Chapter 16
The staging area emptied out around six o’clock.
The deputies left first, loading their horses with the efficiency of men who’d done it a thousand times.
Curtis followed, the chestnut walking up the ramp without hesitation—a small victory Wyatt acknowledged with a nod and nothing else.
Dan had taken the Percheron home an hour earlier, the decorative bridle finally fitted after three rounds of adjustments that had tested Meghan’s patience and Richard’s credit card.
Meghan sat on the tailgate of Wyatt’s truck, notebook open on her lap, trying to finalize the styling schedule for the reenactment riders.
Curtis’s wife wanted pin curls. One of the deputies wanted to know if Meghan could trim his beard before the parade.
Another deputy’s wife had called the salon twice asking about updos.
Making an entire town look presentable for one morning in July had turned out to be significantly more complicated than Richard’s whiteboard had suggested.
Wyatt was in the corral, doing a final check on the portable panels. One of the latches had been sticking all week, and he’d brought a wrench from his truck to tighten it. She could hear the metal clicking as he worked, steady and rhythmic.
The sun was dropping behind the mountains, and the light had turned gold.
Not the harsh gold of midday or the flat gold of noon through a window.
The softer kind that came in the last hour before sunset, when everything it touched looked warmer than it was.
The gravel lot. The fence posts. The tree line along the creek.
The church steeple rising above the roofline.
All of it soaked in that light. All of it temporary. Another twenty minutes, and it would be gone.
Meghan closed her notebook. She’d read the same line four times without absorbing it. The schedule could wait until morning.
She watched Wyatt cross the lot toward her.
He’d rolled his sleeves up at some point during the afternoon, and his forearms were tan and dusty from the work.
His hair—the hair she’d cut, the hair she’d run her hands through in the salon chair—was pushed back from his forehead the way it got when he’d been running his fingers through it all day.
He moved the way he always moved. Unhurried, like the ground would wait for him.
He stopped at the tailgate and set the wrench in the truck bed. “You don’t have to stay.”
“I know.”
“You’ve been here since eight.”
“So have you.”
He looked at her. She looked back. The gold light was on his face, and she noticed, for the first time, the scar on his jaw. Small. A thin line just below his left ear, maybe an inch long. She’d been inches from it in the salon and somehow missed it.
Or maybe she hadn’t missed it. Maybe she just hadn’t let herself look closely enough to see.
“What’s that from?” she asked, gesturing toward her own jaw.
He touched the spot. “A horse. Seven years ago. I was checking her teeth, and she didn’t appreciate my timing.”
“You get beat up a lot.”
“Occupational hazard.”
Meghan slid off the tailgate. Her feet hit the gravel, and the distance between them closed by half. She hadn’t planned that. The tailgate was high, and she was shorter than she liked to admit, and getting down from it meant landing closer to him than she’d been sitting.
That was physics, not a decision, but she didn’t step back. He was right there. Close enough that she could see the dust on his collar. Close enough that if she reached out—which she was absolutely not going to do—she could touch the scar she’d just asked about.
The air between them had weight to it. Not tension, exactly. Something quieter. A thickness she could feel on her skin, in the space between her shoulder and his, in the six inches of warm evening air neither of them was closing.
She became very aware of her own breathing. In. Out. The rise of her chest. The way her hands hung at her sides with nothing to hold onto. No coffee cup, no broom, no spray bottle. Just her hands and the air and the man standing in front of her.
Wyatt didn’t move. That was the thing. Another man might have leaned in. Might have touched her arm or said something smooth or closed the gap with a confidence that assumed the answer. Wyatt just stood there, hands at his sides, eyes on her face, and let the moment be whatever it was going to be.
She could hear the creek behind the tree line. A car on the road. The last birds of the evening settling somewhere in the branches. Normal sounds. None of them loud enough to break what was building between the tailgate of his truck and the gravel under her feet.
“I should go,” she said.
“Okay.”
Neither of them moved.
“My car’s over there,” she said, gesturing vaguely toward the other side of the lot, where her car sat alone under the one tree that offered shade during the day.
“I’ll walk you.”
They crossed the lot together, side by side. The gravel crunched under their feet, loud in the quiet evening. The gold light was fading now, giving way to something cooler, bluer. The mountains were going dark at the edges.
They reached her car. Meghan pulled her keys from her bag, unlocked the door, and stood with her hand on the handle.
“Good night, Meghan,” Wyatt said.
“Good night.”
He waited until she was in the car with the engine running. Then he turned and walked back across the lot to his truck, his stride even, his hands in his pockets. She watched him in the rearview mirror until she pulled onto the road. He didn’t look back.
Meghan drove home with the windows down. The evening air filled the car, warm and sweet with cut grass and honeysuckle. She didn’t turn on the radio. She drove in silence and felt her heartbeat in her fingertips on the steering wheel.
Nothing had happened. That was what she told herself as she pulled into her driveway. Nothing had happened. He walked her to her car. He said good night. She said it back. He left. She left. Two people ending a long workday the way two people ended a long workday.
Except. The six inches. The gold light on his face. The scar on his jaw. The way he had stood there without closing the gap. The way she hadn’t stepped back. The way the air had thickened between them until she could feel it on her arms like the start of a sunburn.
She went inside. Made dinner she didn’t taste. Sat on the couch with a book she didn’t read.
At eight o’clock the next morning, Wyatt was at the staging area. Same truck. Same spot. Same tools in the bed, same leather apron on the tailgate. He was checking the chestnut’s feet when Meghan pulled in, and he looked up and nodded the way he always did.
A lift of the chin. Easy, brief. No reference to the parking lot. No loaded glance. No manufactured reason to bring it up. He just went back to the horse’s hoof, and when Meghan set up her notebook at the corral fence, he walked over and asked if she wanted coffee.
The same question he asked every morning. The same voice and steady presence that didn’t push and didn’t disappear. She said yes.
He brought her a cup. Their fingers didn’t brush on the handle this time. He sat on the fence rail beside her and talked about the chestnut’s progress, and the morning rolled forward exactly the way the last dozen mornings had.
That was the part that undid her. Not the moment in the parking lot. Not the gold light or the six inches or the scar on his jaw. This. The morning after. The absolute refusal to make her answer for something neither of them had said out loud.
He’d felt what she felt. She was sure of that, as sure as she’d ever been of anything. And he had shown up the next day and been exactly the same. No pressure. No expectation. No move she had to counter or match or deflect. Just Wyatt at the fence with coffee.
She sat beside him and drank it, and somewhere between the first sip and the last, Meghan realized she wasn’t afraid of him. That was new. So new it almost scared her on its own.
Almost.