Chapter 17
Jenna
Crowley claims the warm spot on Ethan’s desk where the morning sun hits. Pixel threads between my ankles while I pour coffee. The Tweedles are asleep in a pile on the chair I’ve started thinking of as mine, the one where I sit every morning with his ranch’s financials spread across both screens.
Three weeks since the family meeting. Two since I gave my formal statement to the federal investigators—a woman with sharp glasses and a quiet recorder and questions I answered for four hours.
The evidence is in the right hands. The wheels of justice are in motion, and for the first time since I fled with the flash drive in my pocket, I’m not bracing for impact.
I’m living.
My hands move across the keyboard. My arms rest on the desk and the skin is just skin and I am typing and the coffee is the temperature I like because Ethan knows I let it cool for seven minutes and he times it without a watch.
He’s in the doorway. I know because the air shifts.
I look up. His blue eyes still hit me like a hand to the sternum. He leans against the doorframe with his glasses on, the home version, the real one. His hair is doing that thing it does when he’s been running his hand through it over stock reports, and he has cat hair on his collar.
He’s looking at me the way he did outside the diner, the day he promised me things I didn’t yet know to ask for. He’s kept that promise every night since. But the look hasn’t dimmed. If anything, it’s settled into something more certain.
He crosses to the kitchen, refills my coffee, and sets the blue mug beside my keyboard. His thumb grazes the patch on the inside of my wrist. Just a touch. Just my skin. Just his hand.
Maggie finds me on the porch in the late afternoon, Lucille balanced on one hip like a cast-iron child.
She sets the skillet on the railing with a clang that sends Pixel bolting off my lap, then drops beside me on the step without ceremony, the way she does everything: with the authority of a woman who has earned every chair in every room.
For a minute, we don't talk. The light is golden. The pasture stretches toward the ridge, and somewhere beyond it, Havenridge sits on the same land, and two old men are learning to share it again.
“You look different,” Maggie says.
“Good different?”
“Settled different.” She adjusts her flannel.
“The ranch does that. Grows women. Every one of them arrived looking like you did, and every one of them stopped looking like that eventually.” She pauses.
“Shay took the longest. You’re faster. Must be the data brain.
Once you ran the numbers, you believed them. ”
I laugh. “The numbers are good, Miss Maggie.”
She’s quiet for a stretch. Her eyes go to the skillet on the railing, and her face softens into something tender and far away.
“After Caroline passed, Ben couldn’t walk into his own kitchen.
Her recipes were still taped to the cupboard in her handwriting.
” She picks at a thread on her knee. “So I brought Lucille over every evening and cooked on the porch. Right here on this step, on a camp stove, because if I used Caroline’s kitchen, he’d have lost the last room that still smelled like her.
Three boys lined up with their plates on their knees.
Ethan made sure Gabriel’s food was cut up.
He was seven.” She turns her gaze on me.
“I did that for two years. Jacob never once said thank you. He didn’t need to because I wasn’t doing it for him. ”
She doesn’t need me to respond. The story is an offering—one woman who showed up in the dark, handing it to another who did the same.
I carry two mugs of tea into our room that evening. Not coffee—Ethan’s had four cups today and won’t stop unless someone intervenes.
He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, forearms on his knees, head tipped forward. Contacts out, glasses on the nightstand. Without them, his face is unguarded in a way that still makes my breath catch—the boy behind the cowboy, the one who disappeared into usefulness so nobody noticed he’s hurting.
I set his mug on the nightstand beside his glasses.
He looks up at the small sound. “You made me tea.”
“You’ve had four coffees.”
His mouth works. The man who takes care of everyone still doesn't know what to do when someone takes care of him.
His right shoulder sits higher than the left.
It always does by evening — a decade of holding everyone together loaded onto one frame.
I cross the last three feet between us, stand between his knees, and press my thumb into the knot.
He exhales as if he didn't know he was holding it.
Ethan reaches up to catch my wrist. His thumb follows the tendon down to my palm, back up to the heel of my hand.
