Page 20 of Remmen

The man who’d gone flat and lethal in that truck at one look at Rauf. Down in an alley at nightfall so nobody would catch him feeding the strays.

I stood in the shadow of the office and didn’t let on I was there. I watched for as long as I could stand it. Then I went up my stair very quietly, and let myself in, and left the light off for a while.

CHAPTER 8

REMMEN

A week went by without anything in it worse than a fence dispute, and I should have known better than to enjoy it.

Kazan had a glint in his eye that I didn’t like.

“What did Maisie⁠—”

“Finish that sentence, mayor, and our town won’t have a government much longer.” It was a threat delivered with a smile.

“Do you promise?” I sounded a little too eager. But I’d been grasping the horns of this place to keep it under control for six years and would gladly allow almost anyone to step into my place.

Kazan shook his head. “Maisie’s making friends with your little counselor.”

I didn’t pretend that I didn’t know who he was talking about. The town had seen me give her a tour. It was good for morale if she clearly had a place here. As my friend.

And nothing more.

Then Kazan let it sit. He was the size of a barn and twice as patient, and he’d cornered me outside the cider house for his quarterly complaint about the road and stayed on because needling me cost him nothing.

“Maisie loaned her the little buggy,” he said. “You want to know where it keeps going?”

“I’m sure the counselor has errands.”

“The ranch.” He watched me, steady, reading my face. “Out past the ridge. Three times this week, Maisie says. Alone. Your Agency woman, in my wife’s buggy, driving out to the Butchers to change their bandages.”

The noise of the cider house went a long way off.

I kept my face flat. Six years of telling this town everything was fine had made me good at it.

“She’s got medical training,” I said. “Otho’s stretched thin. It’s sensible.”

“Mm.” Kazan had watched me not want things before. He knew the look. He didn’t push. He set his cup down, clapped my shoulder hard enough to rock me, and left me standing in the road with the whole afternoon going sour.

There were men on that ranch I wouldn’t trust behind a locked door, never mind loose in a yard with a small woman and an open kit. Mestyn’s lot came off the transports the worst of any of us. One of them was fresh off a wound that hadn’t come from any fistfight, and pain made a bad animal meaner.

Every part of me that learned its trade in the sand was up and shouting that she should not be out there.

And none of it was mine to say.

She wasn’t mine. She was under contract. She was forbidden, and I was the mayor who stood behind the rule that made her that way and would have held any other male to it without blinking. I couldn’t forbid her a thing.

It was worse than that. If I rode out and set myself between the Agency’s counselor and the Butchers, I’d hand every man on that ranch the exact story they were itching to tell. That she was the town’s eyes. The office wearing a small woman’s face, sent to watch them.

She was trying to build something out there with her own two hands and her own nerve. My shadow on it would wreck it in an afternoon.

I knew all of that. I got in the truck anyway.

The whole way up the ridge road I told myself I wasn’t going to the ranch. I’d get eyes on the yard from the track, watch her load the buggy and point it home, and turn around and be the mayor again before she ever knew I’d come. I told myself that with my foot flat to the floor. I knew it for a lie, and I kept driving.

I had no plan and no right to be out there, and I went anyway.

There was never a chance of doing it quiet. The last mile of that road ran open, and a bull on the fence line clocked my truck before I’d even made the turn and lit out for the buildings to raise the word. So much for keeping my distance. I was made before I’d stopped moving.