Chapter 13 Lucas
LUCAS
He lay on his back and counted his breaths until the numbers blurred. The house had gone still, but stillness never promised sleep. A mug she’d pressed into his palm cooled untouched on the nightstand, steam gone, vanilla ghosting the room. He’d told himself he didn’t need it. Didn’t need anything.
The ceiling held no answers. He swung his legs out, pulled on jeans and a long-sleeve, and let the old habit take over: door, hall, porch, yard. Wynn watched from his pillow and thumped his tail once in sleepy protest; Luc crooked two fingers in a quiet stay and took the path alone.
The barn met him with night smells—hay, leather oil, warm animal. A low shuffle from Blaze’s stall told him the stallion had already marked his footfall. Luc ran a palm along the top rail as he walked, counting by muscle memory: latch, slat, hinge, gate. The work of his hands lived in each sound.
He meant to saddle up and ride the ridge until his head emptied.
He didn’t make it that far.
Cookie’s stall washed in lamplight. The door stood ajar.
Dahlia’s back filled the frame, shoulders loose beneath one of his flannels, sleeves rolled to her forearms. Her brush moved slow through the mare’s spotted coat; each stroke laid the world down flatter than the one before it.
The horse—his feral girl who’d bitten air for years—dozed under her hand, lip slack, ear flicking whenever Dahlia murmured something he couldn’t hear.
He should’ve turned around. He didn’t.
Dahlia glanced up, sensing him without looking. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“Didn’t try,” he said. His voice came rough. He cleared it and nodded toward the stallion two doors down. “Was gonna take Blaze out. Burn the edges off.”
“Blaze will be ready when you are.” She set the brush aside and smoothed Cookie’s mane. “She wouldn’t settle. Thought I’d give her a proper grooming instead of pacing a strange house.”
“House ain’t strange,” he muttered.
“For me it is.” A hint of a smile. “Less so when you’re not glarin’ at my sage bundles.”
He almost smiled back and didn’t. It left his mouth unsure what to do.
Dahlia stepped out, slid the latch, and draped the lead over the door. Close now, she smelled of cherry gloss and clean cotton. Her hat sat on a peg by the tack trunk, curls spilling everywhere the bun couldn’t tame. The lamplight warmed her skin to honey.
“This isn’t a good idea,” he said.
“Then why does it feel like the only one that makes sense?” Her answer landed soft and sure, not a dare so much as a truth.
He stood there longer than a man should, cataloging exits as if the night were a firefight and not a barn with a woman who had already walked through storms with him. Blaze snorted; Wynn’s absence made the quiet larger. Somewhere in the rafters, a swallow shifted.
He moved first. Not with hunger—at least, that’s what he told himself—but with the same care he used around colts. He stepped into her space and stopped. Her breath lifted his shirt once, twice. The corner of her mouth tipped, amused and patient both.
“You keep staring like you’re starving. Why don’t you just take a bite?”
His jaw tightened. “If I touch you, Dahlia, I won’t stop. You sure you’re ready for that?”
She didn’t blink. “Finally, a right question.”
Cookie blew a long, satisfied breath behind them, as if casting a vote. Dahlia’s hand found the hem of his shirt and tugged. He went.
The first kiss wasn’t fire. It was relief.
Mouths meeting after too many almosts, the kind that quieted an argument he’d been having with himself for weeks.
He braced one palm to the stall door beside her head; the other slid to her waist and memorized the warmth there.
Her lips tasted faintly of sugar from some late-night stash she’d hidden in his kitchen.
She smiled against him when he chased it.
Everything narrowed—the lamplight, the dust motes turning slow, the rise of her throat under his mouth when he trailed lower. The old discipline he wore like armor unlatched itself, piece by piece, and fell to the straw without ceremony.
“Luc,” she breathed, a plea and a permission.
He gathered her in, lifted her without effort, set her on the tack bench just inside Cookie’s door, then thought better of the open stall and shifted them three steps to the empty grooming bay across the aisle.
The hose hung coiled there; clean pads stacked on a shelf; the rubber mat took weight without complaint.
He backed her against the post, his hat brim tapping wood, and kissed her again until her hands fisted in his shirt.
“Tell me to stop,” he said, forehead to hers.
She shook her head once. “Tell me to.”
That pulled a sound from his chest he hadn’t heard in years. He kissed the corner of her mouth, her jaw, the soft place beneath her ear; his hands found skin and learned it—ribs, waist, the curve where hip met thigh. She made a small noise when he cupped her, and he swallowed it like water.
