Chapter 17
Cade
My right calf clenches up like a knot of dry ropes the second the gelding’s hooves pound the clay.
But I don’t fucking care.
I let the pain do what it wants, running straight up into my hip. But it fades as soon as she catches up. Sadie and her horse gallop beside me, and as I glance over to her, she looks annoyed…
Until she doesn’t.
A smile breaks out across her face. And then a laugh. Her blonde hair blows behind her in a way that makes her look fucking majestic and beautiful.
“We’re supposed to be checking fences!”
“Oh?” I shout back at her. “I forgot.”
I pull the buckskin down to a walk, and the silence of the pasture hits me right in the chest. Sadie’s giggles fade, as we fall in step side by side, her eyes casting to the barbed wire.
There are no diesel engines idling down in the draw.
No slamming screen doors. No voices screaming in my head, telling me how little I matter to the dirt I’m standing on.
All I hear is the rhythmic crunch-crunch-crunch of Ransom’s iron shoes splitting the dry clods and the steady, heavy exhale of the horse beneath me.
I look up, squinting against the hard Texas sun. It heats up my skin in a way that just feels… good.
“You look like a kid on Christmas,” she calls out as I meet her gaze. Her voice is dry, unhurried, completely stripped of that timid, submissive pitch she uses up at the house.
“It’s just been a while,” I grunt, shifting my weight in her dad’s old saddle.
The stirrup leathers are worn soft as grease, smelling of ancient neatsfoot oil and the ghost of a man who actually knew how to run an outfit.
“I don’t remember the Marines offering a cavalry course between the rifle range and the prison brig. I’d have taken that out.”
She turns Red along the fence line, her boots clicking gently against the stirrup irons, and then pauses, pointing. “The bottom wire’s loose three sections down. I’ll probably have to fix that if they start pushing on it.”
I nod, and just let Ransom fall in a half-step behind the sorrel, my eyes tracking the way the way Sadie’s wild hair is thrashing against the gray material of her shirt.
Fuck, she’s pretty. Why is she so pretty?
It’s the first time in months my head doesn’t feel like a locked room full of smoke. Usually, the static is a constant within my skull, there’s always something talking, calculating, or fucking screaming at me.
But out here, next to her, the matrix just... drops.
I look at the pale legs of her horse, at the way the dust rises up around the hocks and then dissolves in the slack wind.
The voices don’t have enough leverage to outshout the West Texas space.
For the first time since the elements took me down in No Man’s Land, I feel the tight, cold band around my ribs ease up.
“My granddad had a place outside of Post,” I say before I can check the impulse.
The words sound rough, foreign, like a tool that’s been left in the damp too long to be useful.
“Not this big. Just three sections of sand and mesquite. But he had a buckskin that looked exactly like this one. Named him Bullet. Stupidest horse in the whole county.”
Sadie doesn’t turn her head, but Red slows his pace to match Ransom’s stride. “Did you cowboy for him?”
“Mostly before my stepdad came along and sometimes later on too," I say, my jaw popping as I force the words out. “He taught me how to splice wire before I was ten. Said a man who couldn’t fix his own fence was just letting another man decide where his property ended. Old man logic.”
“Yeah, I get that,” she murmurs. Her fingers move along the split reins, adjusting the slack with an economy of motion that makes my stomach do a strange, tight twist.
Could she touch me like that? My cock twitches, and I ignore it.
“My dad used to say the same thing,” Sadie continues. “Only he wasn’t talking about cattle. He was talking about Clayton.”
I watch her profile in the high light—the yellowing edge of the bruise running down to her jawline, the neat, precise curve of her chin. “Why’d you marry him, Sadie?”
The sorrel takes three steps before she speaks. “When you’re twenty-one, you think a badge means safety. You think the uniform is a shield, not a blind. And you think the rough and tough guy means he’ll protect you. But as it turns out, if a man says he’ll kill for you, he might kill you, too.”
Before I can even think of how to respond to that, she pulls Red up short, her glove pointing down at a rusted T-post where the zinc wire has snapped, the twin ends curled into tight, angry coils against the clay.
“We need to splice this.”
I nod and slide off Ransom, the landing sending a jarring spike of pain straight from my calf to my skull. Fuck. But I push it away and grab the fence pliers out of her saddle bag before she can move, my fingers clumsy but steady as I work the jaws around the broken wire.
“Hold the tension,” I bark at her, my voice way more intense than I intend.
Sadie doesn’t react in any certain way. She slides down from Red, her boots hitting the dirt with a solid, unhurried thud, and grabs the long end of the wire. She racks the splicer and pulls the wires together—consequently pulling us together.
Her shoulder brushes my lower bicep.
The heat coming off her skin smells of lye soap, horse sweat, and that unique, feminine musk that has been tormenting me inside the dark of the stalls.
I could see the tiny, pale freckles across the bridge of her nose and the fine lines at the corners of her eyes that come from squinting into thirty miles of empty space.
I want her so goddamn bad.
“Why are you shaking?” Her blue eyes lock dead center on mine.
“My leg’s just tired,” I lie, shifting my attention back to the wire. I finish the splice and force my eyes to not slip back to her.
“Your leg seems fine,” Sadie muses, her scent drowning me.
Don’t do it, Cade. Don’t do it.
But the space between us goes completely thin, the West Texas wind dropping to a dead slack. The only sound in the world is the heavy, wet exhale of the horses behind us and the click of the cooling tin roof on the windmill fifty yards down the draw.
My hand moves before I can give it permission, my body turning as I drop the pliers to the ground.
My fingers reach for her, the knuckles brushing the yellow-brown skin of her jawline. I don’t press at all, I don’t want to hurt her. I just hold the contact, the warmth of her cheekbone transferring into my calloused palm.
She doesn’t pull away. She just freezes like an abused dog waiting for the next blow. Her lower lip trembles—but her eyes stay level, penetrating, completely prepared to take what hit is about to come.
But as I lean in, I’m the one who takes the hit. Right to the chest.
Because that goddamn wedding band glistens under the Texas sun in the most blinding way.
A horseshoe clicks against a rock behind us, and I don’t lean into her any further.
The shadow of Clayton Briggs shatters the moment with the ring on her left hand, and the capital murder charges written down on a clipboard in Lubbock all come rushing back into the space between our lips.
Sadie lets go of the wire. It snaps back with a sharp ping, and she steps back, her hand going up to smooth a strand of hair out of her face, her chin tilting upward into that defensive, performative mask she wears for the rest of the world.
“We should get back,” she chokes out. “I… I have to clean.”
“Right,” I grunt, reaching down and plucking the plier back up from the ground. I slide them back into place on her saddle, and then turn away from her, unable to handle the way her face is flushed.
I swing back into the saddle, my bad leg burning up through my thigh, but my head is still quiet. For now. It’ll hit me later.
I’m one hundred percent sure of that.
We start back, walking the horses side-by-side, the gold light of the early afternoon stripping the shadows out of the land until there’s nowhere left to hide.
I really want to kick up Ransom and ride like hell.
But as I steal a glance at Sadie out of the corner of my eye, watching the way her fingers hold the reins with that quiet grip, I realize the truth of what had just happened out on the flats.
I don’t want to run from her. I want to own her.
… And I don’t even fucking know what that means.