Iron & Honey (Cowboys of Copper Creek #6)

Sophia

I could handle gunshot wounds, heart attacks, and twelve-hour shifts without blinking.

One biker with dark eyes and rough hands was proving to be a different problem entirely.

I was, on the available evidence, in trouble.

My old, trusty sedan Doris had caught on the second turn of the key at the end of a twelve-hour shift, which was generous of her, and I had driven home through a town that was mine end to end — every cracked sidewalk, every porch light, the bakery's back door propped open onto an alley already smelling of yeast. The light over the Fourth Street intersection had cycled green to yellow to red for nobody and I had waited at red anyway. I had pulled into my own driveway four minutes ago. I had cut the engine, but I hadn’t moved yet.

The cottage sat twenty feet from my front bumper.

Low and white and absurdly picket-fenced.

The most embarrassing thing I owned, paid for by the most extraordinary inheritance a girl could come into — the one I received after losing my parents in the most horrific way possible.

At least it allowed me to have my own property where I could turn my fence into the color of a children's book.

I'd repainted the pickets in June. I'd stood out there in shorts and one of my brother Liam's old UT Austin t-shirts I'd stolen the week he started law school and never given back.

I felt ridiculous painting out there all by myself, but I kept going.

My parents had been dead eighteen years.

It was on the table for me at thirty in the way it had been on the table at twelve — a fact, a shape, a thing I had learned to be a woman around. But that wasn’t what had me sitting in my driveway.

What had me sitting there was a man I had thought about for ninety-six hours straight.

I closed my eyes, remembering our meeting.

It was eleven at night, in the middle of a shift that had already cost me four cups of coffee and any feeling in my left foot, when a man in his late twenties came in with a tea towel wrapped around his right hand and a sheepish look on his face — shaggy dark hair past his collar, scruffy beard, biker tee under an open flannel.

He held the wrapped hand up at me when I pushed the curtain back, the way you'd hold up a parking ticket at a guard booth — by way of explaining what we were both here for.

"Angle grinder," he said, when I lifted the rag. "Moment of stupidity."

Behind him, against the wall, was the tall one.

Six-four. Arms crossed over his chest, the cross of the arms pulling the t-shirt tight across his shoulders.

A jaw the color of two days of work. Forearms ribboned with old white scars and corded with the kind of vein that runs up a man who builds things for a living, which I could tell he did from the grease creases of his knuckles.

My eye went up the vein once more before I told it to stop, and somewhere under my ribs the breath I was halfway through taking lost the thread.

"Cal said I didn't need gloves for a quick job," the patient said to me.

The man against the wall said, low: "I told him to wear gloves."

It was the drawl that did me. Long slow vowels from somewhere further south than this part of Texas. The voice came across the room and landed on the back of my neck the way a hand might. I cleared my throat as I rolled the tray over. I snapped on gloves. I rolled the tray over.

"I'm Sophia," I said to the patient, snapping on my gloves, trying with all my might to focus on him rather than the man behind me. “What’s your name?” I asked, meeting the patient’s eyes.

“Tuck,” this giant man replied, though I swore I heard a bit of nervousness in his tone as I began threading my needle.

"I'm going to clean this out and put a few stitches in. Good news — it's a clean cut. Bad news — "

"My friend's right about the gloves."

"Your friend's right about the gloves."

He winced as I started on the wound — half the sting, half being agreed with on top of being told off. "He is not gonna let me hear the end of this, ma'am."

"I should hope not."

I got a laugh out of him at that — low and surprised, the chuckle of a man who had not expected to be sassed on a Tuesday night by the nurse about to put a needle in him.

I looked up from the wound and gave him the smile that came with it, before I had time to weigh whether or not to give it to him — the real one, the one that usually stayed hidden behind the professional one — and he caught it full in the face and went, for one absurd second, sheepish as a kid being told off by his mother.

"Yes, ma'am," he said again, quieter.

"Lie still. A couple of stitches and you're done."

I bent back to the stitching. My hands had been doing this for six years and they did it now. I threaded the needle. I made the first pass. The patient sat very still under it, as if the only acceptable response to being looked after was to occupy as little space as possible while it was happening.

The man at the wall did not say anything else.

He didn't need to. I knew where he was in the room. My whole body knew.

Then came the sound of a boot lifting off the linoleum.

Two steps, and his shoulder was beside mine.

Six inches of air between us, and the smell of him crossed it — motor oil and soap and something warm and male underneath that my lungs took in without my permission.

I did not look up. The skin from my elbow down to my wrist was humming on a frequency I had not felt in years.

"Nice work," he said, at my ear.

The breath of the words crossed the side of my neck and I lost the count on the stitch.

I found it again. I pulled through and tied it off.

The patient winced and the man beside me shifted forward like a man whose hand wanted to go to the patient's arm — and stopped it in the air, and returned it to his side. I filed the gesture, but didn’t look up.

