Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rogue
I wake up before her.
The early light is grey through the slats again.
She's against my side with her cheek on my chest, her hand flat on my stomach, and the chain at her throat lying along my ribs.
I don't move. I haven't moved in a while.
My hand is on her hip where it ended up sometime in the night and I'm not taking it off until I have to.
Yesterday morning my hand crossed cold sheets and found nothing. Today my hand is on her warm skin and her breath is moving against my chest.
The bed feels different. It feels… full, like it isn't so damn lonely anymore.
I look down at her hair across my shoulder. Sandy blonde. The freckles across the bridge of her nose are darker in this light. Her mouth is slightly open. Her lashes are longer than I remember.
I lift one knuckle and trace the side of her jaw—slow, barely touching, the kind of contact that won't jolt a person awake. Her breathing stays even and I let my knuckle rest at the corner of her jaw for a long moment.
I think about her dead husband. The man who saw Todd coming from a hospital bed and tried to warn his mother. The man who held this woman first. A man who loved her enough to spend his dying days protecting her from the next threat.
I'd like to think he'd appreciate the way I care for his wife and son, and how I'll shed as much blood as I have to keep them both safe.
I'm not going to let him down.
Out of nowhere, there's a creak in the hallway. Small bare feet on the floor, then the quietest whisper from the doorway that I've ever heard. "Rogue?"
I lower my voice so I don't wake her. "I'm awake, partner."
"Diesel's hungry."
"All right. Give me a minute."
The small feet retreat down the hall.
I slide out from under Hadley one inch at a time. Lift her hand off my stomach and set it on the pillow where my body was. She turns into the warm spot and stays asleep with her hair across her face.
I pull on jeans from the floor of my own bedroom and don't bother with a shirt, and walk barefoot into the front room.
Nash is on my rug in his pajamas. Diesel is sprawled next to him with his head in Nash's lap and his old eyes half closed. The boy is scratching the dog's ear slowly, like it's the thing he was born to do.
I pull the bag of dog food out of my pantry—that I moved from the kennel, because I had a feeling this dog would be here too—and pour two cups into Diesel's bowl. The dog rises with the dignity of his age, crosses the floor, eats.
Nash watches him eat. I lean against the counter and watch the boy watch the dog.
"Rogue?"
"Yeah, partner."
"Do you always wake up this early?"
"Yeah. Comes with the job."
He turns his head to look at me. His hair is sticking up on one side and there's a pillow crease across his cheek. "What job?"
I pour myself coffee from the pot I set before I went to bed last night, take a sip and set the cup down on the counter. "Lookin' out for things."
He thinks about that. "Like the ranch?"
"Yeah, like the ranch."
He nods slowly, like he's thinking about it.
"Like your mama. Like you."
His face changes. "Okay."
He goes back to scratching the dog.
I stand at the counter with my coffee in my hand and I don't drink it for a while.
The coffee is half cold when she comes into the kitchen.
Hadley in my t-shirt and a pair of leggings, her hair messy, her face still soft from sleep. She sees the scene—me at the counter, Nash on the rug, Diesel eating—and she stops in the doorway. No words. Just a long look.
I pour her a cup and set it on the counter beside mine without asking. She crosses the kitchen barefoot and picks up the coffee. Her hand brushes mine and stays there.
She leans her shoulder against my arm and we both stand at the counter with our coffees and listen to Nash explain to Diesel that bull riders have to be at least eighteen, but he's going to start training as soon as Spur lets him.
Her shoulder is warm against my bicep. She smells like sleep and like the shirt she stole off my chair.
I bend my head and press my mouth against the top of her hair and stay there. "Mornin', baby."
"Mornin'."
That's all we say for a while.
She takes a sip of her coffee and picks up my hand off the counter and threads her fingers through mine and rests our hands on the wood between us.
Diesel finishes his food and walks back to his spot on the rug and lowers himself down with the long slow groan of an old dog at the end of his morning circuit.
Nash watches him settle. "Mama. Diesel walks like a grandpa."
Hadley laughs against my shoulder. "That's because he is a grandpa, baby."
"Oh." He thinks about it. "Rogue. Is Diesel old?"
"He's old, partner."
"How old?"
"Older than you. Younger than your mama."
Hadley's shoulder shakes against my arm. "Watch yourself, Rogue."
"Yes, ma'am."
