Chapter 9
Logan
The thunderstorm that Lark had used as her excuse to put Tova in my cabin had lasted forty-seven minutes. I knew because I’d been awake for every one of them, lying in the dark while rain hammered the roof and the yellow lab slept on the floor beside my bed without so much as lifting her head.
For a dog who was supposed to be scared, she sure as hell hadn’t seemed that way.
I’d planned to take her back to her kennel the next day. But here it was, four days later, and the weather had been clear and warm for days.
And Tova was still here.
She was currently lying in the opening to the kitchen watching me make coffee, her chin on her paws. I stepped over her to get to the cabinet. She didn’t move.
“Don’t get up on my account,” I said, stepping over her again on the way back.
Her tail swept the floor once.
I poured the coffee and stood at the counter drinking it while she watched me with those brown eyes that always seemed to follow me.
I’d started leaving my bedroom door cracked at night so she could come in if she wanted.
She always did. She’d settle on the floor beside the bed, and I’d hear her breathing in the dark, steady and slow, and some part of my brain that hadn’t shut off in months would ease down half a degree.
Two mornings ago, I’d given her a piece of bacon from my plate. She’d looked at me like I’d invented something extraordinary. I’d been thinking about it since, which was ridiculous, but there it was.
The cabin needed sweeping again. Twice a day because the dog hair was relentless, fine yellow strands that got into everything, and I did it without complaint. That would have surprised anyone who knew me.
Lark’s excuse had been thin from the start, and we both knew it.
But I hadn’t offered the dog back, and she hadn’t asked, and the longer neither of us said anything about it, the more Tova became part of my routine.
Part of whatever this was that I’d stumbled into on a Montana ranch with peeling paint and a foul-mouthed parrot.
I finished the coffee, rinsed the mug, then looked over at Tova. “You ready?”
She stood and stretched, front legs out, back arched, taking her time about it. I held the door open, and she trotted out ahead of me into the morning light.
The walk to the barn was short. The air was cool and clean, the mountains sharp against a sky so blue it looked manufactured. I brought Tova inside and put her in her kennel. She went in easy, turned around once, and lay down.
I latched the kennel door and stood there.
It bothered me. Leaving her. She was a dog in a kennel ten minutes from my cabin and I’d be back in a few hours, and it still bothered me.
Which was ridiculous. Yet I stood there with my hand on the latch for a beat longer than I needed to, aware that I was doing it, aware that being aware of it didn’t stop me from doing it.
Three weeks ago, a dog hadn’t even been on my radar. Now I was standing in a barn feeling guilty about a kennel.
“You’re fine,” I told her. “I’ll be back.”
I walked away before I could do something even more pathetic, like go back and scratch her ears.
Lark was already loading the truck bed with fence wire, staples, and the post driver.
“Morning,” she said. “Ready to go fix the back boundary? I’ve been putting it off for weeks, and it’s not getting any less broken.”
“Let’s do it.”
I tossed the toolbox in beside the wire and climbed into the passenger seat. She pulled out of the lot and headed south on the dirt road that ran along the east side of the property, past the paddocks where Duchess and Maverick stood at the rail watching us go.
The back boundary was a twenty-minute drive over rough ground, and the landscape out here was different from the rest of Pawsitive.
The gentle pastures near the barn gave way to rougher terrain the farther south we went.
Rocky ridgeline rising steeply to the north, the land dropping off into low ground cut with shallow gullies where snowmelt and runoff carved channels through the dirt every spring.
Lark parked the truck on the flat near the access road, down in the low ground between two of those gullies, and we unloaded the tools.
We split up at the fence line. Lark took the section near the south gate, and I started thirty yards east where the wire had gone slack between two posts.
The first twenty minutes were routine. Testing tension, resetting staples, the kind of work that let my hands move while my brain stayed quiet.
Then I found it.
A section of wire cut clean. Not broken from weather, not sagged from age. The ends were sharp and precise. Someone had taken a set of wire cutters to this fence and made a hole big enough to walk through.
