Chapter 25
The porch railing had a loose post.
Wyatt had noticed it two weeks ago and hadn’t gotten around to fixing it, which was becoming a pattern with this house.
He’d notice something, add it to the list, and the list would sit on the kitchen counter next to Pop’s coffeepot, growing longer while the days filled up with horses and parade prep and a woman who kept showing up in his driveway with no agenda other than being here.
Meghan arrived at four. No parade business, no bridle measurements, no notebook.
She pulled in, got out of her car, and said, “I need to not be in my house right now.”
He didn’t ask why. He handed her a glass of water and pointed at the porch railing.
“I need a second pair of hands,” he said. “Can you hold this steady while I drill?”
She could. She did.
She braced the post with both hands while he crouched on the other side, driving new screws into the base where the old ones had stripped out. The wood was good—he’d used pressure-treated lumber when he rebuilt the porch—but the original hardware had been cheap, and cheap hardware failed.
Pop would have had something to say about that.
They moved to the next post. Same problem, same fix. Meghan held. Wyatt drilled. The late-afternoon sun was behind the house, and the porch was in shade. The air smelled like warm wood and the honeysuckle growing along the fence line.
“How many of these are loose?” Meghan asked.
“Four. Maybe five.”
“You built this porch and used bad screws?”
“I built this porch in a hurry. Pop was still alive, and I wanted him to see it finished.”
She looked at him over the top of the post. He looked back. The drill was in his hand, a screw between his teeth, and her face was right there—close, open, lit by the shaded afternoon in a way that made her eyes look lighter than usual.
He took the screw out of his mouth. “Next one’s on the far end.”
They walked the length of the porch. Junebug watched from the fence, tracking their progress with the mild interest of a horse who had seen most things twice and found very few of them worth getting excited about.
The third post was the worst. The base had pulled away from the decking, leaving a gap wide enough to fit a finger through. Wyatt crouched and examined it, turning the drill over in his hand.
“This one needs a new bracket,” he said. “I don’t have the right size.”
“So we stop?”
“We stop.”
Meghan let go of the post and straightened.
She wiped her hands on her jeans, a gesture so natural and unself-conscious that it caught him off guard.
She wasn’t being careful. She was just a woman who’d been holding a porch post on a warm afternoon, and her hands were dusty, and she wiped them on her jeans without thinking about it.
Wyatt stood and set the drill on the railing. They were at the far end of the porch, away from the chairs, away from the front door. The view from here was the side pasture, where the bay mare was grazing and the boarders stood nose to tail, swishing flies.
Meghan leaned against the railing—the section that wasn’t loose—and looked out at the pasture. Her hair was down today, tucked behind her ears. There was a smudge of dust on her forearm from the post.
“Thank you for this,” she said.
“For putting you to work?”
“For not asking why I needed to not be in my house.”
He set the remaining screws on the railing beside the drill and leaned against the post across from her, two feet of porch between them.
The same distance that had been between them at the tailgate, at the corral fence, in every moment over the past month when the space had shrunk without either of them officially closing it.
“You’d tell me if you wanted me to know,” he said.
“I would.”
She looked at him. He looked back.
The pasture was quiet behind them. The bay mare tore at the grass with the slow, rhythmic sound of a horse who had nowhere to be. Junebug had lost interest and was dozing at the fence, one hip cocked, his tail moving in long, lazy sweeps.
Wyatt didn’t move. He stood against the post and looked at her face—the dust on her forearm, the hair tucked behind her ears, the way she leaned against his railing on his porch on his farm like she belonged in all of those places.
He let the moment arrive at its own pace. He’d waited six years. Every haircut in Brynn’s chair. Every time he’d walked out of the salon and carried Meghan’s voice with him down the road to this property. Every look he hadn’t let himself take for too long. A few more seconds didn’t matter.
Meghan pushed off the railing, and then she was standing there, two feet away, hands at her sides, eyes on his face. She didn’t step back.
Wyatt reached out and brushed the dust from her forearm.
A small gesture. His thumb against her skin, wiping away the smudge from the post. He could have stopped there.
It was a reasonable place to stop. A place where the gesture could be read as friendly, helpful, the kind of thing anyone would do.
He didn’t stop there.
His hand stayed on her arm. His fingers against the inside of her wrist, where her skin was warm and her pulse moved beneath his thumb.
She looked at his hand, then at him. “Wyatt.”
He stepped forward. She stayed where she was. The two feet became one, and then less than one, and then his hand moved from her arm to the side of her face.
Her eyes closed, and he kissed her.
It was quiet. That was the first thing he noticed. No sound except the mare grazing and Junebug breathing and the distant hum of a car on the road below the property. The world didn’t rearrange itself. The sky didn’t break open. He just kissed her. And she kissed him back.
The porch held them both the way it had been holding him for two years. She tasted like the water he’d given her and something sweeter underneath, and her hand came up to rest on his chest, fingers spread, steadying herself against him.
Like he was a surface she could trust. Like he was solid enough to lean on.
Wyatt pulled back enough to see her face. Her eyes opened, and she looked at him, and whatever she saw there made her exhale—a long, slow breath he felt against his jaw.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
She didn’t explain. She didn’t have to. He understood it the way he understood everything about her—not all at once, not through speeches, but through patience. Through watching. Through the slow accumulation of small moments that had led to this one.
She leaned her forehead against his chin. He put his arms around her. They stood there on the porch with the drill on the railing and the loose post behind them and the horses in the pasture and the evening coming on slow and warm.
He’d waited years.
And it was worth every single one of them.