Chapter 7
SEVEN
WEST
Playing Catch with a Broken Toy
I will not interrupt their work. I will not intervene.
Gravel skitters beneath the construction worker’s boots as the base of the bridge that I designed months earlier is hauled into place. I close my eyes and try not to watch. This is why I prefer not to stay on-site, but for this particular project, being present is a requirement.
“Lift it. Lift,” one of the project managers calls. I don’t remember any of their names, but the stress in his voice heightens my own.
The instant-coffee sachets this morning had been more effective than I expected, perhaps driven by Haiti’s formidable humidity.
The project I’d travelled to work on slides into crystal focus.
Below, the bridge’s basic exoskeleton has been built in a literal day under direction, teamwork forced by environmental pressures and a swelling river.
I fought for the project not to go ahead during the wrong season but was pushed back by Rand Corporate, who “know better.” As I study the reactive clay soil beneath my feet that shifts with every step, my post-project feedback will redefine that with the same volume.
I turn my back, crumpling the pages that I spent nights working on in my clean hands. Nights back at Coyote Falls when I should have been sleeping but didn’t after I presented the idea of a not-for-profit arm of Rand Enterprises to Cord.
Back when the asshole agreed.
Not that he was an asshole for agreeing to my idea of additional plumbing and services laid out in Haiti, just for agreeing to my plan and then letting me free-range.
Three months later, I had an entire project planned out.
A project he loved, and promptly handed off to someone else with all the free time in the world to implement the damn thing.
The dismissal crippled me inside, left me with itchier feet than ever.
Ten years in one place is too long to stay still.
I never said a thing and kept working for Rand day after day, jamming my boots into the dirt at Coyote until I choked on the particles that I’d laid the groundwork for years before.
We’d always worked side by side, but more recently he had worked alone.
When I found out Lanie was pregnant, I did the same thing she did months before.
I left without looking back.
Suddenly the ranch house seemed small, the land alien even though I knew every damn grain of dirt intimately. But none of it had ever been mine.
And now the dust I worked and bled my drifter’s heart into was changing.
The difference between my story and hers? No pretty billionaire would chase down my sorry denim-clad ass and haul me back to Coyote land or cook me breakfast and braid my beard.
A benefit was that because Rand had the brains to credit me on my own project, I could at least lead the architectural work and slide in at the tail end, fixing the errors I’d foreseen in the workflow before construction began.
And here we are.
The ground trembles beneath my feet. I curse loudly. One of the local men glances sideways at me, his eyes wide and telegraphing his unspoken response. I’m not sure if it’s from my choice of verbiage or the unsettled earth, but I’m moving before I’ve consciously thought the action through.
I grip the rope that burns my palms, hauling backward.
A command rips from my throat in a second or less.
“Get it up,” I shout, not caring if the men around me speak my language or not.
The words don’t matter, but the tone does.
“Come on,” I grate out, the skin on my hands tearing at the lack of gloves as the footing in the reactive clay soil does exactly what I expected after copious amounts of rain—which was why I recommended waiting to start construction for another few months until monsoon season was done. “Get into it!”
I’ve called out the same sorts of things to men seasons round back home in Montana. I’ve broken skin and sweated blood on dirt that moved just like this during torrential rain, and I’ve done it in just as bad conditions.
Neither expanse of dirt beneath my feet was mine, which means today’s clusterfuck is just as shit as any other day on a calendar bearing a different year.
Men skitter about me as hands join mine on the rope already fraying in my hands.
Fuck, this better come together fast or we’re all headed into the drink.
Hesitant at first, the slack slowly tightens.
Feet dig in around me, and when the ground begins to collapse beneath mine and I can taste that feral river water well before I hit the surface, someone grabs my shirt and pulls me back.
The rope has tension. The arc forms and my ass hits the bank.
“Done, sir.” A familiar accent twangs in my ear.
I glance sharply sideways, but the silhouette doesn’t belong to any man I know. “You’re a regular at Rand?”
