Chapter 5
BECK
The clouds are starting to roll in, dark and ominous.
I've been on the porch for maybe an hour, with a length of busted leather rein draped across my lap and a punch in my hand. I should be fixing the rein, but I'm watching the sky over the ridge.
The forecast said we’d get some weather this afternoon. Said scattered. Said thirty percent, which in mountain weather is really just a coin flip.
The clouds stacking up on the western edge are low and heavy. They’re moving faster than they should. There's that faint greenish underside the old-timers around here used to call bruise sky, and my daddy taught me to watch for it before he taught me to ride.
Laurel’s out there on Riot, trail-riding. She left this morning and said she’d be back before the weather turned.
I’m trying to be calm and not act like a nervous Nellie.
But I can’t seem to stop thinking about the woman in every way.
I mean, she kissed me up against the barn wall. She had her tongue in my mouth, her ass in my hands, and when she rolled her hips against my thigh, I lost my self-control in seconds.
Then dinner was the quietest of my whole goddamn life.
I wanted to say a hundred things, but she'd asked for time, and time doesn't mean Beck, fill the silence with your over-the-top feelings, so I kept my mouth shut, which is maybe the first time in all my forty-four years I've ever managed it.
Even later that night in bed, I thought about knocking on her door more times than I can count. But if I’m going to be the man she wants, I have to follow her rules.
This morning wasn’t much better.
We made pleasant chit-chat, two grown adults pretending we hadn't had our tongues down each other's throats mere hours before.
She did look at me, once, just for a second, over the rim of her mug—and whatever was in her eyes, soft and conflicted, was enough to keep me on my best behavior all the way through her second cup.
Then she said she was taking Riot up to the high meadow. The ridge trail. I told her about the weather and to take a coat, and she rolled her eyes.
But she smiled, and I considered it a win.
So now I'm here worrying on the porch.
I text her, but it’s not delivering.
Then I call and it goes straight to voicemail.
I try again to more of the same.
"Goddammit." I push myself up off the rocker, hobbling for the kitchen, snatching my keys off the hook and my hat off the peg.
She's a grown woman who knows how to handle herself. She's a Montana girl. She's got a good head on her shoulders and a horse who could find his way home blindfolded.
I know all that.
But what if she got lost? What if she’s hurt?
I get in my truck and drive too fast on roads I probably shouldn't be driving on. The wipers can't keep up. The truck slides on a switchback near Tucker's gate and I correct on instinct and keep going. The rain is coming down so hard it sounds as if somebody's dumping gravel on the cab.
I dial her number again on the speaker. Voicemail. "What’s up with your damn phone, Laurel?"
I head up the fire road that hugs the back side of the ridge, because that's the way Riot likes to come down off the high meadow when he's done. It’s a long, gentle slope.
But if she got caught up there, she'd take the most sensible route out. And the most sensible route, when the sky is throwing daggers, is the one that ends at…
…the line shack.
Old man Fleming built the thing sixty years ago for cattle drives.
Nobody's used it for anything but storing busted fence wire, some rusty tools, and maybe a first aid kit, since I was a teenager.
Still, it's got a roof and four walls and a stovepipe, and it's tucked into a stand of pines about a mile and a half from where Laurel was headed.
I take the spur off the fire road, the truck pitching over rocks, and there it is through the rain—squat, gray, listing slightly to one side like an old drunk.
And there in the lean-to off the back, head down and munching on some grass, is Riot.
Thank god.
I park the truck as close as I can and half-fall out of the cab, hat pulled down, the cold rain hitting me square in the chest. I grab one of Riot’s rain blankets from the trunk in the truck bed and lurch across the soaked grass to the lean-to.
“Hey buddy.” He blows out a breath at me when I touch his neck. Laurel’s removed his saddle and he’s untacked enough to be comfortable.
I toss the blanket over his back. “Good boy," I tell him. “Laurel inside?”
He snorts and I take that as a yes.
I make it to the door of the shack, and wrench it open.
Laurel is on her knees in front of the rusted potbelly stove with a fistful of damp kindling and pure, focused fury on her face. Her hair is in a soaked rope down her back. Her flannel is plastered to her shoulders. There's a smear of soot across one cheekbone.
She looks up when the door bangs open.
"Beck?"
"Hi, darlin'."
"What are you doing?" She gets to her feet, kindling forgotten. "Your ankle—you drove up here in this?"
