Chapter 20
DAISY
The Blackstone Inn looks like June Hartley reached inside its chest and rearranged its organs.
White linen on every table. Candles in mason jars wrapped with twine and sprigs of something that smells like lavender and sage.
Place cards in careful calligraphy. The whole room feels staged—like it’s waiting to be photographed, which it is.
The Bozeman Gazette photographer is already circling, and the Helena Independent has sent a woman with a notepad and sharp eyes who looks like she’s already halfway to a headline.
Wyatt holds the door and I step inside, and whatever almost-ease we managed in the truck evaporates on contact with the room.
The dry back-and-forth. The smile I almost couldn’t suppress.
Gone.
In here, he’s exactly what he’s always been with me.
Polite. Careful. A man honoring an obligation.
The orchard was the anomaly.
This is the baseline.
A table near the window has two place cards side by side.
Wyatt Hartley.
Daisy Monroe.
Two other auction pairs are already seated: a guy from the feed store I vaguely recognize with a brunette who keeps touching her hair, and a woman in her forties with the spa package seated across from a man who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else.
Wyatt pulls my chair out, and I sit. He sits beside me, gazing at the menu like it requires his full attention.
He didn’t wear his hat tonight. I knew that the moment I opened the cabin door and the full unshielded reality of Wyatt Hartley hit me in the chest like a truck. The chambray. The rolled cuffs. The jaw and the scar and the green eyes with no hat brim to hide behind.
I managed the truck. Barely. But the truck didn’t have candlelight, and candlelight is a different kind of cruel.
“So,” the brunette says brightly, leaning forward. “How did you two meet?”
The question lands in the middle of the table and stays there.
“Her father worked with my family,” Wyatt states flatly, without looking up from the menu. “Long time ago.”
Practically a speech by his standards.
“Oh, that’s sweet,” the brunette coos. “So you’ve known each other forever?”
“Since she was six.”
The brunette’s eyes widen. She does the math the way everyone does the math, her gaze moving between us, recalculating. “Wait, so how old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Oh.” A small, loaded syllable. Then she recovers, smile brightening. “That’s kind of adorable, though. Like a big brother thing.”
Wyatt turns a page of the menu. “Steak looks good.”
A big brother thing.
The brunette pivots to her own date, who seems relieved to be talking about literally anything else. I pick up my menu and study it like I haven’t already decided on the salmon.
Dinner is fine.
The food is good.
Wyatt orders the steak, I order the salmon, and we eat side by side making polite conversation with the other couples while maintaining exactly enough distance that no part of us touches.
His elbow stays on his side. My arm stays on mine.
Every time he reaches for something, the muscle in his forearm shifts under tanned skin in the candlelight and I focus very carefully on my salmon.
The breadbasket passes between us without contact, which feels like an achievement until I reach for my water glass just as he reaches for the salt. Our knuckles brush and we both pull back like the table’s caught fire.
Neither of us acknowledges it. I try to push my head toward Cutter and Mountain West, toward anything with a thread to pull, but none of it sticks. Every time his forearm shifts, I lose my train of thought.
The Gazette photographer stops at our table twice. Wyatt tolerates it the way he tolerates weather.
The first shot is the table, all six of us, candles and white linen. The second is Wyatt and me, and the photographer asks, “Maybe a little closer, folks?”
Wyatt shifts his chair exactly one inch and sets his jaw for the camera with the expression of a man having a perfectly adequate time.
I keep smiling. It feels appropriate.
Across the dining room, Colt is at a corner table with his auction date, the polished brunette in her forties who paid seven hundred dollars for the privilege.
She’s leaning in, one hand on her wine glass, laughing at something he’s said with the easy familiarity of a woman who followed his rodeo career before he walked away from it.
Colt is doing that thing he does where every person within his radius feels like the only one in the room.
The Gazette photographer drifts that direction, and Colt doesn’t even notice. Or doesn’t care.
“Your brother’s having a good time,” the feed-store guy says to Wyatt.
Wyatt glances over. His jaw tightens for half a second before he smooths it out.
“He usually does.” He’s already looking back at his plate.