It still feels strange to say the name and not be talking to the man himself nearly a year after leaving Coyote.
Separating the business conglomerate, the pristine CEO who never sweats, and the rancher, the rodeo rider I’ve personally trained who eats dirt, has always been that way for me.
A different problem to what everyone else here probably experiences, never having met Cord in their life or likely having ever seen a picture of the reclusive billionaire.
I stare at the bridge that looks exactly like the technical drawing I created when I lived back at Coyote.
The paper rolls past me, mud-smudged and ruined.
I clamp my heel on the rubbish, sinking it into the clay at the foundations of its to-scale likeness, an epigraph that will never be discovered. “You ever head up north?”
The man plants his butt in the mud and stretches his shoulders. “Nah. I’m from Texas. You’re a helluva way from home, then.”
I laugh softly. “You have no idea.” I push my heel into the soil, completing the plan’s journey into the custom-made sinkhole.
The mud closes over the paper, sealing it inside.
A sucking sound releases my boot as I clench sore hands, knowing my palms will blister or worse before I hit home turf again.
“Are you on latrine watch later?” We have hours before the sun sets.
Either we keep on moving along, or we’re all gonna get real wet when the weather finally closes in.
He snorts. “You mean am I digging shit holes? Why not. That’s what we’re here for before the rain starts. Isn’t some rich asshole paying us to be here?”
I grin. That describes Cord to a T. “Nothing like breaking your back for a damn good reason.”
Winnie’s replies to my messages dwindle into nothingness after she tries to stick it to me.
The single mom might be my best friend’s sister and off-limits, and the world’s biggest flirt, but she’s also hurting.
I should probably head back to my apartment the moment I’m back on home turf, but the need to see her, check that she’s okay, is stronger.
Silence isn’t Winnie’s strong point, after all.
At least, that’s the story I’m sticking to as I pull up out the front of her semi-darkened town house in Cloakton at an hour late enough to screw her night right up.
The burst blisters that ripple my palms are the least of my troubles after my skin frayed thin like the rope that day on the bridge.
No matter how much I want to forget the ache in my chest as well as my hands, I can’t ignore the woman who has made an island of herself in the midst of the chaotic life that surrounds her.
Winnie’s door is shut when I knock on it, dressed in pink board shorts and a floral shirt.
My arms are sunburnt and sore. At least the mud has washed off.
That took a whole lot longer than I expected and got into places it really shouldn’t have gone.
My brand-spanking-new attire that I purchased at the airport might not be my usual, but it’s cleaner than what I left the site in after the rain started and the clay turned to slop.
“Cord? I said you could have her for three days. It’s only been… one.” Winnie peers at me through tired eyes. One hand disappears into her towel that rubs her mid-length hair. Water droplets spray us both. Her pink lips part as she focuses on me. “What are you doing here?”
“You offered a booty call.” I jam my foot between the doorway and doorframe.
“Hell no, cowboy. That was a—”
“Joke. I got it.” I brace an arm on the door to stop her battering my foot.
“Give me five minutes for proof of life, and I’ll be out of your wet hair.
Ten,” I add when she gives up and heads back inside.
I follow her and she sinks onto her sofa arm without sticking it to me this time at all.
Her body slouches into the pillows. “Winnie?”
She shakes her head, letting the towel drop to the floor from a listless hand. Winnie doesn’t bother answering me.
Shit. Is she drunk? I kick the door shut, glad Sally doesn’t seem to be about. “Rand,” I murmur, taking her smaller hands in my ruined ones. “What the hell happened in the last two days while I wasn’t here?” Sure, I had a flyby-night job to do, but I can still be here for her if she lets me.
She shakes her head but doesn’t pull away. There’s no scent of alcohol on her. After the amount of drunk ranch hands I’ve dealt with over the past decade at Coyote Falls, I’m a fair judge. Which means that my bouncy, sassy little brat of a flirt is just…
Depressed.
There’s no “just” about it.
