Chapter 6 #3
“I—” I stop. Think about it. His hand on my back. His fingers flexing on my hip. His eyes on my mouth. But who made the first move? I did. I turned. I looked up.
I closed the six inches. But he was already there. He was already holding me like he wasn’t going to let go. “It was mutual. But he definitely didn’t stop it.”
“Until he did.”
“Until the ring touched my face. And then he remembered he’s not allowed to be alive anymore.”
Grace winces.
Not at the bitterness in my voice—at the pain underneath it.
“He’s scared,” she says.
“I know he’s scared. I’m scared too. The difference is I’m not pretending the kiss didn’t happen.”
“Give him time.”
“I’ve given him years.”
Grace puts her hand on my knee. Squeezes. “The years weren’t about you. The three days might be. That’s different.”
I look at her—this woman I’ve known for barely a month who somehow became the closest thing I’ve had to a friend since Rose.
Pregnant and tired and covered in hay and giving me advice about the most complicated man I’ve ever met, in the middle of a compound full of bikers, on the tailgate of a farrier’s truck.
Rose would love her.
The thought comes unbidden and lands like a warm hand on the back of my neck.
Rose would absolutely love Grace—the quiet strength, the dry humor, the stubborn refusal to be intimidated by anything—including a six-foot-three MC enforcer who’s terrified of the baby monitor.
“Thank you,” I say. Meaning it.
Grace bumps my shoulder with hers. “You’re part of this ranch now, Bex. Your problems are our problems.”
The words.
I don’t expect them to land the way they do.
Part of this ranch. Our problems.
After Wade Lockhart looked me in the eye and said you’re not family, sweetheart—after a lifetime of being the kid from the bad home, the tagalong, the one whose place at the table was always borrowed—Grace says it like it’s obvious.
Like belonging here is a fact, not a question.
I blink hard and look at the sky.
Don’t cry on a tailgate in front of a pregnant woman, Dalton.
You have a reputation.
“So,” Grace says, stealing the other half of my sandwich. “Was it a good kiss at least?”
I think about his hand in my hair. His mouth on mine. The sound he made.
“It was the best kiss of my entire life, and I want to kill him for it.”
Grace laughs. Full and bright and real.
The kind of laugh that carries across the compound and makes two brothers at the clubhouse door look over.
The kind of laugh Rose used to have—the kind that makes you feel like the world is survivable.
“Yeah,” she says. “That sounds about right for one of these men.”
Shadow finds me after I’m done with the rescue horses.
I’m loading tools into my rig, end of the day, spent.
He walks up the way he does everything—quiet, deliberate, large.
Shadow is the biggest human being I’ve ever been near, and the gentlest, which is a combination that would be confusing if I hadn’t spent my whole life around horses and learned that the biggest ones are usually the calmest.
“He tell you?” I ask. Not looking up.
“He didn’t have to. I know what he looks like when he’s fighting himself.” Shadow leans against the truck. Arms crossed. “I’ve been watching him do it for longer than I can remember.”
“So what do I do?”
“Exactly what you’re doing. Don’t chase. Don’t push. Don’t leave.” He looks at me sideways. “He’s not punishing you, Bex. He’s punishing himself. There’s a difference.”
I know the difference.
I grew up in a house where punishment was random and personal.
What Lee’s doing isn’t that.
It’s the self-imposed exile of a man who touched fire and is now trying to convince himself he didn’t feel the heat.
“He loved her,” Shadow says. Simple. “And the guilt of wanting someone new—especially someone connected to her—that’s not a wall you break down. It’s one he has to take down himself. Brick by brick. All you can do is be there when the dust settles.”
I close my toolbox. Latch it. My hands are steady. The rest of me is not.
“What if the dust doesn’t settle?”
Shadow is quiet for a moment. “It will. I know him. He doesn’t do anything halfway—not grief, not loyalty, and not whatever he’s feeling about you. He’s just not ready to call it what it is yet.”
He pushes off the truck. Squeezes my shoulder once—brief, solid, the same way he’d steady a brother. Then he walks back toward the clubhouse.
I stand by my rig and watch the man who knows Lee better than anyone alive walk away, and I think about dust settling, and brick walls, and the taste of coffee and rain on a man’s mouth during a storm.
Earl calls me around ten at night.
I’m at his place—I’m always at his place, I live in his guest bedroom now—but I’m in the barn doing inventory when my phone rings.
His voice is strange.
Flat in a way that means he’s controlling it.
“Come to the house. Bring a flashlight.”
I go.
Earl is on the porch in his boots and a jacket, which he shouldn’t be wearing because it’s fifty degrees and his immune system is tissue paper.
He’s looking at the east pasture.
