CHAPTER 20 #3
He shut the truck door enough to block the wind but left it open wide at his side. Wren leaned against the seat frame, not climbing in, because mud and water were still everywhere. Colt took out his phone with shaking fingers. No service for one breath. Then a bar came back. He called Junie.
"Calves are safe," he said when she answered.
Junie exhaled. "And people?"
He looked at Wren. Her eyes were closed, rainwater tracking down her face like tears she would not spend. "Wet and mean enough to live."
"That includes Wren?"
Wren opened her eyes. "Junie, I am fine."
"I didn't ask if you were fine. I asked whether you listened."
"Mostly."
"That's what I thought. Beau wants to know if the cows got their umbrellas."
Colt pressed his wet knuckles against the truck door. "Tell her the cows got to higher ground. I will call again before pickup. If the road is bad, she stays with you until I can get there safe."
"Already planned. She is eating soup and telling the clerk the stars on her paper are weather helpers."
"Thank you."
"Do not thank me until you are both dry. And Colt? Don't waste what today showed you."
The line clicked dead.
He lowered the phone slowly.
Rain kept falling, though the worst of the surge had passed.
The crossing was still gone under muddy water, but the rise held cattle.
The chain held. The calves were alive. Wren wiped rain from her cheek with the back of her hand and left a smear of mud there.
"She is very bossy for someone who pretends to run a feed store. "
"She doesn't pretend."
"No. She runs people too."
Colt should have smiled. He could not make his face do it. Wren saw that and went quiet.
The cold text sat between them with the same weight as the chain in the mud. He could talk now because the calves were safe, because he had trusted her with a task and she had held.
"Last night," he said.
Her gaze dropped to the flooded road, then came back. "You don't owe me an explanation."
"I owe you an apology."
She stayed sharp. Good. He had not earned soft yet.
"That text was cold," he said. "I wrote it to make distance and dressed it up like I was protecting Beau."
Wren held Junie's slicker closed at her throat. "Were you?"
"Some. " He took that truth because the whole truth needed all its pieces. "Beau matters in every choice I make. Her routine, her grief, her safety. I will never apologize for keeping her out of adult mess."
"I would not ask you to."
"I know. " He looked toward the upper pasture, where Tuck had the cows moving slow along the ridge. "But that is not all it was. Odette came back. You said yes to one honest week. You were doing paid work here in ways I could not dismiss. And I got scared."
Wren's fingers tightened on the slicker edge. "So you dismissed me first."
There was no cruelty in it. That made it worse.
"Yes," he said.
The word stripped him. He stood there in soaked denim and mud and refused to reach for work before the truth finished doing what it had come to do.
"I'm sorry," he said. "You showed up without me asking. You listened when it mattered. You challenged me when I was about to put you where fear wanted you instead of where the job needed you. Then you held that chain."
"You told me how."
"I trusted you to do it."
Her eyes shifted, and for the first time since she arrived, he saw the hurt under the grit. "Did you mean to?"
"Yes."
"Because of the calves?"
"Because of you."
The rain softened. Water still moved brown and dangerous below them, but the sky over the far ridge had light behind it now, a paler gray that promised nothing except the storm's first tired breath.
Wren's gaze went to his hand. Mud streaked his knuckles where wire had scraped them. She reached out, stopped before touching him, and curled her fingers back into her palm.
"You're bleeding," she said.
"Wire nick."
"Colt."
"I know. " He gave her the smallest piece of a smile. "There are bandages in the glove box."
She opened it, found the tin, and took out a square of gauze. Her hands shook, but the work steadied them. She cleaned the scrape with bottled water while he stood still and let her. The sting was sharp. The care was worse.
"I was angry at your text," she said.
"You should have been."
"I also understood it. " She pressed gauze to his knuckles. "That made me angrier."
"Fair."
"I don't want to be another emergency in your life."
"You aren't."
Her eyes lifted.
He could hear the calves bawling from higher ground, the chain ticking against the post, Tuck's distant call as he shut the upper gate.
Work waited. Counts waited. Bills waited.
Bennet's missed call waited in the wet dark of his pocket, and the unopened envelope waited in the drawer like a question with a deadline.
But Wren stood in front of him, soaked and shaking, and the thing he had been fighting had no more room to hide.
"You are not an emergency," he said. "You are the part that makes me afraid of what I have to lose."
Her breath caught. "Colt."
He turned his hand under hers, careful of the gauze, and closed his fingers around her cold ones.
"I was scared because you had started to feel like home."