Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
TATE
Two minutes early. Hair pulled up in a messy clip with pieces falling around her face.
Leggings. Boots. My flannel. Wait. Not my flannel.
Her flannel. One of those soft ones women buy at stores that sell candles.
But the way it hangs off her shoulder, the way the collar sits open against her collarbone, makes my hands tighten around my coffee mug until I'm worried about the ceramic.
"You're early," I say from the porch.
"You said six. I rounded down." She climbs the steps to my porch like she's been doing it for years. Looks around at the house, the barn beyond it, the corrals where Bucky is watching us with one ear forward. "This is nice."
"It's a ranch."
"Ranches can be nice, Tate."
My name again. She uses it like punctuation. Like a weapon she hasn't decided to fully deploy.
The kitchen is clean because I cleaned it twice.
Once at nine last night. Again at four this morning.
The agreement is on the table, handwritten on a yellow legal pad because I don't own a computer, and the coffee pot is full because I made a full pot instead of my usual four cups. Because she was coming.
I don't examine that too closely.
She sits at my table. In my kitchen. In the chair across from where I eat standing up every night. Her eyes move over the room. The counters. The single plate in the drying rack. The cast iron hanging from the pot rack my grandfather welded forty years ago.
"Coffee?" I pour a mug before she answers. Set it in front of her. Black.
She takes a sip, wrinkles her nose, and gets up. Opens my fridge without asking. Finds the milk. Pours a splash into her mug. Sits back down.
"You just helped yourself to my fridge."
"You gave me black coffee at six in the morning. I'm allowed a survival response."
I sit across from her. The table is small. My knees are close to hers underneath it, close enough that if either of us shifted forward an inch, we'd be touching. Neither of us shifts.
"Wrote it down." I nod at the yellow legal pad on the table. "Not because it's legal. I know it's not. You're a renter. But I wanted you to see what I'm offering."
She reads it slowly. One finger tracing down the page.
Her nails are short. A faded ring of silver on her right thumb.
Her lips move slightly as she reads, and I look away because watching her mouth is a bad idea at any hour, but especially at six in the morning in my kitchen where she's close enough that I can see the freckles on her shoulders through the open collar of her shirt.
"Creek access for the east herd, twice daily. Driveway plowed in winter. Repairs as needed. Firewood before November." She looks up. Those blue eyes. Direct, clear, missing nothing. "This is generous."
"It's fair."
"The firewood alone is worth more than me just agreeing not to complain about cows."
"Creek access keeps my cattle alive through August. Firewood costs me an afternoon with a chainsaw. I know which one I'd rather have."
"You know you could just call my landlord. Get this done properly."
"Could. But Greg Horton's never set foot on this property. He doesn't know the land. Doesn't know the creek. You're the one living here. Your word matters more to me than his signature."
Something shifts in her expression. Softens.
"Okay. You have my word." She pushes the legal pad back across the table. "I won't block access. I won't complain. And when the firewood shows up, I'll pretend I don't know where it came from, since that seems to be how you prefer things."
Simple. She should go now. Back to her cabin, her laptop, her life that doesn't involve me.
She doesn't go.
"Got any more of this terrible coffee?"
I refill her mug. She adds milk again. We sit at the table while the sun comes through the east window, turning everything gold. She asks about the ranch. How many head. How much land. Whether I do it alone.
"Always alone?"
"Since my dad died. Mom moved to Billings. I stayed."
"That's a lot."
"It's work. Work doesn't care if it's a lot."
She wraps both hands around her mug. "That's the most depressing thing anyone's ever said to me before seven a.m."
A sound comes out of me. Short, rough. Almost a laugh. Her eyes widen, and I realize she's never heard me laugh. Nobody has, recently. The sound feels rusty coming up. Unused.
"What do you do?" I ask, because I realize I don't know. I know she's from somewhere with too much traffic. Know she signed a year lease. Know she puts her bare feet in a creeks and argues about property lines. But I don't know what she does, and the wanting to know is uncomfortable.
"Graphic designer. Remote. I do logos, branding, packaging. Mostly for breweries, which is ironic because I don't really drink beer."
"What do you drink?"
"Wine. Cheap wine. The kind that comes in a box."
"There's a liquor store in town. Dave's. He stocks box wine because Mrs. Henderson buys a case a month."
"I already found Dave's." She grins. "Mrs. Henderson and I are basically soulmates."
We've been talking for forty minutes. I know this because the clock on the wall above the stove reads 6:42, and I haven't been late for morning chores a single time in twelve years.
I'm going to be late today.
