"Yeah."
"I love you."
Three words.
Plain. Direct. No qualification, no management, no careful distance between me and the thing I mean.
He looks at me for one long moment.
Then that smile. The real one. The wide undefended one that goes all the way up to his eyes and keeps going.
"I know," he says softly. "I've known for a while."
I narrow my eyes. "Don't be smug about it."
"I'm not smug." He brings my hand up, presses his mouth to my knuckles, looks at me over the top of it. "I'm just right."
I laugh.
He pulls me closer.
The ranch glows around us in the new morning light, and everything that has been sideways for three days settles back into its proper place.
It's hard to believe it was ever anywhere else.
Then his phone buzzes on the rail beside him.
He ignores it.
It buzzes again.
He picks it up with his free hand and glances at the screen and his expression shifts into something I can't immediately read.
"What?" I say.
He looks at me. "It's Marcus again."
My stomach drops approximately three inches.
"He's forwarding something," Beckett says slowly, reading the screen. "An inquiry. Someone's reached out to his office asking whether Silver Mesa Ranch might be available for purchase."
The morning is very still.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
"Who?" I say.
He turns the phone so I can see the screen.
The name at the bottom of the forwarded email is Weston Blackthorn.
Chapter seventeen
Proving It
Beckett
