Chapter 16 Bastien — Day 35
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He woke before she did.
That was becoming a habit. The room was gray with early light, the kind that hadn't found its warmth yet, and the sheet was tangled somewhere around his knee.
Mara slept on her stomach with one arm flung across his chest like she'd caught him in her sleep and decided to keep him.
Her hair was loose. It smelled like the shampoo she used and, faintly, like hay.
He didn't move. Moving would end the moment, and this moment was one of the few he'd let himself keep.
She stirred.
“You awake?” she asked, eyes still shut.
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Not long.”
She made a soft, satisfied sound and shifted closer. “You're warm.”
“Am I?”
“Furnace.” One eye opened, gray-green in the dim room. “Don't move.”
“Wouldn't dream of it.”
She smiled into the pillow, and something in his chest turned over.
“Beau,” she said, testing the name the way she'd been testing it for weeks.
“Mm.”
“You're supposed to be a cowboy. Cowboys wake up before sunrise.”
“I did wake up before sunrise.”
“Then why are you still in this bed?”
“You're holding me down.”
She lifted her arm, considered it, and put it back heavier than before. “Would you look at that. I am.”
“You are.”
“Better stay put, then.”
He turned his head. Her mouth was close. He could see the small freckle just below her lower lip that he'd noticed last night and now couldn't stop noticing. Her hair had come out of the braid entirely, and one strand of it caught in his collarbone.
She kissed him.
Slow. Not sleepy — she knew what she was doing — but unhurried. It said we did this last night and we can do it again and there's no rush. It said the ranch could keep for an hour. Coffee could wait.
He kissed her back the same way.
“This okay?” she asked against his mouth.
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
He almost laughed. “Very sure.”
“Good.” She pushed the sheet down between them. “Me too.”
Her palm found his chest and stayed there. The scar on it — the old barbed-wire line she'd told him about one night in the barn without meaning to — pressed flat over his heart.
“Beau,” she said again, softer.
“Yes.”
“You look at me like—”
“Like what?”
She didn't finish. She kissed him harder, and he stopped worrying about what she'd been about to say, because her weight was over him and her hair was in his mouth and she was laughing, low and delighted, when he rolled them so she was under him.
“Oh,” she said. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“That was fast.”
“Was it?”
“I liked it.”
He kissed her throat, and the small hollow at the base of it where her pulse jumped, and she made a sound he'd think about for the rest of the day.
She started to say something and stopped, mouth caught around the shape of a word she hadn't finished thinking.
“Beau,” he said, gentle.
“Right.” She smiled up at him, sun-streaked hair on the pillow, gray-green eyes gone soft and a little wicked. “Beau.”
“Say it again.”
“Beau.”
“Better.”
She laughed and pulled him down. Before anything else, he reached toward the nightstand; she found the packet with him and waited while he took care of it.
Then he stopped tracking anything except her.
Her hands were at his back. Her mouth was warm.
She said yes and yes and please, and he asked her twice more because he wanted her to say it, and each time she did — clear, unhurried, hers.
The second time he shifted, she gave a small breath of a laugh into his shoulder.
“What?” he murmured.
“You remembered.”
“What?”
“Which side.”
Her hip. She'd bruised it two days ago hauling a bale wrong, and he'd been careful not to press it. She'd noticed. Of course she had. She noticed everything.
“I remembered,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Don't thank me for that.”
“I will if I want to.”
He laughed against her collarbone, and she laughed back, and for a moment nothing was in his head but her. Not Toronto. Not the estate. Not the name that would ruin this. Only her breath, and his, and the small sounds of two people beginning to know each other's bodies.
He watched her face when she came apart.
He watched her hands — hands that had held a lead rope and a fencing tool and a coffee cup that morning, now open above her head against the pillow, palms up, the barbed-wire scar catching the light.
He watched her mouth. He thought: this is a woman who has never asked me for anything.
And the thought hurt in a place he hadn't known could still hurt.
The morning light climbed the wall.
Afterward she stayed on top of him a long time, cheek against his chest, one leg thrown over his. His hand moved in her hair without instruction.
“Furnace,” she said again, muffled.
“Told you.”
“I don't remember you telling me that.”
“You told me. I agreed.”
“Well.” She lifted her head. Her hair was a wreck. “Good talk.”
He smiled up at her, and she looked at him a long second — long enough that he thought she might say something he wasn't ready for. But she only leaned down, kissed him once more, quiet, and rolled off him with a sigh.
“Coffee,” she said.
“Coffee.”
