Chapter 8
Boone watched Vivi follow him into the family room, feet squelching across the floorboards, and felt that familiar mix of exasperation and something else—something that was becoming harder to dismiss as anything other than what it was.
Attraction.
The scent of memories hit him first—but then there was her.
Wet, shivering, and impossibly alive. The scent of her, faint but undeniable beneath the crisp smell of rushing water, teased at the edges of his attention.
He hated how well he was learning it. Just like he hated how his body reacted before his brain could shut it down.
He moved to the hearth, stacking kindling and lighting the fire to help her dry off. Even though it was a hot day, the river came down from the melted snow in the mountains leaving the water a balmy forty degrees.
She stiffened when he draped the thick blanket over her shoulders, the soft weight settling against her. He let his fingers linger on her neck and let the warmth from him press into her for a moment longer than intended.
She didn’t need him, he reminded himself, but he liked being useful all the same. He told himself that was just his personality. But his dick reminded him that he’d never gotten quite so upset with someone for doing something stupidly brave.
His fingers dipped to the curve of her shoulder and he caught the small hitch of surprise in her stance and couldn't stop the corner of his mouth from twitching.
"You're lucky I'm not letting you freeze your toes off," he grumbled.
"I'm fully capable of warming myself," she shot back, confidence layered over chattering teeth.
He stepped closer—close enough to see the water still dripping from her lashes—and allowed himself a slow smirk.
"Capable, huh?" Then he leaned against the armrest of the couch, arms crossed, watching her the way he'd been trying not to watch her since she arrived. "You're a little firecracker."
She met his gaze with this daring fire in her eyes. "Better a firecracker than a damsel in distress."
He felt that little tug in his chest, the quiet jolt that made his usual gruffness falter. The room was filled with the crackle of the fire, their eyes locked, the space between them humming with an unspoken pull neither one would admit to.
There it was again, that low and persistent hum like a current he'd walked into before he'd noticed the water rising. He shook his head slightly, trying to push it down.
"Next time, try not to drag me into your mess."
Her wet hair stuck to her cheek as she tilted her head, that grin pulling at her lips—and he caught himself wanting to lean in and push it back off her skin.
Boone dragged a hand down his face, the rough scrape of his palm grounding him. The fire crackled and filled the silence, but all he could hear was the echo of her laugh, the way she'd looked at him out there in the creek—unguarded, like maybe she felt it too.
He needed to stop hearing that.
He straightened, dragging in a breath that did absolutely nothing to ease the restless energy coiling under his skin.
He’d spent his whole life keeping things straight—his seat in the saddle, his balance on a bull that wanted him dead, his grip when the world tried to throw him, and his emotions nailed down tight where they couldn't cause trouble.
And now here he was, standing in his own living room, losing his grip over a woman who wasn't his to want.
She wasn't available. She wasn't staying. She didn't even particularly like him. But no matter how much his chest ached when she smiled, Boone knew better than to chase something that was only passing through.
He'd learned that lesson already. He wasn't going back to get a PhD in that specific subject.
"I'm sorry about making things worse earlier," she said quietly. "I just saw that poor calf and reacted without thinking. I saw a problem and went after it."
"You probably saved it," he begrudgingly admitted. "But next time, call for me. Fixing things without thinking them through can cause more danger than you bargained for."
He felt the irony of that land on him the moment it left his mouth—like he was one to talk.
Right now, she was the danger. Bright, unpredictable, and impossible to rein in.
Every impulsive move, every spark in her eyes made his carefully ordered world feel unsteady—like the ground beneath him could give way without warning.
She wasn't just challenging him, she was threatening the one thing he'd spent his entire life building: control.
He hated it. He just hated it slightly less than he hated the idea of her not being here.
"Like you said, if I had paused to call you, that little thing would have died," she said, throwing his words back at him.
"And if I hadn't seen you, you might have died." He held her gaze, steady and certain. "I'd take the second over the first, every time."
Something moved across her face that made him wonder what kind of assholes she’d been around. Or worse, what kind of asshole she thought him to be.
He found he didn't want to be that. Not to her.
Which was its own kind of problem.
After a long silence she asked, "What was it like, growing up here? With all this land? The freedom to just roam?"
He sank into the couch and let the firelight wash over his face, feeling the heat work against the chill still settled in his bones from the creek.
He hadn't planned on talking—not about the ranch, not about his father, not about any of the choices he'd made or had made.
