Chapter 19
WYATT
I wake up hard with my face buried in the pillow and her scent in my lungs.
For a few disoriented seconds I don’t move.
Just lie there with my cock aching against the mattress, pulse hammering, breathing her in like a man who’s lost his goddamn mind.
My body is convinced she’s here. Every part of me is convinced she’s here, and the want is so real it takes my brain a full ten seconds to catch up and inform the rest of me that I’m alone in my own bed at five in the morning with no excuse for any of this.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling and wait for my blood to settle.
It doesn’t. I’m hard enough to hurt and the scent is on the pillow, on the sheets, faint but everywhere, warm and floral, and I have no explanation for how it got there that doesn’t make me feel like I’m losing my goddamn mind.
Cold shower. It’s the only play I’ve got.
The water hits like a punishment and I stand under it with both hands braced against the tile until my body finally gets the message. It takes longer than I’d like to admit. And even after, towel around my waist, steam clearing, I can still smell her on my skin like she’s seeped into the pores.
Christ. It’s going to be a long day.
I dress in the dark and head downstairs before the rest of the house is awake. Coffee first. Then the office. The routine is the same as it’s been for fifteen years, and if I lean into it hard enough, maybe the morning will start feeling like mine again.
The coffee helps. The office doesn’t.
I knew it wouldn’t. I stayed out of this room all evening because of it. But the ranch doesn’t run itself, so I push the door open and take it on the chin.
It’s worse than I expected. That same warmth, settled into the room like it belongs, layered over air that’s smelled the same way for as long as I remember.
And reminders of her are everywhere.
The chair sits lower, adjusted for a woman who has a foot of height to make up. The legal pad I keep in the top drawer is out on the desk, the page blank but holding the faint impressions of whatever she wrote before she tore it off.
I sit in the chair, and it’s too low, and it smells like her, so I stand right back up.
Fuck.
Six days of fence posts, icy cold creek water, and not a single surface that held so much as her fingerprints. I came home thinking I’d driven her out of my system the way I drove those damn posts into the hard earth, one heavy blow at a time, until it was buried deep enough to hold.
And it took less than two seconds in my kitchen last night to learn just how wrong I was.
I looked up and she was in the doorway. Hair pulled back, cheeks still flushed from the sun, those brown eyes finding mine across the room like they’d been waiting. And every post I drove at Elk Creek might as well have been made of paper.
I gave the performance of a good goddamn lifetime. And the only person I fooled was her.
Through the office window, the light is already on the upper pasture and the day is moving whether I’m ready for it or not.
My phone vibrates on the desk.
JUNE
Kitchen. Coffee. Now. Be back later.
I pocket it and head down the hall, only to find the kitchen already occupied, which is not what I need.
Maggie is at the counter in yesterday’s scrubs with what looks like dried iodine on her forearm, eating toast directly over the sink.
“Mornin’, sunshine.” Colt tips his mug in my direction from his place at the table. “You look well-rested.”
“I’m fine.”
“Sure you are.” He takes a slow sip, watching me over the rim the way he watches everything, like the world is a card game and he’s already counted what’s in your hand.
“Coffee’s fresh. June made it before she left to check on the Henderson setup.
She said, and I’m quoting here, that if you leave this house before she gets back she’s cancelin’ Sunday dinner indefinitely, and telling everyone it’s your fault. ”
I pour a mug and lean against the counter beside Maggie, who gives me a look that says she’s clocked the dark circles under my eyes and elected not to comment.
Small mercies.
“Daisy’s been on her own all week, by the way.” Colt throws it out there, casual as anything, his eyes cutting sideways to gauge the landing. “In case you were wonderin’.”
My hand pauses on the mug. “Meanin’ what?”
“Meaning her ex left Saturday morning. West had a word.”
He lets that settle for exactly long enough, then takes another sip.
“Oh, and she slept in your room Friday night. June put her there when she turned up, bags backed. Guest room wasn’t ready.” His eyes find mine over the rim, the very picture of innocence. “How’d you sleep last night, by the way? You look a little flushed, brother.”
The pillow. The sheets. Five in the morning with my face buried in her scent and my cock so hard I could barely think straight.
I take a very deliberate sip and give him absolutely nothing.
Colt grins anyway because the bastard knows exactly what he just did.
“Wasn’t aware it was my business.”
“It’s not,” Colt agrees easily. Then the corner of his mouth lifts. “And yet.”
