Page 66 of Thunder

And the dark, in my experience, has never once failed to notice.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Presley

Carelessness never announces itself.

You never feel it happening.

You don't notice the exact day you stop parking your truck around back.

You don't clock the moment you quit checking the yard before you kiss him.

It creeps up an inch at a time, all that happiness making you soft, slow and sure.

Until one ordinary afternoon you're standing in the gap between the horse barn and the equipment shed with Thunder's hands on your face and his mouth on yours in the wide-open daylight.

Not a wall or a door between you and the whole ranch, because you've forgotten to be afraid.

For months I did everything right.

I parked where nobody looked.

I left before dawn.

I checked windows and doorways and the tree line like a woman with a price on her head, because in a way I had one, because us getting caught meant my entire family would come apart for a second time.

And then the family stitched itself back together, and the investigator went away, and my sisters started answering my texts.

Somewhere in all that relief I let my guard down one notch at a time until there wasn't any guard left at all.

Happiness did what fear never could.

It made me stupid.

That's how it gets you.

That's how it gets us.

It starts sweet, is the cruel part.

I've come from the tack room and he's come from the shop.

We meet in the middle the way we do a dozen times a day now, and he catches my wrist and reels me in.

I go, laughing, because Raine's at Mama Lou's and the afternoon's soft and gold, and there's nobody around.

"You've got hay in your hair," he says, and picks it out, and then he doesn't let go.

His hand slides to my jaw, that big warm palm cupping the side of my face the way it does when he's about to kiss me like he means it.

I tip up into him, and he kisses me slow and deep right there in the open, one hand in my hair and the other dropping to my waist, and I melt into him the way I always do.

His hand at my waist rucks my shirt up.

Just an inch.

Just enough that the warm air hits the small of my back, the fresh ink there barely healed.