Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The truck idled on the gravel shoulder, headlights cutting into the dark ahead. Nothing but empty road and the silhouette of the Bitterroots against a sky that had gone deep blue and starless at the edges. Beautiful and indifferent and wide open in every direction.
Wide open.
That used to feel like freedom.
I put my hand on the gearshift.
Idaho by morning. Wyoming by nightfall tomorrow if I pushed it. I had enough cash to get gone and enough sense to know that gone was the smart play here. Sixteen years of instinct, honed sharp as a farrier's rasp, all of it pointed in the same direction.
Go.
Wyatt Cole was coming to Meagher County.
Wyatt Cole, who was thirty-seven years old and still riding bulls because it was the only thing he'd ever been good at and the only place that still wanted him.
My hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
He didn't know I was here. There was no reason he'd know.
I was nobody—a ranch hand in a town that didn't make it onto half the maps, living in a half-finished house under a name that had never been his and never would be.
He had no way of knowing I'd ended up in Meagher County.
No way of knowing I'd come back to my grandfather's land like something that had been thrown away and found its own way home.
He didn't know.
I said it again. Slower.
He didn't know.
The engine idled. The road stretched out ahead of me, dark and open and going somewhere that wasn't here.
I thought about Brody's face when I'd ridden Maribel in those slow, quiet circles. The wet shine of his eyes that he hadn't tried to hide. The way he'd pressed his lips to my temple afterward, even with his wrists cinched behind his back. After I'd taken what I needed and given nothing back.
I thought about the flannel still hanging on the hook inside the back door of his house.
His house.
My house, for now.
I put the truck in drive.
I told myself I was just going back to get my things.
Told myself I'd pack up quick and clean, leave the flannel on the hook, leave the key on the kitchen counter, and be on the highway before midnight.
Told myself I'd done it a hundred times before and it never got harder, it just got faster, and that was a good thing—that was the whole point.
I told myself all of it the entire six blocks through the quiet dark of Larkspur until I pulled up in front of the house with the boarded windows and the flickering porch light.
I let myself in through the back door.
The house was dark and smelled like sawdust and fresh paint. I stood in the kitchen for a moment without turning on the light, just breathing it in, listening to the quiet of a place that was being slowly and stubbornly loved back into something worth keeping.
I should start with the bedroom. Grab the duffel, the boots, the—
Something small and warm wound around my ankles.
I looked down.
Cat blinked up at me in the thin light coming through the kitchen window, tail hooked into a question mark, entirely unbothered by the hour or the state of me. One meow—short and pointed, like there were thoughts about my tardiness—and then a small head butted firmly against my shin.
I stood there for a long moment.
It happened again.
I sat down and Cat walked straight into my hands like it had been doing it its whole short life, purring before I'd even gotten a proper grip. I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets and held the warm, ridiculous thing against my chest and listened to it purr in the dark.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket.
I fished it out one-handed.
brODY
you're taking me underwear shopping
I stared at it.
Outside, the Bitterroots stood dark and silent against the sky. The road to Idaho was still out there, wide open, going somewhere that wasn't here.
I thumbed the little thumbs up reaction and put my phone face-down on the floor.
Wyatt Cole didn't know I was here.
Three weeks wasn't long. I'd kept a low profile my whole life—I was good at it, better than good.
Stay off the rodeo grounds. Stay out of the bars on the big nights.
Let the circuit roll through Meagher County the way it always did, onto the next town and the next and the next until it was somebody else's problem.
He'd never know.
I pressed my chin to the top of Cat's small warm head and told myself that was true until the kitchen stopped feeling like a place I was leaving and started feeling like a place I was staying.
It didn't take as long as it should have.
"Rise and shine!"
The bedroom door swung open hard enough to rattle the frame.
I didn't move. Didn't open my eyes. Just tightened my grip on the pillow over my face and waited for the nightmare to end.
It did not end.
"I will end you." My voice was muffled by the pillow but surely he picked up what I was layin' down.
The mattress dipped under his weight and the pillow was ripped clean off my head, flooding my vision with the cruelty of Saturday morning sunlight cutting through the one window in the room that wasn't boarded up.
"Brody." My voice came out like gravel dragged through tar. "It is too early for you."
"It's eight-thirty."
"I said what I said."
He was sitting on the edge of the mattress, boot heels on the floor, already fully dressed and disgustingly alert, his hat in one hand and that grin stretched wide across his stupidly handsome face.
The same face that had been pressed into my hair last night in the barn.
That had kissed my temple with his wrists looped in his own belt.
That had said please in a voice that had no business being quiet.
