The Brother Returns #3
But the boundary wasn't enough, the truth pressing against him even as he worked, the fence keeping cattle from wandering but doing nothing to stop investigators from asking questions or Liam's words from echoing in his head or Maeve from standing in the path of the choice he'd made when he kissed her in the dance hall and carried her to the bed and let himself believe that the paper was less real than the flesh.
The sun climbed higher, burning off the mist, turning the frost to dew on the grass.
His shirt was soaked, his pants stained with clay, his hands raw from forty feet of fence, three posts, two wire sections, and nothing remained except the ache in his muscles and the hollowness in his chest where hope had been.
He walked back to the cabin. The motorcycle was still there, parked at an angle that suggested it had been abandoned rather than placed.
Smoke rose from the chimney. Maeve had built up the fire.
He stood at the door for a moment, his hand on the latch, trying to compose himself into the man he'd been before last night, the stoic neighbor, the safe choice, the man who didn't feel.
The door opened before he could touch it. Maeve stood there, her face flushed from the fire, her eyes dark, her mouth a line. "Where did you go?"
"I was at the fence," he said, not meeting her eyes.
"You were out there for three hours?"
"It needed work," he said, his voice rough from the cold and the dust.
His hands were wrecked, blisters and blood where a staple had nicked his palm. "You're bleeding."
"It'll stop on its own," he said, turning away so she couldn't see the blood anymore.
"Cole." She said his name the way she'd said it last night, in the dark, when she'd asked him not to stop. Now it sounded different. Heavier. Full of the distance he was already building. "Liam's gone, he rode back to the main house, and he said he's staying until this is resolved."
"Good," Cole said, and Maeve's eyes widened.
"Good? He's threatening to expose us, saying the marriage is a fraud."
"He's right," Cole said, the words coming out before he could stop them, and her face changed, the color draining, the line of her mouth hardening into something that looked like the fence posts he'd just set.
"What?" she breathed. "He's right," Cole said again, and the lie was easier this time because it was the truth he'd been telling himself for five years, the truth that had kept him alive after his wife died.
"The marriage was for the trust and the filing and the protection, not for this, not for us, not for the bed and not for the counter and not for any of it. "
"Don't," Maeve said. "Don't do this. Don't stand there with bleeding hands and tell me last night was a mistake."
"It was a mistake," Cole said, and Maeve stepped onto the porch, close enough that the woodsmoke in her hair reached him, the coffee on her breath, the particular scent of her skin that he'd memorized in the dark.
"You're lying," she said, her voice low and fierce.
"I'm trying to protect you," he said, but the words sounded hollow even to him.
"You're trying to protect yourself." She stepped closer, her eyes blazing. "Liam scared you, he said the word fraud and you ran out here to rebuild a fence because fences are easier than feelings, you'd rather dig holes in frozen ground than admit you're scared."
"I am scared," Cole said, and the admission cost him more than the three hours of labor, more than the blisters, more than anything he'd said last night.
"I'm terrified because he's right, because if they investigate, if they look at us, if they find out that the marriage started as paper and turned into something else, they can void the trust, and then you lose the ranch, you lose everything, and it'll be my fault because I couldn't keep my hands off you, because I wanted you more than I wanted you safe. "
"Safe," Maeve said, and the word was bitter in her mouth.
"You think safe is what I need? You think lying alone in your bed listening to you breathe on that couch was safe?
You think wanting you for eight years and never saying a word was safe?
Safe is killing me, Cole, safe is the slowest death there is, and last night was the first time I felt alive since my father got sick, and you're standing here telling me it was a mistake because some corporate lawyer might ask questions? "
"I'm telling you it was a mistake because I can't survive losing you."
The silence that followed was full of the weight of what he'd admitted, the vulnerability he'd thrown between them like a gauntlet, like a barrier, like the last defense of a man who'd already lost too much.
Maeve searched his face, and understanding moved across her own, the fear and grief and five years of solitude that had calcified into a belief that love was a liability, the man who'd held a dying wife's hand and vowed never to hold another, the vow stronger than the night they'd shared.
"Then don't lose me," she said, but her voice was quieter now, less certain, the first crack in the certainty she'd carried since the dance hall.
"I already am," Cole said. "Every minute I'm with you, I'm one minute closer to the moment when they take it all away, and I can't watch that happen, can't be the reason you lose your land and your family falls apart and you stand in a courtroom explaining that you married a man who couldn't keep his promise to stay on paper. "
He stepped past her into the cabin. The warmth enveloped him, the smell of coffee and pine and the bed they'd shared, and every object was a reproach.
The hooks still stood three feet apart, the counter still held the memory of her body lifted against it, and the bed still carried the imprint of her spine against his chest. He walked to the desk and opened the drawer, the paper inside staring up at him, the contract they'd signed, the boundaries they'd agreed to, the lie that had been safer than the truth.
"We go back to the terms," he said, the words coming out like stones he was stacking between them, one by one, a wall of separate rooms and separate lives and a marriage that existed only for the trust, nothing else, not the bed and not the counter and not the spine he'd traced in the dark.
"And what about last night?"
"It didn't happen," Cole said, and Maeve stood in the doorway, the cold air at her back, the firelight on her face, and when she said "It happened," he looked at her and said, "Not anymore."
He walked to the couch, the same couch he'd slept on for six nights, the cushions thin, the frame too short for his legs, the place where he'd listened to her breathe and wanted her and denied himself.
He lay down, his boots still on, his clay-stained pants leaving dirt on the wool, his raw hands folded on his chest. He closed his eyes and kept them closed.
She stood there long enough for the fire to pop and the coffee to cool, breathing ragged and controlled, the sound of a woman fighting tears she wouldn't let fall, then stepped to the bed and pulled the blanket up and smoothed the pillow.
She moved to the stove, poured coffee, set the mug down with a click that sounded like a door closing.
Then she left. The door opened, the cold rushed in, the latch clicked shut, and her boots crunched on the gravel, moving toward the barn, toward the work that was waiting, toward the ranch that had always been her first love and her first responsibility.
He lay on the couch and the cabin settled around him, the wood creaking in the heat, the stove ticking as it cooled.
The cast iron contracted in a rhythm of small, metallic sighs, each tick a fraction of a degree lost, the smell of cooling ash turning bitter and gray in the firebox.
The wind moved through the pines outside the window, and the one-room log cabin held the sound differently now, the way a hollow holds water, the space between the walls seeming to expand in the absence of her breathing.
The coffee in the pot had gone cold, the oils separating on the surface, and the particular bitterness of stale coffee joined the pine and the wool and the dying embers in an atmosphere that pressed against his chest without mercy, the air itself dense with the residue of what had been broken.