Buttons gave. Denim rasped. The lamplight turned her to velvet and heat.
He moved slow because he wanted to remember, because nothing in him wanted to take this like a man starving even if that was the truth.
She met him with a patience that undid him worse than urgency would have, guiding, answering, letting him relearn gentleness he thought the desert had burned out of him.
“Look at me,” she whispered when his mouth lowered to her shoulder.
He did. What he found there—open, unafraid—stopped time.
“Good,” she said, breath catching as he pressed inside. “Stay with me.”
He did that too.
The rest unspooled in a hush the barn held for them—straw answering their shift of weight, leather creaking when his hand found the saddle rack for balance, Cookie’s slow chew from the other side of the aisle as if the mare had decided the universe finally made sense.
He moved in a rhythm that belonged to this place—pasture wind, fence wire’s faint ring, the measured give of an animal’s breath.
Her legs came around his hips and tightened; his name broke on her lips in a way that rewired every memory of it.
“Dahlia—” It was all he had for a second. Then sense returned enough to search her face, to keep pace with what she needed, to match her in a climb that felt less like falling and more like arrival.
When it took them both, the world went quiet. Not empty—full in a way that didn’t jolt him back to gunsmoke. He rested his brow to hers and let the silence hold.
They stayed there, catching breath, the two of them bracketed by cedar posts and a night that finally loosened its grip. He eased back and smoothed a curl from her cheek. The flannel hung off one shoulder now; his shirt sat half-open, dog tags cool against skin that still hummed.
Her smile came lazy, satisfied. “So much for not stoppin’.”
He huffed a laugh, still winded. “Didn’t say I regretted a damn thing.”
She stole a quick kiss and pointed her chin at Blaze’s stall. “Your boy’s jealous.”
Blaze had his head over the door, ears pricked, the showman. Luc reached blindly for a blanket, found one, and tucked it around her thighs before he turned and clucked the stallion back. “Mind your business,” he told him, the rasp in his voice giving him away.
Dahlia slid off the bench, toes finding her boots. She righted what needed righting and let him do the rest, his hands gentler now that the edge had been burned off. When he finished the last button, she caught his wrist and held it a second.
“This still a bad idea?” she asked.
He thought of the ceiling that wouldn’t let him sleep, the mug gone cold, the way his name had sounded in her mouth when the storm cellar went dark. He thought of Cookie settling under her hand where no one else could coax her quiet.
“No,” he said. “It’s the first thing that’s made sense in a long time.”
They didn’t rush the walk to the door. He killed the lamp; the barn went to silver. Outside, a thin slice of moon lifted over the east pasture. Coyotes yipped somewhere far off and quit when Wynn barked from the house.
On the threshold, he caught her hand. The question that had tailed him for weeks climbed his throat, unasked. He said the truth he could carry instead.
“You got me sleepin’ through alarms and dancin’ in public. I don’t know what to do with that.”
Her lips curved, eyes lifting to his. “Then stop fightin’ it.”
He hesitated. “Where’re you headed?”
“Back to that guest room you swore was mine.”
“Not tonight.”
The words came rough, final. He didn’t give her space to argue. His hand stayed around hers, steady but sure, leading her across the yard toward the house. The screen door gave its familiar sigh, the kind of sound that usually welcomed only ghosts and silence. Tonight, it held something warmer.
Inside, he paused in the hall where the two doors split. Guest room left. His room right. He turned right.
Her steps followed.
The room smelled of cedar and clean sheets, faint smoke from the fireplace he’d left cold since winter. The bed sat wide against the far wall, flannel sheets pulled tight, untouched. He stood there a beat, thumb tracing her wrist, the faint pulse beneath skin he already knew by memory.
“If this ain’t where you want to be, you can still say so,” he said.
Dahlia reached up, caught his shirt, and rose to meet his mouth. “This is exactly where I want to be.”
The kiss deepened until the room disappeared. He drew her closer, felt her smile against him when he backed toward the bed. The mattress dipped under their weight; boots thudded to the floor. Every wall he’d built since Stacie’s goodbye cracked beneath her hands.
Her hat slid to the nightstand. His dog tags hit the wood beside it.
She pressed a kiss to the cleft of his chin—her running joke, his unraveling—and whispered against his skin, “You don’t have to fight the dark alone, Luc.”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.
The night closed over them, quiet and sure. Sheets twisted, breaths tangled, the war in his head went still. For the first time in years, he let someone stay.
And as sleep pulled him under, one truth settled clear as dawn—
with her beside him, he just might make it through the night.