Maisie fell asleep at seven-thirty with her boots still on.
I eased them off, pulled the blanket to her chin, tucked the stuffed horse under her arm. She didn't stir. One arm flung above her head, hair spread across the pillow like spilled gold.
I stood in her doorway longer than I needed to. Watching her breathe the way mothers watch their children breathe — not because we think they'll stop, but because the rhythm of it is the most reassuring sound in the world.
Then I closed her door and checked the locks.
The Highland Park house had a security system that cost more than my car — cameras on every corner, monitored twenty-four hours. I didn't have surveillance. I had single-pane windows and a door chain from the hardware store. And every night I walked the same path, checked the same locks, becausethe part of my brain that had been trained to scan for danger hadn't gotten the message that it was safe to stop. Some nights, my hands shook while I did it. Some nights I checked twice. Tonight was a check twice night — I'd made it all the way to the couch before the doubt crept in, the cold whisper that saiddid you really check or did you just think you checked,and I was back at the front door with my fingers on the deadbolt before I could argue with it.
Locked. It was locked. It was always locked.
I made tea. Sat on the couch with case files. Opened the Mercer folder. Read the same paragraph three times without absorbing a word.
My mind kept drifting back to the party. Not to Clay's grin. Not to his shoulders despite them being the kind of shoulders that made sensible women do stupid things. Not to the way he leaned against things like the whole world was a fence post designed for his personal convenience. Not to the way his jeans fit him, which was a thought I was absolutely not having and definitely not havingtwice. Not to the way his voice dropped half an octave when he said my name, like the wordCalliehad been built for that specific mouth.
Nope. Not thinking about any of it.
I was thinking about all of it.
To the way he'd crouched down to Maisie's level without being asked. He'd looked at her like she was a whole person with opinions, not a prop to be positioned. The way she'd whispered,I told all my friends you're my cowboy,like she was telling him the most important story she'd ever told, and something in his face had shifted, gone soft and serious in a way that couldn't be performed.
I'd been with a man who performed everything. I knew the difference.
And how I'd told him no, and he'd said "fair enough" and meant it, but came back with a different offer. Not charm. Not manipulation. Just a man who'd heard no and tried a different door.
I didn't need a man. I needed this job and this town and this cottage with its checked locks and my daughter sleeping down the hall. I knew what it cost to let someone in — the slow surrender of yourself, piece by piece, until you couldn't remember where you ended and the performance began. I wasn't doing that again. Not for a grin, not for charm, not for a man who made my daughter light up like a Christmas tree.
But his voice sat in the back of my mind like a song I couldn't shake.
I’m offering a friend. No angle.
I stared at the Mercer file until the words blurred. Put it down.
The cottage was quiet. My daughter was safe.
And somewhere on the Blackwood Ranch, a man I'd agreed to be friends with was probably grinning about something, and I was not going to think about what that grin did to his face or the way the string lights had caught the line of his jaw when he laughed.
I turned off the lamp.
I did not think about his smile.
It wasn't the Earl Grey keeping me awake. It was a cowboy with green eyes and a voice that did things to my insides that were frankly rude, and I wasnotgoing to lie here thinking about what his hands looked like wrapped around that beer bottle. I wasnot.
Shit. I was.
Chapter 3
Clay
I woke up feeling like I'd been hit by a truck.
Which, in a way, I had. Except the truck was two thousand pounds of Brahman-cross named Devil's Backbone, and instead of hitting me once, he'd hit me six times over three days in Fort Worth, and now — five days later — my body was presenting the invoice with interest.
The house was quiet. Post-party silence — the kind that settled over a place after a hundred people had left and the walls were still ringing with the ghost of music and laughter. Sunlight was cutting through the blinds in stripes, and I lay in bed for another five minutes, bracing for the pain I knew would come once I stood.
I sounded like Earl's truck when I stood up — every joint popping, cracking, grinding in protest like my skeleton was filing a formal complaint. My knee saidgo to hell. My shoulder saidI told you so. My ribs saidwe're not speaking to you. I was thirty-one years old, and I moved like a man who'd been assembled wrong and was too stubborn to read the damn instructions.
I popped four ibuprofen, chased them with water, and headed downstairs.
