Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Bex
I’m finishing up at the Henley farm when Lee calls.
The Henleys run a cutting horse operation about forty minutes south of Sharp—good horses, good land, a husband-and-wife team who’ve been breeding champions for twenty years and treat their animals like royalty.
Mrs. Henley watches me work every time, standing at the fence with her arms crossed and her reading glasses on her head, asking questions about angles and balance like she’s studying for an exam.
I like her.
I like that she cares enough to learn what her farrier is doing and why.
This is my third visit.
They’ve signed on as regulars—six-week rotation, twelve horses.
Word travels fast in Texas horse country, and the word that’s been traveling is that there’s a corrective farrier working out of the Shotgun Saints’ compound who’s worth the drive, if you have a few horses and don’t need a whole barn fixed up.
My client list has tripled since I came back to Sharp.
I’m booked four weeks out.
I’ve started turning down work I can’t fit in, which is a problem I never expected to have and one I’m grateful for every single day.
I set the last hoof down—a big palomino gelding with the worst medial-lateral imbalance I’ve seen this month—and strip my gloves.
My phone buzzes in the cup holder of my rig.
Lee.
“How’d the Henleys go?”
“Good. That palomino’s going to need three more cycles before he’s balanced, but he’s trending right.” I wedge the phone between my ear and my shoulder, wiping my hands on a rag. “What’s up?”
“When are you heading back?”
“Forty minutes. Maybe an hour if I stop for gas.”
“Swing by the north end of the property when you get here. Past the arena, up the hill. You’ll see my truck.”
“Why?”
“Just come.” A pause. “Please.”
The please does it.
Lee Simms doesn’t say please like a man asking a favor.
He says it like a man offering something and hoping you’ll take it.
The north end of the compound is land I haven’t explored much.
Past the main barn and the arena there’s a gentle rise that crests into a flat stretch of pasture bordered by live oaks.
The kind of Texas landscape that looks like it was designed specifically for the purpose of making a person stop their truck and stare.
Lee’s truck is parked under the biggest oak.
He’s leaning against the tailgate, arms crossed, watching me drive up with an expression I’m still learning to read—somewhere between nervous and certain, the face of a man who’s made a decision and is waiting to see if the woman he made it with agrees.
I park, get out and look around.
There’s a cabin.
Set back from the road maybe fifty yards, tucked into the oaks like it grew there.
Two bedrooms—I can tell from the footprint.
Stone foundation, wood siding that’s been weathered to silver, a porch that wraps around two sides.
It needs work—the porch railing is sagging, one window has a crack, and the yard is more weeds than grass—but the bones are solid.
The roof line is straight.
The chimney is intact.
It’s the kind of place that was built by someone who understood that a house should sit on its land like it belongs there.
“Phantom agreed to sell it to me.” Lee’s voice behind me.
Close. He’s moved from the truck to stand at my shoulder, and I can feel the heat of him in the late-afternoon air.
“Two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom that needs a new floor. Plumbing’s good.
Electric’s been updated. Foundation’s sound.
I figure we can add two more bedrooms before we move in officially, and make any updates you’d like. ”
He sounds like he’s giving a property assessment.
Road Captain reporting on a structure.
Factual. Measured.
Except his hand finds the small of my back and stays there, and the steadiness of his voice doesn’t match the slight tremor in his fingers.
“Lee.”
“I’m tired of sleeping in a room on the compound that smells like oil and looks like a bunkhouse.
Fuck, at least I’m not stuck in the bunkhouse with the full patches and prospects, but it’s not much better.
” He turns me to face him. Both hands on my waist now.
“I’m tired of you driving back and forth between here and Earl’s.
I want a place that’s ours. A door we lock at night.
A kitchen where you leave your coffee mug in the sink and I pretend to be annoyed about it. ”
My heart is doing something structurally unsound.
“I want to start our life, Bex. Here. Together. In a house with a porch and enough room for your tools in the barn and my horses in the pasture and whatever comes next.” His thumbs are tracing circles on my hips.
His bare left hand—still bare, the tan line fading now, the groove filling in with new skin. “Move in with me.”
I look at the cabin.
At the sagging porch and the cracked window and the live oaks bending over the roof like they’re trying to hold it together.
