Chapter 3 Delaney
THREE
DELANEY
Fake dating is a special kind of torture, and I say that as someone who once spent four hours trapped in a cattle trailer with a goat that had opinions.
On one hand, this plan makes sense. It’s small-town camouflage. A public distraction. A way to keep Nash on the ranch without hanging a neon sign that says SABOTAGE INVESTIGATION IN PROGRESS, Y’ALL.
On the other hand…
Nash Hawthorne is not a camouflage-friendly man.
He’s a walking spotlight in a Stetson.
I wake up already tired of thinking about him.
The guest room door across the hall is shut. That should be comforting. Instead it feels like my brain has decided to camp out on the threshold with a folding chair and a megaphone.
He’s here.
He’s different.
You asked for this.
Did you, though?
I dress in jeans and a fitted tee and my oldest boots, the ones with the scuffed toes that make me feel like I’m wearing armor with a little history. When I am ninety-three and someone asks me what I did with my life, I want to say I saved this place in boots that already knew the dirt.
Downstairs, Mama is already in the kitchen pouring coffee with the kind of intentional calm that says she’s refusing to panic on principle.
“You sleep?” she asks.
“Sure,” I lie.
“I heard boots around midnight.”
I choke on my coffee.
She smiles over the rim of her mug. “Not yours.”
“Oh.”
“And I heard your father telling the Lord this morning that if he ends up with grandbabies out of a disaster plan, he will accept that as a blessing.”
“Mama.”
She just hums like she’s savoring the chaos.
“I’m going to the store,” I say, grabbing my keys out of spite.
“Good. Be polite. And try not to stab him in public.”
“Again, Mama—”
“I’m teasing.”
She is not teasing.
Outside, the sun is already loud. Texas doesn’t ease into a day. It kicks the door wide open.
Nash is by the truck, leaning a shoulder against the door with a coffee in one hand and a phone in the other. The hat is on—of course it is—and the brim cuts his eyes in shadow.
He looks like a man built to haunt women who believed in promises.
He lifts his gaze when I step onto the porch. Not a lingering sweep. Not a hungry look. Just a quick, professional check like I’m part of a perimeter he’s responsible for.
And then his mouth curves like he can’t help the second thought. “Morning, Laney.”
I tell myself my pulse is reacting to caffeine. “Morning.”
He pushes off the truck. “We’re doing the grocery run first. Town needs something to gossip about besides weather and who’s secretly on a cleanse.”
“I’m not on a cleanse,” I say automatically.
His smile deepens a fraction. “Didn’t think you were.”
Why does that sound like he remembers how I used to sneak cornbread off the cooling rack?
I climb into the passenger seat and put distance between my knees and his, purely as a matter of national security.
The drive to town is short enough to be dangerous.
Valor Springs blurs past the windows in familiar slices: the feed store with the sun-faded sign, the diner that still smells like cinnamon even from the parking lot, the church with the white steeple that’s been repainted so many times it might collapse from kindness.
Nash doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t need to. The presence of him fills space like storm pressure. I can feel the weight of his attention even when he’s watching the road.
“There’s a list,” he says finally, tapping the folded paper my mother handed him like he’s been in possession of a grocery list long enough to develop feelings about it. “Your mother wants me to verify the brand of flour because apparently there’s a scandal.”
“There is,” I say. “If you buy the wrong one, the biscuits turn out awful.”
He lets out a low laugh that briefly takes ten years off his face.
I stare out the window before that sound can do something reckless to my heart.
We park in front of Miller’s Market, which is half grocery store, half community bulletin board, and one hundred percent where you will run into someone you owe a polite conversation to while holding a bag of onions.
The bell over the door jingles as we walk in. It takes exactly twelve seconds for the first head to turn. Then another.
Then three more.
Small towns don’t stare the way cities do. Cities are impersonal. Texas stares with investment.
Nash slides a hand to the small of my back. Not possessive. Not squeezing. Just a subtle placement like he’s guiding me through a door.
I freeze for a microsecond.
His thumb moves once—barely a stroke, more of a steadying pulse.
And my traitor body decides to remember what it felt like to be fourteen and breathless and convinced he was the only boy who’d ever matter.
I keep walking.
“Delaney!” Mrs. Hartwell calls from the produce aisle. She’s sixty, unstoppable, and probably responsible for half the town’s marriage proposals through sheer influence. “Back home for good?”
“Back for now,” I say.
Her eyes flick to Nash like she’s assessing a prize bull. “And you, sir?”
“Nash Hawthorne, ma’am.”
“Oh, I know who you are.” The smile she gives him suggests she knows who he was at seventeen, too. “I was beginning to think you’d grown allergic to this town.”
Nash’s hand tightens just a hair at my back. “Just been busy, that’s all,” he says evenly.
Mrs. Hartwell hums and looks between us like she’s reading the last page of a mystery. “Well, isn’t that something.”
It is something. It’s a lot of something.
We escape deeper into the store.