Dessert arrives. Some kind of berry crumble with cream that I eat without tasting. Wyatt shifts the candle between us six inches to the left without comment, and the flame stops catching in my eyes where it’s been flickering for the last twenty minutes.
He doesn’t look at me when he does it. Doesn’t seem to register he’s done it at all, so I just look down at my plate.
After dessert, June appears at the dining room entrance with the particular energy of a woman about to redirect a room.
“If everyone would like to make their way out to the terrace, we have a few activities set up courtesy of Shelby and the Blackstone Inn.” She pauses, timing it. “Including a mechanical bull.”
A ripple of laughter moves through the tables. Colt’s date looks at him with an expression that suggests she didn’t pay all that money to watch from the sidelines.
Wyatt pushes his chair back and offers me his hand. I take it. He lets go the moment I’m on my feet and walks beside me toward the terrace doors, his palm settling on my lower back to guide me through the threshold before falling away.
The same place his hand landed when he steered me out of the auction tent and into the orchard. The same gesture. Except that night his fingers had spread wide and warm and stayed, and tonight they barely land before they’re gone.
Pathetic, Monroe.
The terrace is strung with lights. Hay bales line the edges in clusters, and the mechanical bull sits in the center ringed with padded mats.
Off to one side there’s a lasso station with a roping dummy, and beyond that three barrels mark out a short racing course on the flat stretch of grass past the patio.
The evening air is warm and carries the smell of cut grass and the faint sweetness of the wildflower border June must have coordinated with the florist.
The Gazette photographer is already repositioning in readiness.
And Shelby Reynolds is standing by the bull, clipboard in hand. Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders, and she looks as show-stopping as ever.
My stomach drops, and suddenly my dinner isn’t sitting so pleasantly.
She looks up when we come through the doors. Her eyes light up as her warm smile finds Wyatt first. It’s the smile of a woman who has nothing to prove and no reason to guard herself around this man.
“Wyatt.” She touches his arm familiarly. “Glad you made it. How was dinner?”
“Good. June outdid herself.”
“She always does.” Shelby’s eyes move to me. “Daisy, so lovely to see you. You look gorgeous tonight.”
“Thank you.” My voice doesn’t crack, and I silently celebrate the win.
She turns back to Wyatt to explain something about the schedule for the bull, and her hand settles on his forearm while she talks. The move is sure and casual in the way you touch someone you’re comfortable with.
And my mind fills in the rest without permission.
Because of course it does.
Shelby squeezes his arm once and steps away toward the bull to greet the next group coming through the doors.
Wyatt turns to me. “You want to look around?”
He sounds like he’d rather chew on a cactus, and is only asking because it’s expected.
“Sure.” I completely ignore the nausea that stirs in my belly.
We walk toward the hay bales, and behind us, I hear the bull operator fire up the motor for a test run. The mechanical whir fills the terrace, and a cheer goes up from somewhere near the bar.
Colt’s date finds him immediately. She hooks her arm through his and steers him toward the bull with the determination of a woman who has been waiting for this part of the evening since the auction.
Colt goes along with a grin, shrugging off his jacket and handing it to her with a little flourish that makes her giggle behind her hand.
“He shouldn’t,” Wyatt mutters under his breath.
I turn to him with a frown. “Shouldn’t what?”
But Colt’s already swinging a leg over. The operator gives him a nod, and Colt settles into the saddle with the easy, practiced posture of a man whose body remembers this even if the rest of him has moved on. One hand goes up, and the bull starts slowly.
The terrace goes quiet the way a room does when it recognizes it’s watching someone who knows what they’re doing.
Colt rides like it’s second nature. Loose hips, his free hand balanced and steady while the bull picks up speed. His date is cheering from the sideline with her phone out. The Gazette photographer moves in close, crouching for a low angle, and the shutter clicks in rapid bursts.
The bull bucks hard, and Colt rolls with it like water over a stone. Someone whistles, setting off catcalls from the bar as the photographer keeps shooting.
He looks at home. And the camera is catching every second of it.
Wyatt watches with an expression I can’t read. His arms are folded and his jaw is tight, but whatever he’s thinking, he keeps to himself.
