"Sawyer's," Gage said, nodding at them. "Left them when he went. They're working stock now."
I reached out slowly and let the nearer one—a bay mare—sniff my hand. She did, decided I was acceptable, and pressed her nose against my palm.
"She likes you," Gage said.
"Everyone keeps saying that about the animals," I said. "The goat, now the horse."
"Dolly doesn't like anyone."
"Dolly walked me to the main house this morning."
He looked at me for a second. "Huh."
"Is that significant?"
"Moderately," he said, which I was coming to understand was Gage for yes, very.
We kept walking. He showed me the bunkhouse—Sawyer’s place, clean and functional—and the hunting lease acreage at the back of the property, the land going wilder and more cedar-choked as we got further from the main buildings. He pointed out the ridge line where the deer came through in October, the turkey roost in the big live oak, the property line markers nearly invisible in the brush.
He knew every inch of it.
Not the way you know something you've memorized—the way you know something that's part of you. He'd point at a thing before I'd even seen it, name it without thinking, tell me its history in two sentences and move on. The leaning fencepost he'd fixed that morning. The creek crossing where his grandfather had laid the flat stones. The cedar his uncle Austin had carved his initials into sometime in the sixties, now half grown over.
I walked beside him and listened and felt something settle in me that I didn't have a name for yet.
We ended up at the barn.
It was older than the stable, bigger, the limestone walls thick enough that the heat outside became a memory the moment we stepped through the door. It smelled like hay and dust and something sweet underneath—feed, maybe, or just the accumulated warmth of a building that had been in use for generations. The light came through in long slanted bars from the high windows, catching the dust in the air.
Gage pulled the door mostly shut behind us.
I turned around.
He was looking at me with that expression I was starting to recognize—the one that was very calm on the surface and very much not calm underneath.
"So," I said.
"So," he said.
"Is this part of the tour?"
"Could be." He took a step toward me. "Depends on how thorough you want it."
I laughed, and then he was close enough that laughing seemed beside the point. I tipped my face up and he kissed me slow and certain, one hand coming up to cup my jaw, the other finding my waist and drawing me in.
I glanced around. “Really? Here?”
"You have a problem with here?"
I looked around at the barn—the hay, the dust motes turning in the light, the thick limestone walls—and then back at him.
“Just…couldn’t somebody walk in?”
His lips curved. “And what are they gonna do? Stop me from knockin’ up my woman?”
"No," I said. "I—no, you're right."
"Uh huh." He kissed me again and walked me backward, unhurried, deeper into the barn. "You gonna keep arguing or are you gonna let me take care of you?"