He turns his head, and his mouth finds the center of my palm, then lower, nipping the base of my thumb, the thin skin at my wrist where my pulse has started to betray me.
His lips part against the beat of it, and the warmth of his breath makes my fingers curl.
“Come here.”
I lower myself onto his lap. His hands slide to my thighs, steadying me, settling me against him, and the shift in his breathing when my weight meets his tells me everything. I loop my arms around his neck. His forehead drops against mine. We breathe the same air for a moment. Two. Three.
Ethan’s hands move up my sides, taking the shirt with them. I lift my arms, and he pulls it over my head and sets it aside. His palms flatten against my ribs, spreading his fingers wide, spanning me, and his jaw tightens when he hears my small, involuntary moan.
I don’t rush as I unfasten his shirt, one button, then the next, the worn cotton parting under my fingers. He watches me do it. The vulnerability of being watched by Ethan Sutton while I undress him—by a man who sees everything and is letting me see him back—is its own kind of intimacy.
I push the shirt off his shoulders and press my mouth to the scar below his collarbone, the silver line from ordnance training that I’ve kissed so many times now it feels like mine. His hands tighten on my ribs.
We lose the rest of our clothes without urgency. His hands know where they’re going. Mine know where to follow. No fumbling, just the choreography of two bodies that have learned each other well.
He cups my face and kisses me with intention. A kiss that knows where it's going but isn't in any hurry to arrive. Not tonight.
Ethan’s hands find my hips as I rise onto my knees. Reaching between us, I position him at my entrance. We both exhale shakily as I sink down onto him.
I set the pace. My hands brace on his shoulders, his on my hips.
We find the rhythm the way we find everything now—together.
Not his pace, not mine. Ours. The unhurried rock of two people who have nowhere to be and no one to perform for.
His forehead presses against my collarbone.
My fingers thread into his hair. He breathes against my skin, and every exhale moves through my ribs.
His thumb traces the dip of my waist, up along the curve beneath my breast, down to the hollow of my hip. Mapping me the way he mapped fence lines and perimeters and every room he ever walked into for danger, except there are no threats here. Just skin. Just us.
The build is slow and deep and inevitable, the way the day becomes night. His hand slides up my spine to pull me closer, chest to chest, his heart hammering against mine. He is everywhere—his heartbeat, his breath, his hands—and this is what it means to be home in another person.
I come apart quietly. My forehead drops to his as my body tightens around him, and I whisper his name. He follows me with his face pressed into my neck and his arms locked around me.
We stay there, still joined, breathing together. His arms haven't moved. My fingers haven't left his hair.
I press my mouth to his temple. Ethan turns his head and captures my lips in a soft, unhurried kiss that feels like coming home after a long time away, except I’m not going anywhere, and neither is he.
“Tea’s cold,” I whisper.
His laugh vibrates through my whole body. “I’ll make more.”
He doesn’t move. Neither do I.
The room is quiet. The cats are somewhere downstairs committing small crimes. And this moment with my husband is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever been part of.
We’re lying in bed when the phone rings later that night.
Ethan reaches for it. “Yeah.” A pause. “When?” Another pause. “I’ll tell her.”
He sets the phone down. “Beckett. Federal agents picked up Vance an hour ago.”
I sit up. “It’s over?”
“The first part.” He pauses, and a muscle flickers in his jaw, the way it does when he’s sorting information into columns. “Marlon Ennis cleared out his desk at the bank this afternoon. Nobody saw him leave. His house is dark.”
The insider. The man whose name has been in red on Ethan’s dashboard for weeks, feeding LandCorp information while shaking Sutton hands across the counter.
“He ran.”
“Beckett thinks he got wind of the arrest and bolted before anyone could loop him in.” Ethan’s thumb traces a circle on my spine.
“He's not the priority tonight. Vance is. But Marlon Ennis is out there with everything he knows about LandCorp’s network, and a man who runs is either scared or making himself useful to someone bigger.”
Alexander Voss. The name neither of us says.
Ethan’s hand finds my shoulder. “Okay?”
It’s the question he’s asked me every day since the ditch.
I lace my fingers through his. “Okay.”