Boone chuckles again, shaking his head. “Goddamn. Here I was thinking you’d say something predictable—mystery, historical fiction, but no. Lark Westwood reads porn now.”
“Excuse you, it’s calledspicy romance.”
Boone smirks. “Tomato, tomahto.”
I shake my head, grinning. “For your information, I read everything. Thrillers, literary fiction, contemporary.” I sigh dreamily. “But in an ideal world, I’d have a huge library in my house. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, a big window where I could watch the snow or rain, and I wouldn’t have to leave it all day.”
“That actually does sound nice.”
I turn back to him, raising a brow. “Maybe there is some depth to you after all, Wilding.”
His grin stretches wider, his dimples etching themselves into his cheeks. “Don’t tell anyone. You’ll ruin my reputation.”
I turn slightly to glance back at him. “Your turn.”
He raises a brow. “My turn for what?”
“To tell me something I don’t know about you.”
Boone exhales a small laugh, like he has to think about it. Then he says, “Jack and I once spent an entire day trying to see if we could build a working grill out of an ammo can.”
I blink. “Jack?”
“My best friend from the military,” Boone says. “We met in training. He was the guy who could get you to do just about anything, no matter how stupid it was. The friend who made everything feel lighter.”
There’s something in the way he says it, something that makes me want to press for more. But before I can, he keeps going.
“Anyway,” he says, shaking his head, “we were out in the middle ofnowhere with time to kill, and Jack got this idea that we could turn an ammo can into a fully functional barbecue pit. Said he saw a guy do it once.”
I glance over my shoulder at him, raising a brow. “And you believed him?”
He lets out a quiet chuckle. “Jack could convince a nun to rob a bank. He had five of us buying into this genius idea like we were about to revolutionize grilling.”
I can already feel the laughter building in my chest. “So what happened?”
Boone sighs dramatically. “We set a whole-ass field on fire.”
Laughter bursts out of me before I can stop it.
Boone shakes his head, smirking. “Command was so pissed we spent three weeks doing grunt work. Jack swore up and down it wasn’t our fault, that the grass was just ‘unnaturally flammable.’”
I shake my head, still laughing. “Jack sounds like a stand-up guy.”
Boone’s smirk fades.
It’s subtle, but it happens. The lightness in his face dims, his jaw tightens just slightly, his grip on the reins shifts.
He exhales, looking out past me, past Springsteen, past this entire damn ranch.
“Yeah,” he says, quieter now. “He was.”
The weight in his voice tugs at something in my chest. I want to ask what happened. Want to ask why his voice sounds heavier, why his shoulders suddenly look like they’re carrying more than they were a second ago.
The old me would have.
The old me would have leaned in, would have wanted to know every piece of him, would have carried his sadness like it was my own.
But I can’t be the old me with Boone.
