Page 60 of Wild Sanctuary

I pull back just enough to see her face.

She goes perfectly, absolutely still beneath my hands. Her breath stops. Her eyes are locked on mine, wide and searching, and I watch understanding flicker across her face.

She heard it. Whatever I just did to her name, whatever I turned it into, she caught every goddamn syllable. And for a long time, neither of us moves.

The fiddle and steel guitar drift through the orchard on the breeze as the string lights sway above us. Somewhere in the distance, a horse nickers in the Henderson trailer lot, and the sound is so ordinary, so utterly normal, that it feels obscene against the raw silence between us.

Then Daisy turns her face into my palm.

Just slightly. Just enough that her cheek presses against the rough warmth of my hand. Her eyes fall closed, and the breath she lets out shudders through her whole body like something she’s been holding for a very long time.

My heart stops, then starts again at twice the speed.

Because she’s not pulling away. She’s leaning in. This woman who has a comeback for everything, who holds the world at arm’s length with sharp smiles and sharper words, just closed her eyes and pressed her face into my hand like she’s been starving for this. Like she’s hungered for my touch just as much as I’ve craved hers.

When her eyes open, the armor is gone. All of it. The journalist, the brave face, the woman who just looked me in the eye and demanded to know what I want from her. And what’s left is just Daisy. Open and raw and looking up at me with an expression that makes my chest feel like it’s caving in.

“Don’t call me that if you don’t mean it.”

The words are barely a whisper. And I know exactly what she means—the name I’ve used to keep her at a distance, the name that just came out of my mouth meaning something else entirely. Something I can’t take back. Something I don’t want to.

My throat has closed around a truth too big for words—one that’s been building for six years and just cracked through every dam I’ve ever built. My thumb moves across her cheekbone, tracing the faint scatter of freckles there, and I feel her tremble under the touch.

That’s my answer. It’s the only one I’m capable of right now. My thumb on her skin, slow and deliberate, saying everything my voice can’t.

I mean it. I’ve always meant it. That’s the goddamn problem, not you. Never you.

Her hand comes up and rests against my chest. Right over my heart, her fingers splayed across the worn cotton of my shirt. And I know she can feel it—the hammering, the way my whole body is vibrating with the effort of being this close and still not close enough. Every ounce of control I’ve built, every wall, every lie, every late night telling myself it was nothing—she can feel all of it pounding beneath her palm.

Her thumb moves against my chest. One small, slow circle that mirrors the one I just traced on her cheek. Deliberate. Intentional. Like she’s answering me in the same language.

Her eyes haven’t left mine. Brown and gold and wide open, holding nothing back, and the weight of that gaze has the power to bring me to my goddamn knees.

The orchard, the fundraiser, the three hundred people in the tent behind us, all of it just fades to black. There’s nothing left in the world except her hand on my heart and mine on her face and the inch of charged air between us that’s about to become nothing at all.

“Wyatt.”

My gaze drops to her mouth. I can’t stop it. Her lips are parted, and her breath comes in shallow pulls that ghost across my chin. We’re so close, I can see the faint tremble in her lower lip, that smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose I’ve been dying to touch. The way her lashes are dark and wet from the tears she never let fall.

I’m done. The line a dead man drew, the promise I made him, the six years I’ve spent honoring both—I’m standing on the wrong side of all of them and I can’t bring myself to care anymore.

I don’t care about the age gap or the history between us. I don’t care about the fact that there’s most likely a friends with benefits thing back in Denver or that I’ve got no right to be touching her like this in the dark.

Her fingers curl into my shirt. Her face tilts up as her eyelids flutter closed. My hand slides deeper into her hair, and she makes a sound so quiet I almost miss it. Every nerve ending I have redirects to where her body is pressed against mine as the distance between us shrinks to nothing⁠—

Suddenly, headlights cut through the orchard like a blade.

Bright. White. Sweeping across the trees and throwing our shadows against the grass in sharp relief. The light hits us both at the same time, harsh and foreign, and the spell shatters like glass on stone.

My hand drops from her face as hers falls from my chest. I step back so fast I nearly stumble over a tree root, and the cool night air rushes into the space between us, and it feels like someone’s ripped a bandage off a wound that was nowhere near healed.

An engine idles in the orchard lot—something quiet and smooth, the kind of German engineering you hear in city parking garages. Not a ranch truck. Not anything that belongs within a hundred miles of Dawson’s apple orchard on a Friday night in Blackstone Creek.

A car door opens. Closes.

“Babe, is that you?”

The word reaches us through the gap in the trees, and everything inside me goes cold.