8. Chapter 8
Beckett
Ipanicked. That’s the truth. Brynn told me she chose me and I did what I always do when something matters enough to destroy me. I tried to get away from it before it could disappear.
Worse, I tried to make the decision for her.
Don’t stay for me. I actually said that. To Brynn Hartley.
A woman who has spent six weeks demonstrating that the quickest way to piss her off is to tell her what she can and can’t do.
I press both hands over my face. Brilliant, Cole.
Borrowed things get returned. I said that too. But I wasn’t talking about her. I was talking about me.
Somewhere along the way I stopped believing anything could really be mine. Then Brynn walked into this barn and started making herself part of it. Part of me.
And instead of believing her when she said she wanted to stay, I told her not to. Because apparently terror makes me stupid.
I go to the house. Raiford takes one look at my face and pours a bourbon and doesn’t ask. Elise comes in, looks at me, and leaves the room with her phone. She’s texting Brynn. I know because I can hear the fury in the way her fingers hit the screen.
I drink the bourbon and sit on the porch with Raiford in comfortable silence. When the sun sets I go home. I don’t sleep.
I’m in the barn at four AM. I check every horse. Every stall. The routine.
Rebel won’t eat.
He’s standing in the back of his stall. Head up. Ears moving. He’s waiting. He’s waiting for Brynn. She comes every night. She sits with him. She talks to him. He expects her.
She’s not coming.
I stand at his stall door and the horse looks at me and I feel it. The absence. The wrong. The barn without her is like the barn before her, which should feel normal and instead feels empty in a way I didn’t know a building could feel.
Birdie is restless too. She’s pacing her stall, which Birdie doesn’t do. Birdie is the calmest horse on the property. But tonight she’s walking circles because the energy is wrong.
The horses know. They always know.
I walk the aisle. I straighten the cross ties. I end up in the tack room.
Her schedule is on the door. The one I taped up the first night. It’s been updated since then. Her handwriting in the margins. Notes. Adjustments. A woman building something real, one careful decision at a time.
I press my palm flat against the paper.
I told her not to choose me. Like I get a vote in what Brynn Hartley chooses.
I stare at her handwriting. At the schedule I taped up because it was better than mine. At the changes she made that improved every horse in this barn.
She didn’t take anything from me. She made it better. All of it.
Including me.
I sit on the tack room floor. The same barn where I kissed her. Where I carried her down the aisle over my shoulder and her laughter filled the space between the stalls. Where I held her on the office couch and felt, for the first time in my life, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
I need her.
The thought is clear and devastating and true.
I need her in this barn and in this routine and in my life. I need her schedule on the door and her voice in the round pen and her laugh in the aisle. I need the way she looks at the horses. I need the way she stands up to me. I need the way she sees the man behind the wall and isn’t afraid of him.
I’ve never chased anyone. I’m a man who stays in his barn and does his work and lets people leave because leaving is what people do and I learned a long time ago not to stand in the doorway.
But the barn is wrong without her. The horses are wrong. I’m wrong.
I stand up. I walk out of the barn.
It’s still dark. The sky is going gray at the edges. Her cabin is dark. No light.
I walk to her cabin. I stand on her porch.
I knock. Two knocks. Not loud.
Silence. Then footsteps. The door opens.
She’s in a T-shirt and sleep shorts. Her hair is down. Her eyes are red, and the fact that I made this woman cry is the worst thing I’ve ever done. Worse than the words. The tears.
“It’s four thirty in the morning,” she says. Her voice is flat. Guarded.
“I know.”
“What do you want, Beckett?”
“I was wrong.” I don’t have a speech. I have the truth.
“About the supplements?”
“Those too.”
Her mouth almost moves. Almost. “Keep going.”
“I was wrong to tell you not to stay.”
Her expression closes again. “I know.”
“No. I mean I was wrong about why I said it.” I force myself to keep looking at her. “I told myself I was protecting you from making a mistake. I wasn’t. I was protecting myself from believing you.”