“Come on, gorgeous. Tell me who hurt you.” My knees hit the floorboards through the threadbare carpet of her rental, but I don’t give a shit.
Especially when she looks at me through hollow eyes and dark circles that tell me just how many hours those eyes haven’t seen sleep for.
My jaw locks. Before she says his name, I know.
“Brad was here,” she whispers, her voice dull and flat.
“Do I need to call the police?” Keeping my own low and smooth is a vicious war with my internal moral compass.
One half of me wants to scoop her up and carry her to her bed, wrap my arms around her, and hold her until she falls asleep.
Not that I think the fight will last long, considering how exhausted she looks.
The other half of me is fury-driven to find the asshole and drag him to the local police station. I know the terms of her restraining order. I was there when the damn thing was put in place, standing behind Cordell’s wheelchair. Behind her.
A fine tremor ripples over her entire body. I’ve never seen Winnie shake, not through any of Cord’s operations. Not when we both thought he was dead on a stretcher or under a goddamn bull.
“Winnie?” My patience stretches to its limit.
“The police know. He’s in rehab for… I don’t know. Thirty days, or something. I have no idea what he took. He was so out of it.” Her voice fades. She’s lost in a memory I don’t share. “It’s a detox program in an elite something or other…” She yawns and slumps back on the sofa.
Or Winnie would have leaned back on the sofa, only she planted her fine butt on the arm and there’s no support behind her. Her already sagging form slips backward.
“Whoa.” I catch her in time—just—with an arm wrapped around her lower back. “You said Sally is with Cord?”
A nod.
“At Coyote?”
Another nod.
“Good. I’m taking you to bed.”
A pause. Then—
“No booty call, you filthy foreman freak,” she mumbled into my chest as I scoop my arms beneath her tiny body.
“Agreed. I’ve been digging toilets for a day and haven’t slept either.”
Her weary head lifts, a not-quite smirk decorating her pretty face. “Ha. You are a dirty fu—”
“Shut it, Rand.” I nudge her bedroom door open with my boot and then kick them off. “I’ll clean your carpets. My shoes are filthy.”
“Just like you.” She dozes into my shoulder without resistance.
Her warmth wraps around me. The hell of the last thirty-six hours hits me in full. That’s all it’s been since I got the call that the project was going ahead, job done, and returned home again. At least I got a decent airport-club shower before I turned up on her doorstep.
“Winnie. I need you to tell me if you don’t want me to stay.
” I peel back the covers on her bed with the tips of my fingers, glad she can’t see my wince with every movement.
Hell, the pain in my rope-torn palms is unbelievable.
Maybe I do have soft architect hands after all.
“Rand? Winnie. Wake up. Just for a minute.”
“Stay,” she mumbles into my floral shirt. Her hands slide up around my neck, pulling me down to her. “I don’t want to be alone.”
My heart pangs for her. “You won’t be.”
I arrange us on her bed, letting her stay where she is draped over me, both of us fully clothed and her mostly asleep by the time I’m done.
My back is propped with two thin pillows.
I know she can probably buy better but doesn’t, that she and Cord fight about money constantly.
Part of me wants to check Sally’s room. After his last accident gave him a mortality check, literally, the terms of his gift to his niece leave her a million each year.
It’s in a trust and Winnie has full access.
He’s not tight on the conditions, and both of their pillows are definitely included in those terms.
My back will hurt by the time sunrise comes, but I really don’t give a shit. “Winnie?” I mutter, loath to wake her, but I won’t be able to let it go. “Beautiful?”
“Stop it. I’m not—”
“Did he hurt you?” I cut off her protest.
She stiffens in my arms but then lets out a sigh. “Only my ego, my pride, and what’s left of my fragile heart,” she whispers.
And falls asleep in my arms.
“Fuck, girl,” I mutter, gliding my torn and crappily bandaged fingers across her hair. The sticky bits catch on her curls, so in the end I use the backs of my battered knuckles. Winnie sighs at the light contact and snores.
And so do I.