At the pasture stretching out behind it, green from the fall rains, the kind of land that could hold horses and a life and the accumulated weight of two people deciding to build something permanent.
I look at Lee.
The man who couldn’t answer a phone call six months ago is standing in front of me asking me to share a home.
“The porch railing needs replacing,” I say.
“I know.”
“And the bathroom floor.”
“I know.”
“And I’m going to need a proper forge setup if you expect me to work from here.”
He’s trying not to smile. Losing badly. “Is that a yes?”
“That’s a yes, but I’m still going to be at Earl’s checking up on him. He hasn’t been doing good lately, Lee. I’m worried.”
He kisses me under the oak tree with the cabin behind us and the evening light going gold across the pasture.
I blink, and it’s Wednesday.
I’m at Grace’s place.
She’s enormous.
Eight months and change, carrying the boy low and forward, her hand on her belly every thirty seconds in the unconscious way of a woman whose body has become a conversation she’s having with someone she hasn’t met yet.
Shadow has gone from protective to borderline deranged—I watched him try to stop her from lifting a bag of dog food yesterday and she gave him a look that could strip paint.
We’re on her couch.
Tea for her, coffee for me.
She’s supposed to be resting, which means she’s reviewing vet records and texting instructions to the vet tech who’s been covering her appointments while simultaneously folding tiny onesies with one hand.
“You’re not resting,” I say.
“I’m horizontally productive. There’s a difference.” She folds a onesie the size of my hand. Blue. Tiny cowboy boots printed on the fabric. “Shadow thinks resting means I should stare at a wall and breathe deeply for eight hours. Shadow can bite me.”
I laugh.
The ease of it still catches me off guard sometimes—the way laughter comes now, natural and frequent, like a muscle I forgot I had that’s been slowly rebuilding.
Grace did that.
Not just Grace—this whole place, this whole life that assembled itself around me while I was busy shoeing horses and falling in love—but Grace specifically.
The first real friend I’ve had since Rose.
Different from Rose in every way that matters—harder edges, sharper humor, the steel spine of a woman who was kidnapped and caged and walked out the other side refusing to be defined by it—but the same in the one way that counts.
She sees me. Not Rose’s friend. Not Banshee’s woman. Bex.
“Lee asked me to move in with him,” I say.
Grace sets down the onesie.
She looks at me with the expression of a woman who has been waiting for this information and is now going to enjoy every second of receiving it. “The cabin?”
“You knew?”
“Shadow told me. Who Lee told. Who apparently spent three days talking himself into asking Phantom about it before Shadow told him to stop being an idiot and just ask.” She grins.
“These men can face down rival MCs and shoot their way through ambushes, but asking their president to sell them a cabin? Paralyzing.”
I shake my head, but I’m smiling so hard my face aches.
Grace picks up her tea and blows on it.
The light from the window catches the side of her face and for a moment she looks older than she is—not tired, exactly, but seasoned.
The look of a woman who has lived through things that aged her in ways that don’t show on the surface.
“I noticed something at the last club dinner,” I say.
Carefully. Because I’ve been sitting on this for weeks and Grace is the only person I’d ask.
“Phantom. He sits alone. There’s always an empty space next to him, and nobody takes it.
And when Lee and I sat together—when he put his hand on my knee under the table—Phantom watched us for a second and then looked away. Fast. Like it hurt.”
Grace is quiet. She sets her tea down. T
he playful energy recedes, replaced by something more measured.
“My mom,” she says. Not a question.
“Phantom’s ex.”
Grace folds her hands over her belly.
The boy kicks—I can see it, a visible ripple across the fabric of her shirt—and she presses her palm flat against it without thinking.
“Technically, she and my father have been split for years. A long time. But she never really… left. She was still around. Still acting like an ol’ lady.
Showing up to club events, sitting in that seat next to him, handling things behind the scenes.
The role was hers even if the relationship wasn’t. ”
“But he wasn’t in love with her.”
“No.” Grace says it without judgment.
Flat, factual, the assessment of a woman who loves both her parents and has stopped pretending the truth is anything other than what it is.
“I don’t know if he ever was. Not the way she needed him to be.
My father is… he’s a lot of things. Loyal.
Principled. A great president. But he kept her at arm’s length for years and she stayed anyway because she loved him and because the club was her life and because leaving meant admitting it was over. ”
“What happened?”