3. Faith
CHAPTER THREE
Faith
My brain refuses to do the math.
Cold. Pain. The sting of snow on my cheeks. The smell of exhaust and metal. My heart pounding way too fast, tripping over itself. And then…
Blue eyes.
Not Evan’s cool blue, nor my father’s hard steel. Softer. Warmer. Familiar in a way that hits me somewhere below my ribs.
“Faith?”
I blink up at him, eyelashes wet and heavy. For a heartbeat, I’m sure I’ve imagined him out of sheer desperation. Of course I did. It’s the worst day of my life, and my brain has finally cracked.
But he’s still there when I blink again.
Dallas McCoy.
He’s taller than I remember, or maybe it’s just the angle.
The man in front of me is broader across the shoulders, his jaw sharper, his throat roughened by a dark line of scruff.
There’s a beanie pulled low over his dark hair, snow dusting it like powdered sugar.
The beam of a flashlight cuts across his face, throws his eyes into shadow, then catches them again.
“Hi, Dallas,” I hear myself say, except my voice comes out thin and reedy.
His hand tightens around my elbow, a point of gravity in a world that’s spinning too fast. His gaze skims quickly over me, my dress, my bare shoulders, the ridiculous swath of tulle and lace melting into the snow, and his mouth flattens into a line.
“Can you walk?” he asks. That gruff tone is new. “Anything hurt? Neck? Head?”
I frown, trying to do a quick body inventory. Everything aches, but nothing screams. My heart, maybe, but that’s not from the crash.
“I… I don’t think so,” I say. My teeth chatter around the words. “I just sort of slid. I was trying to slow down, but the road just… I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to, I was just trying to get to my mom’s, and the snow, and the ditch came out of nowhere, and…”
“Hey.” His voice slices clean through my babbling. “Stop.”
I clamp my mouth shut so fast my teeth click.
“You’re shaking,” he says. “You’re gonna freeze out here. Let’s get you to the house, okay? We’ll worry about the car later.
His house.
The word hits me a second after it leaves his mouth. I drag my gaze past his shoulder, up through the dark toward the silhouette of buildings. There it is. The outline of the McCoy ranch house against the sky, the porch light beaming, wreath on the front door casting a round shadow.
Of all the places for my car to give up, it picked the curve in the road right above the McCoys’ driveway.
I laugh. It comes out wrong. High and shaky.
“Of course,” I mutter. “Of course I hit the ditch in front of your place.”
His mouth does something that might, in another life, have been the beginning of a smile. It doesn’t make it very far.
“Some of us think of it as a ranch, not a ‘place,’” he says. “You got shoes on under all that?”
I blink. “What?”
“Shoes.” He nods at the dress. “Or are you about to get frostbite on your princess toes?”
I look down. My heels are still on, straps digging into my ankles, the satin now streaked with gray where I slid through slush. My toes are already numb.
“I… yeah. I mean, for certain values of ‘shoes.’”
He huffs out a breath that might be a quiet swear and steps closer, letting go of my elbow to crouch at my feet.
“What are you… Dallas, no, don’t—”
“Faith.” He glances up at me. “You’re not walking uphill in icicle stilts. Hold onto the car.”
He slips one big hand around my ankle, careful, and works the buckle of my heel open with the other. Warm fingers, cold air. My breath catches somewhere in my throat.
I grip the edge of the door and the top of the frame as he told me to, trying not to wobble as he frees one foot and then the other.
The second foot hits the snow, my body shrieks.
“Oh,” I gasp, pain shooting up from my arches. “Oh, no, that’s—”
“Cold,” he finishes. “Yeah. Sorry. Only way through it is through it. Got a bag in there?” he asks, nodding toward the car interior.
“My bag?” My brain takes a second to switch tracks. “Oh. Um. Yeah.”
He leans in, flashlight beam swinging wildly across the seat, grabs it, hooks it over his wrist, then reaches for my jacket and hands it to me. I throw it over my shoulders.
“I’ll come back and see if I can get the hood up later,” he says, more to himself than to me. “See if it’s just the radiator or something worse. For now, we need to get you warm.”
Warm. Right.
The adrenaline that got me out of the car is starting to ebb, leaving everything buzzy and far away. The jacket doesn’t really help.
I nod, because that seems like the right response, and let him tug me gently toward the road.
The climb up out of the ditch is embarrassingly hard. My feet slip on the icy slope, and my dress catches on a dead branch. Dallas curses under his breath as he braces an arm under my knees and another behind my back.
“Wait, what—”
He lifts me.
