Chapter 17
DAISY
The view from Wyatt Hartley’s bedroom window is genuinely unfair. The mountains are still snow-capped, and the morning light across the valley is obscenely beautiful. And none of it cares even slightly about my problems.
My tea has gone cold, because I’ve been standing here for forty minutes.
He didn’t come home.
And sometime around three in the morning, it all started to make sense.
His hand on my face wasn’t a declaration. It was a kindness, offered by a decent man to a woman who’s trembling and scared. Who’s just had a Blackwood bid on her like she’s a parcel of land.
His thumb across my cheek wasn’t a promise. It was a comfort.
His silence wasn’t restraint. There was nothing he needed to take back.
And after a decade of wanting him, I turned it into something else entirely.
It makes complete sense.
What doesn’t make sense is the way he looked at me. I keep coming back to that. The way his eyes found mine across that tent before he’d even opened his mouth to bid. The way he didn’t look away. Not when Holden folded, not when the crowd reacted, not when the gavel came down.
A man simply being kind doesn’t look at you like that.
Does he?
I’m still standing here turning that over when Felix’s rental car pulls into the yard.
I watch it stop. Watch the door open.
My stomach drops at the impending confrontation, but then the barn door swings wide, and West is crossing the yard, arms folded, hat low. He moves with the unhurried certainty of a man who was ready.
He didn’t just hear it. He was listening for it.
The knot in my chest loosens, sudden and sharp, and the sheer relief that floods the space is almost embarrassing.
Felix gets out of the Audi with the energy of a man who slept like crap and has decided that’s everyone else’s fault.
His face is hard, and he’s yelling before he’s fully out of the door, one hand gesturing toward the house.
I can’t hear a word of it over the sound of blood rushing between my ears, but I don’t need to.
West doesn’t step directly into his path. He just places himself in it, the way water finds the low ground without trying. Whatever he says is short. Three words, maybe four.
Felix takes a step forward, but West doesn’t move a single inch. He doesn’t shift his weight, set his jaw, or make himself bigger the way men do when they want to look like a wall.
He already is.
And Felix’s shoulders drop, as though he’s just this moment correctly assessed that the wall in front of him isn’t going anywhere.
He gets back in the car, revs the engine twice for good measure before speeding away from the property. West continues to watch until the trees take him, then he turns, and for just a second before he heads back to the barn, he glances toward the upstairs windows.
I don’t know if he sees me, but I step back anyway.
June finds me in the kitchen ten minutes later, staring at my tea.
“West had a word.” She simply states it, like that explains everything.
“I didn’t ask him to.”
“Nobody did.” She opens the fridge and starts pulling things out for breakfast with the calm efficiency of a woman who considers the matter well and truly closed. “He didn’t need askin’, honey.”
She cracks an egg one-handed against the side of the pan and tosses the shell in the trash.
“Man rolls up here yellin’ across our yard like he owns the place. He’s lucky West got there first.”
I open my mouth but end up closing it again, and just stand there while June slides bread into the toaster. Outside through the window, the paddock is empty, and the drive is empty, and the morning is very quiet.
And I really should get to work.
“You should use Wyatt’s office today,” June announces, without turning around, as though she’s just heard my thoughts. “You’ve been hunched over that tiny desk in the cabin for a week now. His is bigger, the light’s better, and besides, he’s not even here for the next couple days.”
“Where is he?” The words leave my mouth without permission.
June pauses briefly. “Elk Creek fence line. He and Rhett are out there for a few days.” She sets the spatula down. “He won’t be back until later in the week.”
I absorb that in silence. The fence line. That’s where he is. Not where he was.
“I can’t use his office.”
“The door’s unlocked. Coffee’s in the pot.”
She slides a plate of fried eggs and bacon across the counter with a pointed look, and that, apparently, is the end of the discussion.
I eat standing up, which feels about right for this morning. Then I rinse my plate, thank June, and head back across the yard.
The cabin looks different in daylight. Smaller. The brass bed frame catches the morning sun and there’s a dent in the pillow where Felix’s head was. I stand in the doorway for a moment, taking stock.
Right.
I start with the bed. Strip the quilt, shake it out, remake it with the kind of thoroughness that has nothing to do with tidiness and everything to do with needing something to do with my hands. The dirty sheets go in the laundry bag, and I make a mental note to ask June for some fresh ones.
