Chapter 6
Three hours since someone put a bullet where our heads would have been, and Rainey's given up on sleep.
She lasted maybe forty minutes, curled on the bed with her boots still on and her laptop clutched against her chest, before the adrenaline dragged her back to the surface.
Now she's cleaning her backup camera with a cloth she's run over the same lens three times, rearranging the few pieces of salvaged equipment she has left like organizing them will give her some control over a situation that's spiraling.
I recognize the strategy because I use it myself.
Flint's ranch sits at the end of a dirt road that doesn't exist on any map worth a damn.
Forty acres of scrubland, a barn that houses retired bucking stock, and a main house that smells like pipe tobacco and leather oil.
Flint pointed us to the guest room after we told him what happened, locked the doors, checked the windows, and told us to get some rest while he figured out the next steps.
I'm sitting on the porch steps, nursing a bourbon I found in Flint's kitchen and watching the road.
Nobody followed us. I'm almost sure of it.
The sedan bottomed out in the scrubland when we went off-road, and Flint's ranch isn't on any map worth checking.
If Merrick's people found us out here, they earned it.
The screen door creaks. Rainey comes out and sits on the step below mine, close enough that her shoulder brushes my knee. I hand her the bourbon. She takes a pull without looking at the label and hands it back.
"You should eat something," she says.
"You should take your own advice."
Fair point. My stomach is a fist, clenched tight around the knowledge that I almost got her killed tonight. A few inches closer and that bullet would have found one of us instead of empty air.
"Tell me you're okay," I say.
"I'm not okay." She pulls her knees up, wraps her arms around them. "Someone shot at us, Grant. That's not a spray-painted threat on a van. That's a bullet. Actual lead traveling at actual velocity toward our actual heads."
"I know."
"Do you? Because you're sitting here drinking bourbon like it's a Tuesday."
"It is Tuesday."
She turns to look at me. In the yellow porch light, her freckles stand out sharp against skin that's gone pale. "That's not funny."
"Wasn't trying to be." I set the bottle down.
"Rainey, I've been thrown by two-thousand-pound bulls that wanted me dead.
Got stomped on, hooked, dragged. Broke three ribs in Tucson, rode the next weekend with the bones held together by wire and stubbornness.
Getting shot at is just another version of something trying to kill me. "
"The difference is, a bull doesn't aim."
She's right. A bull is rage without direction, instinct without malice. What happened tonight was deliberate. Planned. Someone positioned themselves outside the arena, waited for the right moment, and pulled a trigger.
"I'm going to ask you something," I say. "And I need you to be honest."
"When have I been anything else?"
The question lands wrong. Three days I've known this woman, and there are still walls I can feel every time I get too close to the real her underneath the camera and the bravery and the defiance. I let it go. She'll tell me when she's ready, or she won't.
"Do you want out? Because I can call someone. My sister, Colt, anyone. Get you somewhere safe. Off the circuit, out of this whole mess. You didn't sign up for someone trying to put holes in you."
She's quiet for a long time. Cicadas fill the silence, their drone rising and falling like a pulse.
"Tyler Brennan is dead," she says. "Murdered.
And the man who ordered it is walking around in expensive suits, shaking hands with circuit officials, making deals over steak dinners while Tyler's family tries to figure out how to live without him.
If I leave now, I'm saying that's acceptable.
I'm saying my safety matters more than his life. "
"Your safety does matter more."
"To you, maybe. Not to me."
I grab her arm. Not hard, but firm enough that she has to look at me. "Don't do that. Don't turn this into some noble crusade where you're willing to die for a principle. Tyler wouldn't want that."
"You don't get to tell me what Tyler would want. You don't get to decide what risks I take or what I'm willing to lose."
"The hell I don't."
The words come out raw, stripped of the control I usually keep locked down. Rainey's eyes widen. Not with fear. With recognition. She sees what I'm doing, sees the panic underneath the possessiveness, and instead of pulling away, she leans into it.
"You're scared," she says.
"I'm furious."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
I let go of her arm. She doesn't move away. We're close enough that I can see the pulse jumping in her throat, fast and irregular, belying the calm in her voice.
