Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Rogue
I'm the man who signs her paycheck.
I'm also the man who's gonna bury anyone who comes for her. The Shotgun Saints pay me for one of those jobs. The other one is on the house.
It's four forty-five in the morning, and the three monitors on my desk are already running because I never bothered turning them off last night.
The left monitor's got the ranch books open—payroll due Friday, a vendor invoice from the feed store I haven't paid yet, an auction record from last month I need to reconcile against the deposit.
Center monitor's got the club's accounts running in the background, the kind of work I don't do with the curtains open.
The right monitor's mine.
The right one's the one Phantom doesn't ask about.
I'm sitting in the only chair in the front room of my cabin in a pair of jeans I didn't take off when I fell asleep, drinking coffee that's gone cold while I check the overnight reports.
Nothing flagged on the ranch side.
Nothing flagged on the club side.
Something parked on the right monitor that I'll come back to.
I take a slow swallow of the cold coffee, lean back in the chair, and check the time in the corner of the screen.
Five-fifteen.
She's up.
I know because the light over her kitchen sink came on six minutes ago.
I can see it from my front window if I want to look, and I never want to look, but I always do.
I look.
The cabin behind the bunkhouse is about a hundred yards across the gravel from mine, and the light in her kitchen window is the warm yellow kind that says she's already at the counter, already moving, already starting the biscuits she rolls out fresh every morning because she said once on her first week here that frozen biscuits are an insult to a Texas table.
I think about that sentence at least once a day.
I drag my eyes off the window and back to the monitors, push out of the chair, and pull on a clean shirt because there's no reason to walk into her kitchen smelling like the night I had.
The white hat goes on last. It always goes on last.
* * *
The dogs at the kennel know my walk before they hear my voice.
Diesel's the first one on his feet—big old shepherd mix who runs the kennel the way Phantom runs the club, by being the one who doesn't have to raise his voice.
Jagger's right behind him, all leg and tail and noise, a younger blue heeler we picked up off a guy in Llano who couldn't handle him.
Bella's slower to get up but she's the smartest of the three, a brindle cattle dog who watches the world like she's writing a report on it.
"Mornin'," I tell them through the chain link.
Diesel pushes his nose against the gate.
I scratch his ear with two fingers and keep walking.
The sky's that flat purple it gets in the half hour before sunup, the kind of color that doesn't look real if you've never seen the Hill Country before the day starts.
The cedar smells stronger this time of morning.
The dust is settled.
A mockingbird's going off somewhere by the round pen. He'll be at it 'til the sun's up.
I check the bunkhouse porch as I cross the yard.
Empty.
The brothers will start drifting out in the next ten minutes, but for now, the porch is just rocking chairs and a coffee cup somebody forgot on the rail last night.
I climb the steps, open the screen door and step into the warm yellow light of her kitchen.
She's at the counter with her back to me.
Ashy blonde hair twisted up in a low knot, flour on her right forearm to the elbow, the green dish towel I bought her three weeks ago slung over her shoulder.
She's wearing jeans that fit her better than they did when she got here—she's been eating better, sleeping better, putting some of the weight back on—and a t-shirt that's seen better days but does her no harm.
I don't look at the way the t-shirt sits across her hips.
Okay, I’m lying straight through my teeth. I am looking, and I'm not gonna pretend I don't.
"Mornin', Hadley."
She turns at the sound of my voice, and her face does the thing it does every morning—the small, surprised, settled smile that tells me she heard me come in and hasn't decided yet whether she heard me come in.
"Mornin', Rogue."
"Coffee?"
"Already poured."
She lifts the mug she's set on the counter for me.
Black, no sugar, the way I take it.
The mug is one of the chipped ones from the bunkhouse cabinet because she said the first week that she wasn't gonna waste a good mug on a man who didn't ask for one.
I cross the kitchen and take it from her.
Her fingers don't touch mine. They haven't, not once, in two months.
She's careful about that.
I'm careful too, but for different reasons.
"How'd Nash sleep?" I ask.
"Through the night, finally. First time in a few weeks."
"Good."
"He's been having those dreams again."
I take a sip of the coffee. "About his daddy?"
"About falling. He doesn't say it's about Garrett, but I think it is."
She turns back to the biscuit dough. Her hands move the way they always do when she's working—fast, sure, like she's done this a million times.
