Chapter 14
LEVI
I'm up before my alarm goes off.
I lie there for a minute with one arm behind my head, listening to the ranch start outside my window. The birds are already running through their whole catalog in the timber behind my cabin.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and sit there.
Reid Holt is on the property. He slept in one of the guest cabins. He's going to leave this morning. Before he does, he's going to find me.
I'm not guessing at that. I'd do the same thing.
I pull on my jeans and reach for my shirt off the hook by the door.
The mirror on the back of the bathroom door catches me for a second, and I don't linger on it.
I know what I look like. I know what Reid sees when he looks at me.
Thirty-one years old. Standing in a barn that isn't mine, on a ranch that belongs to someone else, chasing a nineteen-year-old girl who has no idea how far gone I am on her.
I know how that looks. I've been doing it for weeks. I still don't have an answer that comes out right. I pull my boots on and head out the door before I can spend any more time thinking about it.
***
The barn is cool and quiet when I get there. Kade's halfway through the first stall.
Only the first stall.
I stop just inside the door and look at him. He glances up.
"You're early," he says.
"I couldn't sleep," I say.
He goes back to work like that explains everything, because it does. On a normal morning, he'd be two stalls in, maybe three. On a normal morning, I'm the one walking in behind the pace, not ahead of it.
I've never been this close to on time. Not once.
I grab a muck fork off the wall and don't say anything about it. There's nothing to say. I know exactly why I'm here early. Reid Holt and my brother are sharing space in my head, and apparently, they don't let a person sleep in.
We're three stalls in when I hear boots on the gravel outside. Not Sawyer's. Not Logan's. The cadence is different. Measured. A man who's not in a hurry.
Reid steps through the barn doorway and stops.
He doesn't announce himself. He just stands there until I look up, and then he comes in.
I set the muck fork against the wall.
Kade glances at Reid, then at me, then picks up a lead rope off the wall. "I'll get the turnouts started," he says, and heads down the aisle without waiting for an answer.
Reid looks at me for a long moment.
"I'm not here to make trouble," he says.
"Okay."
"I'm not the kind of father who tells his daughter who she can and can't have in her life." He pauses. "She'd laugh at me if I tried."
"She would," I say. That's not strategy. It's just true.
He nods. "Cassie's spent nineteen years being seen through my name before anyone bothered to see her.
Every circuit stop. Every clinic. Every room she's ever walked into, somebody already had an opinion about her before she opened her mouth, because they knew mine first." He looks at me.
"Whispering Creek Ranch is the first thing that's entirely hers.
The first place she came to on her own terms. She didn't ask me about this job.
She didn't ask what I thought about staying. She just stayed."
I don't say anything.
"I watched her work that arena yesterday.
" He stops for a second, and his jaw loosens a little.
Not soft, exactly. More like a man who knows the difference between what he wants to say and what he needs to.
"She's right where she belongs. I knew it inside of ten minutes. I just needed to see it myself."
"She is," I say. "And she got there on her own. Nobody handed her that."
He holds my gaze for a beat. "I know that."
"I'm telling you because I need you to know I've been watching her work this ranch for a month, and I see exactly the same thing you do. She doesn't need anybody to hand her anything." I keep my voice level. "Including me."
Something shifts in the set of his shoulders. Not agreement, exactly. More like a man who came in ready to say a hard thing and is deciding whether it's still necessary.
"I'm not telling you to stay away from her," Reid says. "That's not what this is. But I am telling you that if you're going to be part of what she's building here, you need to be worth it. Because she is." He looks at me. "She doesn't always know that. That's the one thing I can't fix for her."
He puts his hand out.
I shake it. His grip is firm and brief.
Then he turns and walks back out through the barn door. I follow him to the doorway and watch him cross the lot in the early morning light. He stops when Sawyer comes out of her cabin with her coffee. They talk for a minute, and then he hugs her and turns toward his truck.
The engine turns over.
The truck rolls down the ranch road and disappears around the tree line, and there's nothing left but the sound of the barn. Kade comes through the far door a minute later with a lead rope over his shoulder and goes back to his stall.
