Chapter 9 Gage
NINE
Gage
The cattle didn't care that I hadn't slept much.
That was the thing about ranching—the land had its own schedule and it didn't negotiate.
The herd needed moving to the east pasture before the heat peaked, the fence line on the north side had a post that had been leaning since the last rain, and our foreman, Neto, had found signs of a coyote near the calving pen that needed dealing with before it became a pattern.
I'd been at it since before five and by the time noon rolled around every muscle I had was reminding me of that fact.
Not just reminding me I'd been up too early…but that I'd nearly thrown my back out fucking Millie Calloway last night.
Wyatt fell into step beside me on the walk back to the main house, pulling his gloves off and tucking them in his back pocket.
He'd been out with me most of the morning—checking on a heifer that had been off her feed, mostly, but staying in that quiet Wyatt way that meant he had something on his mind and was deciding when to say it.
He waited until we were halfway up the path.
"So," he said.
"No," I said.
"I haven't said anything."
"You've been saying it all morning without saying it."
He was quiet for a few steps. "She still here?"
"She lives here," I said. "That was the arrangement."
"Right." Another few steps. "You doin' okay?"
I looked at him sideways. Wyatt didn't ask if you were doing okay unless he had a specific reason to think you might not be. Maybe it was the doctor in him—making an assessment, even when you didn't ask. "I'm fine."
"Gage."
"Wyatt."
He stopped walking. I stopped too, because when Wyatt stopped moving he meant it—you didn't just leave him standing there. He'd learned that somewhere in Iraq, that stillness, and it had never fully left him.
"I'm not trying to be a problem," he said, raking a hand back through his dirty blond hair. "I just want to know you thought this through."
"I thought it through."
"All of it."
"Yes."
He looked at me for a long moment with those careful eyes.
Wyatt had always been the one who watched before he spoke, who measured things twice before he committed to anything.
It had made him a good medic and it made him a careful vet…
and it occasionally made him exhausting to have a conversation with.
"She's twenty-six," he said.
"I know how old she is."
"And you met her twice."
"I know that too."
"And now she's living in the cottage."
"Wyatt." I held his gaze. "I know all of this. I've been aware of all of this. I'm not a man who does things without thinking about them and you know that."
He was quiet.
"What I need from you," I said, "is not a list of the things I already know. What I need from you is to come eat lunch and be normal about it."
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile—Wyatt didn't do quite smiles—but something adjacent to one. "Normal. With the woman you brought here because you need a baby and she's…an incubator."
I closed my eyes and breathed.
Looked him in the eye.
"With the woman I have an unusual arrangement with, but who I do, in fact, like."
He watched me for a second…then he started walking again. I fell back into step beside him.
"I'm not saying it's a bad idea," he said, after a moment.
"I know."
"I'm just saying—"
"Wyatt."
"—that you have a history of making something your whole life and then wondering why you don't have anything else."
I didn't say anything to that. Partly because there was nothing to say, and partly because he wasn't wrong, and we both knew it.
We came around the side of the main house and I could hear voices through the screen door—my mother's, and another one underneath it that I recognized even though I'd only heard it a handful of times—Millie's, melodic and bright.
And then a third—Sawyer, unmistakably, that loose unhurried drawl he'd picked up somewhere between Briar Hill and a film set in New Mexico.
Wyatt glanced at me.
"Sawyer's already here," I said, unnecessary.
"Apparently," he said. "Guess he's probably slackin' so he can flirt with your girl."
It shouldn't have made me rush, but it did.
I pulled open the screen door.
The kitchen had that particular midday warmth of a room that had been cooking since morning, and the table was full in a way it hadn't been in a while—my mother at the head of it, Sawyer across from her with his boots off and his hat on the back of his chair like he'd been here for hours, and Millie—
Millie was sitting next to Sawyer with her elbows on the table and her head tilted back laughing at something, her hair half fallen out of whatever she'd put it up in, and the sight of her in that blue dress in my mother's kitchen in the noon light hit me somewhere low and certain.
Sawyer saw me first.
"There he is," he said, easy as anything. "We were startin' to wonder."
"Fence line," I said.
My mother was already up, moving to the stove. "Sit down. Both of you. There's enough."
Millie had turned when I came in and she was looking at me now with something warm and a little uncertain in her eyes, like she wasn't sure yet what the protocol was for this—for the morning after, for the communal kitchen, for all of it.
I pulled out the chair next to her and sat down.
"Hey," I said, quiet enough that it was just for her.
The uncertain thing in her expression settled.
"Hey," she said back.
"Sawyer makin' you feel at home?"
"We've been talking for an hour," Sawyer said from across the table.
"About what?"
"Oh, everything," Millie said, and she was smiling now, that full unguarded smile. "He told me about the horses. And the film stuff. And then your mother told him to stop showing off—"
"I wasn't showing off," Sawyer said.
"You absolutely were," my mother said, from the stove.
Wyatt pulled out a chair and sat down across from Millie, those careful eyes moving over her, measuring, for just a moment. "Wyatt," he said. "Gage's brother."
"Millie," she said, and to her credit she didn't flinch at the assessment in his gaze.
"I know," he said. "He mentioned you."
She glanced at me. "Good things, I hope."
Wyatt considered this with more seriousness than was strictly necessary. "Mostly."
