Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I woke up real slow, the way you do when you've slept deeper than you meant to.
Somethin' had pulled me out of it. Not a sound. Not the light, though the morning was already creepin' around the edges of the blinds. Somethin' else.
I opened one eye.
Calvin was propped up on her elbow beside me, head restin' in her hand, watchin' me with the patient, unblinking focus of a woman who had absolutely been at this for a while.
"Mornin'," I rasped.
"You snore."
"I do not."
"You absolutely do."
"That's slander." I scrubbed a hand over my face, buyin' myself a second to fully come back to life. "How long you been starin' at me?"
She considered that a beat too long.
"Calvin."
"You have a very punchable face when you're asleep. And snoring."
"That's not an answer."
"No," she agreed. "It's not."
I dropped my hand and looked at her. Her dark hair was sleep-mussed, the short waves goin' every which way, and she had a faint crease on her cheek from the pillow. No armor. No edge. Just her, in the early mornin' quiet of my bedroom, watchin' me like she was tryna figure somethin' out.
It did somethin' real stupid to my chest.
"You hungry?" I asked.
"Starving."
"I got eggs."
"You got anything else?"
"I got eggs," I repeated.
She sighed like this was a personal failing. "Fine."
I reached out and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, mostly because I could, and she let me, mostly because it was early enough that her defenses hadn't fully reported for duty yet.
"You ever gonna tell me what happened with Rhett?"
She flopped onto her back. "Sassy kissed someone."
I absorbed that. "Okay."
"In front of him."
"Ah."
"On purpose."
I exhaled through my nose and stared up at the water stain on my bedroom ceiling that had looked like a duck for so long I'd named it Gerald. "Okay, yeah. That tracks."
I threw the covers back and sat up, reachin' for the t-shirt I'd left on the nightstand. Calvin stayed flat on her back, eyes on Gerald, arms crossed over her stomach.
"He just sat there." She said it with somethin' between admiration and frustration. "Like a statue. Didn't move. Didn't say a word."
"That's Rhett." I stood and grabbed my jeans off the floor, tossin' her one of my flannels from the chair in the corner. She caught it without lookin' and sat up to pull it on.
"That's insane."
"That's also Rhett."
I headed for the kitchen and she followed, the soft pad of her bare feet behind me in the hall.
It hit me somewhere between the bedroom door and the refrigerator.
Her wearin' my flannel, me rootin' around for the butter, the whole morning unfoldin' like it was somethin' we'd done a hundred times before. Like it was just ours.
I cracked the first egg into the pan before I trusted myself to keep talkin'.
"He's not gonna chase her. Man sat on his hands for twenty years while I played house with the woman he was in love with. Coulda said somethin' at any point." I shook my head. "Didn't. That's just Rhett."
Calvin leaned in the kitchen doorway, watchin' me with her sleep-mussed hair and her crooked-buttoned flannel like she belonged exactly there.
"So what, he's just gonna let her—" She stopped herself, pressin' her lips together. "Not my business."
"Since when?"
She pushed off the doorframe and crossed the kitchen to flick me in the nose before drifting toward the coffee maker.
"Ow." I grinned, crackin' the second egg. "It'll work out. That's all I know. Those two have got more stubborn between 'em than a mule with a grudge, but it'll work out."
Calvin leaned back against the counter beside the coffee maker, arms crossed, starin' at the drip like she was willin' it to go faster. Close enough that our shoulders nearly touched. She didn't pull back. That still got me, every time. The not pullin' back.
"You look out for her."
"I like her." Simple. Final. The tone of someone who didn't plan to elaborate.
I hadn't expected that either, honestly. Wasn't sure Calvin had liked many people in her life long enough to notice. But I just nodded and turned back to the stove, lettin' the quiet settle between us while the butter popped and sizzled and the coffee started to brew.
We ate standin' up, both leaned against the counter, shoulders touchin'. She stole the better half of my toast without askin' and I let her without commentin' and neither of us said a word about any of it.
When the plates were empty she set hers in the sink, rinsed it, and that was that.
"I gotta get back," she said, not unkindly.
"Yeah." I rinsed my plate and set it with hers. "I'll walk you out."
She pulled her jeans on in the bedroom while I found her boots by the door. Handed them to her when she reappeared, still wearin' my flannel over her own shirt from last night. She glanced down at it, then back at me with a question she didn't quite ask.
"Keep it," I said.
She pressed her lips together, fightin' the smile tryin' to break free. She looked back down and finished pullin' on her boots.
I walked her through the back door and down the steps to the lot where her truck sat. The morning was already warm, the sky that particular shade of early blue that didn't last long. She tossed her keys once in her palm, caught them.
"Today was good," she said, squintin' a little against the light.
"Yesterday," I corrected.
The corner of her mouth lifted. "Yesterday."
She stood there a beat longer than she needed to. I stood there right along with her, hands in my pockets, not pushin'. Then she reached up and gripped the front of my shirt, pulled me down, and kissed me once—firm and unhurried and deliberate—before lettin' go and turnin' for her truck.
