Eight
CASS
Everything was different after the kiss, and I hated how much I liked it.
I’d spent the better part of a decade building walls—careful fortifications made of disappointment and the hard-earned knowledge that depending on anyone was just another word for eventual heartbreak.
Those walls had kept me safe. They’d kept Henderson Ranch running when everything else in my life crumbled.
And Walker Kane had taken a sledgehammer to them in the span of a single sunset.
The morning after the overlook, I woke to the smell of coffee I hadn’t made.
Walker was in my kitchen, in yesterday’s rumpled clothes, having refused to leave the night before until he knew I was safe inside—he’d slept in his truck in my driveway like some chivalrous guard dog.
I’d called him ridiculous. He’d called me stubborn. We’d both been right.
“Black, two sugars,” he said, sliding a mug toward me. “I noticed that’s how you take it.”
“You noticed.”
“I notice everything about you. The way you check the horses before anything else. The way you stand at this window every morning and look at the land like you’re making sure it’s still there.”
Something warm bloomed in my chest despite my best efforts to suppress it.
“About last night,” I started.
“We don’t have to define it. I know you don’t trust easily. We can take this as slow as you need.”
“What if I don’t want to go slow?”
The words surprised us both. He crossed the kitchen in two strides, cupped my face in his hands, and kissed me until my head spun. “Then we don’t go slow,” he said against my lips.
When we finally broke apart, he didn’t let go. He just rested his forehead against mine, both of us breathing hard, the coffee going cold on the counter.
“I want to be honest about something,” he said quietly, and for a second my heart seized—but it was only this: “I’m scared.
Not of you. Of how much I already—“ He stopped, shook his head. “I’ve spent fifteen years making sure I never had anything I couldn’t walk away from in an hour.
A go-bag by the door, always. And then I drove up your driveway six weeks ago, and somewhere between the mucking and the coffee and watching you save that calf, I went and got myself something I’d never be able to leave behind. It terrifies me.”
“This terrifies you,” I repeated. “You. The man who walks onto strangers’ ranches and accuses them of harboring stolen livestock.”
“That’s easy. Nobody can hurt you if you don’t care whether they like you.” His thumb traced my cheekbone. “Caring is the hard part. You’d know.”
I would. I did. And standing there in the kitchen where I’d built my whole armored, self-sufficient life, I made a decision that scared me more than any auction loan or calving emergency ever had. I decided to let him in anyway.
The next days passed in a blur of investigation and stolen moments.
Walker showed up each morning with coffee from Rosie’s, having learned his own brewing wasn’t up to Jessie’s standards.
We developed a rhythm that felt almost domestic, which should have sent me running but somehow didn’t.
I knew when he needed a break before he asked.
He knew the difference between my thinking-quiet and my troubled-quiet.
One evening we sat on the porch long after the work was done, watching the light drain out of the sky. I’d brought out two beers; he’d brought out a question.
“Do you ever think about what you’d do if it weren’t this?” he asked. “If the ranch wasn’t yours to carry.”
I almost gave him the answer I gave everyone—that I’d never wanted anything else, that this land was in my blood.
But the dark made honesty easier. “I used to want to be a vet,” I admitted.
“When I was a kid. I had this whole plan. Texas A&M, then vet school, come back and run a practice out of Copper Creek.” I picked at the label on the bottle.
“Then Mom got sick, and Dad needed me, and the plan just—quietly went away. I don’t even let myself think about it anymore. What’s the point?”
“The point is it was yours.” He said it gently. “You’re allowed to grieve a life you didn’t get, Cass. Even while you love the one you have.”
I’d never thought of it that way. I’d spent so long being grateful for what I had that I’d never given myself permission to mourn what I’d given up.
“What about you?” I asked, turning it back on him. “If it weren’t the job?”
He was quiet a while. “I think I’d want exactly this,” he said finally.
“A porch. A piece of land that needs me. Somebody to sit with at the end of the day.” He glanced at me, then away, like he’d said more than he meant to.
“I gave up imagining it a long time ago. Easier not to want things you can’t have. ”
We didn’t kiss that night—not at first. We just sat there in the dark, two people who’d both spent years not letting themselves want, slowly admitting that we did. When he finally kissed me goodnight, it was like something he’d been waiting all day to do.
But underneath the warmth, worry was building like thunderclouds on a summer horizon.
Brody had gone from concerning to alarming.
He’d always been the reckless one, but this was different.
He left the ranch for hours without explanation, came back with a hunted look he tried to hide behind forced smiles.
Twice I’d walked in to find him on the phone, voice urgent and low, cutting off the instant he saw me.
He’d lost weight. The shadows under his eyes had deepened.
“Everything okay?” I asked one evening, finding him alone in the barn, staring at nothing.
He startled so hard he knocked over a feed bucket. “Fine. Everything’s fine.”
“You’ve been acting strange for weeks. Distant. Jumpy. If something’s going on—if you’re in trouble—“
“It’s none of your business!” He grabbed his keys. “I’m twenty-eight, Cass. I’m not a kid you need to protect.”
“Then stop acting like one. Talk to me. Whatever you’ve gotten into, I can help.”
For a moment, something cracked in his face—the defensive anger falling away to reveal the scared, exhausted man underneath. Then it shuttered, and he pushed past me and tore out of the driveway so fast the tires sprayed gravel.
Something was very wrong with my brother. And the harder I pushed, the more he pulled away.
I brought my worry to Walker the next morning, hoping his investigator’s instincts might catch something I was missing.
He listened with his face carefully neutral, nodding at the right moments, his gray eyes tracking my expression with an intensity that usually made me feel seen but today made me feel scrutinized.
“Could be anything,” he said. “Money trouble. Something from his past. Brody’s always been impulsive.”
“This feels different. He looks scared, Walker. Not embarrassed or defensive like when he’s screwed something up. Genuinely afraid.”
He stared down at his coffee. When he looked up, there was something in his expression I couldn’t read. “We should stay focused on the investigation. Double Star is the priority. Jumping to conclusions without evidence is how investigators make mistakes.”
It was reasonable advice. So why did it feel like he was steering me away from something?
“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” I asked. “If you knew something about Brody. If you’d discovered something during your investigation that involved him.”
His grip on the mug tightened, just slightly. “Of course I would.”
He crossed to me, took my hands, kissed me—brief, reassuring, the kind of kiss meant to end a conversation rather than start one. I let him, because I wanted to believe him. Because the alternative was too painful to contemplate.
But as I watched him drive away, that seed of doubt refused to stop growing. Something was wrong. Something beyond Brody’s troubles, beyond the investigation.
Something Walker wasn’t telling me.