6. Too Close For Comfort
Chapter six
Too Close For Comfort
Laney
Iwasn't jealous.
That is my position and I'm keeping it.
What I was, was tired. It was a long day with the storm and the barn and the conversation that got more honest than I planned for.
By the time we got to Whiskey River I was running on fumes, bourbon, and that frayed energy that comes from spending too many hours in close quarters with a man who is increasingly difficult to be annoyed at.
That's all it was.
I get to the barn at five-forty-five the next morning, fifteen minutes earlier than usual, because laying in my bunk staring at the ceiling felt less productive than getting something done.
The bunkhouse was quiet when I left. Remy was snoring through the wall the way he always does, steady and completely unbothered by the universe, and Silas's light was already on which means he was awake too but neither of us made a thing of it.
I have a list. The list is long. The list will keep me busy and focused and completely unbothered by anything that is not directly ranch related.
I start with the horse barn.
Biscuit gets his morning check first, same as always. He bumps my hand when I reach his stall and I give him the apple slices I cut up in the bunkhouse kitchen earlier. I was awake anyway and it gave me something to do at four-thirty that wasn't thinking about eye contact across a crowded bar.
I move down the stall line.
June texted me last night after we got home.
The message said simply: that woman was aggressively boring and you have nothing to worry about.
I stared at it for a solid minute before typing back: I wasn't worried.
June sent back a single emoji that I chose not to engage with and put my phone back in my pocket.
I was not worried.
I grab the feed buckets and get moving.
Remy shows up at six with his hat on sideways and a breakfast burrito from somewhere and the cheerful unrepentant energy of a man who slept perfectly and finds everything about this morning deeply funny.
He leans against the barn door and watches me work with the specific quality of attention that means he's deciding whether to say something.
"Don't," I tell him.
"I wasn't gonna say anything."
"You were absolutely gonna say something."
He takes a bite of his burrito. Chews. Looks at the distance. "She wasn't even that pretty."
"Remy."
"I'm just saying. Objectively speaking."
"I will put you on fence repair for a month."
He holds up the burrito in surrender. "Finished. Said nothing. Moving on."
He pushes off the door frame and grabs a feed bucket. We work down the stall line together and I'm almost convinced he's actually letting it go when he says, casual as anything, "Beckett was looking for you this morning. Said he had something to talk to you about."
I keep my eyes on the feed bucket. "About what?"
"Didn't say." Remy finishes his burrito and tosses the wrapper in the bin. "Seemed like it was something he wanted to say to you directly."
I don't answer that.
Beckett finds me twenty minutes later at the water trough near the north pasture. He's got his new work gloves on and his boots are already dusty which means he's been up and moving for a while.
He stops a few feet away and looks like a man organizing his words carefully.
"I want you to move into cabin two," he says.
I straighten up slowly. "Excuse me?"
"You're the ranch manager. You've been living in the bunkhouse." He says it plainly, no fanfare. "That's not right. Cabin two is empty and it's yours if you want it."
I look at him for a long moment. "I've lived in the bunkhouse for four years."
"I know." He holds my gaze steady. "Doesn't mean you should keep living there."
The morning is quiet around us. I don't know what I expected him to say but it wasn't that.
"I don't need your charity," I say.
"It's not charity. It's a job title." He pulls his gloves on tighter. "Ranch managers get cabins. That's just how it should be."
He walks back toward the barn before I can answer.
I stand at the water trough and look at cabin two sitting quietly in the morning light and feel something shift in my chest that I am completely unprepared for and absolutely not ready to examine.
I haven't even given Beckett an answer about the cabin.
He hasn't asked for one, which is either an order, or strategic. I haven't decided which yet. What he has done is show up to every task this morning already knowing what needs doing, which is new and slightly disorienting after two weeks of explaining everything twice.
He's at the fence line near the east pasture when I find him.
He's replacing two rotted posts that have been on the maintenance list for a week.
He's got the post hole digger positioned correctly, which I know because I watched him get it wrong three times last week and apparently he went home and figured out why.
He doesn't look up when I approach. Just keeps working with the steady focused energy of a man who has stopped trying to prove something and started trying to actually learn it.
It's a meaningful difference.