"You gonna stand there all morning?" Kade says.
I walk back to the stall I was working in and pick up my muck fork.
I turn every word of it over as I work through the remaining stalls.
Reid came in expecting to say his piece to a man who'd get defensive about it, or go quiet, or try to charm his way through it.
I didn't do any of those things. What I said was true.
She got there on her own, and I think he knew it was true before I said it.
The part that's going to stick with me is the part I couldn't argue with.
She doesn't always know her own worth. I've watched that for a month.
I know exactly what it looks like. And Reid can't fix it from the outside any more than I can fix it for her.
That's not our job. What it is is a reason to pay attention.
I pick up the pace on the last stall. Reid wasn't wrong about a single thing he said.
***
I'm cutting across the property toward the arena when Darla comes out the door of the dining hall with a dish towel over her shoulder and a plate of molasses cookies in her hand.
She sets them on the porch rail, goes back inside, and comes back with two glasses of sweet tea.
She does this. I've never once been able to explain how she knows when somebody needs feeding, but in nine years, I've never seen her miss.
She hands me a glass and takes one of the cookies herself and leans against the porch post like she's got all morning.
I take a cookie. It's still warm.
"Did he say what he needed to say?" she asks.
"How'd you know he was going to find me?"
She gives me a look that says that was a stupid question. "Because he's a father. And you don't hide your feelings as well as you think you do."
I eat the cookie and don't argue with her. The tea is cold and sweet. The day has that thick, warm feel that means it's going to be a hot afternoon.
"She's going to be fine, you know," Darla says. She's not looking at me. She's looking out at the property, at the arena, and the cabin row past it. "She came here looking for something that was hers. Looks like she found more than one thing."
"Darla."
"I'm just saying."
"I know what you're saying."
She smiles at her tea glass. "Then stop standing around looking like somebody ran over your dog. Go do your job."
I finish the tea and put the glass on the rail. She picks it up and goes back inside.
I stand there for a second. “More than one thing.” She didn't look at me when she said it, which means she wasn't asking a question.
Darla's been watching this ranch longer than I've been on it.
She saw something in the first two weeks that it took me another month to say out loud.
Being that readable to a woman who has the good sense never to say it unless she's sure you need to hear it does something to a man's pride.
I'm walking toward the woodpile when I feel eyes on me.
I know before I look up where they're coming from.
Cass is at the arena rail, her eyes on mine across the stretch.
I don't look away. Neither does she. It holds for three full seconds before Sawyer calls an adjustment to Vera, and Cass turns back to the group.
Three seconds. I count them on my way to the woodpile. I'm not even sorry about it.
***
The group ride is scheduled for tomorrow, and Sawyer wants the trail rode first, to make sure there's nothing across the path from the wind we got two nights ago.
Kade pulls Jax out of the barn, his big gray quarter horse, and I grab Copper, my red dun, and we ride out through the back gate in the early afternoon heat.
He waits until we're through the back gate. Then he says, "You were on time this morning."
"I'm always on time."
He doesn't say anything, just looks at me.
"Okay, I'm usually on time."
"I can count on one hand the mornings you weren't late."
"That seems like an exaggeration."
"It isn't."
"Kade."
"I'm just noting it."
"Consider it noted."
He nods like that settles it and looks back between Jax's ears. I'm pretty sure he's almost smiling.
The trail opens up past the timber line, and the horses settle into a ground-covering walk, ears up, moving easy.
I've ridden this trail probably two hundred times.
I know where it goes soft after rain and where the roots come up across the path near the second bend, and where it opens into the meadow before it drops toward the creek.
Copper knows it too. He moves like he owns the trail.
We find the first downed branch inside the timber, not big, a limb off one of the ponderosas. I get down, drag it off the path, get back up. Kade watches me without comment.
Further up, near the log crossing, there's a bigger section down across the path. We tie the horses to a couple of pines and work together, rolling it off the trail into the timber. It takes a few minutes. Neither of us talks while we're doing it.
When we're mounted and moving again, Kade says, "Did he say what you expected?"