Chapter 26
twenty-six
He stood there until the blood dried tight across his knuckles, and even then he didn’t move to wash it off.
Creed had come to Valor Ridge because of him.
Not because of Rainey, not because of the RICO case or Brandt’s task force or whatever the Sons had planned. Creed had tracked him specifically, lured him out with his horse, and waited on that ridge for a shot at him.
And Boone had taken it instead.
He looked at his hands again. The red had gone dark and cracked at the creases, and he thought about River’s face when he’d seen it, the way the kid had gone quiet and put a hand flat on the fence post like he needed something solid to hold.
Rainey was protected now. She had River, and Brandt with his flat unhurried competence, and Ghost, a man who never slept, running perimeter sensors off a laptop. The whole ranch had closed around her like a fist.
She didn’t need him standing in the middle of it drawing fire.
Footsteps sounded behind him, light and quick across the porch boards. He knew them before she reached him.
Rainey stopped beside him. She’d changed at some point into the flannel shirt from the pile Mariah had put together, sleeves shoved up, and her hair was loose around her face in a way that made her look younger than she was, or maybe just less armored.
She looked at his hands first. Then at his face.
“Bear says he’s stable.” She said it like she knew that wasn’t what he was standing out here for. “Clean exit wound. No broken bones. He’ll be okay.”
He didn’t respond. Didn’t trust himself.
“Come inside, Evander,” she murmured.
He let her take his hand. He told himself it was only because arguing cost more than complying, and that lie lasted exactly as long as her fingers wrapped around his.
She ran the water hot in the little bathroom off the guest room and made him sit on the closed toilet lid while she worked the blood out of the creases in his knuckles with a washcloth. Tilly lay across the bathroom doorway, one ear up, watching them both with concern.
“You’re quiet,” Rainey said. “Quieter than usual, and that’s saying something.”
“Thinking.”
“About?”
He watched the water run pink, then clear. “Boone shouldn’t have been out there.”
“He made that choice.” She said it like she’d rehearsed it, like she already knew the shape of the argument he was building and had come prepared to dismantle it piece by piece. “You didn’t drag him into that field.”
“He came because of me.”
“He came because someone shot at you and Boone doesn’t let people get shot at alone.
” She wrung the cloth out and set it on the edge of the sink, then took both his hands in hers and turned them over, checking the skin for anything that needed more than water.
“That’s not the same thing, and you know it isn’t.
You’re just choosing the version that lets you leave. ”
He didn’t answer. She let the silence sit instead of chasing it, which was somehow worse, because it meant she was watching him not answer.
“I’m not going anywhere tonight,” he said finally. It was true when he said it. He held onto that.
She studied his face like she was deciding whether to believe him, then apparently did, because her shoulders came down half an inch and she leaned into the space between his knees and kissed him.
It started soft. It didn’t stay that way.
He’d meant to let her lead — she’d been managing his ribs and his stitches and his stubbornness for two days now and had earned the right to set the pace — but something in him had gone loose and reckless since the porch, since the math had finished resolving, and he found his good hand at the back of her neck, drawing her down onto his lap, careful of his own ribs and utterly careless of everything else.
She made a sound against his mouth, surprised and pleased, and he thought, with a clarity that scared him more than Creed on the ridge ever could, I want to remember this. All of it. Every piece.
He stood, taking her with him, and carried her the eight steps to the bed like his ribs weren’t cracked and his side wasn’t stitched, and she laughed low in her throat and said, “Bear is going to kill you,” and he said, “Later,” and put her down on the quilt like something he intended to spend a long time with.
He undressed her slowly. Each button, each layer, a small ceremony he didn’t examine too closely because examining it meant admitting why he was doing it this way tonight and not some other way, why his hands lingered instead of hurried.
He found the sparrow first, the small black line work faded soft at her inner forearm, and put his mouth there before he even thought about it.
“That’s from when I left home,” she said, watching him. “First tattoo. Felt like I’d earned wings, even if I didn’t know how to use them yet.”
He kissed it again, said nothing, moved on.
The wildflowers wound around her ribs in a way that made him bend closer, tracing the vine of it with his thumb before his mouth followed the same path — stems disappearing into notes, notes disappearing into leaves, nothing about it as clean as sheet music, all of it more alive than that.
She went still under his hands, watching him read her own skin like language.
“Nobody looks at that one this long,” she said.
“Then they weren’t looking right.”
On her wrist, the handwriting stopped him cold.
Go be loud.
He knew whose hand that was before she told him — the same slant he’d seen on the note River had left in the bunkhouse card game. He pressed his lips to the words and felt her pulse jump against his mouth.
“He wrote that to me from prison,” she said. “After Dad died. Told me I didn’t have to stay quiet and small anymore.”