She doesn’t say anything. So I keep going.
“You said you chose me and I got scared.”
“That’s becoming a pattern.”
“I know.”
“One I don’t particularly enjoy.”
“I know that too.” I step closer. Not touching her. Not until she decides I can.
“Everything I’ve ever had was temporary,” I say. “Every house. Every ranch. Every person who was supposed to stay. I got good at not asking for things because you can’t lose something you never let yourself believe was yours.”
Her eyes soften. Barely.
“Then you showed up.” I swallow. “And suddenly I want things.”
“What things?”
“You.”
The word comes out rough. “You in my barn. You in my bed. Your ridiculous schedules taped to every flat surface. Your coffee cup beside mine. Your boots by the door. You arguing with me about feed and tack and every other damn thing for the next fifty years.”
Her eyes are damp.
I keep going. “I’m not asking you to build your life around me, Brynn.” I take one more step. “I’m asking to be part of the life you’re already building.”
Her chin trembles. “You hurt me.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to decide what I should want because you’re afraid I’ll change my mind.”
“I know.”
“If I tell you I’m staying, you believe me.”
“I’ll try.”
Her eyebrows lift.
I correct myself immediately. “I will.”
“Better.”
“And if I’m scared, I tell you I’m scared. I don’t shove you away.”
“Much better.”
“Anything else?”
“The supplements.”
I close my eyes. Of course. “The supplements are happening.”
“They were always happening.”
“I know.”
Something happens to her mouth. Not quite a smile. Close. Then her expression turns serious again. “You can’t go cold on me every time this gets real.”
“I won’t.”
“You already did once.”
“I know.”
“I won’t chase you.”
“I know.”
“If you put that wall back up, you’re going to have to be the one who tears it down.”
“I will.”
She studies me. Then she says quietly, “Good.”
I breathe for what feels like the first time all night. “There’s one more thing.”
“What?”
“I love you.” The words come out rough and broken and they’re the most honest sentence I’ve ever spoken.
Her eyes fill. “I love you too,” she says. “You impossible, grumpy, fence-post of a man.”
I reach for her. Then stop myself. Her eyes drop to my hands. Then back to my face.
“Well?” she says.
“Well what?”
“Are you going to stand on my porch all morning or are you going to kiss me?”
I don’t make her ask twice.
I pull her into my arms. She fits against my chest perfectly. I kiss her first, then press my face into her hair and breathe her in and the knot in my chest starts to loosen.
“Beckett?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go to bed.”
I pick her up. Not over my shoulder this time. Against my chest. Her arms around my neck, her face pressed into my throat. I carry her to the bedroom and set her down on the bed and look at her.
She’s looking back at me with those brown eyes and the gold flecks and the tear tracks and the trust that I broke yesterday and that she’s handing back to me right now like a second chance I don’t deserve.
I undress her slowly. I take my time. Her shirt over her head.
My mouth on her collarbone. Her shorts down her legs.
My lips against her throat. I want to kiss every part of her that I can reach because this is not the office couch.
This is not desperate. This is me showing her what I couldn’t say before.
What I almost destroyed yesterday because I was too afraid to feel it.
I bite gently at the curve of her shoulder.
“Mine,” I say against her skin.
Her fingers tighten in my hair. “Yours.”
The word goes straight through me.
“And you're mine,” she adds.
“You’re so beautiful,” I tell her. Against her stomach. Against the soft skin below her navel. “Every time I look at you it gets worse. I can’t think straight.”
I pull her panties down. I press my mouth to the inside of her thigh. She shivers.
“I’m going to take my time,” I say. Looking up at her. “I’m going to make you feel every single thing I can’t say with words.”
“You’re doing pretty well with words right now.”
“Shut up and let me worship you.”
She laughs. The sound catches in her throat and turns into a gasp as my mouth finds her.
I’m slow this time. Deliberate. I learn her all over again.
