He didn't know I was here. There was no reason he'd know. I was nobody—a ranch hand in a town that didn't make it onto half the maps, living in a half-finished house under a name that had never been his and never would be. He had no way of knowing I'd ended up in Meagher County. No way of knowing I'd come back to my grandfather's land like something that had been thrown away and found its own way home.
He didn't know.
I said it again. Slower.
He didn't know.
The engine idled. The road stretched out ahead of me, dark and open and going somewhere that wasn't here.
I thought about Brody's face when I'd ridden Maribel in those slow, quiet circles. The wet shine of his eyes that he hadn't tried to hide. The way he'd pressed his lips to my temple afterward, even with his wrists cinched behind his back. After I'd taken what I needed and given nothing back.
I thought about the flannel still hanging on the hook inside the back door of his house.
His house.
My house, for now.
I put the truck in drive.
I told myself I was just going back to get my things. Told myself I'd pack up quick and clean, leave the flannel on the hook, leave the key on the kitchen counter, and be on the highway before midnight. Told myself I'd done it a hundred times before and it never got harder, it just got faster, and that was a good thing—that was the whole point.
I told myself all of it the entire six blocks through the quiet dark of Larkspur until I pulled up in front of the house with the boarded windows and the flickering porch light.
I let myself in through the back door.
The house was dark and smelled like sawdust and fresh paint. I stood in the kitchen for a moment without turning on the light, just breathing it in, listening to the quiet of a place that was being slowly and stubbornly loved back into something worth keeping.
I should start with the bedroom. Grab the duffel, the boots, the?—
Something small and warm wound around my ankles.
I looked down.
Cat blinked up at me in the thin light coming through the kitchen window, tail hooked into a question mark, entirely unbothered by the hour or the state of me. One meow—short and pointed, like there were thoughts about my tardiness—and then a small head butted firmly against my shin.
I stood there for a long moment.
It happened again.
I sat down and Cat walked straight into my hands like it had been doing it its whole short life, purring before I'd even gotten a proper grip. I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets and held the warm, ridiculous thing against my chest and listened to it purr in the dark.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket.
I fished it out one-handed.
BRODY
you're taking me underwear shopping
I stared at it.
Outside, the Bitterroots stood dark and silent against the sky. The road to Idaho was still out there, wide open, going somewhere that wasn't here.
I thumbed the little thumbs up reaction and put my phone face-down on the floor.
Wyatt Cole didn't know I was here.
Three weeks wasn't long. I'd kept a low profile my whole life—I was good at it, better than good. Stay off the rodeo grounds. Stay out of the bars on the big nights. Let the circuit roll through Meagher County the way it always did, onto the next town and the next and the next until it was somebody else's problem.