I crouched. Fresh tire tracks in the soft ground on the other side, running parallel to the fence line for about ten yards before cutting back toward the county road. A cigarette butt ground into the dirt near the cut section, smoked to the filter.
I looked at the tracks and the cut wire, and my brain did what it always did. The tire tracks I’d found on the back access road a couple weeks ago during my three-a.m. walk. The gate I’d latched that had been unlatched when I checked it. Now this.
Could be teenagers using the back road as a shortcut. Could be someone cutting through the property to get to the county route. Could be nothing at all. But whoever it was had cut a fence to do it, and they shouldn’t be on the property, regardless.
I stood up and looked over at Lark. She was thirty feet away working her section, pulling staples with the claw hammer and tossing them into a coffee can at her feet. Her sleeves were pushed up past her elbows, her forearms tanned and freckled from weeks of outdoor work.
The reason I didn’t tell her had nothing to do with uncertainty and everything to do with her.
She’d been different since she’d come back to Pawsitive a few days ago in the blouse and heels and brushed hair.
She’d looked good. But Lark always looked good.
I’d been aware of that since the coffee shop, since she’d laughed at her own chaos and handed me a flyer with those green eyes that saw too much.
The way her hair never stayed where she put it. The way her whole body got involved when she talked, hands moving, weight shifting, chin tilting up when she was making a point she thought was important, which was all of them.
I noticed all of it, constantly, and I’d gotten used to setting it aside.
The blouse had just made me realize I had a preference.
I liked her better like this, in jeans and flannel with hay dust on her sleeve.
And having a preference at all meant the attraction had settled in deeper than I’d been letting myself acknowledge.
She hadn’t told me where she’d gone that day.
She hadn’t told me anything. But since then, the work had been running harder, the chatter running faster, and the brightness cranked up in a way that took visible effort to maintain.
She was carrying something new on top of everything she’d already been carrying, and I wasn’t going to add to the pile with an announcement about a cut fence that might be nothing.
I replaced the wire with a new section, drove the staples in, and walked back toward her.
“Done with your section already?” she asked without looking up. “You’re making me look bad, Stroud.”
“Your section has more posts. I just had wire.”
“Excuses, excuses.” She pulled a staple free and dropped it into the can with a metallic ping. “I’ve been doing this alone for six years, and you show up with your functional muscles and your competence, and suddenly, I’m the slow one.”
“Functional muscles?” I raised an eyebrow.
She smiled. “Don’t fish for compliments. It’s beneath you.”
I picked up the spare hammer and started on the post nearest to her, resetting a staple that had worked loose. We fell into the rhythm of it, her on one side, me on the other, the wire between us.
“How’d you end up in Montana?” I asked. “Long way from anywhere.”
“That was the selling point.” She grinned at me over the fence wire. “I wanted somewhere that required a GPS and a sense of adventure just to find a grocery store. Montana delivered.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“Back east.” She pulled the wire taut and held it for me to staple. “New York, originally. A lifetime ago.”
“Eleanor from New York.”
Her hands stopped on the wire. Just for a second, a pause so brief that most people wouldn’t have caught it. Then they started again.
“You heard that.”
“Kind of hard to miss when it came through the speaker.”
She was quiet for three staples. I let the silence sit.
“Eleanor is what’s on my birth certificate,” she said. “Lark is what I go by. What I chose.”
“Your family call you that?”
She laughed, short and sharp. “I’m sure my family would rather die than call me Lark.
Eleanor was the only acceptable option for a Monroe of the Upstate New York Monroes.
” She said it in a voice that wasn’t hers, clipped and nasal and dripping with the kind of money that made people mean.
Then she dropped it and was Lark again. “I actually chose the name as an adult. They don’t know and wouldn’t use it if they did. ”
She picked up the wire cutters and moved to the next section. I followed and started on the adjacent post.
There was more behind what she’d said than what she’d actually said.
A woman who changed her own name as an adult had a reason for it, and the reason lived somewhere in that sharp laugh and the voice she’d put on that didn’t belong to her.
But she’d closed the door, and I wasn’t going to shoulder it open.