Chapter 14
WYATT
Sold.
The word rings through the tent like a rifle shot, and my brain catches up with my mouth about three seconds too late.
Two thousand dollars.
I just bid two thousand dollars. In front of three hundred people.
In front of every rancher, shop owner, church elder, and gossip merchant in Blackstone Creek.
In front of Colt, who will never let me hear the end of this.
In front of Shelby, who was mid-sentence when I opened my mouth and stepped off a cliff I can’t climb back up.
In front of Daisy, who is standing on that stage looking at me like I just pulled the pin on a grenade and handed it to her.
What in the hell did I just do?
The murmur starts low and builds fast. I can feel it moving through the crowd—heads turning, elbows nudging, mouths already shaping the words that’ll be all over town by morning.
Wyatt Hartley bid two thousand dollars on Tom Monroe’s girl.
People are looking at me with expressions ranging from surprise to delight, and every single one of them is trying to work out what they just witnessed.
But I don’t have an answer for them. I don’t even have an answer for myself.
All I know is she was up there with that Blackwood kid bidding on her like she was a parcel of land at a county auction, and her face—
Her face reached right inside my chest.
It wasn’t the polished composure she’s been wearing all week.
Not the journalist armor or the sharp smile she uses like a shield.
Something underneath all of that fractured when she heard the Blackwood name, and for a second she looked exactly the way she looked at her father’s funeral.
Small and fierce and holding herself together through sheer force of will while the ground dissolved beneath her feet.
I stood three feet from her at that funeral.
Three fucking feet. Close enough to see the tremor in her hands.
Close enough to hear the breath she kept catching and swallowing back down.
And I didn’t reach for her. Didn’t put my arms around her.
I stood there like a goddamn statue while she shook apart alone, because I didn’t trust what would happen if I touched Tom’s daughter with three hundred mourners watching and his casket barely in the ground.
I let her stand there alone. And I’ve never forgiven myself for it.
So when Holden Blackwood smiled at her like she was something he could buy, and that same look crossed her face—that same tremor, that same fierce, brittle refusal to break—my mouth opened without a conscious thought.
Because I wasn’t going to stand by and watch her hold herself together alone. Not again. Not ever again.
My eyes haven’t left her since I stepped forward.
She’s still on the stage, her fingers curled around the brim of her old hat, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths that she’s trying to control. She’s looking at me like I’ve just upended everything she thought she knew, and she hasn’t decided yet whether to thank me or kill me.
Move, Hartley.
My boots carry me forward before I’ve made a conscious decision. Through the crowd, past the turned heads and the whispers, toward the stage. People move aside without being asked, the way they do when something in a man’s stride says this isn’t a conversation.
She’s looking down at me from the low platform. For once, she’s the one looking down, and the reversal makes my heart race—this tiny woman who barely reaches my shoulder standing above me in the string lights, trembling ever so slightly.
I hold out my hand.
I don’t say anything. Don’t explain, don’t justify, don’t crack a joke to defuse the tension. I simply extend my hand, palm up, and wait.
She stares at it for a heartbeat. Then another. And in the space between those heartbeats, her expression hardens in a way I deserve after the shit I spewed this morning.
Relief eases the tension in my shoulders when her fingers slide into mine anyway and the contact hits me like a live wire.
Her skin is warm and soft against my calloused palm, her hand small enough that my fingers close around it completely.
I help her down from the stage, and when her boots hit the ground she’s close enough that I can smell her.
That scent I caught in my office this morning, something light and warm that’s been following me around the property all week like a ghost I can’t outrun.
I should let go of her hand. I know I should let go.
I don’t.
Instead, my other hand finds the small of her back—light, barely there, a guide more than a grip—and I steer her toward the rear of the tent where the canvas flaps open to the orchard beyond.
Away from the stares and the gossip. Away from Holden Blackwood, who I can feel watching us from somewhere in the crowd with the kind of calculated interest that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Daisy doesn’t resist. Doesn’t ask where we’re going. Just lets me lead her through the crowd with her hand still wrapped in mine and her shoulder brushing my arm, and the heat of that contact burns through my shirt sleeve like a brand.