Nash, on the rug. "Mama. You're not old."
"Thank you, baby."
"You're medium."
The laugh comes out of her before she can stop it.
The cup in her free hand jumps a little and she has to set it down so she doesn't spill.
She turns her face into my shoulder and laughs into the cotton of my shirt and I stand there at the counter with my coffee in my other hand and her hand in mine and her laugh in my chest.
This is what I've been waiting for. A six-year-old on my rug calling my woman medium. A woman laughing into my shoulder at sunup. An old shepherd settled on my floor.
I'd kill for this. I'd burn down a building for this, and I might have to before the week is over.
But not yet. Right now I just close my eyes and feel her laugh.
Hadley takes Nash back to her cabin around mid-morning to clean him up for the day. She comes back an hour later with his backpack of worksheets and her laptop and a stack of books and sets up at my kitchen table like she has decided this is where she lives now.
I don't say anything. I'm not stopping her.
She gets Nash going on the numbers worksheet like the one I told him I'd help with last night. He starts at the table with a pencil in his fist and his tongue between his teeth.
On her way past me to start a load of laundry in the back—my laundry, which she has decided she's doing—her fingers trail across the back of my neck. She doesn't look back.
I keep my eyes on the monitors and feel the heat of her hand on my skin for a minute after she's gone.
I pull up the relay account I used for the Bell tip yesterday morning. There's a new message.
Automatic acknowledgment of receipt from the compliance officer's office. Standard *we received your communication and will review* template. Date-stamped within an hour of when I sent it.
I scroll down.
A second message—not automatic—from the compliance officer herself. A short note. *Thank you for the tip. We will investigate thoroughly. Please reach out if you have additional details to share.*
The personal note is the tell. A compliance officer who responds in person to an anonymous tip has already opened the file. She's already pulled Todd's book of business. She's already noticed the math on at least one account.
The audit will move faster than the week I told Hadley. Maybe four days. Maybe three.
I close the email and the small dry smile pulls at my mouth.
*Got him.*
The right monitor pings. I turn my head.
Hartley's phone has moved.
I drag the GPS log up on the screen and watch the dot. Last night it was parked off a county road south of Llano. This morning it's moved further south. Further toward Llano County. Further toward the ranch than it's been in two weeks of surveillance.
I pull up the map, calculate the distance. I do it twice because I want to be sure.
Forty-one minutes.
Forty-one minutes by truck on the back roads if a man knows where he's going and isn't worried about getting pulled over. Less on the highway if he's willing to risk the cameras. More if he's running a counter-surveillance pattern and adding distance to break his own tail.
That isn't surveillance distance. That's strike distance.
A man with a long gun and a clean line on a Llano County back pasture could be at Sharp's perimeter in under an hour from where that dot is sitting.
My jaw sets.
I stop drinking my coffee. I set the mug down on the desk slowly. I pull the call log.
No new calls from Hartley's number since the forty-seven-minute briefing yesterday morning. He has his orders. He's running them.
I look at the dot for a long moment and let the rest of the cabin sound fall away—the washer cycling in the back, Nash's pencil scratching at the kitchen table, Diesel's slow breathing on the rug. All of it goes quiet in my head. The dot is what's left. I've been here before.
I have sat at desks in other countries and watched dots like this one and decided what to do about them, and the man I was then was a different man than the one sitting at this desk right now.
The man I was then would have left this cabin tonight on a bike with a long gun in a roll and a clean rendezvous in a town two hundred miles from anywhere.
That man's not who I am anymore. I've got a six-year-old in the next room, a woman doing my laundry, and an old dog on my floor.
I'm handling this without ever leaving the ranch.
I take a slow breath through my nose, then I pull my phone off the desk and dial Banshee.
He picks up on the second ring. "Yeah?"
"Stay on the gate today. Don't leave it. Bex brings you food, you eat where you stand."
"What is it?"
"Hartley moved within an hour of us."
Two seconds of silence. He clears his throat. "I won't move."
"Thanks, brother."
I end the call and dial Thunder. He picks up before the first ring finishes. "Yeah, brother?"
"Hartley moved closer. You and Raine close to the cabin today?"
A breath on the line. The sound of Thunder shifting his weight, boots scraping on what's probably his front porch. "Mama Lou's got her until afternoon. Maybe I'll keep her there for the next couple of nights, just in case."