Nash becomes a surprisingly competent grocery partner.
He reads labels, double-checks brands, and humors my mother’s handwritten note that says NO STORE-brAND BUTTER, ABSOLUTELY NOT.
He bends close to hear me over the hum of the refrigeration units, and I fight the stupidly intimate urge to rest my forehead against his shoulder like we’re not walking a high-wire act over the canyon of our past.
“Your mom still bossy?” he asks as he tosses coffee into the cart.
I snort. “She’s refined. Like vinegar.”
“Vinegar’s useful.”
“So is a taser. Doesn’t mean I want one in my purse.”
His mouth kicks up.
We hit the checkout line right as two of the ranch wives and one of my old high school classmates appear on the opposite end of the aisle like sharks scented blood in the water.
Nash reaches into the cart, pulls out a pack of gum, and drops it on the belt.
Then he leans in and murmurs near my ear, “We should probably sell this.”
“What?”
“This.” He flicks his gaze toward the unofficial welcome committee. “You want them convinced? Give them a reason to be.”
I swallow. “We’re not—”
“I know.” His voice lowers. “But they don’t.” He turns me slightly by the elbow—gentle, but sure—and brushes a kiss to my temple.
It’s brief. An illusion. A performance.
It still sends a hot, electric line straight down my spine like my body doesn’t recognize the difference between fake and familiar.
The women gasp.
One of them beams like Christmas came early.
I stare at the gum display and focus on breathing.
“Okay,” I mutter when we’re outside again. “Point made. Your method is… effective.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I’m not.”
He gives me a look that says he has seen worse lies in harder places and survived them.
“I’m fine,” I say softer.
He nods like he’s honoring the line I’m drawing. “Fence next.”
I hate how grateful I am for the subject change.
Back at the ranch, the south fence looks like a mouth with missing teeth. The repair crew is already there, but Gray’s instructions were clear: visibility matters.
So I grab gloves and a toolbox while Nash checks the line, eyes scanning the horizon like he expects the wind to try something.
We work side by side in the sun. Hammering staples. Tensioning wire. Replacing a post that snapped clean at the base. The rhythm of physical labor steadies me—the simple truth of it. You fix what breaks. You keep going.
“Your hands still know what they’re doing,” Nash says after I loop wire with practiced efficiency.
“City didn’t erase me.”
“No.” His voice is low. “It didn’t.”
I glance at him, surprised by the softness I catch there.
The last time we saw each other—
I don’t let my mind finish the sentence.
I don’t let it walk toward that half-remembered night when everything almost tipped into yes and then something else happened. Something sharp enough that time hasn’t dulled it yet. The details are a locked drawer in my chest. I can’t open it while I’m trying to hold this ranch together.
Nash braces a new post while I tamp the dirt around it. We’re close. Too close. Our shoulders brush. A bead of sweat slides down the column of his throat and disappears into the collar of his shirt like a sin.
I hate my brain.
I hate my heart.
I especially hate the part of me that still knows his body language like an old song.
“You always did work mad,” he says.
“I’m not mad.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m focused.”
He hums a quiet laugh. “You’re still bad at lying.”
I plant my shovel harder than necessary.
“Careful,” he murmurs. “You’re going to dig to the center of Texas.”
“Maybe I’ll find your common sense down there.”
“Probably buried under your pride.”
I whip a glare at him—and catch the flicker in his eyes that looks like heat restrained by discipline.
We both go still.
There are moments when the past is just a story. And then there are moments when it shows up in the flesh, in the sun, with a belt buckle and a heartbeat, and you realize you never really outran it.
Nash steps closer to adjust the post. His forearm brushes mine. A simple contact. Innocent. The electricity between us is not. He pauses, jaw ticking once like he’s arguing with something internal.
I should step back.
I don’t.
“Delaney,” he says quietly.
“Don’t,” I whisper, and I’m not sure if I mean don’t touch me, don’t look at me like that, or don’t make me remember how hoping for you felt.
His hand comes up anyway—not to my face, not to my waist. He tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear with a gentleness that feels like a confession.
“May need to practice,” he says, voice rough. “If we’re selling this.”
My breath stutters. I give him a look that’s equal parts warning and surrender. “Practice makes problems,” I say.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “But it also makes it believable.”
Across the yard, one of the ranch hands whistles softly.
Somebody laughs.
The audience is here, whether I like it or not.
I take a step back and force a smile that looks real if you don’t know me well. “Then let’s be believable,” I say.
He studies me for a beat like he can see the tremor under my shininess. “Copy that, sweetheart.”
The word shouldn’t do what it does to me. It should be harmless.
Instead it lands like a warm hand in a cold storm.
We return to work with the kind of careful distance that fools everyone except the two people standing in it.
And while the sun sinks a fraction toward late afternoon, I realize something that makes my stomach go tight.
Saving this ranch is simple compared to surviving this slow, inevitable proximity to Nash Hawthorne.
Because the fence isn’t the only thing that’s going to snap if we keep pulling this hard.