PART TWO HOLT
Left-handed, I miss the steel plate at a hundred yards by a foot and a half.
I reset, breathe the way I taught men to breathe half a lifetime ago, and try again.
Second shot's closer. By the fifteenth I'm hitting more than I'm missing, which isn't where I used to live and isn't nowhere either.
Nobody needs me to shoot anything on this ranch anymore.
I'm doing it anyway, because some morning down the road there might be a reason to, and I'd rather be a man who can than a man who used to be able to.
I'm resetting for a sixteenth try when her arms come around me from behind, chin hooking over my shoulder, close enough that I catch coffee and that shampoo that makes my cock jump every damn time.
"You've been out here an hour." She presses a kiss below my ear. "Ready to saddle up, cowboy, or are you going to keep making that poor steel plate pay for something it didn't do?"
I sling the rifle and turn in her arms instead of answering. I've been sitting on this surprise for a month, and I nearly ruined it twice before I ever get her on the horse.
The trail starts behind Gunderson's bench and climbs straight into pine, the timber closing in cool and dark within the first quarter mile.
Nobody comes up here. That's the whole point of it.
"Where exactly are we going?" Mackenzie asks, mare stepping easy beneath her, saddlebags loaded with more cheese and bread than two people need and a bottle of whiskey I've been saving since Christmas.
"You'll know it when you see it."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting today."
I give her a full, unrepentant smirk, the closest thing to a victory lap I've got left in me.
She's earned the right to hunt down every secret I own, five months of dragging my silences out of me like a dog on a blood trail, but today the secret's mine to keep, and the smirk says so before I do.
She narrows her eyes at me over the mare's ears, honey gone gold in the morning light, and lets it go without a fight, which from this woman counts as a gift.
The timber opens up an hour in, all at once, like the mountain finally decided to let a person see what it's been hiding.
The pool sits at the base of a falls that, today, with the melt still feeding it, comes down loud and full, glass-green water pooling below it, wildflowers crowding the bank in every color the Rocky Mountains know how to make.
Dragonflies work the air over the water in electric blue arcs, and the whole clearing hums, warm and alive, sun coming straight down through a gap in the canopy like it was cut there on purpose.
Mackenzie goes still in the saddle.
"Holt."
"Found this place at seventeen. Never brought anybody up here. Not John, not Knox, not one living soul in twelve years." I dismount, tie off both horses, and reach up for her before she's decided whether she wants help. "Wanted the first person I ever showed it to, to be somebody I actually chose."
She comes down off the mare slow, eyes still on the water, everything guarded in her finally dropping like it dropped once before, her hand on my jaw in a hospital room, telling me not that word, not tonight.
"It's magic," she says, breathless, turning in a slow circle to take in the falls, the wildflowers, the whole impossible clearing at once, a grin breaking across her face like she's twelve years old and just found the one place on earth built for her.
"It's yours now too."
We spread the blanket in the sun. I pour whiskey into two tin cups and she laughs at the cheese, an actual wedge, apples sliced thin, bread torn instead of cut because I never learned to pack a picnic properly.
"This is the least tactical meal I've ever eaten with you."
"Get used to it. I'm retiring from tactical picnics."
She toasts me with the tin cup, whiskey catching the light amber. I watch her throat work when she drinks it and lose the thread of whatever I was about to say next.
"You've got a look on you," she says.
"I've got a look on me most days now. You'll have to be more precise."
"Don't say precise to a federal agent. You'll get us both audited."
"Too late. Already said it." I grin at her, easy, unguarded, a man who's stopped rationing himself out one sentence at a time.
She laughs, and the sound of it goes up into the trees and comes back different, cleaner, like the whole clearing wanted a piece of it.
I hook an arm around her waist before she can get another word out and pull her down flat on top of me, the blanket taking both our bodies at once.
I get a hand in her hair to bring her mouth to mine. She tastes like whiskey and sun, and I take my time with it before I pull back enough to look at her.
"How's this look?" I ask, doing my best attempt at hooded, lustful eyes, which by her expression isn't landing anywhere close to subtle.
