Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Bex
It starts with coffee.
Monday morning, a quarter before seven, I pull into the ranch and Lee is standing outside the barn with two mugs.
One black—his.
One with enough cream to turn it the color of caramel—mine.
He knows how I take my coffee.
I don’t know when he learned that.
I don’t know when he started paying enough attention to notice that I dump half the creamer bottle into every cup, or that I drink it like water from dawn until noon and then switch to ice tea when the heat peaks.
But he knows.
And he’s standing there with two mugs like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“Morning,” he says, handing me the mug.
Our fingers brush during the handoff and he doesn’t pull away.
Doesn’t flinch.
Just lets the contact happen—skin on skin, warm from the ceramic, brief, deliberate, and ordinary.
“Morning.” I take the mug and drink, watching him over the rim.
Something is different.
Not dramatic.
Not a grand gesture or a speech or a moment where he takes my face in his hands and declares himself.
Lee doesn’t operate that way, he never has.
What’s different is subtler and, because of that, more terrifying.
The rigid control that’s defined him since I walked into that feed store has softened.
Not dissolved—softened.
Like a fist that’s been clenched has slowly, carefully, begun to open.
He asks about Earl.
Not the polite, surface-level question he’s been offering since I started working here.
This is specific.
How was the chemo session? What did the oncologist say about the bloodwork? Whether Earl’s eating enough.
I tell him. He listens. Really listens—the way he listens to horses, with his whole body oriented toward the sound, his eyes on mine, his attention undivided.
When I mention that Earl’s been too tired to do the evening feed, Lee nods once and says, “I’ll go by after rounds.”
Simple. Quiet. A man deciding to show up.
He does this all week.
Tuesday, he’s in the barn when I arrive, already working.
He’s moved the bay’s grooming supplies to the station next to where I set up my tools, which means we’re working side by side now instead of at opposite ends of the aisle.
He doesn’t mention the rearrangement.
Neither do I.
We just exist in the same space, our routines overlapping, our rhythms syncing the way two people’s do when they stop resisting the pull.
His hand on my lower back when he passes behind me in the aisle.
Not lingering. Not sexual. Just a touch that says I’m here, I see you, you’re real.
His fingers brushing mine when he hands me a hoof pick.
His shoulder pressing against mine when we lean over a horse’s leg to check an abscess together.
Wednesday, he laughs at something I say.
Not a polite exhale, not the careful humor he uses to deflect.
A real laugh—short, surprised, like it escaped before he could catch it.
I’d been telling Grace about a stallion I shoed in Amarillo who was terrified of plastic bags, and how the owner kept a windsock on the barn that sent the horse into hysterics every Tuesday when the trash truck came, and Lee laughed.
His whole face changed.
For half a second I saw the man from Rose’s wedding photos—open, warm, full of easy joy—and then the half-second ended and he was Lee again, but the echo of the laugh stayed in the barn like a bell that keeps ringing after you’ve stopped striking it.
Thursday, he asks about my day.
Not about the horses. Not about Earl or Lockhart or anything practical.
He asks what I did. Where I went.
Whether the client in Bandera was the one with the mule that kicks.
He asks like he wants to know.
Like the shape of my day matters to him.
Like he’s been thinking about me when I’m not here and the questions are the way the thinking becomes real.
I answer carefully.
Not because I don’t trust him, but because hope is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever held. I’ve held it before and had it taken away, and I’m not sure my hands are steady enough for it this time.
Hell, even the brothers notice.
They’re not subtle about it, either.
MC men aren’t exactly known for their emotional discretion.
I catch a prospect elbowing another prospect when Lee walks me to my truck on Wednesday evening.
Shadow watches us from the porch of his and Grace’s place with an expression I can only describe as cautious hope—the face of a man who’s seen his best friend survive something terrible and is watching, carefully, to see if the surviving is turning into living.
Grace corners me in the vet office on Thursday.
She’s huge now—seven months and carrying it all in front, her white coat straining at the buttons, her hand on her lower back in that unconscious way pregnant women have.
She’s been scaling back on the physical work, which means I’ve been picking up more of the hoof care for the rescues.
We’ve fallen into an easy friendship—she handles the medical side, I handle the structural side, and somewhere in the middle of all those joint assessments and treatment plans, she became my friend.
The first real friend I’ve had since Rose.