“You didn’t listen for a long time.”
“No.” Her voice had gone rough. “I’m working on it.”
When he reached her thigh, the tattoo there brought him up short, and a laugh burst from him. “Is that… a raccoon playing guitar?”
“Holding a guitar.”
“Why?”
“There was tequila.”
“It’s terrible.”
“It’s a masterpiece!”
She was still laughing when he kissed the crooked little raccoon, then the skin beside it, then higher, and her laughter changed register into a moan when he nuzzled her pussy.
He slid his fingers under her panties and found her already soaked.
“Evander…”
He tugged her underwear aside and buried his tongue in her.
She bucked. Hard. The flannel in his fist, her thigh against his jaw, the taste of her and the sound, wild and open, every gasp scrambling his ability to pretend he didn’t need this as badly as air.
He stayed between her thighs, fucking her slowly with his tongue, until she went rigid.
Her heels digging into the mattress as she came into his mouth with his name on her lips.
He let he come down, then took his time building her back up again.
This would be the last thing he got to keep, and he intended to enjoy every second of it.
He used his mouth until she was arching under him again with her hand fisted in his hair, until she came apart again with a broken sound and a third time with his name caught somewhere in her throat.
He worked her until her thighs shook around his head and she sobbed his name.
He didn’t stop for his ribs. He barely noticed them.
“Evander.” She reached for him with both hands, pulling him down. “Come here. Please.”
When he finally sank into her, they both went still for a breath, foreheads together, her legs locking around his hips.
Then he moved, slow and deep.
She met every stroke with her nails dragging down his back and her mouth against his jaw. He wanted her to feel this in her body tomorrow. He wanted it in her bones the way five names were in his— permanent, unerasable, something that stayed even when the man who’d put it there was gone.
He didn’t let himself think the word gone. Not yet.
She came again with her face pressed into his shoulder and her whole body drawing tight around him, and that was what took him with her. A low, wrecked sound left him.
Afterward, he stayed inside her longer than he needed to, his weight braced on his forearms, her fingers tracing slow lines along his spine like she was reading braille.
“Stay,” she said, quiet, half into his shoulder.
He wanted to say I love you. It sat right there behind his teeth. But he knew with absolute certainty that if he let them out, he would never be able to walk out that door before dawn.
He would stay.
He would let her keep him, let this ranch keep him, let all of them believe he was safe to have close.
He kissed her temple instead. “Sleep, Songbird.”
She did, eventually, curled into his good side with one hand splayed over his heart like she meant to keep it there by force. Tilly climbed onto the foot of the bed sometime after — a violation of every rule he’d ever tried to teach her — and neither of them corrected the dog.
He lay in the dark and listened to Rainey’s breathing slow into a long, even rhythm.
When he was sure she was out, he slid from under her. She protested in her sleep, and he froze, mind scrambling for an excuse.
But she rolled over without waking up.
He dressed in the dark without turning on a light. His ribs protested. He let them. He found paper and a pen in the drawer of the nightstand — Nessie’s stationery, a cartoon coffee cup printed in the corner, absurdly cheerful for what he was about to write on it.
He kept it short. Longer felt like begging for something he didn’t have the right to ask for.
Stay with River. Trust Brandt. I’m leaving Tilly with you. She’ll take care of you until I come back.
He looked at the last line for a long time. He didn’t know if it was true, but he wrote it anyway because leaving her nothing felt like cruelty.
He set the note on the pillow beside her, close enough that she’d find it the second she reached for him and found empty sheets instead.
Tilly lifted her head from the foot of the bed and watched him gather his knife, his boots, the small amount of gear that had followed him down from the mountain and would follow him back up it. He crossed to her, crouched despite what it cost his ribs, and pressed his forehead briefly to hers.
“Watch her,” he said, so quiet it was barely sound at all.
Tilly’s ears flattened in something that might have been protest. He rubbed her blocky head. “You’re a good girl.”
She sighed and lay back down against Rainey’s side, watching him as he strode for the door.
He half expected to find Walker waiting for him, but the house was silent.
The yard was gray with the hour before dawn, cold enough that his breath showed, the bunkhouse windows dark, the barn quiet except for the shift and huff of horses still asleep in their stalls.
He walked past it all. Out across the field, past the blood stain Boone had left on the ground.
At the tree line he stopped and looked back.
The main house sat dark and solid against the paling sky, smoke starting to curl from one chimney where someone—Johanna, probably, always first up—had already lit the stove.
Somewhere behind one of those windows Rainey was still asleep with his note on the pillow and his dog pressed against her side, and every argument he’d built on that porch still held, still made the same clean sum it had made hours ago.
Creed would follow him. Away from here. Away from River and Boone and the songbird who had become his world in such a short time.
Everyone inside those fences was safer now.