Chapter Three – Lila19
Chapter Three – Lila
The gallop of horses grew louder, as they closed the distance between us. I turned toward them, my hand remaining on the post holding me upright.
They came over the low rise in the last of the gray light and for a moment they were only shapes against the sky: three horses, three riders.
Then the moon, which had been a pale suggestion above the ridge all afternoon, got some purchase on the cloud cover and broke through, and the silver of it caught them from behind and above and I could see them clearly enough.
The first thing I saw was the cows. Two of them.
The broadest of the three riders had one of them controlled and heading my way. As he came closer, I could see his face was curtained by dark hair, curling a little at his collar, under the brim of a cowboy hat that had seen significant use.
My jaw tightened, back straightened. I did not move toward them. After all I was an omega alone with three men riding towards her.
The man at the front dismounted first. He was tall, with the kind of height that came with real breadth in the shoulders, and he landed in the mud quietly, boots settling into the ground without announcement.
He was not much older than me, with brown hair worn short and practical, and the weathered look of someone who spent the majority of his time outdoors.
He pulled his hat. His eyes, when they found mine, held steady and did not move away.
“Ma’am.” The word came out without performance, the way some men say it, not courtesy as theater, just courtesy.
“Name’s Cole. Apologize for coming in the back way.
” His eyes went briefly to the broken fence, then back to me.
“Found these two about two miles east, close to the highway shoulder. Figured they belonged here.”
The man with the controlling the cattle was still in the saddle. Rhett, he’d said, when I looked at him, his grin already in place as though he’d been keeping it there in reserve. He adjusted the calf against his chest and tilted his head slightly toward the broken posts behind me.
“This little lady had some strong opinions about traffic,” he said, pointing at one of the cows. “We disagreed with her on that.”
The third man had not dismounted yet. He sat his horse behind the other two, and where Rhett was immediately readable, a man who put his warmth in the window; this one was something else.
His eyes were a dark, steady brown that moved across the broken fence line and the churned yard and the gap in the south paddock wire with the unhurried attention of someone filing things away.
He did not appear to be in a hurry about any of it.
When his eyes came to rest on me, they settled without pressing, a kind of directness that did not feel like challenge and did not feel like deference either.
He said his name was Wade, with the plainness of a man who considered names sufficient introduction. Then he asked, not told, whether I was the one who owned the ranch.
I held the post between us and looked at all three of them in turn. “Thank you for bringing them back. Is there anything I do to help you?” I asked.
Cole answered the question like a man accustomed to stating things plainly and not having to repeat himself.
Temporary work, he said. The three of them, willing to take meals and a roof over wages if the work was there.
He didn’t qualify it or explain it further.
He held his hat at his side and looked at me with the steady brown eyes of someone who had said the thing and was now content to let it sit.
I looked at him, I looked at Wade, and I looked at Rhett, who was standing slightly apart from the other two, hands loose at his sides, neither forward nor back.
Three strangers on my land in the failing light, and the fence broken behind me in two places, and the east paddock empty, and my back doing what it had been doing since ten in the morning, and the mud on my boots going up to the laces.
I knew what my instincts said. My instincts were detailed and specific on the subject.
“The ranch isn’t hiring,” I said.
Rhett tilted his head. The grin had not moved. He shifted his gaze from me to the snapped posts at my back, held it there for a moment, then brought it slowly back with the expression of a man refraining, just barely, from saying the obvious thing. He said it anyway.
“That fence seems to have a different opinion.”
Wade did not smile. Cole did not react. I looked at Rhett for a moment, and he looked back.
Cole said nothing. He stood with his hat at his side and waited, and there was something in the quality of that waiting that was more effective than anything he could have said. A man who had learned that silence was a more honest argument than most words.
“How many are you still missing?” Wade asked. His voice was quiet, even under the wind, and the question was a practical one, asked in the tone of someone who had already made a calculation and wanted to check their working.
“One,” I said. “The last one’s been missing since this morning.”
He nodded once.
The wind came off the ridge again and found the collar of my flannel and the gap at my wrist above the glove line, and without deciding to, my free hand moved to the small of my back, pressing flat against the place where the ache lived. I caught Wade’s eyes on the movement. I straightened.
He didn’t look away with the performative quickness of someone pretending not to have seen. He just looked at me steadily, without comment, and then moved his eyes back to the east treeline.
I stood at the post and looked at the three of them and ran through the arithmetic.
Not the emotional arithmetic, but the practical kind, the kind with actual numbers.
One missing animal. The north fence in pieces.
The east fence compromised. Reece, who was sixteen and good but one person, out in the far paddocks alone.
My body, which had been lodging complaints all day in a progressively formal language.
And the bunkhouse sitting empty at the back of the property, where it had been sitting empty for months.
Peanut kicked, and I sighed, knowing she was right. I needed help, and they had arrived at just the right time.
“Meals,” I said. “Bunkhouse. That’s the arrangement.
” I kept my voice flat, because it was easier to say things flat and leave them there without inflection that could be read as gratitude or relief or anything else I wasn’t prepared to be read as.
“Nothing beyond that. I set the work. You don’t make decisions about the ranch without running them past me first.”
Cole did not haggle. He looked at me for a moment and then said, “Understood,” with the simple directness of a man signing a contract he intended to keep.
“That sounds more than fair,” Rhett said. Then he stepped forward.
I put my hand up, a reflexive stop. He didn’t stop.
He stepped past my hand and transferred the rope for one of the cows into my gloved hands. He took the other. “Show me the way,” he said, smiling.
I nodded and pulled the cow behind me, walking across the yard and entering the barn to put her away for the night.
The barn was warm, shaded from the wind, and the smell of manure, and straw settled around me.
I breathed it in and said, “Bunkhouse is around the back,” I said.
My voice had not changed. “Follow the track past the equipment shed. There should be wood for the stove. Dinner is at six.” I turned toward the barn. “Don’t be late.”
They left, and as they did, their scents combined and wrapped around me. Not strongly as it was already fading the way scents did once their source was at a distance, but clearly enough that I stopped moving for a moment.
Cole’s had been the first one I’d consciously placed: something clean and earthy underneath the cold, hay and iron, the smell of a person who worked outdoors in all weather and didn’t mask it.
Rhett’s had been different. It had cut through the cold air before I knew what it was, both dark and sweet, and had no business caressing me with its touch.
I backed away, biting my lower lip, when Wade’s scent registered.
A low, quiet warmth, gunpowder under everything, the type of scent you felt in the chest rather than registered in the nose.
It had been there when he was still in the saddle, when I hadn’t even put a name to him yet, and it had sat in my sternum like something pressing from the inside.
I stood in the stall doorway, with the particular clarity that comes to a person when they have been standing in mud all day and have no more capacity for self-deception.
Three Alphas. They were Alphas, and I’d just agreed to them living on my ranch, beside me, with me, a heavily pregnant, vulnerable omega, all alone.
***
The onions hit the butter and the smell of them opened up through the kitchen, sweet and sharp at once, and I stood at the stove and let it do what smells do in cold houses at the end of hard days, which is to say it made the room feel briefly inhabited.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and kept the wooden spoon moving.
The potatoes were already boiling on the back burner, a sound I had always found unreasonably reassuring, the low, rolling knock of them, the steam that blurred the window above the sink.
I had put together a stew without much deliberation, the kind of thing that fed people without asking anything of them, protein and root vegetables and a broth I had started from the heel of a ham left in the freezer.
I had set four places. One of which, used to be Ethan's. I took a deep breath, knowing I had no choice but to move his chair now.