Chapter 23
DAISY
I wake up warm.
That’s the first thing I register. I’m warm and wrapped in something that smells like cedar and soap and skin that isn’t mine. My face is pressed against soft blue chambray, and underneath it there’s a heartbeat, steady and slow, and for a few disoriented seconds I don’t move.
I just lie here and allow myself to have this.
I understand now.
I witnessed the truth last night, right there on the porch, when his hands were shaking and his forehead was pressed to mine and those green eyes were wide open with nothing left to hide behind.
Just Wyatt. Wanting me and terrified to admit that he’s been drowning in it.
Six years. He’s been carrying this for six years, and every time I told myself he didn’t see me, he was seeing me so clearly it was breaking him into pieces.
I burrow my face into his chest and breathe him in, and bone-deep certainty settles in me. Quiet and fierce and permanent. As though a lock has just shut tight.
Then I open my eyes and find he’s awake.
I don’t know how long he’s been up, but long enough. He’s on his back, one arm wrapped around me while he stares at the ceiling with the fixed expression of a man who’s been having a very long conversation with himself, only to arrive at a conclusion he hates.
I know that face. That’s his I’ve-made-a-decision-and-God-himself-isn’t-changing-my-mind face.
“No.” My stomach drops as I push up on one elbow. “Whatever you’re about to say, the answer’s no.”
“Daisy.”
“I can see it. You’ve been lying here all night building a case for why last night was a mistake.”
“It wasn’t a mistake.” The words are spoken slowly and carefully like he’s rehearsed this part. “But it can’t happen again.”
I sit up swiftly, and his shirt slips off my left shoulder. His eyes flick to it and away so fast I almost miss it. Almost.
“Why?”
“Someone broke into your cabin while we were at dinner. I should have cleared it the minute we got back. Instead, I had you against the goddamn front door.” He sits up too, swinging his legs over the side of the bed so he’s facing away from me.
Giving me his back like that’s going to make this easier.
I don’t think so, pal.
“I was supposed to be keeping you safe. And I wasn’t—”
“Wasn’t what?” I’m not letting him finish that sentence the way he wants to. “Kissing me like your life depended on it? Making me come so hard I couldn’t stand? Coming in your pants while you watched it happen?”
His back goes rigid and I keep going because screw it. He doesn’t get to flinch away from this.
“Which part are you punishing yourself for, Wyatt? Because I was there for all of it and I’m not sorry about a single second.”
His shoulders tighten. I see the muscles shift under his shirt and I want to shake him.
“You make me careless.”
The words hit me right in the heart.
“And last time I was careless, people died.”
The room goes deathly silent.
“What do you mean?”
“The morning your dad and mine died.” His eyes are fixed on the wall. “I was supposed to be in that truck. But the bank called. Some flag on the operating loan, and I stayed back to deal with it while they drove out to the east ridge. Twenty minutes. That’s all it took.”
“I didn’t know that.”
He still doesn’t look at me. “It was nothin’. The flag. The teller couldn’t even explain why it was raised. Twenty minutes on the phone over something that shouldn’t have existed, and by the time I hung up—”
He stops. His hands grip the edge of the mattress so hard his knuckles turn white.
And the journalist in me goes very, very still.
“Wyatt.” I move across the bed until I’m sitting beside him. Not touching. Close enough. “Did anyone ever explain where the flag came from?”
He looks at me for the first time since this conversation started. I can see him trying to figure out where I’m going.
“No. Bank teller said it was a flag on the operating loan.”
“A flag that just happened to come through at the exact time Dad and Bill were driving out to the ridge.”
He stares at me for a beat before a frown begins to form on his brow.
“Someone needed you off that truck. Not off the property. Off that road. Out of the way.”
“Daisy, what are you—”
“I’m telling you what I came here to tell you.” I pull my knees up, tuck my feet under me, and face him fully. I’m done carrying this alone. “The article is real, but it’s not the main reason I’m here.”
His head turns, and he looks at me for the first time since this conversation started.
“I don’t believe it was an accident, Wyatt.”
I watch as that lands, watch his jaw tighten as his eyes fill with questions before I continue. “Dad’s death. Bill’s death. It wasn’t an accident. None of it was.”
All the color drains from his face as those green eyes widen. “What are you talkin’ about?”
His jaw works. His hands haven’t let go of the mattress.
“My dad withdrew fifty thousand dollars a week before he died.” I state it plainly without buildup. “A cashier’s check made out to cash. Just his handwriting in the margin of his notebook that said ‘buying back proof’.”
Wyatt doesn’t move, not so much as an eyelash.
“Fifty thousand dollars from a man who budgeted his groceries down to the last cent and bought Christmas gifts in October. That’s not a whim. That’s a man paying for something he was desperate to get his hands on.”
“Proof of what?” His voice is barely there.
“I don’t know yet. The check was the first thing I found, and it was also the first place the trail went cold. Made out to cash means no payee, no name, no way to trace. So I stopped pulling on the money and started pulling on land.”
“And?”
“Larkspur River was sold at auction through a firm called Whitmore and Associates out of Helena. Legal services on paper. No website, no client list, no physical office I’ve ever been able to find.
They dissolved three months after Mom signed the papers.
Then I pulled every property in the valley that changed hands under financial duress over the last decade.
Four of them were bought by the same shell.