“And yet nothin’.” I carry my mug to the table and sit down like the conversation has already ended. “She came here for an article. The article’s done.”
“Heard that too.” Colt stretches his legs out, crossing his boots at the ankle. “Also heard she’s been workin’ from your office all week. Sitting at our dinner table. Riding into town with June. Makin’ herself comfortable.”
He lets that sit.
“But what do I know? I’m just the pretty one.”
Maggie snorts from the counter.
I don’t answer him. The coffee is hot and strong and exactly what I need, and I drink it while Colt watches me over the rim of his mug and waits for something I’m not giving him.
Only it’s already there.
The ex was an ex all along.
Should make a difference. But it doesn’t.
A promise is still a promise.
And even if it wasn’t, she’s leaving soon.
Giving in now just means I get to lose her twice.
I finish my coffee and rinse the mug, shoulder to shoulder with Maggie, who bumps me with her elbow in a way that could mean everything or nothing.
“You’re going tonight.” It’s not a question.
“I spent two thousand dollars. Not a lot of room to maneuver.”
“Dolly Briggs has called me four times.” She bites into her toast. “Four, Wyatt. She has theories about you that would make a romance novelist blush.”
“Dolly has theories about the mailman. Doesn’t make them accurate.”
“Dolly’s theories about the mailman turned out to be dead-on, actually, but that’s a story for another Sunday dinner.” She polishes off the crust and wipes her hands on her scrubs. “It’s just dinner. I’m sure you’ll survive.”
I’m not as sure about that as she is, but I nod like a man who has the situation firmly under control, and she leaves the kitchen trailing the faint smell of antiseptic and a woman who’s been up since four delivering a calf.
The hours between morning and afternoon pass in feed runs and fence checks and the kind of physical work that keeps a man’s hands busy while his mind goes wherever it wants. Mine goes where it’s been going all day, which is nowhere useful.
June gets back around three and the kitchen fills up the way it does on weekends, by gravity rather than invitation.
West comes in from the paddock, quiet as a closing door. Colt is back at the table with what looks like his third coffee and the remains of a sandwich. Maggie reappears, showered and in clean clothes, an improvement over the iodine-smeared scrubs.
June sets two grocery bags on the counter and turns to face the room, clearly enjoying the power of withholding whatever she knows.
“So.” Her eyes land on each of us. “The Blackstone Inn.”
“Here we go,” Colt murmurs.
“Shelby’s pulled out all the stops for tonight. The Bozeman Gazette and the Helena Independent are both sending people. Apparently, a small town rallying to save its ranching families is the kind of feel-good story editors can’t resist.” She says it lightly, but the satisfaction underneath is real.
And deserved.
“Auction couples are to be seated for dinner first, and afterward they’re opening the back terrace for the rest of town.” She pauses, and it has a quality to it I recognize from fourteen years of living with this woman. “And they’ve set up a mechanical bull.”
The silence that follows is specific and weighted.
Colt’s mug stops halfway to his mouth. “A mechanical bull?”
“And a lasso station. And a barrel racing course.” June unpacks groceries with the calm precision of a woman who has orchestrated every detail of this and is now watching the consequences unfold exactly as intended.
“Photo opportunities for the winners and their dates. The Gazette wants action shots. Very on-brand for the western theme.”
Colt sets his mug down. His face cycles through three things in quick succession: the cocky grin that’s his factory setting, a raw edge underneath that most people would miss entirely, and then the grin sliding back into place so smooth you’d swear the middle part never happened.
I caught it, though. I always do.
A man who rode saddle bronc at the national level is sitting at my kitchen table, treating a mechanical bull at a charity dinner like the funniest thing he’s heard all week.
The space between the joke and the truth is the place where my brother lives most of his life. He’s got his own auction date tonight, and this puts him back in a saddle, even a fake one, in front of the whole town.
He’s already grinning.
Same dance I do with all of them. The work of catching what they don’t say. Three years on, and I’m still figuring out how Dad managed it without any of us catching him at it.
“I’m bringing popcorn,” Maggie pipes up from the counter. “To watch the fallout.”
West, who hasn’t said a word since he walked in, leans back to extend his fist toward Maggie. She bumps it without hesitation. Crisp and silent.
The whole kitchen laughs despite the tension that’s been sitting under every conversation since I walked through the door last night.
Even me. Almost.