"Wyatt," I said.
"I'm kidding." He reached for the bread. "Mostly."
Millie laughed, surprised into it, and something in Wyatt's expression shifted just slightly—not a smile, but an acknowledgment. She'd passed something without knowing she was being tested.
My mother set a whole spread of sandwich materials on the table with a stack of plates, and sat back down at the head of the table.
Then we ate.
Meals in my household were always an experience—and I was beyond grateful to Mom for continuing to come back and feed us even when she really didn't have to.
She'd had six kids to deal with most of her adult life—us three boys plus my Uncle Austin's kids after he and his wife passed—and I didn't think she'd ever stop coming home to make lunch.
She was just as much a part of the ranch work cycle as we were.
The table settled into that particular lunch rhythm I'd grown up with—the comfortable overlap of conversation and the passing of things without asking, nobody waiting to be served, everybody just reaching.
I watched Millie find her footing in it, watched her stop hesitating and just grab the mustard when she needed it, and felt something loosen in my chest.
Then the screen door opened again and Neto came in, hat in hand, followed by my father in paint-stained linen pants and a faded t-shirt I was fairly certain had been old when I was born, his silver hair pulled back at the nape of his neck—and behind them both, Haven Sinclair, still pulling her work gloves off, her dark braid dusty from the morning.
Neto nodded at the table generally. "Mrs. Holt." He'd called my mother that for thirty years and she'd stopped correcting him fifteen years ago.
"Neto." My mother was already up, adding plates. "Sit down."
My father dropped his canvas tote by the door and came to the table with the unhurried ease of a man who had never once felt unwelcome anywhere in his life. He saw Millie and his whole face opened up.
"You must be Millie," he said, like she was exactly who he'd been hoping to meet.
Millie blinked. "Yes, sir."
"Adam," he said warmly, pulling out the chair on her other side and sitting down like they'd been introduced years ago. "Sir was my father. He's been gone twenty years." He reached past her for the bread with absolutely no ceremony. "Gage talks about you."
"Dad," I said.
"Good things," he said, serenely. "Mostly."
"That's what Wyatt said," Millie said, and she looked between them with bright eyes.
"Wyatt and I are aligned on most things." My father began building his sandwich the way he approached everything as an art form—lunch included. "What do you think of the Hill Country?"
"I think it's beautiful," she said. "I grew up in San Antonio so I knew the terrain, but it's different out here. It feels—" She paused, searching for the word. "Older. Like it's been here a long time and it knows it."
My father set down the mustard and looked at her.
"Yes," he said. "That's exactly it." He looked at me. "I like her."
"Dad—"
"Stating a fact." He picked up his sandwich. "The land has memory. Most people can't feel it. She felt it in two days."
Millie had gone pink and was looking very intently at her plate.
Sawyer caught my eye across the table and his mouth twitched.
Haven dropped into the chair next to Wyatt like she'd been doing it since she was fifteen—because she had been—and loaded her plate with the single-minded efficiency of a nineteen-year-old who'd been working since dawn.
She was dusty from the field and her braid had mostly given up and she smelled like horses and she didn't apologize for any of it, which was very Haven.
Then she noticed Millie.
She looked at her for a second—not unfriendly, just taking stock—and then she looked at me, and then back at Millie, and something in her expression went warm and curious all at once.
"Hi," she said. "I'm Haven. I work the ranch."
"Millie," Millie said, smiling. "I'm—well. I live in the cottage."
"I know," Haven said. "Everyone knows." She said it without any particular weight to it, just fact. Small town. Ranch. Word traveled. "It's really nice to meet you. We don't get many new people out here."
"Is it that small?" Millie asked.
"Briar Hill?" Haven considered. "It's not tiny. It's just—" She glanced around the table. "Everyone already knows everyone. New people are exciting."
"Haven," Wyatt said, without looking up from his plate. "Don't overwhelm her."
"I'm not overwhelming her," Haven said. "I'm welcoming her." She turned back to Millie with a bright, unhesitating smile. "See? That's just Wyatt. He's like that with everyone."
Wyatt said nothing. Kept eating.
Haven's smile didn't waver. Years of practice at Wyatt saying nothing, and she'd stopped expecting anything different.
Millie, I noticed, had clocked something and filed it away for later.
She caught me looking and raised her eyebrows just slightly.
I shook my head, just slightly back.
Later. And she seemed to understand it, because she turned back to her sandwich and let it go, and that small wordless exchange sat in my chest like something I wanted to keep.
My father was telling Neto about a piece he was working on—something about the limestone composition of the creek bed, apparently—and Neto was listening with the long-suffering patience of a man who had heard thirty years of these ideas and learned to nod at the right moments.
Sawyer had stolen the last of the chips and was being called out for it by my mother.
Wyatt ate steadily and said nothing and Haven talked enough for both of them without seeming to notice or mind.
And Millie sat next to me in her blue dress with her hair falling down and ate her sandwich and laughed at something my father said and reached for her sweet tea without hesitating, like she'd been coming to this table for years.
I watched her and thought about what Wyatt had said on the walk up.
You have a history of making something your whole life and then wondering why you don't have anything else.
Yeah, I thought.
Maybe.
But right now, sitting at this table, I couldn't think of a single thing I wanted that wasn't already in this room.