Chapter 4 #2
Another slam. Heavy footsteps on the porch—boots, deliberate, the kind of stride that belongs to someone who walks like they own the ground beneath them. The old wood of the porch groans under the weight.
My pulse jumps, quick and sharp, pressing against the inside of my wrists.
“Oh,” Jules says. “That sounds murdery.”
A key slides into the lock and then the front doorknob turns.
“Jules.”
“Yeah?”
“Someone’s coming in the house. People don’t get off of cruise ships early, do they?”
“Well, grab a knife!”
The front door swings open.
And there he is.
Cowboy.
No hat this time.
Dark hair a little longer than before, those curls I remember now falling across his forehead, unruly without the brim to hold them back.
Broad shoulders filling the doorway like he was built to stand in frames.
Jeans, boots, black T-shirt stretched across a chest I unfortunately remember very well—the hard planes of it under my palms.
He stops dead.
I stop breathing.
The world shrinks to the size of this doorway. Every sound falls away… Jules’s voice, the mockingbird, the distant sprinkler. Now there is only the blood rushing in my ears and the impossible, gut-punching fact of him, standing in this house.
His gaze lands on me, drops to my bare feet on hardwood, then rises to take in the towel clutched against my chest, my hair still dripping down my shoulders. I must look like a drowned rat.
I watch recognition hit him in real time. It moves through his face like weather. Confusion first, then a flicker of something raw and unguarded, then a sharpening. Those not-quite-brown, not-quite-hazel eyes narrow, and I feel the look all the way to the base of my spine.
“You,” he says. His voice is exactly the way I remember it—low and unhurried, like each word has to earn its way out of his mouth. But there’s an edge to it now. Something hard.
“Uh,” Jules says, tinny through the speakerphone. “Is that the penis?”
I blindly slap the phone to mute, my face going hot.
Cowboy’s jaw tightens. That jaw. The one that could ruin a girl’s entire life.
It’s doing some very aggressive things right now, the muscle flexing beneath stubble that’s thicker than the last time I saw him.
He looks like he slept about four hours and spent the other twenty doing something physical and punishing.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he growls.
I blink at him. My heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
“What am I doing here?”
He takes two long strides inside, shutting the door behind him with a firmness that’s one notch below a slam.
The room, which had felt too big and too quiet for the last few days, is suddenly far too small.
He brings the outside in with him; the smell of morning air and hay and something warm and woodsy underneath, something that triggers a full-body sense memory so vivid I have to lock my knees.
His eyes narrow further. “What did you do, track me down?”
I laugh once—sharp, disbelieving—because surely he cannot be serious. My fingers are trembling where they grip the towel and I hate that, hate that my body is betraying me with all these inconvenient reactions when I need to be sharp.
“Track you down?” I clutch the towel tighter against my chest, painfully aware of how exposed I am, and not just physically. “I don’t even know your name.”
“If you’re standing in this house, I’m pretty sure you must. Unless you broke in.”
I scoff. “I’m not even going to dignify that accusation with an answer. You truly think I hunted you across central Texas with nothing but your face and a nickname I whispered in the dark?”
“Pretty sure you screamed it, sweetheart.” His eyes flash with a spark of something in that shifting hazel, and for one fraction of a second, I see it: the same look he gave me across that bar.
The one that said I see you in a way that made my blood hum.
It’s gone so fast I almost convince myself I imagined it.
I roll my eyes. I mean, he’s not wrong, but still, I’m not admitting to that now.
“I’m busy trying to understand why my one-night stand just stormed into my kitchen, acting feral.”
“Your kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“This is my grandparents’ house.”
The words hit me square in the chest. Not like a punch, more like a trapdoor opening beneath my feet. My stomach drops. The room tilts, just slightly, just enough that I have to press my toes into the hardwood to stay steady.
I blink.
Once.
Twice.
Then I point at him. My hand is not entirely steady.
I shake my head. “No.”
His arms cross over his stupid broad chest. “Yes.”
