Chapter 5 Delaney
FIVE
DELANEY
Nash comes back in the house like a storm with a heartbeat. The screen door slaps behind him and my mother gasps so hard I think she might swallow her tongue.
“Good Lord—”
Daddy is already halfway out of his chair. “Son, what happened?”
Nash lifts one hand like he’s calming a skittish horse. “Fence wire,” he says, low and steady. “Clean cut. Whoever did it was gone before I got there.”
Then I see it.
Blood.
A thin line down his forearm, darker where it’s pooled at his wrist. Another smear across the side of his hand like he tried to wipe it away and decided it wasn’t worth losing time.
My stomach flips in a way that’s not entirely fear and not entirely something else. “Sit,” I say.
He looks at me like he’s deciding whether to argue.
“Now,” I add, voice turning into the Delaney that can make a room of stubborn cowboys fall in line.
He sits.
Daddy starts asking questions—where, how long ago, did you see a vehicle, did the alarm ping twice, should we call the sheriff—but the words blur because I am focused on the cut and the man attached to it.
“It’s not bad,” Nash says when I step closer.
“It’s bleeding,” I say.
He tilts his head. “That’s how cuts work.”
“Don’t get cute with me, Hawthorne.”
My mother presses a hand to her chest like she might swoon. “Delaney, honey, towels are under the sink—”
“I’ve got it.”
I take Nash’s wrist.
The second my fingers wrap around him, electricity snaps up my arm.
Not romantic electricity. Not exactly.
It’s that primal, protective jolt that says mine in a way I haven’t allowed myself to think in years.
He lets me pull him down the hall toward the guest bathroom.
It occurs to me about three steps too late that I am dragging a very large, very rugged, very wounded man into a small enclosed space where the air will be too warm and the proximity will be too loud.
The door clicks shut behind us. A single light buzzes overhead. And suddenly it’s just wound care and history and the faint scent of his soap mixing with the cedar-and-night smell he always carries like a signature.
“Hold your arm out,” I say.
“Yes, ma’am.” The tease in his voice lands softly, like he’s trying not to spook me.
I clean the cut with antiseptic.
He doesn’t flinch. Of course he doesn’t.
The cut is shallow but wicked—wire is cruel like that, a thin blade that looks harmless until it isn’t.
“Someone cut it again,” I say, more to keep my hands steady than to rehash what we already know.
“Yeah.”
“On the exact section we repaired.”
“Yeah.”
I glance up.
For a second he’s not joking or guarded. He’s all the way present, eyes dark and sharp. The scar at his cheek catches the light and makes him look carved out of trouble.
“You could’ve gotten hurt worse,” I say quietly.
His mouth softens. “I’ve had worse.”
“That’s not comforting.”
A short breath of laughter leaves him, low and surprised. “It used to be.”
It used to be easier to laugh with him. It used to be easy to be anything with him.
I tape gauze carefully, my fingers brushing over the hard ridge of tendon in his forearm.
His wrist flexes under my touch. His gaze drops to my hands. Then back to my face.
The air thickens.
I hate that I notice. I hate that my body notices faster than my brain can build a fence around the reaction.
“This whole thing is supposed to be pretend,” I say.
“I know.”
“You’re not helping.”
“I’m sitting here bleeding politely while you boss me around in a bathroom.”
I press a final strip of tape down harder than necessary.
He exhales like I hit a sensitive spot. The sound is quiet. The look he gives me is not. He shifts slightly, and his knee brushes mine. A tiny contact.
My breath stutters like the traitor it is. I step back to give myself space. The sink is behind me. The counter bites into my hips.
Nash stands. Slowly. Like he’s not sure if the movement is allowed. Like he’s not sure if I’m allowed. “Laney,” he says, softer than the night outside.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not trying to—”
“Not this.” I lift my hands, palm out. “Not yet.”
His brow furrows. “Yet?”
The word comes out before I can swallow it.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It might be.”
I stare at him.
He takes a step closer. Not aggressive. Not cornering. Just closing a gap we’ve been pretending doesn’t exist. His hand lifts like he wants to tuck my hair again—and stops an inch short, the restraint so deliberate it hurts to watch. “I’m trying to do this right,” he says. “The mission. The ranch.”
“Then do it right,” I whisper.
His eyes flick to my mouth.
I can feel the almost kiss like lightning building over a field—pressure and heat and that split second before the sky decides.
My heart bangs.
His breath shifts.
We lean—
A knock hits the door.
“Delaney?” Mama calls, brisk with emergency. “Your daddy needs help getting the cattle into the paddock. They’re riled up from all this commotion.”
I close my eyes like I’m bargaining with the universe.
Nash’s jaw tightens. He steps back immediately.
I hate how grateful I am for his control.
“I’ll go,” he says quietly.
Mama opens the door a crack and stops short when she sees how close we were.
Her expression says oh.
Her expression also says not under my roof without a ring.
Nash slides past her like a man who knows how to exit a room without making it a scene. “Be right there, Mr. Coleman.” He’s gone before my pulse can settle.
Mama leans against the frame, crossing her arms. “Bathroom bandaging is a time-honored Texas courting ritual,” she says.
“Mama.”
“I’m kidding.” She is not kidding. “Are you okay?”
I watch Nash through the window as he jogs toward the paddock, rolling up his sleeves, already taking the lead like the ranch is a language he never forgot.
I don’t remember deciding to speak the truth. It just falls out. “I think I might be falling for him.”
Mama’s face softens in a way that makes my throat ache. She steps closer and brushes a hand over my cheek like I’m still eleven and fresh out of the creek. “Sweetheart,” she says gently, “did you ever even get up from the last time you fell for him?”
I blink. My eyes burn. I laugh once, watery and helpless. Because the answer is right there in my chest, carved deep as that old dock post:
N + D—come home.
Outside, the cattle funnel into the paddock with a chorus of snorts and stomps. Nash moves among them calm and commanding, a quiet gravity that steadies the chaos.
I wipe my eyes and square my shoulders.
Maybe I never got up.
Maybe I’ve just been standing very still for years, waiting for the right kind of brave.
And now he’s here.
Different.
So am I.
The ranch is fighting. The town is watching. And my heart?
My heart is about to test every fence I ever built to keep him out.