Chapter 31 #2
Instead, she brushed her tears away and closed the distance between us.
Her boots crunched softly against the dry earth until she was standing right in front of me.
I looked down, bracing myself, but she wasn’t looking at me with pity or even anger.
In real time, I watched her process every ugly, broken piece of the truth I’d just handed her.
Her dark eyes deepened, offering a quiet, sweeping calm that swallowed the violent edges of my grief whole.
It was a staggering, unyielding kind of power—absolute proof of the incredible woman she was.
Her hand landed softly on my crossed forearms. Warm fingers against sun-heated skin.
I flinched at the contact, my muscles locking beneath her touch, but she didn’t pull away.
Her warmth seeped into me slow and steady, like the first sip of good whiskey—the kind that burned on the way down but settled into your bones and made you realize how cold you’d been.
“Colt...”
Just my name. One syllable that somehow held an apology for a loss she had no part in, grief for a man she’d never gotten the chance to meet, and the kind of understanding that made my throat close up all over again.
She saw it. My penance. My punishment. Three years of distance I’d wrapped around myself like I could prevent this kind of pain from ever happening again.
Three years of holding myself back from the good things life still had to offer because I didn’t deserve any of it.
Not after what happened. Not after losing him.
I had to look away.
“I built the bench myself,” I heard myself say.
I hadn’t planned on giving her that piece, but her steady presence pulled the truth right out of the dark.
“After the funeral. I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t sit still.
I couldn’t be inside the house because every time a floorboard creaked or a door shut, my brain expected him to walk around the corner. ”
I stared down at where she touched me, marveling at how small her hands were compared to mine.
“So, I went out to the workshop. I cut the lumber, honed the wood, and drove the screws until my hands bled and the sun came up. I hauled the whole damn thing out to the grove and set it under his tree because I couldn’t handle the idea of him being nowhere.
” My jaw locked, my voice dropping to a harsh, ruined rasp.
“I needed him to still have a place here. With us. With me.”
Julia’s fingers squeezed my forearm. “It’s a beautiful way to remember him.
I have a feeling he’d love it.” She didn’t try to fix it, because hell, there was no fix, but her thumb traced a slow, steady line across the inside of my wrist. Back and forth.
Back and forth. Like she was reminding me I had a pulse.
I uncrossed my arms and let them fall, my fingers finding hers. My palm swallowed her hand completely, dirt and sweat and all, and I held on because letting go felt impossible.
“It wasn’t your fault, Colt.”
My chest seized. “Julia—”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“You don’t know what happened,” I ground out, staring off in the distance because her gaze saw too much. “You don’t know what I—”
“You didn’t drag him into that arena. You didn’t force him onto that horse.” Her voice was steady, fierce, and so goddamn sure of something she had no right being sure about. “You asked him to ride and he said yes because he loved you and he loved the sport. That was his choice.”
I shook my head, jaw clenched so tight my teeth screamed. “If I hadn’t asked—”
“You can’t kill yourself with what-ifs. None of us is promised tomorrow.” She held my gaze when I tried to pull away. “You can rewrite the story a thousand times in your head, but I’ll promise you this… You will never find the version where you wanted him to get hurt.”
I flinched. Hard. Because she’d just reached into the darkest part of me and dragged the one truth I could never look at directly into the light.
She must have seen the doubt in my eyes, the years of self-conviction that I was responsible, because her free hand came up and pressed flat against my cheek. Her palm was warm and impossibly gentle as she turned my face back to hers.
“I see you, Colt. I see that you would’ve climbed into that arena and traded places with him in a heartbeat if it meant he got to walk out.
That’s not guilt. That’s not the conscience of a man who did something wrong.
” Her brown eyes glistened, but her voice held.
“That’s grief. That’s love leaving the body with nowhere to go. ”
The ground dropped out from under me.
Every wall I’d spent three years building, every brick of silence and distance and self-punishment—she just put her hands on all of it and it crumbled.
My vision blurred and I blinked hard, my throat working, because Colt Calhoun did not cry.
Not at the funeral. Not at the grave. Not once in three goddamn years.
But standing in a pasture with this woman and the truth ringing in my ears, I came closer than I ever had.
A sharp whistle split the air, followed by Ransom’s voice carrying across the pasture at full volume.
“Colt! Big red busted through the gate. I need you mounted up, brother, let’s go!”
The world snapped back into focus. The cattle. The loading. The forty head that needed to be sorted and trailered this afternoon, and the one stubborn steer that had apparently chosen this exact moment to make a break for it.
I closed my eyes. Of all the goddamn timing.
Julia’s hand slipped from my cheek, but she didn’t step back. She stayed right where she was, close enough that I could feel her breath on my collarbone.
I opened my eyes and looked down at her. Really looked. There was dirt on her cheek, grass in her hair, tears drying on her gorgeous face, and the steadiest pair of brown eyes I’d ever seen staring back at me like I was something worth fighting for.
I unfolded my fingers from hers and cupped the back of her head, drawing her forward. I pressed my mouth to her forehead, letting my lips stay against her warm skin long enough to say everything I couldn’t put into words. Her arms wrapped around my middle, squeezing tight for one beat, then two.
“Thank you,” I murmured against her hair.
I pulled back, grabbed my flannel off the fence post, and whistled for my horse. The bay gelding lifted his head from where he’d been grazing twenty yards out, ears pricked, and started toward me at an easy trot.
I swung up into the saddle, gathering the reins, and looked down at her one more time. A grin surfaced—a real one, a full one—and I let her see it instead of fighting to hide it like usual.
“Go easy on the weed whacker, Darlin’.”
The change in subject, the lightheartedness, caught her off guard. “How did you know?”
I reached down and plucked a piece of grass out of her hair. “You’re covered in clippings.”
She laughed. Watery and surprised, the sound punched out of her before she could catch it. I held onto it the whole ride out to the south pasture.
Ahead, Ransom and River were cutting across the lower field on horseback, driving the breakaway steer back toward the open gate where Stetson waited on foot.
The herd milled and lowed behind the fence, restless from the commotion.
Just another day on the ranch. Just another animal that didn’t want to go where it was told.
As I crested the ridge, I glanced back over my shoulder. Even from a distance, I could make out Julia climbing the porch steps, one hand on the railing, her head bowed. She paused at the top, looked toward the grove one last time, then disappeared inside.
My hand drifted to the pendant. “She’s something, isn’t she, East.”
The bay shifted beneath me as a familiar nicker carried across the grass.
Easton’s old mare came trotting up from wherever she’d been grazing, falling into step beside my gelding the way she always did when I rode out.
She’d stopped responding to anyone else after East died.
Wouldn’t let the twins catch her, spooked when Boone got too close.
But she’d come to me every time, pressing her nose into my shoulder like she was still looking for traces of him on my skin.
Three years without her rider, and she still sought me out, both of us missing him.
Somehow, her presence always made me feel like he was close.
A rough breath escaped my chest as I closed my eyes and thought about my Omega. “You’d have loved her, East. I wish you were here, even though I know you would’ve been insufferable trying to make her fall for you first.”
The wind pressed warm against my face, steady and familiar.
It didn’t answer. It never did. But it held against my back the whole way down the hill, and that was enough.