I shake my head. The damp ends of my hair stick to my bare shoulders. “The sweet older couple on a cruise? Mimz and Pops?”
His expression turns suspiciously darker. Something moves behind his eyes—a dozen calculations happening at once behind that line between his brows. He takes a step closer to me.
“You know my grandparents?”
I let out a strangled laugh. It scrapes against my throat. The universe is not real. This is a simulation, and whoever’s running it has a sick sense of humor.
“I live here.”
“You what?”
“I’m their live-in aide.”
He stares at me.
I stare at him.
“A live-in aide for what exactly?”
I swallow. “Health care. I have my license, and they hired me.”
The air between us is thick with something.
It’s the same crackling charge that had been there in the bar, the same electric current that had run between us across a crowded room under green neon light.
Except now it’s not laced with possibility.
Now it’s tangled up in oh God, oh no, oh this changes everything.
Somewhere in the silence, the baby chooses violence, and nausea rolls low in my stomach—slow and deliberate, like the lime-sized human inside me knows exactly what’s happening and has opinions about it.
Great timing.
I press my lips together and breathe through my nose. Not now. Please not now.
His eyes drop to my middle for half a second—quick, involuntary, like his gaze was pulled there by something he couldn’t control—before returning to my face.
And I feel that glance like a brand. Like he knows.
He can’t know. There’s nothing to see, not yet.
But the way his gaze lingers a beat too long on my face afterward, searching, cataloging, trying to solve me the way he did that first night.
It makes my blood go cold and hot at the same time.
And because the universe enjoys me specifically, he says, “You look guilty.”
“I look damp, actually.” I start moving towards the hallway that leads to my bedroom. “I should get dressed.”
His jaw ticks. The muscle jumps once, hard, and I watch it happen and think, absurdly, I kissed that jaw. I kissed it in the dark while rain hit the windows and his hands held me like I was something precious and not just a stranger.
“You expect me to believe this is a coincidence?” He follows me.
I spin to face him and plant one hand on my hip. Which would probably be more intimidating if I weren’t wearing a bath towel and fighting the urge to throw up on his boots.
“I expect you to stop talking like the villain in a soap opera and tell me why you’re in my house.”
“Our house,” he bites out.
I scoff. “Bold claim for a man who didn’t even leave me his name.”
Something flickers across his face. Quick and unguarded — the full version of that almost-smile, except in reverse.
Something that looks, for one unprotected moment, like regret.
It’s there and gone so fast I can’t be sure, but I feel the echo of it in my own chest, because I know that feeling.
I’ve carried it for three months. “I seem to recall you were the one who made the no-name rule.”
Then he folds his arms over that broad chest. The movement pulls the black cotton of his T-shirt tight across his shoulders in a way that is deeply unhelpful to my current emotional state.
“Oliver.”
I blink again. “What?”
“My name. Oliver Blankenship.”
Well, shit. He is related to Mimz and Pops.
Also, it’s very annoying that his name is so damned attractive. It fits him in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Solid and old-fashioned and a little serious, like a name from a different era that landed on exactly the right man.
I lift my chin. “Cora.”
His gaze sharpens like the name means something now. Like hearing it rewrites every memory of that night with a new label, fills in the blank space where a name should have been.
“Cora,” he repeats slowly.
The way he says it—low, deliberate, tasting each syllable—sends a completely inappropriate shiver down my spine. It sounds different in his mouth than it’s ever sounded before. It sounds like something he’s going to keep. Tucked deep inside himself.
I hate that for me.
I hate how much I don’t hate it.
Then he says, “You need to start explaining.”
And I think:
So do you.
And maybe, very soon… I need to tell him he’s going to be a father.
But standing here in a towel with my hair dripping and his scent already filling up every corner of this house I’d foolishly started to think of as a little bit mine.
I’d told myself that night was temporary, the man I’d sealed into a box labeled one night, no tomorrow.
I realize now that the box was never sealed at all.
It’s been open this whole time.
And he just walked right through the door.