“Marginally.” She pulled the container of pie out of the cooler. “I’m eating a slice of this first.”
“From a nutritional standpoint, the order in which you consume the food doesn’t materially affect . . .”
“Gray.”
“Yes.”
“Give me a fork.”
He produced two forks. They sat on the tailgate of his truck eating pecan pie straight from the pan while the sunset blazed in front of them and the mud field reflected the light like hammered copper.
She ate with the unguarded enjoyment of a person who’d spent far too many years denying herself things she wanted.
They ate the chicken and the potatoes, and they talked but not about the investigation, not about the mayor, not about the evidence that was on its way to Helena. They talked about everything but that.
Instead they talked about the kids. About Noah’s latest question, which was whether butterflies remembered being caterpillars, and Gray admitted he’d spent forty minutes reading lepidoptera research papers because the question had genuinely bothered him. This made Bonnie laugh again.
They talked about Cassidy’s voracious reading habit, how she consumed books the way Gray did, compulsively, completely as if unanswered questions were a personal insult.
“She gets that from me,” Bonnie said. Then she paused, surprised by her own words. “I used to be like that. Before the fire. Before my marriage went south. Before I had two young kids. I used to read for fun. Novels, history, science. I used to be curious about everything.”
“What happened?”
“I got busy surviving.” She looked at the valley below them, the mountains going dark against the fading sky. “Being a single parent, having to hold everything together by myself doesn’t leave a lot of room for curiosity. Or for . . .”
She stopped. Started again. “Nobody’s done anything like this for me in a long time.
Nobody’s planned an outing just to make me happy.
I’ve been the person who plans things, who manages things, who thinks ahead so nothing goes wrong.
But you’ve got me beat by a mile in that department.
You brought three thermoses and scouted the sunset.
” Her voice wavered slightly, and she pressed her lips together.
“Bonnie.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t have to be fine around me.”
“I know I don’t. That’s the problem.” She set down her fork. “You keep making it so easy to not be fine, and I don’t know what to do with that.”
He reached over and pulled a cloth handkerchief from the cooler. She took it and laughed, a watery, knowing laugh. “A handkerchief. Of course you planned for the contingency of me crying.”
“I planned for every contingency.”
“Except the mud.”
He sighed theatrically. “Except the mud.” He paused. “And I didn’t plan for this next part either.”
She looked at him.
He kissed her. Not the way she’d kissed him in the parking lot, which had been sudden and brave. A declaration.
This was slower. His hand came up to the side of her face the way it had before, his thumb resting along her jaw, but this time he didn’t let himself be careful. He kissed her with the full, unguarded weight of what he’d been feeling since their first kiss.
Since he’d driven home after kissing her in the dusty chinook wind and realized he was in love with her. That he’d been in love with her for weeks. That every spreadsheet and star chart and contingency plan was his way of saying what he hadn’t had the words for yet.
Bonnie went still for one heartbeat as if she heard his thoughts.
Who knew? Maybe she did. Or maybe she just felt what he was trying to convey to her.
Either way, she gripped the front of his jacket in her fist and she pulled him closer.
And just like that, the kiss stopped being something tender and became something else entirely.
Their kiss before had been good. Better than good.
It had rearranged his fundamental understanding of what physical contact could mean.
Of how different it was to kiss a woman you loved and one you only liked.
But that kiss had happened in a parking lot in broad daylight with Ruth Sanger approximately forty feet away. There had been limits to that kiss.
There were no limits here.
There was only Bonnie’s mouth, warm and insistent against his, and the sound she made when his hand slid into her hair, half sigh, half surrender. The sound knocked every rational thought out of his head and replaced it with a single, overwhelming certainty that this woman was it.
She was the answer. She was the reason he’d been building himself into someone indispensable for thirty years, not so people would need him, but so when he finally found her, he would have something worth offering her.
They pulled apart breathing harder than the altitude accounted for. His hand was still in her hair and her hand was still gripping his jacket and neither of them moved. They stared at each other in wordless wonder.
“That was . . .” Bonnie’s voice was unsteady. Her eyes were enormous. “That was significantly better than the parking lot.”
“The parking lot had time, location, and audience constraints.”
“Ruth Sanger.”
“Ruth Sanger.”
