“You don't have to explain it to me.”
“No.” He closed the box. “I don't.”
He looked at me as he said it, and the space between us seemed to shrink. He took one step toward me. My chest tightened. It had been a long time since I’d experienced a moment like this. If I was reading the signs right, he was about to kiss me.
I took in a breath through my nose and waited while butterflies swarmed through my belly.
Then he stopped. His jaw tightened. He looked at me with a kind of deliberate, controlled withdrawal. “You should go upstairs, Bella.”
His tone wasn’t cold or dismissive. But it held the knowledge that if I stayed where I was, we might cross a line that neither of us was ready for.
I turned and went up the stairs without saying anything, and I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and listened to him below, closing up the barn, doing the things he did at the end of every day, and knew that the shape of this had changed, whether we were ready or not.
CHAPTER 5
JACE
The lockbox sat on the mudroom shelf for three days before I moved it to the truck bed and drove it out to the storage unit by the highway. Not because I'd figured out what it meant. Because I hadn't.
There were debt records from the 1940s, and my grandfather's handwriting scrawled across pages thin enough to tear if I wasn't careful. Names I recognized — Kincaid, Hollister — were listed not as enemies but as co-signatories on a grazing lease that covered land I'd always been told was contested.
The journal underneath it was worse. Thorough, deliberate entries suggested the feud both families treated as historical fact had started from something a lot smaller than either side admitted. I wasn't ready to do anything with that.
So I put it in a unit I paid forty dollars a month for, drove back home, and told myself I'd deal with it later.
I wish I could have done the same thing with Bella.
She was up at six every morning. I could hear her boots on the loft floor, the specific weight of her moving from the bed to the small kitchen, the sound of her camera bag being zipped.
I'd started waking before she did. I'd also started drinking my coffee at the workbench instead of the kitchen window, which was a choice I didn't examine too closely.
The almost-kiss — I didn't have another word for it, though I wasn’t too thrilled with calling it that — had shifted something I couldn't shift back. Not because anything had happened. But because of how clearly we'd both understood what almost had.
I wasn’t going to act on it. Bella Robbins was here through June, maybe a few days into July if her assignment kept getting extended. She photographed people's lives and then she left. That was her life, and it had nothing to do with mine. But Rory liked her. That was a problem.
I finished my coffee and headed out to mend the fence along the edge of one of the practice rings. Rory came through the gate with her phone in her hand and her hair still in a braid from the night before. That meant she'd been up a while and had been working herself up to something. I knew her tells.
“Dad.”
“Hand me that clip.”
She did. I set it without looking up.
“Bella's going out to the rodeo grounds this afternoon. For the Father's Day setup. She’s trying to get candid shots of the families coming in for the rehearsal events.”
“Is that so?”
“She could use a second person to handle the reflector.”
I straightened. Rory was watching me with an expression she'd developed over the last year. Her shoulders slumped as she anticipated being disappointed, like she'd already rehearsed losing this argument. That expression made her hard to look at.
“A reflector, huh?” I asked.
“It's a big silver panel thing that bounces light. She explained it to me. I know how to use it.”
“I know what a reflector is, Rory.”
She waited.
