Chapter 2
TWO
Wyatt
Two nights ago I had my fingers inside Haven Sinclair behind the Spur, and last night I came with her name in my mouth like I had any right to it.
I'd told myself it was just to get it out of my system. That was the lie I'd used at the time. Take the edge off, wake up clear-headed, end of it. Instead I'd lain there after in the dark feeling like I'd done something worse than what I'd already done, which was plenty bad enough.
She'd been twenty-one for approximately four hours.
I'd known her since she was fifteen.
The coffee was too hot and I drank it anyway.
The kitchen was full. My mother moved between the stove and the counter, setting plates down without being asked, squeezing my shoulder once as she passed. She didn't say anything. She never did, on this particular day. She just fed people and kept moving and let February fourteenth be what it was.
My older brother Gage was at the far end of the table with his wife Millie tucked under his arm, the two of them talking low about something.
Their daughter Bea was in the high chair between them, working on whatever my mother had put in front of her.
She got more of it on her face than in her mouth. Nobody seemed concerned.
My cousin Forrest had the chair by the window.
He was drinking coffee and looking out at the morning and not talking, which was just Forrest now.
He'd come home eighteen months ago after Sophie died and he'd been quietly putting himself back together ever since, or trying to.
Some mornings he looked closer to okay than others. This wasn't one of them.
My little brother Dakota was the only one making noise, which was always true.
"You look like you didn't sleep," he said, pointing his fork at me.
"I slept."
"You look like hell."
"Dakota." My mother, from the stove.
"I'm just saying—"
"Eat your eggs."
He ate his eggs. But he looked at me sideways and filed it away, which was the problem with little brothers. They noticed things and they stored them and they brought them back out at the worst possible moment.
I looked at my plate.
Two nights ago Haven had said take me home and I'd stepped back and watched her face do the thing it did when she was deciding not to show something, and then she'd said okay in a voice that wasn't okay at all and walked back through that door.
She might not come in today. That was the thing sitting on my chest since five this morning when I'd given up on sleep entirely.
She was supposed to be here at seven for the start of the winter feeding rotation, same as always, but I'd given her every reason to call it in sick and find somewhere else to be.
I'd looked for her truck when I came up from the cottage. It wasn't there.
That was forty minutes ago.
Bea made a sound of extreme grievance and my mother appeared with a cloth and cleaned her face. Bea accepted this indignity with her father's expression, which made Millie laugh.
Gage caught me watching and raised an eyebrow.
I shook my head. Nothing.
Dakota pushed back from the table and carried his plate to the sink. "Somebody's in a mood."
My mother poked him in the shoulder. “You leave your brother alone,” she muttered. “You know what day it is, right?”
I winced. That day. The day an IED had blown my unit to hell and killed my best friend while he bled out in the sand.
Dakota glanced back at me.
Fuck, he was oblivious.
“Sorry, big brother,” he said.
I grunted. “It was eighteen years ago,” I said. “It’s fine.”
It wasn’t fine, not really. That meant eighteen years alone, eighteen years since coming home with a sore knee that would always be sore, eighteen years of having a glass of whiskey and a cigarette annually in honor of Specialist Ethan Nassar.
Forrest set his mug down.
"Doesn't matter how long it's been," he said. He wasn't looking at me, still looking out the window. "It just doesn't."
The table went quiet.
Forrest wasn't a man who said much, and when he did people tended to listen. Even Dakota.
"No," I said. "It doesn't."
He picked his mug back up. That was the whole conversation. It was enough.
My mother put her hand on my shoulder again as she passed, briefly, and then she was back at the stove and the kitchen noise resumed.
Bea grabbed a fistful of whatever was in front of her.
Millie said something to Gage that made him shake his head slowly in the way that meant he was trying not to smile.
Normal. All of it normal.
Except Haven's truck still wasn't in the yard and it was 7:06, and Haven was never late.
“Could’ve sworn Haven was coming in today,” Dakota said, once again putting his foot in his mouth—even if this time, he couldn’t have known that. “She call in?”
“Not as far as I know,” I said.
"Guess you're gonna have to be your brother's assistant today," my mother said, eyeing him.
Dakota was already shaking his head. "Can't. Me and Maverick have got work to do." He grabbed his hat off the hook. "Those loops aren't gonna throw themselves."
"Maverick's been out every morning this week," Gage said, not looking up.
"Maverick likes mornings."
"Maverick likes you leaving him alone."
Dakota pointed finger guns at our older brother and backed out the door, which was apparently his idea of a rebuttal.
The door swung shut.
My mother sighed. “That boy…”
Then her eyes flitted to the window. “Oh—well there she is. Looks like you won’t need Dakota’s help after all.”
My stomach twisted. Haven.
A few minutes later, Haven came through the door pulling her hair back—dirty blonde, always escaping whatever she'd tried to do with it—and said "Morning" to the room like she hadn't been the first thing I thought about when I woke up.
She was pink-cheeked from the walk from her truck, hazel eyes already moving around the kitchen taking stock the way she always did.
She was short, but she wasn't a petite woman.
Solid, the way someone gets from real work—broad shoulders, capable hands, the kind of build that made you believe her when she said she could handle a calf on her own.
She'd been working this land since she was fifteen and it showed, and she'd never once seemed to care about that either way.
She'd been the prettiest thing I'd ever seen since approximately the moment I'd noticed, which I tried not to think about. She’d been too young then, too—nineteen and flushed from helping me deliver a foal, hair a mess.
My mother was already pulling a plate from the cabinet.
"Sit down," she said. "I made extra."
"Yes ma'am." Haven dropped into Dakota's vacated chair without ceremony and accepted the plate my mother set in front of her. Eggs, toast, the good salsa. She reached for it without hesitation.
Gage looked at her. Looked at me. Looked back at his coffee.
"How are your folks?" my mother asked, settling into the chair across from her.
"Good. Dad's been messing around with a new deer blind out back, so he's happy." She took a bite. "Mom thinks it's an excuse to avoid cleaning the gutters, which it is."
My mother laughed. "Smart man."
Haven smiled. It was her real smile, the easy one, and it hit me somewhere behind the sternum.
She hadn't looked at me directly since she walked in. Not once. She was doing it naturally enough that nobody would notice, and I noticed, which meant she knew I would, which meant it was deliberate.
She was fine. She was sitting in my mother's kitchen eating eggs and talking about her father's deer blind and she was completely, entirely fine.
I picked up my coffee.
"Finish up," I said. "We've got eight cows to check before noon."
She looked at me then. Steady. Hazel eyes, no trace of anything.
"I know," she said. "I'm eating."
Millie snorted. I glared—couldn’t help it.
“Somethin’ funny?” I asked.
“You just…don’t need to be so damn gruff,” Gage cut in. “Nice to see someone willing to give you hell.”
Haven met my eyes across the table. I immediately pictured her pressed against that wall, her lips parted as she came on my fingers.
“I’ll meet you at the barn,” I muttered, standing up.
Then I went for the door, grabbed my jacket, and left—anything to hide the fact that she was still on my mind…and still totally off-limits.