Mountain West Acquisitions. Same Helena profile as Whitmore.
But where Whitmore wrapped up cleanly, Mountain West never did.
It went quiet four months after Dad died and it’s still on the books, filing the bare minimum to stay registered. ”
“Never heard of either of them.”
“You most likely wouldn’t have. But when I laid Whitmore’s articles of incorporation beside Mountain West’s, the signatory name was the same. One phantom person running both shells. And every notarized document in either operation carries the same stamp.”
He goes still. “Whose?”
“Daniel Rupert Cutter. Licensed notary out of Blackstone Creek.”
“Danny Cutter’s in the hospital and old as the hills.” His eyes narrow. “He didn’t break into your cabin.”
“I know. But his daughter Alma is still local. Glen tracked her down for me.”
He’s staring at me like I’ve pulled the floor out from under him, and I suppose I have. Three years of believing it was an icy road and bad luck, and I’ve just handed him a trail that says otherwise.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
It’s not accusatory. It’s bewildered. And it stings, because the honest answer isn’t flattering.
“Because I told myself the fewer people who knew, the better.”
He flinches. Small, but I see it, and I rush to make him see my way of thinking.
“I didn’t know what you knew, or what you might have missed, or whether telling you would help or blow the whole thing up. And part of me was afraid you’d tell me to quit it, and chase me back to Denver.”
“And now?”
“Now someone broke into my cabin and took my laptop, and that tells me two things.” I hold up a finger. “One. Someone knows I’m looking. Which means I’m closer than I thought.” A second finger. “Two. They think they’ve rattled me. They think I’m going to pack up and run away.”
I look at him, steady and sure.
“Everything on that laptop is backed up to the cloud. Every file, every note, every thread I’ve pulled. They stole a piece of hardware, but they got nothing.”
His expression shifts. Part relief, part frustration, and complete pride.
“So you’re not leavin’.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Daisy—”
“I’m not leaving, Wyatt. Someone killed my father and yours, and I’m going to find out who. A trashed cabin isn’t going to change that.”
The word “killed” lands between us like a stone in still water. I said it deliberately. I watch him absorb it. Watch the shift happen in real time—not grief, not guilt, but resolve.
The kind with teeth.
“Killed,” he repeats.
“Yes.”
“You believe that.”
“I know that. Dad drove that switchback every day for years. He knew every curve and every soft shoulder. And he was with Bill, who’d driven it even longer.
Two men who knew that road in their sleep, and they went off it on the same day that you happened to get a phone call that kept you from being in the truck.
” I let that sit. “That’s not an accident. That’s a plan.”
Wyatt stands and walks to the window. He puts both hands on the frame and drops his head between his arms.
I wait. I’ve learned when to push and when to let the silence do the work.
When he turns around, the man looking at me is not the one who was trying to end things five minutes ago. The guilt is still there because that’s who he is at his core, but there’s resolve beneath it now, and it makes hope flutter to life in my chest.
“Alma Cutter,” he states.
“Alma Cutter.” I repeat her name on a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
“What do you need?”
This is not the conversation I expected to be having this morning. Twenty minutes ago he was trying to push me away. Now he’s standing at the window asking me what I need as though he’s ready to tear Blackstone Creek apart board by board.
“I need you to stop trying to protect me from yourself.”
He’s quiet for a long time. I can see it working through him, the war between the man who wants to shut this down and the man who just found out his father might have been murdered.
“You’re not going back to that cabin,” he says finally. Not a question.
“Obviously.”
“You’re staying here. In the house. Where I can—” He stops and reworks. “Where it’s safe.”
“Fine.”
“And when you go to see Alma Cutter, I’m coming with you.”
“Wyatt—”
“That’s not up for discussion.”
I hold his gaze. There he is. Not the man who was trying to retreat five minutes ago. The one who runs a ranch and a family and has never backed down from anything that mattered.
“Okay.”
He nods then looks at me standing there in his shirt like the practicality just hit him. “You need clothes.”
“Everything I have is in the cabin.”
“I’ll send June down to grab what she can once the sheriff clears it.” He picks up his boots and his belt. Pauses at the door. Doesn’t look back. “I’ll make coffee.”
He walks out, and I stand there in his room in his shirt in the early morning light, and I don’t spin it. I don’t dress it up. I don’t tell myself it’s fine.
It’s not fine. None of this is fine. Someone killed my father and someone broke into my cabin, and I’m standing in his bedroom with my hands shaking and my chest tight and nowhere to hide from any of it.
But he believed me. He listened and he believed me, and he’s downstairs making coffee instead of sending me back to Denver.
That’s enough. For now, that’s enough.
I pick up the black dress from the floor, pull it back on and go downstairs.
Wyatt is at the kitchen counter with two mugs and a face like thunder. He slides one toward me without a word.
Then the back door opens, and Maggie walks in smelling like barn and antiseptic, peeling off latex gloves. She stops dead when she sees me, and I can almost see the cogs in her mind taking in the evidence before her.
Daisy Monroe in last night’s dress and barefoot, standing in her family’s kitchen at six in the morning.
Her eyes dart to Wyatt, then to me, before zipping back to Wyatt.
“Hold on.”
She holds up one finger, walks to the pantry, and comes back with a bag of popcorn. Then she hops up onto the kitchen counter, legs swinging as she opens the bag before looking up and nodding once.
“Okay. Go.”