"Here's what's going to happen," I say. "We're staying at Flint's tonight.
Tomorrow, I'm going to the Santa Fe event and I'm going to ride.
Because if I don't show up, Merrick knows we're rattled, and that makes us easier targets.
While I'm riding, you're going to stay here, go through every photo you've taken in the last three years, and find me something I can take to the press or the feds.
Something that connects Merrick to Tyler's death directly, not just the money trail. "
"And then what?"
"Then we burn him."
Rainey searches my face. Whatever she finds there, it's enough to make her decision.
"I'm not staying behind while you ride."
"Rainey."
"No. You don't get to sideline me. I go where you go, or I go on my own. Those are your options."
She means it. I can see it in the set of her jaw, the way her spine straightens, the amber fire in her eyes that makes my chest ache in ways I don't have vocabulary for. This woman walked into my life a few days ago with a camera and an attitude, and now she's the thing I'm most afraid of losing.
That realization hits like a sucker punch. I'm not just protecting an asset or a partner. I'm protecting the first person who's made me feel anything real since I watched Tyler die in the dirt.
"Fine," I say. "But you stay behind the chutes. No media pen, no wandering. You shoot from where I can see you."
"Controlling."
"Alive. The word you're looking for is alive."
She almost smiles. It doesn't quite make it to her mouth, but I see it in her eyes, a crack in the fear that lets something warmer through.
"Come inside," she says.
It isn't a request.
I follow her into the guest room that smells like cedar and old quilts.
The bed is wrought iron, probably older than Flint himself, and the mattress dips in the center.
Rainey stands in the middle of the room, fingers working the buttons of her shirt, and I can see the moment she decides to stop being scared and start being something else entirely.
"Rainey."
"Don't." She looks at me. "Don't ask me if I'm sure. Don't ask me if this is a good idea. We both know it isn't. I'm doing it anyway."
I close the distance between us. Take over the buttons because her fingers are still trembling, and I don't want her rushing through this. Not tonight. Tonight deserves to be deliberate.
The shirt falls open. She's wearing a plain cotton bra underneath, nothing designed to seduce, and it hits me harder than lace ever could. This is who Rainey is. Practical, unfussy, more concerned with function than performance. Real in a world of fabrication.
I trace the line of her collarbone with my thumb, and she pulls air through her teeth.
"Last time was fast," I say. "This isn't going to be."
"Is that a promise or a threat?"
"Both."
I push the shirt off her shoulders, follow the fabric down her arms with my hands, leave the bra for now. Kiss her throat, the hollow beneath her ear, the place where her jaw meets her neck and her pulse beats the loudest. She makes a sound that's halfway between impatience and surrender.
"Grant."
"I said slow."
Her hands come up to my chest, fingers curling into the front of my shirt. She pulls, and the snaps give way with a series of metallic pops. Her palms flatten against my bare skin, and I feel the contact everywhere, a full-body current that makes my muscles tighten.
She pushes my shirt off, and her fingers trace the scar along my ribs from the Tucson ride, the one that left me held together with surgical wire. She bends, and her mouth follows the path her fingers traced. My hand finds the back of her neck, holds her there while the sensation carves through me.
Then she bites the skin just above my belt, and my control fractures.
I haul her up by the hips and her legs lock behind my back, fingers in my hair pulling hard enough to sting. The kiss is open-mouthed and fierce, all teeth and tongue and the kind of hunger that scares me because I can't contain it, can't channel it into something manageable.
I drop her on the bed, and the iron frame groans under the impact. She reaches for me, but I pin her wrists above her head, one hand holding both of hers against the quilt.
"Stay."
"Try harder."
I do. With my mouth on her skin, with my free hand unhooking her bra and peeling it away, with my teeth on her nipple hard enough to make her arch off the mattress.
She fights the grip on her wrists, not to escape but to test it, to test me, and when I don't let go, the sound she makes vibrates through her whole body.
"You like this," I say against her skin.
"I like that you're not gentle."
"I don't know how to be. Not with you."
"Good."