8. Dangerous Territory #2
She accepts this, shifts her weight, looks at Weston with the direct assessment of an eight year old who hasn't learned to pretend yet. "Are you a friend of my dad's?"
"Just a neighbor," Weston says pleasantly.
"Oh." She considers him for a moment. "Our house looks really good now. Laney helped me fix it up." She says it with the casual ownership of someone stating a simple fact. "She knows where everything should go."
Something crosses Weston's face that he smooths over quickly.
Something flashes across Beckett's face that he doesn't bother smoothing over at all.
Maisie, satisfied with her contribution to the conversation, turns and runs back toward the house with Rowdy thundering behind her.
Weston straightens up, adjusts his hat, looks between me and Beckett with a smile that has recalculated itself slightly. "Nice kid," he says.
"Yeah," Beckett says quietly, looking at me. "She is."
Weston makes his goodbyes shortly after.
I watch his truck roll down the drive and think that Maisie just said more in thirty seconds than I've managed to say to myself in three weeks.
She knows where everything should go.
Lord help me.
I find Beckett at the north pasture fence line after lunch.
He's been out here a while by the look of it. He's replaced two posts, reset a third, and got the wire tension on the east section tighter than it's been in months.
His shirt is damp from the heat, his hat is pushed back, his new gloves are finally starting to look like work gloves instead of store gloves. He doesn't look up when I approach, just keeps working with the steady focused energy that has become the version of him I know best.
The version of him I trust most.
That thought arrives uninvited and I let it pass without examining it.
"You didn't have to take the whole fence line," I say.
"I was already out here." He sets the post driver down, rolls his shoulder once. "Figured I'd finish it."
"Remy was supposed to do that section this afternoon."
"Remy spent his afternoon teaching Maisie how to rope a fence post." He glances at me sideways. "She's got a better arm than I do, which I'm choosing to be proud of rather than embarrassed by."
I look down the fence line at the work he's done. It's good. Solid, correctly tensioned, properly set. Three weeks ago he didn't know which end of a post driver to hold. Now he's working a fence line alone and doing it right.
I don't say any of that out loud.
"About this morning," he says.
I look at a fence post. "What about it."
"Weston Blackthorn." He says the name like he's setting something on a table carefully. "He comes around a lot?"
"Occasionally."
"He's interested in you."
"Weston is interested in anything he thinks he can't have. It's a personality type."
Beckett is quiet for a moment. He pulls the wire taut on the next section, checks the tension, moves to the next post. "Has he always been like that with you?"
"Weston is harmless," I say. "He's just competitive."
"There's a difference between competitive and showing up uninvited to someone else's ranch, standing too close to their ranch manager." He stops.
I look at him.
He looks at the fence wire.
"To their ranch manager," he finishes, carefully.
The afternoon sits quiet around us. A hawk is doing something lazy and unhurried over the south pasture. The fence wire catches the light. Somewhere behind us Maisie's voice carries across the yard, followed by Remy's laugh.
"Beckett."
"Mm."
"What were you going to say?"
He pulls the wire. Checks it. Sets the tool down. Turns and looks at me with that steady, direct gaze that has no business being as unsettling as it is. "Something I'm not ready to say yet," he says. Honest, plain, no performance in it.
I hold his gaze for a moment that stretches slightly past comfortable.
There are approximately fourteen things I could say right now. I know this because I've been having this conversation in my head for three weeks and I have cataloged the options thoroughly. Some of them are smart, some are honest, one of them is something I'd regret in the morning.
I pick the safe one.
"The wire tension on section three is still a little loose," I say.
Something moves through his eyes. Patience, maybe. Or recognition. "Right," he says quietly. "I'll fix it."
He turns back to the fence.
I stand there for a second longer than I need to.
Then I walk back toward the barn and tell myself that was the right call.
It takes me until the barn door to halfway believe it.
The almost kiss in the kitchen was one thing.
That was Rowdy's fault and circumstance, and cooking together in a warm kitchen at the end of a long day. I filed it under situational and moved on and mostly believed myself about it.
This is different.
This has been building all day in the way that things build when you're paying attention to someone you're trying not to pay attention to. Every look across the fence line. Every moment where Beckett almost said something real and didn't.
Every time Weston positioned himself too close, I felt Beckett notice it from twenty feet away without moving a muscle.
I'm at the round pen after dinner, doing a final check on Copper, when Beckett finds me.
He comes around the barn corner with his hat in his hand, sleeves rolled up, wearing the expression of a man who has made a decision about something.
He stops at the round pen rail and looks at me across it and doesn't say anything immediately, which with Beckett means he's choosing words carefully.
I keep brushing Copper.
"I owe you an apology," he says.
I look up. "For what."
"This afternoon. At the fence." He sets his hat on the rail. "I was out of line getting territorial about Weston. He's not my business, you're not my business, and I don't have any right to—"
"Beckett."
He stops.
"You weren't out of line," I say. Quietly. Carefully. Like I'm stepping onto ice I haven't tested yet.
He looks at me across the rail.
The evening is doing that thing again where it goes golden and unreasonable, making everything feel closer than it is. The barn is warm behind me, the ranch is settling into its end of day sounds, Copper is breathing slow and steady under my hand.
"This is complicated," I say. "You know that."
"I know."
"You own the ranch. I manage it. Everything I've built here is tied directly to you staying or going and I can't…" I stop. Start again. "I can't afford to make decisions based on something that may not last."
He's quiet for a moment. "That's a fair thing to be afraid of."
"I'm not afraid," I say, which is the least convincing thing I've said out loud in recent memory and we both know it.
He moves around the round pen rail slowly, not fast, giving me every opportunity to take a step back. I don't take a step back. He stops close enough that I have to look up slightly to hold his gaze and the distance between us is not a practical distance anymore.
"Laney," he says. Low, steady, my name in his voice doing something completely unreasonable to my ability to think clearly.
"Don't," I say. It comes out softer than I mean it to.
"I haven't said anything yet."
"I know what you're going to say."
"Do you."
"Yes."
"And?"
My hand has stopped moving on Copper's neck. The brush is just sitting there. Beckett is right there, the evening light is doing its worst and I have run out of fence lines to look at.
"And I'm saying don't," I say. "Not yet."
He looks at me for a long moment. Something shifts in his expression, not hurt, not pushed back, just patient in a way that is somehow more dangerous than anything else he could have done.
"Okay," he says quietly. "Not yet."
He picks up his hat, settles it back on his head, and walks back toward the ranch house with the unhurried stride of a man who has decided he can wait.
I stand at the round pen with my hand on Copper's neck, watching him go. Thinking that not yet is the most dangerous thing I've ever said to anyone.
Because not yet means eventually.
And eventually is a door I just left open.