But there was something about her presence that rendered it almost inevitable.
She didn't crowd him or demand answers, but those eyes—those damn eyes that never looked away—so patient and expectant they lingered on him. He'd been able to resist a lot of things in his life. Turns out patient and expectant weren't among them.
"My dad," Boone began, his voice low enough that he half expected the fire to swallow it. "He used to say, 'You've got grit, son. This place will never fall apart as long as a Callahan is here to hold it together.'"
The words felt heavy. Like a coat he'd worn too long and forgotten how much it weighed.
Vivi tilted her head softly but pointed. "That's a lot of pressure to put on a kid."
"It was his way of passing down the family legacy."
The truth hung there, exposing a vulnerability he hadn’t intended on showing.
Boone flexed his hands absently, feeling the roughness in his palms, and the memory came unbidden.
He was ten years old, hauling fence posts in the back pasture, sun beating down on the back of his neck, sweat stinging his eyes.
Every muscle ached, his small frame groaning under the weight, hands blistered raw.
He'd wanted to cry and nearly quit. But his dad had been there, in that unflinching way he always was and those words had landed like stones in his chest—impossibly heavy to understand for a ten-year-old.
The promise and expectation all tangled together, and he'd felt small and incapable and quietly desperate to escape the burden.
He'd stared at his blistered palms trying to understand what grit was supposed to feel like and wondered if he had enough of it. But somewhere beneath the soreness and the exhaustion, there had been a flicker of something else—pride. His dad had been trusting him with something real.
That memory had never left, just ticked like a quiet drumbeat he'd been carrying ever since.
Even now, decades later, with every decision pressing down on him like the weight of the mountains, he could still feel the ache in those ten-year-old hands and hear the words.
He could still find, somewhere deep down, that stubborn and relentless grit his father had seen in him before he'd seen it in himself.
"No," she said firmly, leaning in slightly,. "It was his way of putting a huge burden on an impressionable kid. Running this place…was it your dream?"
The sudden lump in his throat was very real. He wanted to say yes; to nod and pretend it had always been his choice, but he couldn't.
"Or was it the rodeo?" she asked quietly.
He looked into the flames and saw the rodeo arena instead—the roar of the crowd, the smell of hay and sweat, the rush of the adrenaline and being completely, entirely free. That had been his dream. Not the ranch or the legacy.
The rodeo had been his.
But the ranch had survived—had even thrived—because he'd given up the rodeo and stayed. He just hadn't let himself think about that too hard in a while.
"How did you know I rode?"
She looked pointedly at the wall of belt buckles and trophies. He let out a short chuckle. "Right."
"You miss it?"
He looked at her instead of the trophies and his chest tightened in a unfamiliar way.
She wasn't just asking, she was seeing—past the walls and the stubbornness and the quiet suffocation of responsibility he'd been carrying so long he'd stopped noticing the impact.
And somehow that understanding knocked him completely off balance.
"Yeah," he said quietly to himself. "I miss it. The rodeo was the endgame."
A small, knowing smile pulled at her lips. "That's what I thought. You gave up the thing you loved because you thought it was expected. Because of your parents and the guilt. And because of love and admiration."
Her words cut straight through armor he polished on the regular. He felt exposed—the vulnerability prickling along his skin—but instead of retreating, he stayed. Because someone wasn't flinching at the weight of him, wasn’t judging it or pitying it. She just got it.
"How do you understand that?" His voice came out soft, almost disbelieving. "I don't think I fully understood it myself."
Vivi shrugged—the motion almost casual compared to the intensity in her eyes.
"I've been there my whole life," she explained. "Giving up what I wanted most in the world to please everyone else. My parents, my friends, my boyfriends, especially Lewis." She paused for a beat. "I'm only just now learning to be the Beyoncé of my own life," she admitted with a wistful smile.
Boone let out a laugh—this unexpected and unguarded kind that he hadn't heard from himself in a long time. It was so forceful he could practically hear a crack in his tightly wound world. "I don't even know what that means."
She gave him a smile that lit him from the inside out.
"It means taking the lead in your own story instead of waiting for someone else to write it. It might be full of heartbreak and mistakes and a few dramatic plot twists—but I get to choose how it ends."
Boone shook his head, still chuckling quietly. He looked at her in the firelight—warm and bright and completely unaware of what she was doing to him—and for just a moment let himself imagine writing his own ending, choosing differently.
That thought scared the hell out of him.