Chapter 8
WYATT
On Monday morning, I find a dozen reasons to be near the main barn.
It’s not because Daisy mentioned she’d be interviewing Old Dave first thing. It’s purely because the tack room needs reorganizing. And the feed delivery is due. And there’s a gate hinge that’s been squeaking for a week.
It’s all legitimate work.
Nothing to do with her.
Fucking liar.
I’m checking the hinge—for the third time—when I hear them.
Dave’s voice carries across the yard, that familiar gravelly tone punctuated by wheezing laughter. And then hers curiously asking questions I can’t quite make out from this distance.
I should leave. Go find something to do on the other side of the property.
Instead, I drift closer. Close enough to hear. Not close enough to be caught.
Just to make sure Dave’s not overwhelming her with too many stories. The man could talk the ear off a fence post.
They’re sitting on hay bales outside the equipment shed, Daisy’s notebook open on her knee as her pen moves in quick strokes. Dave’s leaning back, arms crossed, holding court the way he loves to do.
“—and there’s Wyatt, stuck on that roof like a treed cat, too proud to holler for help—”
I stop walking.
“I heard this story at Sunday dinner.” There’s already laughter bubbling out of Daisy’s voice. “But I have a feeling your version has details Colt left out.”
“Left out?” Dave slaps his knee. “That boy don’t know the half of it. He wasn’t even there. I was the one who found him.”
“The hero of the hour.”
“Damn right I was.” Dave puffs up with pride.
“Had to drive the tractor right up to the house so the bull-headed jackass could climb down into the hay cart. Six hours he was up there. Middle of July. Sunburned red as a tomato, trying to salvage what’s left of his dignity.
” He shakes his head, grinning. “Which wasn’t much, let me tell you. ”
Daisy’s laugh rings out across the yard, bright and warm and completely at my expense.
I should be annoyed. I am annoyed. Dave’s been telling that story for years, embellishing it more each time. Last version I heard, I was up there for twelve hours and had to be airlifted off by the National Guard.
But the sound of her laughter…
It settles in my chest and loosens a knot I didn’t even realize was there. Even with the heat crawling up the back of my neck, even knowing I’ll never hear the end of this, I can’t quite make myself walk away.
“How bad was the sunburn?” Daisy asks, wiping her eyes.
“Peeled for two weeks straight. June had him slathered in aloe like a glazed ham.” Dave chuckles.
“And you know what? Never did get a proper thank you. Three days of him stomping around pretending nothing happened, and when he finally said something, it was so quiet I thought I might’ve imagined it. ”
“I said thank you,” I mutter, too quiet for them to hear. In my defense, it’s damn hard to enunciate when your lips are blistered shut.
Daisy’s still laughing, shoulders shaking.
Tom used to laugh like that. Full and easy, like joy was something he had plenty of and didn’t mind sharing.
The thought catches me under the ribs, and I take a step back before I realize I’m moving.
Instinctively, I turn and head for the south pasture, allowing Dave’s voice to fade behind me. I’ve got fences to check. Real work to do. And if I walk fast enough, maybe I can outrun the echo of her laugh in my chest.
* * *
Tuesday is cattle drive day, which means I have a legitimate excuse to be far from Daisy Monroe and her notebook and that laugh.
We’re moving three hundred head to the summer pasture—a full day’s work that requires every hand we’ve got. I’m in the saddle before dawn, Rhett and West flanking me, Colt somewhere behind us cracking jokes that nobody asked for.
The work is hard and good. The kind of work that leaves no room for thinking about anything except the task at hand. Move the cattle. Keep them together. Watch for stragglers. Read the land.
Doesn’t stop my mind from wandering.
I catch myself scanning the valley behind us, looking for a flash of honey-gold hair even though I know damn well she’s back at the ranch. I find myself wondering if she’s talked to Miguel yet. If she’s found Dave again. If she’s laughing at another story about me being an idiot.
I yank my attention back to the herd with more force than necessary.
Rhett pulls Thyme alongside me and Boone as we crest the ridge overlooking the valley—the same ridge that gave our ranch its name. The view hasn’t changed in a hundred years. Probably won’t change in another hundred.
The air’s thinner up here, cooler, and the grass runs silver-green all the way to the tree line.
Below us, the cattle are moving in a dark river, flowing toward the fresh grass of the summer pasture.
Once they’re settled up here, the north boundary needs checking.
Fifteen miles of fence line past Elk Creek, and if winter took posts down, this herd will drift straight onto Blackwood land inside a week.
