Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bex
Something changed on that barn floor.
Not a big, dramatic shift—not a declaration or a conversation or a moment where he looks at me and says I’m done fighting this.
Nothing so clean.
What changed is subtler and, because of that, more dangerous.
The wall between us didn’t come down.
It developed cracks.
And through those cracks, things leak.
A look that lasts half a second too long.
His hand brushing mine when I pass him a lead rope.
The way he says my name now—Bex—lower than before, softer at the edges, like the word has a different shape in his mouth than it used to.
We haven’t talked about the barn floor.
About the confessions, the tears, the hours of sitting shoulder to shoulder while the mare breathed and the dawn came up.
About his hand holding mine.
About my head on his shoulder.
About the horse blanket I woke up under when he was already gone—the care in that, the tenderness of covering a sleeping woman instead of waking her.
We don’t talk about it the way we don’t talk about the kiss.
By silent, mutual agreement.
Because naming it would require deciding what to do with it, and neither of us is ready for that.
So it lives in the air between us—present, charged, growing—and we work around it the way you work around a live wire.
Carefully. Constantly aware of exactly where it is.
The difference is, before the barn floor, he was running from the wire.
Now he’s standing closer to it.
The club met about Lockhart. I wasn’t in the room—church is for patched members and officers, and I’m not that, will never be that—but Lee told me afterward.
He sat on the tailgate of my rig while I cleaned tools and laid it out in short, factual sentences. Phantom’s taking it seriously.
They’re digging into Lockhart’s paper trail.
Property acquisitions going back twenty years.
County commission connections.
A pattern of pressure, patience, and quiet absorption of smaller ranches.
“How long?” I asked.
“Weeks. Maybe more. Paperwork takes time.”
“Earl doesn’t have weeks.”
“Earl has us.” He said it like it was settled. Like the full weight of the Shotgun Saints MC had just been placed between Wade Lockhart and an eighty-acre ranch, and the only question left was how long it took for Lockhart to figure out he was outmatched.
I looked at him—sitting on my tailgate in the afternoon light, his forearms on his knees, his ring catching the sun—and I felt something I don’t have a name for.
Not gratitude, though that was in there.
Not attraction, though God knows that was in there too.
Something bigger.
Something that felt like the ground shifting under my feet, the tectonic plates of my life rearranging themselves around this man and his club and the promise that I was no longer standing alone between Earl and the wolves.
He must have seen something on my face because his expression changed.
Went from Road Captain to something else. Something unguarded and searching and a little bit afraid.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing. But I wasn’t ready to call it what it was. Not yet.
Somehow, it’s like I blink and it’s Thursday afternoon.
It might be late October, but the heat won’t quit, the kind that makes the barn an oven by midday and turns every surface into something you can’t lean on without getting burned.
I’m finishing the last horse of the day—a big warmblood cross with feet like dinner plates—and I’m tired in the way that lives in your bones, not your muscles.
The kind of tired that comes from weeks of 4:30 mornings and Earl’s chemo appointments and Lockhart’s slow-motion siege and the constant, low-frequency hum of wanting a man I can’t have.
Lee is in the round pen with the bay.
I can see him through the barn doors—the pen is fifty yards out, visible from the aisle if you look.
Which I’m not doing.
I’m focused on the warmblood.
I’m a professional. I don’t watch him work horses through barn doors like a woman pressed against a window.
Except I do. Because the bay is letting Lee touch his hooves.
I set down the rasp, walk to the barn door and stand in the frame with my arms crossed and watch.
Lee is crouched beside the bay.
One hand on the horse’s shoulder.
The other running down the cannon bone—slow, steady, the patient descent that asks the horse to shift its weight without demanding it.
The bay’s ears flick. His head comes up. But he doesn’t pull away.
Lee’s hand reaches the fetlock, cups it, and lifts.
The bay picks up his foot.
Front left. The bad one.
The hoof that’s been the source of every argument and compromise between us for weeks.
Lee holds it—gently, briefly, just long enough to establish that the horse did it and survived—then sets it down. Straightens. Puts his hand on the bay’s neck.
The bay turns his head and touches Lee’s chest with his nose.
The same gesture from the round pen weeks ago.
Trust. Offered, not demanded.