I watched her pull out of the lot. Watched the truck until it disappeared around the corner onto Main.
Then I stood there a second longer in the quiet of the empty lot, the morning settlin' around me, and did my level best not to read too much into the fact that she hadn't looked back.
The Birmingham spread was my first stop, and I was grateful for it. Bart's boys ran a tight operation and, more importantly, they weren't talkers. We got on with it.
I'd trimmed and shod the six Birmingham horses—three workin' horses and three family mares—just over a month back, so today it was time to do it all again.
I moved through them steady, the familiar rhythm of it settlin' into my muscles before I'd fully woken up.
Nippers, rasp, the soft grunt of a horse shiftin' its weight.
The smell of hoof and hay and dry summer dirt.
This was what I knew. What I was good at.
I'd been shoin' horses since I was sixteen, apprenticed under my dad's old farrier until the man retired and handed me his client list like a gift I hadn't known I needed.
Now I covered most of Meagher County—a hundred-mile radius of ranches and homesteads and the occasional rodeo outfit passin' through.
It wasn't glamorous work. It was good, hard work and your back paid for it by forty if you weren't careful.
But there was somethin' about it—the patience it required, the way a horse either trusted you or it didn't and you couldn't fake your way to either—that suited me down to the bone.
Cole Birmingham held the last mare steady while I finished her hinds.
"Sullivans picked up two new quarter horses," he offered.
"I know." I set the hoof down and straightened, pressin' a fist to my lower back. "That's my next stop."
"Old man Sullivan'll talk your ear clean off about their bloodlines."
"He always does."
I packed my tools, accepted Cole's cash with a nod, and loaded up the truck.
He wasn't wrong about Sullivan.
The two new quarter horses were young and green and needed the full treatment—clean, shape, shoe—which meant time and patience and a fair bit of convincin' on the younger one, who'd clearly not had enough handlin' and had opinions about the whole process.
I didn't rush her. Never did with a green horse.
You rushed them once and you paid for it for years.
I just kept my voice low and my movements slow until she decided I wasn't worth the fuss and let me get on with it.
Sullivan himself was perched on the fence the whole time, coffee in hand, deep in the particulars of both horses' pedigree. I offered the occasional mm and is that right while my hands did what they knew.
My mind kept slidin' back to Calvin.
The way she'd looked in my kitchen this mornin'. The flannel. The toast she'd taken without askin'. The kiss in the parkin' lot—hard and quick, like a punctuation mark she'd decided on and meant.
I set a hoof down a little harder than I intended and the younger mare tossed her head.
"Easy," I murmured, runnin' a hand down her flank. "Sorry, girl. My fault."
Sullivan didn't notice, still deep in the Kentucky Derby contender from twelve years back. I recentered, took a breath, and got back to it.
Last stop was out past the county line. Widow Pearson. Eighty-one years old, lived alone on forty acres she refused to sell to the developer who'd been circlin' for years, and kept one ancient mare named Biscuit who had to be pushin' thirty and moved like she felt it in her bones.
I'd been comin' out here three years. Charged her half of what I charged everyone else and told her it was a senior discount when she asked. She brought me lemonade every time—real lemonade, hand-squeezed, poured into a mason jar—asked after my mother, and told me I needed a haircut.
Biscuit got nothing but the gentlest trim I had in me. Her hooves were soft with age and she bore the whole thing with the dignified tolerance of the very old and very tired. I took my time with her. Wasn't any reason to hurry.
Today Widow Pearson told me I looked different.
"Do I?" I kept my eyes on Biscuit's near fore.
"Somethin' on your mind." Not a question. She didn't waste words on questions she already knew the answer to.
"Might be."
She made a sound that managed to convey both satisfaction and suspicion at the same time. "Girl?"
I said nothin', which was apparently answer enough because she made the sound again and took a long sip of her lemonade.
"Your daddy had that same look," she said, "right around the time he started courtin' your mama."
I kept my eyes on Biscuit's hoof. "That right."
"Mm." She set her mason jar on the fence post. "Don't overthink it, son. Men who overthink it always wait too long."
I packed up my tools twenty minutes later, tucked her payment—half of what she'd tried to give me—into my shirt pocket, and drove back toward Larkspur with the windows down and the evening comin' on gold across the hills.
By my count, that was nine horses. My back was lettin' me know about every last one of 'em.
The Wild Acre turnoff came up on my right about six miles outside of town.
I drove past it.
Watched it disappear in my rearview.
Told myself I was tired. Told myself she'd just left my apartment this mornin' and the last thing I needed was to show up at the ranch like a lovesick idiot with hay in my boots and tool grease on my hands.
Told myself a lot of things.
Half a mile down the road I slowed, checked my mirror, and made a U-turn in the middle of Route 89.
Took the turnoff.
Didn't have a single good reason.
Didn't need one.