Rhett catches my eye across the herd and I know he’s thinking the same thing.
We’ll need to ride it before the end of next week.
A red-tailed hawk screams somewhere overhead, and Boone flicks an ear toward the sound but doesn’t break stride.
We ride in comfortable silence for a long while.
The only sounds between us are the creak of leather, the low calls of cattle, and the distant whistle of Colt directing a straggler back to the herd.
The silence between us feels easy, but it’s a lie. My mind slips past it, despite my best intentions, to the thoughts that strike at two in the morning when sleep won’t come—thoughts that make my hands ache and my chest tighten.
Her moving beneath me.
Her breath hot against my neck.
Her voice in my ear—
Fuck!
I’ve spent six years trying to burn those images from my mind, and yet they keep coming back. Tenfold, now that she’s here again, and therefore impossible to ignore.
Boone snorts beneath me, tossing his head like he can sense the shift in my grip on the reins. I loosen my hands. Breathe out slowly.
“Everything okay, Boss?” Rhett’s voice anchors me.
“Eyes on the herd.” My voice is sharper than intended as I nudge Boone forward, forcibly pushing all thoughts of anything aside from this cattle drive out of my head.
By Wednesday, I’m running out of places to hide.
I’ve checked fences that don’t need checking. Reorganized the feed schedule twice. Had a thirty-minute conversation with Miguel about irrigation that could have been handled in under five. And still, somehow, she’s everywhere.
Or maybe it’s ’cause you can’t stop looking.
Talking to Sarah by the main house. Walking with Old Dave toward the equipment barn. Sitting on the porch steps with her laptop. I’m aware of her location on the property at all times, like she’s a heat-seeking missile and I’m trying to stay out of range.
It’s exhausting. And humiliating. And getting harder to justify. Nobody comments on my mood. Nobody asks why I keep finding reasons to be on the opposite end of the property from wherever she is. As far as anyone can tell, I’m just busy. Focused. Same as always.
The fact that I’m barely holding it together underneath is nobody’s business but mine.
It happens just past noon.
I’m rounding the corner of the tack room with a saddle slung over one arm when she comes through the barn door from the other side, and we nearly collide.
I pull up short, the saddle swinging wide, and my free hand shoots out on instinct, reaching for her shoulder, her arm, anything to stop her walking straight into sixteen pounds of leather and steel.
I stop myself before I touch her.
My hand hovers an inch from her bare shoulder—she’s wearing a tank top, some thin, faded thing the color of rust, and the strap has slipped so there’s nothing between my palm and her skin but a sliver of dusty air—and I pull back like I’ve touched a hot fence line.
Too late.
She looks up at me, startled, her lips parted on a breath she didn’t finish. From this angle, I’m looking straight down at her, the crown of her head barely clearing my chest, and this close, the barn smell disappears.
All I get is her. Not hay, not leather, not horse. Just her.
And it goes straight through me.
“Sorry.” The word comes out like gravel. “Didn’t see you.”
“No, I—my fault, I was looking at my phone, I wasn’t—”
She’s rambling.
Daisy Monroe, who always has the right words, is rambling. And I’m standing here like a goddamn idiot with my hand still half-raised between us like I don’t know what to do with it now that it didn’t land where my body wanted it to.
I drop it to my side. Hitch the saddle higher on my arm.
“Watch where you’re going,” I manage, flat and clipped.
“Right.” Her voice has gone quiet. “Sorry.”
I’m through the door and halfway to the paddock before I let myself breathe.
The thing that gets me—the thing I’m still thinking about when I should be checking the water troughs in the south pasture—isn’t what happened.
It’s what didn’t.
My hand was right there. One inch from her skin. Close enough that I swear I could feel the heat coming off her shoulder, the warmth of her seeping across that gap like touching her was inevitable and the inch of air between us was just buying time.
But I didn’t touch her, and now some broken, starving part of my brain won’t stop running the math on what it would have felt like if I had.
Because Christ, I wanted to.
I avoid the barn for the rest of the afternoon. Or try to. The horses don’t care about my personal crisis, and by late afternoon the work drags me back whether I like it or not.
I’m coming out of the barn when she finally catches up to me.
“Wyatt.”
I turn, and there she is leaning against the paddock fence like she’s been waiting. Which she probably has, because I’ve been dodging her since noon and she’s not stupid.
Her notebook is tucked under her arm, and there’s that determined set to her jaw that makes my blood run hotter than it should.