Every response, every sound, every way her body moves under my hands.
I hold her hips and take my time and her fingers thread through my hair and she whispers my name like a prayer.
“Beckett. God. Right there.”
I give her what she needs. Patient and steady and relentless until her thighs are shaking and her back is arching and she comes with a sound that’s half my name and half a scream.
I kiss my way back up her body. She reaches for my shirt and I let her pull it off. My jeans. Everything. She pulls me down onto her and the contact of our bodies is different than what we’ve had before. The slow burn of something that’s going to last.
I push into her and we both exhale. I hold still. I look at her face.
“Stay with me,” I say. Not about this moment. About everything.
“I’m here.”
I move. Slow. Deep. Watching her. She wraps her legs around me and her hands grip my shoulders and every thrust is a promise. An apology.
“You feel incredible,” I tell her. My forehead against hers. “You’re so tight around me. So perfect.”
She pulls me closer. Deeper. Her nails dig into my back and I groan against her neck.
“Harder,” she whispers.
I give her harder. But controlled. Each thrust deliberate and deep and I angle my hips until I find the spot that makes her gasp and I stay there.
“Right there,” she says. “Oh God, right there.”
I grip the headboard with one hand and her hip with the other and I drive into her with a steady, devastating rhythm that has her clawing the sheets and saying my name on every exhale.
“Come for me, Brynn.” My voice is raw. “I need to feel you fall apart.”
She does. She comes hard and loud and her body tightens around me and the sensation pulls me over with her.
I bury myself deep and let go and the release is not just physical.
It’s everything. Every wall. Every fence.
Every door I locked to keep people out. All of it, gone.
Burned down by a woman who refused to leave even when I gave her every reason to.
I collapse beside her. Pull her against me. Our legs tangled, our breathing ragged, the sheets twisted around us.
“We should go check on Rebel,” she says.
“Yeah.”
Neither of us moves.
“Beckett?”
“Yeah.”
“If you ever go cold on me again, I will reorganize every inch of this barn while you sleep and you will never find anything.”
“Understood.”
We get up. We dress. We walk to the barn together in the early light.
The morning air is cold enough to see our breath. The valley is turning gold.
The barn door creaks when I open it. The familiar sound. But this morning it sounds different. Because she’s beside me when I hear it.
She stops in the aisle. She looks around. At the stalls, the cross ties, the whiteboard, the tack room door with the schedule. Her eyes stop on the barn office.
I know what she sees. Before I went to her cabin, I took down the old handwritten sign that said FOREMAN’S OFFICE.
There wasn’t anything wrong with it. Except that it wasn’t true anymore. The new sign is plain. Black letters printed on white paper, taped over the old one. Nothing fancy.
HORSE OPERATIONS
She looks at the sign. Then at me. “You changed it.”
“It needed changing.”
“Did it?”
“Yeah.” I shove my hands into my pockets. “This isn’t my barn anymore.”
Her eyebrows rise.
I shake my head. “That came out wrong.”
“I’m enjoying watching you struggle.”
“I mean it’s not just mine.”
Something in her face changes. Softens. “Ours?” she asks.
The word hits me harder than it should. “Yeah.”
I clear my throat. “Ours.”
“This barn feels like home,” she says. Quiet. “It’s the first barn that’s felt like home instead of a workplace.”
I take her hand. I squeeze it. I don’t have words for what that does to me.
Rebel sees her coming. His head goes up. His ears go forward. He nickers. The sound of a horse who was waiting for his person.
Brynn goes to his stall. She opens the door. She walks in and puts her hand on his neck and says, “Hey, buddy. Sorry I’m late.”
Rebel drops his head. He blows against her shoulder. He walks to his feed bucket and starts eating.
Birdie, in the next stall, stops pacing. She stands still. She looks at me through the stall bars with the patient eyes of a twenty-year-old mare who has been waiting for the humans to figure it out.
I look back at her.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
She chews hay. Satisfied.