Page 84 of Where She Belongs

“What in the world is going on out here?”

Rylee’s head snapped up, and her heart forgot its rhythm.

Tate was here.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Tate took the porch in at a glance. Rylee, the love of his life, rooted at the railing with her arms wrapped tight around herself. Roxy, holding a sheaf of papers the way a gambler holds a winning hand. And Alexander, the man who ought to be escorted to the state line and never seen again, wearing the expression of a fellow watching his own funeral go by.

Roxy laughed from the doorway. “Oh goodie, the crew is all here.”

Rylee shot her a disapproving look. “Can you just…”

Her aunt shook her head. “Not a chance, sweetheart. This is better than the opera.”

“You heard her,” Rylee said to Alexander. Her voice wasn’t entirely steady, but it held. “You should go.”

“That’s right.” Roxy patted the folded papers against her palm, gently, the way one pats a sleeping dog that might still bite. “We wouldn’t want to tie up what little holdings you have left in court, would we?”

Tate stayed where he was. His name had been wrecked in this same yard by this same man, and there was part of him enjoying the scene.

“Court?” Alexander squeaked. “I haven’t done anything⁠—”

Roxy’s eyes flicked to Tate briefly. “I’d say slander is definitely something worth exploring, wouldn’t you, Mr. Dennison?”

Tate straightened, a wicked grin forming on his lips even as Alexander’s frosty glare pinned him. “I would, Mrs. Carter.” He could sense Rylee watching him and he sobered. This wasn’t a side of him she’d likely seen. And if he were honest, he wasn’t sure how she’d react. It was all in jest. Of course he’d never take action, but did she know that?

Alexander continued to stammer as his eyes darted from one of them to the next. Then they narrowed into slits and he pointed a finger at Roxy. “I could just as easily drag your name through the mud. You claimed your niece was ready to get married. You made everyone believe⁠—”

Roxy crowed with laughter. “Throwing parties to introduce my niece to eligible men is hardly a promise of betrothal. Even you must understand something as simple as that.”

Tate schooled his expression the second Alexander’s furious gaze found his. He didn’t have to help the man dig his own grave. Clearly, he’d been pushing Rylee into something she didn’t want, and all because he had ulterior motives. Tate had always known there was something off about that man. Now he knew what.

Alexander turned from Roxy, and when he came back around he had stopped looking at her altogether. He was looking at Rylee, and his face had gone almost kind.

“Sweetheart.” Gentle. Reasonable. The register he had been saving. “Look at where you are. Mud to your knees and a barn you paid to put back up and a man who won’t answer a question. This is not a life. You do not belong out here, you have never belonged out here, and every person on this porch is too polite to tell you so.”

Rylee didn’t move.

“I’ll tell her. She belongs here.” He came up onto the bottom step so the man had to turn to keep him in view. “She belongs here more than I do, and I was born on this road. Her father’s name is on that mailbox. She put that barn back up out of her own pocket. She’s been in the west field cutting eleven years of scrub off ground nobody else would trouble themselves with, and she feeds those animals before she feeds herself. You’ve had plenty of time to figure it all out, but you don’t know one thing about her that isn’t written down somewhere.”

Alexander got as far as one syllable.

“And that picture you’ve been hauling around.” Tate didn’t raise his volume for it. “The woman in it is the developer’s daughter. I’ll tell Rylee the whole of it the minute you’re off her property, and I’d have told her the day you put it in my hand if I had the sense God gave a fence post. So put it away. It isn’t worth what you paid.”

Nobody on that porch moved.

Alexander got his arm halfway up, and Rylee got there ahead of him.

“I’m staying.”

She wasn’t looking at Tate when she said it. That was the piece he would take out and turn over later, on nights when he needed proof. She was looking at Alexander, and she said it flat, a fact and not an argument.

“Not for a season. Not to think it over. I’m staying, and I’m keeping every animal on this property, and I’ll be standing right here when the snow comes this winter and every one after that.”

“Rylee—”

“You came out here for a girl who was going to give up and go home.” She let that sit. “She isn’t here.”