I lean against the counter beside her with the coffee in my hand.
Not close enough to crowd her. Close enough that if she leaned a little, the back of her shoulder would touch the front of mine.
She doesn't lean and I don't either.
Unlike many others, I'm a patient man.
* * *
The brothers come in around five-thirty.
Banshee first, on account of he sleeps less than I do these days.
Then Spur, then Blaze, then Thunder, then the prospects two at a time the way prospects move.
Blight last, like always, dragging his feet because he's never gotten used to the early hour even after years of riding for the Shotgun Saints.
I take my seat at the head of the long table by the window.
Same seat I've taken every morning for the better part of a decade.
Hadley brings the plates out without asking who wants what. She knows.
Banshee gets four eggs over easy and three biscuits because his metabolism runs hot.
Spur gets a steak with breakfast because he's been working the round pen since before dawn and burns it off.
Blight gets dry toast and black coffee because he's nursing the kind of hangover a man earns.
The prospects get whatever's left and they get it gratefully.
She brings me my plate last.
Two eggs scrambled. Bacon. A biscuit. A small bowl of her redeye gravy that nobody else at the table gets because she made it special the second week and saw the way I cleaned the bowl.
She sets it down in front of me.
I look up at her.
She doesn't quite meet my eyes.
"Thank you, sweetheart."
The word slips out before I can catch it.
I’ve been doing that a lot lately.
She turns and walks back to the kitchen without responding, but I see the back of her neck go pink above the collar of her t-shirt before she gets to the door.
That's mine to keep.
Banshee's grinning at me from across the table.
I look at him and he keeps grinning.
I don't say a word.
Halfway through breakfast, the screen door bangs open and a six-year-old comes barreling into the bunkhouse in pajamas covered in dinosaurs, dragging Stitch by one ear and looking for his mother.
The whole table goes quiet for the half second it takes for the brothers to realize he’s there.
Then everybody goes back to eating.
Nash has done this every morning for the last three weeks.
The first time he did it, Spur asked Hadley if she wanted him to walk the boy back to the cabin, and Hadley said no, that as long as Nash wasn't bothering anybody he could come find her, and that was the end of that.
The brothers like the kid.
Banshee taught him how to whistle through his teeth last week.
Spur let him sit on the fence at the round pen for an hour last Saturday watching the mustang go around.
Nash sees his mother through the kitchen door, then he sees me.
He hesitates for a moment before he comes over.
He climbs up on the bench next to me without asking, drags Stitch into his lap, and looks at my plate.
"Mornin', partner," I say.
"Mornin'."
"You eatin' with us?"
"Mama said I could."
"You want pancakes?"
He nods, slow and serious, the way the boy nods about everything.
"Sausage too?"
He nods again.
"Hadley," I call into the kitchen without turning my head. "Pancakes and sausage for my little partner."
"On it."
She brings the plate out a minute later. Three pancakes the size of saucers, two sausage links, a small dish of syrup on the side because Nash doesn't like his pancakes drowned.
She sets it down in front of him and puts her hand on the back of his head for one second before she walks back to the kitchen.
Nash picks up his fork, stares at the pancakes and turns to me.
"They're too big," he says.
I take his fork. Cut the pancakes into pieces the size of a quarter the way I've been doing for him three days a week now. Hand the fork back.
"Thank you," he says.
"You're welcome."
He starts eating.
Banshee's still grinning at me from across the table.
He sees it, and if he sees it, I know the rest of the brothers will pick up on it soon enough.
After breakfast the brothers head out to morning work.
Spur to the round pen. Banshee and Thunder to the western fence line where a section came down in last week's storm. Blaze on the road to San Antonio for a meet. Blight and the prospects to whatever Phantom tells them to do.
I head back to my cabin.
The ranch books don't run themselves and the deposit from last month's auction is still sitting in the wrong column.
I sit down at the monitors with a fresh cup of coffee and pull up the QuickBooks file.
I work for two hours straight.
Reconcile the auction deposit.
Run payroll for Friday.
Pay the feed store invoice.
Update the cattle inventory after the four head we lost in last week's storm.
Approve a vendor request for new fencing wire.
Sign off on the bunkhouse grocery order that Hadley submitted yesterday—she came in three hundred dollars under budget and I make a note to ask her how, even though I know how.