"Posts need to go eighteen inches minimum," I say, out of habit.
"Twenty in this section," he says. "Soil's softer near the drainage line. I checked."
I look at the post. Look at him. "You checked."
"Silas mentioned it last week. I wrote it down."
I don't say anything to that because what I want to say is something along the lines of good.
And that feels dangerous coming out of my mouth before eight in the morning.
Dr. Emmy Torres's truck rolls through the ranch gate at half past nine, which I completely forgot about until this moment.
Emmy does a routine check on the horses every six weeks, vaccines and teeth and general wellness, and she does it with the brisk efficient energy of someone who genuinely loves animals and has limited patience for everything else.
She climbs out of her truck and looks immediately at Beckett, who is still working the fence line, and then at me with both eyebrows raised.
"That's him?" she says, without lowering her voice.
"Emmy."
"What? I'm just asking." She pulls her kit from the truck bed. "June said he was good looking. June undersells things."
"June needs to mind her business."
"June is the only one of us who minds anyone's business properly." Emmy falls into step beside me toward the horse barn. "Has he gotten better or is he still flooding fields?"
"He's getting better."
She glances back over her shoulder. "Mm."
"Don't."
"Didn't say a word."
"You said mm. That's a whole sentence coming from you."
Emmy grins and pushes the barn door open.
She works through the horses with the calm efficiency I've always admired.
Checking each one with quiet steady hands and talking to them in a low voice that isn't quite words and isn't quite not words either.
Biscuit leans into her like she's an old friend, which she is.
Beckett appears in the barn doorway twenty minutes in, hat in hand, and watches Emmy work with genuine interest. He doesn't interrupt. Doesn't ask unnecessary questions. Just observes until Emmy finishes with Biscuit and turns around and finds him standing there.
"Beckett Wilder," he says. "I own the ranch."
"Emmy Torres. I keep your horses healthy." She looks him up and down with the frank assessment she applies to everything. "You've got good animals here. Well managed."
"That's Laney's work," he says. "Not mine."
Emmy looks at me.
I look at Biscuit.
"Uh huh," Emmy says, in a tone that carries significantly more information than those two syllables should reasonably contain.
I make a mental note to find better friends.
Maisie finds me after lunch.
This is not unusual. Maisie finds me after lunch most days now, appearing at my elbow with the reliable frequency of a scheduled appointment that nobody formally made.
She's got Rowdy with her, which is also not unusual, and a look on her face that I've learned means she has a plan and is about to tell me about it in a way that makes it very hard to say no.
I brace myself.
"The ranch house looks sad," she says.
I look up from the supply order I'm reviewing. "Sad how?"
"Empty sad." She pulls herself up onto the fence rail beside me with the easy athleticism of a kid who has been climbing things her whole life.
"Dad unpacked all the boxes but he didn't put anything anywhere.
It's just stuff sitting around in rooms. There's no...
" She waves a hand searching for the word.
"Character?" I offer.
"Yes." She points at me. "Character. It needs character."
"That's your dad's job, kiddo."
"Dad doesn't know how." She says this with the affectionate certainty of someone who has accepted a parent's limitations and moved on. "He picked everything out from catalogs. It all matches too much."
I look at her. "Too much?"
"Everything is the same color gray." She wrinkles her nose. "It looks like a fancy hotel where nobody actually lives."
I think about the ranch house as I've seen it in passing. She's not wrong. Beckett has expensive taste and excellent instincts for business and approximately zero instincts for making a space feel lived in.
The furniture is beautiful, cold, and arranged with the precision of someone who read an interior design article and followed the instructions exactly.
"What do you want me to do about it, Maisie?"
She gives me the look. The one that says she finds my question genuinely baffling. "Help me fix it."
"I'm not an interior decorator."
"You made the bunkhouse feel like home."
I open my mouth. Close it. The bunkhouse argument is actually a reasonable one and I resent that she's eight years old and already knows how to make a reasonable argument.
"Does your dad know you're doing this?"
"It's a surprise."
"Maisie."
"He'll like it." She says it with complete unshakeable confidence. "He needs things on the walls and real stuff on the shelves and maybe some plants. People who need to slow down need plants. My grandma says so."