He stepped back.

The air went cold where he'd been. I finished and dressed the wound, before giving the patient his discharge instructions. "Keep it dry for forty-eight hours," I said. "Come back in ten days to get the stitches removed. And wear gloves next time."

"Yes, ma'am. Thanks, doc."

"Nurse," I corrected him, peeling off my gloves.

They headed for the door. At the threshold, the man who'd been holding up the wall stopped and turned back.

Held out a hand. The logo on his chest came into focus for the first time in the whole encounter — Black Iron Customs, white on black, a hammer struck through the letters.

I took the hand because I thought I was supposed to. I was being purely professional.

"Caleb," he said in a low voice, his drawl sitting under the second syllable.

His fingers closed around mine—warm, calluses pressing into my palm—and stayed closed a beat past the threshold of a handshake.

His eyes finally caught mine.

On the available evidence, the man was criminally attractive.

His thumb moved across the back of my knuckle. Once. Slowly. A small enough motion that a person who hadn't felt it could deny it had happened, but it was absolutely deliberate.

This was the part where, if my brain was working properly, I would have said my name back.

What I gave him in place of my name was a small, polite, mortified smile.

His eyes dropped to my badge.

"Sophia." So-phi-a. Three syllables of a name I had answered to for thirty years that had never sounded the way they did coming out of his mouth.

I pulled my hand back. I pressed it against my hip the way you'd press a cup you didn't want to spill.

The patient leaned back through the door. "Come on, Casanova. Fuck. Can't take you anywhere."

The man in the doorway turned, half-grinning. Kill me now, he’s gorgeous.

"I'll see you soon, Sophia," he said in that same drawl, drooping lower.

My mouth opened on every word in the English language and what came out, again, was nothing at all.

He held the grin a beat longer than was polite before exiting. I watched him leave—who could blame me? The man was built like a Greek god who had happened to discover denim—listening as his steps grew quieter and quieter, eventually blending into all the other steps in the corridor.

I stood at the empty gurney with my hands unsteady. It finally hit me that his friend called him Casanova because he was one. I told myself, standing in that bay, that I would not be seeing him again.

I opened my eyes. I could tell the blush was still creeping down my neck.

Lucky for me, my brother was three counties away and not standing in my driveway, because Liam would have clocked the color in ten seconds, asked who gave it to me, refused to drop it until I told him, and had Caleb's plate run by lunch.

Some women got overprotective big brothers.

I got an overprotective Texas Ranger with investigative powers and absolutely no respect for personal boundaries when he thought he was protecting me.

I was the woman whose brother had put his body around mine in a doorway when he was fifteen and I was twelve.

He'd heard the door break. He'd grabbed me.

He'd thrown himself around me before either of us had a word for what was happening. Still, he couldn’t stop me from hearing every sound my parents made on the way to not being my parents anymore.

I'd heard all of it; the door, the shots, and the horrible, silent seconds before the rest of the world arrived.

He had carried that for eighteen years. I had never corrected him, never had the courage to.

We had slept that night in the Wilsons' basement.

Aunt Lou had come down the basement stairs at six-fifteen in the morning, saying my name before her feet hit the bottom step.

She wasn't blood. She had been my mother's best friend—sister not by blood but by choice, family because they had decided to be.

Their children grew up together, running in and out of one another's lives like cousins long before any of us knew how much that would matter.

She'd been Aunt Lou my whole life, and she was Aunt Lou now, and every time I said her name my mother was in the room with me.

A brother who'd done that for me did not, ever, have to apologize for running a plate.

And I was not a woman who got turned inside out by a man she'd known for all of three minutes.

But four nights ago it had developed a problem.

The dawn had come properly up while I'd been sitting there. The bruise-blue behind the houses had turned pale. The streetlamp at the head of the block had cut out on its timer. The world had entered the part of itself that wakes.

And that’s when I caught myself thinking about his hands for the third time in an hour. I hadn’t thought about a man like this since…actually, I don’t think I had ever thought about a man like this.

I opened the door of Doris and got out. The morning air was cool on the back of my neck where the color was finally letting up. I shut the car door without slamming it, the way you don't slam a car door in a quiet block at that hour.

I took the path to my porch. My hand went into my bag for the keys.

Across the road, at the edge of my eye, was the SOLD sticker.

It was new, recently slapped across the FOR SALE board on the front lawn of the big two-story on the south side of the cul-de-sac that Murph had complained about every Sunday at the diner because the agent kept parking across his mailbox that had been on the market for six months.

SOLD in four thick red letters at a slight angle, as if whoever had stuck it on had been in a hurry.

I had a brief, exhausted thought about what kind of person bought a house on Sycamore Row and whether they would be a quiet kind of neighbor or a leaf-blower-at-seven-in-the-morning-on-a-Saturday kind of neighbor, but that was all the attention I had for the thought at the moment.

I’d find out later, I told myself. I went and put the kettle on.