Chapter 8 #3
Two starving people crashing into each other with everything they’ve been hoarding for years—the pain, the loneliness, the anger at the universe for taking the person who was supposed to make this unnecessary.
I match him.
Every thrust, I rise to meet.
My hips rolling against his, my nails scoring lines down his back, my mouth on his neck tasting the salt of his skin.
I am not quiet and I am not careful and I am not sorry.
I bite his shoulder and he groans and drives deeper and the tack room fills with the sounds of us—skin against skin, breathing gone ragged, my voice saying things I don’t plan and can’t control.
“Lee.” His name in my mouth between breaths. “Lee. God. Don’t—don’t stop—”
He doesn’t stop.
His hand tightens on my thigh.
His hips snap forward with an intensity that makes my vision white at the edges.
He’s not holding back.
Five years of suppressed wanting pouring out in every thrust, every grip, every bruising press of his body into mine.
I can feel his ring against my thigh where his hand grips—cool gold on hot skin, Rose between us even now, even here, and I don’t flinch from it because Rose is part of this whether we want her to be or not.
His mouth finds mine.
The kiss is messy—open, desperate, tasting like sweat and need.
He swallows the sound I make when he shifts the angle and hits something deep that sends lightning up my spine.
My legs tighten around him.
My hands go to his hair—damp at the temples, dark with sweat—and I hold on because there is nothing else to hold.
Just him. Just this. Just the furious, consuming reality of two bodies saying everything their mouths spent years refusing to say.
The pressure builds. Low and relentless and devastating.
He can feel me getting close—I know because his rhythm shifts, becomes harder, more deliberate, his hips grinding against me at the top of every stroke in a way that makes me shake apart from the center out.
His hand slides between us and his fingers find the place where we’re joined and press, and I shatter.
The orgasm rips through me like a detonation.
My whole body locks—spine arched, legs clamped, my mouth open against his shoulder in a soundless scream that becomes a sob because the release is physical and emotional and five and a half years of grief and want and guilt all letting go at once.
I break against him in waves and he holds me through it—holds me up, holds me together, and his arms and his body and the wall the only things keeping me from falling.
He follows me over the ledge seconds later.
His hips stutter, lose rhythm, drive deep one final time.
He buries his face in my neck and the sound he makes—God, the sound—is my name.
Just my name. Broken open.
Spilled against my skin like a confession.
His body shudders against mine and I feel him let go—feel the tension that has lived in him for years release in one shattering pulse, and the intimacy of it—of feeling this man come apart inside me, of holding him while the walls he built crumble—is the most devastating thing I’ve ever experienced.
We stay there, against the wall, breathing and shaking.
His face in my neck, his arms around me, my fingers in his hair.
Slowly, he lifts his head and looks at me.
His face.
Not self-loathing.
Not the horror I braced for.
Something rawer. Stripped.
The face of a man who just felt something he’d convinced himself he’d never feel again and is still processing the fact that he survived it.
I touch his jaw as he closes his eyes and turns his face into my palm.
We don’t speak.
There’s nothing to say that our bodies haven’t already said.
Lockhart comes back on Saturday.
I’m at Earl’s, in the barn, because the barn is the only place I’m useful and I need to be useful right now because useful is the opposite of falling apart.
I hear the silver truck and my hands go still on the hoof knife and something cold settles in my stomach.
By the time I get to the porch, he’s already talking to Earl.
Same posture. Same smile. Same expensive Stetson.
But the casserole is gone and the tone has shifted—still polite, still smooth, but the warmth has a thinner quality.
Stretched. Like patience wearing to its end.
“The market’s shifting, Earl. What I offered three weeks ago was generous. What I’m offering now is fair. In six months, it might be half that.”
Earl is in his rocker.
He looks worse today—the chemo hit hard midweek and he hasn’t bounced back yet.
His skin is gray.
His hands are trembling around his coffee.
But his eyes are the same—clear, blue, furious.
“I told you no.”
“You did. And I respect that. But I’d be failing as a neighbor if I didn’t point out the reality of your situation. Medical bills. Property taxes. Maintenance costs on a property this size. You’re a practical man, Earl. The numbers don’t lie.”
I step onto the porch. “He said no, Lockhart.”
Wade turns to me.
The smile stays but his eyes change. Cooler. Appraising.
The neighborly veneer thinning to show what’s underneath—a man who is used to getting what he wants and is recalculating now that he’s encountering resistance from an unexpected direction.
“This is a family matter, Bexley.” My full name. Deliberate. A power play so subtle you’d miss it if you weren’t raised by a man who used your name like a leash. “I’m sure Earl appreciates your help, but decisions about the property should be made by—”
“By who?” I step closer. My voice is level. My hands are not. “By family? Is that what you were going to say?”
Lockhart holds my gaze. And then he says it.
“You’re not family, sweetheart. You don’t have a say in this.”
The words land like a blade in the one place I have no armor.
Not family.
The thing I’ve been afraid of my whole life, said out loud, on this porch, by a man who saw exactly where to cut and did it with a smile.
Not family.
The kid from the bad home.
The tagalong.
The girl who got a chair at someone else’s table because a dead woman loved her, not because she had any right to be there.
Behind me, Earl’s rocker creaks.
“Wade.” Earl’s voice is thin but it carries.
The voice of a man who has spent seventy years on this land and will not be contradicted on his own porch.
“That girl is more family to me than you will ever understand. And if I hear you speak to her that way again, on my property or anywhere else, we’re going to have a different kind of conversation. ”
Lockhart’s smile doesn’t waver. But something behind his eyes recalculates. He tips his hat.
“No offense intended. Just stating facts.” He looks at Earl. “The offer stands. But it won’t stand forever.”
He walks to his truck, tips the hat again through the window and drives away slow.
I stand on the porch and hold my body very still and do not let the shaking start until his dust has settled.
Earl’s hand finds mine. Bony. Trembling. But sure.
“You are my family,” he says. Quiet. Fierce. “You have been since you were eight years old and Rose dragged you home like a stray cat. Blood doesn’t make family, Bexley. Love does. And don’t you let any slick son of a bitch in a clean hat tell you otherwise.”
I squeeze his hand because honestly, I don’t trust my voice.
He squeezes back, pats it once and lets go.
I walk to the barn, close the door and put my head in my hands.
Not family. You don’t have a say.
The words burrow in and find the wound that’s always been there—the foundational crack in the bedrock of who I am, laid down by parents who didn’t want me and reinforced by every year of being the guest, the visitor, the girl who existed in someone else’s family by invitation rather than by right.
Rose was the one who made me feel like I belonged.
Rose is gone.
And without her, what am I?
Earl’s charity case?
Lee’s guilt?
A woman with strong hands and no home of her own?
Grace’s voice comes back to me. You’re part of this ranch now. Your problems are our problems.
Earl’s hand on mine. You are my family.
Lee’s voice on the phone at midnight. I’m on my way.
I lift my head, wipe my face and pick up my hammer.
Lockhart wants this ranch.
He wants Earl broken and me gone and the land signed over to a man whose family has been swallowing small ranches like a snake swallows eggs—whole, patient, inevitable.
He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.
He sees a sick old man and a girl who isn’t family and a piece of land waiting to be taken.
He doesn’t see the Shotgun Saints.
But oh, he will.