She sat up on the edge of the bed and reached for the first thing to hand, which was his shirt on the floor. She dragged it over her head. It was three sizes too big. The collar slipped off her shoulder, and she made no attempt to fix it. She looked at him over her bare shoulder.
“This is mine now.”
“Is it.”
“For the walk to the bathroom. And then it's still mine.”
“Okay.”
She turned and picked up the leather watch from the nightstand — the one she'd wrapped around his wrist the night before, half joke and half not.
“Give me your hand,” she said.
He held it out.
She unfastened the strap and drew it off him gently, and set it back on her own wrist where it belonged. She fastened it. She rubbed her thumb over the buckle once and looked at him.
“Thanks for keeping it warm,” she said.
“Any time.”
“Don't say things like that so easily.”
“Why?”
“Because I'll start to believe them.”
She stood before he could answer, his shirt hanging off her, and padded to the bathroom on quiet feet. The door clicked shut. Water ran.
He lay in her bed and stared at the ceiling and told himself the thing he told himself every morning now. Today. Today he'd tell her. And underneath that, the other thought, the one that had been getting louder every day. Not yet.
He got up. Made the bed on his side out of habit. Showered downstairs because the upstairs bathroom was hers and she was in it, and he liked the small courtesy of that.
Opal was in the kitchen when he came down, moving between stove and counter with the economy of a woman who'd cooked there thirty years.
“Coffee's on,” she said, without turning.
“Thank you.”
“You look like a man who slept.”
He poured a cup. “I did.”
“Good.”
She glanced at him then. She had a way of looking that never gave anything away, and it didn't now — but he knew she saw more than she said. He didn't know how much more.
“Mara said you were driving to Alpine today,” she said.
“Truck part.”
“What part.”
“Fuel filter.”
“Mm.” She turned back to the stove. “Pick up sugar for me while you're at the mercantile. We're low.”
“Sugar.”
“Two pounds.”
“Yes ma'am.”
“Don't yes ma'am me. It's early.”
He drank his coffee. The truck part was real — he'd ordered it two days ago from a shop off Highway 90 and it was waiting on the counter for him. That part wasn't the lie. The lie was the two hours he'd sit in a parking lot afterward.
Mara came down while he was on his second cup. She'd showered and re-braided her hair and put her own clothes back on, but she was still in his socks, which he found he had no complaint about.
“You leaving?” she asked.
“After I finish this.”
“Drive safe.”
“Always.”
“Bring me a sandwich if you go to the Big Bend.”
“Turkey?”
“Turkey.”
“Done.”
She kissed him on her way past to the coffeepot, warm and quick, and Opal, at the stove, gave a small dry cough that fooled no one.
The drive to Alpine was long the way West Texas roads were long — flat and full of sky, the kind of drive that gave a man too much time inside his own head.
He kept the radio off. He kept both hands on the wheel.
He watched a dust devil spin itself apart in a fallow field south of the highway and thought about the number.
Sixty thousand.
He'd arranged fifty thousand the first time from his personal account through outside counsel. He'd told himself it would be the last. He'd told himself he'd disclose it before another dollar moved, or let the ranch settle its own account. He'd told himself a lot of things.
None of them had been true. He'd known that on the porch with her three nights back, listening while she counted the number down out loud. He'd known it that morning watching her sleep. He knew it now, driving.
The foreclosure clock was still ticking. Forty-nine days remained, and the bank answered to shareholders, not to a woman with a scar on her palm and a five-thousand-acre problem.
He picked up the fuel filter at the shop off 90. He paid cash. He talked to the man behind the counter about the weather for as long as courtesy required and no longer. He got back in the truck.
He didn't drive home.
He drove to the hotel on the far edge of Alpine, the one with the wide gravel lot and the cell signal that held even inside a locked cab. He parked at the back, angled so the truck faced out. He killed the engine. He reached under the passenger seat for the laptop bag.
He set the laptop on his thighs and let the connection find him. The screen was too bright in the closed cab. He dimmed it. He typed a password he'd memorized so thoroughly he could type it in his sleep.
The secure counsel portal held the first Vale gift file: the executed gift letter, source-of-funds verification, Sul Ross Bank's cure-escrow instructions, and Mara's public default notice.
He opened the supplemental recommendation he had submitted two days earlier. Its status read: COUNSEL REVIEW COMPLETE — DONOR CONFIRMATION REQUIRED.
RECIPIENT: VALE RANCH OPERATIONS. PURPOSE: THIRD-PARTY DEBT-REDUCTION GIFT. SUPPLEMENTAL TRANSFER.