Three days since I put my hand on a woman's face and damn near kissed her in the dark, and then pulled back like a coward and told her to drive safe while my voice cracked in half.
I've been hauling loads at dawn. Leaving the mill records in the box before the sun's up. Working the far quadrant whereI can't see the east field or the orange tractor cutting its lines. Grown man hiding in his own timber because a woman with green eyes and a slipping stirrup is doing something to him he swore he'd never let happen again.
The stirrup.
I fixed her goddamn stirrup. Stood there in the rain fussing with leather I had no business touching, adjusting a strap on a saddle that isn't mine, for a woman who isn't mine, while every part of me screamed to pull her off that horse and finish what I started.
The chisel's on the nightstand. The piece of walnut is supposed to be a spoon. It isn't a spoon. It's three nights of not sleeping, carved into wood.
Delaney Briggs. That was her name before she took mine. Before she was Delaney Harrison. Before she was Wyatt's wife with my family name in her mouth and my brother's kid in her belly, probably by now, knowing the two of them.
Twenty-eight, I was. Building something. Had the mill running clean, had a house half-framed on granddad's back acreage, had a ring I'd saved eleven months for. Had a woman who curled into my chest at night and told me she wanted all of it. The house. The babies. The porch swing.
She wanted all of it. Just not from me.
Wyatt's three years younger. Charming where I'm quiet. Easy where I'm hard. Got our mother's smile and our daddy's talent for making people feel like the center of the room. I've never blamed him for being likable. I blamed him for being likable with his hand on my woman's thigh for over a year while I was framing walls for a future he was already living in secret.
When I found them, I went to my mother. That's the part I don't tell. Not the finding. The after. I went to the kitchen where she hummed and cut me the corner piece of pound cake everySunday, and I stood there with my heart in my throat, and she said she knew.
Eight months, she knew.
Forgive, Aiden. Family's family. Don't you pull this apart over something like this.
Something like this.
I sat in my truck in her driveway for two hours. Then I drove north. Didn't stop till the pines changed species. Been out here since.
The walnut spoon has a crack in it now. Pressed too hard with the gouge last night, split the handle. Scrap.
I get up. Pull my boots on. Start the stove.
The coffee I make isn't as good as hers. I drink it anyway.
The ranch yardat seven thirty is busier than I've been giving it credit for, since I've been dropping loads before six to avoid exactly this.
Today I'm late. Overslept, if you can call it that. Dozed off around five with the chisel still in my hand, woke at six forty with a crick in my neck and the spoon handle in two pieces on the floor.
I back the trailer through the gate. The load's chained right, sixteen footers, clean pine from the northeast quadrant. Gabe wants this batch for the new fence posts along the distillery road.
I'm unclipping the chains when I hear boots on gravel. My body knows before I turn.
Paige is on the fence rail by the equipment barn. Clipboard on her knee. Pencil in her teeth. Hat tipped back. She's beenhere a while, I can tell. She watches me swing the trailer without waving, without calling out, without a thermos.
The thermos. She hasn't come to the block in three days. No hoofbeats at seven fifteen. No coffee. No banter. She heard the door shut and she backed off.
Because I taught her to. Because she reads people like she reads horses, careful and patient, and when I flinched, she gave me room.
And I hate it.
She hops off the rail and walks over. Professional. Even stride.
"Morning."
"Morning."
"Fifth load this month." She flips a page. Pencil out of her teeth. "Six hundred board feet, give or take. Sign here."
I sign. The clipboard passes between us. Our hands don't touch. That's on purpose. Hers, not mine.