The bathroom takes longer than it should because I end up standing at the sink for a full minute staring at my own reflection.
I look like someone who didn’t sleep. I look like someone who stood up to her ex, the bully, and then spent what was left of the night lying in another man’s bed because she made a fool of herself in an apple orchard and had nowhere else to go.
Which is exactly what happened.
I’m still wearing Wyatt’s shirt over the leggings June left out for me. It’s soft against my skin, worn to the kind of softness that takes years, and it smells like him and I need to stop noticing that immediately.
I slip it off my shoulders and fold it carefully. I’ll put it back where I found it when I go back to the main house. On the hook behind his bedroom door, where he’ll find it and never need to know it spent a night being used as emotional support by a woman who read too much into an apple orchard.
That’s the plan.
I pull on jeans and a clean sweater and drag my hair back. Then I grab my laptop charger from beside the bed, which is the only thing I forgot when I packed up last night in a hurry.
I stand there for a second, charger in hand, looking at the stripped bed and the empty windowsill and the cabin that feels like it’s exhaled.
Then the bright, unforgiving light of a Montana morning does what it always does and cuts straight through the noise.
I was wrong.
About him. About last night. About what any of it meant.
There it is. That’s the full picture.
He’s out there somewhere past the ridge, driving fence posts into the ground at Elk Creek. Not thinking about orchards or nicknames or the woman who pressed her face into his hand like she was starving for it.
Just working. Like nothing happened.
Because for him, nothing did.
Fine.
Then I’ll do the same.
I’ll focus on finishing the investigation and filing the article. Then I can get back to Colorado.
Mind made up, I head back toward the main house.
Once I let myself back in, I go upstairs first to collect my laptop and the investigation files from the nightstand.
Then I shake out the shirt, and hang it back on the hook behind his door.
I grab my creased dress and crumpled hat, intent on returning them to my cabin later, before making my way back downstairs to Wyatt’s office.
Like his room and his shirt, it smells just like him.
I give myself exactly three seconds to be pathetic about it.
One… Two…
I close my eyes and inhale more deeply than required before exhaling.
“Three.”
Then I open my eyes and nod once before taking in my surroundings.
The room is as spare as everything else about him. A wide oak desk with a reading lamp, alongside a banker’s chair with leather that’s worn soft from years of use, is backed by bookshelves lined with land survey maps, livestock records, and a handful of actual books.
There’s a row of Louis L’Amour paperbacks with their spines cracked from rereading, a copy of Lonesome Dove so worn the cover is held on with tape, Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky with a receipt tucked in as a bookmark, and one battered manual on ranch management that looks like it’s been consulted so many times it’s given up trying to stay together.
A stack of farmers’ almanacs, three years deep, sits stacked in the window that looks out over the training paddock and the valley beyond.
I set my laptop on the desk and don’t let myself think about whose chair I’m sitting in.
I didn’t come here to sit in his space and think about him. I came here to work, so I open my files and get to it.
I’ve been at it for maybe two hours when footsteps sound in the hall, and Marcus Donnelly appears in the doorway with a stack of ledgers under one arm and a smile that reaches all the way to his eyes.
“Well now.” He steps into the room, bringing his familiar warmth. “June said someone was borrowing the office. Didn’t realize it was you, sweetheart.”
My chest loosens at the sight. Of all the people to walk through that door, Marcus Donnelly is exactly the right one.
“Marcus.” I stand. “It’s good to see you.”
“You too, sweetheart. You too.” He crosses to the desk and sets the ledgers down on the corner. “I got the quarterly accounts for Wyatt. Been dropping them off this way for twenty years.”
He sets them down the way he’s done eight times a year for two decades. Green cloth-bound, brass-cornered, Bill’s old system.
The fact that Wyatt keeps it going says everything about who he is and what his values are.
“Twenty years of house calls. Do accountants usually do that?”
“Good ones do.” He smiles, unhurried. “Besides, these aren’t just numbers to me. They’re this family’s livelihood. Felt wrong to reduce that to an attachment in an email.”
I smile softly. “Sounds like something my dad would’ve said.”
Marcus straightens at that. “Now that reminds me. I have something here for you.”