Outside, the snow kept falling, steady and relentless, burying everything that came before.
We let it.
Chapter Ten
~ Liam ~
The wind off the main drag was all road salt and ammonia, sharp in the nose and dry enough to make your teeth ache. We stood outside the County Clerk’s office, backs to the institutional-green bricks, the last of the afternoon squeezing sideways through a bank of low, dirty clouds. The sun was giving up early, and I couldn’t blame it.
Across the lot, Macon leaned against the hood of Hooper’s truck, face set to “please bother someone else.” Burke was already inside the cab, window cracked, a cigarette burning in his fingers as if he was on break from a job that paid actual money. They talked without moving their mouths, the way men do when silence is the only form of privacy left.
Hooper hadn’t said a word since the elevator, just kept his hands jammed in the pockets of his canvas jacket, head tipped back to watch the clouds inch along. His profile was almost comically rugged in this light, every old break in his nose and jaw working together like a homemade puzzle. If he was nervous, it didn’t show.
I was the one vibrating. Not with fear or guilt, exactly, but with the leftover electricity of having finally, absolutely run out of next steps. There was no motel reservation, no road to check for tail lights, no exit strategy at all. I’d signed the paper, put the ring on, smiled for the bored clerk’s camera. All that was left was to go home.
It scared the hell out of me.
Hooper didn’t look at me, but he could probably feel the agitation coming off me like a heater gone haywire. He let the silence spool out, thick and weirdly companionable, until the courthouse clock tower across the square clanged a dry, metallic three-thirty.
A few pigeons startled off the ledge, flapped into the nothing above us, then settled again, as if the world was in too much of a hurry to change.
I waited for him to break the silence, but he didn’t. He just stood there, letting me simmer, giving me space to chicken out if that was what I needed.
I hated it, but I respected it.
I dug my hands deeper in my own pockets, found nothing but the slick of my own sweat, and finally said, “I don’t know if this was the right thing.”
Hooper grinned, just a flash, then let it fade. “You mean the paperwork, or the part where you have to look at my face every morning?”
I made a noise—maybe a laugh, maybe just a leak of pressure. “Either. Both.”
He shrugged, and for a second his eyes darted to the truck, where Burke was holding court for an audience of zero. “It buys us time,” he said. “Takes Eleanor’s leverage down to zero, at least until her lawyers learn to read the part of the code that says ‘marriage contract’ is still a contract.”
He turned toward me, full-on, and I felt the bulk of him like a pressure system moving into my space. “Also, now you get a tax break.”
The joke landed, somehow, and I managed a real laugh. It cracked something in my chest, the tightness loosening just enough to let some oxygen in.
The clouds were moving faster now, and I watched them for a second, trying to remember when I’d last stood still long enough to watch anything. The answer was never, but I didn’t say it out loud.
Hooper’s tone softened. “You don’t have to stay, you know,” he said, quiet enough that nobody else would have caught it. “Ifyou want to keep running, we’ll help you. But the ranch is behind you, whatever you want to do. I’m behind you.”
I flinched at the phrase, the honesty of it. It had been so long since someone offered me allegiance with nothing asked in return that it took a full ten seconds for the meaning to parse.
“I’m tired,” I said, voice so flat it startled me. “I’m tired of being a problem someone needs to solve.”
He nodded, like he’d been expecting that. “So let us be your problem for a while. Go inside, sleep, eat something that isn’t from a gas station. If you hate it, we’ll drive you to the next state line personally.”
He didn’t blink. Didn’t even try to sell it.
I tested the weight of what I was about to say. “I don’t want it to be just a legal arrangement,” I said. “I know why we did it, but I don’t want it to be—” I fumbled for the words. “I want it to be real.”
Hooper closed the last of the distance, close enough that I could see the tiny flecks of engine oil at the edge of his thumbnail. His voice went even lower, more private.
“It is,” he said.
He didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t reach for me. He just let the words do their work and then looked over my shoulder, toward the truck.
Macon was pretending not to watch us, but his posture gave him away. Burke had moved on to tapping the windowsill with one finger, his cigarette gone, the windows fogged with his own breath.
