19. Nora
— ? —
Nora
Lightning took the Boones’ hay barn at dusk.
I heard the call come over the emergency channel while I was finishing up at the clinic, and by the time I made it to their property the sky was red with fire and the volunteer crew was already scrambling.
Six horses in the paddock adjacent to the burning structure, all of them panicked, all of them needing to be moved before the wind shifted.
Hunt’s truck was already there.
I saw him before he saw me, silhouetted against the flames as he worked to open the paddock gate. He was moving with calm efficiency despite the chaos, his voice low and steady as he approached the nearest horse, a big bay gelding who was rearing and screaming at the fire.
“Easy,” I heard him say. “Easy, I know. We’re going to get you out.”
The gelding came down. Let Hunt clip a lead rope to his halter. Followed him toward the secondary paddock like Hunt had some kind of magic that worked on terrified animals.
He probably did. It was one of the things I’d fallen in love with first.
I ran to help with the remaining horses.
It should’ve been a clean evacuation. Five horses moved safely, one to go, the fire contained to the barn with the volunteer crew keeping it from spreading.
But the last horse, a small gray mare, had backed herself into the corner of the paddock and was refusing to move, every muscle in her locked with fear.
Hunt handed off the gelding and went back for her.
I watched him approach slowly, carefully, his hands up and his voice that low murmur that animals responded to. The mare trembled but didn’t run. He got close enough to reach for her halter.
Then a section of the barn roof collapsed with a crash that shook the ground.
The mare bolted.
Hunt went down under her hooves.
I heard myself scream his name, heard it like it was coming from someone else, and then I was running toward him without any memory of deciding to move.
He was on the ground, on his side, and one of the other volunteers had caught the mare and was leading her away, and I was on my knees beside him before my brain caught up with my body.
“Hunt. Hunt, look at me.”
He groaned. Rolled onto his back. His face was scraped and his shoulder was bloody and he was breathing, he was definitely breathing, but there was a lot of blood.
“I’m fine,” he said, which was clearly a lie.
“You’re not fine. You just got kicked by a horse.”
“I’ve been kicked by worse.” He tried to sit up and winced. “The mare?”
“She’s safe. Everyone’s safe. Now stay still and let me look at you.”
The wound was high on his shoulder, just under the collarbone, right beside the healing bear scars. A long gash, deep enough to need closing, bleeding freely but not arterially. He’d been lucky. A few inches to the left and the hoof would’ve caught his throat.
“Can you move your arm?”
He demonstrated, lifting his left arm with a grimace. “See? Fine.”
“You need stitches.”
“Then stitch me.”
“Hunt, you need a hospital.”
“The nearest hospital is forty-five minutes away and the emergency room will take hours.” He pushed himself to sitting despite my protests. “You’ve got sutures in your kit. You’ve closed worse than this on animals twice my size. And I trust your hands more than any ER doc I’ve ever met.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to point out that I wasn’t qualified for human patients and that veterinary sutures weren’t the same as medical ones and that the proper protocol was to get him to a professional.
But his shoulder was bleeding and the fire was still burning and he was looking at me with absolute faith, and I’d stitched up worse than this. Doc Hale had made sure of it.
“The tack room,” I said. “It’s away from the fire and there’s light.”
He let me help him up, let me guide him toward the small building on the other side of the paddock. The tack room was dusty and dark until I found the lantern and lit it, and then it was golden and shadowed and close.
“Sit on the saddle rack.” I pointed to the sturdy wooden structure against the wall. “Don’t move.”
I got my kit from the truck and came back to find him exactly where I’d left him, shirtless now, his ruined shirt discarded on the floor. The lantern light caught the hard planes of his chest and the ridges of his stomach and I made myself focus on the wound instead.
Professional. I was being professional.
I cleaned the gash with antiseptic and laid out my sutures and positioned the lantern for better light. Hunt sat perfectly still, his breathing steady, not even flinching when the antiseptic must’ve burned.
“This is going to hurt,” I warned.
“Just do it.”
I put the first stitch in. He didn’t make a sound.
I’d closed wounds like this a hundred times on a hundred different animals, and I let the rhythm of it take over. Clean, position, pierce, pull, knot. The familiar motions steadied my hands, let me forget that this was my husband’s skin under the needle, my husband’s blood on my fingers.
Second stitch. Third. The wound was closing neatly.
And then I saw the ink.
Fresh. Fine-lined. Directly over his heart.
LENORA.
I froze with the needle in my hand.
“Nora?” His voice was careful. “Everything okay?”
