Chapter 22 #2
"She's five."
"Wyatt got his first horse at six," he says. "Brooks didn't trust it but he got through it."
I smile at that, at the easy way he references his family, the way the McCallister's exist in his conversation like weather. Always present in his thoughts, entirely natural.
"Hadley is being relentless about it."
"She's already relentless about it," he says. "I'm just waiting on you to cave."
"I'm not caving."
"Riley."
"I'm not."
He looks down at me with that expression, the one that sits somewhere between patient and amused, and I feel the smile pulling at my mouth before I can stop it. "Maybe a small horse," I concede.
He laughs, low and warm. The sound of it moves through me the way it always does, settling something that didn't know it needed settling.
We sit quiet for a moment, the swing moving, the night spread out around us. I let myself think about what comes next without bracing against it the way I used to brace against anything that looked too much like a future.
Hadley starting school from this house in the fall. My work at the elementary school, and the kids I've already started to know. The community that has been folding itself around me with a warmth I didn't anticipate when I drove back here into River Bend planning to stay temporarily.
My mother, who has been saying I told you so with her eyes for three weeks without saying a single word out loud.
And Jace.
Jace, who built this house with rooms bigger than he needed for one person on purpose. Jace, who catches Hadley's hand without thinking about it. Jace, who told me he loved me in a quiet kitchen with nothing left to hide behind and meant every syllable of it.
"What are you thinking?" he asks.
I look out at the ranch, at the land that started all of this and is somehow also where it ends, where it begins, where it becomes whatever it's going to be.
"I'm thinking I couldn't be happier right now," I say.
His arm tightens around my shoulders.
"Yeah," he says quietly. "Me too."
The swing moves. The night holds us. The ranch sits patient and vast around the house he built.
And for the first time in five years I don't feel the pull toward the exit.
I feel the pull toward this.
Toward him and Hadley and the horse she's going to get whether I cave or not. Toward the McCallister women in the stands who called me his wife, and the brothers who show up before sunrise and the grandmother who says everything with her eyes.
Toward the life that assembled itself around me while I was busy being careful.
I pull the blanket tighter and lean into his side.
He presses a kiss to the top of my head.
Neither of us says anything else for a long time.
We don't need to.
We stay on that porch swing longer than we should.
The kind of longer that happens when everything has been running at full speed for weeks and suddenly it isn't. When the body doesn't know what to do with stillness because it forgot stillness was an option.
The night air is cool, the blanket is warm and Jace is solid beside me in a way that makes me not want to move, ever.
Eventually the night gets late enough that I straighten off his shoulder and stand, holding out my hand.
He takes it.
We go inside and lock up, moving through the house in the easy rhythm that has become as natural as breathing. Somewhere between the front door and the hallway the energy between us shifts. We both know how we want this night to end. In each other's arms, warm and loving.
He stops me in the hallway, his hand finding my waist, turning me toward him in the unhurried way he has when he's ready and isn't in any rush to get past the getting there.
"Hey," he says quietly.
"Hey," I answer.
He walks me back toward the bedroom slowly with him following close behind me, his hands sliding from my waist up to my breasts and I hear him do that, Jace, little chuckle.
That sound does what it always does to me, reaches past every careful layer I spent five years constructing and finds the part of me that stopped being careful the night I chose him.
The bedroom is quiet and dark.
He takes his time. He takes my shirt off over my head. He is still behind me so he unsnaps my bra. I feel the roughness of his hands over my breasts. He is slow and methodical without hurrying.
With the focused attention of a man who decided somewhere along the way that this was worth doing properly. I stop thinking in complete sentences approximately thirty seconds after the door closes.
There is nothing held back tonight.
He turns me around and undoes my pants, slides them down my legs so I can step out of them along with my panties.
I reach for his shirt and he lets me take it, his hands dropping to my hips while I work the buttons. When my palms find the warm skin of his chest, he exhales in a way that tells me I'm not the only one feeling this differently tonight.
He lays me back against the pillows and takes his time working his way down, his mouth finding the curve of my throat, the line of my collarbone, my breasts one by one, learning all of me with a patience that makes restraint feel like a genuine waste.
His hands find me hot and wet. He massages my clit with his fingers. He slips two fingers inside me. My body arches and a moan comes out that I try to hush.
His mouth is still on my breasts. His teeth grazing just enough to make me squirm. His hands and his mouth work together in a way that suggests he has been paying attention to every response I've ever given him and is applying that knowledge deliberately and without mercy.
I stop being quiet about it.
There's no point. Hadley is at Grandma's house.
He looks up at me once, his eyes dark and certain in the low light. "You good?"
"Don't stop," I tell him.
He doesn't.
By the time he finally settles over me I am not thinking of anything outside of this room. I have stopped caring about all of it entirely.
He moves slowly at first, watching my face, staying connected to my eyes when he slides inside me. He starts slowly moving in and out. “Harder,” I tell him, "I want it harder, I want to explode with you." He doesn't hold back.
I can hear the bed moving below us. I can't concentrate because it feels so good.
I don't want it to stop. Suddenly I'm there.
I'm right on the edge and he can see it.
"Let it go baby," I hear him whisper and I do.
My whole body shakes and arches. He follows right after.
We work to catch our breath as we lay tangled in each other.
He pulls me close. my head resting on his shoulder, his arm heavy and certain across my waist, his breathing slowing in the dark beside me, and I lie there in the quiet feeling, the kind of settled that can't be constructed or decided on. It just is. The way he is. The way this is.
I close my eyes.
Sleep comes fast and without argument.
I don't know how long I've been under when his phone lights up the room.
He reaches for it quickly. The transition from sleep to alert taking half a second because some habits don't leave when you have kids.
I watch his face in the glow of the screen.
Every muscle in his body goes tight.
He turns the phone so I can see the screen, and what's there makes my stomach drop clean through the mattress.
A message from Brooks. Four words and a photo.
The four words: Colt is on the move.
The photo is a security camera image. Colt Ramirez walking out of a building I don't recognize, phone pressed to his ear, expression carrying nothing easy or champion-like about it.
He isn't smiling.
He's calculating.
He knows Dusty is in custody.
He knows the net dropped tonight.
And he's already deciding what to do about the fact that he's the only loose end left.
Whatever he just decided to do about the fact that his twenty year operation came apart at the seams, he's already set it in motion.