My mother laughed. "Smart man."
Haven smiled. It was her real smile, the easy one, and it hit me somewhere behind the sternum.
She hadn't looked at me directly since she walked in. Not once. She was doing it naturally enough that nobody would notice, and I noticed, which meant she knew I would, which meant it was deliberate.
She was fine. She was sitting in my mother's kitchen eating eggs and talking about her father's deer blind and she was completely, entirely fine.
I picked up my coffee.
"Finish up," I said. "We've got eight cows to check before noon."
She looked at me then. Steady. Hazel eyes, no trace of anything.
"I know," she said. "I'm eating."
Millie snorted. I glared—couldn’t help it.
“Somethin’ funny?” I asked.
“You just…don’t need to be so damn gruff,” Gage cut in. “Nice to see someone willing to give you hell.”
Haven met my eyes across the table. I immediately pictured her pressed against that wall, her lips parted as she came on my fingers.
“I’ll meet you at the barn,” I muttered, standing up.
Then I went for the door, grabbed my jacket, and left—anything to hide the fact that she was still on my mind…and still totally off-limits.
THREE
Haven
Amber had said:You walked away first. That means you won.
I'd thought about that for two days. I was still thinking about it walking across the yard toward the barn, workboots in the winter-stiff grass, breath coming out in a thin cloud in the February morning. Amber wasn't wrong, exactly. I had walked away first. I'd buttoned my jeans and said okay and gone back inside and I hadn't cried, not even a little, which I was choosing to count.
The thing was, I knew what I'd felt against my hip in that parking lot.
Wyatt Holt had wanted me. Not in a polite way. Not in anoh you're a sweet kidway. In a way that had made my knees stop working correctly, in a way that he'd had tophysically remove himself from, in a way that a man did not fake at forty years old behind a bar on a Tuesday night.
He'd wanted me and then he'd decided he shouldn't, which was a different thing entirely.
I pulled the barn door open, grabbing a few halters from the rack on the way in. Wyatt was at the supply shelf with his back to me, pulling on a long plastic glove that went all the way to his shoulder.
I stopped.
"We're preg-checking today?"
"Three of them are due for confirmation." He didn't turn around. "You good to hold?"
Romantic.
There was nothing more romantic than doing rectal exams on cows all morning.
"Yeah." I set down the halters I'd grabbed. "I know how to hold a cow, Wyatt."
"I know you do."
He reached for the lubricant and I turned away and looked at the middle distance for a second, because there was absolutely nothing I could say about that that wouldn't make things significantly worse.