"Couldn't reach you. Phone went straight to voicemail."
"I guess there’s no service up here. I tried." Her voice cracks just a little, and that tells me she was scared.
I limp across the floor as she stands, and pull her into my arms. She wraps her arms around me and we just hold each other.
"You're soaked," I say.
“Quite.” She chuckles. “Riot’s under the lean-to.”
"He’s settled. I put a blanket on him.”
“Good, I was worried about him.”
“Don’t be. He’s a trooper. Been in much worse. And the lean-to will hold. We're not driving out of here in this anyway—those switchbacks'll be running like a creek by now."
"So we're stuck?"
"Yup, but there’s no one I’d rather be stuck with than you."
She huffs out a laugh. "Always on, aren’t you?"
“Yes, ma’am.”
I get the fire going while she searches the shack for anything useful. The kindling she had was too damp, but there's a stack of split pine in the corner that's been drying in here since before I was born, and once I get it lit, the stove starts pulling as if it's grateful to be useful again.
"I've got a duffel in the truck I keep behind the seat," I say. "Some spare clothes, blankets, and things for emergencies."
"Wow, you’re prepared? I’m impressed."
"To be fair, I just keep a lot of dumb things behind the seat. Today the dumb things actually paid off."
“So you’re lucky, rather than organized.”
“Bingo.”
She laughs as I start to go get the bag, but she stops me. “No way. I’ll get it. You stay off that ankle as much as possible.” I want to argue, but I know it’s futile.
After grabbing my keys, she goes out and comes in with the duffel. She sets it on the one warped table and unzips it.
She starts pulling out my clothes…T-shirts, flannels, sweatpants, a couple pairs of wool socks. "This will do nicely,” she says. “Now turn around."
I turn my back and stare hard at a knot in the pine wall while I hear her stripping out of her wet clothes behind me—the heavy slap of denim hitting the floor, the slide of fabric over her body.
"Okay, I’m done."
I turn back around and she’s a vision. She’s drowning in my flannel, the hem almost hitting her knees. She's rolling up the long sleeves as much as she can and she's got my wool socks pulled up as high as they’ll go.
It’s cute as all get out.
She looks so soft and small and sexy in my clothes that I have to brace one hand on the table to keep my feet under me.
She catches the expression on my face and one corner of her mouth twitches. "Don't laugh."
"Oh, I wasn’t gonna laugh.”
"You were thinking about it."
"Darlin', most of what I think about involves you, but laughing wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
She actually blushes, turning away as I start peeling off my own soaked outer layers.
She turns away.
“I don’t mind you watchin’ me undress,” I say, throwing on a T-shirt and dropping my jeans for the sweatpants. It takes me longer than usual, because I have to remove the brace and then put it back on.
“I’m happy you’re so comfortable with your body,” she replies, laying a blanket over some straw on the floor.
“I’d like to get more comfortable with yours,” I say. I can’t help it.
She shakes her head at me as I get down onto the blanket, propping myself against a post and opening my arms to her.
To my surprise, she gets down beside me and tucks into my side, pulling the other blanket around us.
It’s really nice. “I could get used to this.”
The fire is starting to warm the space, even as the rain comes down in sheets outside.
I take the time to enjoy holding her for moment. "Laurel, I need to tell you something."
"Okay."
"I'm not the same guy I was back then. I won’t pretend I wasn't a menace. Treating women like notches on my bedpost. But I'm not him anymore."
She goes still against my shoulder.
"I haven't been that man for a while now. But it’s hard to get people to forget. Especially ones in a small town."
Her hand roves over my chest, palm flat over my heart. “Then who are you now?”
I stare at the fire.
"I'm a man who talks to his horse more than he talks to people," I say slowly.
"I cook for one and I'm getting tired of it.
I've got a list in my head of every dumb thing I did between nineteen and thirty-five that I'd undo if I could, but I can't, so I'm trying to make up for those things while I can.
" I pause. "I'm a man who came home to Hollow Peak since I didn't have anywhere else to go, and stayed because I remembered all the reasons I loved it. "
Her fingers curl into the fabric of my shirt.
"That's who I am now," I say. "I want different things than the cocky kid you keep hearing stories about. I want one woman, a porch we can sit on at the end of the day and a kitchen that smells like something I made for her.” I pause. “And a big bed she falls asleep in beside me after we’ve made love. Maybe a child. But it’s okay if we just have horses or cows or chickens. I'm not picky.”