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Could only stare at the small, precise letters inked into his skin, dark against the pale expanse of his chest.
My name. Over his heart.
“When?” The word came out rough.
Hunt was silent for a moment. Then, quietly: “The week you left.”
I felt a wall crack in my chest, one I’d been maintaining through sheer force of will.
“It hurt less than the rest of that week,” he added.
I made myself breathe. Made myself pick up the needle again. Made my hands steady through the fourth stitch and the fifth and the sixth, professional to the last knot, while my name, my full name that no one called me, sat inked over his heart like a permanent wound.
I tied off the final suture.
Cut the thread.
Looked up.
He was looking down at me.
The lantern light caught his eyes, pale and burning and desperate, and the storm was still in my blood, adrenaline and fear and the memory of seeing him go down under those hooves.
I kissed him.
It wasn’t a decision. One second I was looking at him and the next my mouth was on his, my hands fisted in his hair, kissing him with all the anger and want and confusion I’d been carrying for months.
He made a sound against my lips, surprise or relief or both, and then his hands were on my waist and he was kissing me back.
I’d forgotten what this was like.
No. That was a lie. I remembered exactly what this was like. I’d been remembering every night in his flannel, every time I caught his scent, every time I looked at him and felt the heat I was pretending didn’t exist.
I bit his lower lip. He groaned.
“This doesn’t mean I forgive you.” I pulled back far enough to say it, my breath coming fast.
“Understood. Doesn’t mean a thing.”
“It means nothing.”
“Yes ma’am.”
I kissed him again, harder, and shoved him back against the saddle rack until the wood creaked. My hands went for his belt. His went for the hem of my shirt, and then we were tearing at each other like the barn was still on fire, like stopping might kill us both.
He got a hand on my jeans and I knocked it away.
“I’m in charge,” I said.
His throat worked when he swallowed. “Yes, ma’am.” The rough scrape of his voice dropped straight into my belly and pulled, and I hated that too, hated how wet I already was just from the sound of him handing himself over.
I shoved my jeans down my hips and climbed into his lap, one knee braced on either side of him, careful of the fresh stitches and not careful about a single other thing.
He was already hard against me. I reached between us and wrapped my hand around his cock, lined him up, and sank down slow, taking every inch of him, and we both made noises that had no business anywhere near walls.
This was not the careful married sex we’d let go quiet somewhere in the second year.
This was mean, and it was mine. I flattened my palms on his chest, over the ink and the edge of the bandage, and I fucked him at exactly the pace I wanted, and he let me, because tonight he didn’t get a say in a single thing.
His hands gripped my hips and held on and didn’t steer, knuckles gone white, the muscles in his forearms standing out where he fought himself not to take over.
“You can touch me,” I said, and he touched me like I might disappear, one big hand splaying up my spine and the other dropping between us to circle my clit right where I needed him, sure and unhurried, because he’d never once forgotten how.
I hated how good it was.
I hated that his hands still knew me by heart, that even furious, even now, my body opened for him like none of it had happened, like the fight in my chest and the slick heat between my thighs belonged to two different women.
“Nora.” He breathed my name into my throat, half-ruined. “Fuck, you feel-”
“Don’t talk.”
“Let me-”
“I said don’t.”
He shut up. He dropped his forehead to my collarbone and let me use him, his breath ragged against my skin, and I worked myself on him hard and filthy, grinding down until the knot low in my gut pulled tight and tore loose.
When it took me I bit down on his good shoulder to trap the word clawing up my throat, and the groan that tore out of him rattled through my whole body.
He came with my name half-formed on his tongue, hips jerking up into mine, and I shattered a second time on the aftershocks, nails dug into his back, his stitches be damned.
The second I could breathe, I was off him.
I fixed my jeans with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. Didn’t look at him. Couldn’t look at him.
“The west paddock fence is tomorrow’s priority,” I heard myself say. “Be there at seven.”
I walked out of the tack room and didn’t look back.
At home, I showered until the water ran cold. I put on his flannel because I couldn’t seem to stop doing that. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out what the hell I’d just done.
At one in the morning, I picked up my phone and called his number.
I hung up on the first ring.
Thirty seconds later, my phone buzzed with a text.
Still awake. Still only yours. Always was. That’s the part you got wrong.
I held the phone against my chest and felt the words sink in like a bruise.
It doesn’t change what he did.
It doesn’t change anything.
I fell asleep holding the phone, and if I dreamed about his mouth and his hands and the way he’d said my name like it’d cost him blood, that was no one’s business but mine.