“The cattle are out,” he says.
My stomach drops. “What?”
“I heard them on the road. Got up to check. East fence is down. Cut.” He looks at me. Those blue eyes, Rose’s eyes, bright with anger and fatigue and something that looks like fear but that Earl would never call by that name. “Clean cuts. Wire cutters. Four sections.”
Not weather. Not rot. Not an animal pushing through.
Deliberate. Surgical.
Four sections of fence cut so the cattle would drift out of the pasture, across the bar ditch, and onto the county road.
I’m already moving.
Keys, truck, flashlight.
I call the sheriff’s non-emergency line while I drive the fence line with my high beams on.
I find the cuts—clean, even, the work of someone who knows how wire fencing works and exactly where to sever it for maximum drift.
Four sections. A quarter mile of open fence.
The cattle are scattered along the county road.
Most of them are grazing the shoulder, confused and docile.
I get out and start pushing them back through on foot, which is stupid and dangerous in the dark on a road where people drive too fast, but I don’t have a horse and I don’t have help and Earl’s cattle are on a highway.
I find one down at the curve.
Hereford cow. One of Earl’s best.
She made it to the center of the road before a truck hit her.
The driver is on the shoulder, shaking, his front end destroyed.
He’s not hurt. The cow is.
She’s down on the asphalt, breathing in wet, labored heaves, her back legs at an angle that tells me everything I need to know.
I call Grace.
Then I call the sheriff again, this time the emergency line.
Then I sit on the road beside a dying cow in the dark and put my hand on her neck and wait for help that’s twenty minutes away.
The driver keeps saying, “I didn’t see her. I didn’t see her.”
I know. You can’t see them in the dark.
You can’t see anything on these roads at night until it’s too late.
You’re driving and it’s dark and the road is empty and then suddenly it isn’t, and by the time your headlights find what’s in front of you, there’s no time to stop.
A dark road. Something in the path you didn’t see. Impact.
I press my hand against the cow’s neck and feel the life leaving her body in slow, shuddering increments, and I think about Rose on a highway in the rain and I can’t breathe.
Grace arrives first.
She’s not supposed to be out here—six months pregnant, middle of the night, on a highway—but she comes because that’s who she is.
She takes one look at the cow and her face tells me what I already know.
She gets her kit.
Does what she can, which isn’t much.
The cow dies under our hands at 10:32 PM on a random week night, on a road she never should have been on.
The sheriff comes. Takes a report. Looks at the fence cuts and says, “We’ll investigate,” in the tone of a man who already knows nothing will come of it.
Grace drives home.
I round up the last of the cattle with the sheriff’s deputy holding a spotlight from his cruiser.
We get them through the gaps and I wire the fence shut with baling wire and T-posts because a real repair has to wait for daylight.
Earl is on the porch when I get back to the house.
He hasn’t gone inside.
He’s been sitting in that rocker for two hours in the cold, waiting.
“We lost the Hereford,” I say. No way to soften it.
He closes his eyes. Nods. Doesn’t speak.
One of his best cows.
A good breeder.
Revenue he can’t afford to lose, taken by a set of wire cutters and a message from a man who smiles when he delivers threats.
“Lockhart,” Earl says.
“Yeah.”
“Prove it.”
“I can’t. But I know someone who might be able to.”
I go inside. Sit on the edge of the guest bed. Pull out my phone.
My fingers hover over his name in my contacts.
Lee.
The man who kissed me days ago and hasn’t spoken a full sentence to me since.
The man who looked at me like I was both the answer and the sin.
The man who took Earl’s papers and said nobody’s taking it from him, not while I’m standing.
I swore I wouldn’t chase him.
Swore I’d hold my ground and let him come to me on his own time, if he comes at all.
But Earl’s cattle were on the highway, his best cow is dead, someone is coming for this ranch, and the ground I’m holding isn’t just mine anymore.
I call him.
He answers on the first ring.
The significance of that—the man who hasn’t answered a phone call in five and a half years, picking up before the first ring finishes—hits me so hard I forget what I was going to say.
“Bex?” His voice. Alert. Immediate. Not the flat, guarded tone of the last three days. The real one. The underneath one. “What’s wrong?”
I tell him. Fences cut. Cattle on the road. The Hereford dead. Lockhart. Everything.
Silence on the line, until he says something that surprises me. “I’m on my way.”
He hangs up. No discussion. No hesitation.
I sit on the bed and press the phone against my chest and feel his voice still vibrating in my ear—Bex, what’s wrong—and I think about what Shadow said. He doesn’t do anything halfway.
And I think about the sound Lee made when he kissed me. That broken, hungry sound.
And I think about the first ring.
He answered on the first ring.