Given because it was earned by a man who sat on an overturned bucket in the dark and waited.
Lee looks up.
Across fifty yards of dust and afternoon light, through the barn doors, his eyes find mine.
And he smiles.
Not a grin. Not the full, easy smile that Rose got, the one I saw in wedding photos and Sunday dinners and the life that existed before the highway.
This is smaller. Quieter.
He smiles at me, and I break.
Not visibly.
Not in any way he can see from fifty yards. I don’t crumble or cry or press my hand to my mouth.
I just stand in the barn door and feel the last piece of whatever I was using to keep this at arm’s length give way, quietly and completely, like a dam that’s been leaking for weeks finally admitting the water was always going to win.
I want him.
Not in the abstract, not in the theoretical, not in the safe little box where wanting someone means thinking about them at night and then getting up and going about your day.
I want him in the way that rearranges your priorities and dismantles your logic and makes you willing to risk everything—the friendship, the memory, the fragile peace you’ve built with grief—for the chance to touch him again.
I am so fucked.
It happens after hours.
Everyone’s gone.
Grace went home not too long ago—Shadow hovering, his hand on her back, the pregnancy making him more protective by the week.
The brothers dispersed after dinner.
The ranch goes quiet in stages: engines, then voices, then bootfalls, then nothing.
Just the horses and the night sounds and the particular brand of Texas silence that isn’t silent at all—crickets, wind, the distant hum of the highway.
I should have left too.
My rig is packed, my tools are clean, there’s no professional reason to still be here at 7:30 on a Thursday evening.
But the warmblood threw a shoe during turnout and I came back to re-set it, and now the shoe is set and I’m in the wash bay cleaning the horse’s hoof and telling myself the reason I’m still here has nothing to do with the fact that Lee’s truck is still in the lot.
I finish and turn the warmblood out, walk back into the barn to grab my apron and find Lee standing in the aisle.
He’s leaning against a stall door, arms crossed, like he’s been there for a while.
Like he was waiting.
The barn lights are on their evening setting—low, amber, the kind of light that turns everything warm and close and makes shadows out of the spaces between things.
His face is half-lit. His eyes are on me.
Not on my work. Not on the horses. On me.
“You’re still here,” I say. Smooth, Dalton. Pulitzer-worthy observation.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t move from the stall door. Doesn’t uncross his arms. But something in his posture is different—the rigid control is still there but it’s straining, like a rope pulled to its limit, the fibers starting to separate. “The bay picked up his front left today.”
“I saw.” I walk toward my apron, which is hanging on a hook six feet from where he’s standing, because I am an adult and I can walk past a man in a barn without my body catching fire. “That’s ahead of schedule. We can start corrective work next week.”
“Bex.”
I stop three feet from him.
Close enough to see the tension in his jaw.
Close enough to see the pulse in his throat, fast, faster than a man leaning casually against a stall door should have.
Close enough to smell him—leather, hay, sweat, and underneath it the warm base note that I have been trying and failing to stop cataloguing since the first week.
“What?” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
He’s looking at me the way he looked at me through the barn doors this afternoon.
Except closer.
Without fifty yards of distance to dilute it.
The full, unfiltered intensity of Lee Simms’s attention directed at me from three feet away, and the impact of it is like stepping into a current—every nerve in my body orienting toward him, every cell rearranging around the gravitational pull of his gaze.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to stop this,” he says. His voice is low. Rough at the edges. The voice from the barn floor, the one that comes from the underneath place. “I’ve been trying for weeks. I can’t.”
The air between us goes solid.
“I can’t stop thinking about you.” Each word sounds like it’s being pulled out of him by force.
Like the admission is a physical thing, heavy and sharp, and speaking it aloud is costing him something vital.
“I can’t stop watching you. I can’t stop hearing your voice in my head when you’re not here.
I haven’t slept in a week because every time I close my eyes I’m back in that stall with your mouth on mine and I don’t want to wake up. ”
I can’t breathe.
I literally cannot draw air into my lungs because the space in my chest where air is supposed to go has been filled entirely by the sound of Lee telling me he can’t stop thinking about me.
He pushes off the stall door.
One step. The three feet becomes one.
I can feel the heat of him—actual, physical heat radiating off his body, or maybe that’s mine, or maybe there’s no difference anymore.