Colt dismounts to applause and whoops. His date throws her arms around his neck, and he catches her with a laugh and a spin that the photographer captures from three feet away. The flash goes off twice and Wyatt’s jaw tightens another fraction.
He doesn’t say anything else. But I watch him watch his brother accept a beer from someone near the roping station, his date still tucked under his arm.
The Gazette photographer trails them like a man who’s found his front page, and something about Wyatt’s silence tells me this conversation isn’t over. It’s just been delayed to a later time.
“You want to try the lasso?” he asks, turning back to me.
The pivot is deliberate, but I throw him a bone.
“I haven’t roped since I was fourteen, Wyatt Hartley.”
He quirks a dark eyebrow. “Muscle memory?”
“Now that’s optimism if I ever heard it.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. More like the ghost of one, there and gone so fast I almost miss it, but it makes my chest ache in a way that I refuse to examine.
The roping dummy is a sawhorse with a plastic steer head bolted to one end. Two coiled ropes hang from a hook on the fence post beside it. Wyatt picks one up, tests the weight, and holds the other out to me.
I take it and immediately remember that I have no idea what I’m doing.
“Loop’s too big.” He frowns, watching me fumble with the knot.
I can’t stifle a snort that says I-told-you-so. “I said it’s been twelve years.”
“Wasn’t a criticism.” He steps closer. “Here.”
His hands close over mine on the rope, adjusting my grip. He reshapes the loop with a quick, practiced motion that puts his chest behind my shoulder and his chin somewhere above my left ear.
My lungs momentarily forget how to work.
“Smaller loop. You’re not ropin’ a barn.” His voice is low and close and I can feel the vibration of it in my spine. “Swing from your wrist, not your elbow. And keep your eyes on the horns.”
His breath is warm against my skin, and goosebumps tingle down my spine.
He smells like warm skin and the cedar and clean cotton scent I recognize from his sheets, and I need him to step back immediately.
He does and I exhale quietly in relief, though his scent still teases my nostrils.
“Try it.”
I throw, and the loop sails wide, landing in the dirt three feet left of the dummy.
“Wrist,” Wyatt says.
“I used my wrist.”
“You used your whole arm.”
I face him with narrowed eyes as I press down on the smile that threatens my lips. “That’s a generous interpretation.”
There it is again. The almost-smile that isn’t one, except this time it lasts half a second longer than before.
I coil the rope and throw again. It lands closer, but the loop at least passes over the dummy’s ear.
“Better.”
“Don’t patronize me, Hartley.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He picks up the other rope and tosses it in one easy motion. It drops clean over both horns and settles at the base of the neck like it was placed there by hand.
I stare at it, then pivot to Wyatt. “Now you’re just being a show-off.”
“Muscle memory,” he drawls, and this time the almost-smile reaches his eyes for just a second. For a split second, the air between us shifts into something that feels dangerously close to how it felt in the orchard before reality crept back in.
Our gazes meet and hold, and I know I should stop smiling, but I don’t. I can’t.
Instead, I throw and miss again, chuckling as the rope lands a mile wide this time. “I think your muscle memory theory has a flaw.”
Wyatt shakes his head slowly, then closes the distance between us to stand behind me. His hand lands on my hip to square my stance, and his other hand wraps around my wrist to guide the motion. Every point of contact registers like a brand.
Hip.
Wrist.
The wall of his chest against my spine.
“Slow.” The word is a low rasp against the shell of my ear.
“Smooth.” His fingers tighten around my wrist.
“Now release at the top.”
I do, and the rope drops over the horns.
“There you go, Daisy-girl.”
His hand is still on my hip.
My back is against his chest. I can’t help but lean into him.
His breath is warm against the side of my neck and neither of us moves.
Then his thumb shifts a quarter inch against my hipbone, and every nerve in my body fires at once.
My sharp inhale is almost inaudible. Still he drops his hands and steps back, putting several feet of space between us that may as well be the Grand Canyon.
“Gettin’ late.” His voice is level, jaw set. Whatever door cracked open just slammed closed. “I should get you home.”