I squeak, arms flying up around his neck on instinct. For a heartbeat, I’m pressed against his chest, the solid heat of him searing through the thin bodice of my dress. He smells of leather and coffee. Cedar, maybe, and a hint of smoke.
“Just till we hit the driveway,” he says, like this is no big thing, as if he doesn’t have a whole woman plus ten pounds of tulle in his arms.
His breath puffs warm against my temple. “Safer this way.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Faith,” he says, and somehow my name comes out half warning, half… something else. “It’s fine. Let me.”
It’s the “let me” that undoes me. For years, the only people “letting me” do anything have been letting me obey, letting me fit in, letting me be what they want. This is the opposite; this is him asking to take care of me.
My throat tightens. I nod into his shoulder and don’t argue again.
The walk up the drive is a blur of dark and white and the crunch of his boots in the snow. My head rests against his shoulder because I can’t quite hold it up. My fingers curl into the wool of his coat, hanging on because he’s the only solid thing in a world that’s gone weird and slanted.
“You still living at the ranch?” The question slips out before I can stop it.
“Yeah.” The word comes out clipped. “Some of us stick.”
Ouch.
The sting is sharp, even through the numbness. My grip tightens reflexively. “Dallas, I—”
“Faith.” He adjusts his hold on me, not looking down. “Maybe save it for when you’re not shaking like a leaf, okay?”
Right. Fair.
By the time we reach the wide front steps, my teeth are chattering so hard they make my skull ache. The big wreath on the door is new but familiar in style: pinecones, plaid ribbon, a spray of red berries. Maggie McCoy’s handiwork, no doubt.
He shifts me carefully so he can open the door, hip bumping it inward with the ease of someone who’s done this his whole life. Warmth rushes out to meet us, scented with pine and ham and wood smoke and sweetness… cocoa, maybe.
Rusty shoots past us the second the gap’s big enough.
I’m suddenly acutely aware that I am in a stranger version of a familiar place, in a wedding dress, cradled like some damsel on the threshold. If I weren’t already trembling, that’d do it.
“Keep your head down,” Dallas murmurs as he carries me over the threshold. “Everyone’s asleep. No need for a full McCoy welcome committee at midnight.”
“Midnight?” I croak.
Time lost meaning somewhere around the hotel parking lot.
“Almost,” he says. “You got in under the wire. Santa Claus would be impressed.”
He veers left, still wrong-footing me, because my mental map of this house is years out of date, and nudges open a door I know: the living room.
He sets me down gently on the big, worn couch that used to be the site of all our movie marathons.
It sags familiarly under my weight. I topple sideways, clutching at my skirt to keep it from swallowing the coffee table.
The room spins. I squeeze my eyes shut, drawing in a shaky breath, and open them slowly.
The living room looks both exactly the same and entirely different. Same stone fireplace, same oak mantel lined with family photos and old rodeo buckles. Same crocheted throw over the back of the recliner, probably courtesy of some church lady.
But there are new pictures, too. Boone and Rose, laughing in front of the barn. A little girl with familiar McCoy blue eyes and a gap in her front teeth, holding a bucket bigger than her head. A baby in a cowboy hat too big for his skull.
Stockings hang from the mantel. Two catch my attention, the ones with names plastered across them. Ellie in glitter glue, and Lila in carefully stitched letters.
“Well,” Dallas says, breaking into my thoughts. He’s standing a couple of feet away now, arms folded across his chest, gaze sweeping over me. “You look like a snow-drenched cupcake.”
A weak laugh escapes me. “Is that your professional opinion?”
“Yup.” He jerks his chin toward the hallway. “Bathroom’s still in the same place. Third door on the left. You think you can walk that far without face planting?”
I look down at my bare feet. They’re blotchy red, wet, dusted with rapidly melting snow. My toes curl.
“Define ‘walk’.
He exhales through his nose, then reaches for me again. “All right, cupcakes. Let’s do this the fast way.”
“I can walk, you know,” I protest, even as my hands fly up to his shoulders again when he scoops me up. “You don’t have to keep—”
“Faith,” he says. “I just watched you almost fall over getting out of a car. Let me get you to the damn bathroom before you pass out in the hall and scare the kids in the morning.”
The kids.
Right. There are kids here now. Little people with sticky fingers and big eyes and expectations about Christmas morning. The idea of one of them finding me sprawled in a puddle of tulle like a murdered wedding cake makes me wince.
I wonder who the kids belong to.
“Okay,” I say, shrinking a little. “Point taken.”
He carries me down the hall. It’s dim but familiar. The same creaky floorboard near the hall closet, the same family photos lining the walls. There’s an added layer now: crayon masterpieces, a construction paper turkey, a crooked paper ornament with a glittery star that says Lila, Age 3.