She laughed, soft and shaky. She was looking at him the way she’d looked at the evidence wall in the fire station—as if she was seeing the full picture for the first time and it was bigger and more terrifying and more real than she’d ever imagined.
But this picture wasn’t a crime. It was him. And the terror in her eyes was threaded through with something luminous and reckless and brave.
“Do that again,” she said.
He did it again.
The second kiss lasted longer and went deeper and left them both quiet afterward as if something important had been settled. She leaned against his shoulder and he put his arm around her and they sat in the truck bed watching the sunset’s full color display until the first stars started to appear.
“That’s Jupiter,” he said, pointing to the bright, steady light above the western horizon.
“Of course you know which one is Jupiter.”
“I check the astronomical calendar most days. Our date happened to coincide with a good event to see.”
She lifted her head and looked at him. The last light was gone but the sky was clear and the stars gave enough faint light to see her face. “Gray. I need to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“I think I’m falling in love with you. And that terrifies me. Because the last man I loved . . .” She stopped. “You know what happened.”
“I do know.”
“And the man I gave my loyalty to after that used it to cover up a murder.” She took a breath. “So my track record with trust is not great.”
“I know that too.”
“But I’m sitting on a tailgate eating pie with a man who brought three thermoses and a star chart, and I feel safer than I’ve felt in four years. Maybe ever. So either my judgment is finally getting better or it’s getting spectacularly worse. I honestly can’t tell which.”
He turned to face her. He took both her hands. “I can’t promise you I’ll never let you down. I’m going to make mistakes. I’m going to get things wrong. I’m going to calculate the dew point and forget about the mud.”
She smiled. Her mouth trembled, but her joy was real, and it undid him.
“But I can promise you I’ll be honest with you. I won’t go behind your back. I won’t deceive you. And I will be here tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out what it takes to make someone stay. And the answer turns out to be simple. You choose it. Every day. You just choose to stay. And I’ve already chosen you. I’ll always choose you.”
She kissed him again—quick, fierce, the way she’d kissed him in the parking lot when Ruth Sanger had barely disappeared from sight and she didn’t care.
Then she leaned her forehead against his and they sat there breathing hard, two people on a ridge above a valley they were both finding their way home in.
They stayed until the cold drove them down the mountain.
He drove her to Jenna and Sully’s place with the heater running and Bonnie’s hand resting on his arm.
They picked up the kids—Noah was exhausted and fell asleep promptly in the back seat.
Cassidy read quietly by the light of her cell phone and was savvy enough not to ask them how their date went.
If he looked half as radiant and relaxed as Bonnie did, Cassidy didn’t need to ask a single thing. She would read exactly how it had gone on their faces.
The porch light was on when they pulled into Bonnie’s driveway. He carried Noah inside and deposited him in his bed, where Bonnie took off his shoes and tucked him under the blankets. Cassidy murmured good night to both of them and disappeared into her bedroom, still engrossed in her book.
Bonnie walked him to the door and stepped out onto the porch with him in the yellow porch light and cold night air. Her hair was windblown and her cheeks pink from the wind and cold. But her eyes were steady and certain and unafraid.
“Thank you,” she said. “For all of it. The planning, the thermoses, the mud.”
“Even the mud?” he asked doubtfully.
“Especially the mud.” She touched his face, briefly, gently. “The mud was the best part because you stopped being perfect and were just—you.”
“Do we dare kiss, or do you have nosy neighbors?”
“I have all kinds of nosy neighbors,” she murmured. And then she stood on tiptoe and kissed him with enough passion to leave no doubt in the mind of any busybody who happened to be spying on them as to whether or not he and Bonnie were romantically involved.
She stepped back, and the look she gave him, warm, direct, loving, told him everything he needed to know.
He waited until she was inside to return to his truck. He drove back to the ranch with the window cracked and the cool air on his face.
He’d meant what he’d said to her. You just choose to stay. Every day.
He meant it with the full commitment of having spent his life looking for the key to never being his father, never doing to a family what had been done to his, and have found the answer. Or at least the answer that mattered most.
He stayed.
He hoped Cassidy would write it in her notebook someday. And when she did, she would be right. Because leaving wasn’t in his DNA. It was not a thing Grayson Lawton did. Ever.