I waited for it. For the question, the look, some acknowledgment of the fact that I'd belted his hands behind his back and dry humped him into oblivion and then peeled out of the ranch like my tail was on fire. Some version of what the hell was that or are you okay or want to talk about it.
He said nothing about any of it.
I narrowed my eyes.
He just sat there grinning at me like a golden retriever on his best day.
"You're not gonna ask," I said.
"Nope." Completely unbothered. Like we were discussing the weather. "Reckon you'll tell me when you're ready."
I stared at him for a long moment, searching for the angle. Some men used silence as a tactic—let it pool up around you until you filled it yourself just to make it stop. I'd learned to outlast that particular brand of manipulation before I could legally drink.
But Brody wasn't doing that. He just… meant it.
Which was somehow more disarming than any angle would've been.
I narrowed my eyes at him.
He reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear.
I kept narrowing.
He kept smiling.
"You're not human," I told him.
"Been said before."
I stood and dragged both hands through my hair. "I'm taking a shower."
His brows waggled. "Want some company?"
"I want some coffee."
"On it!" He was on his feet in an instant, entirely too pleased with himself. On the way out the door, his palm landed across my ass with a crack that echoed off the bare walls.
I looked at the empty doorway for a moment, shaking my head, then grabbed my toiletry bag and headed for the bathroom.
From somewhere downstairs came the cheerful clatter of him rooting around in the kitchen, followed by the banging of a man who could not locate a coffee filter under any circumstances.
I could only hope like hell he found one because dealing with a man who acted as if the sun had personally asked him to fill in for it today would require more than one cup.
Twenty minutes later, hair damp and human again, I followed the sound of him down the stairs and found my first hit of caffeine waiting at the edge of the counter.
The kitchen was coming together in that same slow, stubborn way the whole house was: new countertop on one side, subfloor still exposed on the other, a stack of hardwood planks lined up against the wall waiting for today.
Brody was already crouched over the layout, tape measure in one hand, pencil tucked behind his ear, reading glasses that he would die before acknowledging he needed perched on his nose.
I'd found them in a kitchen drawer the second week and hadn't said a single word, which was, I felt, one of my more generous contributions to this relationship.
If that's even what this was.
Hell if I know.
I picked up my mug and drank half of it standing at the counter before I picked up a plank.
"You done your starting line yet?"
He looked up. Looked back down. "Almost."
"It's crooked."
"It is not."
I knelt beside him and sighted down the chalk line. Said nothing. Let the geometry speak for itself.
He paused for a beat before admitting, "It's a little crooked."
"Mm." I snapped the line then stood.
He watched me do it with the expression of a man recalibrating several assumptions at once.
I was used to that look by now—the moment people stopped seeing the Docs and the attitude and started seeing what was underneath them.
My daddy may not have given me much, but he gave me a childhood spent learning every job on the circuit that needed doing.
And I'd turned that into sixteen years of doing a little of this and a little of that.
I picked up the first plank and fitted it to the line.
Brody reached for his mallet.
We fell into it—the rhythm of the work settling over us the way it always did, easier than it had any right to be.
The knock of the mallet. The satisfying click of tongue and groove.
The smell of fresh-cut wood and sawdust. I called out measurements and he cut them and neither of us said much beyond that.
About forty minutes in, I became aware that it had been a while since I'd heard the mallet.
I looked up.
Brody was sitting back on his heels, mallet hanging loose from one hand, watching me work with an expression I recognized from the barn—soft and unguarded and not bothering to hide itself.
"You're not working," I said.
"I'm supervising."
"You're staring."
"That too."
I set the next plank in place and held out my hand for the mallet without looking at him. After a beat, he put it in my palm.
"Cat's not down here," he said.
I drove the plank home.
"She's asleep upstairs, curled up in my sweatshirt on the bedroom floor."
Brody's head snapped my way. "She?"
"Congrats, daddy." I grinned. "It's a girl."
"How do you know?"
"Had to run a sample over to the vet a few days back. Figured I'd get Cat checked out while I was there." I hammered the next plank into place without looking up. "She's healthy as a horse. About twelve weeks old. And a she."
Brody said nothing.
I glanced over.
He was still crouched on the floor, hands loose between his knees. A dozen different expressions flickered across his face like channels being changed too quick to land on any one of them.
I waited for the joke. The grin. Some version of well, I'll be damned delivered with a wink and a finger-gun.
Instead, he set down the board he'd been holding with a quiet, deliberate click.
Stood up.
Turned for the door.
And left.
I stayed on the flooring with the mallet in my hand and listened to the back door settle shut behind him.
I looked at the door.
Looked back at the plank in front of me.
Looked at the door again.
What the hell just happened?