The realization does something to my chest. Loosens a knot I didn't know was there, or maybe tightens a new one. Both. She's sitting in my kitchen drinking my terrible coffee, and the room feels different. Fuller. Less like a place I eat standing up.
"I should let you get to work." She stands. Carries her mug to the sink, rinses it, sets it upside down in the drying rack next to my plate.
Two mugs in the rack. Two.
"Thank you. For this morning." She turns, leaning against the counter. "And for the porch step."
"Told you I don't know what you're talking about."
"And I told you I don't believe you." She crosses her arms. The flannel slips again. That shoulder. Golden skin in the morning light. "Why won't you just admit you did something nice?"
"Because then you'd expect it."
"Would that be so terrible?"
Yes. Because expectations mean staying. Expectations mean someone counting on me for something beyond cattle and fence wire. Expectations mean the kitchen table with two chairs instead of one, and I've been sitting at one for so long that the idea of two makes my throat tight.
She reads all of it on my face. I can see her doing it, tracking the shift, filing it away. Her expression changes. The teasing drops. Something softer takes its place.
"Tate."
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't look at me like that."
"Like what?"
Like you see something worth staying for. Like the silence doesn't scare you. Like you'd put your feet in my creek every damn day if I asked.
I don't say any of that. I push off the counter where I've been standing and walk toward the door because distance is the only language I trust. But the kitchen is small, and she's between me and the exit, still leaning against the sink.
We end up face to face. Close. Too close. Her chin tips up. Those blue eyes lock onto mine, steady, unblinking. Her lips part on a soft breath that I can feel against my jaw.
My hand moves before my brain gives permission. Fingers curling around the back of her neck, thumb resting at the hinge of her jaw. Her pulse hammers under my palm. Fast. Scared fast, or wanting fast, and knowing the difference matters.
"This is a bad idea." My voice is rough. Barely mine.
"Probably." She doesn't step back.
"You're my neighbor."
"I'm aware."
"I'm difficult."
"I noticed."
"Piper." Her name scrapes out of me. "I haven't kissed anyone in three years."
"Then you should probably stop talking about it and just do it."
Something breaks. The last thin wire of restraint I've been stringing between fence posts since the day she showed up in her yard with bare feet and a mouth that won't quit.
I kiss her.
My mouth covers hers, firm, hungry. Her hands grab fistfuls of my shirt, pulling me closer.
She tastes like milk and bad coffee and something sweeter underneath, something warm that goes straight through me.
Her back hits the counter edge. My free hand grips the butcher block beside her hip, caging her in without meaning to.
She doesn't seem to mind. Her fingers slide up from my shirt to my jaw, rough against my stubble, holding me against her mouth.
I kiss her deeper. Tongue against hers, slow, deliberate. Testing. She makes a sound in her throat. Quiet, breathless, involuntary. My hand tightens on her neck. My hips press forward against hers until the counter is the only thing keeping us upright.
One kiss. That's all this was supposed to be. A lapse in judgment at six forty-five in the morning in my kitchen where nobody has touched me in three years.
But her mouth opens under mine, and her fingers curl into my hair under the brim of my hat, knocking it off, and the sound it makes hitting the floor is the loudest thing in the room.
And I can't stop. Don't want to. My thumb traces her jaw.
My teeth catch her bottom lip. She arches into me with a gasp that vibrates against my chest.
I pull back. Forehead against hers. Breathing hard. Both of us. Her hands still in my hair. My hand still on her neck.
"Okay," she whispers. "That was..."
"Yeah."
"We should probably talk about this."
"Probably." My thumb is still moving along her jaw. Can't seem to make it stop.
"But not right now."
"No. Not right now."
She slides out from between me and the counter. Steps back. Her cheeks are flushed, her lips swollen, her eyes wide and bright. The flannel is completely off one shoulder now, and I can see the strap of her tank top, thin against her skin.
"Six a.m. meetings are dangerous," she says.
"You don't know the half of it."
She walks to the door. Opens it. Pauses with one hand on the frame and looks back at me standing in the middle of my kitchen with my hat on the floor and my hands gripping the counter behind me because if I don't hold onto something, I'm going to follow her.
"Thanks for the coffee, Rawlins."
The door closes. Her boots cross the porch. The steps creak under her weight, and then silence.
I pick up my hat. Put it back on. Look at the drying rack where her mug sits next to mine. Look at the chair where she sat. Look at the door she walked through.
Three years. Three years of silence, routine, the safe mechanics of a life built for one. And in forty-five minutes, a woman with blue eyes and freckles and a mouth that gives as good as it gets just put a crack in every wall I've spent a decade building.
My lips still taste like her.
I'm late for morning chores. First time in twelve years.
I don't care.