We clear the tent and the noise drops to a muffled hum behind us.
The orchard stretches ahead in orderly rows, the old apple trees still holding the last of their blossoms. Petals drift in the grass beneath them, while their branches are laced with string lights that cast warm pools of gold across the grass.
The air is cooler out here—the kind of spring night where the warmth drops out of the sky the second the sun does—clean, carrying the scent of apple blossom and new grass and that distinctive distant sweetness of the mountain wildflowers that bloom along the ridge this time of year.
I walk her deeper into the trees until the tent is a soft glow behind us and the music is just a suggestion on the breeze. Then I stop, and the quiet settles around us like a blanket.
I still haven’t let go of her hand.
Let go, Hartley. Right now. Before this becomes something you can’t undo.
I let go this time.
She doesn’t step away. Just stands there in the dappled light, one hand still holding Tom’s hat against her thigh, the other hanging at her side where my hand used to be. The trembling I noticed on the stage hasn’t stopped—it’s subtle, barely there, the kind of thing most people wouldn’t catch.
But I’m not most people. Not when it comes to her.
We stand in silence for a long moment. The band has started up again inside the tent—the opening bars of “Cover Me Up” drifting through the orchard on steel guitar and fiddle. A breeze moves through the orchard and the string lights sway, sending the shadows dancing across her face.
She speaks first.
“Holden Blackwood.” Her voice is steady, but there’s a tightness underneath that she can’t quite iron out. “His father bought Larkspur River for two hundred thousand below market value. Did you know that?”
“Yeah.” My voice comes out rougher than I intended. “I know it.”
“I’m standing up there, and that man whose family profited from the worst thing that ever happened to me is bidding on me like it’s sport.” She’s looking at the ground, at her boots, her jaw working. “And everyone’s smiling and cheering. Laughing, like it’s charming.”
Her voice cracks on the last word. Just barely.
Just enough and my chest tears clean open.
The hand holding her hat is trembling, and she’s doing that thing she does—the thing she did at the funeral and again on stage—where she locks her jaw and lifts her shoulders and tells herself that if she holds her body together, the rest will follow.
“Daisy.”
“And then you.” She looks up at me, and the tears are still there but there’s a ferocity too.
“You told me I was your problem this morning, Wyatt. That I was in the way. And tonight you bid two thousand dollars and looked at me like… like that—” She stops, shaking her head with a frown. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
I reach out before I can think better of it and tilt her chin up with one finger. Gentle. Just enough pressure to bring her face up to mine.
“Hey. Look at me.”
Her eyes meet mine, and the impact damn near takes me out at the knees. Brown with those amber flecks, bright with tears she’s refusing to let fall, and so close I can see the reflection of the string lights swimming in them like tiny gold stars.
I should take my hand away from her face. I should step back. I should do a hundred things that a responsible, decent man would do when he’s standing too close to a woman he has no right to touch.
I don’t do any of them.
Instead, I notice a honey-gold strand of hair curling against her cheek where the evening breeze has coaxed it forward.
My hand moves on its own, my finger tracing from her chin to the curve of her jaw as I tuck the strand behind her ear.
The rough pad of my thumb grazes the soft skin below her earlobe, and her breath catches.
A sharp, quiet intake that I feel against my wrist.
The feel of her under my calloused hands is something I know with absolute certainty I’ll never be able to unfeel.
She’s warm and impossibly soft and her pulse is hammering against my thumb.
And some part of me that’s been locked in a box for six years breaks free with a violence that leaves me breathless.
I lean down. Close enough that her hair brushes against my jaw, close enough that I can feel each shallow exhale against my throat. Close enough to breathe her in—warm skin and something floral and singularly her.
I let myself have it. Just this once. I let myself stand in the dark with Daisy Monroe’s face in my hands and her scent in my lungs and the warmth of her skin seeping into the rough places I’ve spent thirty-five years hardening against the world.
The words come out low. Barely a whisper. Meant for her and no one else.
“No one’s ever gonna make you feel like that again, Daisy-girl.”