“He’s different,” she says. Not a question. She’s leaning against the exam table, eating crackers from a sleeve she keeps in her coat pocket. “Shadow said he hasn’t seen Lee like this in years. Since before.”
“Like what?”
“Present.” She tilts her head, studying me with the same clinical attention she gives the horses. “You did that.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You stayed.” She says it simply, like it’s obvious, like staying is the easiest thing in the world and not the hardest thing I’ve ever done. “You showed up and you stayed and you didn’t let him push you away. That’s not nothing, Bex. You know how Banshee can be.”
I look at my hands.
The calluses, the scars, the permanent darkening of the skin around my knuckles from years of forge work.
Hands that are good at building things. Holding things together. Fixing what’s broken.
“I’m scared,” I say. The admission surprises me.
I don’t do vulnerability—not with anyone, not ever.
But Grace has this quality, this steady warmth that makes truth feel safe.
“I’m scared this is just—grief bouncing.
A man who was emotionally dead for years coming back to life and reaching for the nearest warm body.
What if it’s not me he wants? What if it’s just not being alone? ”
“I promise you, this man will not hurt you. One look in his eyes tells me that much.”
It’s Friday afternoon, and I drive out to Earl’s after my last client.
The road is familiar—I’ve been driving it daily for weeks now, the twenty-minute stretch of two-lane blacktop between the club and Earl’s ranch, and my truck knows the turns the way a horse knows the way home.
I’m running through the evening list in my head—Earl’s dinner, his meds, checking the south fence that’s been leaning—when I come over the last rise and see the truck.
Lee’s truck. Parked in Earl’s drive.
My foot comes off the gas.
I slow to a crawl and stare at the black pickup like it might be a mirage, like the Texas heat is playing tricks on a tired woman’s eyes.
But it’s real.
Dusty, dented, the Shotgun Saints decal on the rear window.
Lee’s truck at Earl’s ranch on a Friday afternoon, unannounced, uninvited, without being asked.
He was here the other day to help with the afternoon chores, so is that why he's here?
I park and walk around the side of the house toward the sound of a hammer.
He’s on the south fence line.
Shirt off because it’s eighty-two degrees and the sun hasn’t started dropping yet.
Post driver in his hands, sweat running down his back, the tattoos across his shoulders dark against the sun-brown skin.
He’s replaced four posts already—the rotted ones I’ve been worrying about for weeks, the ones I flagged on my mental list of things I’ll get to when I get to them because there are only so many hours in a day and I’m one person.
Earl is on the porch, in his rocker, sweet tea in hand.
He’s watching Lee work with the expression of a man who has been waiting years for his son to come home and is trying very hard not to spook him by looking too pleased about it.
I stand at the corner of the house, and I can’t move.
The hope I’ve been keeping under lock and key—the hope I refused to name, refused to feed, refused to let out of the cage where I keep the things that could destroy me—rises so fast it nearly chokes me.
It fills my throat and my chest and the backs of my eyes and I have to put my hand on the side of the house to stay standing because my knees have decided they’re done supporting a woman who is watching Lee fix Earl’s fence without being asked.
Lee looks up and sees me.
He wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist.
“South fence was leaning,” he says.
Like this is normal. Like this is what he does on Friday afternoons. Like he hasn’t just walked back into a life he abandoned and started putting it back together with his hands.
“I know,” I manage. My voice is steady. The rest of me is not.
He holds my gaze for a beat.
There’s something in his eyes I haven’t seen before—not the guarded neutrality, not the grief, not even the raw hunger from the tack room.
Something quieter. Surer.
The look of a man who has made a decision and is following through.
“I’ll finish this section before dark,” he says. “The east line needs wire. I’ll come back Sunday.”
Sunday… he’s planning to come back.
Not because I asked. Not because Earl guilted him. Because he decided to.
I nod and walk past him toward the porch because if I stand here looking at him any longer I’m going to cry and I have a reputation to maintain.
Earl watches me sit down in the other rocker.
His eyes are bright, amused.
The eyes of a man who is dying slowly but has just been given something worth staying alive for.
“How long has he been here?” I ask.
“Couple hours. Showed up around two. Didn’t say much. Just started working.” Earl sips his sweet tea. “He’s coming back to us, Bexley.”
“Give him time,” I say.