"Like a man who's about to get exactly what he's after."
"Good. Wanted to be precise."
We eat slow. She tells me about a Boy Scout troop she nearly drowned on the Yampa, and I laugh harder than I've laughed in months, whiskey burning warm in my chest, sun doing exactly what she promised it would to a body that spent a decade forgetting how to be warm on purpose.
Then she stands, unbuttons her shirt right there in the sun, and doesn't look back to see if I'm watching.
I'm watching.
"Coming?" she asks, already down to nothing, already at the water's edge, and I'm only two steps behind her, naked and completely, utterly happy.
The pool takes my breath the second I'm under, cold enough to shock and clean enough to feel like absolution. She comes up laughing under the falls with her hair slicked dark gold down her spine, water running off her collarbone in a way that has me forgetting the cold entirely.
"You look like something out of a myth," I tell her, wading closer.
"I look like a woman who just jumped into snowmelt. Romanticize it less."
"Can't help it." My hands find her waist under the water, and she doesn't pull away, just leans in, water sluicing warm where our bodies meet despite everything the creek's doing to cool it. "Told you once I wanted you like this. Out in the open air. Told you I wouldn't care who walked up on us."
"You remember that?"
"I remember every word I've ever said to you sober.
It's the drugged confessions I've got gaps in.
" My thumb traces the line of her jaw, water dripping off both of us into the pool.
"You told me your fantasy once. Whispered it right in my ear like a secret you weren't sure you were allowed to have. "
Her breath catches. "You remember that too."
"Whiskey and cheese and apples. A creek under a waterfall.
Drying off naked in the sun." I press my mouth to her temple, to the shell of her ear, quiet enough that only she and the dragonflies get to hear it.
"Making love until you'd worn me out twice, not just yourself.
Falling asleep under the stars in my arms."
"Holt."
"I built the whole thing for you, Mac. Every piece." I pull back far enough to watch her face take that in, watch her eyes go bright and unguarded in a way she still isn't fully used to letting me see. "This is your fantasy. I've been sitting on it for months, waiting for the right sky."
She doesn't say anything for a long moment. The falls keep running behind her, dragonflies stitching light across the water, and when she finally speaks her voice has gone rough at the edges.
"I love you."
It comes out before I've said it first, which isn't how I planned this, and I don't care one bit that the plan just broke.
"I love you too." I get both hands in her wet hair, tilt her face up to mine.
"Have for longer than I let myself admit.
Kept telling myself it was temporary. A case.
A season. Something that would burn off with the weather.
" My thumb drags along her cheekbone, water and something warmer both running down it now.
"It didn't burn off. It just got bigger every single day you stayed under my roof, until one morning I woke up and understood you weren't visiting anymore.
You'd moved in. Not just the house, Mackenzie. All of it. Every part of my heart too."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Good." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. "Because I already told you. I don't threaten. That includes myself. You're not leaving this ranch unless you drag me with you."
She kisses me then, both of us dripping, cold-warm, and entirely undone. I carry her out of the pool with her legs locked around my waist and lay her down on the blanket in a patch of sun that's been waiting all afternoon for exactly this.
I take my time drying her with my mouth instead of a towel, every inch of her lit gold, wildflowers crushed sweet beneath the blanket, dragonflies working lazy circles overhead like they've got nowhere better to be either.
She arches into every place my mouth lands, a moan breaking loose from her that the whole clearing gets to keep.
"More," she says, the same word she's said to me since a line shack in February, except there's nothing left guarding it now.
I give her more. I give her all of it.
Slow at first, patient the way I promised her patient could be, until slow isn't enough for either of us and she's pulling me down with both hands fisted in my hair, my wet hair dripping onto her breasts with every thrust, taking everything I've got and asking for what's underneath it too.
I take her like that, deep, watching her whole body arch off the blanket under me. When she comes apart, it drags me right over with her, my release pulsing into her in long, spent waves, her name gone rough and half-formed in my throat while I finish inside her.
We come down slow. I roll onto my back and pull her into my shoulder, her leg thrown over my thigh, both of us breathing like we ran the whole trail up here.